Canada’s unlikely serial killer
Everyone thought he was a kindly granddad – but Bruce McArthur has admitted to the bizarre murders of eight men
HE WAS once regarded as a kindly suburban man – an unremarkable, tubby fellow with a ready smile who played Father Christmas at his neighbourhood mall every festive season. Bruce McArthur was well liked, a devoted dad who used to be a travelling salesman of underwear and socks before opening a landscaping business.
But there was another side to the 67-year-old “twinkle-eyed grandfather”, as one report called him – a man who preyed on gay men, murdered them, took pictures of their bodies in bizarre poses then buried their dismembered corpses in pot plants and compost heaps.
McArthur pleaded guilty in a court in Toronto, Canada, to eight counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
This means he’ll be 92 before he can apply for any form of release.
Evidence heard in court was so explicit prosecutor Michael Cantlon cautioned those present that it could affect their health and wellbeing.
He was right to warn them. Details of McArthur’s crimes became more sickening as sentencing proceedings wore on, resembling something straight from a creepy Stephen King novel.
McArthur kept trophies of his slayings, sick mementos including victims’ hair in zip-seal bags which he stored in the shed of a landscaping customer’s property.
Police also discovered thousands of photos on McArthur’s electronic devices that he’d taken of men he’d murdered.
Part of McArthur’s post-killing ritual was to pose the dead men, dressed in a fur coat or leather hat or with an unlit cigar in his mouth and a rope around his neck, Cantlon said.
These pictures weren’t presented in court as the prosecutor deemed them too disturbing for public viewing.
THE killer chose his victims well.
Most of them were immigrants of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent who “lived on the margins of Canadian society”, as NBC News put it. Many of them led double lives and some were never even reported missing.
One was a recent immigrant with a drug problem. Another man, a Muslim, hid the fact that he was gay from his family. A few were married with children. Another victim was a homeless cocaine addict and prostitute.
The only thing they had in common was their link to a neighbourhood called Church and Wellesley, which is known as Toronto’s Gay Village.
People who frequented the neighbourhood might have lived on the fringes of society but it didn’t take them long to realise something sinister was going on. Since 2010, seven members of Toronto’s close-knit LGBTQ community had gone missing without a trace, prompting fears
of a serial killer on the loose.
“There were whispers,” said resident Michael Reyes after McArthur’s arrest last year (YOU, 15 February 2018). “I’d go for my morning coffee and I’d hear people talking about it.”
But as late as December 2017 Toronto police chief Mark Saunders insisted there was no evidence of a serial killer.
Still, cops interviewed those close to the missing men and McArthur was even brought in for questioning at one point, but there wasn’t much suspicion around him. He was, after all, a pensioner known locally as Santa for his Christmas-time employment at a shopping mall.
“He liked tropical birds and hated Donald Trump,” writes Vanity Fair’s Zander Sherman. “At five feet 10 [1,78m] and 221 pounds [100kg] ‘Santa’ was unassuming in both appearance and demeanour – the type who baked muffins, sipped wine and lavished friends with roses on their birthdays.”
One of McArthur’s many friends described him as “the kindest person I’ve ever known”, according to police records.
McArthur separated from his wife – his high school sweetheart and the mother of his two children, Melanie and Todd – after he came out as gay in 1998, but they remained friends.
In his late forties he moved into the village. He owned a small but respected landscaping business called Artistic Design and was popular with his clients – many of whom were older, wealthy Toronto residents.
But the reality was that by April 2017 McArthur had killed seven men – Skandaraj Navaratnam (40), Majeed Kayhan (58), Abdulbasir Faizi (42), Soroush Mahmudi (50), Selim Esen (44), Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam (37) and Dean Lisowick (47) right under the noses of investigators.
He’d come up with an easy way to get rid of the bodies – chopping them up and burying them in pot plants he used for his landscaping business or the compost heaps in a ravine behind the property where he stored his landscaping tools.
He seemed to be getting more brazen and went after his next victim just two months after his last. But he slipped up.
Andrew Kinsman (49) was an LGBTQ activist and former bartender in Toronto who had lots of friends, including McArthur. When he suddenly went missing the day after Toronto’s gay pride parade, it was reported straight away.
On Andrew’s calendar on the day he went missing was written just one word, Bruce. And it told the authorities everything they needed to know.
IT’S not clear why it took police so long to move on McArthur, who was arrested only in January last year. They’ve also faced criticism for the fact that the breakthrough occurred only after a prominent white man disappeared. Toronto LGBTQ activist Haran Vijayanathan said that from the beginning police treated Andrew’s disappearance differently to the seven others.
“It was like, ‘You guys took this seriously when it happened to be a white person who went missing’,” he told Vanity Fair. “But when the other guys went missing no one really paid attention.”
Police chief Saunders insisted it was “unequivocally inaccurate”.
Whatever the truth, it was the end of McArthur’s murder spree. When cops moved in on him on 18 January after having him under surveillance for weeks, they caught him red-handed.
Bursting into his flat they found a Middle Eastern man known only as John hogtied to his bed. John and McArthur had been intimate several times, John would later tell police. But this time McArthur had handcuffed him and covered his head with a black leather bag. John begged him to remove it but he refused.
There’s no doubt McArthur intended John to be his next victim – he already had a folder with the man’s name on it and the USB stick he used to store his other grisly pictures.
McArthur had asked if anyone knew that John was coming to his home, Cantlon told the court. John told McArthur, “It’s a secret. Nobody knows.”