A Canadian man who raped and murdered four indigenous women, dismembered their bodies and disposed of them in garbage bins was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday.
Jeremy Skibicki, 37, was found guilty last month of first-degree murder in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after the defence failed to show that mental illness limited his ability to commit the crimes.
Judge Glenn Joyal, who accused her of “inhumanity and barbarity” in his written verdict, sentenced Skibicki to four concurrent life sentences – with no possibility of parole for 25 years – in a case widely seen as symbolic of the plight of Aboriginal women in Canada, where they face disproportionate violence.
At Wednesday’s hearing, he added that the sentence “unfortunately does not adequately reflect the seriousness of these crimes and his moral culpability,” according to local media.
The serial killer targeted Native American women he met at homeless shelters between March and May 2022.
He would take them to his apartment to sexually assault them before strangling or drowning them in his bathtub, and then perform other 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. The partial remains of another victim, Rebecca Contois, were found in a dumpster in Winnipeg and at another landfill.
The body of a fourth, unidentified woman in her 20s, whom Skibicki confessed to killing along with the others, remains unaccounted for. Local indigenous leaders gave her the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or “Buffalo Woman.”
Harris’s daughter Elle said hearing at the trial how her mother was killed was “horrible to live through,” local media reported.
At the time of her arrest in December 2022, then Minister for the Crown and Aboriginal Relations Marc Miller acknowledged that the case was “the legacy of a devastating history that has repercussions today”.
Aboriginal women account for around a fifth of all women murdered in gender-related cases in the country, despite making up only 5% of the female population.
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