National Post (National Edition)
THE MISSING
DOCUMENTS SHOW POLICE WENT TO GREAT LENGTHS TO FIND 3 MEN LATER TIED TO McARTHUR MURDER PROBE
Adead body in a steam bath on New Year’s Day, a man claiming to be a cannibal, officers sneaking into a house and cloning computer hard drives and a GPS tracker secretly hidden by detectives on a suspect’s vehicle are among the tantalizing — but ultimately fruitless — early leads Toronto police chased in the years before Bruce McArthur was charged with killing eight men linked to Toronto’s gay village.
The investigative efforts by police in the cases of three missing men are detailed in an immense — but heavily redacted — stack of police documents released by an Ontario judge Friday morning.
All three men would later be confirmed dead by police, allegedly at the hands of McArthur, a 66-year-old Toronto landscaper.
McArthur is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Selim Esen, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam, who died between 2010 and 2017.
The documents deal with early police probes of three of those victims — Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan — who were considered missing under suspicious circumstances at the time. A vetted and redacted version of the police and court records was ordered released by Ontario Court Judge Cathy Mocha after a request by media organizations.
The three cases led to an 18-month Toronto police probe, called Project Houston, which was closed in 2013 without any arrests.
Several sworn affidavits by different officers reveal glimpses of a police investigation struggling at the time to find the missing men or to learn their fate.
After McArthur’s arrest on Jan. 18, 2018, Toronto police faced criticism over its handling of the missing person cases, including accusations it didn’t take cases of missing members of the gay community seriously enough.
The new documents show that although the first probe failed to solve the mystery of what happened, detectives conducted a wide investigation of the three cases, spanning 18 months from 2012 to 2013.
Police made applications for several judicial authorizations to search cars, properties, computers, phones, financial data and airline manifests, to secretly record conversations, electronically track a suspect’s vehicle and access the victims’ internet, credit card and email records. Investigators also used a confidential informant and even undercover police officers.
Detectives were pretty certain at least two of the missing men, Navaratnam and Faizi, had been abducted and murdered but they could not yet gather enough evidence to lay any charges. In mid-September 2010, the first of McArthur’s alleged victims was reported to police as missing by a friend.
Navaratnam was a 40-year-old man who came to Toronto from Sri Lanka as a refugee and was well known around Toronto’s gay village. Though heavily redacted, documents from 2010, written by police requesting a judge’s permission to access phone records, gives a play-by-play of the early days of the probe.
Within a month, police believed “unknown persons” had abducted him. Officers and 16 friends and concerned members of the community walked through the trails and forest in Riverdale Park, poking under heavy brush. The park was known to be a popular meeting place for gay men in the area, police said in a summary of the then-fledgling probe.
Investigators searched Navaratnam’s apartment, looked at his bank statements, emails and cellphone records. They returned to Riverdale Park with a cadaver dog and tried to enlist
a helicopter equipped with an infrared system capable of detecting human remains, but were told the forest canopy would interfere.
At each turn, investigators found “nothing of evidentiary value.”
By December 2012, police had new information.
When Navaratnam’s case was re-examined, police changed his status from a missing person to a murder victim.
“Until recently,” Const. Lindsay Riddell with the Toronto Police Homicide Unit wrote to a judge on Dec. 17, 2012, “there had been no new evidence or leads.” Riddell was asking a judge for a warrant to plant a tracking device on a vehicle in a document called an information to obtain. The tracking device was approved and was in play until June 1, 2013, the documents say.
Officers also went back to the court for a judge’s approval to compel Yahoo Canada to turn over data from the victim’s email account, a second time, after a friend received an email from the defunct account, although police believed it was likely a spam email.
In the days following,
homicide investigators obtained a general warrant to conduct searches of a person’s home. Investigators said they also needed their request sealed by the judge to protect the identity of a “confidential informant.”
Shortly before Christmas 2012, police undertook a clandestine operation to sneak into a home without the occupant knowing. Inside, they found several tower computers and agents with the police technological crimes unit secretly cloned the hard drives.
The identity of that suspect is redacted from the released documents, but he has been identified as James Alex Brunton.
CTV’s W5 reported last week that detectives spent months on a tip from a man in Switzerland. The man said he spent time on a forum about cannibalism and met someone from Peterborough, Ont., who suggested he had actual experience with cannibalism. After seeing that multiple gay men were missing in Toronto, the Swiss man called Toronto police, who sent detectives to conduct an interview.
“We did have multiple undercover operations in play,” Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga told W5. “And ultimately it was through one of those undercover operations where we were finally satisfied that he was, in fact, not responsible for killing anybody.”
Although dismissed as a suspect in the cases of the missing men, Brunton was later convicted of child pornography offences.
Police also sent requests to 14 other police departments in Ontario asking them to search their records for unsolved missing person reports for males between the ages of 21 to 24. That range is odd given the ages of the three missing men were about twice that. Halton police, west of Toronto, responded with a case from 2006 with “similar circumstances,” but the outcome is not revealed in the records.
Project Houston officers settled on two other similar cases to include in their probe.
Faizi, a husband and father, was 42 when he was reported missing to Peel police on Dec. 30, 2010. He disappeared after speaking to his wife on the phone. Relatives said he spent the bulk of his time working or with family.
Kayhan was a 58-year-old father. He was reported missing in Toronto by his son on Oct. 25, 2012. The two spoke every few days, police were told, and when Kayhan didn’t respond to multiple messages, his son became worried.
Police started re-interviewing people known to have had contact with the three men shortly before they disappeared.
Investigation of all three cases led police to Toronto’s gay village.
The interviews and receipts from the victims led officers to look into a number of landmark businesses that cater to the LGBT community, including bars, nightclubs and saunas.
One person interviewed by police spoke ominously of a dead body being found at The Cellar, a premise known as a “gay sauna (that) has no name on its door,” a police affidavit says. An investigation led officers to believe the body was that of a 45-yearold man who died in the steam baths on Jan. 1, 2007, of a heart attack and that foul play was not suspected.
Police asked judges for more search warrants in May 2013, this time for two vehicles and a home with outbuildings on the property. Again the suspect’s identity is redacted from the released documents.
Investigators also took an interest in 2013 in a website called SilverDaddies.com.
In an application for a judicial authorization filed in February 2013, police said SilverDaddies.com is a website describing itself as “a meeting place for mature men and other men (both daddies and younger) who are interested in keeping their daddy happy and/or sexually satisfied.”
The police material about the website is mostly redacted, making it difficult to understand how SilverDaddies factored into the investigation back in 2013. McArthur, however, is known to have used the site, at least at the time of his arrest, writing in his personal profile that he was “Just here to see what’s out there and maybe make a few new friends .”
Police also sent a toothbrush and disposable razor, believed to have been Navaratnam’s, to the Centre of Forensic Sciences for testing. It is unknown what the tests may have yielded as the following 10 pages are all redacted.
Similarly, a section introducing a judge to Skype, a program that provides video chat and voice calls between computers, is followed by eight redacted pages and a section offering an analysis of Navaratnam’s phone records is followed by 13 redacted pages.
Another intriguing lead mentions Navaratnam travelled somewhere, although the destination is redacted. The police report notes that Navaratnam did not drive and would have had to go there with someone else.
Riddell told a judge on Feb. 12, 2013: “It is unknown who he went there with on this occasion.”
IT WAS THROUGH ONE OF THOSE UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS WHERE WE WERE FINALLY SATISFIED THAT HE WAS, IN FACT, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLING ANYBODY. — DET.-SGT. HANK IDSINGA, ON CLEARING ONE SUSPECT IN THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THREE MEN.