A relative of Navaratnam meets press after judgment. Inset: Kanagaratnam and Navaratnam
A Toronto serial killer who murdered eight men including two Sri Lankan was sentenced to life in prison last week.
Bruce McArthur, a 67-year-old landscaper, who was credited with beautifying upscale residences, killed and dismembered eight men in his high-rise apartment and mixed their remains in flower planters which the police recovered from some properties in Toronto.
Some of his victims were connected to the Toronto gay village and according to police records the man has murdered them in a killing spree stretching from 2010 to 2017 ‘hiding in plain sight’. He has staged their bodies, dressed them in a fur coat with unlit cigars stuck in their mouths, and taken their pictures which he stored in digital files in his computer.
He was to claim his ninth victim he named only as ‘John’ when police raided his apartment and arrested McAarther, saving the life of the intended victim. He was found tied to McArthur’s bed. His name has not been released.
A duffle bag containing his tools of murder – a duct tape, a surgical glove, rope, zip ties, a black bungee cord and syringes – was found in his apartment. The serial killer, a grandfather and a former mall Santa, had kept personal belongings of his victims, most of them vulnerable people like new immigrants or refugees waiting for their asylum clearance.
Sri Lankan Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40, was his first victim. He was a landscaper who had worked with McArthur and went missing in September 2010. Navaratnam, known as Skanda, had met the alleged killer in 1999 and they began a relationship in the early 2000s, according to a friend who knew the Sri Lankan.
“Navaratnam started working for him as a landscaper,” said a person who spoke to Toronto Star daily. Another friend said he wasn’t aware of a relationship with McArthur, but did confirm to CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) that the two knew each other. “Skanda introduced me back in 2008 or 2009 to McArthur as somebody he knew,” he said.
Navaratnam has been described as “incredibly social, gregarious, outgoing,” but he never spoke about his family. The friend said, occasionally he would relay concerns about immigration authorities, as he was a refugee from Sri Lanka, and what would happen if he went back to his family there.
The two friends eventually drifted apart, but he bumped into Navaratnam one last time at a nightclub in 2008. “We hugged, I talked to him about everything,” he told the Star. “He was still doing the landscaping, was still with Bruce at the time, and that’s where we ended the conversation.”
Another friend said he saw Navaratnam at a Starbucks the day before he went missing. “He was all excited because he had a dog.” When he was not seen after 2010 his friends and relatives had thought he had gone underground for fear of being deported to Sri Lanka after his request for asylum failed.
A friend of Navaratnam told a magazine, in June 2013 that he may have gone into hiding. Another person who knew him told the magazine: “When he disappeared, it was a shock to all of us. I think something probably scared him. Skanda was a political refugee from Sri Lanka. He was brought here because he got into some trouble with the Sri Lankan government. It was political. I think he was [an activist].”
“I know he couldn’t stay in Sri Lanka because he would have been killed,” he said. “It was not unusual for Navaratnam to disappear for short periods of time, but, three years is exceptionally long”.
McArthur’s eighth victim was 37-year-old Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam who had been living in Scarborough after coming to Canada from Sri Lanka in 2010 and was not reported missing. He was not linked to the Gay Village like the other seven men. He was last seen leaving a now-defunct nightclub.
According to the CBC Kanagaratnam had come to Canada along with 492 Sri Lankan asylum seekers brought to shore off the B.C. coast in August 2010 after a three-month journey from Thailand
The passengers claimed refugee status but were detained on suspicion that some of them had links to the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). According to media reports Kanagaratnam lost his appeal for asylum and became homeless.
Friends and relatives thought that Kanagaratnam had gone into hiding after his refugee claim was rejected. His family had last heard from him in August 2015.
The other victims were Andrew Kinsman, 49, Selim Esen, 44, Abdulbasir Faizi, 44, Dean Lisowick, 47, Soroush Mahmudi, 50, and Majeed Kayhan, 58.
McArthur sought out men marginalized by their sexuality, ethnicity, immigration status or poverty. Most of his victims were refugees or immigrants. Several struggled with substance abuse. Some had not revealed whether they were gay.
The break in the case came in June 2017, when Kinsman, a white, Canadian-born activist with deep ties to the community, went missing. Police related McArthur to the missing men when the investigators saw the name ‘Bruce’ scribbled on Kinsman’s diary.
Keeping the duffle bag with him after discarding the vehicles related to the killings was evidence that the killer intended to continue with his murder spree, according to police investigators.
Toronto police came under heavy fire for their alleged lethargic attitude towards the investigations. A Toronto police officer has been charged with insubordination and neglect of duty in connection with the investigation into the serial killer. The charge is connected to an incident in 2016 when McArthur was interviewed by police after a man said he choked him during sex. No criminal charges were laid at the time. McAthur killed two more men after he was released without further investigations.
McArthur murdered men for “his own warped and sick gratification,” the judge said on February 8 as he sentenced McArthur to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
The ruling means McArthur will be 91 before he can apply for any form of release, which the judge said he was highly unlikely to receive.
“Although he has taken responsibility by pleading guilty, there has been no evidence of remorse,” said Justice John McMahon adding that ‘he would have continued to kill if he wasn’t caught.’ – newstrails.com
