Toronto's Gay Village Murders

Author:
Rupert Taylor
Updated:
Jul 9, 2024

Toronto's gay village is close to downtown.
AILAFM on Flickr

A Harbinger of Murder

On Halloween in 2001, a Toronto man hooked up with a male hustler. In his apartment, the prostitute was attacked with a metal pipe. The attacker said in court: “I don’t know why I did it.”

He received a two-year suspended sentence and the affair was written off as just one of those things. However, it was a harbinger of worse to come—much worse.

The First Victims

Skandaraj Navaratnam, known to his friends as Skanda, had emigrated to Canada from Sri Lanka. Skanda was gay and like most local men of his orientation, he lived in Toronto's gay village in the midtown area of the city.

LBGTQ+ people could live and socialize there in relative safety away from the knuckleheads who sometimes attacked them. It likely did not occur to them that a predator might be inside the community.

In 1999, Skanda began a relationship with a man called Bruce McArthur who was a landscaper and part-time mall Santa.

A friend bumped into Navaratnam in 2009 and thought he was in poor shape. The friend, Kevin Nash, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

“He looked scared, and I had to ask him if Bruce had hurt him, and he said no, but he was afraid of Bruce's violent behaviour.”

McArthur was active on numerous gay dating websites that featured bondage and sadomasochism. He had developed a reputation in the gay village for wanting rough sex and several bars had banned him.

The last time Skanda was seen alive was on September 6, 2010; he was leaving a gay bar in the company of an unidentified man.

Abdulbasir Faizi was living a double life. He had a wife and children and secretly spent time in gay bars picking up strangers for sex. On December 29, 2010, he called his wife saying he was working late. He never returned home.

The disappearance of two gay men in similar circumstances drew the attention of police. A unit code named Project Houston was formed to investigate.

In McArthur's youth, homosexuality was illegal in Canada and the idea of a pride parade was unthinkable.
Chris Cheung on Flickr

Police Investigate Gay Disappearances

By the middle of 2013, police had identified another missing man who fit the profile of Navaratnam and Faizi—middle-aged gay men of south Asian origin. Majeed 'Hamid' Kayhan was also a bisexual man who spent time in gay bars. He went missing in October 2012.

The Project Houston team got an anonymous tip linking McArthur to two of the missing men. He was interviewed by a relatively inexperienced detective constable who a later inquiry determined carried out a sloppy interrogation.

The detective never checked to see if their suspect had a criminal record. Had he done so, the would have found that McArthur was responsible for the violent assault in 2001 to which he had pleaded guilty.

After 16 minutes, McArthur was released and Project Houston was shut down. But homosexual men continued to disappear from the gay village.

In August 2015, Soroush Mahmudi, 50, vanished, and, in January 2016, the same thing happened to Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37.

In June 2016, McArthur was arrested but not charged after a man complained he had been choked by him. McArthur convinced police the event was part of a consensual sex act.

In 2017, two more names, Selim Esen, 44, and Andrew Kinsman, 49, were added to the growing list of gay village habitues who were nowhere to be found.

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Police set up another task force, Project Prism, in June 2017, although, astonishingly, Police Chief Mark Saunders said he didn't believe a serial killer was on the loose.

One of the things that the FBI has shown since the ‘80s is that there’s a significant portion of serial killers who are primarily motivated by sexually sadistic fantasies and this idea of violent sex, dominating another person, of having complete control over them. Serial killers also tend to have a pattern in the victims that they select.

— Jooyoung Lee, University of Toronto associate professor of sociology

Serial Killer Captured

The investigation was difficult. After years of harassment, there was a toxic relationship between police and the gay community. Tom Hooper, a York University historian, noted:

“For both gay men in the 1970s and queer people of colour today, the police have been enforcers but not protectors. Isolation, combined with a fear of police, has marginalized members of our community and made them more vulnerable to violence.”

A breakthrough came when police found an entry on the calendar of the latest missing man, Andrew Kinsman. It simply read “Bruce” on June 26, 2017, the last day he was seen alive.

Then, CCTV footage showed Kinsman getting into a Dodge Caravan that was traced to Bruce McArthur. Police got a warrant to monitor his cellphone use and install a cloning device on his computer, where they found postmortem photos of his victims.

McArthur was put under 24-hour surveillance and, on January 18, 2018, he was seen entering his apartment with a young man. Police knocked on his door and McArthur opened it.

Right then and there he was arrested and charged with two murders. In the apartment police found his companion already tied to a bed with a black bag over his head.

Eight folders were found on McArthur's computer, each labelled with the name of one of his victims. There was a ninth named folder that was empty; it carried the name of the man police rescued when they apprehended the killer and he would have died by strangulation just as the previous eight men had.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence of his crimes, McArthur entered a guilty plea to eight counts of first-degree murder and received a life sentence with no hope of parole for 25 years.

Justice John McMahon noted that even if McArthur survived until he was 91 and applied for parole at the end of his sentence, it's extremely unlikely he would be released.

Motivation of Sexual Sadists

Bruce McArthur was born in 1951 and grew up in rural Ontario in a religious family at a time when homosexuality was considered deviant and abhorrent. He hid his sexual orientation by marrying and having children.

In the early 1990s, McArthur began dating men and revealed that he was gay to his wife. Divorce followed and McArthur was able to explore his sexuality.

One of the things he discovered was a fondness for dominant and submissive role playing. He posted on gay dating sites looking for submissive men with whom he could play out his fantasies. In addition, he sought out vulnerable people as his victims.

Sociologist Jooyoung Lee tells us how this predilection plays out:

“You have a person who is experimenting with rough sex, is immersing themselves in the world of bondage and domination, and they enjoy the power that they feel over another person. And, it gets to this tipping point where the violence in play escalates to a point where they feel swept up in the moment and the violence takes over and it becomes fatal. And, in the aftermath they relive those moments and realize how much they enjoyed killing."

As with many serial killers, McArthur kept mementos of his victims such as jewelry, photographs, and hair clippings. He would take these items out so he could enjoy a small rush reminiscent of the one he got when he killed. However, over time, the level of gratification wears off and the need to kill again surfaces.

Had McArthur not been caught, there's no doubt he would have gone on to claim more victims.

Bonus Factoids

Following the pipe assault in 2001, Bruce McArthur was given a pre-sentence psychiatric evaluation. The report said he showed “absolutely no signs of psychopathy,” and the likelihood that he would commit further violent crimes was “very minimal.”
Some murderers don't bother concealing their grim work and leave their victims where they fell. McArthur chose to conceal his handiwork and found a unique way of doing so. He dumped body parts into large planters that he tended for customers of his landscaping business.
Statistics Canada reports that “Between 2009 and 2021, the rate of homicide against First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women and girls was six times higher than the rate among their non-Indigenous counterparts.” While most victims were killed by someone known to them, a troublingly high number have died at the hands of strangers. Most often, the victims have been sex workers and police have had a poor record of solving these cases.