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Saskatoon Police will embark on a month-long search of the city’s landfill for evidence into the disappearance of Mackenzie Lee Trottier on Wednesday.
Trottier was 22 when she was last seen leaving her home in the 300 block of Trent Crescent on Dec. 21, 2020.
According to police, in late 2023, a substantial amount of data was collected identifying a specific area of the landfill, located at 42 Valley Road, that could provide evidence for the investigation.
Thirty-three days have been set aside for the search, with the area being approximately one meter deep and 930 cubic meters in size — about a third of an Olympic swimming pool’s volume.
The police service’s major crime section and public safety unit will receive assistance from RCMP dogs, the Calgary Police Service, and forensic anthropologist Ernie Walker.
Landfill searches in Saskatoon have been conducted in the past, with one recently highlighted in the podcast Deals, Debts, & Death: The Disappearance of Kandice Singbeil, hosted by the SPS.
The podcast delves into the eight-year cold case of 33-year-old Singbeil, who was last seen riding her bike in downtown Saskatoon in May 2015.
Episode 4 describes surveillance footage of a person throwing a large item in a white sheet into a dumpster in an area where Singbeil was last known to stay.
Tyson Lavallee, a detective sergeant in the major crime unit, explained in the podcast how they started the search.
Because of GPS-equipped trucks and cameras in the dumpster areas, he confirmed an approximate location at the landfill.
Kandice Marie Singbeil was last seen riding a bike in downtown Saskatoon in 2015. (Supplied)
“I know exactly on that cliff face where (the truck) dumped, so that turned something that is the size of a football field to something that’s maybe closer to a tennis court,” he said in the podcast.
The search included help from cadaver dogs, teams from the public safety unit and the forensic identification team.
The operator would take an excavator and move it down to run a ten-foot wide and two-foot deep strip of garbage for 50 feet for the dogs to go over. The search team looked for bike parts, clothing and human remains.
“It could be anything from body fat to coagulated blood or dried blood,” Lavallee said, adding that searchers looked for different types of maggots that form when a body decomposes.
However, after three days of searching, Singbeil’s body was never found.
The challenge of landfill searches
While Wil Tonowski, a retired detective for the Edmonton Police Service, hasn’t been involved in a specific search in Saskatoon, his 30-year career involved several landfill searches to look for victims, remains, and evidence.
“People talk about searching for a needle in a haystack, it’s even worse than that,” he said, adding that challenges can lie within the size of the landfill, how organized it is, and how much time has passed.
Tonowski has seen searches hit a dead end, but also cases where a body or evidence is discovered.
“When you have success and you find evidence that leads to finding a body, (it) in turn would hopefully give some relief to the family that their loved one has been found.”