Court hears Magnotta interview

U.K. reporter was following animal abuse allegations

For the first time, the jurors in the Luka Magnotta murder trial have heard the admitted killer’s sibilant voice at length.

An audiotape of Mr. Magnotta’s bizarre interview in England with reporter Alex West was played in court Tuesday, with Mr. West testifying via video link from the Canadian High Commission in London.

In the interview, Mr. Magnotta was alternately sly, flirtatious, defensive and, Mr. West said, “somewhat sure of himself, cocky.”

Perhaps their most telling exchange came when Mr. West bluntly asked, “Are you still working as a gigolo?”

“Well,” Mr. Magnotta replied, all but hissing, “that’s harsh.”

Yet even then, he didn’t turn on his heel and go back to his room, but kept talking, protesting his innocence with just enough insincerity that it sounded fraudulent.

Mr. West, who works for the London-based tabloid the Sun, door-stopped Mr. Magnotta on Dec. 8, 2011, at a north-end pub where he had a room.

It was less than six months before Mr. Magnotta killed and dismembered the shy Chinese student Jun Lin at his Montreal flat, acts he has admitted here through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, though Mr. Leclair says Mr. Magnotta was so mentally ill he should be found not criminally responsible.

But in 2011, Mr. Magnotta was merely suspected by animal activists and the newspaper to be the notorious Internet cat-killer who had tortured kittens, filmed their deaths and posted the videos online.

Two days after the interview with Mr. West, someone writing under the name of John Kilbride — a child victim of notorious British serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley — emailed the paper, promising, “… next time you hear from me it will be in a movie I am producing. That will have some humans in it, not just pussys {sic}.”

In another line, the writer said, “This time, however, the victims wont {sic} be small animals.”

Because of details in the lengthy and sexually explicit email — reference to an encounter with a “very sexy journalist {sic}” and allusions to the cat-killing videos that had been the very subject of the interview with Mr. West — it seems likely Mr. Magnotta was the author.

As well, some of the lewd sexual details, in which the writer fantasized about the journalist he’d met, match in intensity and perversity some of the acts Mr. Magnotta actually committed upon the body of Mr. Lin.

The email also bore another trademark signature, as Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer and the jurors have learned, of Mr. Magnotta — his fondness for lifting willy-nilly the names of the famous or infamous and incorporating them somehow into his world.

For instance, he used the names and real addresses of the sister of convicted felon Karla Homolka and Hubert Chrétien, son of the former prime minister, when he was mailing out Mr. Lin’s severed hands and feet.

Mr. Magnotta hasn’t formally admitted writing the Dec. 10, 2011 email to the Sun, and isn’t charged in connection with it.

But pr os e c ut or Lo ui s Bouthillier told the jurors in his opening statement weeks ago they should consider this email evidence that Mr. Magnotta “was planning to kill a human being and that he was going to make a movie.”

Yet for all the clear menace in the email, it was the interview with Mr. West which may provide the jurors some of their most valuable information about Mr. Magnotta.

He isn’t required to testify in his own defence, of course, and if he doesn’t, this tape will be the jurors’ best evidence of who he is.

For every time Mr. West tried to ask a question about the cat videos — “why are people naming you as the person who killed a cat?” — Mr. Magnotta replied with a sulky, “Ask them” or took refuge in the advice of an unnamed lawyer.

At one point, Mr. West even showed Mr. Magnotta a screen capture from one of the videos showing in it a fellow who looked remarkably like him. “This is you,” he said. “No it’s not,” Mr. Magnotta replied.

“It certainly looks like you,” Mr. West said.

“No it doesn’t,” Mr. Magnotta said.

Mr. West was clearly convinced that Mr. Magnotta was in fact the architect of the online buzz about him.

As he put it once, “What if you’ve created the personality cult about yourself ?” to which Mr. Magnotta replied, as he did frequently, “I want to be left in peace.”

He variously claimed to regularly receive death threats because of stories he was involved with Karla Homolka and about the cat-killings, that “people are pretending to be me” and to be the victim of criminal harassment.

At one point, near the interview’s end, the unconvinced Mr. West mused aloud, “You are obsessed with your own fame.”

“Really?” Mr. Magnotta said. “If that were the case, wouldn’t I be sitting down with everyone who wants an interview and admitting to the horrible things you’ve accused me of?”

He had just in effect done that, spending 27 minutes with the reporter. Mr. West murmured, almost as if to himself, that Mr. Magnotta’s reactions weren’t normal. “Oh,” Luka Magnotta snapped, “You’re a doctor now?”

In cross-examination of Mr. West, Mr. Leclair in a weak moment asked if his client, in his professed desire to be left in peace, didn’t remind him of the famous reclusive actress, the late Greta Garbo?

Mr. West is too young to have known this, but Ms. Garbo, who retired in 1941 at the age of 35, is probably the first person on the planet to have truly cemented her fame by furiously proclaiming how she didn’t want it.

The trial resumes Thursday.