From salesman to accused killer
Robert MacEachern was finished supper, sitting in front of the television at his cattle farm, wanting to watch the news for the next day’s weather but stuck on one of his wife’s programs instead. The phone rang. He answered it. His brother was on the other end, a little out of breath.
“Did you hear?” he asked. MacEachern hadn’t heard. He hadn’t seen the news that night, Jan. 18. So he’d missed all the stories about Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old man accused of murdering two men who had disappeared from Toronto’s gay village.
MacEachern grew up with a Bruce McArthur. They went to the same one-room schoolhouse outside Woodville, Ont. But it couldn’t be the same Bruce, he thought. It couldn’t be the clean-cut Bruce from Palestine Road who tattled on his classmates and sucked up to the teacher.
MacEachern’s wife went to the computer and pulled up a photo of the accused. He had closecropped white hair and a goatee. MacEachern called his brother back.
“Yeah that is the Bruce we grew up with,” he told him. He knew because he’d seen him less than a year earlier, in May 2017, at an anniversary party for McArthur’s sister and her husband at the Legion in Coboconk, Ont. “It was total shock,” he said.
The shocks have continued ever since.
Police have now charged McArthur with three more counts of murder. They believe there may be more to come. At a press conference in January they acknowledged what Toronto’s gay community had long feared — that they now believe a serial killer had been preying on gay men tied to the Church Street village since at least 2012.
McArthur is now charged with five counts of firstdegree murder, in the deaths of Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick and Soroush Mahmudi.
Investigators believe McArthur used his landscaping business to conceal human remains and have spent weeks digging up properties in Toronto, searching for evidence of bodies in planters and garages and other locations they think McArthur might have used to hide evidence of his alleged crimes.
But the investigation may eventually spread much further. Most serial murderers begin killing in their mid to late 30s, according to experts. McArthur spent at least some of his 30s and 40s working as a travelling salesman, pitching socks and underwear across Ontario. He has ties to Oshawa, the Kawartha Lakes area and other locations across the province.
I JUST COULDN’T BELIEVE HE’D DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT.
“If I was advising the police, I’d advise them to look back at anybody — males that are missing, unsolved crimes — that go back 20 or 30 years,” said John Bradford, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on serial murders.
Hank Idsinga, the homicide detective leading the murder probe, says investigators are “definitely” looking into McArthur’s life before he came to Toronto, in about 2000.
But the people left behind from that life — friends, classmates and relatives — are looking back too, wondering who it is they’ve been staring at for all these years.
“Is this for real?” MacEachern remembers thinking at his house on Palestine Road, about a kilometre away from the worndown black barn at the old farm where McArthur grew up.
Investigators are now digging into McArthur’s history. The question is: How deep does it go?
McArthur, born on Oct. 8, 1951, spent his childhood with his sister and parents in a sturdy-looking bungalow speckled by black and red bricks near Woodville, Ont. It’s a pocket of Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region populated more by farmers than by cottagers, where to be considered a local rather than an outsider requires a tenure of generations.
The McArthurs were among the local families of good pedigree. His parents, Islay and Malcolm ‘Mac’ McArthur, farmed and ran a kind of foster centre out of their home. Mary Anne MacEachern, a friend of the family who visited regularly during the 1960s and early ’70s, said parents from Toronto often sent their troubled children to the McArthur house to get them away from the trappings of city life. “There was always kids coming and going,” she said. “Lots of times there would be maybe six to 10 ... I never, ever heard any of those kids ever complain about being there.”
For their efforts, the McArthurs earned a good reputation around town, she said.
Mac McArthur was regarded in the area as a man who “did his work and never bothered anybody,” said Robert MacEachern, who grew up a few kilometres away from the McArthurs before moving to their street as an adult in the 1970s.
MacEachern remembered Bruce McArthur as an unremarkable schoolmate. A year younger than MacEachern, he wasn’t small but he wasn’t big either — just a normal member of the bunch at the schoolhouse a short walk down the road from the McArthur farm.
MacEachern’s brother, Ron, remembered McArthur differently.
“He was the teacher’s suck,” Ron said. “I just couldn’t believe he’d do something like that.
“He never got into any trouble. Like, we were in a one-room school — boys, we done shit. He was always sucking up to the teacher. If we got into trouble, he’d run in and squeal on us. He just wasn’t like the rest of the boys.”
From Grades 9 through 12, McArthur was bused into nearby Fenelon Falls for high school. There were two streams at Fenelon Falls Secondary, a five-year academic program and a four-year arts and technical cohort. Like McArthur, Tom Barbour was in the four-year stream. “He was a pretty prim and proper guy,” Barbour said about MacArthur. “When they said he was a landscaper, I thought, ‘Jeez, that doesn’t seem like the guy I knew.’ ”
It was at Fenelon Falls that McArthur met and began dating Janice Campbell, according to one woman who knew them both. Their graduation photos appear pages apart in the Fenelon Falls yearbook for 1969-70. McArthur’s picture shows a neat looking, dark-haired young man. His nickname was “Snoppy.” His favourite pastime was “a good argument.” His ambition was “to be successful.” As for his probable future: “your guess is as good as mine.”
“He was a nice kid,” said Barbour. “I was kind of shocked to tell you the truth.”
McArthur and Campbell would spend the next three decades together as a couple. Her picture shows a longhaired young woman with an oval face and slight smile. Her pet peeve, she wrote, was “someone who can’t decide what they want. Her probable future: “To die young.”
The young couple left the area not long after graduation. But they were back often in the mid 1970s visiting McArthur’s parents, who both fell ill and died relatively young, one not long after the other. Elva Dahms nursed McArthur’s father after he suffered a brain tumour in the late ’70s. “When I knew him,” she said of the younger McArthur, “he was working for Eaton’s.” She described McArthur then as “a very good looking, darkhaired young man.” He visited often enough to make an impression with Dahms, something she remembers now, almost 40 years later.
By 1986, McArthur and Janice were married with two children, one girl and one boy, and living in a typical suburban block in Oshawa.
McArthur turned 35 the year he bought his Oshawa home. As of 1993, he was working as a salesman for McGregor Hosiery and Stanfields, placing socks and underwear in Ontario department and clothing stores. Jo-Ann Boyd’s husband, Ross, worked for several years with McArthur. She believes McArthur worked in McGregor’s northern territory, a job that would have put him on the road, crisscrossing between Ontario towns, for most of his working days.
To Bradford, the forensic psychiatrist, that job suggests police have a massive, likely provincewide investigation ahead them on the McArthur case.
According to multiple media reports, McArthur gradually came out of the closet in the late 1990s. He left his wife and family in Oshawa in 1998 or 1999 and moved into Toronto proper. That move makes sense to Antoine Elhashem, the former vice-president of Pride Durham. Back then, there was effectively no out gay life to speak of in Oshawa, he said. If you lived in Durham County and you wanted to meet other gay men, you drove into the city.
The ’90s were trying in several ways for the McArthur family. For one thing, Bruce McArthur declared bankruptcy in 1999. For another, the ’90s marked the beginning of a legal ordeal that continues to dog the family to this day.
As a teenager, McArthur’s son, Todd, began making obsessive, obscene phone calls to women he did not know. In the years since, he has racked up dozens of convictions, for charges including harassment, and making indecent phone calls.
In 2014, Todd McArthur was sentenced to 14 months in jail after he admitted to making multiple obscene phone calls to a stranger at her workplace According to an agreed statement of facts read into the record at his sentencing, McArthur phoned the woman and made repeated references to nude photos of her. He made sexually suggestive comments and asked her if she was wearing panties. During many of the calls, the statement said, he would whisper her name just before he hung up the phone.
Todd McArthur was already on probation for two similar charges when he committed that offence. His lawyer told the court at that time that he had been diagnosed with “telephone scatalogia” and that he had been treated for his illness for at least 10-15 years. McArthur told his lawyer his condition was linked to depression and might also be associated with his first sexual experience — an explicit conversation he had on the phone with an older woman when he was 11 or 12 years old.
Todd McArthur was warned at that hearing that if he committed the same crime again, he’d be going to federal prison. But last fall he was charged with new counts of indecent telecommunication, criminal harassment and breach of probation. He was released on bail and ordered to stay with his father, Bruce McArthur, at his Toronto apartment.
Though it might be tempting to link the alleged crimes of the McArthur men, Bradford said there is nothing in the scientific literature at all about serial killers and their children.
(In truth, there isn’t much real research about serial killers at all. There just aren’t enough of them to make a decent sample size.)
There are some very preliminary studies that suggest there might some “kind of a neuro-biological” disorder common to sado-sexual mass murderers, Bradford said, but it’s far from conclusive. “The evidence is not there at the moment.”
At Todd McArthur’s sentencing hearing in 2014, the Crown referred to his “extremely supportive parents” and “healthy middle-class family.” Janice and Bruce split up when Todd was 17, the Crown said, but Todd always maintained positive relationships with both of them, and with his mother’s new spouse.
Indeed, until recently Bruce McArthur seemed to have a somewhat healthy relationship with his ex-wife and family. (It is not clear whether they were ever legally divorced.) When Janice’s parents died, in 2007 and 2003, Bruce McArthur was referred to in their obituaries as, if not part of the family, then at least an adjunct to it. Janice also made an appearance at the May 2017 anniversary party for McArthur’s sister, two partygoers confirmed.
But some elements of McArthur’s violent life had already spilled out into the open. In 2001, he was convicted of assault after he attacked a man with a metal pipe.
He hasn’t been convicted of anything else. But based on the charges already laid, Bradford thinks police need to at least investigate the possibility that the killings started decades ago.
“I’m being completely hypothetical here,” he said. “But let’s make an assumption: This is a guy that’s travelled around a bit. He’s been a salesman, which puts him in a situation where he could find vulnerable victims. But let’s assume for arguments sake that he may have started in his late 30s and there may have been one incident every five years and he’s now looking at 20 or 30 years (of possible crimes.)”
Idsinga said police are “looking into McArthur’s life before he moved to Toronto. For now, though, they’re working backwards from what they already know, “focusing on the remains that we have recovered and identifying them … covering off the addresses that we know he has worked on between 2010 — 2018 (and) conducting interviews of his historic lifestyle, Idsinga wrote in an email.
When that’s done, he wrote, “(w)e may get a clearer picture of exactly how far back we have to go.”
PROFILE Continued from NP1
National Post, with files from Victor Ferreira, Doug Quan and Serena Lalani