Missing bodies suggests ‘organized killer,’ expert says
TORONTO — An organized killer is one who leaves no body behind — making a murder investigation all the more challenging for police and prosecutors, an expert says.
Thomas Hargrove, founder and chair of the U.S.-based Murder Accountability Project, told the Toronto Star that an unrecovered body, or bodies, “speaks to a very organized killer.”
Hargrove spoke to the Toronto Star on Wednesday, several days after the arrest of Bruce McArthur, 66, who has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Selim Esen, 44.
The bodies of Kinsman and Esen have not been found. At a news conference last Thursday, police said they believe there are more victims.
Hargrove said there are both organized and disorganized killers, with disorganized killers tending to be more opportunistic and “they kill when they can.”
“Often they don’t own cars because nobody would sell them a car or allow them to have a driver’s licence.”
Disorganized killers disproportionately have mental illness or mental challenges, he added.
But organized killers are different, Hargrove explained.
“They plan. They look for victims — they can still be opportunistic — but they look for particular victims and they make a plan to avoid detection and capture.”
Hargrove described murder investigations where no body has been found as “devilishly hard to solve.”
The murder charges against McArthur haven’t been tested in court.
“It’ll be a difficult case to get a conviction on. But to make an arrest without recovery of bodies is fairly remarkable,” Hargrove said.
Michael Arntfield, professor of criminology at Western University and director of the university’s Cold Case Society, said “the vast majority of serial offenders” target marginalized people.
“The fact that a particular strata of people in a particular neighbourhood was targeted is not unusual, and we see this consistently across Canada and the U.S. in that offenders tend to stick to a given area,” Arntfield said. “And they tend to target people who they have already ingratiated themselves with.”
What makes the McArthur investigation unusual, he said, is the two murder charges laid with no bodies.
Arntfield said that having no body means “you’ve got no coroner or pathologist who said that the person is dead, and how they died and that they died as a result of criminal violence.
“You don’t have any of that. So you have to assemble a case based on the totality of circumstantial pieces of evidence — and that is a laborious process.”