A Canadian man who raped and murdered four indigenous women, carved up their bodies and disposed of them in rubbish bins, was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison.
Jeremy Skibicki, 37, was found guilty last month of the first-degree murders in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after the defence failed to prove that mental illness limited his capacity to commit the crimes.
Justice Glenn Joyal, who accused him of “inhumanity and barbarism” in his written verdict, handed Skibicki four concurrent life sentences – with no chance of parole for 25 years – in a case seen by many as a symbol of the plight of indigenous women in a country where they face disproportionate violence.
In court on Wednesday he added that the sentence “regrettably does not adequately reflect the gravity of these offences and your moral culpability”, according to local media.
The heinous crimes committed by Mr Skibicki have left deep scars on First Nations communities
Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met in homeless shelters between March and May 2022, his trial heard.
He brought them back to his flat to sexually assault them before strangling or drowning them in his bath, and then engaging in further sexual acts on their bodies.
The remains of his victims Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran are believed to have ended up in a landfill north of the city, which is currently being searched, while the partial remains of another victim, Rebecca Contois, were found in a garbage bin in Winnipeg and in a separate landfill.
The body of a fourth, unidentified woman in her 20s, whom Skibicki confessed to killing along with the others, is still missing. She was given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or “Buffalo Woman”, by local Indigenous leaders.
Harris’s daughter Elle said listening at the trial how her mother was killed was “horrific to go through,” according to local media.
“The heinous crimes committed by Mr Skibicki have left deep scars on First Nations communities,” Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs was also quoted as telling the court.
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At the time of Skibicki’s arrest in December 2022, the then-minister of Crown-Indigenous relations Marc Miller said the case was part of “a legacy of a devastating history” of Canada’s treatment of Indigenous women “that has reverberations today”.
Indigenous women represent about one-fifth of all women killed in gender-related homicides in the country – even though they are just five per cent of the female population.
In 2019, a national commission went so far as to describe the thousands of murders and disappearances of First Nations women over the years as a “genocide”.
In his July verdict, Judge Joyal said the case was “emblematic of much of what is associated with the tragedies that underlie the grim reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada”.
