A year after being arrested on suspicion of killing five men who had frequented Toronto’s Gay Village, Bruce McArthur confessed to the murder of a total of eight men, whom he dismembered, concealing their body parts in flower pots at a home where he worked as a landscaper.
As the Washington Post notes, just a month after telling residents of Gay Village that they need not fear that a serial killer was targeting the area, Toronto Police announced in January 2018 that they had arrested and charged Bruce McArthur, a landscaper and part-time mall Santa who frequented the area’s gay bars, for the murder of five men over a period of nearly a decade.
“The evidence today tells us that there is not a serial killer,” Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders reassured residents in a December 2017 press conference, the Post reports. A month later, McArthur, then 66, was behind bars. A year later, he confessed to targeting and killing not five but eight men, pleading guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder.
“According to the Globe and Mail, almost all of his victims had frequented the bars and nightclubs in Gay Village, though several were not openly gay,” the Post reports. “Many were refugees or recent immigrants from South Asia or the Middle East, and several had struggled with addiction, homelessness and financial troubles.”
On Tuesday, McArthur pleaded guilty “in a quiet voice” to the murders of Selim Esen (44), Andrew Kinsman (49), Majeed Kayhan (58), Dean Lisowick (47), Soroush Mahmudi (50), Skandaraj Navaratnam (40), Abdulbasir Faizi (44), and Kirushna Kanagaratnam (37), CBC reports.
“Michael Cantlon, a lawyer for the Crown, revealed some details of the killings, telling the court that each murder included planning and deliberation, and that six were sexual in nature,” the outlet reports. “He said that during a search of McArthur’s bedroom, police found a bag containing duct tape, a surgical glove, rope and zip ties. Cantlon also said McArthur ‘staged’ some of his victims after they were murdered and kept some of their items as souvenirs, including jewelry.”
In March 2018, CBC reported that police had actually interviewed McArthur years before his arrest, a revelation that caused a stir in the community. Skeptical activists blasted the news as “not surprising” given what they perceived as authorities’ overly dismissive years-long response to the community’s fears that the mysterious disappearances of men from the area was the work of a mass murderer.
“The first of McArthur’s victims to disappear was Navaratnam, a Sri Lankan refugee who was last seen leaving a gay nightclub with an unknown man at around 2 a.m. on Sept. 6, 2010,” the Post reports. “Later that year, Faizi, an Afghan immigrant, was reported missing after he visited a bathhouse and gay bar. When Kayhan, who was also originally from Afghanistan and a regular at bars in Gay Village, vanished in the fall of 2012, police launched a probe into the three men’s disappearances, calling it Project Houston.”
McArthur was interviewed within a year after the investigation launched, but after failing to identify a suspect, Project Houston was shut down.