Uncover - S14: "Boys Like Me" E2: A Supreme Gentleman

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Evan and Alek are in the same special-needs program in high school, where they’re both bullied and ostracized. But while Evan tries to break out of his shell, Alek retreats further into himself and finds solace in some of the most disturbing corners of the internet. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/boys-like-me-transcripts-listen-1.6732152

Queer life in Montreal was wild. Montreal in the 90s was a great time, but it had a dark side. It was not a safe city for gay people back then. But what else was behind a series of deaths in the city? Somebody's killing gay men, and we want to know why. I'm Francis Pruort, and this is The Village, The Montreal Murders. Get early access to episodes at cbc.ca slash listen, or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts.

This is a CBC Podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please take care. All right, for the record, my name is Detective Rob Thomas. My badge number is 3917. I'm attached to the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit polygraph. Today's date is Monday, April 23rd, 2018. The time by my clock is approximately 10.46 in the evening.

I'm presently at 32 Division. This is from a video recorded the day of the Toronto van attack, just a few hours after Alec Manassian was taken into custody. Just have a seat right there, please. Thanks very much. You doing okay? Yeah. custody. That last voice, that's Alec. The camera's looking down on him. He's in a white jumpsuit, his head's shaved, and he's sitting up straight with his hands clasped in front of him, almost like he's at a job interview. You probably have better days than this, I guess, eh? Yeah.

Well, I am a little shaken, to be honest. A little shaken? It's not like the usual day, obviously. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Ever since I knew that this was going to be released, I've been eagerly awaiting it, yet dreading it at the same time. Yeah.

I've been eagerly awaiting it yet dreading it at the same time. More than a year after the interview took place, Evan and I were sitting outside the Ontario Superior Court in downtown Toronto. Alec was arrested the day of the attack, but the trial date still hadn't been set. The case was huge, and every aspect of the trial would be scrutinized by the media and the public. So there were a series of pre-trial hearings as the Crown and Manassian's defense team worked out the details. We'd been going to a lot of these hearings. Evan, he had a personal reason for being there. I wanted to, you know, see Alec in the flesh because I wanted to get a sense of, you know, where he was at based on his body language, if he felt any guilt or shame for what he did.

Evan and Alec went to high school together, but hadn't spoken much since graduation. Since the attack, Evan had been trying to figure out how and why their lives had taken such different paths. But Alec wasn't present at all of the hearings. And when he did attend, it was by video link. So Evan and I hope the police interview might give us some insight. It had taken some time, but court services eventually copied it onto a USB drive for us. It's a big deal. Yeah.

Because now we actually get to see what was going through his head on the day of. Right. As soon as we got the file, we sat down and watched it, right there in front of the courthouse. Before we get started, I want you to know that we're being videotaped and audiotaped.

Okay? Okay. Do you know what I mean by that? Yes. Everything I sing and do is being captured. Exactly. Yeah. On audio and video.

Okay? Now, here's what I want to do, Alec. I want to talk to you. Okay? It's important that I talk to you. All right? And I'm going to ask you questions about what happened today. Okay?

The interview is about four and a half hours long. Do you understand what first-degree murder is? It's a premediated murder and completely intentional and considered to be what's known as in cold blood. Well, yeah, that's a fairly precise way of describing it. We call it premeditated. It means premeditated. You understand what premeditated means? Yes, it would mean that someone planned for that murder in advance. Right, planning and deliberation. I'm Ellen Chloe Bateman.

This is Boys Like Me. like me. Can we take a break? Yeah, sure. Sorry, that was hard to hear. Yeah. You want to take a break? No, I meant like just a breather. Yeah, no problem. I don't like his tone of voice here. He's so detached from any of his actions. Why do you think? He's trying to pass it off as nothing.

It's just, it's horrifying to hear him talk like this. And it reminds me of when people would discipline him for annoying people in school. Evan and Alec had been in the same special needs class for students with autism. When teachers asked him to apologize for annoying things he did in high school, his apologies never sounded genuine. He never sounded like he was actually sorry for anything that he ever did. He didn't give a shit about who he pissed off or who he made uncomfortable.

He just kept doing it. So it makes me really think whether or not this sociopathic tendency was there or not. I wanted to know more about Evan and Alex's time as classmates, so Evan brought me to Thornley Secondary School. It sits on top of a hill in a North Toronto suburb, about a 10-minute drive from where the attack happened. I just remember being really nervous because I didn't know anyone at the school and I had no clue where to go. I was just told go once you get off the bus go directly to room 208. You go past the office and then eventually room 208 will be in a central corridor and the lights in room 208

half half of it was fluorescent the other half was uh dimly lit the reason why is because apparently kids on the autism spectrum are very sensitive to fluorescent lights and also there was a padded room called the quiet room where anyone could go if they needed to cool off. Did you ever need to go in there? I went in there a few times. I was never like sent in there, but some kids, you know, would be sent into the quiet room to have meltdowns and stuff like that. Being a kid with special needs was tough. A lot of the school felt off-limits. And you'd get called names like SPED,

short for special education. The first couple years I was at Thornley, there were school buses for everyone. There were school buses for the special needs kids and the neurotypical kids alike. However, for the last couple years I was there, the funding ran out and the neurotypical kids alike. However, in the last, for the last couple of years I was there, there are the funding ran out and it got to a point where there was just school buses for the special needs kids. And every day at the end of school, when people would be coming out and going home, they would see the special needs kids

get on the bus over by that driveway. So if anyone saw me get on a bus, they knew that we were sped. So it was a giveaway. Evan and the other autistic students would have some classes in room 208, but they'd mix with the rest of the student body for others. If you could pass as neurotypical, it made it easier to avoid being bullied.

But that bus situation made that pretty much impossible. I was picked on daily. I literally heard the kid sitting behind me whisper, you know, he's from that class. He's retarded. So I learned the hard way that that stigma existed very early on. It felt like, you know, we can't talk about this classroom. Some people we can't let know we're from there. But whenever we hung around Alec, it was a dead giveaway that we were affiliated with him. And sometimes I pretended I didn't know Alec

because he would essentially make a mockery of who we were. Evan considered Alec a friend, but it was a complicated friendship. I remember seeing him at birthday parties. He was just a chill guy who you could play games with. That's why when I saw him at school the next day, it's like, who are you and what did you do with the guy I was talking to on the weekend? Alec was a strong student who was great at computers and math, but he had these quirks that only seemed to come out at school. He'd make jokes and bad puns constantly,

and he'd greet people with this strained, exaggerated grin. It made people around him really uncomfortable. Alec was one of the most fascinating guys I knew at Thornley because I was always wondering why would he act like a complete doofus and go out of his way to embarrass himself and us. For about three years, I would have called Alec a friend, but then I reached a point where I just didn't want to hang out with him anymore because I was trying to fit in with, you know, the regular population of the school. I didn't

want to be known as a spad kid anymore. What stood out the most was the way he spoke at school. It was loud, grating, and bizarre. Alec called it his silly voice. Like, why do you think he was talking in that voice? At the time, I didn't know. Did you like hanging out with him when he wasn't being silly? Absolutely, yeah. He was a calm guy to be around. Absolutely, yeah. He was a calm guy to be around. I would feel sympathy for him sometimes when the kids would say really crude things to him,

like, you know, are you going to eat dog shit off the ground for lunch? But after a while, I just kind of, I just didn't let it bother me anymore because it's like he's bringing this on himself. He knows what he's doing. He seems to enjoy it. So what can you do? He seems to enjoy it. So what can you do? A few months after he was arrested, Alec underwent a series of intensive psychiatric evaluations.

He described his behavior in school as a kind of mask he was putting on. He said, and I'm quoting here, They'd make fun of me anyways. It was better to have them laugh at the facade, better to have negative attention than to have people ignore me. We never got invited to parties. Very few kids wanted to be social with us outside of school. Did you go to prom? I went to two high school proms at Thornley because I knew I was going to be taking grade 12 twice.

Was it fun? The first prom time I went, yeah, it was fun. I was more excited for the second prom than I was for the first one because I knew more people and I was acquainted with more people and I was feeling a lot more socially confident. And what surprised the hell out of me was, uh, the, the dudes I shared a limo with to prom were teasing me about how I looked so handsome in my suit and how I was going to be voted the prom King for sure. And I laughed and like, Oh, you flatter me like a peasant like me, the king. Never. So I just laughed it off as a joke. And then once they announced that I was the prom king at the crowning ceremony at the dinner, it was like, oh, you were serious.

Evan was riding high until one of those guys from the limo let it slip that it was a prank. It was a cruel joke. And when I even told my mom about it, she said, oh, it's like the movie Carrie. There was no bucket full of pig's blood, but there didn't have to be. For some of the kids at Thornley, the idea that someone like Evan thought he was actually popular enough to be voted prom king, that was funny enough. They didn't vote for me because I was popular. They voted for me because they wanted to humiliate me. How did that make you feel? Well, for a long time after that, I said, well, this is what happens when kids on the spectrum try to become popular. They're laughed at

and they're mocked. That's why a memory that once was a crowning achievement in my life is now sad. A few weeks later, Evan graduated. The ceremony was held at a banquet hall near Thornley. So I was kind of emotional that high school was ending and then I see Alec. He looked very nervous to be there. I asked him how he was doing and he talked. He didn't use a silly voice at all. He just seemed very nervous and uneasy being at graduation. He seemed really kind of aimless and a little directionless.

That was the last time I saw Alec in person. After graduation, Evan went to film school. It felt like a new beginning for him. It wasn't always easy, but he started to make connections with other students. He built a network of friends and started to feel more confident. But Alec's life was moving in a different direction. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs.

We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about girls in general?

I'm attracted to them. Have you ever had a relationship with a female? I don't wish to answer that. Okay, all right. had a relationship with a female? I don't wish to answer that. Okay. Alright. In terms of your feelings towards women in general, how would you describe that? I would say that sometimes I am a bit upset that they choose to date obnoxious men instead of gentlemen. Yeah, yeah. And you have a problem with the women that date these fellows?

Yes. Why is it that you have a problem with the women? Because I feel that it's illogical to be dating such men when they could be dating gentlemen instead. to be dating such men when they could be dating gentlemen instead. Was it something that occurred as a result of a single incident? Was there one particular moment in your life where it sort of struck home? On Halloween of 2013, I was attending a house party

and I walked in and attempted to socialize with some girls. However, they all laughed at me and held the arms of the big guys instead. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And how did that make you feel? I felt very angry that they would, because I considered myself a supreme gentleman, I was angry that they would give their love and affection to obnoxious boobs. This part of Alec's police interview got a lot of attention when it first became public. It seemed like it might point to a motive.

But by the time Evan and I watched the video, I learned enough about Alec to know something was off. The story didn't sit right with me. And I wasn't alone. Yeah, it was out of character. And I wasn't alone. Yeah, it was out of character. I'm just wondering, who invited Alec to a Halloween party? That's what's going through my mind.

This is another of Alec and Evan's classmates. He asked us not to use his real name, so we're calling him Iggy. Iggy and Alec were close at Thornleigh, and they stayed in touch after graduation. In fact, they were in touch on and off, right up until the attack. And then there's the part where he approached the girls. I'm just wondering, so how did he approach the girls? Like, he just walked up to them and started a conversation, like inserted himself to whatever they were talking about. Evan reached out to Iggy to see if he talked to us about his relationship with Alec.

He agreed to meet us at a deli in the north end of Toronto. Evan and I arrived early and got a table. Iggy parked his bike outside and came in. He looked nervous. Right away, I knew it was a mistake to meet him there. Who would want to open up about a friendship with a mass murderer in a packed deli? So we walked around the neighborhood instead, where we could talk openly. Iggy and Alec became friends in the first semester of grade 9,

when their teacher in 208 partnered them up. I'll be honest with you, I was kind of a little bit annoyed, like, oh, I'm going to be friends with this weird guy. But he was actually okay when I finally came over to his place and I was like, oh, he seems normal and then, you know, eventually I got

used to him and then I got used to his clownish antics at high school to the point where I found it amusing. Iggy and Evan paint a similar picture of Alec, but for whatever reason, he just didn't get on Iggy's nerves as much. We mostly kept in contact through text.

We would, you know, like, make plans for our next visit to watch another movie. But, you know, he would, you know, postpone, like he would postpone like, you know, a couple of times and, you know, that would be annoying, right? In 2017, Alec disappeared. He ghosted Iggy for nearly a year, but then he reached out a few months before the attack.

I don't remember, you't remember exactly what he said, but he basically said, like, sorry for not calling you. I've had... I was busy. I've had some hard times, but it's all good now, or something like that. Something like that. Yeah, so I came over to his place,

and then we just went back to our usual routine of hanging out. Alec and Iggy kept in touch after that first visit. He showed me and Evan some of their old texts. It's normal stuff. Two young guys nerding out about video games, Marvel movies, Elon Musk. Iggy tried talking with Alec about girls, whether Alec liked anyone, that sort of thing. But he says that Alec brushed off these conversations with a self-deprecating

joke or shrug. To Iggy, he just seemed shy or disinterested. That's why Iggy didn't buy Alec's story about the Halloween party. Alec isn't the kind of guy who would crash a party or talk to complete strangers. Manassian told psychiatrists that he was too shy to talk to women. He couldn't even order a meal from a waitress. Turns out my suspicions and Iggy's were right. Alec eventually admitted that the whole Halloween story was made up. Fiction or not, that story is still important. It's a story about an outsider in an unfair, unjust world. A world where a supreme gentleman loses out to obnoxious brutes, and where women are the spoils of victory. It's a story that connects Alec to an ideology.

There was someone else I was eager to speak with about what it was like in Room 208. It was like a safe space to me compared to the hell that I went through growing up. That was miles, miles better for me. I began to make my first friends there. I mean, an actual group of friends. That was the first for me in high school, so I was ecstatic and, like, looked forward to hanging out with Evan and the others every day. This is another of Evan's classmates. We're calling her Leah. She was the

only girl in 208. Leah and Evan hadn't been in touch in years, so it took a while to track her down. As a group, like, we all got along pretty well, generally, but there were, again, a few people in the classroom that we did not necessarily get along with much. Like, you know, Alec. I remember, even from the very day that um I met him he seemed to be rather afraid of me he was very uh withdrawn yes but whenever I tried to approach him and try to say hi or greet him he would just shy away or curl up but then like revert totally back to normal once I was either a safe distance away from him or if my attention was on something else.

Like at the time, my first impressions were that maybe I had come on a little too strong and maybe I could just give him a little space. Maybe he's not used to meeting new people, but then I'd see the way that he greet the guys and be very confused. We spoke to some people who were staff at Thornley during this time off the record. They told us that Alec's aversion to women seemed genuine. I was pretty upset and angry because the way he treated me compared to everybody else, I felt like he was doing it on purpose to anger me.

Talia, it didn't seem like Alec was scared of girls. It felt like he wanted to make her feel bad, just for existing. Maybe he was doing it to, like, not only spite me, but maybe he was trying to say something to me that he just didn't have the guts to tell me to my face, you know? So whenever I tried to confront him about it, he would just shy away from me and then get me all the more angrier.

So it would go on in a cycle until I gave up. In hindsight, Alec's behavior and how he treated Leah seemed like obvious red flags. But none of his classmates, not even Iggy, who remained close with Alec, had any idea what was coming. Like most of us, Iggy learned about the attack from the news. I saw Alec's name just right there. And I'm like, oh damn, Alec Manassian. Oh, but that's not my friend Alec Manassian, that's like another guy right?

I'm like huh? No that can't be, that can't be. No first I sent a text to Alec, hey Alec how are you? Because if he like you know if he texts me back then I would have said to him, hey Alec search your name on Google. But he didn't return Iggy's text. Pretty soon it was clear that Alec was behind the attack. Iggy was actually close to the scene, so he headed over on his bike. So, you know, I biked to like right up to the police tape just to see, like, what the crime scene's like. And there was, like, a body just lying there with a tarp over it.

He sent one last text that day. Alec, I heard what you did. It was deplorable. I'm disappointed in you. I'm disappointed in you. Manassian's psych evaluations revealed that he had regularly fantasized about killing people while he was still in high school. He spent a lot of time looking at mass shootings online, and he'd do this when he was upset about being bullied. When psychiatrists asked why he never committed an attack in high school, he told them that he didn't have a way of getting a gun.

And back then, he didn't have the will to go through with it. How do you feel now knowing that he was looking at mass attacks and school shootings in that period? It makes my skin crawl, to be honest. I've thought about, you know, alternate realities in which he did get his hands on a gun and did do a school shooting. It's not easy to think about, to know that he wanted to do that to us. The psych reports make it clear that Alec's isolation and feelings of frustration grew more intense after high school. He talked about being rejected by a woman in college

and told the doctors that he'd be naive for expecting to find a girlfriend. In 2017, he left college and enlisted in the army, but was released before completing basic training. He also had trouble holding down a job. If Alec was frustrated by any of this, he kept it to himself. I mean, if he did felt ashamed or disappointed, I wouldn't have detected it in his voice or in his demeanor. In fact, not long before the attack, things actually looked like they might be turning around for Alec. He was scheduled to start a new job as a programmer on April 30th,

a week after the attack. He told the psychiatrist that he had already convinced himself he was going to fail at that job too. He was just going about his life, but he wasn't talking to anyone about how he felt on the inside. I started thinking that it's unfair that certain guys will not get any love and affection from girls. Okay.

What do you mean by certain guys? Such as me, that are very nice and act gentlemanly. Right, right, right. Are there other guys? Did you find other guys that are the same? I know of several other guys over the internet who feel the same way, but I know they are, I would consider them too cowardly to act on their anger. During one of his psych evaluations, Alec told a psychiatrist that he enjoyed reading degrading comments about women online. He'd read them over and over again and said he liked to hear about women being put down.

Alec told doctors that he found relief in explanations of why women didn't go for men like him. And in knowing that he wasn't the only one who felt left out. So on the internet, what were you talking about in terms of? Specifically certain boards on 4chan. Oh, okay, 4chan. I'm familiar with 4chan. Sites like 4chan

can be confusing if you're not deeply immersed in internet culture. So 4chan is basically it's an old-style bulletin board you might find from the 1980s.

There's nothing fancy about it, but it does collect a certain group of individuals, hackers, and guys predominantly who love to push the envelope. 4chan is huge. There are dozens of boards devoted to totally innocuous things. Movies, pop culture, whatever. But the boards Alec was on?

They were different. At the time of the van attack, they were ground zero for most of the racist, misogynist, and white supremacist content on the site. Every woman goes home and gets in bed with an alpha male. They like the concept of beta males, but allies don't get laid. 4chan wasn't the only site popular with trolls and incels in 2018, and Alec was spending time on a lot of them. Each individual site might have a different focus, but their ideologies overlapped when it came to women. These men believe they're victims of women, of male beauty standards.

Women are the object of their desire, but also the root of their misery. A couple of months after Evan and I got that USB key with Alec's police interview, we got word Alec was going to be in court for one of the pretrial hearings. The hearing focused on Alec's laptop and cell phone. The judge says three encrypted electronic devices seized were unable to be cracked. Police have tried since his arrest, even hiring experts to help. The authorities wanted to know who he had been in touch with leading up to the attack. This was Evan's chance to see Alec

in person, and Iggy wanted to join us too, so the three of us made plans to get to the courthouse early. Do you know what time the thing will start? 10 a.m. We got like 10 minutes? Yep.

Here, I'll get the last one. We weren't allowed to record in court, so I took notes. Eventually, Alec was let in by the court officer. Evan was sitting next to me. It was nerve wracking and I actually, I needed to reach out to you to hold your hand. I had to hold your hand because it was like, okay, this is a bit of a shock to my system seeing him in the flesh. I wasn't ready for it. It was a long hearing with a lot of back and forth between the Crown and the defense.

But Iggy and Evan were entirely focused on Alec. OK, that was that. Now, that was something, you know, you're seeing. That, no, that was something. You know, you're seeing, well, you're seeing our old high school friend who is now a, well, I guess a criminal, right? I was going to say terrorist, but I don't know if that's technically correct. I mean, if you want my opinion, I would say that he kind of is a terrorist because terrorism, he's a criminal either way, but terrorism is when you commit a heinous act, like you destroy public property or you kill people in the name of an ideology, whether it's a religion or a political party or just any kind of

like ideology that causes you to have allegiance. So in this case, his incel ideology? Yes. I think it's terrorism. Right, right. That's just me. The Crown and the defense ended up coming to an agreement out of court, and Alec eventually handed over his passcodes. What investigators discovered reinforced what Alec had told police and psychiatrists.

It may not have been apparent to anyone in his life, but Alec had been lurking on incel sites since about 2015. He'd spent years in forums that celebrated or even encouraged precisely the kind of attack he'd go on to commit. What came to light after police got access to his devices was that he'd been looking up incel killings in the month before his attack So I wanted to know more about the sites where these killers are often celebrated and why their message, a message of hate and hopelessness is resonating with so many young men is resonating with so many young men. Next time on Boys Like Me.

So you've got like this huge excess of males and they've really got nothing to look forward to. Their feelings mean fucking nothing to anyone. And well, they've pretty much got two choices. They can either drop out or kill themselves. The first time I wanted to kill myself was in winter of 2010, right after I turned 18. These conversations are real. The violent misogyny that they're talking about is real. I think it's really dangerous to talk about it in terms of it being shitposting or dark humor and not taking those threats seriously. Boys Like Me was created by me, Ellen Chloe Bateman.

The series is produced by me, Chris McEnroe, Scott Dobson, and Michael Catano. Michael Catano is our head writer. Additional writing by Scott Dobson. Additional production by Evan Mead. Eunice Kim is our associate producer. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Sound design by Michael Catano. Chris Oak is our story editor. Damon Fairless is our senior producer. And the executive producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Additional audio from RT News and Fox News. If you like the series, we'd really appreciate it if you'd take the time to rate it and review it.

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