‘We never say his name,’ says victim’s sister about the murderer.
Warning: Graphic details follow.
“Bruce.” A name jotted down in a calendar. A whisper from the dead. And suddenly the mystifying case of men who’d vanished from the Gay Village area would be cracked open.
Six months later, after crossreferencing data and roundthe-clock surveillance, homicide detectives arrested Bruce McArthur at his Thorncliffe Park Drive apartment: Jan. 18, 2018.
Last week, the 67-year-old landscaper pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of eight men.
Andrew Kinsman, a friend to McArthur for 15 years, wrote down that name, “Bruce”; an appointment to keep, either “2 p.m. or 3 p.m.”
He became McArthur’s eighth and last — far as is known — murder victim.
It’s not clear why an investigation of missing males which had slogged along for six years — first came Project Houston, then came Project Prism — abruptly triggered a massive undertaking by police. A person with knowledge of the investigation says the explanation is straightforward: Kinsman had been reported missing only a day after he was last seen, on June 26, 2017. In the other disappearances, the time lag was longer. In a couple of cases, the men were never reported missing at all.
But Kinsman, 49, superintendent of a residential building on Winchester St., enjoyed a close-knit community of family and friends. He was known to tenants as a responsible custodian with an established day-to-day routine. It was odd when chores around went unattended. Stranger still that he would leave his cat alone, in his unit, unfed.
On this occasion, police responded with alacrity. They searched Kinsman’s home and discovered that calendar notation. Cops had at least a first name to follow up, a lead.
They seized closed-circuit video from Kinsman’s neighbourhood and were able to track some of his movements. Crucially, one of the detectives found two pieces of footage from around 3 p.m., June 26, that showed a man fitting Kinsman’s description getting into a red Dodge Caravan. The video did not capture the van’s licence plate. The driver’s face was unclear.
But the van, with its roof racks, rain deflectors on the passenger window and silver rims with five spokes was distinctive. Police visiting a Dodge dealership on Front St. where the manager, shown a photo, identified the vehicle as a 2004 Anniversary Edition model. That piece of information was vital because — as Crown attorney Michael Cantlon told court on Monday during a sentencing hearing, reading into the record an agreed statement of facts — it narrowed down the scope of the police search dramatically.
Police obtained a list, from the Ministry of Transportation, of all Dodge Caravans/ Grand Caravans registered in the GTA: 6,181 matched the criteria.
But, in a moment of smart cop thinking, Det. Dave Dickinson — co-lead of the investigation — cross-referenced the list with the name “Bruce.” That shrunk the vehicles of interest to five. Among the owners was Bruce McArthur, the only individual from among those five who’d had any recent encounter with Toronto Police Service.
That previous contact would subsequently loom as an opportunity missed and rued.
In June 2016, McArthur hooked up with a man he’d known for years. In the back of McArthur’s van, he directed that man to lie down on a fur coat, to put one arm behind his back. (The fur coat would pop up repeatedly in photographs police obtained depicting McArthur’s other victims, both alive and deceased.)
McArthur held the man’s wrist with “an angry look on his face,” Cantlon told court. Despite the man’s objections and pleadings to be freed, McArthur squeezed his larynx, started strangling him. The victim managed to roll away and escape. (He would be unable to swallow properly for a week.) He then reported the assault to 911 and gave police a statement. McArthur turned himself in, gave an “exculpatory” statement deemed to be credible and was released without charges.
Cantlon stressed that, even if police had run a criminal check on McArthur at that point, they would not have been able to access details from a 2003 incident for which McArthur pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon, wherein he’d struck a man — a gay hustler — numerous times with a metal pipe. He’d received a conditional sentence of two years, but the conviction had been expunged in 2014.
“At the time he received the record suspension, he had committed three murders undetected,” Cantlon said.
In any event, armed with the knowledge they now had, police, in October 2017, tracked the Caravan to a wrecking yard in Courtice, Ont., impounded the vehicle and sent it to the Centre of Forensic Sciences for testing.
Found: eight blood spots on the seats and in the trunk, and semen traces. The samples spit up four DNA profiles — one of them belonging to Kinsman, one of them to McArthur. (Another would eventually be traced to Selim Esen, missing since April 2017.
In December 2017, investigators conducted a covert search of McArthur’s home. They copied a USB drive and a digital external drive located in McArthur’s bedroom. On the digital devices, they discovered more than 100 photos of Kinsman dating as far back as 2007. Also: a metal bar wrapped with tape, believed to be a murder weapon. That pipe shows up in several photographs and would later be seized from McArthur’s new vehicle.
In 18 of the photos, Kinsman is dead, his body staged for the camera. Lying on top of a fur coat, naked, with a rope looped around his neck, knotted at one end. The pipe is looped through the knot, allowing it to be tightened, to apply pressure. There are close-ups of Kinsman’s genitals and ligature marks around his throat.
Kinsman’s remains would be found, following McArthur’s arrest, in large planters removed from the backyard of a Mallory Cres. property where McArthur worked as a landscaper and stored his equipment, under an arrangement with the owners, for many years. Dismembered remains of six other victims were also discovered in the pots.
Cause of death for Kinsman was strangulation, the pathologist determined.
His head had been shaved — an apparent kink of McArthur’s with some victims, who also had their beards removed, apparently post-mortem.
Obstructing Kinsman’s airway was a ball of paper towelling that may have been inserted after death.
A man who’d beaten cancer, had come to this horrific fate.
In his first interview with police after being arrested, McArthur claimed he’d had sex with Kinsman only once, a decade earlier, and had not seen him since December 2016.
That poor man. That trusting friend.
Impassive in the dock, McArthur showed no emotion during the two hours that Cantlon intoned the facts into the record. Nor did he react in the afternoon as grief-ridden family and friends stepped into the witness stand to deliver victim impact statements.
Karen Coles, sister to Andrew Kinsman, recalled her “baby” brother as a “generous, compassionate and thoughtful man.”
“He gave back to the community in which he lived, worked and volunteered. He wanted to make the world a better place for those struggling to survive. He was a champion of the underdog.”
She misses their conversation, aches that she never got a chance to say goodbye.
They had searched and searched and searched, his family and friends.
“When he was missing, I’d lie awake at night, wondering where he was and what he might have suffered. Now, I lie awake and think about how he was murdered and dismembered by someone he knew.”
Another sister, Patricia Kinsman, recalled how they’d searched tirelessly for six months.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I envision his life ending the way it did.
“A person that strangled Andrew, dismembered him, threw him in a planter and then admired his work for seven months.”
They’ll never be whole again, Kinsman’s loved ones.
“Murdered by him. We never say his name,” Patricia Kinsman said.
They will look for comfort in the knowledge that a jotting in a calendar by Andrew Kinsman sparked the unravelling of Bruce McArthur and breathed life into all the murdered men.
As another friend, Ted Healy — and many friends spoke — said: “Andrew never suffered fools and it baffles me how he” — McArthur — “got Andrew to trust him.”
McArthur took Kinsman’s life and thought he’d silenced him forever. “But Andrew outsmarted him.”
Let that be his epitaph.