Bruce McArthur, the Canadian gardener who murdered 8 homosexual men and hid his remains in potted plants

Now that one of its members has pleaded guilty to killing eight men, some are wondering why the police have not acted before.

In February 2018, about 200 people gathered in a small park in the heart of Toronto's gay neighborhood (known as the Village) to mourn the victims of an alleged serial killer.

Many wore bracelets painted with the words "love", "heal", "stand up", "remember". The slogans were used in an emotional exchange between the organizers and the crowd.

"Today, we remember," they said, and the words echoed in the crowd.

"Today we are resisting, today we are healing, today we are getting up, today, especially today, we love."

A year later, the names of the victims and the identity of the murderer are known. Bruce McArthur, a 67-year-old gardener and landscaper, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to eight counts of first-degree murder.

The hearing will begin on February 4 to sentence, a procedure in which friends and relatives of victims will testify how the murders have affected their lives.

Serial killer

McArthur grew up in a rural area of ​​Ontario, in central-eastern Canada, and married a woman in the 1980s.

From an early age, he knew that he was homobadual, but he tried to ignore it.

Grandfather and father of two, McArthur came out of the closet with a little over 40, left his family in the city of Oshawa and moved to Toronto.

There, he became a regular visitor to the village, as the gay neighborhood of the city is called.

In Zipperz, one of the bars frequented by many of his alleged victims, he is often seated at the bar, having a drink or chatting with a man.

"I called it Santa Claus," said Harry Singh, owner of Zipperz, at the BBC McArthur worked as a mimic of Santa at a mall during a Christmas.

But few people knew their dark side.

In 2003, he was sentenced to two years in prison on probation for badaulting a prostitute with a metal tube.

As part of his sentence, he was required to avoid male prostitutes, no longer frequent the gay neighborhood of Toronto and refrain from using the narcotic amyl nitrite, also called poppers.

Human remains in pots

The Canadian had close relationships with some of the clients who hired him to design and maintain his garden.

One of them, Karen Fraser, even allowed her to put tools in the shed of her house.

The police will later discover the remains of several bodies hidden in pots on the property, as well as in a nearby ravine.

Fraser comments that McArthur never gave any idea what kind of man he really was. He was energetic and happy, loved plants and was obsessed with his grandchildren.

"From what I see, the man I met did not exist," he says.

The discovery that his precious home had become the cemetery of a serial killer devastated her.

Now, while the man is preparing to be convicted, Fraser confesses that he has nothing to say to him.

"I do not like much forgiveness, I do not like to close much, they did terrible things," he says naturally.

The victims

The arrest of McArthur in January 2018 confirmed the worst fears of many residents of Toronto's gay neighborhood, who had suspected for years that a serial killer was attacking his community.

"Too many people have been lost for too long in our community," said Troy Jackson, one of the organizers of the vigil.

Located at the intersection of Church Street and Wellesley Street, Village is the city's enclave for the LGBT community (bad, gay, transgender and bibadual) since the 1960s.

But it's more than a neighborhood: it's also become a home for many people who feel marginalized because of their badual inclination.

Many of McArthur's victims were immigrants from South Asia or the Middle East who had no family in Canada.

For them, the gay neighborhood was their safe place. Instead, it has become a hunting ground.

According to his plea of ​​guilty, McArthur allegedly killed:

Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40 years old. (2010)

Abdulbasir Faizi, 42 years old. (2010)

Majeed Kayhan, 58 years old. (2012)

Soroush Mahmudi, 50 years old. (2015)

Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37 years old. (2016)

Dean Lisowick, 47 years old. (2016)

Selim Esen, 44 years old. (2017)

Andrew Kinsman, 49 years old. (2017)

Unanswered questions

The police did not reveal how Bruce McArthur became a suspect in the murders.

It was known that he had had bad with one of the victims, Andrew Kinsman, and he discovered footage of a surveillance camera showing Kinsman getting into his car on the day of his disappearance .

Rumors that someone was attacking the community began when Skandaraj Navaratnam disappeared from Zipperz on Labor Day weekend in 2010.

Nicknamed Skanda by his friends, this 40 – year – old man, who had left Sri Lanka for Canada, came to Canada in the 1990s and quickly adapted himself to life in the village, where he moved to Canada. was very soon bound to friendship.

"His laugh was just ridiculous," Zipperz's waitress and close friend Navaratnam told the Toronto Star newspaper, Jodi Becker.

"If Skanda laughed, everyone started laughing, even though it was not funny."

Then, the number of missing persons increased significantly and in 2012 the police deployed a task force to investigate. The investigations ended 18 months later.

In June 2017, the disappearance of Kinsman triggered a community-wide search and rekindled rumors of a serial killer in the neighborhood.

Shortly after, the police appointed a second task force to investigate the disappearances of Kinsman and Esen.

Until December of this year, however, the Toronto authorities publicly stated that "there was no evidence" of a serial killer.

This denial eventually damaged an already fragile relationship between the city's LGBT community and the police.

Haran Vijayanathan, executive director of the South Asia AIDS Alliance, spoke on behalf of many victims.

Vijayanathan has successfully launched an independent (still ongoing) investigation into how the authorities handle missing persons investigations.

Vijayanathan told the BBC last February that if the police had paid more attention, we can not help but wonder if the lives of other dead or missing men could have been saved.

"These are the" maybe "and the" and if "we have to deal with."

BBC

Themes