S04E10: BRUCE MCARTHUR (CANADIAN SERIAL KILLER MINI-SERIES, PART II)

AJ: Coming up on this episode of Crime Family.

You can't really have a conversation about serial killers in Canada without talking about Bruce McArthur.

And it was during the course of this investigation that the Toronto police got a very unexpected lead. The authorities in Switzerland reached out to inform the Toronto police that there was an informant in Switzerland that came to them with astonishing accusations.

Katie: I find that crazy. It's like you beat someone over the head with a pipe. It's, "Oh, it seems like you're a good guy. Like, see you later."

AJ: Yeah. You made a mistake.

Katie: I don't get it. Yeah.

I mean, they have sketch artists, couldn't they just get a real good sketch of this guy, they know what he looks like, so you'll know the sketch looks just like him. Couldn't they have done that instead of a dead picture of this guy?

AJ: So a lot of people were speculating that there's a ton of cold cases from the seventies and eighties that they started to investigate thinking that he could have been responsible for that.

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crime Family. I'm your co-host, AJ, and I'm here with my two sisters, Stephanie and Katie, just like always. Before we start today's episode, we just wanna let you know about our patron community. If you like the show and you want exclusive extras, like ad free content, bonus episodes, a private community to connect with us, free merch and an exclusive new true crime series Doc Talk, consider becoming a patron. Doc Talk is like a book club for true crime documentaries. Each month we'll select a new doc to watch and discuss it in full. We'll take your questions and discuss the topics you want. You have access to this exclusive new series at a tier three membership, as well as all the other extras I mentioned. Join us on Patreon to continue the true crime conversation and build a community. We'd love to have you. By signing up today, you'll also get automatic access to our bonus episodes, including one about Sarah Boone, known as the Suitcase Killer, one about the updates in the Adnan Syad case and a Halloween one. So check out the show notes for the link to become a patron today, or go to patreon.com/crime family podcast. Also, we've recently launched our exclusive merch store on Red Bubble. We're so excited to have the official crime family logo and designs on everything from t-shirts to stickers to mugs and hats. Check out our merch store to help support the show at the link in the show notes.

Welcome to part two of our four part miniseries on Canadian Serial Killers, and you can't really have a conversation about serial killers in Canada without talking about Bruce McArthur, who was arrested in 2018 and charged with the murders of eight men in Toronto. The details of this case are infuriating, frustrating, unbelievable, and may be disturbing to some listeners so please use discretion when listening to this episode.

So I'm assuming you guys have heard of this case. Maybe you don't know the details, but you at least have heard of the name Bruce McArthur I'm assuming?

Stephanie: Yes.

Katie: Yeah, I definitely know the name, but I am not familiar with the details.

AJ: So I'll just get right into it. The main events that happened in this case took place between 2010 and 2017 when a series of men had gone missing from Toronto's gay village. So the church in Wellesley area of Toronto is known in the city as the Village. It is a major part of the city, and it's here where one of the world's largest pride parades and festivals take place every year and it is known as a sanctuary and safe space. Throughout the time when the men were being reported missing, there were whispers of a possible serial killer in the Village, but an apparent lack of a police investigation and no confirmation from the police led to anything official. So instead, families, friends, and acquaintances of the missing men had to take it upon themselves to raise awareness of the disappearances in an attempt to gain attention and find out what really happened to them.

The first man to go missing in all of this was named Skandaraj Navaratnam, and he was last seen leaving the popular bar Zipperz with an unknown man in September of 2010. Then just a few months later, Abdulbasir Faizi, a 42 year old man who was married with a son, he had been secretly been visiting the gay bars in the church in Wellesley area, and that's where he disappeared from without a trace in December of 2010. His family reported him missing on December 29th. It was only a few days after he went missing, when police found his 2002 Nissan Sentra abandoned on Moore Avenue, which is near the intersection of St. Clair Avenue East and Mount Pleasant Road. Then in 2012, another man went missing, and this time it was 58 year old Majeed Kayhan. He was last seen on October 14th, 2012, and was reported missing a day later by his son. After the disappearances of these three men in this two year timeframe, they were all known to frequent the Village, rumors began to run rampant in the Village that there may be a serial killer responsible. In response to these three missing men, the Toronto Police launched a special task force called Project Houston to investigate the disappearances and determine if there was a link between the three of them. The information in this case, all of this mostly came out after the fact. No one really knew any of these details back in 2012 when this Project Houston was launched. The leads that they were following came out in 2018 or 2019. It was during the course of this investigation that the Toronto Police got a very unexpected lead. The authorities in Switzerland reached out to inform the Toronto Police that there was an informant in Switzerland that came to them with astonishing accusations. The informant claimed to be a part of an online cannibal fetish community, and he says that he had been speaking with a man named James Alex Brunton, who disclosed to him that he had "killed and eaten a brown-skinned male from Toronto's gay Village." Once being told this by James Alex Brunton, this informant checked online to see if Toronto had any missing men that matched that description, and that's when he found the press release for Skanda Navaratnam. He was the first one to go missing, and this prompted him to go to the police and the authorities in Switzerland took his information seriously because this same informant actually helped the police in Slovakia track down a cannibal serial killer not long before this. This was someone who had a history of giving good tips and information. So because of the informant's history, they took his information and brought it to the Toronto Police immediately. Of course this was intriguing for the Toronto Police and then they began looking into this lead and they even flew to Switzerland to, you know, interview some people and track down this lead and see if there was any validity to it. Rumors started running rampant in the Village and Toronto as a whole about the possibility that the three men's disappearances were tied to this online cannibal ring. So it was one of those things that, I guess people had heard about and it sounded crazy that people thought, "Oh, that has to be a rumor," but then it was actually confirmed by police in 2018, or 2019 that this was actually something that they had been looking into. So like I said, they flew to Switzerland and they tracked down all this information, interviewed some people, and eventually during this investigation they ruled out James Alex Brunton as being involved with the disappearance of any of these three men after a month's long surveillance operation. James Alex Brunton actually lived in Peterborough, so they put him under constant surveillance 24 /7 for months and months, trying to see if he was the guy that may be responsible for this. They concluded that his claims of cannibalism were just fantasy. He was later charged with unrelated sex crimes against young boys, so he isn't a good person regardless. There's a documentary on this case and they talk a lot about, I guess they break down people who are on these cannibal fetish websites and they say there's hunters and howlers. Howlers are people who will just talk about it and brag about it, but it's fantasy. They're not actually doing it. Then hunters are people who actually are doing it and saying that they're doing it. So it's very gross and cringe.

Katie: Disgusting.

AJ: Yeah, pretty much. So this James Alex Brunton, he wasn't the guy that they thought might be behind this, but he was later charged with unrelated sex crimes. Project Houston would go on to exhaust all their leads, but they wouldn't find the real person responsible for the crimes. But one thing that they were able to find during their investigation as well was that there was a Toronto user on the cannibal fetish website with the username Silver Fox, and it was in November of 2013 when the police were able to identify who Silver Fox was. It was a man named Bruce McArthur. Also in their investigation into Skanda Navaratnam and Abdulbasir Faizi's disappearance they looked through their belongings, they were doing their investigation, and some of their belongings that they found suggested that Bruce knew both of these men. So the police brought Bruce in for an interview and during the interview Bruce admitted to knowing them both. He says he knew Skanda because they both socialized with the same group of people frequently at a bar called the Black Eagle. He denied having a sexual relationship with Skanda at that time. According to an article by the CBC, Bruce also admitted to knowing Majeed Kayhan since 2003 as well. So he basically admitted to knowing all three of these missing men. He says that Kayhan had worked for him for about a month and that the two had a sexual relationship that had since ended. Bruce had his own landscaping business and would often have many different people working with him. He does say that there was a time when Majeed Kayhan was one of those people that was working for him. In the interview, he gives information saying he knows all three of the men, but the police had nothing to determine that he was responsible for their disappearances, so they let him go after one interview and they didn't consider him a suspect or a person of interest. Like I said, so there are a lot of people who, you know, go onto those cannibal fetish websites. They never act on their desires and so the fact that he was on this website isn't necessarily proof that he would be responsible for something like this. So because he was known to frequent that site and because they thought he might know some of the victims, which he ended up knowing them, that's why they brought him in, but they determined that he wasn't their guy either, so they crossed him off their list after this one interview. That premature action of ruling him out would prove to have even more deadly consequences as there were more men who would soon go missing from the Village as well. So, like I said, Project Houston exhausted all their leads. Nothing came of the investigation into this online cannibal community, so the task force was closed in April of 2014, and the three disappearances were still unsolved. Then in August of 2015, a 50 year old man of South Asian descent named Sorouch Mahmudi went missing from Scarborough, which is just a suburb of Toronto. He was married and seemed to be living a double life as well. He was still in the closet and would frequent Toronto's gay Village, unbeknownst to his family. Then again in April of 2017 another man named Selim Esen went missing. He was a 44 year old Turkish citizen who was last seen alive on April 15th, 2017. According to the police, Selim Esen frequented the gay bars in Toronto but didn't have a fixed address. It took about two weeks for him to be reported missing to the police. Like many of the other victims, Selim was an immigrant to Canada. He was part of a visible minority group and therefore his disappearance didn't really garner the attention of any media or really the police. They didn't seem that they were really looking into his disappearance that much at all. It's not farfetched to think that the serial killer knew that these types of victims could easily slip through the cracks and that their disappearances wouldn't really arouse any suspicion from the police. I mean, we've seen that in other serial killer cases where they target marginalized people, people that they know won't be reported missing or that whose disappearances won't be really taken seriously. So it seems like this is something that happened in the investigation because it took a long time for the media, or the police to take a lot of these disappearances seriously. I think that this caused them to make mistakes in their investigation that could have led them to Bruce McArthur much sooner. Then it was the next person who went missing when the case really started to gain traction in the media and law enforcement. Andrew Kinsman was a 49 year old white male who went missing in June of 2017, just after Toronto Pride. He was a community volunteer. He had a lot of connections in and outside of the Village and was just an overall really likable person with a large social circle and interesting that attention to the case only really picks up when it's a white male that goes missing because the other men, like I said, were all part of visible minority groups and garnered no coverage really at all by the media. With the other disappearances, it was only really inside the Village itself, or within Toronto as well, where people were advocating for them and where word was going around. But it wasn't a case that was, you know, known on a national level or an international level. No one would really had known that there was a series of men that had been missing. It was just a Toronto thing. But then when Andrew started going missing and the investigation ramped up, then that's when it became more widespread news and more people around Canada and the world heard about it.

Katie: So were police connecting these disappearances at this point, or were they just thinking they're separate occurrences?

AJ: Well, they made a series of media appearances, press conferences and they kept denying that there was a serial killer. They just kept saying like, "There's no evidence to show that it's a serial killer." They just downplayed it cuz that question kept coming up, like, "Is there a serial killer?" By this point there's, you know, five, six men that have gone missing and they keep denying it. Like I said, Project Houston was put together to discover if there was a link, but then they couldn't really determine a link except for Bruce McArthur, who they didn't think was relevant to the case. Then they just shut it down cuz they were like, "Nothing came of it." So I don't know if after that shut down they determined that there was no link or if they still thought there was and they just didn't have proof of it. I don't really know.

Katie: Okay. So at least they were aware that it could be linked but they weren't sure that there was yet.

AJ: Yeah, yeah. That's why they started Project Houston was cuz they suspected they were linked.

Katie: Okay. They didn't know at this point though.

AJ: Yeah.

Katie: Got it.

AJ: Yeah. They didn't know. No, they didn't know. And like I said, they kept downplaying it cuz there's like many press conferences or interviews with police where that question keeps coming up, "Do you believe there's a serial killer?" They kept saying, "At this time, no, we have no evidence to support that." So while people in the Village and in Toronto were like, "It feels like there might be a serial killer." The police were not really going with that theory or at least not putting that out there to the public that they were. Yeah, it definitely wasn't a case that was on a national or international scale yet. But of course, when Andrew went missing, that all changed. So his family and his large social circle really got behind his disappearance and advocated for him in a way that we didn't really see with the other victims. This could be, you know, one of the biggest reasons why, that's why the case got more attention once he went missing was cuz he had that huge community that supported him and advocated for him. Whereas the other ones, you know, a lot of them were like immigrants or new to Canada. They didn't have a lot of family within Canada, and some it took a while to even be reported missing. So you know, if you have a loud group who's advocating for it, then you're probably just gonna get more media attention. So I think that could be a reason. But also I do think it was a little bit of, they just wrote off the other victims because they were immigrants to Canada, and I don't know, that's what I think. There was a lot of criticism throughout the investigation, that I'll get into a little bit later. So yeah, Andrew Kinsman went missing in June of 2017 and he was last seen near his home in the Cabbage Town area of Toronto. Police were able to take that information and they gained access to surveillance footage of the neighborhood that surrounded Andrew's house on the day that he was last seen to see if anything suspicious showed up on the footage. This is when they got a major break in the case in August of 2017. So in that surveillance footage, the police saw a red Dodge Caravan that circled the block twice around the time that Andrew was last seen on that day and they thought that this could be suspicious and they were able to get a really good look at the van on the surveillance footage. It was a pretty clear image. Of course, no license plate and no image of the driver, but the car itself, they could see clearly on the surveillance footage. So they were able to determine that it was between a 2004 and 2006 model Dodge Caravan. Their next step is they went to the Ministry of Transportation and they subpoenaed a record of every 2004 to 2006 Dodge Caravan that was registered in the city of Toronto. From there they got a list of 6,000 red Dodge Caravans, which is of course a massive undertaking to cross reference every single one. So that was, you know, one unit's job is to go through all 6,000 and investigate them. But what gave the police a little bit of an edge was that during the search of Andrew Kinsman's home during the investigation, they saw on his calendar that on June 26th, which was the day he went missing, they saw on his calendar he had an appointment that was listed as Bruce. That's just what it said. And the police were able to cross reference all 6,000 Dodge Caravans with ones that were registered to someone named Bruce, which came back with a list of only five, and one of the names on that list was none other than Bruce McArthur, so of course the police remembered that Bruce McArthur had been interviewed four years earlier in 2013 as a part of the online cannibal fetish community tip. But as it turns out, that interview in 2013 wasn't even the first time that the police had a run in with Bruce. I'm gonna take you back to October 31st, 2001. On that day, there was a man named Mark Henderson, who was unlocking his apartment door when he got attacked out of the blue by a man with a metal pipe, and he was hit in the head multiple times with the pipe, which cracked his skull. He managed to get into his apartment and call the police, and that prompted the attacker to run off immediately. Mark ended up in the hospital with damage to his head, hand, and finger, which required six weeks of rehabilitation. So as it turns out, the attacker was Bruce McArthur. The attack was outta the blue and seemingly random. However, after this attack, Bruce actually turned himself into the police. He identified himself as the man who attacked Mark Henderson, and he was immediately arrested and charged with weapons, dangerous assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm. According to an episode of the Canadian news show W5, Mark and Bruce were not strangers, and they had crossed paths periodically in the gay Village. They weren't friends. They just knew of each other. But as for why Bruce attacked him, we still don't know. The case went to trial in 2003 and at the time of the court proceedings, Mark was described in the court process as," a male hustler." This is a very dated term now, which basically means an escort or a sex worker. W5 says that Mark was also a nurse and he was an actor and a model, and he felt as though the police and the media wrote him off as nothing more than just a sex worker. They were victim blaming and they were downplaying the attack and authorities were saying it was no more than "two guys on Halloween fighting." It wasn't that, obviously, this was a brutal unprovoked attack, that if Mark hadn't managed to get inside of his apartment when he did, it may have ended up as a murder. Bruce pleaded guilty during the proceedings and he was just sentenced to one year of house arrest, a two year ban from entering the gay Village and three years probation. The maximum sentence for these charges could have been 10 years in prison, but the judge deemed that Bruce was "unlikely to re-offend," so let him off pretty easy. So according to court transcripts, the judge said, "you made a mistake on this particular day, but it sounds to me like you're a pretty good person and it sounds to me like you're not going to be back here anyway." After the sentencing, Bruce was free to go. Like I said, he just had the one year house arrest, two year ban from the entering the gay Village and three years probation.

Katie: I find that crazy. You beat someone over the head with a pipe, "oh, it seems like you're a good guy. See you later."

AJ: Yeah. You made a mistake.

Katie: I don't get it.

AJ: Yeah. Mark Henderson, who was the victim, he says that it was because they painted him as, "oh, he's a sex worker. He, you know, is in dangerous situations all the time." He thinks that that's a big reason as to why maybe the judge let Bruce off because...

Katie: Probably.

AJ: They didn't really take him seriously as the victim.

Katie: Yeah. And if Bruce had done that to someone that lived in a prominent community, like a doctor or something, then yeah, he'd probably be still in jail forever.

AJ: Yeah. He would've gotten the 10 year maximum sentence probably. He was just free to go and he did his house arrest and his probation. By the time Bruce becomes suspect number one in the disappearances of these missing men, 16 years later, his criminal record had been expunged and there was no record of any of these assault charges from 2001. So in 2014, his record was expunged, so he had no criminal record in 2017. Now, when Andrew Kinsman goes missing and they do the Dodge Caravan and he pops up, there's no criminal record that he has.

Katie: Oh, how do you get your, I thought it was just minors that could get their record expunged. Oh, I guess maybe not. How do you get your record expunged for a violent attack as an adult? That seems kind of crazy.

AJ: I know. It doesn't really explain it. There's an article on the CBC and they do a timeline of all the major events in the case, and they just say in 2014, I guess there was a change to the criminal code or there was a new law that came out. Somehow he fell into that and was able to get his record expunged.

Katie: Oh, if you make a mistake and beat someone over the head with a pipe, but you only do it once, then your record gets wiped, I guess.

AJ: Yeah. So it was annoying. So like I said, 2001, there was that opportunity when he showed his first violent side when he attacked Mark Henderson with a pipe. And then in 2013, when they interview him, they're following up on the lead about the cannibal website. And then there was another opportunity to catch Bruce in June of 2016 when a man called 911 saying that a man named Bruce had tried to strangle him to death in the back of his van, but he managed to get away. Again Bruce turned himself in for this. And after a police interview where Bruce denied any wrongdoing, he chalked it up to just a lover spat that went wrong. The police believed him and let him walk free without any charges. So in the span of 15 years between 2001 and 2016, there were three opportunities when Bruce could have been apprehended and given harsher sentences to possibly prevent these missing men from falling victim to him. So it's crazy that there was three very distinct, I mean, somebody called 9 1 1 saying they were almost strangled to death in the back of a van. I mean, I feel like that's a pretty serious allegation. Bruce was able to talk his way out of it. I mean, there is footage of the police interrogation when they bring him in for the 2016 attack and the police seem to believe everything he says. Obviously they do cuz they, they let him go. Now that you know a little bit more about Bruce McArthur and what he's capable of based on these incidents, I'm gonna go back a little bit into Bruce McArthur's upbringing and earlier life prior to all these violent incidents and before these men went missing from the Village.

So Bruce was born on October 8th, 1951 and he grew up in the small town of Woodsville, Ontario. His family was well liked in the community, and Bruce and his sister had a seemingly normal upbringing. However, Bruce does say that his father was "a bully" to him and was much harder on him than his sister. His parents were very religious. His father was Presbyterian and his mother was a devout Catholic. Bruce would go on to attend high school in nearby Fenelon Falls, and he began dating a woman named Janice Campbell and the two high school sweethearts were together for the next 30 years. By 1986, they were married and they had two children, and they were living the typical suburban family life in Oshawa, Ontario. Bruce had a series of jobs in this time. He was going from job to job. One of his jobs was as a traveling salesman at one point. That put him away from home a lot of times, and he was always on the road. By the late 1990s, Bruce uprooted his suburban life by coming outta "the closet" and leaving his wife and children behind. Shortly after that, he moved into Toronto, and then around that same time, in 1999, Bruce filed for bankruptcy and was also dealing with his son Todd's own legal issues. His son had been making obscene phone calls to numerous women that he didn't know, and in the following years had "racked up literally dozens of convictions for charges, including harassment and making indecent phone calls." As a result of his ongoing legal troubles, Todd was ordered to stay with his father in his Toronto apartment. So there was a period of time where his son was also living with him in his Toronto apartment. According to an article by the National Post, Todd maintained good relationships with both parents after their split, and Janice and Bruce were actually able to maintain an amicable relationship themselves, and it's unknown if they were ever legally divorced. Bruce was listed in the obituaries for both of Janice's parents in 2003, 2007, and in a nice way and suggested that they were on good terms at that time. So when Bruce moves to Toronto in the late nineties, after leaving his family, he really immersed himself into Toronto's gay community, saw it as almost like a rebirth of sorts. This is outlined in season one, episode five of Film Rises series, Making a Serial Killer. We don't really know what happened in the first few years of his new life that caused his violent streak to break out. It was like the late nineties when he first moved to Toronto. We know that in 2001, that was the first time that this violent side came to the surface, and then that's when he attacked Mark Henderson with the metal pipe. It all just went downhill from there. So what are your guys' thoughts so far about Bruce or about the missing men?

Katie: I feel like, as we see in other cases where he was just doing, he did a crime, a violent crime, got away with it, did another one got away with it. So maybe he just felt like he was never gonna be held accountable really for anything he did, so that's why it escalated.

AJ: Yeah, that's a good point. That's also mentioned in some of the episodes of the shows I've seen on this case. They do say that it emboldened him to escalate it more because he had these run-ins with the police and nothing happened. He felt like, you know, it kinda gives you that confidence like, "oh, if something was gonna happen, it would've." Especially in 2013 when they bring him in, like, "oh, you knew all three of these missing men." If anything, that would've been the time when he probably thought like, "oh, they could really catch me for something," and they didn't. Then it just gets worse and worse.

Stephanie: It goes to show the justice system and how sometimes they don't take cases seriously, especially back when he beat up that person with the pipe. He just got to walk free. How do you justify that? I dunno. I just feel like the justice system is sometimes way too lenient than they should be, and it causes people to do more harm than good.

AJ: It's just sad too to think if he had gone to jail for 10 years in 2003 when he was on trial for all that, many of the missing men could have survived because obviously he wouldn't have been there to kill them. It's just crazy to think that a maximum 10 year sentence that he doesn't even get any jail time at all. He gets three years of probation. House arrest for a year. That's basically it.

Now, fast forwarding to the summer of 2017 again, and to the heart of the investigation into Toronto's missing men, the police were able to determine that the red Dodge Caravan that was seen circling the block a few times in the area where Andrew went missing belonged to Bruce. Then shortly after Andrew's disappearance, the Toronto police publicly announced the launch of a new special task force this time called Project Prism to investigate the disappearances of the men. Shortly after this announcement, Bruce gets rid of his Dodge Caravan. However, because the police have a lead about the Dodge Caravan, they're able to recover the vehicle from a wrecking yard and they run forensic tests on it. In the back of the van there is blood that is found that matches Andrew Kinsman, and this gives the police real solid evidence that makes them close in on finally catching Bruce, and it's a little bit weird to me because they don't arrest him then. There's a long drawn out investigation after this, which seems weird to me because there's blood of the missing person in the back of the car that he owned. I feel like in most cases that would be enough to charge you, but maybe not. To me, it seems like that should be enough. I wouldn't consider that circumstantial evidence really.

Katie: So, yeah, legit blood in the back of their van. That's not circumstantial at all.

AJ: Yeah, in the back of the van was a pool of blood, that he had attempted to clean it up I think, but they were obviously able to still recover it forensically and it was blood of Andrew Kinsman in the back of the van that they knew belonged to him, that he gave away right after they announced this new task force. So it's just crazy that they wouldn't have gone and arrested him right then. But I don't really know the ins and outs.

Katie: Yeah, that seems super sketch.

AJ: Yeah, because this would've been shortly after they announced this task force, and he isn't arrested until January of 2018. So it was the summer when this happened, and then he is arrested in January. It's still five, six months after that. This is crazy. If the police had just been a few days later going to that wrecking yard, then the car may have been destroyed and then they would've never been able to run the forensic tests that they needed to produce these leads. So it's a really good thing that they got there when they did. So as a result of this lead, the police do put Bruce under 24/7 surveillance. They begin to suspect that he's the guy that's responsible and they needed to keep him under watch for the safety of the community and so that they could catch him. They obtain a warrant to go in and search the inside of Bruce's apartment for evidence as well. It's a huge investigation. There's a whole unit that's dedicated to just this one investigation and they identify an opportunity when both Bruce and his roommate are gonna be gone. In the documentary Making a Serial Killer, the lead investigator, Hank Idsinga, he talks about how this came about and he said it was a very arduous, drawn out process of having to coordinate the roommate's schedule and then Bruce's schedule and there's surveillance going on 24/ 7, so it was a huge undertaking, but they had this one window of opportunity where both of them were gonna be out of the house so that's when they decide that they're gonna go in to the apartment and look for evidence. They go in there and they attempt to clone the contents of Bruce's computer, and then in the middle of this operation, the surveillance team notifies the police in the apartment that Bruce is on his way back. As a result, the police have to prematurely leave and, you know, leave no trace behind that they were ever in there. They're only able to clone about 45% of the computer's contents in that time which wasn't, you know what they wanted, obviously, but the police got lucky because in that 45%, they were able to find evidence on the computer that Bruce not only knew all of the missing men, but that he had files on his computer that contained photos of all of them. The police were able to determine that there was an attempt to delete the images, but they were able to recover them, and it took over five weeks of combing through over 100,000 images and computer content before coming across the first photographs. So just in that 45%, there were a hundred thousand items that had to be searched through from pictures to files, to search histories to all of that stuff. It took them five weeks before they even got to the first picture that was relevant to the investigation. So it did take quite a while. Some photographs were of camping trips and other normal things, but the police also found several post-mortem photographs where the victims were posed in a state of undress in various poses In this search, the police also found other images of an unconscious person who was posed for pictures. However, this person actually wasn't dead and survived this encounter with Bruce, and this person had no idea that these photographs were even taken until this information came out in the investigation. So could you imagine? He said that he was with Bruce and then was unconscious and then woke up, but didn't know anything that had happened. Then he found out that there was all these pictures that were taken of him. It was really gross. Additionally, there were also folders that contained images of two other men that had not been reported missing. That was 37 year old Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam. Last seen in December of 2015 and 43 year old Dean Lisowick, who was involved with Toronto's shelter system at the time that he was last seen. At the time that the images of Kanagaratnam were found on Bruce's computer, he was not even reported missing, and the police had no idea who the photographs were of. So this prompted them to release a postmortem photograph to the media for help in identifying him after Bruce had been arrested for the murders. I remember watching that press release when it happened. They actually showed footage that they took from Bruce's computer of a dead man and they asked for help in identifying who this person was, cuz there was no missing person that fit that description. It was really creepy. They said in the press conference that this was their last resort obviously.

Katie: That's creepy. I mean, they have sketch artists, couldn't they just get a real good sketch of this guy? They know what he looks like, so you'll know the sketch looks just like him. Couldn't they have done that instead of a dead picture of this guy? That just seems like, I don't know.

AJ: Yeah, I know they could have. They say, it is a very heavily edited sketch. Obviously they probably took out if there was blood or, or whatever, but you can very clearly tell from the picture that they released to the media that this person is dead or unconscious at the very least. So it's just creepy. And yeah, they could have done a sketch artist for sure. I don't know why they wouldn't have thought of that, but I feel like that would've been just as useful. I don't know why they felt the need to have to release that photo, but it was super creepy.

By January of 2018, the evidence was mounting against Bruce and the police were closing in and they were getting closer, to pressing formal charges. In the documentary Making a Serial Killer, the team had decided that on Saturday, January 20th, that would be the day that they would make their move and arrest him. However, on Thursday morning, January 18th, Bruce returned to his apartment with an unknown male and the police jumped into action and they decided to arrest him immediately because they believed that this unknown male was in immediate danger. So 18 minutes after the police watched Bruce enter his apartment with this unknown male, they go up to his apartment, they knock on his door and they arrest him. Bruce comes to the door when they knock on it and he just opens the door and they arrest him immediately. At the time of his arrest, Bruce was 66 years old and they found the male tied to the bed with a hood over his head. The police identified that there was actually another folder on Bruce's computer with the name of this male on it. This led police to believe that if they hadn't intervened, that this man would have become the ninth victim. That evening, on the day of the arrest lead investigator Hank Idsinga announced the news of Bruce's arrest in a press conference, which is the first time that the police acknowledged that there was a serial killer in Toronto's gay Village after denying it multiple times previously. At the time of the arrest, police only had enough to charge him with two of the murders, but the rest of the charges for the other six victims would come in the following months. So it was a total of eight men when all was said and done. Now that the police had the photo evidence of the murdered men, they still hadn't found any of their bodies. After Bruce's arrest, police had the daunting task of locating and identifying bodies of the victims. They had enough evidence to prove that Bruce was involved in the murders, but without the bodies or remains of the victims it's very hard to have closure in the case. Bruce was a self-employed landscaper for many years, and as part of the investigation, the police started to search the properties of known clients that McArthur had. Police started combing through the property of one of his clients on Mallory Crescent, which was a place where McArthur was permitted to store all of his landscaping equipment, and they were shocked with what they would discover at this property. So inside large planters on the Mallory Crescent property and in the ravine behind the property, police would go on to find the remains of all eight of McArthur's victims. There were dismembered remains inside these large planters on this property, which is so crazy to think. The people who lived in the house were of course mortified because they had this landscaper coming, he chose this property as the place where he was gonna use to dispose of all of his victims, which is super crazy to think of. Imagine, the couple who are living in the house, the police show up and say, "okay, you have to vacate your home for six months while we investigate." It's just crazy.

Katie: It's gross. Was it the body parts in the big planters and stuff planted on top of them?

AJ: They were dismembered remains and they didn't really go into detail about how small the pieces were, if they were teeny bone fragments or if they were larger pieces, but they just said the dismembered remains of all eight.

Katie: Jesus.

AJ: I know. It's crazy. They couldn't really be identified. They had to be identified through dental records. Obviously you can't fit a full body into the planter anyway. There was also in the ravine behind the house, there was also body parts as well, or remains. They just say remains, so I don't really know if they found a full body in the ravine or if they found body parts or just pieces. I'm not sure, but it was gross nonetheless. Like I said, eventually the police would go on to identify the remains of all eight victims and charge Bruce McArthur with eight counts of first degree murder. The Mallory Crescent property was also near a part of the city where, remember, Abdulbasir Faizi's car was discovered years earlier during the initial investigation into his disappearance. They found his car on that intersection, and Mallory Crescent was right near there. So as it turns out, when they found that car, they were very close to where all of these, well, at that time there was only, there was three missing men. But you know, it's just crazy to think that they were so close at that time, like literally so close. That's where the car was and then that's where all these bodies ended up being discarded. Bruce McArthur pled guilty to all charges and during an agreed statement of facts read at his sentencing, the morbid details of his crimes were revealed. I'll spare you most of the gory details, but he would essentially murder the men most likely by strangulation during sex. Then he would pose their dead bodies for photographs afterwards. Often the bodies would have ropes around their necks, and he would put hats and fur coats on some of them, and then he would also shave their head and facial hair, and some of the hair from those victims, which Bruce was collecting, was then found in Ziploc bags in a shed on another property. So gross.

Stephanie: That's so disturbing.

Katie: Eww!!. It's so gross.

AJ: I feel like that out of all of it is just the thing that grosses me out the most. Like you see that a lot with serial killers too, is a lot of them will have rituals when they kill. They'll do the same thing step by step. In this case, his ritual was to pose these bodies with fur coats and hats and nooses around their neck. It was just gross. And then shave their head and then save the hair. It's disgusting.

Katie: Eww, it's so gross?

AJ: So his sentencing hearing began on February 4th, 2019, and Bruce was eventually sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. So that would make him 91 years old if he were to get out after 25 years. Legal experts believe that it's highly unlikely that he would be granted parole even if he were to live that long. They say that he, you know, he's older, he has type two diabetes, so he's not like someone who's probably gonna live to be 91. Even if he were to live that long, he probably wouldn't get out anyway. But to me, I think 25 years, the potential to get out after 25 years for all of that, to me is crazy. Like you said Katie, in the episode just previous to this one with the serial killer, that new law in 2011, or the change to the law where they could do consecutive, they didn't do that in this case .Obviously it would've been like if they did consecutive 25 years, it would've been 200 years before he could get parole .

Katie: Yeah. I wonder why they wouldn't do that anyway. It's not like he's ever gonna get out, but why not just give him consecutive?

AJ: I know. Well, they interviewed the judge that made that decision. I think it was Global News and he just says," that's making a statement if we did that. What's the point of doing that?" He basically said, "if he was not as old as he was and he was younger, like if he was 30 years old, then maybe I would've considered it. But the fact that he's gonna be 91 after 25 years, then like, why?" But I mean, I think it's more of a statement to do it. You know what I mean? It's more of a statement to say you're gonna be doing it. Yes, it's 200 years. You're not gonna get parole.

Katie: Yeah. It's not like it costs anyone more money to have a harsher sentence. Just hand down the harsh sentence. I don't know.

AJ: I couldn't imagine why they wouldn't do that in every case for people who kill multiple people. It's just weird to me that because this was, obviously, his sentencing was 2019, so they had the opportunity to do that, but they didn't. It's just weird to me seeing that he could hypothetically get out when he's 91. I mean, he'd be 91, but still, I don't think he should have the chance to ever get out.

Katie: Yeah. No, he should be hopeless.

AJ: I touched on it a little bit before, there was a ton of criticism of the way that the Toronto Police handled the disappearances of the missing men. So they didn't appear to be making any progress in the investigation or seeming to care that much until it was a white male who went missing. Also, the police's denial of a serial killer in the Village was criticized as well, and they believed the police were not being upfront with the community about the risks and not admitting that there may be a link between all the disappearances. And then also, this ties into ,in late 2017, the murder of Tess Richie in Toronto. That's the case that we covered last season. I think we touched on it a little bit in that case because that happened the end of 2017, at the height of the investigation of Bruce McArthur. He was arrested in January. I think we mentioned it in that episode that the police resources were so thin because they had so much manpower investigating Bruce McArthur, so that's why the whole Tess Ritchie thing was a mess because the police didn't have the resources. That's why in that case, Tess's mother is the one who had to find her body not very far from where she went missing. If you don't remember that case, she was the one who went out with a friend and then she ended up being murdered, but her body was found by her own mother a few days later, very near where she went missing. The police, they couldn't find her, but then her mother goes out one day and searches and finds her. They chalked it up to police resources, I guess, because they had so much happening with the Bruce McArthur thing.

Katie: Well, it does sound like they did put a lot of effort into this case, though. Like you were saying, people weren't happy with how they handled it, but it seems like they did quite a bit and they were successful in the end. So..

AJ: Yeah, I mean, they put in a lot of effort 10 years later after the initial, oh, not 10 years. Well, the first man went missing in 2010, so it was eight years, or there was a few years in between some of the killings. You'd think if they had caught him, they would've had the potential to save half the victims, or five of the victims if they had in 2013, if they had arrested him, then, then it would've been those three men he would've killed, but the other five wouldn't have died. All the other five were killed after that. I don't know. I mean, yeah, eventually they did a lot, but I think a lot of it also too, who knows how much of that came from the added pressure of the case because they had all that pressure from the media. Everyone was looking at this case. Right? So I don't know how much of it was...

Katie: Yeah, that's true. But maybe they did a lot later than they should have. If they would've done more earlier, it would've been a different result, for sure.

AJ: They had him in 2001 when they could have arrested him for that, put him in jail for 10 years for that assault and they didn't. So that was their first mistake. Then they expunged his record, which was the second mistake.

Katie: Mm-hmm.

AJ: So then by the time that he's being looked at, he doesn't have a criminal record. I feel like that's one of the criteria you would look for. Another thing about this case too was, they say that a lot of serial killers don't just start killing in their later years. He was 66 when he was arrested, so that means in 2010, at the time of the first murder, he would've been 58. So a lot of people were speculating that there's a ton of cold cases from the seventies and eighties that they started to investigate thinking that he could have been responsible for. They think there's a high chance that he had been killing for decades and we just didn't know.

Katie: Yeah, I was thinking about that too. I was thinking that it's pretty old for a serial killer. Usually they're done or you know, the end of their spree by then.

AJ: Yeah, I feel like it's very rare for someone 58 to just start killing. I think that's just why I think serial killers are so fascinating to people because you always mention what could propel someone to do that? Not even just once, but multiple times in his case, eight times. And there was, I mean, the case the prosecution was trying to make during the trial, he would re-offend if he wasn't caught. This wasn't the end of his streak. He was probably gonna kill that ninth person that they ended up saving. So he would've continued on and on and on if he wasn't caught. So what propels someone to do that? I mean, once is bad enough, but eight times or more. It's just crazy.

Katie: Well, yeah, it's like unfathomable to us to be like, "why does somebody enjoy doing that?" I can't even imagine. You know, seeking that out to do that. It's just disgusting.

AJ: Yeah. You can tell, like I said, there's the police interview footage when they bring him in in 2016 when he strangles that man in the back of his van, and when they bring him in, he's very calm just the way he talks, totally inconspicuous. There's nothing in anything that he says would make you think that he could be responsible for any of that. There was also controversy because they never released his mugshot. All the photos they released of him were pictures of him at Niagara Falls or pictures of him dressed as a mall Santa too, which is crazy. Every picture they showed of him was showing him smiling or whatever and they would never show his mugshot, which is what I feel like they do to many other people. They show those mugshots nonstop. Every picture you see of them is their mugshot, but for him, they refuse to release his mugshot. They just said, "we're not doing that." So if you look at pictures of him, you're typing Bruce McArthur, Google Images, it'll come up, picture of him at Niagara Falls or picture of him as Santa or whatever. It's just totally not what you would expect. You'd expect a mugshot, but you don't get that. So yeah, like as I said, as a result of this case and many other factors, there's been a lot of continued tension between the gay community in Toronto and the police. Like I said, the police were banned from participating in the Toronto Pride Parade for the years, since this. There's just a lot of tension there. There already was anyway. Like I said, police were, at one point, looking into the series of cold cases from the 1970s because he was born in 1951, so he would've been in his early twenties, in the seventies when a lot of cold cases would happen throughout Ontario. But then there was also, what I think I remember, Katie, in one of our season, I think it was season two, there was that case that you did of the trans woman in Vancouver who was murdered. And then it was a theory thrown out there that Bruce McArthur could have been responsible for it or something. I remember you saying that. I think that it was just people were just throwing anything at the wall saying like, "well, all these cold cases, it could be Bruce McArthur", even though there was no evidence to back it up. Because he was a traveling sales man at one point too, that always had him on the road, people thought like, "well, he could have been in multiple provinces and he was killing these people everywhere."

Katie: Yeah, I remember that episode and I remember Bruce McArthur coming up?

AJ: They thought that he could have done it because he was a traveling sales man. They were associating him with all of these cold cases from years ago.

So yeah, that's the Bruce McArthur case. That's really all I have on it. I also find it just very weird too, that it was in his late fifties is when he'd start killing. That seems very late. Like we said, most serial killers start when they're much younger and it progresses and progresses. But for someone to start when he was 50 years old, it just seems older than most people would start.

Katie: Yeah, but also when you think about how he tried to kill that guy with the pipe and he tried to strangle that guy, it's like he wasn't that experienced and didn't really know how to do it, and he failed those two attempts and then he was successful. So it was him starting out.

AJ: Also too, an interesting thing is in some of these cases, like Andrew Kinsman and Skandaraj Navaratnam, which was one of the first to go missing, in those cases he knew those men for a long time before he killed them. He had dated them before, so it wasn't even a first time thing. He knew them, built a relationship with them, had rapport, and then like this. So it's probably like he had planned it from way back when when he first met them. Like, "okay, I'm gonna kill. But not right now. I'm gonna wait and then eventually do it."

Stephanie: I feel like there's probably a lot more cold cases that they should look into.

AJ: Yeah.

Stephanie: See how far back it goes.

AJ: Yeah, and I don't know if they're still looking into those. I mean, obviously Bruce never admitted to those, because why would he. But also Steph, I think you mentioned before, did he ever give a reason or anything?

Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

AJ: Throughout the whole court proceedings, obviously cameras aren't allowed in the courtroom in Canada, but all of the court reporters were saying, he said very little. He plead guilty so there was no trial. It wasn't a drawn out thing. So he pled guilty and then they had the sentencing, but he never testified or he didn't really say anything. No one really knows why he did it. We can only guess.

Stephanie: I feel like he didn't really have a leg to stand on if he pleaded not guilty. There was so much evidence pointing towards him from all these missing people to his computer.

AJ: I think I did read something, at the beginning of the proceedings, he was gonna try to plead no contest, which I guess is what you plead when you're not pleading guilty, you're just not contesting the charge. You're just saying like, "oh well yeah, the evidence looks bad so I'll take the charge. But I'm not saying I did it." I think there was talk that he might be doing that, but then he just pled guilty. Like Steph said, he didn't have a leg to stand on. Also at the end of the day too, we can try to guess why he did it, but does it really matter why? The fact is that he did it. He killed eight innocent men and it's just, it's crazy. But he is in jail now, which is the good thing. So, wild case and disturbing for sure.

So that does it for part two of our serial killer miniseries. Thank you so much for tuning in. You can follow us on all the social medias @crimefamilypodcast on Instagram, crimefamilypod1 on Twitter and Crime Family Podcast on Facebook.

Send us an email with your case suggestions and your feedback on the podcast at crimefamilypodcast@gmail.com. You can also check out our website, crime family podcast.ca. We also recently launched our Patreon page, so definitely join us on Patreon. If you're a fan of the show and you want more exclusive content, like extra episodes, free merch, or a new true crime series Doc Talk, you can join us on tiers one, two, or three. That is on patreon.com/crimefamilypodcast. Or you can look at the link in the show notes. Also, we do have our merch store as well on Red Bubble, and you can find the link to the show notes in there so you can show your support for the show with all of our cool merch. So definitely check that out as well.

 Thank you so much for listening to part two. We'll be back next week with part three of the miniseries where Steph will be telling us the case of another Canadian serial killer. So thank you so much. We hope you're enjoying the mini-series and we'll see you next week. Take care.

Stephanie: Bye

Katie: Bye.