How does Saskatoon's successful landfill search compare to the one planned in Manitoba?
CBC
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
A recent search that recovered a missing woman's remains from a Saskatchewan landfill years after she was last seen could help guide a similar effort about to begin one province over.
The people tasked with finding the remains of Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, which are believed to have been brought to the Prairie Green landfill near Winnipeg after the women were murdered by a serial killer in 2022, are expected to soon meet with the team that last week brought home the remains of Mackenzie Lee Trottier, who was 22 when she was last seen in Saskatoon in 2020.
The forensic anthropologist behind Manitoba's search, which is expected to start late this fall, "has been following the search in Saskatoon very closely," a Manitoba government spokesperson said in an email this week.
"Manitoba's team looks forward to meeting with the Saskatoon team to learn from their success."
That expertise isn't the only thing Manitoba's search team could get from the one in Saskatoon. According to a police chief who did a study on landfill searches, the update in Saskatchewan should also be "a huge bump, a huge morale driver" for the search about to get underway in Manitoba.
Brian Paulsen, an assistant chief of police in Sturgis, S.D., who completed his master's thesis about landfill searches in the U.S., said he was "a little bit shocked" to hear Trottier's remains had been found after so much time.
"Right now my research … would have told me that Saskatoon was not going to be successful, nor would Winnipeg," Paulsen said of his 2019 study, which concluded a search shouldn't be started if more than 60 days have passed since a person's remains were put in the dump.
"But Saskatoon kind of brings us back and says, 'Wait a minute, it can be done.'"
However, the details of the Manitoba search are different from the Saskatchewan one in several ways — something noted this week by Saskatoon police Chief Cameron McBride, who confirmed at a news conference his force plans to share some of the lessons from their search with the Manitoba team.
"Although I don't know a lot of the intricate details or, you know, specifics around the Winnipeg circumstance, I do know enough to say that our circumstance was significantly different from what they're facing," McBride said.
From the potentially massive difference in the size of the area to be searched, to how long each was expected to take, to how searchers even knew where to start, here's a look at how the two landfill searches compare.
One of the biggest differences is the size of the areas searchers were expected to focus on.
In the Saskatoon case, police said the search expanded as time went on from an initial area of interest of 930 cubic metres.
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