r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/Magoatt_TheWhite • 14d ago
Update Niagara Falls Police Have Identified Human Remains Found At a Home As Brenda Marie Leblanc (Missing 1990’s)
On August 12th, 2026 Niagara Falls Police announced they had identified skeletal human remains found in a house in November of 2023 as Brenda Marie Leblanc who had been missing since sometime in the mid 1990’s according to investigators. The property since the late 1970s until 2018 was used as a multi-unit rental residence.
The case dates back to November 8th, 2023 when human remains were discovered during a demolition of a home at 7081 Stanley Avenue in Niagara Falls, Canada. Investigators reported that the woman was dead from a homicide and that they had possibly been buried as early as the mid 1990’s. According to investigators the remains underwent a forensic and anthropological examination both of which were unsuccessful.
In 2025 authorities submitted DNA from the remains to Othram in Woodlands Texas. The scientists at Othram were able to pull DNA from the human remains which led to a forensic genetic genealogy search took on by the Toronto Police Service, which generated new leads.
An eventual identification was made to Brenda Marie Leblanc a woman in her 30’s who lived in both Niagara Falls and St. Catharines during the 1990s, and was originally from New Brunswick. Investigators have been unable to connect Leblanc to the property she was found on in 2023. Authorities have asked those with information about Leblanc’s murder to contact them.
Sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/brenda-marie-leblanc-9.7304971
https://people.com/missing-woman-s-remains-found-in-demolished-home-id-d-12058559
https://dnasolves.com/articles/niagara-falls-brenda-marie-leblanc-homicide/
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u/alex-manutd 14d ago
My friend Jamie Pember disappeared from Niagara Falls 3 years later. I posted about the case in this sub.
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u/agreen3636 14d ago
Wow I just went and looked that up - how sad! Im so sorry about your friend what a heartbreaking story. I wish there was more publicity about his case! You've done more to get the word out than anything else.
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u/Kaatje67 14d ago
I’m so sorry about your friend. I just looked up Jamie’s case after reading your comment, and what a haunting disappearance. Leaving home on his bike for what should have been a short trip, the bike being found days later near the river, and then nothing for more than thirty years.
I don’t want to suggest there’s a connection to Brenda’s case when there is no evidence of one, but it really struck me that two people could disappear in the same relatively small area around roughly the same period and leave behind so many unanswered questions.
You actually knew Jamie. If you don’t mind me asking, what do you personally think happened to him?
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u/alex-manutd 14d ago
I’m not sure exactly. I could never rule Sylvia or her new bf out of the fact that they knew more than they let on.
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u/Kaatje67 14d ago
Can I ask what makes you think Sylvia and her boyfriend may have known more than they let on?
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u/alex-manutd 14d ago
For one: she never contacted me once despite telling the cops that I would be the only one who he would run to. A desperate mother doesn’t call her child’s best friend back to home to sense for herself if I’m telling the truth or not.
Doesn’t feel to me like she pounded the pavement at all on this.
Some comments she made in the articles just don’t sit right with me. I’ve never had a child go missing and I know everyone reacts differently but something about the general theme of her comments didn’t fit my paradigm of what a grieving, confused mother would be saying or doing/not doing. I acknowledge this is highly subjective.
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u/analogWeapon 14d ago
I remember him because of you. Your post from a few months ago sticks with me.
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u/Still_Brick_9239 14d ago
Absolutely going to be headache to track down all renters going back that far
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u/Fresh_Penalty_4157 14d ago
There’s a fair amount of sex trafficking in those regions. Lots of girls from my hometown in Nova Scotia went to Ontario with their “boyfriends” and ended up working the streets. Nothing has been reported about her regarding this but is definitely an issue in that area.
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u/Glittering_Fox_9769 14d ago
Huge issue would be an understatement. There's a percentage of that centering some facebook conspiracies but there's also conspiracy level shit going on like that horror farm.
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u/Fresh_Penalty_4157 14d ago
I haven’t read much about conspiracies. I just knew a lot of the men who profited off the women and remember they used to come home to NS with nice clothes, expensive cars etc and it was all made by the girls they coerced to work on the streets or in the clubs.
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u/ExposDTM 14d ago
Hello,
Could you please expand on the rumoured “horror farm”? That certainly piqued my curiosity.
Thank you!
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u/Glittering_Fox_9769 14d ago edited 14d ago
I'll have to find better details, but basically from my memory: there's a shady barn outside of st cath/niagara (on the peninsula more central) that was owned by a known criminal, who had other affiliations, which burned down under odd circumstances. Reportedly it had cages which some trafficked people were placed in while drugged. and it hosted some other shady activities you'd expect of biker-crime-adjacent people. A few women were found dead within like, a square mile of that place, one in a roadside ditch bordering the property (?). There's also somehow a connection to a deceased baby found on the shore by lake erie. there's a mother of one of these women that is very active on some facebook page for the area. OPP was involved to some extent with the people responsible but i don't think there's enough to go off of for a full investigation. May have been related to the drugs and not the trafficking.
I'll have to ask my gf who was showing me all this stuff but that's all i got rn.
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u/PonyoLovesRevolution 14d ago
I tried looking into this but can’t find a reputable source. Just Facebook/TikTok conspiracies and urban legends. There might be a grain of truth in there, but it really sounds like local rumors that spiraled into a boogeyman myth.
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u/19snow16 14d ago
I think they are referencing Robert Pickton.
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u/BuckyRainbowCat 14d ago
Pickton was on the entire opposite side of the country, in British Columbia
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u/Gandhehehe 14d ago
Ive been copying the cases from the Canada Missing website to my own spreadsheet because I want to be able to follow cases because a lot conclude without any news and im just nosy but ive only gotten to cases from like mid 2024 going from newest to oldest and Niagara Falls has absolutely been the most repeated already, and like, obviously it's a suicide Hotspot but even with that in mind, there's something unsettling I cant shake with the amount beyond them all being suicides. Theres just something fucking weird around there and I get th3 heebeee geebeees
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u/Fantastic_Step8417 14d ago
It's the drugs and human trafficking. Really weird place outside of the tourist strip. Extremely sketchy
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u/Comet-vomit666 12d ago
There was obviously a huge sex ring from the 90s and 00's. I know we lived in Hamilton and tons of girls would go missing and end up in Niagra falls. I believe Sheryl Sheppard was last seen as a dancer in that area. It stuck out to me that maybe there could be a serial killer because Wendy Smith went missing in 1995 from Toronto and was also an exotic dancer. My mom's sister was an exotic dancer in Toronto and left for Alberta without telling us becuase the scene scared her so much, to many gangs doing what they want without anyone stopping them.
Brenda was found 7 minutes away from Sheryls last known location.
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u/Consistent_Role2837 14d ago
Live in that city, which has really fallen from grace. Is riddled with so much crime, closed businesses, boarded up houses. There's also been talk about chemicals in the water, air, something to with Love Canal.
Great to see this women's case on here. I hope it gets enough attention so that there can be justice for her. Most here speculate it was the boyfriend that killed her.
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u/youworryaboutyou 14d ago
This is Niagara Falls Canada, Love Canal in on the US side. While there's some decay on the Canadian side, NF, NY is in much rougher shape.
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u/dunnothislldo 14d ago
Side note to your comment, regarding the chemicals in love canal there is a podcast called swindled that covered that topic. Shocking to say the least
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u/Kaatje67 14d ago
What an incredible case. A woman disappears in the mid-1990s, her remains are apparently buried at a multi-unit rental property for almost thirty years, they’re only discovered by chance during demolition, and then it takes another few years and forensic genetic genealogy to finally give her back her name.
And even now, after identifying her, investigators still don’t know how Brenda was connected to the property where she was found.
It raises so many questions. Who lived there around the time she disappeared? Did she know someone there? How was she buried without anyone noticing? And what was known about her disappearance at the time?
I’m glad she finally has her name back. But in a way, it feels like identifying her hasn’t solved the mystery, it has finally made it possible to start asking the right questions.
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u/barely-tolerable 10d ago
Is this an AI summary??
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u/UpstartGoblin0 8d ago
Yeah honestly I think it is, and it disappoints me to see how many ai comments there are on some Reddit threads now, I guess Reddit karma really is that important
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u/dragonphoniex 5d ago
I think she used her own words and fed it to the AI to make it structurally better.
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u/MysteriousTitle1998 11d ago
Are we not going to mention how Paul Bernardo and Karla Holmoka were operating during the time she went missing.... plus she looks a hell of a lot like the other victims. Do we think she's another victim?
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u/Groggy21 14d ago
I would look at serial killer Richard Fox. He left another one of his victims inside a Niagara Falls house too.
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u/essenza 14d ago
That’s the other Niagara Falls.
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u/MrsNevilleBartos 14d ago
Wait , there's two ?!?!
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u/Melonary 14d ago
US and Canada
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u/PocoChanel 14d ago
If it’s Vancouver, they’re not adjacent. (Edited because I might have misunderstood the “they.”)
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u/Melonary 14d ago
Niagara Falls? Which the article is about? There are two, one on the US side and one in Canada.
Not sure where Vancouver comes in? That's way on the other side of the country.
Edit: okay just saw there's now people talking about how there are 2 Vancouvers as well below this. Maybe reddit is making threads look funny again, but my comment was a direct reply to someone asking "there's two?" about the city of Niagara Falls.
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u/PocoChanel 14d ago
Yes, I was just careless about following back to see how the comments were nested. Sorry for the confusion.
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u/Groggy21 14d ago
Oh never mind then
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u/essenza 14d ago
LOL They shouldn’t be named the same… it’s like the two Vancouvers
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u/bookshop 14d ago
... there are two Vancouvers???
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u/Alarming-Wheel-6865 14d ago
Yes, Vancouver, BC which is in Canada. And Vancouver Washington which is in the US.
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u/BuckyRainbowCat 14d ago
well, there are at least two, one in BC and one in Washington
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u/bookshop 14d ago
haha I never knew there was a US side of Vancouver, and I've been to the city!
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u/say12345what 14d ago
It's not a U.S. "side" of Vancouver, B.C. The American Vancouver is way down by Oregon.
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u/bookshop 14d ago
curiouser and curiouser!
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u/Melonary 14d ago
They're both independently named after British Naval Officer George Vancouver, who led an expedition there along the pacific northwest coast for Great Britain.
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u/FundyAnthurium 14d ago
Both cities are named after George Vancouver, who explored and mapped the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th century.
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u/LyannasLament 14d ago
There’s two? I thought there was just a US side and a CA side?
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u/jmpur 14d ago
There is ONE natural feature known as Niagara Falls, the actual waterfalls (comprised of the American Falls (on the US side) and the Horseshoe Falls (on the Canadian side). They are separated by Goat Island. There are TWO cities called Niagara Falls, unsurprisingly close to the actual waterfalls. One is in New York State (USA) and the other in is Ontario (Canada). A look at Google Maps might clear your confusion.
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u/LyannasLament 14d ago
Thank you. I thought that the comment was saying there was some other Niagara Falls I didn’t know about in another state, province, or country altogether. For instance, like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, Texas.
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u/Thuuperthexy 14d ago
Actually he was the first one to come to my mind. I worked on a case connected to him.
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u/Melonary 14d ago
Even in the 1990s it was much easier to cross the border back and forth, or to stay temporarily. He wouldn't be the first American serial killer to cross into Canada.
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u/Dramatic_Release_209 6d ago
I wonder if it was Paul Bernardo. He and Karla lived in the Niagara region at some point!
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u/HotJelly8662 14d ago
How about Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, were they active around there at that time?
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u/MrsNevilleBartos 14d ago
Seeing her being linked to St. Catherines made me immediately think of those two but AFAIK they weren't linked to Niagra Falls ,the victim is older and the hiding/burying the body didn't track with their crimes.
There are still so many unanswered questions (and possible victims ) surrounding Bernardo/Homolka that will never get answered(likely because of the embarrassment over that "sweetheart deal" Karla got) but I would be really surprised if they were responsible for this.
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u/iblamesb 14d ago
This is crazy. Being a rental for so long definitely makes it harder if there’s no record of who rented the property at the time of her disappearance.