Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, but why did it take 16 years to catch the Toronto serial killer?
Now, award-winning journalist Mobeen Azhar is delving into a community that is still grieving to explore the unanswered questions around McArthur and his numerous crimes, for new‘It was a case that got personal quite quickly,’ Azhar explains to Metro.co.uk ahead of thedoc launch. ‘Like many of McArthur’s victims, I’m a gay man with brown skin and so I started thinking how this happened and what the motivation may be.
The police linked this to Bruce McArthur, and were alerted to how he had taken a vehicle matching this description to a scrapyard. When the caravan was found – not yet scrapped, still untidy and full of old coffee cups – forensics tested the vehicle and found traces of blood that matched Andrew’s DNA.While this still wasn’t enough evidence to issue an arrest for McArthur, it allowed the police to put him under surveillance.
Karen still lives with her husband at the house where the human remains of Bruce’s eight victims were discovered ‘Am I comfortable that they were there and that I often watered those pots? No, absolutely not, but the flesh pieces are not the men,’ Karen tells Metro.co.uk. ‘It was a really long process to gain trust to get people to talk,’ Azhar explains. ‘But so many people wanted to contribute to a cultural conversation about all of our communities and how we make each other sager.’
‘When I learned he was a serial killer I honestly started to think I had actually died and just hadn’t realised it yet, or that I would close my eyes and open them at any point and I would be right back there and no time had passed,’ he says. McArthur is believed to prey on those, like Josh, who were particularly helpless, exploiting these vulnerabilities in order to keep his crimes under wraps for so long.
Soroush Mahmudi, a refugee from Iran with no family in the country, was also killed by McArthur in 2014.