‘The landfill is not a burial ground’: Parents of Ashlee Shingoose want search of Brady Road to begin soon
Posted March 27, 2025 12:36 pm.
Last Updated March 27, 2025 7:25 pm.
When a Winnipeg sergeant showed up at the home of Albert and Theresa Shingoose on a First Nation in northeastern Manitoba, they didn’t expect much.
“We figured all they were going to say to us is they were still going to look. That’s what we thought,” Albert told a press conference in Winnipeg Wednesday.
Instead Winnipeg police shared a major update regarding their missing daughter Ashlee Shingoose: that she is the previously unidentified victim of a Winnipeg serial killer and that her remains are likely in the city-owned Brady Road landfill.
“My wife and I, we looked at each other, and we cried,” Albert recounted. “It was a happy, happy cry. It was good to hear where our daughter is.”
The 30-year-old Shingoose, herself a mother, was known for three years only as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or “Buffalo Woman,” until police finally matched Shingoose’s DNA to an item of clothing identified by killer Jeremy Skibicki during a post-conviction interview in December 2024.
That interview also provided investigators with more information about what happened to Shingoose’s body after she was killed, leading them to establish her remains are likely at the Brady landfill.
“Now we all gotta work hard to bring her home,” Albert said. “We need you to make it move now, to get that landfill going. I need your words, I need your voices, speak up, let’s say it, let’s get the landfill going, to bring our daughter home.
“The landfill is not a burial ground for anybody. We’re not garbage, nobody’s garbage. Let’s make it work, all of us. Get your voices going, talk. Let’s make it happen.”
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is promising the landfill will be searched. “I cannot promise you that we will bring her home, but I can promise you that we are going to try,” Kinew said Wednesday.
Winnipeg police add they are committed to being part of the efforts to search Brady Road, an obvious contrast to the force’s position years ago on the now successful search of the Prairie Green landfill – a privately run facility north of Winnipeg – for the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.
“The initial decision not to search for the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran has had significant impact on the families and community,” Winnipeg police Chief Gene Bowers said Wednesday. “We have had time for reflection, almost nearly three years. While we cannot undo the past, we can learn from it. Today we know what needs to be done.”
Albert Shingoose welcomed the commitment from police as well as the provincial and municipal governments.
“It’s good to hear all the top people accept to go and look for Ashlee, our loved one, your sister,” he said. “I’m very happy to hear they accept to go and search that landfill.”
“We still need to do action, we still need to work together to find her at the landfill,” added St. Theresa Point Chief Raymond Flett. “We’re all human beings, nobody is any different. This is a humanitarian issue.”
Flett, a former high school principal, says Ashlee was a student at his school. He says he used to see her in the hallway, “happy with her friends, her classmates.”
“She was well behaved. Came to class, came to school. And that’s how I want to remember her, positive memories that we have of her.”
Shingoose’s parents described her as a quiet girl and loving person who was dedicated to her children.
“She wanted to look after her kids,” her mother Theresa said. “When she came out with her kids, she went to a woman’s shelter because we had no place at our home. She wanted to watch her kids the best way she knows how. They found a place for her. She was making it good after that.”
But things took a turn, Theresa described, and Shingoose began drinking and taking drugs.
“Then she lost her kids and they were sent to my home for me to look after,” she said. “Ever since, I did look after them.”
Theresa told reporters she always believed her daughter would be found. Albert said he strongly believed she was “Buffalo Woman” long before this week’s positive identification.
Shingoose, Harris, Myran and Rebecca Contois – all Indigenous women – were killed by Skibicki in 2022. His trial heard he targeted them at homeless shelters in Winnipeg and disposed of their bodies in garbage bins.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak renewed calls for an inquiry into the investigation of the women’s deaths.
“Why did it take the police so long?” asked Nepinak. “And there was such pushback. And why was the previous provincial government so resistant? And we need to look at that as a society, my friends. All of us have to look at that and ask why. Why did it take so long? Why did there have to be such a push?”
