Magnotta likely boasted of plans to video death
MONTREAL — Luka Magnotta likely bragged of his plans to video a death weeks before he killed and dismembered Lin Jun, a 33-year-old student from China.
The stunning revelation is contained in a 121-page report entered into evidence Friday at his ongoing murder trial here.
According to forensic psychiatrist Joel Watts, who assessed Magnotta over 40 hours of interviews and who concludes he was psychotic at the time of the May 25, 2012 killing, he asked him “about online postings that appeared on the Internet in the weeks prior to the killing, allegedly promoting the video of Lin’s death.”
To this, Watts said, Magnotta replied, “I have been trying to make sense of it. I hope it was not me. I don’t remember doing it, it feels weird.”
Though the information is in Watts’ report, he hasn’t yet been asked about it at trial.
The report provides the most fascinating and arguably the most complete look into the 32-year-old Magnotta, who through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, has admitted “the physical part” of the five charges he faces but who is pleading not guilty on the grounds of mental illness.
Unusually, Watts had two distinct chances to assess Magnotta, the first in June of 2012, when he was asked by Montreal Police to fly to Berlin, where Magnotta had been arrested, in order to accompany him back to Canada.
This was done at the insistence of German authorities, and was apparently the first time Canada had been asked to provide a psychiatrist for a person who was being extradited home.
It gave Watts just a brief time with Magnotta, who’d been arrested when the man he was staying with in Berlin recognized a picture of him in a German newspaper and called police. At the time, Magnotta was at an Internet cafe, reading stories about himself.
Watts’ first impression was that Magnotta had a “very theatrical presentation.”
He was, he told Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors Friday as he began his testimony, “suspicious about the way he (Magnotta) was presenting the symptoms.” He found him “organized” in his thinking, “deliberate,” and noted “He doesn’t answer directly.”
There was, Watts said, “a showy quality to his presentation. ... I wondered if he was being straight with me.”
Certainly, at that time, he wasn’t so concerned about Magnotta’s mental state that he ordered a further assessment in Montreal. Rather, Watts said, “I told the police I didn’t have any objection about leaving him with them.”
But that fall, he was contacted by Leclair, who asked if he would do a full formal assessment of Magnotta.
Over the ensuing year, he saw Magnotta 12 times at the Riviere-des-Prairies detention centre in long interviews and had access to his lengthy psychiatric history, the voluminous Crown disclosure in the case (including two videos Magnotta made of Lin’s dismemberment), all of which served to allay his original suspicion that Magnotta was either playing him or malingering.
He diagnosed him as having suffered around the time of the killing “an acute episode of psychosis” due to his schizophrenia, which had gone untreated for at least a year.
Despite what he called a “psychotic break,” Watts found that Magnotta would have been able to meet one arm of the two-pronged legal test for sanity, but not the other. He said he would have been able to “appreciate what he was doing, and the consequences,” but “I do not think he knew it was wrong because of his psychosis.”
He is the second defence psychiatrist to conclude Magnotta wasn’t legally sane at the time of the killing.
Like Dr. Marie-Frederique Allard, who testified before him, Watts described Magnotta’s assessment as the most difficult of his career.
His report is filled with the contradictions in the Toronto native, a former escort who dabbled in gay porn videos and was notorious online even before he posted the dismemberment video on several “gore” sites.
In 2011, Magnotta was sought by animal activists enraged by kitten-killing videos.
There were three of these, Watts’ report suggests — one where two kittens were sucked into a vacuum bag, one where a cat taped to a broom handle was drowned in a bathtub, and a third that began “with an individual playing gently with a cat on a bed” and ended with a yellow python approaching the cat and devouring it.
In one of the videos, Magnotta was seen rubbing his groin with the dead kittens. He told Watts he remembered doing it, but said “it didn’t turn me on.”
Magnotta told Watts he killed the cats but said he’d been forced to do it by “Manny Lopez,” a figure he claims was a brutish client who abused him; it isn’t clear if this man is real or a product of Magnotta’s imagination, but certainly the jurors have seen no evidence he exists. Magnotta also expressed bewilderment that he would have hurt the cats. As he protested more than once, “I loved animals, everyone knows this.”
But in his very active online life — he had more than 20 Facebook accounts under different names — he even provoked the animal-rights groups, though he claimed it was to make them stop and leave him alone.
Magnotta also denied ever wanting to kill anyone, and told Watts he wasn’t aroused by violence, though he admitted to being aroused by “scat” (human feces) because “it makes him feel closer to people.”
The trial resumes Monday.