Witness recounts four days in Berlin with killer
Court: Magnotta spent wad of cash with man he met online
IMONTREAL t was a clash of the titans — one for the ages. Someone should have fired a pistol and cried, “Gentlemen, start your laptops!”
There at his laptop in Berlin was Frank Rubert, noted smalltime thief and fraudster with his penchant for boys of a certain age, that age being 15 to 16, and numerous criminal convictions for sex offences against minors on his long rap sheet to prove it.
And there in Paris at his laptop was Luka Rocco Magnotta, killer on the lam from Montreal, looking for a safe landing. To that end, he had posted an ad on Gay Romeo, an international gay chat line. He called himself william2323, and on his sexy profile, he gave his age as 22 or 23, though he’d already been around the block 30 full seasons.
Rubert spoke only German, Magnotta English and some French, so they communicated with Google Translate, the result that they spoke in one pidgin language or another, as when Magnotta told Rubert, who was called Avira online, “I am seeking residence to live. I want to live with kind man,” or when Rubert told Magnotta, “I’ll even come to like me and live with me if you want to live in ( Berlin).”
Next thing they knew, and this unfolded online in a matter of days, the bargain sealed May 31, 2012, Magnotta was taking a bus from Paris to Berlin to live with Rubert and Rubert, still suspicious but not so much he could stay away in case it was true, was waiting at the bus station for him.
He was expecting the hot young guy from Gay Romeo, who inexplicably was interested in him, a skinny fellow with a cadaverous face who was then approaching his 51st birthday.
But who got off that bus was a not terribly clean, “worn down” fellow with long hair who was demonstrably not 22 or 23, let alone someone who could pass for younger.
Essentially, as Magnotta’s lawyer Luc Leclair put it to Rubert on Wednesday in his cross- examination at his client’s trial, “You thought he was a young boy, you liked that picture, but when he showed, you thought, ‘ Oh my God, this is not a young boy. I don’t want this person?’”
Rubert didn’t want to take him home. He certainly didn’t want to have sex with him.
But Magnotta had paid for his own ticket, so Rubert, with his well practised eye for the long game, decided he’d take him home for the night and figure out how to off- load him, pronto.
Magnotta, for his part, was probably willing to sleep with Rubert (“Yes I will enjoy to live with you and we will have relationship,” he told him once). After all, he had worked as an escort and wasn’t delicate about such matters. But when it became obvious that sex wasn’t going to be the currency of this particular match, he, like Rubert, went to Plan B.
He flashed the wad of cash he was carrying — he had, by Rubert’s estimate, € 4,000 to € 5,000 on him — and told him, essentially, that what was his was Rubert’s.
Now he may have most liked the young and nubile, but Rubert was also amenable to the charms of filthy lucre.
A new bargain was struck, the details unspoken but they worked out nicely: They would sleep in the same sofa bed in the small apartment, but not have sex. They would blow through the stack of euros and hit the bars and even a men’s brothel called Blue Boy Bar together. They would drink and carouse, all on Magnotta’s dime.
Rubert didn’t like Magnotta’s “style” and told him, so he promptly went into the loo and emerged with short hair, and told Rubert, he said, and here he made scissor motions with his fingers, “Frank, my hair. I cut them for you.”
( Magnotta had merely removed his black wig and stuffed it in his bag. But Rubert didn’t realize that and he was impressed by the gesture.)
And this is how Luka Magnotta came to live for four days — Thursday, May 31 to Monday, June 4, 2012 — with Frank Rubert in his flat in Berlin, where they communicated in the flesh just as they had online, each man on his own laptop in the living room, typing in his own language, and using Google Translate.
It was so modern: Two strangers who had never met and would have had sex but found their way to a reasonable accommodation of a different sort nonetheless.
The dream ended that Monday.
Rubert was meeting a business colleague, and though he had certainly entertained having sex with this stranger ( before he saw him) and though he had no qualms about burning through his money and though he’d given him house keys, he didn’t trust him enough to leave him alone in the flat.
He deposited Magnotta at an Internet café.
Rubert had to transfer trains, and as he did, unusually, he bought a newspaper, and saw a picture of a young man that looked like the fellow with whom he was sharing a bed. The accompanying story, he said, had “cruel things” in it, and he feared “maybe I had a murderer” on his hands.
He phoned the police, told them where they could find Magnotta, and went to the local station. Shortly after, the cops came to let him know the man had been arrested.
One of the officers told him, “‘ Happy birthday.’ I said, ‘ It’s not my birthday,’” Rubert replied. The officer said, “Today, yes, it’s your birthday. You could have been the next.”
As for Magnotta — who has admitted that he killed and dismembered 33- year- old Lin Jun but is pleading not guilty, claiming that his mental state prevented him from fully understanding the nature of his acts — he occasionally glared at Rubert as he testified, and Rubert glared right back, Google Translate rendered unnecessary, at last.