Creating the perfect victim of a serial killer
“Why did Canada kill you?” the brother of the murdered Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam repeatedly called out in Tamil, hugging the coffin at his funeral on Sunday. How did he become a victim of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur?
These are good questions, always asked when the hunt for a possible serial killer begins, whether in Sri Lanka, Canada or the U.S. How could it have been allowed to happen? And are there changes that will make it less likely to happen again?
Serial killers are figures from nightmares; we expect such psychopathic creatures to vanish with daylight. But there they are and always will be. It’s a game of chance. When the police don’t know you’re missing or can’t be bothered to search for anyone with a “highrisk” lifestyle, they have helped make you a perfect victim.
Kanagaratnam’s family in Sri Lanka hadn’t called police, assuming he had gone underground after his refugee claim and appeal were turned down. It’s not clear why federal officials didn’t deport or at least track him. He became an unperson, which made him the most desirable target for any serial killer: someone no one would look for, and with no visible connection to anyone who would bring him death.
When the late Laura Babcock vanished in 2012, her desperate boyfriend went to the Toronto police. The officer wasn’t interested in another missing girl living on the edge. If he had been, perhaps another of Dellen Millard’s victims, Tim Bosma, might be alive.
At 78, Samuel Little, just revealed as perhaps America’s most prolific serial killer, resembles Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer of the 1980s, who said “prostitutes were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing.” They both targeted sex workers, vulnerable poverty-stricken women addicted to drugs and alcohol, in other words, women without power.
Serial killers are like highways. As Ginger Strand wrote in Killer on the Road, a revelatory 2012 book on violence and the U.S. interstate, the endless highway “turns a nation into nondescript nowhereland” peppered with truckstops that attract murderous long-haulers and isolatos. Did that truck briefly stop? Who got into its cab last night? No one knows. The deregulation of industry — undersupervised temp truckers, Uber, Airbnb — has created “sweatshops on wheels” that make it easier to commit murder. Driverless trucking will come with one unforeseen advantage: fewer rapes and killings.
Kanagaratnam was getting by as best he could in Toronto, a “sanctuary city.” The concept is a humane one. Undocumented people living here illegally can obtain services like health care, public transit and shelters without being questioned about citizenship status. But it makes the city more dangerous for everyone — does this person have a criminal record or even auto insurance? — and worse, helps cement the vulnerability of the undocumented.
Canada assumes that failed refugee claimants or immigrants will obey the law and leave the country. But if they don’t, they are forever vulnerable to blackmail, torment, or death at the hands of monsters.
By allowing this, cities ultimately leave the survival of these people to chance. Canada does not work by chance. Canada is an organized country. Toronto is a city of regulation. How wonderful it is to live under that umbrella of paperwork and obligation, how pleasant to drift along following the rules.
I am haunted by Kanagaratnam’s lonely life in cold, unfriendly Toronto. We don’t know what his killer may have offered him: sex, money for sex, or small-scale work that paid in cash.
And then the police reluctantly released a photograph of the face of a corpse. They admitted it was an indignity but had nothing else to help them discover his name and his loving family.
Strand writes that “every crime requires the intersection of three elements: a criminal, a victim, and a place.” A city can work on each, dissuading the criminal, removing the victim, or changing the place.
That might mean altering the sanctuary city to keep alive the very people we were trying to help in smaller ways.