Mass killer suspected before chief let on
TORONTO• A police task force investigating suspicious disappearances of several men in Toronto’s gay village believed there was reason to expect “the worst” as early as August 2017, months before Chief Mark Saunders assured the public there was no evidence the disappearances were the work of a serial killer.
In fact, the day before Saunders’ dismissal of the spreading fear, his officers had secretly broken into the apartment of Bruce McArthur, their prime suspect in a series of presumed murders, to search for evidence in their widening probe.
On Jan. 18, 2018, police announced the arrest of McArthur, a 66-year-old selfemployed Toronto landscaper. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of men linked to Toronto’s gay community.
According to court documents released Wednesday, members of the task force, codenamed Project Prism, had noticed a pattern between men vanishing from the village.
They were all middle-aged with facial hair and selfidentified as “bears” in the gay community, a term for a “larger, hairier man who projects an image of rugged masculinity,” police documents say.
Each spent time at the Black Eagle Bar on Church Street and each disappeared on a holiday.
At that point, investigators believed five men were missing, though eventually the tally would rise to eight.
“It is reasonable to believe the worst,” Det.-Const. Joel Manherz wrote in court documents in August 2017. “Although, at this time we have not yet discovered a concrete connection between the men, they do share some similarities which suggest they may be related.”
Manherz was requesting a judge’s order to compel Google to hand over data for two email addresses related to Andrew Kinsman, the last of McArthur’s alleged victims to go missing. Kinsman, 49, went missing on Pride Weekend in 2017. Police noted the other missing men also disappeared on holidays: Selim Esen on Easter, Majeed Kayhan on Thanksgiving, Skandaraj Navaratnam over Labour Day and Abdulbasir Faizi over Christmas.
The Project Prism documents, all filed by investigators to convince judges to allow search warrants, offer glimpses inside the final stages of the investigation that captured the alleged serial killer. A vetted and heavily redacted version of police and court records was ordered released Wednesday by Ontario Court Judge Cathy Mocha after a request by media organizations, including Postmedia.
The documents show the extent of police interest in McArthur and his alleged killings, more so than Saunders let on.
On Dec. 5, 2017, police officers covertly entered McArthur’s Toronto apartment at 95 Thorncliffe Park Dr., but soon had to scramble out after a detective monitoring McArthur warned them he was heading home.
Two days later, police investigating suspected murders returned to the apartment, heading straight for a room they believed to be McArthur’s bedroom, quickly searching it and copying electronic devices.
Whatever police found inside — pages on the results of their search are redacted — it did nothing to dismiss McArthur as a suspect.
The next day, however, Saunders gave his public statement debunking rumours of a serial killer stalking the gay village.
Police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray said Wednesday that, while the documents show investigators may have believed the worst at the time, Saunders was still being truthful on Dec. 8 when he said: “The evidence today tells us that there is not a serial killer.”
“It’s one thing for an investigator to believe something, it’s another thing for it to be evidence to move something forward,” Gray said, adding that she spoke with lead investigator Acting Insp. Hank Idsinga, who agreed there was no concrete evidence proving the serial killer theory at the time.
“There’s no contradiction to what the chief said at his news conference,” Gray said.
The police investigation was hampered, at least to some degree, by a reluctance of some in the community to come forward to police, the documents say.
One witness in the investigation into Esen’s disappearance, who police found during their probe, told a detective he did “not come forward of his own accord, because he was concerned the police would ‘out’ him,” an officer wrote.
Another witness said she was “apprehensive about talking to the police.”
This is the second recent release of thousands of edited pages of police and court documents on the investigation.
The batch released last Friday dealt with three victims — Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan — whose disappearance between 2010 and 2012 led to the launch of a Toronto police probe in November 2012 called Project Houston.
That project was closed without any arrests 18 months later, even though investigators seemed certain at least two of the men had been murdered.
The even larger batch of documents released Wednesday related to a subsequent police probe, called Project Prism, that was launched in August 2017, adding two more missing men to the list: Kinsman and Esen.
McArthur’s alleged victims include the five men whose disappearances were investigated in the two probes and three additional men: Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam.
All of the men died between 2010 and 2017, Toronto police say.
Through the course of their investigation, detectives uncovered a horror show: The dismembered remains of seven of the dead were recovered from large planters at a Toronto home where the alleged serial killer had worked; remains of the eighth were found later in a ravine behind the property.
After McArthur’s arrest, police searched McArthur’s apartment the next day. Scooped up was a large cache of electronic equipment — computers, several phones, hard drives, a digital audio recorder, USB drives, an iPad, iPod, compact discs, memory cards and others.
Members of the LGBT community condemned police for not warning citizens that a serial killer might be loose in the gay village.
Saunders has since announced an independent external review into how the force handles missing persons cases.
HE WAS CONCERNED THE POLICE WOULD ‘OUT’ HIM.