2010-2017 Toronto Serial Homicides Part I

 Between 2010 and 2017, a total of eight men disappeared from the neighborhood of Church and Wellesley, the LGBTQ village of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The investigation into the disappearances, taken up by two successive police task forces, eventually led to Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old self-employed Toronto landscaper, whom they then arrested on January 18, 2018. On January 29, 2019, McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder in Ontario Superior Court and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years. McArthur is the most prolific known serial killer to have been active in Toronto, and the oldest known serial killer in Canada.

The criminal investigation of McArthur became the largest ever conducted by the Toronto Police Service (TPS) and also called on the resources of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other police and forensic services. Criticisms of the TPS's handling of the initial missing persons investigations led to several internal reviews, an external review called by the civilian Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) and the formation of a dedicated missing persons unit.

Early life

Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur, or Bruce McArthur, was born on October 8, 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario, and was raised on a farm in Argyle, in the Kawartha Lakes region. In addition to raising McArthur and his sister, his parents fostered troubled children from nearby Toronto, often with six to ten in their care at any given time, and reportedly had a good reputation in the area.

McArthur's mother was Irish Catholic and his father a Scottish Presbyterian; both were devout, causing religious arguments in which McArthur supported his mother. This led to derision from his father, who McArthur suggested in retrospect may have sensed his homosexuality. McArthur had trouble accepting his sexual orientation, which would have been seen as abnormal in rural Ontario at that time.

In primary school, a classmate recalled that McArthur did not fit in with other students. For his secondary education, McArthur was bused to nearby Fenelon Falls Secondary School, where he met and began dating Janice Campbell, both graduating in 1970. McArthur later graduated from a program in general business and married Campbell when he was aged 23.

Married life

Around 1973, McArthur began working at an Eaton's department store in downtown Toronto as a buyer's assistant. He left this employment in 1978 and began working as a travelling salesman for McGregor Socks, soliciting department stores to carry his merchandise. McArthur later worked as a merchandising representative for Stanfield's, a garment company.

In the mid-1970s, McArthur's father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and was sent to a nursing home. McArthur became disappointed when his mother took interest in another man, and grew much closer to his father at this time. His mother died of cancer in 1978 and his father died in 1981.

In 1979, McArthur and his wife moved into a house on Ormond Drive in Oshawa; by 1981 they had a daughter, Melanie, and a son, Todd. In 1986, the family bought a home on Cartref Avenue in Oshawa.  McArthur became very active in his church, keeping himself busy to avoid examining his homosexual feelings.

McArthur began having affairs with men in the early 1990s. He came out to his wife more than a year later, but they continued living together. Sometime after 1993, McArthur's employment in the clothing trade came to an end. The couple faced financial difficulty, in part due to legal issues connected to their then-teenaged son, Todd, who had been prosecuted for making obscene phone calls to women. The couple mortgaged their home in 1997 and declared bankruptcy in 1999.

McArthur separated from his wife in 1997 and moved to Toronto, as there was no gay community in Oshawa at that time. He frequented the bars of Church and Wellesley, Toronto's gay village, and moved into an apartment on Don Mills Road while pursuing a four-year relationship with another man. When they broke up and his divorce was being finalized, McArthur saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed Prozac for several months. At about this time he began his career as a landscaper.

Halloween assault

Just after noon on October 31, 2001, McArthur followed actor and model Mark Henderson into his apartment after being invited inside to see his Halloween costume. McArthur struck Henderson several times from behind with an iron pipe that he often carried. Henderson fought back before losing consciousness. After waking he called 9-1-1 then was taken to St. Michael's Hospital, where he needed several stitches on the back of his head and his fingers, as well as six weeks of physiotherapy.

McArthur turned himself in after the attack, claiming to not to remember the attack. He pleaded guilty to charges of assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm, and received a conditional sentence of 729 days (two years less a day) on April 11, 2003. A further charge of carrying a concealed weapon was withdrawn at the time. The Crown had earlier believed jail time was warranted but agreed to conditional sentence after psychiatric and pre-sentencing reports suggested McArthur was a low risk to reoffend. Henderson, was traumatized by the incident, and did not provide a victim impact statement for the sentencing. There were also concerns that McArthur's behaviour may have been due to the combination of his anti-seizure medication with amyl nitrite, a muscle relaxant which is sometimes taken recreationally before sex.

McArthur avoided incarceration, spending the first year of his sentence under house arrest, followed by a six-month curfew and three years of probation. During the sentence, he was barred from Church and Wellesley except for work and medical appointments, had to stay at least 10 metres (33 ft) from Henderson's home or workplace, and could not spend time with "male prostitutes". McArthur was forbidden to possess firearms for ten years; was not to purchase, possess or consume drugs without a medical prescription; and was specifically barred from possessing amyl nitrite. He also had to submit his DNA to a database and was compelled to undertake psychological and psychiatric counselling, including anger management. A defense lawyer found the list of conditions uncommon and suggested that the judge was concerned that McArthur still posed a danger. A retired detective noted that parole conditions at the time were unenforceable, were not publicized, and that parole violators were caught only if they attracted police attention.

In 2014, McArthur was granted a record suspension on the 2003 conviction, which was subsequently expunged from his record and would not have appeared in criminal background checks. Most records and exhibits pertaining to the case were destroyed in 2010, in compliance with Toronto Police Service (TPS) retention policy. The only surviving documents were the transcripts of the guilty plea and sentencing hearing, the psychiatric report and presentencing report ordered during the trial, and pictures of Henderson's injuries and McArthur's weapon.

Additional background

In 2002, while the assault case was still pending, McArthur registered with Recon, a gay fetish dating website for men into BDSM. McArthur's profile noted his interest in submissive men. He was also active on numerous gay dating websites including Silverdaddies, Manjam, Grindr, Bear411, BearForest, Scruff, DaddyHunt, Squirt and Growlr. McArthur joined Facebook in 2011 and catalogued his participation in local nightlife, with younger men of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent in several photos. By this time McArthur had reestablished himself in Toronto's gay community and was a regular at gay bars. By the late 2000s he was living in a 19th-floor apartment in Thorncliffe Park, about 5 kilometres (3 mi) northeast of Church and Wellesley.

McArthur's banishment from Church and Wellesley over the 2001 assault remained well known, and he had developed a reputation for BDSM and rough sex. In 2011, he told an acquaintance named Robert James about an incident in which he had reacted violently after being asked to leave a coffeehouse. James decided to heed advice to stay away from McArthur, explaining that he had heard disturbing stories about him. According to James, McArthur turned red and screamed about "f---ing f---ots [sic] telling stories about me!" and, "You're just like the rest of them, you think I'm crazy." A. J. Khan, a Toronto restaurant owner, recalled questioning McArthur in 2013 when he came in alone instead of with his boyfriend. McArthur said his boyfriend was on vacation, and when Khan noted he had seen the man the previous day, he angrily left and never returned.

McArthur's landscaping business operated under the name Artistic Designs. A colleague who installed water features on three of his projects recalled that McArthur was always accompanied by an older white man, who appeared to be romantically involved with him, and a day laborer, usually of Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Most of McArthur's clients were wealthy elderly women who found him charming, and he had built a client base through personal recommendations. During the off-season, he portrayed Santa Claus at Agincourt Mall and made floral gifts for charities.

McArthur's separation from his wife was initially heated, though they later reconciled. His son was reported to have difficulty accepting his father's sexuality. In 2014, after Todd was sentenced to fourteen months in jail for making multiple obscene phone calls, he was released on bail and ordered to live with his father and assist with his landscaping business. A former friend of Todd's visited one night and discovered the wall of McArthur's bathroom was decorated with photos of naked "East Indian" men. Todd told him that they were men whom his father knew. McArthur did not hide the fact, laughing over it at breakfast.

Missing person’s investigations

Project Houston

In November 2012, the TPS launched a task force, dubbed "Project Houston", into the September 6, 2010, disappearance of Skandaraj "Skanda" Navaratnam, believing that he had been murdered. The investigation was launched after a man posted on the cannibal web forum Zambian Meat that he had killed and eaten a man in Toronto. Police briefly investigated a possible link between Navaratnam and convicted murderer Luka Magnotta, but this lead was eventually abandoned for lack of evidence.

By June 2013, Project Houston had identified two other missing people’s cases linked by geography and lifestyle: Abdulbasir "Basir" Faizi and Majeed "Hamid" Kayhan. Like Navaratnam, both men were middle-aged South Asian immigrants who disappeared from Church and Wellesley between 2010 and 2012. An anonymous tip linking McArthur to Navaratnam and Kayhan led police to interview him on November 11, 2013. McArthur stated that he regularly interacted with Navaratnam at a gay bar, but denied being in a relationship with him. He also admitted to employing Kayhan, with whom he had broken off a sexual relationship. Project Houston concluded with no evidence to link the disappearances, that a crime had been committed or to identify a suspect. According to a 2016 case summary, there was still nothing to explain what had happened to the three men.

Missing Rainbow Community

On June 26, 2017, one day after attending Pride Toronto, Andrew Kinsman disappeared near his residence on Winchester Street in Cabbagetown. On the evening of June 28, several friends gained access to Kinsman's apartment. They found no sign of disturbance, though his 17-year-old cat was out of food and water. Noting that Kinsman's life was stable and that he would never leave without notifying anyone or taking his cat and prescription medicine, the friends reported the disappearance to the TPS the following day. Kinsman was active on social media, but investigators found his cell phone was turned off the day he disappeared.

Composite of 11 missing persons notices

At the end of July 2017, the TPS created a new task force, Project Prism, to investigate the disappearances of Kinsman and another man, Selim Esen, and to look for any links with the unsolved disappearances investigated under Project Houston. Greg Downer, a friend and colleague of Kinsman's, organized a community safety meeting on August 1 in which police gave an overview of the task force. Realizing the difficulty police faced with judicial authorizations for data from servers located outside Canada, which caused crucial delays in the missing persons investigations, Downer appealed to dating apps to provide an option for users to consent to have their data released to police if they went missing. Safety hotlines were also set up for those reluctant to speak to police.

Fears of a serial killer stalking Church and Wellesley grew on November 29 when the body of Tess Richey was found by her mother in an alleyway four days after she was reported missing. The following day, police announced that the body of Alloura Wells, a homeless transgender woman, had been identified, her body having been discovered in a Rosedale ravine in August. Because of fears in the community, TPS Chief Mark Saunders held an unprecedented December 8 news conference on the three separate investigations. Although the cases occurred in close proximity, the TPS did not believe they were related and Saunders said they had no evidence of a serial killer.

Project Prism

Project Prism was overseen by Detective Sergeant Michael Richmond and led by Detective Sergeant Hank Idsinga, who had served on the homicide squad for over thirteen years and had been assigned to Project Houston for six months. The task force also included an officer from the sex crimes unit and six officers from Police 51 Division, three of whom had been members of Project Houston. The investigation was difficult because of the lifestyle of the subjects, who used dating apps and frequently met strangers.

Kinsman's disappearance was central to the creation of Project Prism because of a lead obtained at the end of July. According to an agreed statement of facts read in court, police found "Bruce" on Kinsman's calendar for June 26⁠ ⁠– the same day Kinsman was last seen. Surveillance video outside Kinsman's residence showed a person matching his appearance approach a red vehicle. The video did not show a licence plate or a clear picture of the driver, but chrome siding identified it as a 2004 Dodge Caravan. There were more than 6,000 similar models in Toronto, but only five were registered to someone named Bruce; of those the only 2004 model belonged to McArthur. By late August or September 2017, police matched the van from surveillance video of McArthur's apartment, but it was no longer at his residence.

Redacted warrants and police documents, partially released by a judge in mid-2018, revealed that in August and September investigators had obtained production orders compelling the release of McArthur's data from Google, Rogers Wireless, Bell Canada, Telus, Royal Bank of Canada and Manulife Bank of Canada. Around September, tracking warrants had been obtained for McArthur's vehicles and phones. In October, further orders were granted for information from Yahoo!, Air Canada, additional banks and Pink Triangle Press, an LGBT publisher.

On October 3, plainclothes officers visited at Dom's Auto Parts in Courtice, Ontario, 70 kilometers (43 mi) northeast of Toronto, where owner Dominic Vetere confirmed he had purchased McArthur's Caravan on September 16. Police found it intact and had it towed away, also copying surveillance video of McArthur visiting the shop. Vetere said that officers later told him that they had found trace amounts of blood in the vehicle. This blood was identified as Kinsman's.

Court documents show that, in November, cadaver dogs were brought to a Mallory Crescent residence in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto. McArthur had an arrangement to tend to the owners' yard in exchange for storage space in their garage. The dogs did not indicate any human remains. A camera was installed to monitor the garage. Police also obtained a log of McArthur's key fob for his apartment. With this and a tracking warrant for his cellphone, they built a timeline of the day Kinsman went missing. DNA evidence from the Caravan which matched Kinsman and Esen, which allowed investigators to obtain a general warrant for McArthur's apartment on December 4. Police covertly entered his residence and cloned his computer's hard drive.

In a December 8 news conference, investigators stated they had completed 62 witness interviews, 28 judicial authorizations and assigned 308 actions, of which 225 had been completed. Police had also conducted searches, utilizing resources from the mounted and canine units; on one occasion a drone was used. They said that they had no evidence to link the disappearances.

The investigation picked up in January 2018, when Idsinga noted they had many 15-hour days and a 72-hour stretch of intensive investigation in mid-January. On January 17, two pieces of evidence came to light directly connecting McArthur to Esen and Kinsman. A partial download from his computer, which was going through forensic analysis of deleted files, yielded post-mortem photos of the victims. Round-the-clock surveillance was put on McArthur, with instructions that he should be immediately arrested if observed "alone with anyone".

Arrest

Police surveilling McArthur decided to apprehend him shortly after they saw a young man enter his Thorncliffe Park apartment on January 18, believing his life was at risk. A source told CTV News that the officers found the young man restrained on a bed when they entered the apartment. Referred to in court as "John", the man had met McArthur through dating app Growlr and had met him for sex several times. Prior to the police intervention, "John" had agreed to be handcuffed to McArthur's steel bedframe; McArthur put a black bag over his head and tried to tape his mouth shut before the rescue.

Following McArthur's arrest, police seized electronic devices from his apartment, including five cellphones, five computers, three digital cameras and about a dozen USB flash drives. Evidence found on these devices prompted investigators to charge him with two counts of first-degree murder in the presumed deaths of Kinsman and Esen. Their bodies had not been found, but police said that they had a "pretty good idea" of how they died. Idsinga was satisfied that there was enough evidence for murder convictions even without the bodies.

Homicide investigation

At the time of McArthur's arrest, Idsinga said that police believed he was responsible for the deaths of other men and were most concerned with identifying these victims. Doing so included coordinating with other police services, tracing McArthur's whereabouts and his online activity.

By the end of January, Idsinga described the ongoing case as unprecedented, with hundreds of officers involved and thirty properties being searched. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service (OFPS) and the Centre of Forensic Sciences (CFS) aided the searches of McArthur's apartment and the Leaside property. Additional charges were laid and at the end of February, the investigation was expanded to outstanding murder cases, hundreds of missing-persons cases and sudden death occurrences, coordinating with other Canadian and international forces.

Apartment and Leaside home

On January 18, police executed search warrants at five properties associated with McArthur: four in Toronto and a 9-acre (3.6 ha) property about 200 kilometres (120 mi) northeast in Madoc,

Ontario. The Madoc property and a home on Conlins Road were residences of Roger Horan, a landscaper and long-time friend of McArthur. Another property searched was the condominium of McArthur's former boyfriend on Concorde Place. These three properties were released back to their owners by January 23. Of greater concern to investigators were McArthur's high-rise apartment in Thorncliffe Park and the Mallory Crescent residence in Leaside.

The owners of the Leaside residence were barred from their home to allow a forensic search. The search was extended to an adjacent ravine, aided by cadaver dogs and members of the heavy urban search and rescue team. Cadaver dogs took a "strong interest" in large planter boxes on January 19. The planters had frozen to the ground, requiring heaters to thaw them. On January 29, police announced that they had found the dismembered skeletal remains of at least three people in two of the twelve planters. Although the remains had not been identified, police had gathered enough evidence to charge McArthur with three additional counts of first-degree murder in the presumed deaths of Majeed Kayhan, a Project Houston subject; Soroush Mahmudi, who disappeared in 2015; and Dean Lisowick, a homeless man who was never reported missing.

On February 8, police announced that they had found the remains of three more people from the Leaside residence, and that one of the six sets of remains belonged to Kinsman, identified through fingerprints. Additional planters were seized from across the city, including one from the Danforth neighborhood and two properties in North Rosedale. A forensic pathologist was expected to take at least ten days to excavate for remains at the Leaside residence by hand. Forensic anthropologist Kathy Gruspier, who arrived to oversee the excavation, did not find any sign of soil disturbance by previous digging. Excavation of two sewage lines at the home was conducted on February 13, and a section of one line was removed for testing.

The investigation had a continuous presence at the Leaside residence, often described as "ground zero", and police established a command post on the property. On February 10–11 the search was completed and it was released to its owners after more than three weeks. The owners requested that police keep crime scene tape up around the yard to deter journalists by whom they were feeling increasingly harassed.

Police believe that some of the murders took place at McArthur's apartment, where they conducted a four-month forensic search.

Forensic investigators spent hundreds of hours searching every inch of McArthur's apartment, where Idsinga suspected some of the murders occurred. It took them several weeks before searching McArthur's bedroom, where they expected to find the bulk of their evidence. The search concluded on May 11, having occupied ten forensic officers for nearly four months. They took more than 18,000 photographs and collected over 1,800 items. Idsinga noted the thoroughness required as the first murder was believed to have occurred eight years previously. The searches of the Leaside residence and McArthur's apartment made up the largest forensic investigation conducted by the TPS.

On February 23, McArthur was charged with a sixth count of first-degree murder in the death of Skandaraj Navaratnam, a subject of Project Houston. His remains and those of Mahmudi were identified through dental records, and had been recovered from planters at the Leaside residence.

On March 5, the TPS held a press conference and released a photo of an unidentified deceased man alleged to be another of McArthur's victims. Police later received over 500 tips regarding the photo and were checking on 22 potential identities. They also announced that a seventh set of remains had been recovered from the Leaside planters. Michael Pollanen, Ontario's chief forensic pathologist, said his organization had never before been involved in an investigation with such scope, drawing on the skills of each member for many unique challenges, such as scientific issues related to decomposition and post-mortem dismemberment.

On April 11, McArthur was charged with a seventh count of first-degree murder in the death of Abdulbasir Faizi. He was, at this point, charged with the deaths of all five men from the Project Houston and Project Prism investigations. The charge came as Faizi's remains were identified from the Leaside planters, along with those of Esen and Lisowick. Investigators had finished searching the Leaside planters, from which the remains of all but Kayhan had been identified; they had one set of unidentified remains. They had also searched eight additional planters from elsewhere in the city, which had contained no human remains.

On April 16, McArthur was charged with an eighth count of first-degree murder in the death of Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, whose remains were the seventh set identified from the Leaside planters. Police said his name had not come from the many tips generated by the release of his post-mortem photograph but that he had been identified with help from an undisclosed international agency. Kanagaratnam was a Tamil asylum-seeker who was under a deportation order and had not been reported missing. Police said they would look into why his name was not on a list of missing persons. He had last had contact with his family in August 2015, and police believed that he had been killed between September 3 and December 14, 2015.