Accused serial killer was ‘a working class dude’
Sub-contractor worked with Bruce McArthur
When Matt MacKinnon worked alongside Bruce McArthur at three homes in the Greater Toronto Area, he’d set his lunch down on the planters his contractor had put in. Working inches away from them to install stone water fountains, MacKinnon hung his tools from them when his hands were busy.
This week, MacKinnon discovered that McArthur had allegedly used planters to bury dismembered skeletal remains.
“I didn’t take the ( first allegations) seriously because things get blown out of proportion,” MacKinnon said. “Next thing I know they’re pulling (human) parts out of my f-- king customers’ properties.”
As part of a widespread murder investigation, Toronto police have confiscated planters at two homes — one on Balmoral Avenue in Toronto and another in Mississauga — where MacKinnon worked as McArthur’s sub- contractor. McArthur, 66, currently faces five firstdegree murder charges and Det.- Sgt. Hank Idsinga said this week he expects more charges to be laid.
At a third home near Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue where they worked together, MacKinnon said, McArthur was fired earlier this year and the property owner hired a new team of landscapers to redo his planters. If small skeletal remains were buried in those planters, MacKinnon doesn’t think the landscapers would have noticed what they were removing among the soil.
“If it was anything small — like five or six inches — it just looks like aggregate,” he said. “You come across sticks and stones and pieces of broken concrete or brick.”
MacKinnon, who runs a small company named DragonFly Water Features, first met McArthur at a garden centre in 2011 and the two decided to work together.
The man who police have labelled an alleged serial killer owned a business called Artistic Designs and would always arrive in a “sh---y little van,” accompanied by two men. One, MacKinnon said, was an older white man who appeared to be romantically involved with McArthur. The man would not only accompany McArthur to each job, but he’d also be with him during after-hours meetings. MacKinnon never saw the two apart. “This year, he’s gone,” MacKinnon said.
McArthur also hired a “grunt,” MacKinnon said, to do the heavy lifting but each time he worked with McArthur, he’d see someone new in the position. During one job, MacKinnon saw Andrew Kinsman — one of McArthur’s alleged victims — lugging bags of debris. Most of the other men were of Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern descent.
“Bruce was a working class dude,” said MacKinnon, who described McArthur more as a gardener than a landscaper. “His tools sucked, he dressed shabbily. He always had a clean haircut and a clean beard — but other than that, he was a slob.”
Most of the work McArthur did was simple, but McArthur considered himself an “artist,” MacKinnon said. His main job was to maintain properties by blowing leaves and trimming plants. Most of his customers had large concrete patios taking up a majority of the property and so he had success selling planter arrangements. At the three properties, the arrangements were exactly the same, leaving MacKinnon to believe McArthur was self-taught.
He may not have been as skilled as other landscapers, but his customers loved him. Most were wealthy elderly women in their 80s who found him charming, MacKinnon said. When a job was complete, they’d sit on the patio and share a glass of wine or a cup of tea. McArthur built a network of customers solely on word-ofmouth, MacKinnon said.
“He’s not shifty or aggressive and he wasn’t overly intelligent,” he said. “The dude was regular as f--k.”