The Misery Machine - Bruce MacArthur: The Toronto Ripper | The REAL Bad Santa

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

This week, Drewby and Yergy head to the Church and Wellesley in Toronto to discuss the shocking crimes of Bruce MacArthur, a middle aged landscaper and mall Santa, who preyed upon men, in particularly South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, whom he had met in Toronto's gay village. We discuss the case with a special focus on the victim' stories, and shine a light on how police could have prevented his murder spree.  Levi's Fundraising Page: https://gofund.me/6b9e4f07 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932017_Toronto_serial_homicides https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/hunter-what-made-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthur-tick https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2021/04/29/true-crime-doc-about-bruce-mcarthur-hints-at-possible-motivation-of-toronto-serial-killer.html?rf https://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/the-bruce-mcarthur-victim-who-no-one-took-seriously-might-have-stopped-a-serial-killer-1.5148167 https://www.oxygen.com/catching-a-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthur/serial-killer-week/who-were-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthurs-8 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/13/toronto-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthur-police-investigation-report https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/epstein-report-bruce-mcarthur-toronto-police-1.5986451 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmgMEXjWHc&ab_channel=GlobalNews    

Bruce MacArthur was born on October 8, 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario, and was raised on a farm in Argyle. In addition to raising MacArthur and his sisters, his parents fostered troubled children from Toronto, often with six to ten in their care at any given time. MacArthur's mother was Irish Catholic, and his father was a Scottish Presbyterian. Both were devout, causing arguments in which MacArthur supported his mother. This caused tension with his father, who MacArthur later felt, may have sensed his homosexuality. MacArthur had trouble accepting his sexual orientation, which would have been seen as abnormal in rural Ontario at the time. A young MacArthur attended a one-room schoolhouse for his primary education.

Later, MacArthur attended Fenelon Falls Secondary School, where he met and began dating Janice Campbell, both graduating in 1970. MacArthur later graduated from a program in general business and married Campbell when he was 23. MacArthur began working for Eaton's department stores as a buyer's assistant around 1973 in a downtown Toronto building. A few blocks north of where MacArthur was working, a gay village was forming on Yonge Street between college and Wesley Streets. MacArthur left Eaton's in 1978 began working as a traveling salesman for McGregor Sox, soliciting department store. to carry his merchandise. He later worked as a merchandising representative for Stanfields, which is a garment company. In 1979, MacArthur and his wife moved into a house on Ormond Drive in Oshua. By 1981, they had a daughter, Melanie, and a son Todd. In 1986, the MacArthur's

bought a home on Cartruff Avenue in Oscewa. He became very active in his church, keeping himself busy to avoid examining his feelings. MacArthur began having sexual affairs with men in the early 1990s. More than a year later, he came out of the closet to his wife, but they continued living together. Sometime after 1993, MacArthur's employment in the clothing trade came to an end, and the couple faced financial difficulty, in part due to legal issues connected to their teenage son, Todd, who was obsessively making obscene phone calls to women he did not know, and from what I understand Andy was calling them up asking what they were wearing and pleasuring himself on the phone. It sounds like some of the creepy guys that we used to get when we worked at the call center.

Yeah, when we worked at ACS, there was two campaigns that got repeated offenders, let's say. The couple mortgage their home in 1997 and further declared bankruptcy in 1999. Oh, I want to talk more about this. Okay, go ahead. When I worked at the call center portion of the employer that I, have currently. I got a lot of those gentlemen on the phone. Oh, really? They liked me. They really did. Well, how'd they know they were going to get you? I don't know. And I'm sure it wasn't the same person every single time, but I'd have to forward a lot of telephone calls to my manager, who was a big gruff

woman. And she would prefer what I would do is pull transfer it to her without saying anything to the customer. While they were mid-sentence. And then she would just start talking to them while they were, you know, getting going to kind of ruin their day. So MacArthur separated from his wife in 1997 and moved to Toronto. He frequented the bars of church in Wesley, which is 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, MacArthur saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed Prozac for several months. At about this time, he was attempting to gain work as a land-scale And on Don Mills Road where he moved, from what I understand, that was a neighborhood where a lot of immigrants were.

And that's going to play a bigger part later on in our story. Yes, it will. So just afternoon on October 31st, 2001, Halloween, a few weeks after his 50th birthday, McCarthur followed actor and model Mark Henderson to his apartment building after being invited into Henderson's apartment to see his Halloween costume. I don't know what he dressed up as. MacArthur struck Henderson several times from behind with an iron pipe that he often carried. Henderson fought back before losing consciousness. He called 911 when he awoke and was taken to St. Michael's Hospital. So there's some different accounts of this.

I watched an interview with Mark Henderson. It was about 20 minutes long. And he said that he knew who MacArthur was, but he stayed away from him. He said that guy always gave me the creeps. and he thought that when he went into his building, because he lived in an apartment building, that MacArthur was going in to see some other tenants, that they didn't exchange any words or had any interaction of any sort. So this Halloween costume thing, I don't believe it's actually the case. I know I've seen that report in some sources, but Mark Henderson himself claims he was just going home, MacArthur came in, and then next thing he knew, he felt himself getting bashed in the back of the head. And he was bleeding pretty bad. He thought he was going to die. Does Canada have 9-1-1?

I mean, that being their code, I really should have put emergency services or looked into it because you know how Europe has different numbers. Are they a 911? I'm not sure, and I should know that having spent an obscene amount of time in Quebec. So Canada, friends, let us know in the comment section. Yeah, leave us a comment, please. So MacArthur, who turned himself in after the attack,

said he did not remember the incident or why he might have done it. He pleaded guilty to charges of assault with a well. weapon and assault causing bodily harm, and on April 11, 2003, received a conditional sentence of 729 days. There were concerns that MacArthur's unexplained behavior may have been due to the combination of his anti-seizure medication with amyl nitrate, a muscle relaxant, which is sometimes taken recreationally before sex, also known by the slang term, Poppers. And I shouldn't gloss over Mark Henderson's experience at all. I encourage you to watch the interview with him. If you just type Mark Henderson, Bruce MacArthur into YouTube, you should be able to find it pretty easily. But Mark Henderson couldn't even enter the courtroom during his sentencing. In retrospect, he wishes that he did.

The fact that MacArthur got off so light and that this was just looked at, oh, just some drunk Halloween spat, really doing a disservice to the victim, I feel. And Henderson later dealt with this fear put into him by this incident. and the trauma put into him by this incident, he later decided to become one of the first out-gay cops on the Toronto Police Force. And he spent, I believe it was 10 years, trying to bridge the gap between the police force,

which had not the best relationship with the gay community in Toronto. They don't have the best relationship with the gay community anywhere. Especially with Toronto at the time. I just wanted to make that clear. I know a lot of people may be able to infer that, But Mark Henderson wanted to actually close that gap in Toronto, and that's what he tried to do.

MacArthur avoided prisons 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 Wesley except for work and medical appointments and had to stay at least 33 feet away from the victim's home or workplace and could not spend time with male prostitutes. I believe there was a clear stipulation that, he could not spend any time in the gay village for a prolonged period of time. MacArthur was forbidden to possess firearms for 10 years.

He was not to purchase, possess, or consume drugs without a medical prescription, and specifically not to possess poppers. He also had to submit his DNA to a database and was to complete court-ordered counseling for anger management. In 2014, MacArthur was granted a record suspension on the conviction, which was subsequently expunged from his record. He essentially got the charge against Henderson expunged completely. And prior to that, I believe it was around 2010, they had already destroyed the records.

Yeah, I had heard something about that too. They have like a really short records retention and they were already gone. I should probably put this in here now, especially if there's some people that know a lot about this case, have been following it for a long time. We could probably go for three hours on MacArthur's case. There's a lot of victims, a lot of potential victims. a lot of avenues you can go down. So if this is a case that interests you, there's going to be a lot more information, but I want to be able to get this as concise as possible for people knew this case to understand, because I didn't know about this until recently.

And... Yeah, this was a case, one of our patrons, Victoria, suggested to us. Yes, thank you, Victoria. I hadn't heard of it before. The reason why this appalled me is because there's this kind of belief that a Jeffrey Dahmer type is a thing of the past. I'll just kind of leave it like that, but I was shocked to think that the things that MacArthur did happened in the present. Let's get a little bit further with that little PSA out of the way. So in 2002, while the assault case was still before the courts, MacArthur registered with recon, which is a gay fetish dating website for men into BDSM, where his profile noted his... interest in submissive men. He was active on numerous gay dating websites including Silver Daddies,

Man Jam, Grinder, Bear 411, Bear Forest, Scruff, Daddy Hunt, Squirt, and Growler. And I've only heard of one of those apps. Sounds like Mr. McArthur has a type. I'm not going to shame anyone for what they're into. No. I love Bear Daddies. They're great. McArthur joined Facebook in 2011 and cataloged his nightlife with pictures of parties, vacations, birthday dinners, and concerts. Younger men of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent were in several of his pictures. By this time, MacArthur had become part of the gay community and was irregular at its bars. Since 2007 or 2008, he was living in a 19th floor apartment at Leeside Towers in Thorncliffe Park. MacArthur's 2003 banishment from Church and Wesley remained well known and he had developed a reputation

for BDSM and rough sex. I'm wondering if it made him kind of infamous, like maybe kind of a bad boy, I don't know, this assault. If he was known... If he was known to have assaulted somebody who was a model and an actor, but then was becoming popular

in the gay community and accepted. We'd only be speculating on what his reputation was. I'm not really sure. So he had become a self-employed landscaper operating under the name Artistic Designs. Most of MacArthur's clients were wealthy elderly women who found him charming,

and he had built a client base through personal recommendations. During the offseason, MacArthur portrayed Santa Claus at an Agencourt mall. I mean, he was a mall Santa, and he made floral gifts for charities. This dude was legitimately a mall, and he looked like a same. Even if he wasn't done up in his Santa outfit, he kind of has that Santa look to up. He's a silver daddy. Yeah. MacArthur's separation from his wife was initially heated, though they later reconciled. His son Todd was reported to have difficulty accepting his father is gay, and in 2014,

Todd was sentenced to 14 months in jail for making those multiple obscene phone calls. He was released on bail in order to stay with his father in Toronto and assist him in his landscaping business. In November 2012, the Toronto Police launched a task force of Project Houston in regards to the September 6, 2010, disappearance of Skanda Raj, Navaratnam. According to a 2018 investigation, a man posted on cannibal website, zombie and meat, in 2012, that he had killed and eaten a man in Toronto, which had led to the formation of Project Houston. Police briefly investigated a possible link between Navaratnam's murder and convicted killer Luca Rocco Magnata, although this lead was eventually abandoned for lack of evidence. By June 2013, Project Houston had identified two other

missing persons cases linked by geography and lifestyle. Abdul Basir, also known as Basir, Faisi, and Majid Hamid, Kayan. Like Navaratnam, both men were middle-aged immigrants of South Asian origin who disappeared from Church and Wesley between 2010 and 2012. An anonymous tip linking MacArthur to Navaratum and Kayan led police to interview him on November 11, 2013. Police had been told that he had a romantic relationship with Navarotan. Rattam and had visited Kahan.

MacArthur told police that he knew both men and regularly interacted with Navaratnam at a gay bar, but denied being in a relationship with him. MacArthur also admitted to a ploying Kahan, whom he had broken off a sexual relationship. Project Houston concluded that there was no evidence to link the disappearances. So yeah, of course, here's where it starts getting darker. On June 26, 2017, one day after attending Pride Toronto, Andrew Kinsman disappeared from Cabbage Town and was last seen the area of his residence on Winchester Street. On the evening of June 28th, learning that no one had seen Kinsman for a couple days, friends gained access to his apartment.

They found no sign of disturbance, though his 17-year-old cat was out of food and water. They reported Kinsman's disappearance to police the following day. Kinsman, who was openly gay and had deep roots in the community, was regarded as a stable and responsible man, whose friends felt would not leave suddenly and certainly not without his cat or his prescription medication. So I don't want to foreshadow or anything, but his friends doing this not only saved his cat, but it really, really helped the investigation later on.

Yes. The fact that they had the foresight to do that. So fears of a serial killer stalking Church in Wesley grew on November 29 when the body of Tess Ritchie was found by her mother in an alleyway four days after she was reported missing. The following day, police announced that the body of Alura Wells, a homeless transgender woman, had been identified. Her body discovered in a Rosedale ravine in August.

At the end of July 2017, Project Prism was formed to investigate the disappearances of Kinsman and another man, Selim Esson, and to look for any links with the unsolved disappearances investigated under Project Houston. And we're trying our best with pronunciations. I'm sorry if we're not getting them accurate. Kinsman's disappearance was central to the creation of Project PRISM because of a lead obtained at the end of July. Police found Bruce written on Kinsman's calendar for June 26th, the same day Kinsman was last seen. That day, surveillance video outside Kinsman's residence showed a person matching his appearance approach a red vehicle. The video did not show a license 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, I'm not surprised, but only five were registered to someone named Bruce.

Of those, the only 2004 model, belonged to Bruce MacArthur. So on October 3rd, after tracking warrants had been issued, plane clothes officers arrived at Dom's auto parts in Cordes, Ontario, searching for MacArthur's 2004 Dodge Caravan, which the owner confirmed he had purchased on September 16. The police found it intact and had towed it away, also copying surveillance video of MacArthur visiting the shop, so he had sold the car. Trace amounts of blood in the vehicle were identified as kinsmen's. In November, cadaver dogs were brought to a Mallory Crescent residence in the Leaside neighborhood of Toronto. MacArthur had an arrangement to tend to the owner's yard in exchange for storage space in their garage for his landscaping equipment.

The dogs did not have any hits for a human remains. A camera was installed to monitor the garage. Police also obtained a log of MacArthur's key fob for his apartment. With this and a tracking warrant for his cell phone, they built a timeline of the day Kinsman went missing. So that I found a little interesting. Do some apartments just have slide cards? I mean, some dorm rooms do,

so I'm assuming some newer apartments must. I don't know. I really shouldn't say things like that. We're a little behind the times here in Maine. Oh, we're definitely behind the time. Everything's old. Yeah, we have like buildings from the 1800s. Yeah.

People still live in here, so. So DNA evidence for MacArthur's van, which matched Kinsman and Essen, allowed investigators to obtain a general warrant for MacArthur's apartment on December 4th. Police then covertly entered MacArthur's residence and cloned his computer in hard drive. It's one thing that, you know, going through this case surprised me. But the amount of evidence they had early on, why they couldn't bring him in quicker. Yeah, I would think at this point with all the... the covert operations that they've done, especially when they find blood in his car, that should

have been enough to do an arrest. But there is quite a few criticisms of the Toronto Police Department. Yeah. We'll get into that later. Two pieces of evidence came to light directly connecting MacArthur to the disappearances of Essen and of Kinsman. A partial download from MacArthur's computer, which was going through forensic analysis to deleted files, yielded post-mortem photos of the victim that day.

round the clock surveillance was put on MacArthur with instructions that MacArthur should be immediately arrested if observed alone with anyone. Again, at this point, I think they should have really immediately taken him in. Yeah, they have post-mortem photos of a victim on his computer

and they're just going to continue to watch him. I just don't know what they're looking to find here where they just surveying him, hoping that they would lead him to victims they didn't know about. I'm really not sure here. I don't know. Is this another thing where,

we have different laws than what's going on in Canada. Like, I don't want to put like an American spin on this. Like, I want to try to be like accurate. I just am very confused personally as to why it is that they have to wait so long. Yeah. Or did they? Because in America, and I'm not, you know, I'm just saying this is how it is in America, far less information would have occasioned an arrest on MacArthur.

So Canadian friends, please, if you can leave a comment, let us know what's up. We would love to hear from you. Yeah. So police officers surveilling MacArthur decides to apprehend. him shortly after they saw a young man enter his Thorncliffe Park apartment on January 18, 2018, believing that the man's life was at risk. Police officers found the young man restrained on a bed when they entered MacArthur's apartment. The man was shaken, but he wasn't injured.

The man had arrived in Canada from the Middle East five years earlier and was married and had not told his family that he was gay. He had met MacArthur through the dating app growler and said that he had met for sex several times. He had agreed to keep his relationship with MacArthur's secret and let himself be handcuffed in MacArthur's steel bed frame. MacArthur put a black bag over his head and tried to tape his mouth shut before police officers interrupted him. Police seized electronic devices from the apartment, including five cell phones, five computers, three digital cameras, and about a dozen USB flash drives. Evidence found in MacArthur's apartment shortly after the arrest prompted investigators to charge MacArthur with two counts of first-degree murder in the presumed. deaths of Andrew Kinsman and Salim Essen. Their bodies had not been found, but police said they had

a pretty good idea of how they died. So police executed search warrants at five properties associated with MacArthur and his landscaping business. Four in Toronto and a nine-acre property about 120 miles northeast in Maddoch, Ontario. The Maddoch property and a home on Conlands Road were residences of Roger Horan, a landscaper and longtime friend of MacArthur. Another property search was the condominium of MacArthur's former boyfriend on Concord Place. Of a greater concern to investigators were MacArthur's high-rise apartments in Thorncliff Park and the Mallory Crescent residence in Leaside. That was the place he was storing his equipment. The owners of the Leeside residents were barred from their home January 18th so that forensic investigators could search it.

The search of the property was extended to an adjacent ravine aided by cadaver dogs and members of the heavy urban search and rescue team. Cadaver dogs took a, quote, strong interest in large planar boxes they found there. The planters had frozen to the ground requiring heaters to thaw them. A large planar was wrapped and brought to the coroner's office for examination. On January 29, police announced that he had found the dismembered skeletal remains of at least three people, and two of the 12 large planter boxes seized from the Leaside residence. Although the remains had not been identified, police had gathered enough evidence to charge MacArthur

with three additional counts of first-degree murder in the presumed deaths of Majid Khayhan and Sorush Mahmoudi, who disappeared in 2015, and Dean Lissowick, a homeless man who was never reported missing. On February 8th, police announced they found the remains of three more people and planters from the Leaside home, and that one of the six sets of remains belonged to Andrew Kinsman, identified through fingerprints. Additional planters were seized from across the city, including one from the Danforth neighborhood

and two properties in North Rosedale were searched. Codaver dogs were having trouble detecting scents due to the cold weather and frozen ground. The police investigation had a continuous presence at the Leaside Home, often described as ground zero, and the police established a command post on the property. On February 10th and 11th, the search of the house was completed, and it was released to its owners after more than three weeks. The owners requested that police keep up crime seam tape around the yard to deter reporters that were being pretty nosy and harassing them. On February 23rd, MacArthur was charged with a six count of first-degree murder in the death of Scandaraj Navaratnam. Navratum's remains and those of Mamudi were identified through dental records and had been recovered from planters at the leoside home.

On March 5th, police held a press conference and released photos of an unidentified deceased man alleged to be one of MacArthur's victims. Police later received over 500 tips regarding the photo, and this photo is pretty readily available online. They also announced that a seventh set of remains had been recovered from the Leaside planters. On April 11th, MacArthur was charged with a seventh count of first-degree murder in the death of Abdul-Bazir-Fizi. This charge came as Faisi's remains were identified. from the Leeside Planters, along with those of Essen and Lysawick. On April 16th, MacArthur was charged with an eighth count of first-degree murder in the death of

Karushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, whose remains were the seventh set from the Leeside Planters. The victim was a Tamil asylum seeker who was under deportation order and had not been reported missing, and he wasn't reported missing because his family thought he had already died years ago. Do you know more information about that? Yeah, when contacting them, it was actually a completely different agency was able to identify him because he was going to be deported. None of the 500 tips even broke the surface of who he was. So when they actually contacted the family about this, that's when they had told the authorities that they didn't even know he was alive. They had thought he had died overseas.

So you're starting to see why Bruce MacArthur, one of the reasons Bruce MacArthur targeted the people he did. So between July 4th and 13th, 20th. 20 police investigators conducted excavations in the forested ravine behind the Leaside property. They began sifting through a large compost pile, then proceeded with the guidance of trained dogs and a forensic anthropologist, collected human remains almost every day of this search. Every day they collected human remains between July 4th and 13th. And then further, they kept going. On July 20th, it was announced that the remains belonged to Kehan,

and that all the remains of all MacArthur's alleged victims had now been identified. Five victims were noted by investigators for their similarities. So they were middle age, bearded, patrons of the Black Eagle bar, and self-identified as bears. So if you don't know what bears are, they're gay men who have overtly masculine traits such as beards. They're huskier. They're huskier. Some are into leather. Sometimes they're pierced and tattooed.

But they're bigger guys. That was his preference. And I would say that he was a bear himself. A bear himself for sure. Yeah. These men had also disappeared over holiday weekends. So Labor Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. Kinsman was after Toronto Pride.

And eight of the victims had ties to Church and Wesley. Physical similarities, which usually included facial hair, beards. Six were Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern. So he definitely had the type he was going after. So we've spent a lot of time talking about MacArthur's background and what happened with him. We tried to dig up as much information as we could about each of the victim, so going forward, here's who each of them were and what happened with them. Navaratum, who was 40 years old, was last seen in the early morning of September 6, 2010, as we mentioned earlier. He left Zippers,

which is a former gay village bar that, as my understanding, no longer exists. And he left with an unknown man. A friend who saw Navaratnam the day before said he was excited about having a dog. He left this pet behind at the bar when he disappeared. And so he was reported missing a couple days later. Navaratnam was romantically involved with Bruce MacArthur, whom he met in 1999. So they knew each other for quite a while. Navarotanum also worked for MacArthur's landscaping business, and friends said that they were still involved in 2008. So this is quite a period of time.

Navratum was a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka and had no family members in Canada. So, Abdul Bucir Faisi, whose 42 was last seen on December 28, 2010, leaving his workplace in Mississauga, though banking records later placed him at Church and Wesley. His last night out included a stop at the Black Eagle Bar and at the Steamworks Bathhouse. He was an immigrant from Afghanistan. While living in Iran, a childhood friend had cautioned him on coming out as gay, advising that he should, quote, find God or leave. That conflict remained with Fizi, who kept his gay life hidden from him.

his family, including his wife and children, and rightfully so, because you can get killed for that there. A colleague said that he had been working overtime to ensure that his two daughters got everything that they wanted for Christmas. He was reported missing on December 29th to Peel Regional Police west of Toronto. His 2002 Nissan Centro was found abandoned on Moore Avenue, steps away from the Beltline Trail, a small ravine, which is a popular cruising spot for gay men. More Avenue connects to Mallory Crescent and the Leaside home where MacArthur stored his landscaping equipment. On April 11, 2018, police charged MacArthur with the murder of Faisi, which occurred on or about December 29, 2010.

Majid Hamid Kayan, 58, was last seen on October 18, 2012 in the gay village near Yonge Street and Alexander. He was reported missing by his adult son on October 25th. He was an immigrant from Afghanistan who fled to Canada with his wife and children in the 80s. He and his wife divorced in 2002, but as a son of a Muslim cleric, he had not come out to his entire family. He suffered from PTSD from the Soviet-Afghan war and was a heavy drinker. According to a bartender, Kayan had been an active person in the gay village since around the 1990s, and he would stay at an apartment kept by his partner who would also not come out

to his family. Following the death of his partner, Majid Kai Han became romantically involved with MacArthur. His remains were found in the ravine beside the Leaside property, the eighth set to be identified. Sarush Mahmoudi, age 50, was last seen alive on August 14th, 2015 by his home near Markham Road and Blake Manor Boulevard in the South Cedar Bray neighborhood. He was a manufacturing plant worker who lived with his wife. Police believe that MacArthur killed Mahmoudi on or about August 15th, 2015. He was reported missing by his wife in August. and Mamoudi had come to Canada as a refugee from Iran and did not have any family in Canada until he met his wife. They moved from Barry to Toronto to be closer to his wife's family.

So despite everything, police and his family had not connected him to Toronto's gay scene up until this point. Andrew Kinsman, age 49, was last seen June 26, 2017, the day after the Pride Parade near his Winchester Street residence in Cabbage Town, south of the gay village. He was reported missing on June 29th. A friend who last saw him said that Kinsman was happy and upbeat. Kinsman was known as a stable and responsible man, a superintendent of his building and a community volunteer. Kinsman had known MacArthur for at least a decade. Back to when, Kinsman was a bartender at the Black Eagle.

Kinsman was seen carrying bags of debris on one of MacArthur's landscaping projects in 2011 and had been in a sexual relationship with MacArthur for some time. So you're seeing kind of a trend here. here that a lot of these people knew MacArthur for sometimes more than a decade worked with him, were in relationships with him. He was praying on people, not all of them, but quite a few people that were very close to him and trusted him. Salim Essen, 44, was last definitively seen on March 20th, 2017, near Yang Street and Bloor Street.

Though there have been reports that he was seen as late as April 14th near Bloor Street and Ted Rogers way in the gay village. He was reported missing by a friend on April 20th. Police initially described Essen as a man of no fixed address who often pulled a wheeled suitcase with him. A friend disputed this, however, saying that Essen was, quote, in an unhealthy relationship, end quote, and would at time stay with friends. Essen was a Turkish citizen who had first come to Canada to be with a partner that he had met in Turkey. According to the friend, he struggled with addiction but was getting control of his problem and had completed a certificate course in peer counseling from St. Stevens Community House just before he disappeared. MacArthur was also a client of St. Stevens

and very trusted within the community support organization. He was killed by MacArthur on or about April 16, 2017. Dean Lissowick, who was 43 or 44, they don't definitively have information on that, was not reported missing. He was a resident of Toronto's shelter system. He had periodically stayed at the Scott Mission on Spanda Avenue since 2003 and was last recorded there on April 21st, 2016. He had faced struggles, including issues with substance abuse, but was remembered to be very respectful. He was trying to work more as a cleaner or a laborer, having previously worked as a prostitute. He was killed by MacArthur on or about April 23, 2016. Karushna, Kumar, Conagorotnam, age 37, last had Connie.

with his family on August 2015. He was not reported missing. He was one of 492 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka who had arrived in Canada on the MV Sun Sea, assuming this is a boat, in August of 2010. When his deportation order was given, he went into hiding in the Tamil community in Ontario and worked as a cleaner and a mover. MacArthur killed him on or about January 6, 2016. which took place in Toronto between 2010 and 2017 were extremely gruesome. MacArthur kept trophies from his victims, including jewelry and a notebook. MacArthur took hundreds of post-mortem digital photos of his victims, which were recovered forensically after he tried to delete them. He took staged post-mortem photographs, typically with ropes around the victim's necks, or with them nude in a fur coat or hat, some photographs with their heads and beard's shaved, and he kept their hair in Ziplog bags at a shed in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Many were killed in his bedroom through ligature strangulation. One photograph showed a rope around a victim's neck twisted with a metal bar wrapped in tape. The bar was found in MacArthur's 2017 van and contained DNA from Kinsman and Essen. On February 8, 2019, Justice McMahon sentenced MacArthur to life imprisonment with no parole eligibility for 25 years. years. He's still eligible for parole after that many people are dead. I don't know if this is common in Canada. I feel like this is a disservice. McMahon described the crimes as pure evil and stated that MacArthur showed no evidence of remorse. Then why is he eligible for parole? And would have continued killing had he not been apprehended. Then why is he eligible for parole? Despite this,

he felt that the descendants should not be one of vengeance, given MacArthur's not advanced age, but he's getting elderly, and his guilty plea, because he did plead guilty, surprisingly. McArthur could apply for parole when he's 91, but McMahon said that it would be highly unlikely he would be granted parole. It's also been noted he won't even live that long because he has type 2 diabetes in his really bad shape.

Yes, this is also true. So he's likely to die in prison all things considered, but just give him life. Just put the stamp on it. I understand it's all kind of smoke and mirrors at the end of the day. Just give him life. Gay activists and editorial writers have suggested that the police only looked at the disappearances seriously when a white man, Andrew Kinsman, was reported missing.

There have also been suggestions that MacArthur was initially overlooked as a suspect because he is white. And yes. Yes. There are many criticisms of the Toronto Police Force for this. Because they didn't care until Andrew Kinsman came along. Right. And, you know, like I said, thank goodness for his friends who were very quick to go into the apartment, one, to save the cat. two to get the evidence that had Bruce written on the calendar or they wouldn't have put it together.

They let him go after he was known with two of the original disappeared men. Yeah, and then the expunged assault, there's just so many things. Like, let's go back to Henderson, the assault, okay? That wasn't a kill, but it was an assault. Had he gotten jail time, like actual jail time, had he... I would have done those 700-plus days. Had he not had the record expunged? This could have changed things.

I'm assuming a little bit here. But when someone has the record expunged, I assume that they don't show up on a list of convicted criminals. No. When trying to put together a suspect list or people of interest. So that definitely hurt things too. And again, he got brazen and went after Kinsman. Kinsman, White, a pillar of the gay community. Very well known.

At the bar that they all frequented? Yes. So if that guy goes missing, people are going to know about it immediately. But when you have, we have refugees going missing. And like Yergi said earlier, one of them's family didn't think that he was alive anyways. When you just go after refugees like this, especially illegal immigrants that are avoiding deportation, nobody's going to really notice. And the police may not even really care. So again, here we go.

yes, he didn't cannibalize anybody, but let's go back to Dahmer here. Who did Dahmer go after? He went after people of color. He went after people of color, and he went after immigrants. And what happened? How long did this take? And yes, part of that was held up by the police

were so hands off with these gay cases. But again, we have still here a serial killer who has been praying on gay men, gay men who are people of color and immigrants, and the police just hands off. And I think we, I'm going to be up front about this.

I don't think we were as descriptive in the ways in which the police were hands off in this case and the things the police could have done. There was a lot of examples of this in documentaries and YouTube. And again, like, we could talk for another hour on this. But I really encourage you, if you are interested in this case, to definitely look further into other YouTube channels about that. There are so many victim stories of. folks that actually lived through MacArthur that I don't think that we'd be able to do it justice. You really need to hear it in those victims' words. Yeah, there's been this good series, and it's easy to find on YouTube, good series of videos,

of interviews with victims of Bruce MacArthur that survived, that not just Mark Henderson, there's other people too, that go into their situation in detail, how they felt about it. And I think this is very good that they're doing this to try to honor some of these victims and their experiences because the one thing we also didn't mention, while Toronto police believes they got all of MacArthur's victims identified, he could have more. He honestly could. He could have an endless kill count. He could have been. So my assumption is that he started killing after he divorced his wife. But it's reasonable think he could have been doing kill.

kills before then. Yeah. So... And a lot of people didn't necessarily know that they were victims of Bruce MacArthur until police contacted them after finding some of the photographs. Right. Like those who had lived through it. Right. Some of them didn't know his name or didn't know that something was going on with him. You'll find interviews with people that work closely with him for a long time or knew him. And then when they heard about MacArthur's arrests, they're like, oh, that must be a different Bruce MacArthur. Can't be that guy. Can't be that mall Santa. I knew. It couldn't be the guy I worked with on a landscaping company, it just can't be. That's why I say there's a lot of rabbit holes here,

and there could be a lot more people that Bruce MacArthur is responsible for murdering. And we may never know. They may never find them at this point. And I don't know how much information Bruce MacArthur's going to give up. He basically pled guilty because the police had him dead to rights with so much evidence, irrefutable evidence. So, again, sad to see this.

the Toronto police feels like they did a good job, I feel like they could have done better. I think that they did a good job once the ball was rolling in finding everybody that they could. They did a good job once they realized Kinsman was gone. And yes, they did good at recovering the known bodies, yes. That's what I mean. That's all I mean.

Had they been more proactive, I think they could have saved many lives. So there it is. That's the last episode you'll ever hear that we recorded in the old apartment. So we recorded this back in June, but we decided to hold on to it because it's kind of Christmas adjacent since he was a mall Santa. And Victoria was the one who suggested it. So thank you so much, Victoria.

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