00:00:05
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHAKIR RAHIM: You had people who had full lives-- social lives, support networks, families, hobbies.
00:00:28
There was no logic to why they would suddenly disappear. HANK IDSINGA: There were an awful lot of other occurrences
00:00:34
of missing men. Guys who just wanted to disappear. Do we have a serial killer? We just simply did not know at that point in time
00:00:42
what we were dealing with. JOOYOUNG LEE: His methods for disposing victims show that he's somebody who's
00:00:49
very calculating and rational. HANK IDSINGA: The smell of decomposition was so bad that we were pretty confident that there was
00:00:57
something in those planters. JOOYOUNG LEE: He's using objects that he has access to to hide
00:01:04
the remains of his victims. HANK IDSINGA: And this was a man who played Santa in a shopping mall.
00:01:13
You wouldn't think for a second that he was a serial killer. And that's the scary thing.
00:01:17
[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: In Toronto's gay village, an investigation is launched after three
00:02:07
men are reported missing. It would take six years to discover the truth around their disappearance.
00:02:13
HANK IDSINGA: I'm a 30-year member of the Toronto police service. I've worked in homicide, in our homicide squad since 2005.
00:02:25
And In late 2012, I became involved in an investigation run out of one of our divisions referred to as Project Houston
00:02:35
to try and figure out what's happened to these three missing men. Now, Skanda Navaratnam went missing in late 2010.
00:02:43
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHAKIR RAHIM: For a long time, the Church and Wellesley community has been a center in the city
00:03:04
for the queer community. And deeply meaningful in terms of being a place to gather, to socialize, to celebrate, to find support.
00:03:17
JOOYOUNG LEE: I think when people talk about the Church neighborhood, they think of it as overall a safe neighborhood.
00:03:27
It's known for being a very open and tolerant space. It's the site of the gay pride parades.
00:03:35
It's a space that draws LGBTQ folks from all over the country and other countries who attend this festival.
00:03:44
[MUSIC PLAYING] HANK IDSINGA: You've got three missing men between 2010 and 2012.
00:04:06
And it's a serious enough situation to carry on with that project to try and figure out what's happened to these three missing men.
00:04:15
And at that point in time, we simply did not know what had happened to them. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:04:27
The police authorities in Switzerland were contacted by what they classified at that time
00:04:33
as an informant. The informant told them he was part of a online cannibal fetish community.
00:04:42
And he had been chatting with a user on the website who was identified at the time as John Jacob.
00:04:50
And John Jacob told this informant that he had killed and eaten a brown-skinned male
00:04:59
from Toronto's gay village. So the informant went online himself to see if there are any murder victims or missing
00:05:08
men from Toronto's gay village. And he happened to find the press release about Skanda Navaratnam.
00:05:14
So he presumed it was Skanda Navaratnam that John Jacob was talking about. So he contacted the authorities in Switzerland.
00:05:23
And it sounds like a bit of an unbelievable story, but the last time he had given them similar information,
00:05:32
it was about a cannibal in Slovakia. And based on his information, the police in Slovakia
00:05:38
ended up finding a cannibal serial killer and ended up killing him actually during a shootout
00:05:47
and finding multiple victims around his property. So this informant's credibility was quite high.
00:05:54
So the information was taken quite seriously. It was passed on to the investigators
00:05:58
who were investigating the Skanda Navaratnam occurrence. And now that you have a witness who is telling you
00:06:07
he's been privy to an online confession by someone claiming to have murdered somebody,
00:06:13
now it becomes a murder investigation as opposed to a missing persons investigation.
00:06:20
NARRATOR: Project Houston would not find the missing men, but it unearthed a username on the cannibal fetish
00:06:26
website who was based in Toronto, Silverfox. Perhaps he might know something about the missing men.
00:06:34
HANK IDSINGA: In November of 2013, 51 division actually identified who Silverfox
00:06:40
was and interviewed Bruce McArthur at the time, who was Silverfox. He wasn't able to offer any information
00:06:48
at that time to help with the missing persons investigations. He was strictly a witness at the time of the interview.
00:06:55
NARRATOR: Having concluded McArthur knew nothing about the missing men, he was free to go.
00:07:00
The mystery remained just that, a mystery. Were they dead or alive? No one knew.
00:07:11
Three years later, men start going missing from Church and Wellesley again. Soroush Mahmudi, a 50-year-old professional painter,
00:07:20
last seen alive by his home in Scarborough, Toronto. HANK IDSINGA: Soroush Mahmudi, a South Asian male
00:07:27
who lived in a suburb of Toronto, married, in the closet. Of course, the thought of a serial killer
00:07:37
was high in the investigator's minds. Do we have a serial killer? We just simply did not know at that point in time
00:07:45
what we were dealing with. There were an awful lot of other occurrences of missing men
00:07:51
that we looked at from the village, from around the village. Guys who just wanted to disappear.
00:07:58
I often tell the story about a missing man from the village from 2010 who disappeared off the face of the Earth very
00:08:07
similarly to these three victims that we identified and he reappeared in 2014. And he was interviewed and he said, yeah,
00:08:16
I just wanted to get away. I wanted to disappear for a while. And he moved to the other end of the city
00:08:23
and didn't tell anybody. He left his belongings behind. So it wasn't unusual to see occurrences like that
00:08:30
with alternate explanations. [MUSIC PLAYING] Selim Esen, a lot like Skanda Navaratnam--
00:08:46
resident of the gay village, didn't have a permanent address-- wasn't reported missing for about two weeks
00:08:52
after he disappeared. JOOYOUNG LEE: These are also people who do not receive the same kinds of attention from the media
00:08:58
or from police when they go missing. And you don't have to look very far in Canada.
00:09:03
If you look on the West Coast to the story of the Highway of Tears, you see that there are generations of missing
00:09:10
and murdered Indigenous people who've, you know, have vanished without, you know, much media attention
00:09:18
or, you know, police resources to find them. And serial killers are very aware of these things.
00:09:24
They know that certain people-- they can get away with it with certain people easier than others.
00:09:29
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHAKIR RAHIM: His disappearance really got on the radar and he had a group of people who were really advocating
00:09:41
for his disappearance to receive a high priority in the investigation. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:10:07
Some of the men were known to go to bars or clubs in the village. And they had people that they knew there.
00:10:14
And when they went missing for a period of time, it was noticed that they were not there.
00:10:23
Andrew Kinsman probably had the most prominent stature in terms of the most social connections,
00:10:30
did a lot of volunteer work with queer organizations. And so his disappearance, compared to others,
00:10:38
really got on the radar. And he had a group of people who were really advocating
00:10:43
for his disappearance to receive a high priority in the investigation. HANK IDSINGA: So let's gather all of the surveillance video
00:10:55
from the neighborhood surrounding this address. So we had these collection of video evidence.
00:11:03
And it was in August of 2017 where the investigators were able to finally sit down and start going
00:11:12
through all of this video. I remember the conversation and it was like, we really didn't know what we were looking for, right?
00:11:22
Let's just watch the video and see if anything jumps out at us. So one thing that jumped out was a red Dodge Caravan
00:11:29
that circled the block twice right around the time when Andrew Kinsman went missing, which was at about 2:30
00:11:36
in the afternoon June 26. So they started focusing on that red Dodge Caravan. They were able to find it on a camera a couple of blocks
00:11:45
away from Andrew Kinsman's house. And it was a good enough image of the Dodge Caravan.
00:11:51
We were able to go to the Ministry of Transportation and say, can you give us a printout of all the 2004
00:11:58
to 2006 red Dodge Caravans in the city of Toronto? They provide us a list. There's over 6,000 of these red Dodge Caravans.
00:12:08
But we also knew on Andrew Kinsman's calendar he had a appointment noted, Bruce.
00:12:16
So out of those over 6,000 red Dodge Caravans, how many of them were registered to somebody named Bruce?
00:12:25
There were five, one of them being Bruce McArthur. As soon as that name popped up, one of the investigators said,
00:12:35
Bruce McArthur, we interviewed him in 2013. Let's look at Bruce McArthur. BRIAN FREDERICK: Bruce McArthur comes
00:12:45
from a generation where sexuality, homosexuality, wasn't as open. We know that McArthur came from a religious household.
00:12:58
His father was Presbyterian, his mother was Catholic. And that there was some bullying of him by his father.
00:13:05
And least what McArthur alleges is that his father was harder on him because he sensed
00:13:09
his son's lack of masculinity. JOOYOUNG LEE: He grew up in a world that was very intolerant
00:13:17
and that was not accepting of people who were not straight. This was something that he may have been struggling
00:13:24
with for who knows how long. This could have been something-- he could have been having
00:13:29
desires to be with other boys and men since his adolescence or teenage years. And this was something that he couldn't be open about.
00:13:39
He lived in a family that was very religious. He lived in a society that would not
00:13:46
endorse this kind of behavior. So he lived in a world where in a sense, he had to hide his true self from not only his family,
00:13:54
but the rest of the world. And this can be a very traumatic experience for a young person
00:13:59
to grow up in a world where you feel like you constantly have to have a mask. BRIAN FREDERICK: McArthur was married for 25 years.
00:14:09
This isn't uncommon. And he told his wife, he came out to his wife and left her.
00:14:14
And had this sort of second birth, this rebirth into the gay world. Started socializing in the gay bars, meeting other gay men.
00:14:25
And Toronto has a very vibrant gay scene, diverse. I imagine that he found that there
00:14:30
were all types of gay men. JOOYOUNG LEE: He immerses himself into the gay village.
00:14:35
It's a neighborhood that has a long-standing history for being this space that is very
00:14:42
tolerant towards LGBTQ folks. It has a very active nightlife. There are bars, there are, you know, sex clubs,
00:14:50
there's a lot of activity. And I feel like somebody like Bruce McArthur, after living repressed for so long, comes to this
00:14:58
and he feels like a kid in a candy store. Like, this is an experience that he has not
00:15:02
been able to have for so long and now he's finally able to have it. He starts meeting other gay men--
00:15:08
tall, short, you know, out-of-towners, foreigners, masculine, and feminine. And that's the key point there I think is that
00:15:18
how can these men in McArthur's mind be openly, outwardly effeminate when he wasn't allowed to as a child?
00:15:27
JOOYOUNG LEE: After Bruce McArthur has bottled his identity up for 30 years and comes out
00:15:33
and embraces his sexuality, I think he's at this point, somebody who's very eager to get caught up with this life
00:15:41
that he's been repressing for so long. He throws himself wholeheartedly into this lifestyle
00:15:49
and tries to really catch up on time that he's missed. All the while I think he still has this life of socialization.
00:16:00
BRIAN FREDERICK: We know that in 2001 McArthur was brought to the attention of police
00:16:03
for having assaulted a male prostitute in a bar. He claims that it was the result of him being off his medication
00:16:10
for epilepsy. JOOYOUNG LEE: And he assaults him pretty badly. There's a police report.
00:16:14
I think this shows that he's beginning to experiment with different kinds of domination
00:16:20
and that he's enjoying the sense of power that he has over people. At this stage, it can still be purely sexual.
00:16:30
He also may have felt rejected in that moment and felt angered by the fact that he was finally trying
00:16:38
to live his true life, his true self and embrace this and then somebody told him no.
00:16:44
NARRATOR: It had been Bruce McArthur's first brush with the law. A psychological assessment concluded
00:16:50
that the risk for further violence from him was very minimal. He is sentenced to two years probation.
00:16:56
BRIAN FREDERICK: As part of his probation arrangement, McArthur is ordered to stay out of the gay area of Toronto.
00:17:03
Now this would have been, in my opinion, the straw that broke the camel's back. This was the stress.
00:17:08
He's finally come out of the closet, he's leading this life that he enjoys leading,
00:17:12
and now he's barred. NARRATOR: As the years passed and men were going missing, McArthur's life in Toronto became immersed in the church.
00:17:21
He was religious. JOOYOUNG LEE: Bruce McArthur was somebody who, at least on the surface, was
00:17:27
participating in church life and appeared to be very religious. And a lot of times when we think about serial killers,
00:17:34
we assume that they resemble the kinds of characters we see in movies, like Hannibal Lecter
00:17:41
from "Silence of the Lambs." That they just embody evil in everything they do and that they couldn't possibly be involved
00:17:48
in something like a church. But there are many serial killers over time who, you know, have been a part of churches
00:17:56
and who have been a part of other kinds of social activities that we would never assume
00:18:02
are the things that serial killers do. Dennis Rader, for example, also known as the BTK Killer in Wichita, Kansas
00:18:10
was a long-time member of his church and was by most accounts, somebody who was a respected
00:18:17
member of his society. NARRATOR: Between 2010 and 2016, nobody suspected that Bruce McArthur was connected to the stories
00:18:26
emerging of missing men. HANK IDSINGA: Looking at a photograph of Bruce McArthur
00:18:30
or even sitting down and talking to him face to face, I think anybody who would be absolutely shocked to find
00:18:39
out what exactly he had done. You wouldn't think for one second that this guy was capable of doing what he did, right?
00:18:51
He comes across as a very soft spoken, very gentle older man. JOOYOUNG LEE: People said they never would have suspected him
00:19:01
to be found to be the killer. HANK IDSINGA: And this was a man who played Santa in a shopping mall.
00:19:09
You wouldn't think for a second that he was a serial killer. And that's a scary thing.
00:19:15
There's also an incident in North Toronto where Mr. McArthur is arrested for choking
00:19:21
a male in the back of his van. SHAKIR RAHIM: And he was interviewed by the police
00:19:25
and he just sort of denied what happened. And they just believed his word and that was that.
00:19:31
That was the end of that 2016 investigation. So there were just a litany of examples
00:19:39
where you could have caught McArthur. NARRATOR: Detectives felt that they lacked the evidence to arrest him
00:19:45
in relation to the missing men. But by 2016, Bruce McArthur had become a suspect.
00:19:51
HANK IDSINGA: The 2001 occurrence comes up. In the meantime, since the 2013 interview,
00:19:58
there's also an incident in 2016. So that's a red flag that goes up as well. So the investigation focuses, at that point in time,
00:20:08
on Bruce McArthur. [MUSIC PLAYING] In the days following the public announcement of Project Prism,
00:20:19
he gets rid of the red Dodge Caravan. And we are lucky enough to recover that from a wrecking yard.
00:20:27
And it's forensically examined. And in the back of the van, there is blood, which is found and eventually identified
00:20:37
as belonging to Andrew Kinsman. So once we have that information in November of 2017,
00:20:44
now it becomes evidence of a murder and evidence, obviously, linking McArthur to that murder.
00:20:56
We have as much surveillance as we can muster-- keeping an eye on him, identifying his associates.
00:21:03
He lived in a high rise apartment building and he had a roommate. And surveillance was able to identify an opportunity
00:21:10
in the middle of the night where we'd be able to go into his apartment. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:21:36
We were headed down the path of preparing a wiretap investigation because we thought if he
00:21:42
is responsible for of this, if these are murders, there's no way he's doing this by himself.
00:21:49
But once we had the blood, we had enough evidence where we could go to a judge and get a warrant
00:21:57
to allow us to surreptitiously enter his apartment and clone his computer. You can imagine the logistics of obtaining
00:22:09
that judicial authorization to do it-- having the surveillance teams watching him around the clock,
00:22:15
nailing down his roommate's schedule, and nailing down his schedule. Having locksmiths ready to go at a moment's notice.
00:22:24
Having tech officers ready to go at a moment's notice and investigators. And also, forensic investigators to take
00:22:32
photographs as we're executing the warrant. So it's an awful lot of work to prepare for that
00:22:37
and then jump at the opportunity when you have it. And I'm thinking the date was December the 7th of 2017 where
00:22:46
we were able to go into his apartment, clone 45% of his computer before our surveillance
00:22:52
team notifies us he's actually headed back so we have to get out of there. And we were lucky enough to be able to get
00:22:59
that 45% of his computer. [MUSIC PLAYING] In that 45%, we have over 100,000 images--
00:23:21
thumbnails from websites, images in emails, personal photographs-- and we have over a million artifacts--
00:23:30
websites visited, emails sent-- that we have to manually go through to try and find something.
00:23:38
And it was five weeks worth of work when we found the first photograph. He created a file for each of his victims.
00:23:47
He had photographs in there of them when they were alive. He had taken photographs of them on camping trips
00:23:53
with a couple of the victims, photographs of them in previous visits and relationship-type photographs.
00:24:02
But he also had photographs in there-- posed post-mortem photographs in there. One of the victims who survived being choked
00:24:13
unconscious by McArthur, he's given some interviews. And he didn't even realize it had happened until we found
00:24:21
photographs of him on McArthur's computer, obviously unconscious in the photographs in a state of undress.
00:24:29
[MUSIC PLAYING] We had photographs which we had recovered from McArthur's computer of what turned
00:24:45
out to be Kumar Kanagaratnam. And we had no idea who he was. And so we had to release that to the media.
00:24:54
NARRATOR: With McArthur still free, the case of Kumar Kanagaratnam displayed McArthur's ability to pick a victim few would miss.
00:25:02
HANK IDSINGA: Again, a refugee claimant from Sri Lanka. Outstanding immigration warrant for him,
00:25:08
never reported as missing. And we can only narrow down the timeline of his murder very loosely.
00:25:17
He was a refugee aboard a infamous cargo ship called the "Sun Sea," which docked in Vancouver I
00:25:23
believe in 2010 with several hundred refugee claimants on board. So really sad, vulnerable victims.
00:25:37
McArthur I think got very careful after that 2013 interview to target some people who he knew
00:25:47
probably wouldn't be reported missing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dean Lisowick, who was never reported missing,
00:25:56
was a resident of the shelter system in Toronto. JOOYOUNG LEE: Well, sometimes what
00:26:03
happens is that you have a person who is experimenting with rough sex, is immersing themselves in the world
00:26:12
of bondage and domination. And they, you know, enjoy the power that they feel over another person.
00:26:18
And it gets to this tipping point where the violence in play escalates to a point where they
00:26:25
feel swept up in the moment and the violence takes over and it becomes fatal. And in the aftermath, they relive those moments
00:26:36
and they realize how much they enjoyed killing. Once he decided he was going to kill that particular victim,
00:26:45
he would create those folders. And definitely speaks to premeditation. And then also puts us in a position where we're
00:26:53
very comfortable to say that there are no other victims between 2010 and 2018. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:27:06
So on January the 18th, it was a Thursday morning, and I had said, he is not allowed to go behind a closed
00:27:13
door with another man. So let's just keep following him. And unless he does that, we're going to leave him
00:27:20
alone till Saturday morning. Well, Murphy's Law, of course. Thursday morning, he picks up a male who we had seen him pick
00:27:27
up before and he takes him back to his apartment at about 10 o'clock in the morning.
00:27:33
NARRATOR: The surveillance team needed to act quickly. HANK IDSINGA: The investigator calls me and says,
00:27:39
we're going to go and arrest them. Yes, go and arrest him. And so within 18 minutes I believe
00:27:47
of them seeing him go into the building, they're at his door. They knocked on the door and Mr. McArthur came to the door.
00:27:57
And he was placed under arrest right there and then for two counts of murder. The ninth victim-- who has never been publicly identified,
00:28:08
I'll call him John-- was found tied to McArthur's bed. And he had had a hood placed over his head by McArthur.
00:28:16
And he had managed to wiggle the hood off of his head. And sure enough, there was a file folder
00:28:23
on McArthur's computer with the name of that ninth victim on it. So there's no doubt in my mind, whether it had been that day
00:28:30
or a subsequent day, that John would have been victim number nine. NARRATOR: With eight men gone and a ninth rescued,
00:28:40
detectives arrested McArthur. If he had killed these men, where were their bodies?
00:28:50
[MUSIC PLAYING] McArthur had been arrested just minutes before he intended to kill his ninth victim.
00:29:01
Investigators learned from his computer the key moments on his road to becoming a serial killer.
00:29:09
BRIAN FREDERICK: He stumbles across this website, Recon, which is a fetish website.
00:29:14
It's known for bondage, discipline, sadomasochism, BDSM. And perhaps, starts to devise a plan
00:29:22
for dealing with these effeminate passive men. So he assumes a more dominant role, the dom
00:29:29
if you will, and seeks out these men who are the subs, subordinates. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:29:39
He sought out a certain type of victim-- immigrants, individuals who may not have had their whole family
00:29:46
with them in Toronto. This fits the profile of the type of serial killer who goes for a victim that will not
00:29:54
go noticed if they go missing. SHAKIR RAHIM: And the fact that it took so much work to make people accept and understand
00:30:03
that the racial and sexuality dimension of this case was part of why McArthur was able to continue
00:30:13
what he was doing for so long. And the fact that the police were reflexively defensive--
00:30:20
that even the media didn't really pay attention to this angle, that even some members of the community
00:30:25
did not fully emphasize or think about race when it came to these victims-- that was deeply upsetting to me.
00:30:33
JOOYOUNG LEE: Race plays a big role in this case. It plays a role in the sense that Bruce
00:30:38
McArthur as an older white guy was just a good ol' boy from Canada. Is not somebody who, on the surface,
00:30:46
is somebody who would elicit a lot of attention from police. He's not somebody who is under the same kinds of surveillance
00:30:53
that let's say, a Black man or a Brown man who is Muslim is under when they come into Canada.
00:31:02
In a lot of ways, Bruce McArthur's race helped him evade the authorities for so long.
00:31:08
It also plays a role insofar as that some of his victims were also Brown men who were living
00:31:15
in communities that were not as open and tolerant of the gay lifestyle. SHAKIR RAHIM: We've seen it in cases of serial killers
00:31:23
in the United States who've also preyed on vulnerable members of the community. And so to me, it does seem that it
00:31:30
is an invitation to individuals who are wanting to do such horrific things. Because they know they can get away with it for a long time.
00:31:42
And I think the interactions McArthur had with police-- over many years, with many different officers,
00:31:49
despite many different entry points that should have raised a red flag-- is illustrative of that.
00:31:57
NARRATOR: By January 2018, McArthur was in custody. Evidence to prove he was a serial killer was building,
00:32:04
but there was still no bodies. Families needed closure. McArthur was a landscaper, accustomed to digging
00:32:11
holes in the ground and cultivating planters. Detectives searched the properties
00:32:16
where they know he has lived. HANK IDSINGA: We were able to obtain our search warrants for the properties
00:32:22
in the ensuing 48 hours. The one property, where ultimately all the victims were found, was on Mallory Crescent
00:32:29
here in Toronto and the ravine behind Mallory Crescent. And this was a location where McArthur stored
00:32:36
his landscaping equipment. And it was an older couple who actually own the house,
00:32:44
but they had vacation property in Northern Ontario. So he really had open access to the property
00:32:52
during summer months. And you can imagine their shock and their surprise when we show up and basically tell them,
00:32:59
you have to get out of your house. We don't know when we're going to be able to give it back to you.
00:33:04
[MUSIC PLAYING] But it was a really, really cold winter here in Toronto so the ground was frozen solid.
00:33:15
And the canine units were first used on the property of Mallory Crescent. They were searching the backyard.
00:33:26
And one of the dogs gave us an indication on a planter that was at the back of Mallory Crescent.
00:33:35
But we didn't know if he was indicating the ground underneath the planter or the planter itself.
00:33:40
And the planter was frozen solid. So we ended up seizing the planter and we seized, I believe on the first day, three planters.
00:33:50
And we brought them to our Property Bureau because they had to thaw out so we could search them.
00:33:55
So once they were at the Property Bureau, they started thawing out. And then the smell of decomposition coming from them
00:34:05
was so bad that we were pretty confident that there was something in those planters so we ended
00:34:11
up taking them to the morgue. And they sat in the loading bay at the morgue for a couple
00:34:19
of days so they could thaw out. And then the first thing the pathologist was able to do
00:34:26
was X-ray one of the planters once it had thawed out sufficiently. So the X-ray was still very blurry,
00:34:33
but you could make out-- because it was still essentially a block of ice-- but you could still make out that there
00:34:39
was what appeared to be a rib cage in that planter. [MUSIC PLAYING] JOOYOUNG LEE: The power, the thrill
00:34:48
of dominating them up to the point of killing them is a rush. And they continue having that sense of power
00:34:55
by treating the remains, the corpses of their victims like dolls. They have this sense of complete and utter domination over them.
00:35:05
And they enjoy the sense of humiliation and shame that they can, you know, put these poor people through.
00:35:16
HANK IDSINGA: So they had to hoist this planter using a crane up onto an examination table.
00:35:22
And then use power saws to cut away the sides of the planters. And the first planter that they cut
00:35:29
open there were some human remains found in that planter. And subsequently, in the other planters that we recovered
00:35:36
from Mallory Crescent, were the bulk of seven of the eight victims. JOOYOUNG LEE: Bruce McArthur's methods for killing,
00:35:47
by the accounts I've read, suggest that he was somebody who enjoyed having control.
00:35:52
His methods for disposing victims show that he's somebody who's very calculating and rational.
00:35:57
He's using objects that he has access to, which are planters, to hide the remains of his victims.
00:36:07
And this is also something that allows him revisit these places where, you know, he feels a connection
00:36:14
to the remains of these victims that he's killed. The actual identification of the remains in the planters
00:36:23
needs to be based on dental records, fingerprints, or DNA. So Andrew Kinsman was in one of the planters.
00:36:36
And Andrew had had titanium knee replacements. So when we found a set of titanium knee replacements
00:36:46
in the remains, we were pretty confident that that was Andrew Kinsman. But he was actually still preserved
00:36:54
enough that we were able to identify his fingerprints on the remains. So Andrew was identified by fingerprints.
00:37:05
Kumar Kanagaratnam was identified by fingerprints. Dean Lisowick, who was never reported missing,
00:37:15
was identified from the photographs found on McArthur's computer and then ultimately DNA
00:37:22
from the remains. The majority of them were identified through either DNA or dental records at the end of the day.
00:37:31
So it was a different process for each of the victims. BRIAN FREDERICK: McArthur discards of his victim's bodies
00:37:40
in the same place that he's working, in these gardens, in these pots. Now, one could, perhaps, assume that this
00:37:50
is a disregard for his victims. McArthur might have wanted them close to him. These would have been his totems,
00:37:57
his trophies, his talismen around him when he's working. JOOYOUNG LEE: Bruce McArthur kept lots of mementos
00:38:04
from his victims, including their hair. And this is another common practice amongst killers.
00:38:11
They enjoy having small items that remind them of their victims. These are things that serial killers return
00:38:20
to in the interim between kills because it gives them a small dose of the rush that they felt when they killed.
00:38:29
But ultimately, over time, the gratification they get from these items begins to taper off
00:38:36
and they begin to seek out a new victim. Because these items can't ever live up to the real thing
00:38:44
through the act of killing another person. [MUSIC PLAYING] Every time we identified another victim,
00:38:54
we laid another murder charge. And every time we did that, we had to bring McArthur back
00:38:59
to court, advise him of the new charge, and put him before the courts again. And he never said anything during any
00:39:09
of those interactions. So one thing we know about serial killers is that they learn.
00:39:17
They develop better strategies and techniques over time because they make mistakes.
00:39:22
And they begin to develop a routine, a ritual that they use to not only perfect the way they kill people,
00:39:33
but also to conceal evidence of the killing itself. And so Bruce McArthur may have been somebody who began,
00:39:42
you know, sort of getting swept up in the moment and killing his first victim. And then in the aftermath, realizing he liked it.
00:39:50
But over time, you know, because this is a career of killing that spans quite a bit of time, he's
00:39:57
somebody who is, you know, perfecting his technique and is learning from past mistakes
00:40:03
and is becoming very organized and careful in his thought process. And that includes selecting victims, that
00:40:10
includes how to dispose of their remains so that he doesn't get caught. He's somebody who's, you know, continuously
00:40:18
refining his strategies and getting better at it over time. NARRATOR: For Detective Hank Idsinga, a case like no other.
00:40:27
A serial killer who terrorized a community. HANK IDSINGA: I've never dealt with anyone
00:40:35
like Bruce McArthur. To see what it is he did, the absolute terror he brought down upon the city.
00:40:48
And it touches the gay village and the gay population of Toronto, but it touches everybody else in Toronto
00:40:55
as well. [MUSIC PLAYING] SHAKIR RAHIM: It's a horrific tragedy what happened. It makes me feel deeply pained that these men
00:41:21
lost their lives. And that they were all had such a-- they had friends, they had family members who loved them,
00:41:29
they were navigating the issues in their lives the best they could. And that their lives were cut short
00:41:35
in such a brutal and meaningless manner is horrifying and deeply tragic. [MUSIC PLAYING]