Why did the police ground Project Houston?
Bruce McArthur is charged with killing one of three men who was subject of a 2012 investigation
In 2012, Toronto police assembled a task force to search for three missing men from the Gay Village. It was shut down after 18 months. Four years later, police say a serial killer is responsible for at least one of their deaths.
Majeed Kayhan, police say, was murdered by 66-year-old Bruce McArthur.
McArthur has been charged with the killing of four other men, and police believe there may be more victims. The two other men subject to the 2012 task force — Skandaraj Navaratnam and Abdulbasir Faizi — haven’t been listed as victims of McArthur. But Navaratnam has been connected to him and Faizi’s car was found a short distance from his home.
So why did police shut down the task force searching for them?
“With no evidence to suggest criminal activity, the project closed,” police spokesperson Meaghan Gray told the Star this month. As former Toronto police superintendent Gary Ellis explained, with limited police resources “it’s like a game of whack-a-mole to decide what not to do.”
“With no evidence to suggest criminal activity, the project closed.” MEAGHAN GRAY POLICE SPOKESPERSON
Project Houston — as the task force was dubbed — began when officers were researching the disappearance of Navaratnam, according to a 2013 post by 51 Division. Investigators turned to the missing persons database, narrowing their search to individuals with similar ethnicity and lifestyle to Navaratnam, as well as those associated with the area of Church and Wellesley Sts.
That’s when Kayhan and Faizi came up. But Kayhan didn’t go missing until 2012, two years after Navaratnam. Police never searched the missing persons database in relation to Navaratnam during those years, Gray confirmed to the Star on Tuesday. “I would like to provide a more detailed explanation,” she wrote in an email discussing the database search.
“The investigation into the disappearance of Mr. Navaratnam was ongoing when, at the end of 2012, evidence came forward that suggested Mr. Navaratnam may have met with foul play.” It was this evidence that spurred the creation of Project Houston, and the addition of the other two men.
“Investigators have concluded there are a number of similarities between the three men and they have not been seen since they were reported missing,” police wrote in a Facebook post at the time. A project name is typically selected by the lead investigator and can either refer to aspects of the investigation or be entirely arbitrary.
The unspecified evidence suggesting foul play related to Navaratnam was pursued, Gray said, but ultimately discounted by investigators.
Over the project’s 18-month span, police interviewed dozens of witnesses about the three men. Numerous judicial authorizations, a term that can include things such as search warrants, were taken, though police wouldn’t provide the Star with a specific number. Properties were searched and computers were seized and searched, too. Police declined to elaborate on what they found.
In October last year, Gray told the Star the force does not disclose details about resources put into any project. Seven months into Project Houston, police were still putting boots to the ground — slated to be out on the Village streets at10 a.m. on a Thursday, canvassing and handing out flyers, a police post at the time said.
“Thousands of hours were expended by almost a dozen officers assigned to the project,” Gray told the Star. “I won’t get into any more specifics, given the ongoing case with Bruce McArthur.”
Then, in April 2014, the project was shut down. McArthur had never been a suspect during the investigation.
“Sometimes you have to pull a plug on an investigation because it’s not yielding the results,” said Gary Ellis, head of Guelph-Humber’s Justice Studies program and a former Toronto police superintendent.
The days where two detectives go out and solve a case had “long gone,” Ellis said. Today, police investigations are incredibly resource-intensive. And Project Houston was far from the only Toronto police project ongoing at the time.
Project Traveller was a year-long weapons-related operation, target- ing the Dixon City Bloods street gang. Its spinoff, Project Brazen 2, began when detectives overheard wiretap conversations between alleged gangsters, talking about thenMayor Rob Ford and his crack use. Those two projects were resourceintensive.
Project Capella, a co-ordinated effort between multiple police forces, narrowed in on killer Dellen Millard.
Project Greymouth, Project Battery, Project Rx, Project Wheeler, Project Spiderman — code names piled up simultaneous to Houston.
Overlooking a serial predator had been raised as a concern to the Toronto police before, and they’d implemented changes since then. Decades earlier, an investigation by the then-Metropolitan Toronto Police Service and the Green Ribbon Task Force into Paul Bernardo was famously botched. In the words of an attorney general’s report, it was “not a story of human error or lack of dedication or investigative skill” — but a story of systemic failure.
That investigation had been bungled, Justice Archie Campbell wrote, in part by a lack of unified direction. Tips were “scattered throughout the files and index books and binders and desk drawers.”
Toronto police were given recommendations to prevent similarly tragic oversights in future. For Houston — and later, Prism — there was one primary investigator and one investigator in charge of major case management, in addition to the other officers on the project.
Houston was neatly categorized on a program called Power Case, which designates workflow, manages tips and matches information against existing and linked case data. There was no automated crime linkage system in place during the Bernardo investigation, which could have linked his crimes together. Without ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System), the report says investigators looking into Bernardo’s crimes in different areas “might as well have been operating in different countries.”
ViCLAS was used for Houston, Toronto police confirmed to the Star.
But questions of how certain links were overlooked linger. Police confirmed DNA was an investigative avenue explored during Houston. A court had ordered DNA samples from McArthur to be taken and placed in a database — where it would stay indefinitely — nearly a decade earlier.
McArthur was subject to the DNA order as part of a 2003 sentence for one count of assault causing bodily harm and one count of assault with a weapon: he assaulted a man with a metal pipe. A court order barred him from an area that included the city’s Gay Village, and prohibited him from spending time with “male prostitutes.”
As information emerges, members of the Village community are raising questions. “McArthur was linked on Facebook to one of the men,” said Angus MacDougall, 35, who frequents the Village. McArthur and Navaratnam appear to have been friends on the social-media site, though McArthur has not been connected to his specific disappearance.
“Don’t you think you could have done a simple cross-reference with the people on his Facebook friends list against people who had been charged with a criminal offence against a gay man?”
“You’re simultaneously under-policing a community that has (an alleged) serial killer targeting it, and over-policing it for having sex with other men in a park,” said MacDougall, referencing the 2016 Project Marie that used undercover officers to find people soliciting sexual encounters in Marie Curtis Park. With files from Jenna Moon
“You’re simultaneously under-policing a community . . . and over-policing it for having sex with other men in a park.” ANGUS MACDOUGALL