2022년 4월 4일 월요일
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이 사건은 토론토에서 발생한 역사적으로 기록될만한 엽기적인 연쇄살인사건을 수사한 기록들을 보여준다. 게이들을 타겟으로 한 살인마적 충동을 가진 게이의 범죄라는 생각이 든다. 오랜시간동안을 아무런 단서도 포착하지 못하고 접었던 사건...게이타운에 실종자들이 지속적으로 발생하면서, 사건의 단서를 실종자들에게서 나타난 공통의 이름, 브루스,와 실종자의 아파트앞에서 실종자인듯한 사람을 태우고 떠나는 희미한 영상에서 차량의 특징을 단서로 찾게된 범죄자... 이 작은단서로 찾아내기 까지 5년동안의 관찰과 증거확보로, 마침내 범인을 찾아내고, 체포하게된 경과가 들어있다. 범인을 서둘러 체포해야 또다른 희생양이 될뻔한 사람을 구출해낼수 있었던 사건. 사건을 조사하면서 인터폴에서 얻은 인육을 먹는자들의 사적인 모임에 관한 이야기는 참으로 섬득하게 만든다. 이 사건일지를 읽어가다보면 아주 드라마틱한 공포영화를 보고있다는 느낌이 든다.
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IT TOOK A VILLAGE: PART 1
Inside the investigation that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur
June 2017: Another man vanishes from the Gay Village. Part one in a four-part series on the Toronto police investigation and community efforts to catch the killer.
By Wendy GillisCrime Reporter
timer17 min. read
READ THE CONVERSATION
This article was published on Mon., May 6, 2019
On January 2018, Toronto police arrested a 66-year-old self-employed landscaper named Bruce McArthur. It would become one of the biggest cases in the city's history. Over the next few months, McArthur was charged with a staggering eight counts of first-degree murder in slayings that dated back nearly a decade. All of his victims were men. All had ties to Toronto's Gay Village. The largest forensic probe in Toronto police history, the investigation reached back through eight years of pain and fear in the city’s Gay Village, exposing a tragedy of unthinkable scale that raised urgent questions about how a killer went undetected for so long. It Took A Village is Star crime reporter Wendy Gillis's exhaustive account of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur.
The frying pan was the only thing out of place. It lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, apparently knocked from the stove where Andrew Kinsman, a skilled but clumsy cook, could often be heard banging about.
Two days had passed since his neighbours heard the sounds of his cooking, or his familiar footfall on the stairs — heavy and stiff from knee replacements due to cancer. He hadn’t returned text messages or emails. The garbage wasn’t put out, the first time Kinsman, the diligent superintendent of a charming eight-unit building at Metcalfe and Winchester Sts., had ever missed pickup without arranging for a stand-in.
And so, a trio of neighbours used a spare key to go into Kinsman’s apartment at dinner time, two days after the 49-year-old last left his home on the late-June Monday after Pride. On his way out, sporting his usual cargo shorts and shoulder bag, he stopped to return keys a tenant had forgotten in her mailbox, and they chatted about the weekend’s celebrations.
Inside the apartment, the neighbours found Oom, Kinsman’s elderly cat. Through a shared wall, Kinsman’s next-door neighbour could regularly hear the gruff-but-kind man shower his pet with “adoring baby talk,” and he’d always relied on a close friend to catsit. But Kinsman hadn’t called in that favour, and Oom had no food or water. One of Kinsman’s downstairs neighbours placed the frying pan back on the stove, wondering if the cat had knocked it off looking for something to eat.
What they dreaded was now plainly evident. Andrew Kinsman was missing. It was time to call police.
For months that summer, investigators went in and out, sealing and resealing Kinsman’s apartment door with police tape. They seized and searched his iPad. They took a toothbrush for forensic testing. They conducted a bright-light search for blood and other fluids. They took notebooks, USB keys, papers with passwords written on them, old cells phones, SD cards and two Nikon cameras. Inside his closet, they found two boxes containing $130,000. The cash, a likely product of Kinsman’s longtime distrust of banks, was a strong signal he hadn’t left by choice.
On a Friday in mid-August, 53 days since Kinsman was last home, Toronto police Det.-Const. Charles Coffey noticed a calendar on his fridge. In it, Kinsman had marked his appointments for massages and physio to treat a neck injury. There, written in all-caps on the day he disappeared, June 26, 2017, Kinsman had left himself two reminders. “Pay Fido” and, in a smaller print for either 2 or 3 p.m., “Bruce.”
A dedicated task force of officers would later recognize that note for what it was: a critical breakthrough in what would become the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history, a probe that would reach back through eight years of pain and fear in the city’s Gay Village. Over the next few months, the note would set off a chain of discoveries, each building off the last, exposing a tragedy of unthinkable scale that raised urgent questions about how a killer went undetected for so long. But on the day Coffey found the calendar, the team of officers probing a series of mysterious disappearances from the Village considered it through a clinical lens, as another piece of potential evidence to test or discount. “Bruce” did not yet hold any significance — though this was not Toronto police investigators’ first opportunity to connect the name to the Village’s missing men. No ceremony marked its discovery.
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The "Bruce" note found in Andrew Kinsman's calendar -- seen written on June 26 above "PAY FIDO" -- became a crucial piece of evidence in the largest investigation in Toronto police history.TWITTER
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There are few “a-ha” moments in real-life investigations. Under the highly proscribed and procedural investigative system used by Ontario police services in complex probes, officers take a methodical approach to test a possible lead until it is eliminated as irrelevant. They added the name “Bruce” to a list of potential evidence. They would follow where it took them.
What follows is the most-complete account yet of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur. It is based on more than two dozen interviews with investigators, including Det. David Dickinson and Insp. Hank Idsinga, witnesses and community members, victim impact statements, and thousands of pages of court filings. The majority of the documents are police affidavits filed to obtain warrants, which outline evidence they’ve collected, witness interviews they’ve conducted and investigators’ theories.
In part one: Another man vanishes from the Village.
***
One week after Kinsman’s disorienting disappearance, a search party met up at Jet Fuel, a busy Parliament St. coffee shop, before heading out into the July afternoon. An ever-growing contingent of friends, family and community members had assembled to plaster posters around town and publicize Kinsman’s case, and his face. The posters showed him smiling behind glasses, a big beard and moustache. He’s tall, they said, with short hair and several tattoos — “Queer” was inked onto his right arm. Dozens of searchers had been scouring the city.
That afternoon, Greg Downer, a friend of Kinsman’s, set out on the first of 500 kilometres he would trek searching that summer, with his dog Zoe by his side, according to a statement Downer sent to the media earlier this year. Fellow searchers caught him up on what they knew about Kinsman’s disappearance — and they talked about the others.
Just two months before Kinsman disappeared, an adventurous 44-year-old Turkish man named Selim Esen sent a text to his ex-partner and was never heard from again — “I’m tired and I need money,” he wrote.
Esen, who was in treatment for drug addiction, had still been in daily contact with his former boyfriend. After two weeks with no response, his ex reported his disappearance to police and they put out a press release.
But Esen and Kinsman were only the most recent men to disappear from the Village. Downer and the others discussed the list.
The first was Skandaraj Navaratnam, a lively 40-year-old Sri Lankan with a wide circle of friends and a dog he adored. He was last seen leaving Zipperz, a since-closed Village institution, nearly seven years earlier on Sept. 6, 2010. He was reported missing by his close friend.
Three months after him, 42-year-old Abdulbasir Faizi left his job at a Mississauga printing company and was never seen again. Faizi, who was closeted, was adored by his two girls, aged 6 and 10. He told his wife he was spending time with a friend after his shift and that night he grabbed food in the Village, where he was a regular at the Black Eagle bar — a popular hangout for middle-aged gay men. His 2002 Nissan Sentra was found abandoned in the city, locked, with no signs of foul play.
And in October 2012, 58-year-old Majeed Kayhan was reported missing by his son after he stopped returning his calls. Kayhan, originally from Afghanistan, was a regular at Zipperz, the Black Eagle and Woody’s, another gay bar. His birds were found dead inside his home on Alexander St., in the heart of the Village.
In the 18 months after Kayhan went missing, the Village watched as Toronto police launched, investigated and then closed a special task force into those first three disappearances. They dubbed it Project Houston — as in, “Houston, we have a problem.” It had interviewed dozens of witnesses, conducted canvasses and ground and water searches, checked shelters and hospitals and sought new evidence through court applications. But the efforts failed to return any criminal evidence. The project closed in April 2014.
Some of the posters never came down, and the Village’s fears lingered. And after Downer’s first day of searching, he was convinced by the undeniable similarities in all five cases: all were middle-aged men with beards or stubble, and with the exception of Kinsman, all had brown skin. They were familiar faces in Village streets and bars “that people just stopped seeing,” Downer said.
The searchers “knew we had a serial killer on our hands,” Downer recalled in his statement.
He created a Facebook group for the Kinsman search, then another for missing people from Toronto’s LGBTQ community.
On Aug. 1, Downer and about two hundred people packed inside The 519, an LGBTQ community centre on Church St., to air their concerns and press police for answers.
There representing police was Insp. Peter Code, then the second-in-command of 51 Division, the downtown detachment that includes the Village. He told the crowd there would be a new task force: Toronto police had assembled a team of officers who would be taken off other caseloads to exclusively probe Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances. He urged everyone in the room to continue sharing information.
But for now, he said, there were few answers.
“We do not have a lot of information for you,” Code said. “I understand how frustrating that must be.”
***
The new task force was dubbed “Project Prism.” It assembled inside 51 Division, housed in a refurbished heritage building on Parliament St., a 30-minute walk south of the Village. It was 13 days after the town hall at The 519, nearly two months since Kinsman had gone missing and four months since Esen’s disappearance.
The team had nine officers pulled from within the division and throughout the force. Two investigators — Dets. Barry Radford and Henry Dyck — had taken the lead from the early days of Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances. Three others — Coffey and Det.-Consts. Josh McKenzie and Patrick Platte — had been involved in the Project Houston investigation. They were led by Det. David Dickinson, on loan from the force’s homicide squad.
His involvement didn’t mean police thought Kinsman and Esen had been murdered. Homicide detectives are occasionally tapped to head complex cases outside of death probes, because of their experience with what’s known as “major case management,” a strict organizational system that is employed during investigations into homicides, sexual assaults, some missing persons cases and more. The provincial system was created after a review of police handling of Paul Bernardo, the serial killer and rapist who terrorized Scarborough and later St. Catharines for nearly six years starting in the late 1980s. At one point in its sprawling investigation, Metro Toronto police interviewed Bernardo and submitted samples for forensic DNA testing. Those samples weren’t processed until February 1993, more than 25 months later; during that time, he raped four young women and murdered two others. The review found problems with coordination and communication and recommended a province-wide computerized system that would collect and organize vast amounts of information about a crime, including officer notes, names and locations, witness statements and more.
Dickinson, lean, and in the homicide cop tradition, permanently wearing a suit, would be the primary investigator. It would be his job to assign the team and keep the investigation moving and organized. The 38-year-old was an officer by the age of 20. He spent some of his formative policing years at 51 Division, became a detective and joined the homicide squad in 2014. But Dickinson’s success in laying murder charges had come with mounting court obligations, and he had been taken out of the rotation for new homicide cases. That made him available to manage and direct Prism when he wasn’t in court, and his history with the division meant he already knew some on the team.
During the first meeting, Dickinson laid out the plan. He would designate the officers’ tasks. They would come back for weekly round tables to provide updates and determine next steps. Detail-oriented and driven, he would read every report to ensure work progressed even while he was in court.
McKenzie brought the team up to speed on Project Houston — although Prism officers were not reinvestigating the Houston cases, they needed to know about the three men who’d disappeared years earlier. “We had to keep them in the back of the mind, and be aware of what they were all about, should there be overlap,” Dickinson said. Dyck and Radford also shared what they knew about Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances.
Det.-Const. Joel Manherz, who was new to the case, saw the hurdles ahead. A veteran of the force’s sex crimes unit, Manherz had extensive experience conducting online investigations. In 2013, he was named Toronto’s Officer of the Year for solving a child sex abuse case that dated back more than five decades, recovering the largest cache of self-made child pornography in Canadian history. Hearing the other officers speak, he noted there was little to link Esen and Kinsman’s cases, and no evident launching pad.
“It was hard to feel optimistic,” Manherz recalled in an email to the Star. “There were no obvious leads, (the investigators) were not all familiar with each other and we really needed to find a jumping off point. Something we could sink our teeth into.”
***
Mario Wong, the general sales manager at Downtown Chrysler on Front St. E. at the lip of the Don Valley Parkway, was working on a warm late-August day when he noticed something unusual. Two uniformed Toronto police officers were walking toward him.
Coffey and Det.-Const. Jeff Weatherbee gave few details. They told him they needed help with a case and he saw it, matter-of-factly, as his duty to help. The officers took out a pixelated picture of a red van.
It was a still from surveillance video taken across the street from 71 Winchester. After Kinsman disappeared, police had quickly secured any footage from nearby, before it could be overwritten. Weatherbee had spotted something in the top-right corner of one video showing the street in front of Kinsman’s building. The camera didn’t show the entrance, but it did capture the sidewalk out front. There, at 2:49 p.m. on the June afternoon Kinsman disappeared, a red van could be seen coming to a stop in front of his home.
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A still from security-camera footage taken outside Andrew Kinsman's home the day he disappeared. Toronto police managed to traces images of the red van stopped here back to its owner.ONTARIO SUPERIOR COURT EXHIBIT.
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The driver parked and waited. At 3:06 p.m., a man wearing a dark green shirt, beige shorts and sandals walked towards the van, then went out of frame. One minute later, a different camera captured him getting into the van’s passenger door. Police believed it was Kinsman. But the video didn’t show his face, nor the driver’s. Crucially, it also didn’t show the van’s license plate. But the vehicle looked like a Dodge Caravan. A salesperson might know more.
Wong looked at the pixelated image. Some models look similar, making it difficult to determine a year. But he saw a unique appearance package. The van had distinctive chrome side trim and no fog lights. Wong recognized it right away.
“That van is a 2004 anniversary edition,” Wong told them. “They only make that van in that year.”
It was a head start — the team had a van and could start trying to find the driver. They wouldn’t have to pull vehicle registry information for an untold number of Ontario drivers with red vans. They could narrow it to one year. Still, out of caution, Dickinson asked the province’s Ministry of Transportation for ownership information for Ontario Dodge Caravans made between 2003 to 2006.
Meanwhile, investigators continued to search Kinsman’s apartment and obtained search warrants for his accounts with dating apps. They acquired Kinsman’s user names and passwords including for the gay dating site Squirt, and logged on.
“You were active 3 hours ago, are you okay l?!?” a confused user messaged on Aug. 10, after Coffey signed onto Kinsman’s account.
The ownership records landed on a USB key on the last day of August. Dickinson was in court, but eager to get home to comb through them and find any leads the team could chase the next day. He pulled up the Excel spreadsheet at his dining room table around 10 p.m.
It revealed 6,181 registered owners. The first thing Dickinson did was search for “Bruce.” Just five owners had that name. Of those, just one had a 20th-anniversary edition Dodge Caravan from 2004. That owner was a 66-year-old man named Bruce McArthur.
Dickinson immediately ran the Bruces through the Toronto police internal database. McArthur’s name was the only one to return a recent run-in with police: an occurrence report from June 20, 2016. In it, a man alleged McArthur had attempted to strangle him during a sexual encounter inside his van.
Dickinson paused. This wasn’t a speeding ticket, or jaywalking, or theft. The report established that McArthur was likely a gay man, someone who had been accused of committing a violent assault, in the back of his van.
A van that matched one parked outside Kinsman’s home the day he was last seen alive.
“It was a big moment for me,” Dickinson recalled.
***
The 911 dispatcher had barely said a word before the man interrupted.
“Yeah, someone just tried to strangle me.”
The man was calling through his in-car speakerphone, from his vehicle parked in a Tim Horton’s lot at Bathurst. St. and Finch Ave. W. Off in the distance, in the evening summer light, a red Dodge Caravan was careening down Bathurst, haphazardly heading into oncoming traffic before swerving into a southbound lane. The caller wanted police to catch the van, and he urgently rattled off its location to the dispatcher. Then he pulled out of the lot to chase it himself.
“OK. Tell me what happened,” the dispatcher said calmly.
“Just get somebody here ...” the man responded.
“I need to know what happened —” she said.
“He tried to strangle me to death,” the man interrupted.
“Who did?” the dispatcher asked. “Who did?”
The caller — the Star is not naming him because he is a victim of an alleged sexual assault — only knew him as Bruce. They’d met, the man told the Star, about five years before after Bruce contacted him on silverdaddies.com, a gay dating site. The man didn’t even have a number for Bruce, who had usually called from a pay phone. The men spent little time together outside of sexual encounters.
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The man who says he was assaulted by Bruce McArthur touches his neck as he recounts how he says he was choked in the back of McArthur's van.STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR
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Once in about 2014, he said, Bruce invited him over for dinner at a swanky home he was house-sitting. Bruce had made him a rich, creamy pasta dish and made an odd request. He pulled a brown fur coat out of the closet and asked the man to put it on — he wanted to take pictures. The man thought it was weird. He hadn’t wanted to. But he gave in.
More recently, he said, Bruce had begun dropping by unannounced. He showed up at the man’s home, one time still wearing the costume he wore during holiday shifts as Santa Claus at Scarborough’s Agincourt Mall. And he’d twice shown up at the man’s work. He’d never gone inside, but instead left notes under the windshield wipers of the man’s truck.
On June 20, 2016, Bruce was there waiting when the man got home from work. Hungry and in need of a shower, he was annoyed at the surprise. Nonetheless, he said he invited Bruce to come inside, but he declined. He wanted to hook up in the van — “he was insistent on it,” the man said. They agreed to meet up at the Tim Horton’s, and the man took the time to take a shower.
Bruce’s red van was parked on the side of the lot, adjacent to the sidewalk. It was far from secluded, but the van’s windows were dark and reflective so it would be difficult to see inside. The man said he parked a couple spots away, then walked over. Bruce wanted to get into the van immediately. There was construction material inside, but he had taken out a bench to make space to lie down. Bruce had also put down a tarp and, on top of it, that same fur coat from two years earlier. Bruce didn’t want him to get dirty, the man remembered thinking.
He said they had only been kissing for about a minute when Bruce asked him to put his arm behind his back. “I wanna do something,” the man remembered hearing. Then, suddenly and with unexpected force, he said Bruce slammed his hand onto his throat. One arm pressed firmly onto his neck, the other holding his arm, he said Bruce’s hefty bulk pinned his 140-pound body down.
Without warning, he said, he was fighting to live. The man felt his vision closing in with dark spots. In flashes, he said, he could see a terrifying determination and disgust in Bruce’s eyes — looking back as though he were a piece of garbage. Without air, Bruce’s pressure steady and sustained on his back, the man said he felt his eyes bulging out of his head. As his heart raced, he thought of his mother and made a decision. She wasn’t going to bury him.
With every ounce of energy he had left, the man said, he leveraged his body against the ground and pushed himself up, throwing Bruce off. He scrambled out of the van. The first gasp of air was the sweetest he’d ever taken.
Within a minute, he was back in his truck, chasing Bruce down Bathurst. The 911 dispatcher convinced him to stop his pursuit, and he pulled over to the side of the road. An ambulance showed up. He was OK, even if he wouldn’t be able to swallow properly for days. Officers from Toronto police’s 32 Division arrived. They conducted an interview on the spot, and the man said he told them he never wanted Bruce to contact him again.
“Tell Bruce to stay away from me,” he told them. “I’ll kill him.”
Just before 9 p.m., Bruce turned himself in to a Scarborough police station. He told the officers his name was Bruce McArthur, the man in the altercation at Bathurst and Finch, and that there had been a misunderstanding. They drove him back to the 32 Division station in North York. During a videotaped interview, McArthur said the man had asked him to pinch his penis, and he thought that meant he wanted it rough, according to court affidavits. It escalated to strangling, but McArthur claimed it was because he misread the man’s desires.
To investigating officer Det. Paul Gauthier, McArthur appeared genuine and credible, the affidavits state.
McArthur was not charged. He was released unconditionally.
Gauthier has since been charged with professional misconduct in connection to the case. He denies any wrongdoing.
Part 2: How the smallest of traces tied Bruce McArthur to the murder of Andrew Kinsman
This article was published on Mon., May 6, 2019
One day after Det. David Dickinson found Bruce McArthur’s name on an Excel spreadsheet, a Project Prism investigator was at a towering brutalist apartment complex overlooking the Don Valley. A property manager at 95 Thorncliffe Park Dr. soon confirmed McArthur was still leasing a 19th-floor unit, with a roommate.
It was the first day of September 2017, now more than two months since Andrew Kinsman, a well-liked fixture in Toronto’s Gay Village, was last seen. A Toronto police task force probing his disappearance and that of Selim Esen, another Village regular who vanished in April, had a promising lead: using surveillance video and vehicle registration records, they believed they had identified McArthur as the man who picked Kinsman up at the exact time he disappeared.
At 95 Thorncliffe — police had gotten McArthur’s address from the registration records — investigators learned access to the building and its parking garage was controlled by electronic key fobs. That meant they could determine when McArthur came and went, based on records for his unique fob. There were also surveillance cameras in the underground parking area, although the footage from June, which might have given a clue to Kinsman’s whereabouts, had already been erased.
But the recent video still proved useful: at times that corresponded with McArthur’s fob, it showed a red 2004 Dodge Caravan exactly like the one seen outside Kinsman’s home. It featured the same roof racks, chrome accents on the doors and black rain deflectors. Then, in mid-August, the footage showed McArthur driving an upgraded van; vehicle registration records confirmed he’d just bought a 2017 Dodge Caravan from a dealership in Windsor.
An officer called the dealership and took a statement. McArthur had bought the van over the phone. He wanted the cheapest model, didn’t care what colour and said it was for his father-in-law. When he came to pick it up, he spent just 10 minutes at the dealership and paid by certified cheque.
Meantime, Prism investigators brought in Toronto police’s mobile support services, a little-known branch of the intelligence section. The unit supports criminal probes with surveillance, anything from surreptitiously shooting pictures of suspects to tailing them through the city. The Prism officers needed to know McArthur’s routines, his habits and schedule.
The investigators built out a profile of the man. He was white, five-foot-nine and 205 pounds, with grey receding hair and brown eyes. They scraped his Facebook page, noting how many friends he had and their family connections. He was once married. He had a son, and was friends with a younger woman investigators deduced was his daughter. Around 2000, McArthur came out as gay and separated from his wife before moving to Toronto from Oshawa. He’d since started his own landscaping company, Artistic Design, and worked all over the GTA.
The investigators did background checks on McArthur’s family. His son, they found, had more than 30 criminal convictions for harrassment-type offences and was living with his father at 95 Thorncliffe as a bail condition on a new charge.
McArthur also had a criminal record — he violently assaulted a man in 2001, on Halloween. The victim told police that both men had been on Alexander St. in the Village when McArthur trotted after him into a nearby building and asked about his plans for the night. As the victim moved to unlock a security door, McArthur suddenly hit him in the skull and ribs with a metal pipe. When the victim called 911, McArthur attempted to rip the cord out of the wall. Soon after, he turned himself in to police.
McArthur was convicted of assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon. He was given a conditional sentence of two years less a day, ordered to seek counselling for anger management and barred from an area of the city that includes the Village, where the Crown worried he might come into contact with male sex workers.
McArthur later obtained a record suspension from the Parole Board of Canada; his conditions had long-since expired.
That same week that Dickinson found McArthur’s name in the vehicle database, he told fellow Prism investigator Det.-Const. Josh McKenzie he had identified the landscaper as a person of interest in Kinsman’s disappearance. When McKenzie heard McArthur’s name, he immediately recognized it.
McKenzie, who had 15 years on the force, had been a member of Project Houston, the special task force into the disappearances of Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed (Hamid) Kayhan, three brown-skinned men who vanished from the Village between 2010 and 2012.
McKenzie realized why he knew McArthur’s name: he’d interviewed him during Houston.
“Get me the interview,” Dickinson said.
What follows is the most-complete account yet of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur. It is based on more than two dozen interviews with investigators, including Det. David Dickinson and Insp. Hank Idsinga, witnesses and community members, victim impact statements, and thousands of pages of court filings. The majority of the documents are police affidavits filed to obtain warrants, which outline evidence they’ve collected, witness interviews they’ve conducted and investigators’ theories.
In part two: As the Kinsman case closes in on McArthur, police realize he’d been on their radar before.
The revelation that McArthur was interviewed during Project Houston was officially made public this year. It has only strengthened a belief held by some in the LGBTQ community and beyond that Toronto police failed to act on earlier opportunities to solve the Village disappearances — and save lives.
After all, how could police have called McArthur into an interview room so early in the case, only to let him go?
McKenzie first noticed McArthur in September 2013, after he found a common link between Navaratnam and Faizi, the first two men to go missing: the email address silverfoxx51@hotmail.com. McKenzie found it searching through Navaratnam’s deleted contacts, alongside a cellphone number, according to court affidavits. He also found “Silverfoxx51” written in a notepad belonging to Faizi.
When police searched their databases for the cell number, they found a December 2005 entry for McArthur, then 61 — he had been pulled over and didn’t have valid insurance. They also searched for “silverfoxx51” on the gay dating site silverdaddies.com and found a profile for a “Bruce,” 61, from Toronto. And Navaratnam was Facebook friends with a Bruce McArthur who appeared to match the silverdaddies account.
It’s not clear if investigators placed any importance on McArthur’s 2003 conviction. The conviction is not mentioned in a Project Houston court application outlining why McArthur was called in for an interview.
McArthur agreed to voluntarily answer questions about the missing-person cases in the Village. In a videotaped interview on Nov. 11, 2013, McArthur confirmed he knew Navaratnam through a friend. He told McKenzie and the other officer they’d socialized together as part of a large group that met on Sundays at the Black Eagle, at the time a hangout for middle-aged gay men into leather. He denied he ever had a sexual relationship with Navaratnam — a lie — and claimed he’d found out about his disappearance through the missing-person posters put up all over the Village.
According to court documents detailing the interview, McArthur did not admit to knowing Faizi — he said he didn’t recognize him from a photograph. But McArthur confirmed the silverfoxx51 account was his, as it was written in Faizi’s notebook.
McArthur also offered up a surprise. He told the officers he knew Kayhan, the third missing man. They had met 10 years earlier at Trax on Yonge St., one of the city’s oldest gay bars, now-shuttered. They’d had a relationship but McArthur said he’d broken it off. He told police Kayhan would repeatedly ask McArthur to buy him things. He also said he gave Kayhan a job landscaping, but said he’d refused to do any work.
Watching the video of the interview nearly five years later, Dickinson recalled that McArthur seemed “believable.”
“He comes across as calm, just like any other witness interview that wants to help out,” Dickinson told the Star.
The interview had connected McArthur to all three missing men, but the Houston investigators did not make him a person of interest or a suspect.
Five months after McArthur spoke to police, Project Houston closed.
Toronto police Insp. Hank Idsinga told the Star that at the time of McArthur’s 2013 interview, all police knew was that the three men were missing. A lead investigator on both the Houston and Prism probes, Idsinga said officers had no evidence the men were murdered, or kidnapped or had died from a drug overdose or suicide, or anything else that might explain their disappearance. In this scenario, McArthur could not be a suspect or person of interest, he said.
“Until you establish that a crime has been committed, people are just witnesses,” he said.
Houston investigators also found connections between witnesses and the missing within the tight-knit Village community, Idsinga said. Judicial authorizations police filed during Project Houston reveal police interviewed other witnesses who knew at least two of the men. Investigators had also found another email address linking Navaratnam and Faizi.
Project Houston interviewed McArthur because he knew some of the men, he said — “but other than that, we’ve got nothing.”
That doesn’t sit well with Haran Vijayanathan, the executive director of the Alliance for South Asian Aids Prevention, an LGBTQ organization that has been vocal throughout the McArthur case. He said he can’t understand why McArthur wasn’t more closely scrutinized by police — as a brown man, he believes he would have been, were he linked to the three cases in the same way.
“They would have been at my doorstep asking questions — and it seems that that’s what they did, but then they let him go.”
***
By early September 2017, the Project Prism team was learning McArthur’s schedule through close monitoring by the surveillance team. He was out the door by 9 a.m., travelling across the GTA gardening and maintaining yards for clients in Mississauga, Bowmanville and Toronto. He was usually home by 9 p.m.
His most frequent stop was to 53 Mallory Cres., a stately two-storey home on a quiet Leaside cul-de-sac. A few minutes’ drive from McArthur’s apartment, on the edge of the Lower Don Valley, the home was frequently his first or last stop. Surveillance officers watched him doing yard work and accessing the garage, and later installed a camera on public property aimed at the garage door.
The surveillance team was also on the lookout for an opportunity to get a sample of McArthur’s DNA — samples can often be obtained through discarded items, such as a coffee cup or cigarette butt. Just a few days into their surveillance, investigators spotted McArthur going into a Church St. Second Cup. They grabbed his plate and a fork after he left, then sent them to Ontario’s Centre for Forensic Science.
In mid-September, police got the court’s permission for an intrusive move: they would place a tracking device on both of McArthur’s vans — the 2004 Dodge Caravan they believed he used to pick up Kinsman and the new 2017 model he bought in August.
To get the court’s permission for such an invasive move, police have to convince a judge there’s sufficient reason to believe the person committed a crime.
Det.-Const. Joel Manherz, who joined Prism from the sex crimes unit, prepared the application for a warrant. His job in the task force was as the affiant, the officer who writes documents that lay out the evidence for the judge who rules on the warrant. His affidavits — dozens of which were released largely unredacted on Monday— expose investigators’ early suspicions that McArthur may have been responsible for not only the death of Kinsman, but also the disappearances of Esen, Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan. Though there was no concrete evidence linking the men, Manherz noted their similarities: all were middle-aged and bearded; they all frequented the Black Eagle; they were all self-identified “bears,” a persona of gay men he defined as “a larger, hairier man who projects an image of rugged masculinity.”
“Adding to the concern of police and the community, is the fact that four other self-identified ‘bears’ from the gay community have gone missing from the Village … since 2010 — all under mysterious circumstances,” he wrote in a Sept. 14, 2017, affidavit.
Manherz stated that in order for police to start treating McArthur as a suspect, not just a person of interest, the Prism officers needed to know exactly where he went and who he interacted with. A tracker could lead them to key evidence, he argued.
“If we are to assume that McArthur was responsible for Kinsman’s death in some way and possibly the deaths of the other four males, the tracking devices could reasonably lead us to where he may have discarded the body or bodies,” Manherz wrote.
Within days, they had the warrant and covertly placed a tracker on McArthur’s new van. Police started receiving real-time GPS information about McArthur’s whereabouts immediately.
But there was a major problem. The old van, the one seen picking Kinsman up — it was gone.
McArthur had taken the van to the Bowmanville address of one of his relatives after he bought his new van. Officers checked on it four times in early September. Each time, they saw it parked in the driveway.
But when they returned later in the month, it had vanished. It could be in the garage, they rationalized, so an officer returned the next day. It was still missing; a few days after that, nowhere to be found.
By early October, the van had been missing for about two weeks, and the team was getting frustrated. They knew the vehicle potentially contained evidence about Kinsman’s disappearance.
“OK, let’s go find this thing,” Dickinson told the group at one of their roundtable meetings. “We need to find this van.”
Prism investigators McKenzie and Det.-Const. Patrick Platte, checked auto yards near Bowmanville. They went to three with no luck before pulling up to Dom’s Auto Parts in nearby Courtice. Manager Dominic Vetere checked his records and confirmed: they had a van with that vehicle information number. His documents confirmed McArthur was the previous owner.
“They didn’t tell me what case it was,” Vetere recalled. “They just said it was an important case to them.”
They got lucky. Because the yard salvages parts instead of quickly destroying vehicles for scrap in a mechanical press, the van was mostly intact; just its tires, rims and the speedometer instrument panel were gone. Platte and McKenzie stayed with the van as new tires were installed, then they sealed it to preserve evidence. They called a tow truck and followed behind down the highway back to Toronto.
Meanwhile, the tracking device on McArthur’s new van provided a detailed window into his daily movements — and they were entirely benign. Police watched as he worked a mostly predictable Monday to Friday landscaping schedule. They tracked him as he dined on sushi with friends, went to Costco and home improvement stores, ran errands, stopped at Tim Horton’s, visited the Bowmanville homes of his daughter and his ex-wife.
As time went on, Dickinson felt a creeping doubt.
“I’m thinking, all this guy is doing is landscaping all day long,” Dickinson said. “Is this the right guy?”
In the Prism round tables, the team would discuss other potential leads. Officers checked back in with witnesses, including two Australian adult film stars who may have spent time with Kinsman during Pride weekend, right before he went missing. One told police he’d been at a “leather love” party Friday night and at a superhero party Saturday. Kinsman might have been at one them, he said, but he wasn’t sure. It was just one lead the team pursued, then determined was irrelevant and closed off.
“What hadn’t been closed off was Bruce McArthur,” Dickinson said.
During the quiet of his commutes along the QEW to his home outside Toronto, Dickinson would go over the information that pointed to the landscaper. The “Bruce” on Kinsman’s calendar. The older Dodge Caravan. The strong likelihood that the person driving that van was responsible for Kinsman’s disappearance.
“I’d be driving and going, OK, well, there’s nothing else, this all leads to him. So let’s keep doing this.”
***
Investigators had poured months of resources into the wrong suspect before. It happened during Project Houston.
In fact, it’s what launched Project Houston.
In November 2012, Toronto police received an unlikely call from the Interpol office in Bern, Switzerland. An official had a tip: someone described as a “high-level, reliable” Swiss police informant had information a cannibal might be active in Toronto.
The informant was part of a small, members-only online cannibalism fantasy website known as Zambian Meat, which is no longer active. He had been corresponding with a user named “Chefmate50” who said he lived on a farm north of Toronto and admitted, in encrypted Skype messages, to consuming human flesh.
“I am for several months in contact with a suspicious person who claims to have eaten a human being,” reads the transcript of the informant’s report. Cheftmate50 appeared to have a “strong interest” in sexual cannibalism and a preference for men, he said.
The informant had previously helped police identify a real killer in Slovakia, who was also a member of the cannibalism group. The suspect, Matej Curko, was shot dead by an undercover police officer during a sting operation. He has since been linked to at least two homicides. When the informant claimed he’d identified another potential killer, police listened; a Toronto investigator travelled to Switzerland in April 2013 to interview him.
Based on his conversations with Chefmate50, the informant believed he knew the cannibal’s type. The victim, he theorized, would be lean, between 18 to 35 years old, and would have hung out in Toronto’s “gay scene,” especially parks and saunas. He believed the killing would have happened between 2009 to 2011.
“If the statements of (Chefmate50 are) correct, there must be a corresponding missing person case,” the informant said.
He had, in fact, done his own research. He identified the still-unsolved case of Navaratnam, the outgoing Sri Lankan who’d disappeared in 2010. He might be the victim.
When a team of Toronto police officers began investigating, they realized Navaratnam wasn’t the only potential victim. There was a trio of men who disappeared from the Village in a cluster between 2010 and 2012.
“As we’re investigating it was, hold on a second,” Idsinga said. “We also have Basir Faizi …. Maybe it’s him he’s talking about. Hold on a second, Majeed Kayhan … maybe it’s him he’s talking about.”
Within weeks of the Swiss informant’s tip, Toronto police formed Project Houston to look into the disappearances of Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan. Investigators cast a wide net to determine who the men communicated with and what they were doing prior to their disappearances. And they seriously considered whether one of the disappearances was connected to a cannibalism ring.
Houston investigators filed a court application for information about chefmate50@yahoo.com, and soon learned the user’s real identity through his IP address. James Alex Brunton, then 63, was a portly 220-pound white man who lived in Peterborough with his wife. He worked and volunteered with minor hockey leagues, including as the secretary of the Peterborough Minor Petes. He had no criminal history or prior contact with Toronto police.
Police obtained warrants to further the investigation, including one requiring Yahoo to hand over Brunton’s chefmate50 emails. The content was unsettling. Among the most disturbing correspondence was arrangements Brunton was making with a 15-year-old boy from Colorado. The boy had already sent Brunton naked pictures of himself and signed a contract agreeing that, when he turned 18, he would be enslaved then eaten by Brunton, his “master.”
“Master can have my body to butcher and eat as desired,” the contract read.
Police obtained warrants to probe deeper, including entering Brunton’s Peterborough home, tracking his vehicle, and surveilling him for days on end, according to court affidavits. On his computer, they discovered he had been covertly videotaping the boys and young men of a Peterborough hockey club while they were naked in the change room and showers.
Police eventually ran a sting operation in which an undercover police officer made an arrangement for Brunton to pick the officer up at the airport, then eat him, according to the affidavits. But the plan fell through when Brunton failed to show, the documents state.
They never found evidence linking Brunton to any of the three missing men. During questioning by police, Brunton said he didn’t recognize photos of Kayhan or Faizi but recalled seeing Navaratnam at Remington’s, a male strip club on Yonge St.
Police later pursued possible links between Brunton, the missing men and Canadian killer Luka Magnotta — who was convicted of first-degree murder in the 2012 killing and dismemberment of Chinese exchange student Jun Lin. In a September 2013 affidavit seeking access to Magnotta’s computers from the Montreal police, Toronto investigators prepared a two-page list of circumstantial links between Brunton and Magnotta, including their mutual interest in cannibalism and the possibility that they’d met while Magnotta worked as a dancer at Remington’s. The document also noted that Magnotta, using aliases, posted on several gay websites in 2010 that he was “looking for Middle Eastern men,” a potential connection to the Houston disappearances. This lead also went nowhere.
Brunton was eventually arrested and convicted over his contact with the 15-year-old boy, including two counts each of making, possessing and importing child pornography. Court heard Brunton paid the Colorado teen $3,500 between 2009 and 2012 to send 80 naked photos and three videos. The judge called the cannibalism group “profoundly bizarre and depraved,” and described teen’s contract with Brunton as a “ghastly” fantasy. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail.
Brunton claimed that’s all it ever was. According to court affidavits, Brunton told police in a post-arrest interview that his preoccupation with eating other humans was “‘100 per cent fantasy.’”
After his conviction, his lawyer said Brunton “was troubled, depressed and feeling inadequate and, unfortunately started searching online that led to various things that aren’t illegal.”
***
Lost, then found, McArthur’s old 2004 Caravan was towed from the Courtice scrap yard to the Toronto police Forensic Identification Services for testing. The van had a lot to say.
Forensic scientists found blood in 17 places, including on the steering wheel, the inside of the driver’s-door window, the back of the driver’s seat and four areas in the trunk. They also detected semen and acid phosphatase, a constituent of semen.
Police already had Kinsman’s DNA profile from a toothbrush taken from his apartment. That sample could now be compared to the blood detected in the van. It offered the first chance for the team to definitively link McArthur to the missing man.
Forensic scientist Nicole Vachon’s report came back with a strong match, linking Kinsman’s DNA to blood found in the van.
On Nov. 8, 2017, Toronto police upgraded Bruce McArthur from a person of interest to a suspect in the murder of Andrew Kinsman. But although it was a major development, they decided the blood wasn’t enough for an arrest — it was in minuscule amounts, the largest drop about the size of a penny; and could likely be explained away by a defence lawyer, who could explain another way Kinsman’s blood was in the van, like an accidental cut. The team would continue surveilling McArthur, through physical surveillance and the van tracker — not just to solve the crime, but also to mitigate the risk the suspected murderer posed to the public.
But it wasn’t just Kinsman’s blood in the van. The forensic tests showed the presence of two different male profiles and officers started on a mission to identify the others. Police checked for matches with Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan — they had DNA samples from all three Project Houston cases — but none were found. That wasn’t a surprise, however, McArthur had purchased the van after they went missing.
The obvious next step was to test if either sample could be Esen’s. But first, they needed to obtain his DNA. A Turkish-speaking Toronto officer was recruited to contact Esen’s brother Oguz in Turkey to see if he had Esen’s toothbrush or hairbrush, but he didn’t. The officer then requested Interpol’s assistance to obtain a DNA sample from Oguz, which would provide familial DNA. But crossed-wires with Turkish authorities caused delays and the expense of sending a package by courier was too much. Ultimately, Dickinson sent a mouth swab in the mail, along with enough Turkish lira to cover return postage.
One of the two unidentified DNA profiles carried a different mystery. It came from blood found only at front of the van, including from an opening where the speedometer panel had been removed. Police theorized that whoever had removed the panel had cut themselves sometime after the van was junked at the scrapyard. They went back to Dom’s Auto Parts, pulled receipts of speedometer purchases and contacted the buyers, but no one had purchased a speedometer from McArthur’s van. Vetere, the owner, then arranged for an employee who worked on the van to give his DNA, but the results came back negative.
Police never did find a match.
The surveillance team had, meanwhile, begun tracking McArthur’s friends and associates, including his roommate and an on-again-off-again younger boyfriend. In late November, they got the court’s permission to monitor McArthur through his cellphone data. The authorization allowed police know the people he was talking to.
By Dec. 5, police had built a strong enough case against McArthur to ask for the investigative power that comes with a “general warrant.” When granted, it gives police the right to use a broad suite of investigative techniques or procedures, including searching and seizing property. In a detailed affidavit, Manherz alleged McArthur, alone or with an unknown person, murdered Kinsman. He also stressed the potential link to Esen and the Project Houston cases.
“Investigators are continuing to seek out evidence of the crime and … evidence relating to the disappearance of the other four men from The Village,” Manherz wrote.
McArthur’s apartment, he said, was among “the best places to search for the existence of that evidence, in a covert manner.”
Part 3: How the careful plan to arrest Bruce McArthur came undone in minutes
This article was published on Mon., May 6, 2019
WARNING: This article contains graphic content.
A blanket of snow accompanied December’s arrival in Toronto, cloaking yards and wilting any plants that had hung on through rare late-fall warmth.
Winter’s onset had disrupted Bruce McArthur’s once-predictable landscaping schedule at a critical time in the Toronto police investigation into the disappearances of Andrew Kinsman and Selim Esen.
On Dec. 5, 2017, court had given the officers of Project Prism the green light for a covert search of McArthur’s apartment at 95 Thorncliffe Park Dr., a towering building overlooking the Don Valley. The special task-force had found Kinsman’s blood in McArthur’s 2004 Dodge Caravan. That was enough to make the landscaper a suspect in the likely murder of Kinsman, but it wasn’t yet enough to justify his arrest.
Still, the revelation helped earn Prism the right to enter McArthur’s two-bedroom corner unit and, once inside, take photos and videos. They could also secretly “clone” his computer, allowing police to comb through its contents later.
Immediately after obtaining the warrant, eight investigators entered McArthur’s apartment knowing he and his roommate were both away. It was quick preparatory entry, the Prism officers needed to get a sense of the space and, especially, McArthur’s bedroom.
The room had taupe walls and the wood parquet flooring common in old apartments. At its centre, there was an imposing poster bed with thick metal beams. It was cluttered. Dresser drawers were stuffed and full storage containers covered the floor. A walk-in closet was so overfilled with boxes and clothes police wouldn’t be able to thoroughly search it.
They went back the next day for the search. An officer from the technological crimes unit began copying an external hard-drive, a desktop computer and an older-model computer. Others sifted through the contents of the room. Inside McArthur’s bedside dresser drawer police found sex toys alongside several ropes, duct tape and a pair of dark-coloured leather gloves. In a night-stand, there was a strange metal bar, about eight inches in length and wrapped in tape. They began taking DNA swabs of the bar and from an orange stain on a pillow.
The officers had been at work for about an hour before they got word from the team running surveillance on the landscaper: unexpectedly, he appeared to be on his way home. McArthur was normally out of the house at this time, but he appeared to have changed his routine because of the weather.
They had downloaded just 45 per cent of McArthur’s desktop computer, but they couldn’t stay for the rest. They needed to quickly wrap up and get out.
What follows is the most-complete account yet of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur. It is based on more than two dozen interviews with investigators — including Det. David Dickinson and Insp. Hank Idsinga — witnesses and community members, victim impact statements, and thousands of pages of court filings. The majority of the documents are police affidavits filed to obtain warrants, which outline evidence they’ve collected, witness interviews they’ve conducted and investigators’ theories.
In part three: Police have a suspect in one murder. The Village worries there are more.
***
The week before Prism officers covertly entered McArthur’s home, 22-year-old Tess Richey had been found murdered in a Village alleyway by her mother, days after her family reported her missing. One day later, police confirmed a body found in a Rosedale ravine over the summer belonged to Alloura Wells, a transgender sex worker who was last seen downtown in July.
And Kinsman and Esen had been missing for months.
Many in the Village and the media were openly questioning whether police were doing enough to rule out the possibility a serial killer was at work, and whether the disappearances could be linked to the cases probed during the earlier Project Houston task force: The disappearances of Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan — who all vanished from the Village between 2010 to 2012 — had never been solved, and Project Houston had closed in 2014.
On Dec. 8, three days after Prism secured the general warrant that let police search McArthur’s apartment, Toronto police chief Mark Saunders held a news conference to address those fears. It would be natural to be concerned about the number of disappearances in the Village, Saunders acknowledged. But, he stressed, police had found no connections between any of the cases.
“I know, obviously, you don’t want to create public panic,” one reporter asked Saunders. “But is there any reason for you to say, definitively, that there is not a serial killer that is in that area?”
“We follow the evidence, and the evidence is telling us that that’s not the case right now. So, if the evidence — ”
“Right now?” the reporter interrupted.
“If the evidence changes,” Saunders continued, “that’s another day. But the evidence today tells us that there’s not a serial killer based on the evidence that’s involved.”
***
The apartment wasn’t the only residence Project Prism investigators were authorized to search. The surveillance officers had identified McArthur’s key associates, including a man who appeared to be a close friend. The officers found the duo spent a lot of time together and regularly spoke on the phone. Importantly, on June 26, the day Kinsman went missing, McArthur’s cellphone records revealed this friend was the first person he called after a long period in which he had, uncharacteristically, not accessed his phone. Police had made the friend a “person of interest” in Kinsman’s likely murder, meaning investigators could not yet exclude him as being connected to the crime.
They got permission to search the friend’s Scarborough house as well as his home on a nine-acre plot of land in Madoc, a small town two-and-a-half hours east of Toronto. Either location might be a place to dispose of human remains, the investigators theorized in their warrant application.
Adding an extra challenge was the fact that the Scarborough home was up for sale. In their court application, the team had proposed entering during an open house “under the guise of being prospective buyers.” It didn’t come to that; in late December, two sergeants from the Toronto police canine unit and their service dogs, Major and Blue, searched the property for any recent dig sites or the odor of decomposition. They found nothing.
The arrival of winter prevented the search of the Madoc property altogether. Soon after the team got the search warrant, a dump of snow fell, making it “impossible to search the property without leaving evidence which might compromise the investigation,” said one court affidavit in a trove that was released largely unredacted Monday.
The Prism team, meanwhile, had moved out of their dedicated space at 51 division to an undisclosed location closer to McArthur’s home. They were beginning to work toward what they anticipated would be the next step in the investigation: a wiretap. By listening in to McArthur’s conversations, they might catch him talking about the disappearances, or learn if anyone else was involved.
And police spent weeks sifting through the digital devices they recovered in the search of McArthur’s apartment. Their findings would break open the case.
McArthur had kept dozens of images of Kinsman; his changing appearance suggested they had been taken over several years, starting as early as 2007. The shots were portraits — they showed Kinsman holding potted plants or caught him taking pictures of nature with his own camera. McArthur had also screen-grabbed news articles about Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances and stories about the creation of Project Prism itself. Investigators also found a low-resolution image of Esen, taken from an unknown online source.
From one USB key, investigators found 49 separate folders containing images of men. In one folder, they found nearly three dozen pictures of Skanda Navaratnam, who went missing in 2010 and was a focus of Project Houston. The images showed him sitting on a park bench flanked by two dogs or looking upon the camera from under a wide-brimmed fedora.
In yet another folder was a series of pictures of Kayhan, whose 2012 disappearance was also probed during Project Houston. In some of the shots, Kayhan appeared to be in McArthur’s bedroom, sometimes wearing the same fur coat that showed up again and again in the photos, worn by different men including McArthur.
On the USB key, police also found an image of the missing person poster of Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan, all of the men from Project Houston.
***
Det.-Const. Joel Manherz was working out of Toronto police child exploitation unit on a frigid Wednesday in January. He was preparing to testify at trial later that day and had finished about 30 minutes early. He decided to pull up the files the team had extracted from McArthur’s electronics.
For more than a month, Prism had been reviewing an estimated one million digital artifacts cloned during the covert search of McArthur’s digital devices. They scoured images, looked at his internet searches, examined any maps he’d pulled up, the contents of his emails. Manherz, who had experience in online child pornography investigations, opted to use a different kind of photo-specific software.
It allowed him to search a cache of temporary thumbnail images McArthur’s computer had created and hidden in a system folder.
The search returned a number of pictures he thought at first might be more of the same ones they had already recovered that showed men sleeping on McArthur’s distinctive metal bed. But as Manherz looked closer, he realized these images were different from anything the team had found so far.
The man in the pictures was dead.
“I had to call my coworkers over to see them,” Manherz said in an email to the Star. He needed to confirm his belief that they were post-mortem images. He was worried they could be more of the same sleeping pictures, and that he was just projecting.
Within minutes, then-Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga and Supt. Bryan Bott, then-head of homicide, confirmed what he saw, Manherz said.
The discovery was tragic and seismic. The pictures were of Esen. They gave police the first direct evidence he was dead and that McArthur had killed him. Later in the day, investigators found other post-mortem pictures of Kinsman. As the software kept running, they found more images of murdered men they didn’t recognize.
Toronto police had evidence Bruce McArthur was a serial killer. He had victims they hadn’t even known were missing.
Quickly, Project Prism members and senior management gathered at Toronto police headquarters. They needed to decide what to do next. Det. David Dickinson, the Prism team leader, was at home waiting for news on the wiretap warrant — but that was suddenly irrelevant. He dropped everything and drove in.
They decided they would arrest McArthur and charge him in the murders of Kinsman and Esen. But police needed time to file warrants to seize and search the homes, cars and cell phones belonging to McArthur and others who police had not yet excluded as part of the crime. They included McArthur’s close friend and the owners of 53 Mallory Cres., the home McArthur visited most days on his landscaping routine.
Every passing moment after an arrest is time accomplices can use to destroy potential evidence. The team needed to work as a coordinated unit; the logistics would take two, maybe three days. McArthur would be arrested on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2018. Until then, he would be under constant surveillance.
Meantime, Prism prepared a protocol for the arrest, which included one major caveat.
Until Manherz found the new photos, investigators had theorized Kinsman had been murdered in McArthur’s van. But the photos of the dead men showed distinct features of McArthur’s bedroom, and that fact meant he had also likely killed in the apartment. Police could observe when McArthur was in the van, but they lost control once he closed his apartment door.
Between now and his arrest, police could not let anyone be with McArthur in his home, alone.
***
“He’s got a guy. He’s headed back to his apartment.”
“Pardon?” Dickinson asked. He wasn’t sure if he’d heard correctly.
“He’s got a guy, he’s headed back to his apartment,” the officer on surveillance repeated.
The team watching McArthur on the morning of Jan. 18 had just passed the message along to Prism officers stationed near McArthur’s building: McArthur was driving his 2017 Dodge Caravan back to 95 Thorncliffe. He had a middle-aged, brown-skinned man riding with him.
“John” — his pseudonym in court documents — was an immigrant from the Middle East. He had met McArthur on the dating app Growlr the previous summer and the men had hooked up on several occasions. Throughout, McArthur refused to give his phone number and, that morning, he had asked John if anyone knew he was with him. John was married to a woman and not out about his sexual orientation. He said no.
Police had to arrest McArthur immediately. At the off-site office, it was controlled chaos. Dickinson told the team to “take their addresses” — meaning they should secure the properties they’d been assigned to search and seize during the arrest-planning meeting just the day before. The original plan was tossed. The investigators didn’t yet have warrants, but they had to go now to ensure evidence wasn’t lost while they waited.
Dickinson flew out the door and into an unmarked SUV and ran a few reds to meet the surveillance team at McArthur’s building. Two Prism officers, Det.-Consts. Derek Pape and Patrick Platte, were already there. Together they waited a few interminable minutes for the elevator to take them to McArthur’s 19th-floor unit. Members of the surveillance team were already there, waiting outside his door.
Inside, McArthur brought John into his bedroom and asked him to undress quickly. He told John that they were going to try something different. Then McArthur handcuffed John to the bed and put a leather bag over his head. John asked McArthur to take it off — it had no holes, he couldn’t see — but he refused. When John managed to get it off himself, McArthur tried to tape his mouth shut.
There was a knock at the door.
Dickinson, Pape and Platte were prepared to force McArthur’s door. But it didn’t come to that; he answered their knock.
McArthur didn’t seem surprised and didn’t put up a fight. Dickinson told him he was under arrest for first-degree murder. McArthur said he had a prior engagement he needed to get to. The officers put him in handcuffs.
Pape then went into McArthur’s bedroom. He found John naked, handcuffed and alive.
***
There was a pounding, urgent knock on Karen Fraser’s door, too. It was about 10:25 a.m. — minutes after McArthur’s arrest — when two officers strode up the walkway to the side door of 53 Mallory. Fraser, 73, was about to begin painting a bathroom wall. Her partner Ron Smith, 69, was working upstairs in the office.
Fraser, petite with a red pixie cut, was blasted by frigid air when she opened the door, so she ushered the officers inside. They got to the point.
“You have to leave your home now,” one told her. “A serious crime has been committed and Bruce McArthur has been arrested.”
McArthur had been the couple’s landscaper for almost a decade and was a frequent presence in the yard during the spring and summer months. At their cottage up north, Fraser and Smith were neighbours with McArthur’s sister, who had mentioned her brother was starting a landscaping business. Fraser and Smith agreed to let him use their garage to store some of his equipment in exchange for him tending to their expansive yard. “It seemed like a flawless arrangement,” Fraser said.
Over the years, they struck a cordial, if distant, relationship in which they discussed gardening and food and little else. At the height of landscaping season, McArthur would come to their home as often as three times a day, sometimes bringing his son to help, or, occasionally, other men he’d hired. The couple had trusted McArthur and they gave him a key so he could use their washroom when they were away during the summer. McArthur often used their yard as a staging ground for pots and planters he arranged for other clients. He’d brought large pots for their yard, too, filled with lime sweet potato vine, mandevilla and begonias.
Fraser and Smith didn’t have time to ask questions. The officers told them to gather their necessities and leave. They grabbed a few clothes; a police officer stood nearby as Fraser gathered her underwear. Next, the officers said, they needed to go to 51 Division to be interviewed.
They waited in the lobby for hours, in the dark about what was going on. Eventually, they were interviewed separately. Fraser was shown the photos from the Project Houston posters, the ones showing Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan smiling. She recognized two of them — McArthur had brought Navaratnam and Kayhan to her property as workers. She remembered seeing Kayhan standing at the edge of the ravine in her backyard “clumsily trying to use a shovel.” It was obvious he wasn’t cut out for the job, and McArthur had been angry with him. She’d later emailed McArthur to ask about the man, but never got a response.
At the end of the interview, after an officer turned off the tape recorder, Fraser finally asked what police thought McArthur had done. McArthur hadn’t struck her as capable of masterminding anything, so she’d assumed he’d been caught up in something orchestrated by someone else. She wasn’t prepared for what she was told. “I just couldn’t picture Bruce killing,” she said.
It was hours before they were allowed to go. As she stood on the sidewalk, in a cold sunset and the din of rush hour, it hit Fraser. They couldn’t go home.
“Where are we going?” she asked her partner.
They called friends as they drove up the Don Valley Parkway. One offered dinner, others said they would take them in for the night.
After supper, Fraser and Smith went back to the house to feed their cats. They arrived to a jarring scene: dozens of media trucks and vehicles, their bright lights illuminating the driveway and garage.
The following day, investigators fanned out across the GTA, searching properties linked to McArthur through his landscaping work, eventually recruiting scores of officers from other police forces.
But the main investigative effort focused on 53 Mallory, and before long Fraser and Smith’s home was ground zero of an international news story.
One day after McArthur’s arrest, police brought the cadaver dogs Major and Blue to the Mallory home. The dogs showed a strong interest in five items — the large planters McArthur had brought to the property.
Heavy and frozen to the ground, the pots were taken to Toronto’s Centre for Forensic Sciences. There, forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Gruspier opened the planters and made a horrifying discovery: skeletal and dismembered remains — of at least three men.
In the weeks to come, forensic pathologists would perform the grim task of removing the remains and identifying the bodies. Their findings would open up another dimension to the sprawling investigation, and heap yet more suffering on a community whose worst fears were coming true.
Part 4: Inside the final days of the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history
This article was published on Mon., May 6, 2019
WARNING: This article contains graphic content.
“The city of Toronto has never seen anything like this,” then-Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga told a crush of reporters and a bank of TV cameras jammed into the Toronto police headquarters media gallery.
It was a frigid morning in late-January 2018, 11 days after police arrested a 66-year-old landscaper in the murders of Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman, two men from the city’s Gay Village. There was a major development in the case — police had charged Bruce McArthur with three new counts of first-degree murder.
A veteran homicide cop, Idsinga had been monitoring Project Prism since its inception. But he became actively involved in November, after the special task-force found traces of Kinsman’s blood in McArthur’s old van, making him a suspect in that killing. Idsinga, who towered over the podium with a buzzed head and low, authoritative voice, was fast becoming the public face of an unprecedented investigation.
He also brought knowledge of Project Houston, another special task-force that he led for a time. It had investigated three earlier disappearances from the Village before dissolving in 2014 without finding evidence of a crime.
Prism had now identified five alleged victims, Idsinga said, putting on glasses to spell out their names for reporters. Among the three new victims, one was a man many in the Village would remember from Houston. Two others they were hearing about for the first time. There would be more.
“We have no idea how many more there are going to be,” Idsinga said.
What follows is the most-complete account yet of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur. It is based on more than two dozen interviews with investigators — including Det. David Dickinson and Insp. Hank Idsinga — witnesses and community members, victim impact statements, and thousands of pages of court filings. The majority of the documents are police affidavits filed to obtain warrants, which outline evidence they’ve collected, witness interviews they’ve conducted and investigators’ theories.
In part four: With McArthur in jail, the Village confronts the full scale of his crimes.
***
In the frenetic days that followed McArthur’s sudden arrest on Jan. 18, the Prism officers began poring over his apartment — scouring every surface and piece of furniture inch by inch, seeking hair, blood, fingerprints, fibres or any other evidence.
Meanwhile, the review of McArthur’s digital files continued and investigators found yet another major piece of evidence on his phone: a photo of 58-year-old Majeed (Hamid) Kayhan, one of the Project Houston men who disappeared in 2012, that appeared to have been taken after his death. The image resembled other post-mortem images McArthur had taken of Esen and two men the officers didn’t yet recognize. All of them appeared to have been killed and then staged with a fur hat or the fur coat that McArthur had also asked other, still living, men to wear.
The evidence suggested McArthur had killed Kayhan on Oct. 18, 2012, a week before he was reported missing by his son.
It was more difficult to identify the other faces in McArthur’s photo collection who had not already been on Prism’s radar.
An officer from the force’s forensic identification section used facial-recognition software to compare one photo with the Toronto police database. It returned a match with a 43-year-old man with two distinctive moles on his lower right cheek. Dean Lisowick was a familiar and friendly face in the Village and a frequent user of the city’s shelter system. He was never reported missing, but police had his photo in their records and a relative of Lisowick later confirmed the match. Data from the image told police McArthur had killed him on or about April 23, 2016, two days after he was last seen leaving the Scott Mission, near College St. and Spadina Ave.
Det. Keri Fernandes, who was assisting Prism from the sex crimes unit, found another match among current Toronto police missing-person reports. Soroush Mahmudi was reported missing by his son-in-law on Aug. 22, 2015. The 50-year-old had not been at his job for seven days and he left behind a bag he normally took with him to work. Mahmudi had disappeared before, but this was the first time his family had reported him missing. They gave police a photo showing the man’s short hair, broad cheeks and neat goatee. It matched the one from McArthur’s computer.
McArthur killed Mahmudi, police said, on or about Aug. 15, 2015, the last day he attended work.
Those were the five at the time of Idsinga’s news conference: Kinsman, Esen, Kayhan, Lisowick and Mahmudi, killed between October 2012 and June 2017.
But the Prism team knew McArthur had killed at least once more — they had recovered an image of another still-unknown dead man among McArthur’s photos. There were also several sets of unidentified human remains recovered from 53 Mallory Cres., the Leaside home where McArthur tended the yard and stored his landscaping equipment. And police had reason to suspect the landscaper had also killed Skandaraj Navaratnam and Abdulbasir Faizi, the other two men from Project Houston. That task force had linked McArthur to both men, though Prism officers hadn’t yet found any direct evidence he had killed them.
***
At 53 Mallory, the Prism investigators tried using heaters to thaw the frozen backyard. A team from the Ontario Provincial Police had used ground-penetrating radar to scan the backyard and detect any disturbances in the soil. They found eight areas that needed further searching — but it was too cold and the heaters couldn’t sufficiently thaw the earth to start digging. Police opted to come back with the warmer weather.
An extensive search was also taking place inside the home. Owners Karen Fraser and Ron Smith had been “extremely co-operative,” one officer noted in a court affidavit, and they’d showed genuine surprise about their landscaper’s crimes. But police had to search everywhere. They’d given him a key to their house.
For 22 days, Fraser and Smith relied on friends and neighbours for shelter. They regularly saw their home as the backdrop of the evening news, but couldn’t return. The couple worried especially about how to take care of their rescued cats. Their pets couldn’t be left in the house, so all but one moved to a temporary home with the couple’s accommodating friends.
The remaining cat, Purrfect, had escaped to the basement when the police arrived and she had hidden amongst the storage ever since. Fraser and Smith asked the police to look out for her, and received updates by text.
“I checked on Purr,” an officer texted in early February. “She is eating and drinking. Saw her for a minute then she went into hiding.”
Officers thoroughly searched the home’s garage, finding a suitcase containing a vibrator, plastic gloves and surgical mask; rope and duct tape; two large knives and four hacksaws; a hard drive and a camcorder, according to a police affidavit.
The Prism team was also reaching out to the men who had been attacked by McArthur — and survived. They included the man who’d called 911 in 2016 after McArthur tried to strangle him in the van, the one he attacked on Halloween 2001 and two others.
In an interview after McArthur’s arrest, Peter Sgromo told police that he’d gone out for dinner in the Village with McArthur, a longtime friend, in the spring of 2017. During the meal, McArthur talked about his travels in Italy and, later, they hooked up in his van. That was where the killer forcefully grabbed Sgromo by the neck, he told police. He held onto McArthur’s elbow and escaped the van. He hadn’t spoken to McArthur since.
In another interview, Sean Cribbin told police he and McArthur had hooked up in the summer of 2017 after meeting on a dating app. On one occasion, Cribbin said, they went back to McArthur’s apartment, where McArthur showed him some of his “bondage equipment.” The men had sex but Cribbin said he felt uncomfortable and cut the encounter short.
Prism investigators found photos of Cribbin handcuffed in McArthur’s bed and being choked with a bar. Cribbin hadn’t known McArthur was taking pictures.
“At least four males have come forward to say that McArthur attacked them without provocation and they all feared for their lives,” Det.-Const. Joel Manherz wrote in a court affidavit.
Meanwhile, pathologists at the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service were working to identify the remains from the planters. Officials can use various methods to identify a body, including fingerprints, dental records and DNA, each one progressively more difficult. By mid-February, Michael Pollanen, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist began reporting matches: the remains of Kinsman and Mahmoudi had been recovered.
His pathologists had also found the remains of a new victim: Navaratnam, the first of the three Project Houston men to go missing from the Village, in 2010. It was the first piece of direct evidence incriminating McArthur in Navaratnam’s murder.
On Feb. 23, investigators charged McArthur with a sixth count of first-degree murder.
***
By early March, police had reason to call another press conference. Prism had hit a wall trying to identify the last man found in McArthur’s collection of post-mortem photographs.
In an exceedingly rare move, Idsinga told reporters investigators were reluctantly releasing the picture of the dead man in the hope he might be identified by a member of the public. The photo showed a dark-skinned man with black hair and a beard seen from the neck up, his mouth slightly open and his eyes closed. Idsinga said the photo had been “cleaned up” to “remove some artifacts.”
“We need to put a name to this face and bring closure to this man’s loved ones,” Idsinga said.
As the photo circulated, the pathologists continued their work. On Feb. 28, Pollanen sent police an email indicating his pathologists believed the planters contained the remains of at least seven different people.
By the end of March, they’d identified two more sets of remains: those of Lisowick and, importantly, of Faizi, the Afghan immigrant who disappeared in 2010.
Faizi’s remains were critical new evidence. Unlike most of the others, police hadn’t found original images of Faizi on McArthur’s computer. But forensic pathologists were able to use a single tooth from one set of remains to match Faizi’s DNA. Police charged McArthur with a seventh count of first-degree murder in early April. McArthur was now charged with the murders of all three men whose disappearances were the focus of Project Houston.
Just five days later, yet another charge.
Police had identified the man in the picture. In 2010, Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam was among hundreds of Tamil asylum seekers who’d come to Canada from Sri Lanka on the MV Sun Sea. During the migrant ship’s 100-day journey he’d collected rainwater for tea and made rice soup from sea water. Kanagaratnam’s family hadn’t heard from him since 2016, but his refugee claim had been denied, so they’d assumed he’d gone underground. The 37-year-old was never reported missing.
McArthur was now charged with murdering eight men in killings that spanned 2010 to 2017. It was the worst serial killing in the city’s history.
***
As July heat scorched the city, police returned to 53 Mallory for a final search. Seven of McArthur’s victims had been identified among the remains found inside planters seized and taken to the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service. They wanted to find the eighth.
With the ground now warm enough to resume the dig, investigators started excavating the steep, forested ravine slanting down to a CP rail line behind the home. McArthur had used the slope as a compost pile, filling it with leaves, soil and brush. A dozen investigators worked with Dr. Kathy Gruspier, the forensic anthropologist, removing buckets of soil then carrying them down the hill to sifting tables. Looking around, Dickinson saw a yard nature had transformed since the winter search; leaves had filled the maple and poplar trees and the hedges had grown in. It was completely secluded.
Just hours into the excavation, they found human remains. They called the coroner’s office. Over the nine-day excavation, they located remains virtually every day.
The pathologists identified the remains of Kayhan, killed in 2012. He was the only victim whose body had not yet been recovered. Police had already charged McArthur in Kayhan’s murder, but the discovery brought closure. It also established that McArthur, who’d worked on dozens of properties all across the GTA, had chosen one place for his victims.
A few months later, officials relinquished the remains. After months or years of uncertainty about their loved ones’ whereabouts, the men’s families were at last able to mark their deaths.
Haran Vijayanathan had already committed to helping relatives claim the remains. He knew distance and language might be barriers to the families of the men. Vijayanathan, the executive director of the Alliance for South Asian Aids Prevention, started co-ordinating with grieving families locally and in London, Sri Lanka and Dubai.
Vijayanathan, an outspoken advocate with a neat short beard and dark hair, was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka — Kanagaratnam’s hometown. He had been sitting in his Carleton St. office planning the year ahead when he heard about McArthur’s arrest on the radio. Only a month earlier, he’d listened as Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders responded to the community’s long-held concerns about a serial killer by telling a news conference police had no evidence the Village disappearances were connected. At the time, he’d taken Saunders’ word at face value; McArthur’s arrest made his “blood boil.”
Saunders has since stressed that at the time of his comments, police only had tangible evidence for a single homicide — Kinsman’s.
“As the investigation continued to evolve, and accelerate at an incredibly fast pace in a short period of time, it exploded into multiple victims. So, when I made that comment we had a person that we were interested in,” Saunders said. “He was a suspect for a homicide, not for a serial killer.”
As the head of an organization dedicated to LGBTQ and HIV-positive South Asians and Middle Easterners, Vijayanathan felt a responsibility to ask why it took the disappearance of Kinsman — a white man — to find a killer who had, for years, preyed on racialized men. Yes, Kinsman had written down the name “Bruce” in his calendar, but Faizi had also identified the killer, Vijayanathan noted — he’d scribbled McArthur’s email user name in his notebook six years before.
Even before the full scale of McArthur’s killings was known, Vijayanathan had drafted a letter on behalf of ASAAP’s board urging city officials to call an independent inquiry. It was imperative to examine how a serial killer went undetected for so long, even as the LGBTQ community repeatedly raised the alarm.
The revelation that Project Houston investigators let McArthur go, after linking him to all three missing men, has deepened Vijaynathan’s belief that the missing-person investigations were inadequate. ASAAP has alleged that racism, homophobia and classism “played a significant role” in police failure to thoroughly probe the disappearances.
In March 2018, with the support of Saunders, the Toronto police board launched an independent inquiry into the force’s handling of missing-person investigations. The retired judge leading the review has since vowed to examine whether systemic bias or discrimination impacted the initial investigations into McArthur’s early victims. In July, Toronto police launched a dedicated missing-persons unit, an initiative aimed at helping investigators quickly pick up on the patterns in the thousands of disappearances reported each year.
Co-ordinating some of the memorials wove Vijaynathan closer into the victims’ lives and illuminated similarities to his own. At Kanagaratnam’s funeral last fall, he watched as mourners swarmed the flower-topped casket, some collapsing onto it. Kanagaratnam’s mother sat in a chair immediately next to her dead son, despondent. Vijayanathan imagined his own mother.
In the year since McArthur’s arrest, Vijayanathan has organized community healing circles and attended all but one of McArthur’s court dates, picking up and dropping off relatives so they could be there, too. “I wanted to be at those places as well, to say, there are people of colour who give a damn about this situation,” he said.
It took an emotional toll. Vijayanathan took the holidays to process.
Vijayanathan is now sitting, as a citizen, on the independent review’s advisory committee. He’s repeatedly heard how racialized, LGBTQ and underhoused people feel unsafe to approach police officers, or feel they aren’t taken seriously when they do. He hopes the review can change that and begin to close the space between police and the many communities angered by the McArthur case.
“The divide is still there and I don’t think the gap is going to close any time soon. That wedge is so deep it’s going to take a while to get it out.”
***
“For years, members of the LGBTQ community believed that they were being targeted by a killer,” Crown prosecutor Michael Cantlon told a vast and packed downtown Toronto courtroom in early February this year.
“They were right.”
Just over a year since McArthur’s arrest and nearly a decade since his murderous spree began, the sprawling case had come to a sudden end. Hunched, expressionless and noticeably thinner since his arrest, McArthur stood up in court and said “guilty” to each of the eight counts of first-degree murder. He had waived his preliminary hearing, then entered his plea early. There would be no trial.
The serial killer had spent much of the last year inside the Toronto South Detention Centre’s special handling unit, a segregated area of just four cells. Immediately after his arrest, he was on suicide watch. A few months later, he was joined in the unit by Alek Minassian, the alleged murderer behind the Yonge St. van attack.
McArthur was allowed out of his cell for four hours a day. He sometimes struck up conversations with the officer standing guard about books, old movies and the Leafs. “He could have been mistaken for any regular adult,” said one jail employee, “and could never have been suspected of what he did.”
When McArthur was escorted to court or professional appointments, other inmates would hurl threats and insults; for his protection, jail guards were advised to stop walking other prisoners in the halls at the same time. The concern was warranted. McArthur has since been sent to hospital following an assault inside a federal prison.
During the serial killer’s three-day sentencing hearing, court heard McArthur kept mementos of his victims, including Navaratnam’s silver bracelet and Esen’s notebook. Data from his computer showed he revisited the photos he’d taken of his victims staged after death.
Most of the men’s remains were decomposed, and forensic officials could only determine the cause of death for McArthur’s last victims, Kinsman and Esen — both killed by ligature strangulation. Kinsman’s DNA was found on the tape-wrapped metal bar police found next to McArthur’s bed during their secret entry; the photographs on his computer show he likely used the bar to tighten a cord around their necks.
On the computer, Prism investigators found a folder containing nine subfolders of photos — one for each of his eight victims and a ninth, labelled “John,” the man officers found tied up inside McArthur’s apartment on the day he was arrested. Were it not for police intervention, Ontario Superior Court Justice John McMahon said he had “no hesitation” concluding John would have been McArthur’s next victim.
A small team of investigators has been reviewing old cold cases, looking for any possible connection to McArthur, but none have been found.
Since his arrest, McArthur had shown no remorse and given the chance to address the court he said nothing. Still, his guilty plea had averted a lengthy trial and that saved his victims’ families, friends, court staff and the larger community a “nightmare” of having to endure months of gruesome evidence, McMahon said.
Some details may nonetheless be seared into the minds of those present in court. Faizi’s two young daughters still bring photos of their dad into bed at night, his wife said. Navaratnam used to send daily texts just to say “have a good day,” said a friend. Kinsman loved to bake. He left snacks for his neighbour when she was working on her dissertation. All eight men led lives of success and challenge. People loved them.
McArthur’s actions were “pure evil,” McMahon said — he was a sexual predator and killer who exploited the vulnerabilities of his victims, men who had immigration or mental-health challenges, or were living a double life because of their sexual orientation. His crimes had devastated immigrant and racialized populations and made the city’s LGBTQ community feel endangered in the place where they’d once felt most safe.
A conviction, McMahon acknowledged, can only go so far.
“Each family member, each loved one, and the members of the community will live with this nightmare forever.”
The judge sentenced McArthur to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, when he would be 91 — although the nature of his crimes makes it highly unlikely it would ever be granted. Now 67 and diagnosed with diabetes, McArthur is already in ill health. He will almost certainly die in jail.
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