Killings in Toronto’s gay community expose neglect

TORONTO — A day after attending Toronto’s gay pride festivities last June, Andrew Kinsman, 49, a building superintendent with deep roots in the community, dropped out of sight, missing his volunteer food-bank shift and leaving his cat unfed.

Friends knew right away there had to be something wrong, and now, after months of anguished searching, the horrific answer to what happened to him has not only shaken the gay community, it also has widened its long-standing rift with Toronto police.

Last week, police said they had recovered the dismembered remains of six people, including Kinsman, from planters on a property where Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old landscaper, worked, and investigators were searching 30 other places across the city. McArthur has been charged with the murders of Kinsman and four other men, and police said additional charges were expected.

But as the investigation has grown, so, too, has anger among gay activists in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, who accuse authorities of neglect in missing-person cases involving gay men that have stretched out over nearly a decade.

“The symptom is missing and murdered people,” said Nicki Ward, a director of the neighborhood association for Church-Wellesley, an area also known as the Gay Village, where the cases were concentrated. “The disease is how police manage the job of taking care of the community.”

For decades, the Gay Village, a cluster of streets dotted with rainbow flags, restaurants, bars and coffee shops, has been a meeting place for gay, lesbian and transgender people. Police raids of bathhouses in the neighborhood in 1981 — a Stonewall moment in this country — spurred Canada’s gay rights movement, which ultimately led to the passage of a same-sex marriage law more than a decade ago and greater legal protections for sexual minorities.

Relations between the community and law enforcement were strained anew last year when the organizers of the gay pride parade, in support of Black Lives Matter, barred uniformed officers from marching. The decision spurred anger from officers and protest from politicians who tried to cut funding for the event.

By then, men had been vanishing from the Gay Village for years, spurring rumors of a serial killer. In December, the Toronto police chief, Mark Saunders, said there was no evidence of such a killer — an assertion that prompted outrage just weeks later, when McArthur was charged.