Bringing Mackenzie home: Paul Trottier reflects on 1,319-day journey to recover daughter's remains

Paul Trottier says it was the conversation he waited three-and-a-half years to have with his daughter Mackenzie.

But it wasn'thow he planned on it taking place.

Mackenzie Lee Trottier was last seen by her family on Dec. 21, 2020, catching a ride-hailfrom their Saskatoon home.

On Aug. 1, 2024 1,319 days later searchers recovered the 22-year-old's remains from the city's landfill.

Paul Trottier picked up his daughter's cremated remains from the funeral home after police finished their forensic work in early August, wrapping the container that held her ashes in a jacket and buckling her into the front seat of his Subaru.

He says he offered her a cigarette and said his piece to her.

"Three years is a long time, not talking to your child," he said in an interview.

"There was laughter, there was sorrow, there was remorse. All those things were part of the conversation.

'You're home. We got you home.'"

Unanswered questions

What exactly happened to Mackenzie Trottier after she left home that day where she went, who she met, how she died may never be known.

Today, Paul Trottier is not sure any of that is important.

"What mattered was getting our daughter home. That was the only thing we wanted at the end of the day," he said.

"A lot of peoplemedia, friends and family, associatesthey all ask the question, 'What happened?' It doesn't matter. She's not with us.

"It matters for the sense we don't want this to happen again. What do we have to do to ensure that those things don't happen? Let's try and figure that out, rather than spinning in nastiness."

As the weeks turned to months turned to years, the search for Mackenzie spread outside the province. Posters and billboard campaigns, along withanniversary stories, kept the searchin the public consciousness and triggered tips about possible sightings in other cities.

Behind the scenes, police focused on a house on the 1300 block of Avenue B N. in Saskatoon. Investigators knew a man at the house had a relationship with Mackenzie, and he was considered a suspect in her disappearance.

"She had stayed at that residence quite often," and "one person always stood out to investigators as being involved in Mackenzie's disappearance,"said Saskatoon Police Service major crimes unit Sgt. Corey Lenius.

"This person is now deceased and there are no other suspects."

The man, never publicly identified by police, died of a drug overdose in December 2023.

Trottier says he knew the man before Mackenzie disappeared. Hedidn't like him in his daughter's life "because he's a user, he used people," said Trottier.

The man's death triggered a mix of emotions.

"[It] doesn't dissipate the anger, it doesn't dissipate the judgment, any of those nasty things you feel about the person," he said.

"It was like the wind got taken out of our sails. The lead suddenly was no longer."

WATCH |Paul Trottier reflects on long journey to recover daughter's remains:

Paul Trottier reflects on long journey to recover daughter's remains

2 months ago

Duration 2:14

Paul Trottier reflects on the search for his daughter Mackenzie, whose body was found in Saskatoon's landfill more than three years after she disappeared, and his hope to help other families of missing people.

The landfill search

But then, this past spring, police came to the family. They said that they wanted to search the landfill.

"'The evidence points in this direction,' they would say. We don't want to go there, but the evidence is pointing us there," Trottier said.

"You're a parent, you want to bring your daughter home but I don't want this to happen. I don't want this to happen there."

Trottier saysfrom the start, he likened the physical and emotional toll of the search for Mackenzie to climbing a mountain.

Now, three years into the search, he found himself facing a literal mountain of garbage.

"How do you deal with that?" he said.

Police say they'renot yet ready to talk about how theytracked Mackenzie Trottierto the landfill.

What is known is that finding Mackenzie Trottier's remains there was a long shot at best.

It involved:

• A veteran police technology officer cracking the passcode on electronic devices owned by the dead suspect, revealing a search history that included questions about garbage pickup around when she went missing.
• Narrowing down the area of the landfill to where a specific truck emptied a specific load on a specific date.
• Sifting through more than 5,000 tonnes of garbage from a targeted area.

Police enlisted forensic anthropologist Ernie Walker to sort through the dump debris recovered by searchers and identify possible remains. He saysin his experience, landfill digs can be high-risk, but low-return, operations.

"These kind of big searches of landfills are not commonly successful," he said at an Aug. 6 news conference after Trottier's remains were found.

"Officers basically climbing through piles of trash doesn't produce much, if anything, and it's extremely dangerous to the searchers."

He said the hunt for Mackenzie Trottier, which began on May 1, had advantages over other searches, beginning with the structure of the Saskatoon landfill. By virtue of its location, the site is bracketed by a rail line, the river and the Montgomery Place neighbourhood.

Trash is stacked vertically, so the landfill is growing up, not spreading out.

"In order to do that, you need to compact the trash so it will hold the weight of whatever is above it," said Walker. "And you do that by tracking how much is going there on a daily basis."

Trucks haul more than 100,000 tonnes of waste to the landfill each year. In 2020, before the start of the city's green bin program, these loads included everything from household plastics andfurniture toorganic materials such as grass clippings, food waste even animal carcasses and offal from hunting season.

GPS trackers on the trucks showedwhere the trash was picked up, and when and where it was unloaded in the landfill. Those meticulously kept records showed where in the landfill the truck from the 1300 block of Avenue B N. unloaded.

Timing was also in the searchers'favour.

Trucks dump the waste in a designated area. It's compacted and then, at a certain point, the waste is covered with a layer of dirt.

Three days before Mackenzie vanished, workers opened up a new area of the landfill. This meant the waste including that from the target neighbourhood would be in about a one-metre thick layer directly above the fresh dirt. Find that dirt, and searchers would know how deep they needed to search.

Investigators dug through eight metresto get to the layer they wanted, and then began moving horizontally.

Walker says searchers also caught a significant break at the sorting end.There wasa concrete pad at ground level next to the landfill that served as a staging ground for searchers to spread out trash for sorting and inspection.

"You want to create what's called a monolayer you take all the trash and disperse it, you lay it all out so it's not very thick," he said.

"Wandering through a metre of trash is not going to be enough."

All that said, the challenges were daunting.

Heavy machines were continuously spreadingthe trash after it was dumped, so where the GPS indicated a load was deposited mightnot be where it ended up. Thegarbage sliddown into unseen fissures and voids.

And then there is the nature of the landfill.It is not a static pile of dry, clean garbage. It's a complex system of biological and chemical processes rich and active enough to generate gas and electricity that is constantly shifting and morphing.

Factor in prairie winds, high summer temperatures and rain, and it's clear why searchers spent 93 days on sitetriple the length of time originally allotted.

"The searchers were looking for more than just human remains," Walker said.

"They were looking for indicators in the trash that we might be in the right area a piece of paper with an address on it."

Moving forward

Trottier says he's spent the weeks sinceMackenzie was found working through his feelings and resting.

"At this point, it doesn't feel over. I understand fully that we've got Mackenzie at home, that we'll start the grieving process now," he said.

"But I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done with missing people."

WATCH |Paul Trottier describes the feeling of being told his daughter's body had been found:

Paul Trottier describes the feeling of being told his daughter's body had been found

2 months ago

Duration 2:07

After more than three years of uncertaintly, and a months-long police search at a local landfill, Paul Trottier got a phone call he'd been waiting for. Police then sat him down and told him they'd found the body of his daughter Mackenzie.

The Trottiers became members of a community of missing person families when Mackenzie disappeared though "nobody wants to be part of this family,"he said.

Now, he's now hoping to find a way to help others on the same journey.

"Every single case is individual and separate and different. The commonality is with the families and the experience of the families," he said.

"How does the family deal with the aftermath of reporting to the police, the Crime Stoppers information, the choices to fundraise or not, billboards, whatever, that's required to move that case forward?"

Trottier says he'll try tohelp others find "a path forward to kind of negotiate yourself through the weeds as you're trying to find your way as a parent or family member of a missing person."

In the immediate future, Trottier says some of his daughter's ashes will be spread at the family's lake, the balance kept at home in an urn that will be made by a family friend.

"She's coming home," he said.

"That's a pretty significant thing, because many people who have those that are missing don't have that opportunity."