PLAYING IT COOL
Video shows Magnotta after killing
During the witching hours of May 25, 2012, while most of Montreal slept, Luka Rocco Magnotta was getting busy.
Already, he had killed and dismembered Lin Jun, the 33-yearold international student from China he’d brought back to his apartment in a low-rise building the evening before.
Now he had a million things to do — dispose of Lin’s body parts, find a suitcase big enough for his torso, put some things in the mail, clean up and clear out his apartment, and get ready to fly to Europe the next day.
He might as well have been whistling, so unhurried and relaxed was he as he went about his work.
Surveillance cameras, improbably sophisticated for such a modest building, caught the two men entering the lobby at about 10:20 p.m. on May 24.
It was the last time Lin, who was wearing long shorts, a distinctive yellow T-shirt with cartoon figures on it and a ball cap, was seen alive.
At 2:47 a.m. on May 25, Magnotta was making the first of seven trips to the basement garbage area of the building.
About 30 minutes of this video was played Thursday for Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jury sitting at Magnotta’s murder trial.
Sometimes, as he wound his way down the two flights to the garbage area, he wore his black wig, later recovered among his possessions when he was arrested in Berlin.
Sometimes, he wore Lin’s ball cap (it appears to have been his keeper souvenir, and also found in Germany), and sometimes he wore Lin’s yellow T-shirt (it was found in the garbage bags he tossed).
Sometimes, he wore latex gloves.
He changed clothes any number of times.
He never appeared to be on any sort of schedule.
He separated his garbage in the proper, modern fashion, putting some items in the recycling bins.
He was neat, too, or careful — sometimes hiding what he’d just put in one of the two big barrels with other things, sometimes moving items from one barrel to the other, occasionally reaching in to squish down the contents when the barrels filled up.
And almost always, he had time to stop and admire himself in the big mirror in the small lobby of the building; it’s that old-school sort of building, where a mirror is the main decorative element.
Magnotta, usually on the way out, would pause before the mirror, tuck the wig behind his ears and pout at his reflection.
Often, he looked back at the mirror as he headed out the front door to the sidewalk — sometimes carrying bags with things inside that were red with Lin’s blood — to catch a glimpse of his butt in the mirror.
(When I first saw these same videos at the preliminary hearing in 2013, the line that sprang to mind then was, “Does my a — look fat in these body parts?” Magnotta, of course, said no such thing, but, as with the whistling, he might as well have: He was that jaunty.)
It’s the sort of building where on an early summer night, residents gather on the front stoop. Magnotta, sometimes with garbage bags in hand, just tiptoed coolly by them.
The surveillance video wasn’t played in silence.
In the witness stand was a detective from the Montreal police major crime squad, Claudette Hamelin. Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier was asking her to describe each segment, and she did this, attributing each seg- ment to particular cameras of the system.
Yet it seemed as though there was nothing else in the world going on as the videos ran, they were so horrible.
At 4:36 on that same morning of May 25, Magnotta was caught on camera leaving the building, carrying in the crook of one arm a tiny black and white puppy.
A minute later, he was back with the puppy; perhaps he’d taken it out for a pee? Perhaps it had survived Magnotta?
But no, the body of the puppy, Hamelin told the jurors earlier, was found in garbage bag No. 18 — the police sorted through the building’s garbage, which had been put out for collection that morning, opening at least one bag to find “blood flowed out of it” — with some of what appear to have been Magnotta’s weapons, including a grinder saw.
The puppy’s body wasn’t autopsied, Hamelin said, though it bore no obvious signs of violence; perhaps it died just from being too near Magnotta.
The video puts into sharp perspective the size of the boulder his unorthodox lawyer, Luc Leclair, is attempting to push up the mountain.
As the trial began this week, Magnotta pleaded not guilty to five charges, including firstdegree murder.
But not long after, Leclair told the jurors his client admitted “the physical part” of all the offences — the homicide, the dismemberment, the making of and posting online a video of same, and mailing out Lin’s hands and feet.
“I will show at the time of these events,” Leclair said, that Magnotta “was not criminally responsible” because of mental disorder.
It will be quite the trick to square that with the cool fellow compulsively checking himself out in the mirror as he kicked Lin Jun, and a puppy, to the curb.
The trial resumes Monday.