She was always a loving person’: Parents of Ashlee Shingoose share their grief

APTN News: heresa Shingoose moves around her kitchen keeping busy. She’s making small talk, explaining she will soon head over to the school field to go make bannock with the other Elders of St Theresa Point Anisininew Nation. It’s midweek through their annual celebration, the Bannock Festival.

She’s also pouring coffee for herself, her husband and her two guests. Theresa agreed to talk to APTN News about her daughter Ashlee Christine Shingoose. Ashlee is the third youngest child of her and her husband Albert’s eight kids.

“She was always a loving person,” Theresa said as she prepared herself to talk about Ashlee so openly for the first time since she went missing in March 2022. For the longest time, the mother has kept her emotions deep down. She says it’s easier and keeps the household in peace.

Ashlee was 31 when she disappeared. Around the same time in Winnipeg, a serial killer was preying on vulnerable Indigenous women at shelters in the inner city. However, the community did not know about his violent acts just yet.

“She never did anything wrong to us,” Theresa said as she revisited her memories of her daughter, “Like some girls would yell at their parents, she was never like that. She was friendly with everybody.”

Theresa talks about the day Ashlee was born on June 28, 1991. From the moment she held her daughter, she knew she was special. Theresa shares that Ashlee was a quiet and happy baby. She said Ashlee would sleep through the night and was always giggling during the day.

As Ashlee got older, Theresa said she was always helping around the house. Once her twin sisters were born, it sparked motherly instincts inside Ashlee. “She loved taking care of the twins. She wasn’t much older (than them) but she acted like (she was their) mom,” Theresa said.

Theresa turns to look at her grandson, and Ashlee’s secondborn, sitting on the bed behind her, asks him to get her wallet. From inside it, she pulls out a status card.

“She sent it back,” Theresa said as she gripped it and stared at her daughter’s photo. “She said ‘Mom I don’t want to lose my ID cards.’ She told me that and that’s why I still have,” she said.

Theresa is sitting close to her husband Albert. They’re separated by the corner of the table and exchange glances from time to time.

You can see that after 40 years of marriage, they don’t need to speak words to one another, their eyes do it for them. They are treading water carefully. The family said they usually do when it comes to talking about Ashlee as it sparks many different kinds of emotions.

“Now and then I cry, now and then I get frustrated, now and then I get mad,” Albert said as his voice goes from a whisper to a roar in three short sentences. After a pause and a look in the distance he added, “Even sometimes I pick on my wife, I don’t know, on my family, that’s how frustrated I am.”

And just like that he’s quiet again. Some seconds go by with a great tenseness, making it feel like minutes have passed. Then slowly, he shared this, “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be around here, I should be out there looking,” Albert said.

Instinctively, Theresa gets up from the table. It’s a distracting mechanism because it looked as though she was holding back tears. She started to top up coffee cups and pointed to the sugar and milk on the table.

Albert knows the drill. He quietly reaches for both and fixes up his hot drink. And for a while, everyone in the kitchen refuels and sits in silence.

Building timelines an issue as time passes

Theresa said Ashlee first moved to Winnipeg around the summer of 2016. She left St. Theresa Point in search of a better life for her and her two kids. In St Theresa Point, it’s overcrowded. There are roughly 300 homes and about 3,500 people living on the reserve, often resulting in three or four generations living under one roof.

In the Shingoose household, when Ashlee left for Winnipeg, 15 people were living in the home.

“I said ‘okay, if this is going to help you. You can go,’” Theresa said.

Theresa said for about three or four years, Ashlee was doing good for herself and her kids in the city. Theresa would go visit them every couple months. Then she started noticing changes in her daughter.

Ashlee eventually told her mom that she was struggling with domestic violence. Not long after, a third child that Ashlee had while living in Winnipeg was put under the care of child and family services. Her two older children were then given to Theresa and Albert.

In missing person cases, especially after time passes, building timelines are often hard for both the authorities and the families that are left in limbo with no answers as to where their loved one is or what could have happened.

The Shingoose family knows this, as they too struggle with their own memories as time passes. For example, Albert shares a story about the last time he ever saw his daughter, Ashlee, “She was slim, she had long hair,” Albert said.

Albert said he ran into her at a convenience store near Isabel Street and William Avenue, in the city’s core. The convenience store has since closed, but at the time, Albert remembers having to wear a mask because COVID-19 restrictions were enforced.

He’s unsure of an exact date but remembers there was no snow on the ground and they were dressed in lighter clothing. He invited his daughter to the small apartment he was renting.

“She ate, she helped herself,” Albert said adding, “She didn’t talk very much to me.”

It had been a long while since he last seen his daughter, so he asked her to stay the night and he said she nodded in agreement. When Albert went to bed, he said he offered his bed to his daughter but she told him she liked sleeping on the floor. He said he watched her grab a blanket and went to lay near the door.

He said he found her behaviour odd, but he didn’t want to scare her with questions.

“She didn’t say nothing to me,” Albert said about that last night with his daughter. “She didn’t tell me she was leaving and what not. She just left and that was the last time I seen her.”

Theresa said she hadn’t seen her daughter in person for even longer. But she used to get a phone calls from Ashlee.

“She used to call me every day, ‘Mom, I love you,’” Theresa said. Slowly those calls turned to once a week getting briefer each time. Then after Christmas in 2021, she said those calls stopped all together.

Theresa shared the last conversation she had with Ashlee.

“She said ‘mom, I can’t do it,’ and that’s what hurts me. I should have been, I should have went out and pick her up,” Theresa said.

‘No evidence, no answers, no closure’

Ashlee Shingoose in an undated photo.

During the first week of the trial for Jeremy Skibicki, 37, in early May 2024, Theresa and Albert found themselves sitting amongst the families of the women he was on trial for killing.

They had been invited as Ashlee’s name would be brought up during testimony of Winnipeg police Const. Jan De Vries. On Thursday, May 9, De Vries told a packed courtroom that he was the “Exhibit Officer” who documented evidence from inside Skibicki’s apartment, the building and the back alley.

There had been roughly 130 photos talked about in court that were taken of evidence collected in Skibicki’s apartment, though they weren’t shown due to their graphic nature.

“When we went to that court, they said to us, they had her DNA on a cigarette butt they found in that guy’s home,” Theresa said.

She refuses to say his name. Many families, friends, supporters and community feel the same way.

During his testimony, De Vries said in addition to the four women Skibicki was on trial for, there were DNA profiles of an additional 12 women found inside his apartment and nine were still not identified. Police said this does not mean they were all victims of foul play.

However, De Vries also said on the stand, that police were still investigating and searching for those women.

Skibicki’s since been found of four first-degree murders for the killings of Rebecca Contois, 24, Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26 and the yet to be identified person given the name Muskode Bizihiki’Ikwe or Buffalo Woman from Elders in the Indigenous community living in Winnipeg.

On July 11 when Chief Justice Glenn Joyal gave his oral verdict. The Shingoose family were in Winnipeg but didn’t attend court. Instead, they participated in a Sundance Ceremony on the outskirts of the city.

They said they also have no plans to attend his sentencing hearing this week, on Aug. 28.

“No evidence for us, no answers, no closure for us there,” Albert said, “If they are not talking about Ashlee, why should we be there, you know?”

Instead, Albert looks forward to the days ahead, because not long after attending the trial in May, he says the investigators on Ashlee’s case contacted him.

“What they were saying to me, we are not giving up yet,” Albert told APTN that police told him they plan to go back to Skibicki, “And ask him questions. If (he) really seen her. or if they know that’s her he killed or what not, that’s what they were going to try find out.”

The Winnipeg police would not confirm or deny what Albert said of his conversation with the two investigators on his daughter’s case.

“Ashlee Shingoose is still considered a missing person case,” spokesperson Const. Dani McKinnon said.

Nor would police answer any follow-up questions relating to the trial,” Given sentencing has not taken place, WPS will hold off on any follow-up related to this trial.”

Search the landfill

One of the many rallies in Winnipeg supporting a search of the Prairie Green Landfill. Photo: APTN file

Skibicki had disposed of all the women’s remains in garbage bins. After the discovery of partial remains of Contois behind Skibicki’s apartment on May 16, 2022, he was arrested. By the summertime, the city-owned Brady Landfill was searched where the torso of Contois was found.

The whereabouts of Buffalo Women’s remains are not known. The remaining two, Harris and Myran’s remains, are believed to have ended up in the privately owned Prairie Green Landfill on the outskirts of Winnipeg. As Skibicki had dumped their remains in a commercial bin behind a nearby business, a couple blocks from his home, those bins were picked up by the private company.

As details started to come out about the deaths of the four women at the hands of Skibicki, a push by families and supporters to “Search the Landfill” quickly turned into a firestorm and political campaign for much of 2023.

Initially, Winnipeg police told the families it was not feasible to search. After much community pressure, a change in the provincial government, and a commitment from the federal government, the families were told this past spring, that a search of the landfill would begin this October.

Sadly, Albert believes his daughter Ashlee may have ended up at the landfill too.

“If she’s in the landfill, we should find her,” Alberts said, “I am thinking that’s where I should be looking.”

Theresa, also believes her daughter is no longer physically here. She said she’s been getting spiritual visions inside the sweat lodge and traditional ceremonies.

“The creator had her already. I will say it’s a dream, but it’s so very real,” Theresa said as she brushed away tears on her face.

Theresa and Albert said they have started grieving for Ashlee. They are spiritual people with traditional teachings. They say they will continue to pray for the day they can find their daughter’s remains and give her a proper traditional funeral.