Did Magnotta’s shrink miss a big red flag?
MONTREAL — The forensic psychiatrist who asked Luka Magnotta if he’d promoted a death video online weeks before he killed and dismembered Lin Jun now doesn’t remember what prompted the question.
Dr. Joel Watts, who is testifying for the defence and who concluded Magnotta was psychotic at the time of Lin’s May 25, 2012 slaying, described the conversation on page 92 of his 121-page report.
The report has been an exhibit at Magnotta’s murder trial since last Friday, but Watts, who has been testifying since then, was asked about this part of it only Wednesday.
In the report, Watts seemed relatively unequivocal, certain that he’d read something online that had struck him as akin to promotional material.
“I asked Mr. Magnotta about online postings that appeared on the Internet in the weeks prior to the killing, allegedly promoting the video of Mr. Lin’s death,” he wrote.
Magnotta, he said, then told him, “I have been trying to make sense of it, I hope it was not me, I don’t remember doing it, it feels weird.”
But asked by prosecutor Louis Bouthillier what he was referencing, Watts said, “I cannot recall exactly which postings because we have not seen them again (in evidence at trial).”
Bouthillier asked Watts if he’d done his own research on the web, and he replied, “It’s possible I did, but I can’t recall.”
He agreed, however, that the information was “pertinent” enough that he thought he should raise it with Magnotta.
Pertinent is rather an understatement.
Since Watts was assessing Magnotta’s mental health to determine if he was legally sane at the time of Lin’s killing, anything that suggested he may have been advertising a videoed death in advance of the death would seem the equivalent of a giant red flag — or at least a yellow one.
Yet it appears not to have raised more than a passing concern with Watts; the subject occupies one five-line paragraph in his detailed report.
Certainly, he devoted far more space to discussing the mysterious “Manny,” a person who may or may not exist but who functioned as Magnotta’s scapegoat for the animals he killed and videoed online and whom he even sometimes claimed was on the phone with him — and even with Lin — on the night of the homicide.
Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer and the jurors haven’t seen an iota of evidence that Manny — Magnotta told his doctors his full name was Manny Lopez, a name as common in Spanish as Bill Smith is in English — is a real person.
The only references to him have come from Magnotta himself through the defence psychiatrists, and the short form of what Magnotta told them is that Manny made him do all the bad things he did: he was an abusive former client of his escort business who bludgeoned Magnotta into making sex videos, killing four cats (including his own pets) and who was the driving force behind Lin’s killing.
In other words, Manny is the ultimate in the win-win that is often self-reporting: if he is real and controlled Magnotta and forced him into killing, only Magnotta ever saw him (and, sadly, Magnotta has no contact information for him); if Manny is a delusion or an auditory hallucination, then he’s evidence of how ill Magnotta was.
After almost 40 hours of interviews, Watts diagnosed Magnotta as a chronic schizophrenic who was suffering psychotic symptoms at the time of Lin’s killing. Because of this, he said, Magnotta was unable to know what he was doing was wrong and thus was not criminally responsible for his actions.
But Watts also found the 32-year-old suffers from histrionic personality disorder (showing chiefly in his attention-seeking behaviour and provocative way of relating to others) and traits of borderline personality disorder (revealed in his fear of abandonment, chronic feelings of emptiness, and a pattern of unstable relationships). Additionally, he diagnosed him with a paraphilia based on Magnotta’s admission that he has been sexually excited and voluntarily has engaged in practices involving human feces.
He was and is, in other words, probably as complicated a diagnostic ball of wax as there is, or at least among them.
Watts said he considered four potential motivations for Lin’s killing, and in the end, concludes Magnotta’s behaviour was psychotically driven.
But chief among the others he considered was what he calls “the attention- and notoriety-seeking theory,” that Magnotta is “a selfabsorbed, attention-seeking narcissist who had coldly killed animals in the past in order to shock.…”
Watts found some support for this theory, too, as he detailed in his report — from Magnotta’s large online presence to “the seemingly planned and careful editing of the video of Lin’s dismemberment and the shocking sexual acts and indignities performed to his body” to the dry run he did a week before the killing with a young Colombian man over whose sleeping body he posed with “an electric rotating saw … implying perhaps that he was already staging some video ahead of time, or that he had previously thought of escalating to violence toward someone in the future.”
How useful it would have been to know more about those briefly mentioned online postings, promoting a death video weeks before the death.