Serial killer should die behind bars, sentencing hearing told.
If only monsters looked the part, with cloven feet and slitty eyes.
Then maybe little girls wouldn’t walk off with strangers, lured by the promise of puppies. And grown males might see the evil intent in a man’s heart.
Because Bruce McArthur doesn’t look like wickedness incarnate.
He appears a cipher, a blank slate, unknowable beyond the gruesome artifacts of his crimes: Eight men murdered, dismembered, interred in giant planters and garbage bins, corpses staged like mannequins, for the camera, before disposal.
And nowhere in the detailed agreed statement of facts presented in court his week is their even a hint of the why of it.
“He was caught,’’ Crown prosecutor Craig Harper reminded court. “He did not stop.’’
McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder a week ago, sparing the victims’ families and friends a long trial. But there was really no mercy or compassion in that act. Evidence against the 67-year-old landscaper was overwhelming, the police investigation – however belatedly – comprehensive.
A father, a grandfather, a one-time mall Santa, McArthur has scarcely spoken during the court proceeding, conveyed no emotion, shuffling obediently in and out of the dock. His pallor is grey, jowls sinking into his neck.
Given the opportunity on Tuesday by Justice John McMahon to address the court, perchance to express some remorse, he declined. “No, your honour. I’ve discussed this with my counsel and I don’t want to say anything.’’
Not that repentance would alleviate anybody’s grief or mitigate the outcome. All that remains, with an automatic life sentence, is for McMahon to decide on eligibility for parole far, far down the line: After 50 years, as the prosecution has urged – two consecutive sentences – or 25 years, the minimum in first degree murder before a felon can apply for parole, as McArthur’s defence lawyer is seeking.
McArthur would be 91 if sprung on parole at the quarter-century mark; 116 a halfcentury from now, which is more symbolic than realistic, but lawyers can argue on the head of a pin. Either way, it’s likely he’ll die behind bars.
But has he achieved his heart’s desire, his compulsion, this serial killer who stalked the Gay Village neighbourhood, targeting a longtime friend, an ex-lover, a homeless man with mental illness, a refugee who’d fled civil war in Sri Lanka? Some of the victims were isolated and marginalized; others were trusting, never saw betrayal coming.
Harper told court the prosecution was avoiding the term “serial killer’’ because “it is woefully inadequate’’ to describe McArthur’s crimes over seven years. “Mr. McArthur is a sex predator. He preyed on his friends, he preyed on the vulnerable. He deliberately preyed upon them at a moment of sexual intimacy, when they were most vulnerable.
“The enormity of Mr. McArthur’s crimes is unique, even among those who commit multiple murders.’’
Adding that the crimes were of sustained cruelty. “The act of strangulation is not momentary. Death was just the beginning of the indignities. He memorialized his crimes.’’
He mocked them in death, cladding naked bodies in fur coats, a fur hat, sometimes sticking a cigar between their lifeless lips. Kept souvenirs and collated files, even when sometimes he didn’t even know their names – “Turkish guy.”
McArthur was hurting victims as early as 2001, when he struck a male sex worker repeatedly with a metal pipe for no discernible reason, pleading guilty to assault and assault causing bodily harm – for which he received a conditional sentence that was expunged in 2014 but vacated (restored) Monday.
And he would have kept killing, might have slain a ninth victim – “John’’ – who was rescued when police, who’d been keeping McArthur under surveillance by then, forced their way into his apartment on Jan. 18, 2018. “Literally caught moments away from likely committing another murder,” Harper said.
So much wreckage left behind as, for the second day, loved ones continued to take the stand to deliver emotional victim impact statements about a brother, a husband, a cousin, a friend.
Piranavan Thangavel told of arriving in Canada from Sri Lanka with Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam – who had never been reporting missing.
“The day we reached the shores of Canada, as refugees, was the day we found courage and hope in our hearts. But that hope and courage has faded in many of us.
“There were 492 of us, who arrived on the MV Sun Sea boat in 2010 as refugees, but many of us fear to speak out or talk about the incident. There is fear that something like this might happen to another one of us as well.
“Laws were made to prevent such crimes from happening, but they have failed us – they have failed Kirushnakumar and other victims like him. We, as refugees, fled in disgust and far after bearing eyewitness to the widespread vile, torturous murders and crimes against humanity during the war in 2009 in Sri Lanka.
“For us now to hear of such a horrible death, we who live in this world as refugees, feel like there is no safety for us anywhere in the world.’’
Most of the victims were of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Some had kept their sexual orientation a secret from family. Umme Fareena Mazook, wife of Soroush Mahmudi, had the Crown read her statement as she sobbed in the public gallery. She has struggled financially since her husband’s disappearance in 2015, had to leave her job because of psychological trauma.
“The severe degree of my emotional distress had a major impact on my relationship with my son and my friends as my emotional and mental health changed drastically,’’ she wrote.
Kareema Faizi, spouse of Abdulbasir Faizi, has been working 18-hour days to provide for two daughters who were just six and 10 years old with their father vanished, last seen alive at a bath house in the Gay Village on Dec. 29, 2010.
“My daughters suffer terribly knowing what happened to their father,” she wrote. “They pretend to be strong in front of me. But when they are alone in their room, they take a picture of their father with them. I hear them crying constantly.’’
The aching words, the tears, none had any outward effect on McArthur. But of course he’d been a chameleon for such a long time, leading a double life even after he’d come out as gay to his own family, never apparently revealing the menace and the depravity, the cruelties that thrilled him. Those photographs and the souvenirs he took from some victims were, said Harper, a macabre indulgence, to revisit the thrill.
McArthur may have pleaded guilty but, as Hardy stressed, “he has not confessed.”
“He wasn’t remorseful. He wasn’t ashamed. He wasn’t repulsed by what he’d done. He enjoyed what he did. He murdered those men for what can be described as nothing more than self-gratification.’’
Unless McArthur un-zippers himself at a future date, to a psychiatrist or a biographer, that’s the closest we’ll likely get to an understanding of his psyche, his malevolent obsessions.
He killed that first time, in September 2010 – Skandaraj Navaratnam, a friend – and there was no reckoning. So he killed again and again and again and again and again and again.
The victims stare out at the courtroom, frozen in photographs from happier times, their faces projected on a large monitor.
McArthur doesn’t look at them either.
When he looks in the mirror, what does he see, this decrepit old man?