Ghastly video beyond description
Magnotta averts gaze as stabbing, dismemberment shown in court
Warning: This column contains graphic content.
MONTREAL — As his notorious 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick video was played Thursday for the jurors at his murder trial, Luka Magnotta himself, bent over low from the waist, his gaze studiously averted from courtroom screens, all but disappeared from sight in the prisoner’s box.
Ten minutes and 22 seconds later, with the video finished and Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer calling for an immediate recess, Magnotta got slowly to his feet for the departure of the jury, as courtroom etiquette here dictates.
As the last of the jurors filed past him en route to their jury room, he delicately touched a finger to his left eye, as if wiping away tears.
It was enraging if entirely typical: Many of those charged with such crimes refuse to look at their handiwork, the inferences hanging in the air that, what, they are filled with regret? Shame? Sorrow?
My own view is that the old retail maxim, “If you break it, you buy it,” should also apply to accused criminals, in particular to Magnotta, who after all has admitted killing and dismembering the shy Chinese student Lin Jun.
He broke Lin, in other words.
The least he could have done is squarely face what he did; if you break it, you must own it.
Luc Leclair, Magnotta’s lawyer, told the jurors at the start of the trial that his client admits the “physical part” of the five offences with which he is charged. Those charges include first-degree murder, indignity to a human body, the making and posting online of 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick (the video was known by several names but this is the most infamous) and the mailing about of Lin’s hands and feet.
But Leclair said Magnotta should be found not criminally responsible because of the severe mental illness he purportedly suffers: Thus his not guilty plea.
The 32-year-old’s mental state at and around the time of the May 25, 2012, homicide is the only real issue for the jurors.
The video is ghastly beyond description, and for that I am grateful.
As someone smarter than me said, it was as though Magnotta was randomly picking through a big box of all the perverse and repellent things he could think of to do to a human body — so there was a lot of methodical stabbing to the chest; now some cutting on the abdomen, once in a sort of tic-tactoe pattern; here and there some faux-humping of the corpse.
It is mercifully unclear if the actual homicide was captured on the video, though several times Magnotta had the camera linger at the gaping wound to Lin’s throat and later, after he decapitated him, on his severed head.
Also mercifully, the jurors learned last week from forensic pathologist Dr. Yann Daze that all but one of Lin’s litany of wounds — the exception the slashing of his throat, which was likely the cause of death — were inflicted after death.
If this knowledge didn’t diminish the macabre nature of what was done to the body of the 33-year-old Lin, it was of considerable comfort to remember that he was alive for virtually none of it.
Throughout the video, shot at Magnotta’s grimy studio apartment, he appeared to take considerable care that his own face was never visible.
He was always wearing hoodies — one black or dark blue, and one purple.
The dismemberment was done to music, and this either was playing at the time or Magnotta later added a soundtrack — True Faith, by the ’80s British band New Order.
Equally disturbing was what Magnotta did on camera to a live human being.
The video began with a gloved Magnotta straddling the naked motionless body of a man tied with rope to a bed, above which was Magnotta’s Casablanca poster.
T he man was blindfolded; he appeared dead or unconscious.
But then he suddenly lifted his head, and a leg, and was clearly trying to move, was struggling. The next shot was of Magnotta stabbing a body.
At the time 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick hit the web — and Magnotta appears to have posted it to three different “gore” sites — the widespread assumption was this first man was also Lin.
It was only here at trial that for the first time in public prosecutor Louis Bouthillier revealed that the man was someone else, a still-unidentified stranger who appears to have served as Magnotta’s dress rehearsal.
Jurors have seen surveillance video of this man entering Magnotta’s apartment building on May 18, but unlike Lin, he left alive the next day, albeit in a noticeably dazed condition.
As Magnotta’s attack on Lin’s body wore on, it was almost as though he was running out of party tricks, and turned to the most bizarre in his repertoire.
It was at this point that he put a black and white puppy — the jurors have heard, from a man who several times hired Magnotta as an escort in Montreal, that once he brought along a young puppy of this description — at Lin’s severed torso.
The puppy was found, dead, in the dozens of bags of garbage Magnotta put out for collection, some holding Lin’s severed legs and arms.
Magnotta then went at Lin’s buttocks with a knife and fork.
The final shots showed one of Lin’s arms in Magnotta’s freezer, his head on the floor, and Magnotta lying naked on the bed, with a severed arm, still with its hand, faux-masturbating: He had finally run out of gas.
It is instructive, about the nature of man and beast, to remember that the puppy was placed in position before its own death, while the only thing that may have put Magnotta there, at the wheel of his own freak show, was an alleged mental illness.