In finding Jeremy Skibicki guilty, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal dismissed the evidence put forward by the defence as ‘fabricated’ and said the Crown had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Skibicki understood the planned and deliberate killings were legally and morally wrong.

Toronto Star: Last week in Winnipeg they were dancing in the streets when Jeremy Skibicki was found guilty of first-degree murder. And why shouldn’t they: Indigenous people have been waiting a long time for such a definitive verdict.

But what does it say about our criminal justice system?

It seemed clear that Skibicki would be found guilty. He confessed to police the crime, he described the crime, and he told of how he disposed of the bodies of four Indigenous women: Rebecca Contois, 24, Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, and an unidentified woman known as Buffalo Woman (Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe) — all women he’d targeted after meeting them at downtown shelters in early 2022. Three of the four women have never been found although a search of the landfill where Myran and Harris are believed to be is underway.

It’s highly disturbing to watch the police tape in which the 37-year-old casually admits in a matter-of-fact way that he did lure the women to his apartment, where he strangled or drowned them, had sex with their bodies, and then dismembered them before spreading around the remains in dumpsters. He also admitted that he was a white supremacist who believed he was doing the world a favour by getting rid of them.

But he was clever enough to plead not guilty. Instead, he argued he should be found not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder, schizophrenia, claiming he had heard voices and believed he was on a mission from God.

But Chief Justice Glenn Joyal was having none of it. He dismissed the evidence put forward by the defence as “fabricated” and said the Crown had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Skibicki understood the planned and deliberate killings were legally and morally wrong.

He called the murders “emblematic of much that is associated with the tragedy and very grave reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.”

This case mirrors the 2019 Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls that found there was “genocidal” intent in the murder and/or disappearance of hundreds of Indigenous women. The perpetrators either consciously or subconsciously picked their victims because they were Indigenous, and, they believed, no one would miss them. 

Even the notorious serial killer, Robert Pickton, who lured mainly Indigenous women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to his pig farm near Port Coquitlam where he tortured and killed them before leaving them to his pigs, counted on the fact that they wouldn’t be missed. He was tried and convicted of five murders, while an additional 27 murder charges were dropped because even if found guilty it wouldn’t increase his sentence. Meanwhile, he told an undercover RCMP officer he killed 49 women.

In other words, they were viewed as disposable. And the RCMP and other police forces in Western Canada adopted the same attitude. They didn’t really look for them when they went missing. They were slow to lay charges, if at all, when bodies turned up. It was all put down to “that’s just the way it is” or that they were sex workers or drug addicts, or both, and it had somehow been their fault.

In the Winnipeg case Skibicki had no qualms about admitting that he killed four women. He actually seemed to be bragging about it. As if he expected the police to sympathize with him.

“This whole thing about racial purity, the extinction of the white race — you know, the great replacement theory, globalism, Bolshevism, an effort to eradicate white people. I don’t believe that races are meant to be forced to live together,” he told police. 

I’ve never heard anyone express their desire to kill Indigenous people so succinctly. Jeremy Skibicki may have said out loud what so many others were thinking.

The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Girls and Women got it right the first time in 2019 when they said there was “genocidal” intent in the murders or disappearances of hundreds of girls and women.

We just didn’t want to believe them.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based writer and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @GillianSteward.