KILLER OF EIGHT GETS 25 YEARS IN PRISON  

                                                         

Fortunately for people living in Canada, there aren.t that many serial killers roaming our streets. However, we learn of them once in a while. This article is about Bruce McArthur who was a serial killer in Canada.

Bruce McArthur was born on Oct0ber. 8^th, 1951, (when it was 19 days before I turned 18 and was serving in boot camp in the Canadian Navy in Nova Scotia) He spent his childhood with his sister and parents in a sturdy-looking bungalow speckled by black and red bricks near Woodville, Ontario. It’s an area in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region populated more by farmers than by cottagers, where it is best to be considered a local rather than an outsider.

                                                                                                    

McArthur had previously spent years as a travelling salesman in various cities in the Province of Ontario. He was married and has two sons. Later he became a landscaper.   

Some of McArthur`s victims were active on online dating apps for men who have sex with men, in which McArthur stated that he wanted to meet submissive men.

McArthur had met a male sex worker^[ on a chat line and later had sex with him. Just after the noon hour on October 31, 2001, a few weeks after his 50^th birthday, McArthur was invited into the man's apartment to see his Halloween costume. McArthur struck the man several times from behind with an iron pipe that he often carried. The victim lost consciousness and when he became conscious again, he then called 911 and was taken to St. Michael's Hospital. He had suffered injuries to his head and body and needed several stitches on the back of his head and his fingers as well as six weeks of physiotherapy`

McArthur, who turned himself in after the attack, said he did not remember the attack or why he might have done it. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to charges of assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm, and on April 11, 2003, received a conditional sentence of 729 days (two years less a day). A further charge of carrying a concealed weapon was withdrawn at the time. The Crown prosecutor had earlier believed jail time was warranted but agreed to a conditional sentence after psychiatric and pre-sentencing reports suggested McArthur was a low risk to reoffend. The victim, said by the Crown attorney to have been traumatized by the incident however, he did not provide a victim-impact statement for the sentencing, and there were concerns that McArthur's unexplained behaviour may have been due to the combination of McArthur's anti-seizure medication with amyl nitrate, or "poppers", a drug that enhances sexual pleasure.

McArthur avoided being sentenced to prison and instead he was spending the first year of his sentence under house arrest followed by a 10 pm curfew for six months, and three years' probation. During the sentence, he was barred from Church and Wellesley except for work and medical appointments, had to stay at least 10 metres (33 feet) from the victim's home or workplace, and could not spend time with "male prostitutes". He was forbidden to possess firearms for 10 years. He was not to purchase, possess or consume drugs without a medical prescription, and specifically not to possess poppers. McArthur had to submit his DNA to a database and was compelled to undertake psychological and psychiatric counselling including anger management.

A criminal defence lawyer found the list of conditions uncommon and suggested that the judge was concerned that McArthur was a danger to all male prostitutes. A retired homicide detective noted that the parole conditions were unenforceable, that they are not published or made as public knowledge and that parole violators get caught only if they come to the attention of police.

In 2014, McArthur was granted a suspension on the conviction which was wiped clean from his record, and would not have appeared in criminal background checks during subsequent investigations.

In Canada, a conditional discharge means that the defendant has no criminal conviction providing he meets the criteria of not being a risk to society. In McArthur’s case, most of his records and exhibits were destroyed in 2010, in compliance with Toronto Police Service retention policy. The only surviving documents were the transcripts of the guilty plea and sentencing hearing, the psychiatric report and pre-sentencing report ordered during the trial, and pictures of the victim's injuries and the weapon.

In 2002, while the assault case was still before the courts, McArthur had registered with a gay fetish dating app for men into BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) where his profile noted his interest in submissive men. McArthur joined Facebook in 2011 and catalogued his nightlife with pictures of parties, vacations, birthday dinners and concerts. Younger men of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent were in several pictures. By this time he had become a part of the gay village community and was a regular at its bars. Since 2007 or 2008, he was living in a 19^th-floor apartment at the Leaside Towers in Thorncliffe Park, a neighbourhood populated mainly by immigrants about 5 kilometres (3 miles) northeast of the Church and Wellesley Streets area known as the Gay Village. McArthur's banishment from the Church and Wellesley area in 2003 remained well-known and he had developed a reputation for BDSM, rough sex and an explosive temper.

In 2011, Robert James had been spending time with McArthur, who told him about an incident in a coffeehouse: when he had been asked to leave, McArthur's temper burst and he knocked all the glass jars off the counter. James decided to heed advice given to him to stay away from McArthur, explaining that he had heard disturbing stories about him. According to James, McArthur turned red and screamed "Fucking bastards telling stories about me! You're just like the rest of them. You think I'm crazy."

A. J. Khan remembered McArthur as a friendly regular at his restaurant, the Church Bistro 555. Towards the end of 2013 when  McArthur came into his restaurant one day alone instead of with his usual companion. Khan noted that he had seen the man the previous day. He asked McArthur where his friend was. McArthur said that his boyfriend was on vacation. That was when McArthur angrily left and never returned to his restaurant.

McArthur had become a self-employed landscaper operating under the name Artistic Designs. A colleague of his who installed water features on three of his projects in 2011 described McArthur as more of a gardener, operating out of a little van with old tools. He said that McArthur was always accompanied by an older white man, who appeared to be romantically involved with him, and a day labourer, of Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern descent.

Most of McArthur's clients were wealthy elderly women who found him charming, and he had built a client base through personal recommendations. During the off-season,(Winter months. McArthur acted as a Santa Claus at the Agincourt Mall and made floral gifts for charities.

        

McArthur's separation from his wife was initially heated, though they later reconciled. His son Todd was reported to have difficulty accepting his father as a homosexual. In 2014, Todd McArthur was sentenced to 14 months in jail for making multiple obscene phone calls. He was released on bail, ordered to stay with his father at his Toronto apartment and assist with McArthur's landscaping business. 

A former friend of Todd's visited him one night and discovered that on one of the walls of McArthur's bathroom, it was covered with photos of naked men with erections. He said that most of the men appeared to be "East Indian" and that Todd said that they were men whom his father knew. McArthur did not hide the fact, laughing over it at breakfast.

As an aside, when I was eleven years old in 1945, my mother sent me to North Vancouver to live with a man who was previously the owner of a private residential school in North Vancouver. I soon discovered to my horror  that he was a pedophile and was sexually abusing me and the other two boys living there in his home.  When my mother visited me, she saw photos of naked boys on the walls of his bedroom. She contacted the Children’s Aid and we were subsequently removed from his home.

Project Houston was an 18-month Toronto Police Service (TPS) investigation which began in November 2012, initially looking at the September 6, 2010, disappearance of Skandaraj "Skanda" Navaratnam. The police had searched Riverdale Park, a popular LGBT cruising spot, in 2010 with Navaratnam's friends and later with cadaver dogs and mounted patrols. Two years later, police believed that Navaratnam had been murdered but had no leads. 

According to a 2018 W5 (television series) investigation, a man posted on a cannibal website Zambian Meat in 2012 that he had killed and eaten a man in Toronto, which had led to the formation of Project Houston.  Was McArthur the cannibal?

The investigation for the missing men became the largest investigation conducted by the Toronto Police Service who also called on the resources of the   Royal Canadian Mounted Police  and other police and forensic services. Criticisms of the Toronto Police Service`s handling of the missing persons investigations have led to a number of internal reviews, an external review called by the civilian Toronto Police Services Board and the formation of a dedicated missing persons unit.

In the summer of 2017, amid public speculation of a serial killer at the Church and Wellesley area, evidence was gained from another missing-persons investigation which led TPS to create a second divisional task force named  Project Prism. In January 18^th 2018, Project Prism investigators obtained evidence connecting two disappearances to Bruce McArthur, who was at that time a 66-year-old self-employed landscaper, whom they promptly arrested.

Robert MacEachern, a former friend of McArthur when both were attending the same school, had finished his supper and was sitting in front of the television at his cattle farm, wanting to watch the news for the next day’s weather but was stuck on one of his wife’s programs instead. The phone rang. He answered it. It was his brother on the other end. Did you hear?” he asked. MacEachern hadn’t seen the news that night, so he’d missed all the stories about Bruce McArthur, who was accused of murdering two men who had disappeared from Toronto’s gay village which is in downtown Toronto, Canada`s largest city.  Later the Police charged McArthur with three more counts of murder. They believed there may be more to come. Their belief was a valid one. At a press conference they acknowledged what Toronto’s gay community had long feared—that they now believe a serial killer had been preying on gay men tied to the Church Street Gay Village since at least 2012.

Robert McEachern later said that Bruce was an OK man. Bruce McArthur’s parents were decent folks who took in kids sent to them from the City of Toronto. Bruce McArthur was also a friendly baker whom neighbours often saw him carrying trays of muffins around his condo building. So why did Bruce McArthur turn into a serial killer of men?

Serial killers kill their victims either because they are terrorists, for revenge or for sexual reasons or even to make a name for themselves. What was McArthur’s motive?  It has been suggested that sex was his motive and he didn’t want his victims to tell anyone that he was not fully]heterosexual.  

Before he became a fixture in the gay village, McArthur was married with a wife and fathered two sons and had a home in Oshawa, east of Toronto. A bankruptcy filing for McArthur from 1999 shows that his house was a typical suburban home: a two-story detached with a two-car garage on a corner lot in Oshawa. In the filing, McArthur’s assets were listed as $190,000 against $277,812 in liabilities

By 2001, McArthur appeared to be living in Toronto. That was the year he was accused of attacking a man using a metal pipe. According to the Toronto Star, McArthur was convicted of assault causing bodily harm in 2003 and ordered to stay away from a swath of downtown Toronto that included the gay village. He was also forbidden from meeting with male prostitutes. The court was concerned that he may be a danger to them.

The police soon after charged McArthur with three additional counts of first-degree murder, bringing the total victim count to five men and dating back to 2012. The police announced that that there could be more charges. They asked any customers of McArthur’s landscaping company to permit their properties to be searched after remains were found in some planters connected to McArthur.

McArthur’s landscaping business, Artistic Design, had a list of roughly 30 clients, The police said that body parts belonging to three people were found in planters at the back of a yard on Mallory Crescent in the Toronto neighbourhood of Leaside, (a subdivision of the City of Toronto) where McArthur reportedly stored equipment in exchange for his landscaping work.

Besides cutting the grass and blowing leaves, McArthur would cart containers of plants between his red minivan and the yard. His actions seemed quite normal. Unbeknown to the owners of the homes he was bring the containers to, they didn’t know that there were only the bones of human bodies in the containers.

Until recently, McArthur was something of a fixture in the gay village. Of nearly a dozen people in the village who spoke to the National Post, all but one said they recognized McArthur. Some said they remembered seeing him at local bars and others said they just recognized him from the neighbourhood, whether they ran into him at a local coffee shop or passed by him on the street. A server at Garage, a local restaurant on Church Street, remembers seeing McArthur several times in the summer seated on the patio. He seemed harmless enough to him. He just looks like a friendly old man.  He and the others in that gay village connected the missing men with McArthur.

“The scary part, is that literally the person beside you could be a killer,” said a man at Woody’s who was sipping a white wine at the bar. “You just don’t even know anymore.”

Years before McArthur was named as an alleged serial killer, Bruce McArthur was brought in by police to a police station for questioning in a separate incident unrelated to men missing from Toronto's Gay Village and was let go, according to sources familiar with the incident.

McArthur, who later was charged with six more counts of first-degree murder, after the 2014 closure of a police investigation dubbed Project Houston, which investigated three missing persons, and before the 2017 launch of Project Prism, which culminated in McArthur's January 2018 arrest,

Homicide detectives while probing McArthur's case did not find out that the police had previously questioned McArthur until after his arrest. These investigators then passed this information to the Toronto police professional standards unit and an internal investigation began recently. From what I learned, a man approached and officer stating that McArthur tried to strangle him but the officer didn’t take the complaint seriously. At the time of the writing of this article, that officer is going to appear before a police tribunal to explain why he came to that stupid conclusion hat nothing was wrong.  When I learn that the decisions is, I will place it at the end of this article as an UPDATE.

Years ago a semi-naked man ran towards a police officer in a city street in the USA and said that the man chasing him tried to kill him. The serial killer told the officer that the young man was drunk and he would take him back home and sober him up. The officer went with them to the apartment and since everything looked OK in the apartment, he left the two men alone  in the apartment. If he had searched in the refrigerator, he would have seen the head of a victim the serial killer had killed earlier. The serial killer murdered the young man soon after the officer left the apartment.  

The Toronto police discovered dismembered skeletal remains in backyard planters. What happened to the victim’s flesh?

There may be more victims killed by McArthur but only the remains of eight of them were found by the police. The remains of the victims were those of Selim Esen, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Majeed Kayhan, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Skandaraj Navaratnam.

It was the Toronto police allegation that a serial killer was responsible for the gruesome murders that had prompted at least one homicide expert to suggest the perpetrator was likely a psychopath. Criminologist and former police officer Michael Arntfield said the revelations suggest that the victims’ bodies were moved and hidden. It’s a relatively rare tactic “strongly co-related with offenders who are in the psychopathic spectrum.” He made this statement as opposed to those murderers suffering from a mental health issue or acting spontaneously out of anger or under the influence of a narcotic.

Arntfield, who is also a professor at Western University in London, Ontario also said, “These are people who have fantasized about this for some time, who put considerable mental and physical energy into scouting and identifying locations, preparing for any contingency.”

I studied Abnormal Psychology for nine months at the University of Toronto as part of a five-year criminology program. I was also a group counsellor in a detention centre for several years and conducted group sessions with some of the inmates who were killers. This doesn’t make me an expert on this subject but I have some understanding of the minds of killers so I will give you my thoughts about psychopaths.

Psychopaths are unabashed in their actions against others, whether it is defrauding someone of their life savings, manipulating law enforcement personnel during an interrogation, by blaming their victims for their crimes and or killing human beings. They have no empathy towards other human beings. In other words, they care less about the feelings of others.

This is particularly true in cases involving psychopathic killers. When psychopaths commit a homicide, their killings likely will be planned and purposeful—that is, organized, and not committed in the heat of passion. The motive of a psychopathic killer will often involve either power and control or sadistic gratification. Yes, psychopathic killers enjoy the feelings they get when they murder their victims. 

When faced with overwhelming evidence of their guilt, a psychopathic killer such as Ted Bundy will often claim they lost control or were in a fit of rage when committing the act of murder. In reality, however, their killings are stone-cold, calculated, and completely premeditated. Where Bundy and McArthur were both psychopathic killers and both confessed to their crimes.

Incidentally, Bundy and I had one thing in common. We both sat in the electric chair in the death house in Florida. He was executed and I was given a personal tour of the prison where the electric chair is located. 

Just as sociopaths are a special breed, so too are their victims. What was it about these victims that made them seem vulnerable? A later study found that the men were picking up on whole suite of nonverbal cues, including the length of their stride, how they shifted their weight, and how high they lifted their feet. Taken together, these cues gave the psychopathic men a rough gauge of how confident their potential victims were. Body language that implies a lack of confidence  read: socially submissive that includes lack of eye contact, fidgeting of the hands and feet, and the avoidance of large gestures when shifting posture.

The women who wound up on the receiving end of Bundy’s attentions were individuals who, were not very worldly, experienced, or outgoing. They were psychologically vulnerable and hence ill-equipped to resist this killer’s predations. And so the psychopath continues on his way after he murders them.

McArthur wasn’t interested in having sex with the lesbian women in Gay Village. He was more interested in having sex with the gay men. Thank God he wasn’t a pedophile.

The audacious act by McArthur of stashing remains in private yards would be immensely alluring to this killer by offering him a sense of “immeasurable power” to secretly wield over city officials and victims’ family members.

Serial killers get a thrill when they know things other people don’t know. The thrill for them is revisiting these scenes knowing something that the police and society don’t know even exists. I don’t know where McArthur murdered his victims but he knew where he placed their remains and since they were on the properties of his customers and he would return to those places often, he must have gotten quite a thrill when he saw the flower planters where he placed the remains of his victims.

Of course, as soon as the police were told by one of McArthur’s customers that human remains were found in a flower planter, the locations of the others victims were easy to determine.

It’s difficult to get rid of bodies. How do you do it in a place like Toronto? You don’t have access to heavy machinery and can’t bury them 30 feet underground. The planters were ideal for a landscaper like McArthur. But where did he dismember the bodies of his victims. Was it in his van?  Was it a thrill for him  when he cut up the bodies?  We will never know unless he agrees to discuss his crimes to a psychiatrist while he is in prison and the psychiatrist’s report eventually becomes public.

The 2012 FBI report states that 15-20 percent of the two million+ prisoners in the U.S., which are 90 percent male, are psychopaths.

I sense that there is some type of trepidation in killer’s lives where they think that they’re going to be caught, whereas other killers are arrogant and very confident in themselves I have no idea if McArthur was seriously concerned that he would be caught but I suspect that after a while, he was less in fear that he would be caught since he had placed the victim’s remains in his customer’s flower urns and generally, they are rarely if ever emptied.  But then one day…..

The police caught their first two breaks when they combined two key pieces of evidence—an entry in Kinsman’s calendar for the day he disappeared reading “Bruce,” and a surveillance video showing a man who looked like Kinsman getting into a red Dodge Caravan outside his home. The Police were able to narrow down the age and exact model of the Caravan in question. Searching a vehicle registration database, they found that there were only five Caravans in the Toronto area matching the one in the video in which one of them was owned by someone whose first name was  Bruce. McArthur’s name was one of the five persons who owned those kinds of vans. Because he had attracted police attention in 2016 for choking a man who escaped, McArthur became a person of interest.                                    

Officers were able to locate McArthur’s Caravan at a home connected to him in Bowmanville, Ontario. A few weeks later, it was gone having been moved to a wrecking yard out-of-town. McArthur had replaced it with a much newer Caravan. Forensic examination of the old Caravan led to what the police called an “investigative breakthrough” — DNA belonging to Kinsman who was McArthur’s victim. The victim was probably cut up in the van and McArthur hadn’t cleaned the inside of the van sufficiently in order to hide all of Kinsman’s blood. Many killers get caught by skipping up over stupid and careless acts.  By not cleaning the inside of his van; that was the third and final break that convinced the police that Bruce McArthur was the serial killer they were looking for.

McArthuer was tried for the murder of eighty men. H pleaded guilty right from the start, thereby the families didn’t have to hear all the grisly details as to what had happened  to the victims.

 Justice John McMahon told the court while delivering his sentence. “I am satisfied, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these men died a slow and painful death by ligature strangulation for the sexual gratification of Mr. McArthur. All or most of the victims were vulnerable individuals who were lured to their deaths, no doubt on the promise of consensual sexual activity. The accused exploited his victims’ vulnerabilities, whether they involved immigration concerns, mental health challenges or people living a secretive double life.”

Justice McMahon sentenced McArthur to life in prison for each of the eight counts. He said that McArthur won’t have consecutive periods of parole ineligibility that the crown had asked for with respect to two of the deaths.

At age 67, McArthur will be eligible to be released from prison in in 2044 when he is 91 years of age. 

Strange enough, that sentence may seem odd considering the fact that he confessed to murdering eight men. In Canada, when a persons kills more than one person after the year 2011, the sentences will be consecutive.  However, the judge added that McArthur is suffering from diabetes and may actually die in prison before his 25-yer sentence is over. Further, he said that it is highly unlikely that the National Parole board will ever grant him parole. However, there have been many instances were parolees have continued committing the same crimes again. Despite that possibility, how successful would a 91 year old man be in trying to strangle a younger man if he was released from prison? 

Serial killer Clifford Olsen killed ten young persons in the Province of British Columbia and was sentenced to twenty-five years. When the twenty-five years were completed, the National Parole Board refused to release him. The killer eventually died in prison.

When is Canada’s next unknown serial killer going to do his dirty deeds? There are millions of people in Canada and they are obviously completely unaware of what the future holds for them. Unfortunately for some them, a serial killer will kill them and each of their families and friends  will suffer from their loss of the victims.