John lived his sexuality in the shadows and led a double life: no one in his Middle Eastern family knew he was gay. That’s why she decided that morning to secretly meet an individual, whom she met in an app, and give free rein to a sporadic encounter of rough sex. Once in his lover’s apartment, John agreed to snort some popper and be tied to the bed. However, the host had planned a better diversion: kill it, tear it apart and hide it in a pot.
Just as Bruce McArthur began his grisly ritual, a Canadian police tactical team broke down the door and arrested him. Authorities had been monitoring him for weeks after finding incriminating evidence in his eighth crime. Arresting this ‘affable’ gardener, as his friends call him, ends a wave of murders that has scared the gay community of Toronto, Canada for ten years.
When he was arrested, he had already killed eight men between 2010 and 2017. Bruce McArthur was a gardener who also worked as a Santa Claus in a shopping mall in Canada..
Sean Cribbin, the person who managed to escape thanks to the police, said the killer had the profile picture personified as Santa Claus in his dating apps.
“He looked like Santa Claus, even in his profile: in his photo he looked like Santa Claus from the mall,” said Cribbin, referring to the now infamous photos of McArthur. who worked as Santa for the Scarborough Mall. “Now it’s creepy, but right now it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s doing community work.'”
The 67-year-old pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder in court.
Most of his victims had some connection to the Village, Toronto’s gay neighborhood. Almost all of them had Middle Eastern or South Asian origins.
But since McArthur pleaded guilty at the trial, much of this evidence in the case went unheard in court.
The police intervention was not accidental. To McArthur they had been investigating it since 2017 for the disappearance of two men: Selim Esem and Andrew Kinsman. And, before that January 18, when they arrested him, they kept him under surveillance. Therefore, they broke into the apartment when they saw that he had brought in another potential victim.
The evidence Justice had against McArthur was overwhelming. There was surveillance video, photographic evidence, and even DNA.
In addition to Esem and Kinsman, the victims included Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Dean Lisowick, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam.
The details of what the killer gardener did with his victims are gruesome. After examining the defendant’s computer, investigators found that some he shaved their heads and beards after strangling them and who kept his shaved hair in bags that he hid in a shed near a Toronto cemetery.
During the search of the McArthur house, in addition to a USB stick with several folders, some with the names of the eight victims and even one named John; found the cops human remains hidden in pots and even in a nearby field.
According to the BBC, the key piece of information in finding the killer gardener was Kinsman’s death. It is that the victim had noted in his diary, dated June 26, 2017, the name Bruce. Just that day he disappeared.
another clue was a surveillance video of the neighborhood where the victim lived on the date of his disappearance. A very peculiar car was observed there: a red 2004 Dodge Caravan. After police investigation, it was determined that there were five men named Bruce who had that car, but only one model owned the 2004 model. , Groundskeeper McArthur.
That car was found in a junkyard by the police. When they examined it, they found traces of blood and semen. After genetic analysis, the DNA tested positive with the Kinsman and Esem profiles.
It was then that the police began monitoring McArthur and they acted when he was about to commit the ninth crime.
Source: ABC and La Vanguardia
Source: Clarin
