Bones discovered near Sept-Îles: Samuel Gauthier’s family hopes it is the man who has been missing since December

The relatives of a father who has been missing for six months are hopeful that the human bones discovered Saturday morning on Lac-Daigle Road, a few kilometers from Sept-Îles, belong to him.

“It stirs up a lot of emotions, we need a conclusion to all of this. With the forest fires of the last few weeks, we no longer believed it, ”says Carolanne Dufour, the spouse of Samuel Gauthier, missing since last December on the North Shore.

It was a passerby who made the macabre discovery on the side of the road, around 4:45 p.m., in the forest sector located north of Sept-Îles.

Contacted by a friend of the latter, M^me Dufour says that the man in question was doing work in the area and had stopped to urinate when he fell on the body.

“He started digging around a bit because he thought it smelled like corpses. It was there that he saw clothes and a body wrapped in a sleeping bag,” she explains, confirming information obtained from other sources by The newspaper.

The missing piece?

A scene was quickly erected by the authorities, alerted by the passerby. Investigators and the forensic identification service of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) went to the scene to gather as much information as possible.

The bones were recovered and transferred to the Laboratory of Forensic Sciences and Forensic Medicine in Montreal for analysis, said Hugues Beaulieu, spokesperson for the SQ.

“We have no idea who it could be at the moment. It could take some time,” he said.

But for Carolanne Dufour, it may be the missing piece of a puzzle she has been trying to put together for months. And this, even if she has no proof that it is indeed her spouse.

“We have a body, clothes, DNA. All this on a silver platter. This will potentially catch those who did this!”, she hopes.

The noose is tightening

Samuel Gauthier, 28 years old and father of two young children, lived in Quebec when he went to the North Shore to help a friend at the beginning of December.

He was last seen on Cartier Street in Sept-Îles around 2 a.m. on December 11. His family believes he was the victim of murder after associating with the wrong people.

Remember, however, that Stéphane Pilote, another 28-year-old man, has also been missing in the region since January 6, 2021.

“In any case, the noose will tighten around those responsible for these crimes,” says Carolanne Dufour, convinced that the two disappearances are linked.