Police charge 66-year-old man with two murders

Believe suspect may have killed more in Toronto

Toronto police have charged a 66-year-old man with murdering two gay men and say they believe he is responsible for several other deaths.

The arrest comes a month after Chief Mark Saunders insisted that there was no evidence to suggest a serial killer was behind disappearances in the Village, a downtown neighbourhood known as a hub to the LGBTQ community.

Homicide Detective-Sgt. Hank Idsinga said Bruce McArthur, who works as a self-employed landscape designer, was arrested at 10:25 a.m. Thursday in connection with disappearances in the Village.

Although no bodies have been recovered, McArthur was charged with the firstdegree murder of Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Selim Esen, 42. Kinsman was last seen on June 26, less than two kilometres away from the Village. Two months earlier, Esen was last seen one block north of the neighbourhood.

“We believe he is responsible for the deaths of Mr. Esen and Mr. Kinsman, and we believe he is responsible for the deaths of other men who have yet to be identified,” Idsinga said.

Police would not release a photo of McArthur, Idsinga said, to protect the “integrity of other witness statements.”

What they did reveal was that McArthur runs a landscape design company named Artistic Design. McArthur, police said, lived in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood about eight kilometres northeast of the Village. He owned four properties in Toronto, police said, and one other in Madoc, Ont., a rural town north of Belleville with just over 2,000 people.

Police are searching the properties.

McArthur lived in a highrise building in Thorncliffe Park, according to two neighbours.

Chantal Smith said she’d often small-talk with him on the way up to her apartment on the elevator. He loved cooking, she said, and would often be seen carrying several trays of freshly-baked muffins.

Another neighbour described McArthur as “super creepy” every time he rode the elevator with him because he would often stare at him without looking away. The neighbour said McArthur had a boyfriend who was always with him.

According to his Facebook page, McArthur appeared to visit the Village for the Pride Parade. McArthur is often pictured with his family, including photos from 2015 and 2016 when it appears that he worked as a Santa Claus at at least one local mall.

McArthur has a profile on the gay dating website silverdaddies.com and describes himself as owning a landscaping business and being “romantic at heart.”

Idsinga said police had been investigating McArthur for “several months” but could not make a “definitive link” to the disappearances until Wednesday. He said police had a “pretty good idea” of how the men died but would not elaborate.

Idsinga said both Kinsman and Esen had a relationship with McArthur. Both Kinsman and Esen, along with McArthur, were active on dating apps, but police wouldn’t confirm that’s how they met. Kinsman appeared to be in a “sexual” relationship with McArthur for “some time,” police said. McArthur’s relationship with Esen was less clear.

“We don’t know what his exact relationship with Mr. Esen was leading up to the (alleged) murder, whether he had just met him that day or whether he had known him for some time, we just don’t know that yet,” Idsinga said.

The arrest was made as a result of the Project Prism investigation that was formed to look into the disappearances of Kinsman and Esen in August. In December, police said Project Prism would be working closely with Project Houston — another task force investigating the disappearances of three gay men who went missing from the Village community between 2010 and 2012.

It has been more than five years since Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam, 40, Abdulbasir “Basir” Faizi, 44, and Majeed “Hamid” Kayhan, 59, went missing. On Facebook, McArthur appears to be friends with Navaratnam. Police originally said the cases were not connected but later admitted that their ethnicity and the fact that all three frequented the Village led them to think otherwise. Police did not say whether McArthur was connected to these cases.

Aside from Kinsman and Esen, Alloura Wells, a transgender woman, was last seen alive in the Village in July. Police found her body in a nearby ravine but only identified her when her family reported her missing in November.