Bruce McArthur Case

Background: Bruce McArthur

Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur was born on 8 October 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario. He was the second child and only son of Malcolm and Islay McArthur. He grew up on a farm near Argyle in the Kawartha Lakes district. He attended high school in Fenelon Falls.

McArthur’s mother and father served as foster parents to troubled children from Toronto. They had a good reputation in the community. But there were troubles in the household. Malcolm and Islay were, respectively, Presbyterian and Catholic, which caused dissent in the home. McArthur would side with his mother, earning his father’s scorn.

As a youth, McArthur was stockily built but effeminate. He later told a therapist that he believed his father had suspected him of being gay and tried to suppress it through a regime of manual labour. McArthur felt his father gave him an unfair share of the farm’s workload and resented him for it.

After high school, McArthur completed a two-year business course at a college in Barrie. At age 23, he married Janice Campbell. They would have two children: Melanie and Todd. McArthur then began working as a buyer’s assistant for Eaton’s department store in downtown Toronto. That position eventually led to a job as a travelling salesman for McGregor Hosiery. McArthur moved his family to Oshawa. He later became a merchandising representative for Stanfield’s Limited, a clothing manufacturer.

Family Dysfunction and Coming Out

For years, Bruce McArthur presented himself as a conventional member of his community: a family man who was productively employed and was active in his Presbyterian Church. But there were problems in the McArthur home. Todd would later claim that his father was physically abusive. As a teenager, Todd was in trouble for repeatedly making obscene phone calls. He would eventually serve time in jail for obscenity and harassment convictions.

Sometime in the early 1990s, McArthur told his wife that he was gay and had been sexually involved with men. They continued to live together but experienced financial difficulties due to McArthur’s loss of employment and Todd’s legal expenses. In 1997, McArthur and Janice separated. In 1999, he declared bankruptcy.

McArthur moved into an apartment in Toronto and started working as a landscaper. He frequented bars in Toronto’s Gay Village — the stretch of Church Street roughly between College Street and Bloor Street. He gained a reputation for being obsessive and controlling and for engaging in rough sex. When a four-year relationship he’d had with another man ended around the time his divorce was finalized, McArthur began seeing a psychiatrist and was prescribed the anti-depressant Prozac. He was also taking the muscle relaxant amyl nitrite, also known as “poppers,” which he used as a sex aid.

First Violent Episode

On 31 October 2001, McArthur assaulted and injured a male sex worker with an iron pipe. He turned himself into police and was sentenced to a year of house arrest, followed by a six-month curfew and three years probation. He was forbidden to possess amyl nitrite and was barred from the Village for the period of his probation. McArthur was obliged to undertake anger management counselling and to submit his DNA to a database. He later successfully applied for a pardon, and so avoided having a criminal record. McArthur once again patronized bars in the Village. He was active on numerous gay dating websites.

Landscaping Business

In 2003, Bruce McArthur established a landscaping business called Artistic Design. He built up an extensive clientele and was in demand for his work, particularly among older, wealthy women, who found him charming. Because he could not keep his equipment in his apartment, he made an arrangement with some of his customers who had space on their properties. In return for free landscaping work, they would provide McArthur with storage space.

On the job, McArthur was often seen in the company of an older white man with whom he seemed to be romantically involved, and with men who seemed to be of Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern descent. In the off-season, McArthur made floral gifts for charities and appeared as Santa Claus at a shopping mall.

The First Missing Persons

On 6 September 2010, Skandaraj Navaratnam, an immigrant from Sri Lanka, disappeared after having last been seen at a Village bar. He had been involved, off and on, with Bruce McArthur. Police found no trace of Navaratnam. Two other Asian immigrants were also reported missing. Abdulbasir Faizi was last seen on 29 December 2010. Majeed Kayhan went missing on 14 October 2012. Although Faizi had a wife and a home in Brampton, both men were known in the Village.

In November 2012, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) launched an investigation called Project Houston to look for the three missing men. Investigators learned that besides their ethnic backgrounds and connections to the gay community, the three missing men had one other thing in common: their acquaintance with Bruce McArthur. Police interviewed McArthur but could find no reason to consider him a suspect. They had no evidence that the disappearances were linked, or that a serial killer was stalking the Village. Project Houston was discontinued after 18 months.

The TPS would later face harsh criticism for their handling of the investigation, and for refusing to consider the disappearances the result of a serial killer. Of particular concern was the failure of the police in June 2016 to follow up on an incident in which McArthur had allegedly choked a man during a sexual encounter.

On 30 April 2017, Selim Esen, a Turkish immigrant, was reported missing. He had struggled with drug addiction, and police did not initially connect his case with any other disappearances. Andrew Kinsman went missing from his home in Toronto’s Cabbagetown area on 26 June. Unlike the other missing men, Kinsman was not of Asian background. He was known as a social activist in the LGBTQ2 community.

Because of Kinsman’s disappearance, the TPS organized a new task force, Project Prism, on 14 August 2017. It had been seven years since the disappearance of Skandaraj Navaratnam. Fear that a serial killer was on the loose now gripped the Village, even though police had not yet come to that conclusion.

Investigation and Arrest

In the early summer of 2017, detectives searching Kinsman’s apartment found the name “Bruce” written on a calendar. Further investigation led them to a vehicle that had formerly belonged to Bruce McArthur. On 8 November 2017, a forensic examination of the vehicle revealed traces of Kinsman’s blood. McArthur was considered a suspect and was put under surveillance. Police covertly searched his apartment and two of his hard drives. The evidence revealed by analysis of the computer data included photographs of the missing men, some of them photos of Esen and Kinsman that were taken after they had died.

TPS officers arrested McArthur in his apartment on 18 January 2018. At the time of his arrest, McArthur had a young man he’d met through a gay dating website handcuffed to his bed.

On the day McArthur was arrested, police began forensic searches at four properties in Toronto and one in the town of Madoc. All were linked to McArthur’s landscaping business. The search was later expanded to other locations within and outside Toronto. Human remains were found hidden in planter boxes in the yard of a residence in the Toronto neighbourhood of Leaside, and in a ravine adjacent to the property. They were eventually identified as those of Kinsman, Navaratnam, Esen, Faizi and Kayhan. Police also found the remains of three other victims: Soroush Mahmudi, an Iranian refugee; Dean Lisowick, a homeless man with mental health issues; and Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, a Sri Lankan asylum seeker who had been under a deportation order and was the only victim with no clear ties to the Village.

A meticulous search of McArthur’s apartment turned up more than 1,800 pieces of evidence, including digital photographs and a notebook that had belonged to Esen. Ziplock bags containing hair from some of the victims were found in a shed that McArthur kept near Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The McArthur case forensic search was the largest in Toronto police history.

McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, making a trial unnecessary. On 8 February 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 25 years.

Legacy

As a result of their handling of the Bruce McArthur case, the Toronto Police Service faced allegations of racism, homophobia and indifference toward people experiencing homelessness. As a result, the TPS launched an internal review, and a new missing persons unit went into operation in July 2018. The TPS was also subject to an external review by the civilian Toronto Police Service Board (TPSB).