Searching for buried secrets in landfills
Conditions limit effectiveness of technology
Warning: disturbing content The poignant words penned by a relative of a Regina homicide victim reflect the final indignity:
“They threw him away, like he was nothing.”
Not only was Ronald Matthew Kay’s life stolen from his loved ones, so was his death. Their tormented victim impact statements, read aloud recently in a Regina courtroom during the killer’s sentencing, made clear that without recovery of Kay’s remains, there could never be the proper ceremonies and funeral rites needed to put him — and his family — at peace.
Never stated in so many words, the most likely fate of Kay’s remains emerged from his killer’s contrite confession. After 32-yearold Kay was beaten, his body was lifted into a residential garbage bin, rolled to the curb, and left there — never to be seen again.
It will likely never be known exactly what came next, but the circumstances point to the probability that the contents of that dumpster followed the usual path, hauled away to the City of Regina landfill. By the time police learned that information from the killer, three years had elapsed since Kay disappeared.
It’s a disturbing prospect without any certainty, and one that has arisen before in the provincial capital and beyond.
As a serial killer left a Regina courtroom last September, the mother of one of his victims shouted a last, anguished plea for answers: “Please, just tell me where my daughter is.”
Clayton Bo Eichler replied, “I don’t have that answer.”
That cryptic response has never been publicly explained. Eichler admitted killing Richele Lee Bear, so shouldn’t he of all people know the whereabouts of her body? His other victim, Kelly Nicole Goforth, was found in an industrial dumpster by a man digging for recyclables. The circumstances raise the inevitable question: Did Bear’s body meet a similar fate, but without such fortuitous intervention?
Regina police have declined to confirm any searches of the landfill for Bear’s body, or whether Eichler is a suspect in any other unsolved missing-person cases, including that of Kimberly Cruickshank. Like Goforth and Bear, she vanished in 2013 and was known to have been acquainted with the killer.
A decade earlier, Regina police officers spent hours poking through a sea of trash at the city’s landfill in search of Jaroslav Joseph (Joe) Heindl, a 72-year-old house painter who was known to salvage castoffs from garbage bins. His vehicle was found on Dec. 31, 2002, abandoned in a city parking lot outside a grocery store. There was a Loraas Disposal bin in the Lakeshore Mall parking lot, which led police to speculate that Heindl may have been looking in the dumpster and encountered some difficulty, such as a heart attack.
“This one (bin) had been emptied,” a police spokesman said at the time. In a 2009 interview, an RPS cold case investigator said “there’s a very good chance” Heindl climbed or fell into the dumpster. “Without finding him, how are we ever going to truly know?” Heindl remains missing. Ending up in the dump — whether deliberately or not — is not just the stuff of movie plots and whodunnit novels.
On June 12, the body of a 37-yearold man turned up at the Regina landfill. Police have released no further details, referring inquires to the coroner’s office. A spokesman said this month that the coroner is still awaiting autopsy results, and noted investigations generally take six months.
Last year, a Regina man who had been inside a large Loraas bin in the city’s industrial area was injured when the dumpster was emptied — along with the 44-yearold — during garbage collection. He managed to scramble atop the moving truck, where he was spotted by a motorist, who flagged down the driver.
A 36-year-old Saskatoon man had an even closer brush in May 2001. He suffered injuries after being pulled from the trash at the Saskatoon landfill moments before the debris was to be compacted with heavy equipment. Workers heard moaning and discovered the man — who later admitted he was struggling to breathe and nearly unconscious — buried in the garbage pile. The homeless man later told the StarPhoenix he’d sought shelter in a garbage bin, couldn’t get out of the garbage truck, and wound up at the landfill.
If those are the near misses, police in Saskatchewan also know without a doubt that some bodies lie in local landfills.
In the fall of 2010, Saskatoon police, with the help of a Calgary Police Service cadaver detection dog, sifted through the city’s landfill, looking for the tiniest of bodies. A 17-year-old girl admitted to secretly giving birth and putting the newborn in a garbage bin outside her home. A sanitation crew then came along and gathered the garbage — and unwittingly the baby’s body, which was never found.
Months before that search, police and volunteers scoured the landfill in Weyburn in hopes of finding a newborn’s remains — to no avail. A woman in that city admitted leaving the tiny body in a garbage bag next to a dumpster.
Asked recently about any searches of the Regina landfill or efforts made to find any bodies or the prospects of such recovery, the Regina Police Service declined any comment. The Leader-Post turned to the experts to shed some light on the topic.
Some have likened such searches to finding a needle in a haystack. How big is that “haystack?”
Every day, an average of 600 to 700 metric tonnes of waste — the weight of about 400 cars — is collected from Regina and some surrounding communities and trucked to the city’s landfill, explained Lisa Legault, the City of Regina’s director of solid waste.
Each sanitation truck stops at about 1,100 homes and makes a couple of trips to the landfill.
“Every time a truck comes to the landfill, it has waste in it from about 400 homes,” she said.
The waste is dumped daily into a specific grid of the landfill on a rotating basis as the week progresses. Each day, a grid is tightly compacted to reduce pockets of air and prevent combustion, then covered by dirt.
Speaking generally, Legault said the city on occasion fields inquiries from people trying to recover items, including jewelry and gifts, accidentally tossed in the trash.
“The most interesting one that I remember coming across was someone who wanted to come to the landfill to look for a lottery ticket that they wanted to check because they may have won the jackpot,” Legault recalled. “And they had put it in a desk, which they had taken to the landfill a few months prior.”
Legault also noted the city landfill “is a very dangerous place” for any search. Aside from heavy trucks and mechanical equipment, there’s rotting food, used diapers, nails, razors and broken appliances.
She said from time to time, police have inquired about investigating at the landfill. Beyond that, she referred any inquiries to RPS, which declined to wade into the subject.
Information from the City of Saskatoon indicates the amount of garbage the city’s landfill receives “fluctuates by day and by season,” but on average, about 2,000 tonnes of waste ends up there every week from all sources, including city garbage trucks and residential selfhauls.
Single-family households, according to data from the city, account for about 1,000 tonnes of waste per week, or 200 tonnes per day. The Saskatoon landfill has been in operation since 1955 and holds about six million tonnes of waste.
During weekly garbage collection in the summer months, an average of 16 trucks collect trash from about 14,000 homes each day. The average truck collects from 400 to 500 homes before it’s considered full, depending on its size.
Dr. Emily Holland and Dr. Kathy Gruspier use their know-how as forensic anthropologists to assist police, the courts, and pathologists in death investigations.
Based at the University of Brandon, Holland has been a consultant on Drag the Red, a community volunteer effort dragging the Red River in Manitoba and searching the shoreline for traces of missing people.
“No matter where you go, no two searches are the same, but the same principles apply,” Holland said. “You want to be systematic and organized and effective and efficient.”
She instructs volunteers to “really pay attention to detail, and what is it that you’re seeing.” Holland noted finding bones in the woods or on a ground surface can be “really difficult” because the environment changes.
“Identifying bone or human body parts in a landfill, it’s still difficult — but it’s not impossible. A decomposing foot is going to look like a decomposing foot,” she added
But the odds of recovery come with a lot of variables — from how the waste is managed to the time span involved and rate of decomposition.
“If someone was put in a dumpster last week, the dump truck was emptied at the landfill — you could potentially go in and look,” Holland said. “If it was two years ago, it would be completely at the bottom (of the pile). In a two-year-old case, I think it would be extremely difficult to find someone.”
Gruspier, with the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service, said a corpse in a landfill can potentially be relatively well preserved if sealed off from oxygen, for example due to the compaction process.
As to pinpointing location, the scientists note technology is of limited assistance. Infrared drones, used in search and rescue work, rely on heat generation. “That’s not really going to work in a landfill,” Gruspier said, noting there’s just too much decomposing matter emitting heat, or in the alternative, too little because of oxygen starvation.
Identifying bone or human body parts in a landfill, it’s still difficult — but it’s not impossible.