THE MIND OF A KILLER
HIS CRIMES SHOCKED THE WHOLE WORLD. NOW NEW DETAILS HAVE EMERGED IN THE MURDER THAT INSPIRED THE HIT NETFLIX DOCO
It started with a horrific video posted online of a man in a hooded top suffocating two kittens by vacuum sealing them into a plastic bag. The crime so disturbed a group of cat lovers that they formed a network of amateur internet detectives to try and track him down, but the story ended with a brutal murder that truly shocked the world and was the basis of the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k with Cats.
Director Mark Lewis, together with one of the sleuths, Deanna Thompson, recently revealed even more shocking details of the crimes of Canadian killer Luka Rocco Magnotta, currently serving a prison sentence of at least 25 years.
For those who aren’t familiar with the case, it began in 2010 when the video appeared and the group started to use small clues in the footage to work out the culprit’s identity. Another video showed a live kitten being eaten by a snake. Within a few months, they became convinced that Magnotta was responsible, and offered a reward for anyone who could bring him to justice. He was questioned by police, but no charges were brought.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Are you upset with law enforcement?’ No, I’m frustrated by the system,” Thompson told Variety. “If somebody would’ve knocked on Luka’s door and just had a conversation and done a wellness check, then all of this could’ve been prevented. This was 2010 – law enforcement back then, they were like, ‘What? This is internet hoo-ha.’ I do hope that law enforcement takes these things more seriously.”
Thompson spent months trying to understand their suspect. “One of my roles in the groups was his psychology and his linguistics. I would often try to get into his head space so the message to me was very cautious. We did film it, which kinda set me back personally at the time. I was like, “OK, I need to stop analysing every sentence so much.”
While she and her colleagues were tracking him, another even more terrifying video had been posted, entitled ‘1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick’ which showed a man stabbing another with an ice pick multiple times. Allegedly, a second video was later released showing the killer eating the victim’s flesh
– a gruesome detail left out of the Netflix show.
The dead man was Chinese international student Jun Lin, 33.
His dismembered torso was dumped in bins near his Montreal apartment, while his hands and feet were mailed to primary schools and political parties including that of now-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His head was recovered from a nearby park.
Magnotta became a suspect early on, but fled Canada before being caught in Berlin in June 2012, while reading news about himself at an internet cafe. After being extradited, he was charged with murder, but pleaded not guilty, claiming a fictional ex-lover named Manny Lopez made him commit the crime.
The court heard that he was bullied at school and reported hearing voices in his head at 17, leading to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He was convinced the government was following him. He become obsessed with fame, and even had cosmetic surgery to enhance his looks. He auditioned for a number of reality series – including modelling competition COVERguy and Plastic Makes Perfect in 2008 – but they amounted to nothing. To pay the bills he worked as a stripper, made pornographic videos and did escort work.
Soon he was in trouble with the law, convicted of impersonating a woman to apply for a credit card and buying $15,000 worth of goods. He received a nine-month conditional sentence with
12 months of probation.
As the years passed, he became a sadistic psychopath, gaining the fame he cherished through the sick videos. Magnotta was convicted of first-degree murder in 2014 and jailed for a minimum of 25 years.
“I vaguely remember the story making international news years ago,” Lewis says. “As I began to look at it more and more, I was absolutely flabbergasted. The story that proceeded the murder of this extraordinary crime – these internet sleuths that operated, the story with what they had done – it was all so amazing. What you saw [in Cats] is a real-time evolution of what happened on the internet. Not only was it an unbelievable story, it had something incredibly important to say about internet culture and the difficulty of prosecuting these crimes.”
Thompson was widely praised for her investigative work, but some questioned whether outing him as the animal torturer pushed him over the edge.
“What’s been so special for me is to see young women who’ve been inspired to go out and do their own investigative work, that’s been very cool,” she tells Variety, “… but then there’s the one reaction that’s like, ‘You’re responsible for the murder.’ How the f--k am I responsible? [Pauses] It’s very uncomfortable. It’s been hard. It’s been really hard. It’s bittersweet.”
But Lewis is full of praise for her efforts. “It was an amazing true-life cat-and-mouse game,” he says. “Almost like a real-time evolution of a psychopathic killer on the internet – in that way it feels like a thriller, like a James Patterson novel where there were real twists and turns.”
MAGNOTTA TODAY
According to letters from Magnotta, now 37, obtained by The Toronto Sun, he signed up for an inmate dating site called Canadian Inmates Connect in 2015. Two years later, he married a fellow inmate, Anthony Jolin, with Magnotta’s mother – who co-authored My Son, The Killer with Brian Whitney in 2018 and who, to this day, supports her eldest child – as his witness.
“I unconditionally love my son,” she told Global News. “I know we have a bond that can work through anything.”The killer told Whitney: “We have movie nights. We all have our own TVs. I have painting class and I exercise a lot. I practise language studies.”
“It’s a true-life cat-andmouse game”