WARNING: this article contains graphic content.

A glimpse of a red van captured on surveillance video, a blurry shot of murder victim Andrew Kinsman getting in, and one word jotted down on a calendar: “Bruce.”

Seven years after Bruce McArthur murdered his first victim, police had the evidence that would, in the words of Crown lawyer Michael Cantlon, “crack the case open” — leading them to a serial killer who preyed on vulnerable men, took ritualistic photographs of their staged bodies and was possibly minutes away from a ninth murder the morning he was arrested.

The evidence, collected in the wake of Kinsman’s June 2017 disappearance, launched an unprecedented investigation that ultimately put McArthur, 67, under constant police surveillance. And so investigators were watching on Jan. 18, 2018 as McArthur accompanied a man up to his apartment and, fearing for his life, made the impromptu arrest of a man now known to have planned and executed eight murders.

Tied up in McArthur’s bedroom — confined as were past victims, inside the room where most of his murders took place — investigators found “John.” Just like most of McArthur’s other victims, he was a recent immigrant and was gay.

Unlike all the other victims, “John” made it out alive.

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“For years, members of the LGBTQ community believed that they were being targeted by a killer,” Cantlon said in his opening address to a packed court, on the first day of sentencing for McArthur, who pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder last week.

“They were right.”

The grave acknowledgement began a sombre reading of admitted facts, Cantlon unfurling in detail the deaths of each victim and the investigation that brought a killer down. The information, Cantlon warned members of the public Monday morning, would be disturbing.

“Please think carefully about whether or not you wish to expose yourself to the nature of the information that will be presented in court,” he told a full courtroom, one of the largest in the downtown courthouse.

In the final moments of reading out the facts, Cantlon himself struggled to finish, his voice catching as he spoke the victims’ names.

All the while McArthur sat nearly motionless, eyes open and mouth unmoving as his atrocities were exposed and, later, their toll relayed through victim impact statements.

“I believed for years that he had simply disappeared. But secretly I worried that he had been killed,” Phil Werren, a long-time close friend of McArthur’s first victim, Skanda Navaratnam, told the court.

“A life that was snuffed out by someone that knew him for close to 15 years,” said Kinsman’s sister Patricia Kinsman, telling the court she has a sadness that will not go away.

McArthur “strangled Andrew, dismembered him, threw him in a planter and then admired his work for 7 months,” she said, looking at McArthur as he sat in the prisoner’s box.

First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years, guaranteeing McArthur will be in jail until he is at least 91 years old.

But it’s possible his sentence for each count of first-degree murder will be served consecutively, assuring the killer would die in jail. Arguments are set to begin in court Tuesday.

For the first time since McArthur’s arrest, court heard how he came to be on police radar, with police piecing together surveillance footage from Kinsman’s apartment with knowledge he had meeting with a “Bruce.”

Toronto police Det. David Dickinson and a team of investigators determined — through distinctive van features including the absence of fog lights — the make and model of McArthur’s van: a 2004 Dodge caravan. They then sought vehicle registry information from Ontario’s Ministry of Transport, which produced 6,181 results in the Greather Toronto Area.

Of those, five owners were named Bruce.

But only one had any recent contact with Toronto police: McArthur, who in 2016 was arrested but not charged in connection to a report that McArthur had attempted to strangle a man. McArthur was made a person of interest.

One month before his arrest, police made a surrepticious search of McArthur’s apartment, downloading digital files off a USB drive and an external hard-drive, and an old desktop computer hard-drive.

It was there that investigators found the most incriminating evidence: reams of photos depicting most of his deceased victims, although McArthur had made attempts to delete them.

The images showed what Cantlon called “post-offence rituals:” including that McArthur posed his deceased victims and took photos of them, frequently using the same fur coat or hat, and sometimes placing a cigar in their mouth.

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The photos also sometimes showed a murder weapon: a rope attached to a metal bar. Court heard McArthur repeatedly killed by strangling his victims using a rope attached to a metal bar.

McArthur carefully organized those photos, creating sub-folders for each of his victims, their titles suggesting he didn’t know the names of all of his victims. The folder containing images of Selim Esen, his seventh victim, for instance, was labelled as “Turkish Guy.” Those for victims Soroush Mahmoudi and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam were simply “4” and “5,” respectively.

McArthur kept photos of the men both alive and dead. Forensic analysis showed McArthur would look through the images months or years later, or email the images to himself.

Read more: Why experts say we should investigate Bruce McArthur’s motive — even if we never get answers

Importantly, police located a ninth folder, labelled “John.” In it were photos of the man investigators had found tied up on McArthur’s bed on the day of the arrest. Forensic analysis showed that on the day of Kinsman’s murder, McArthur had searched for “John” and downloaded photos of him from social media.

The summary read out in court confirmed McArthur was interviewed in 2013 as part of Project Houston — the special Toronto police project investigating the disappearances of McArthur’s first three victims: Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan. That project ran from 2012 to 2014, but did not result in any charges.

Police interviewed McArthur on Nov. 11, 2013, after an analysis of Faizi and Navaratnam’s belongings revealed both men knew him. Police did not consider McArthur a suspect at the time, but treated him as a witness in a missing person’s case.

The killer admitted to police he knew both men. He told them he regularly socialized with Navaratnam at The Black Eagle, a Toronto bar, but denied having a sexual relationship with him. McArthur told police that he’d employed Kayhan and that they had had a sexual relationship, though McArthur said he’d broken it off.

Two weeks after he was interviewed, McArthur purchased a new van, the 2004 Dodge Caravan that would ultimately lead police to him.

Cantlon described new, detailed information about a June 20, 2016, incident in which a man told police McArthur had attempted to choke him, but the killer was released without charges.

The incident began when the man met McArthur inside his van, where he had removed the seat behind the driver’s seat so that there was room to lie down, revealing a plastic sheet on the floor and a fur coat on top of that. Court heard McArthur asked the victim to lie on the coat and instructed him to put an arm behind his back. Then, “with a look of determination on his face,” he “grabbed the victim’s throat and started strangling him,” Cantlon said.

The victim managed to roll away, escaped the van and called 911. McArthur went to the police station on his own and was arrested, but gave an exculpatory statement and McArthur was released without charges.

A brief summary of the facts read out in court last week revealed that the majority of the eight killings, spanning 2010 to 2017, were sexual in nature. McArthur dismembered the bodies of his victims “to avoid detection,” Cantlon said, then disposed of body parts at the Leaside home where he had worked as a gardener and stored his landscaping supplies.

McArthur also kept some items belonging to his victims, including a bracelet worn by his first victim, Navaratnam, jewelry from his sixth victim, Dean Lisowick, and the notebook kept by Esen, his seventh victim. Police also found a duffel bag belonging to McArthur that contained duct tape, a surgical glove, zip ties, a black bungee cord, rope and syringes, court heard.

In victim impact statements, more of which will be read Tuesday, friends, family and community members described not just the devastation of years and months of not knowing the fate of their loved ones, but the betrayal of their lives ending at the hands of someone who was part of their safe spaces, their “chosen family” as Rev. Deana Dudley of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto said.

“The men who were killed were our brothers. And for many people within the LGBTQ community, their murders have changed the way we look at the community forever. Even with the defendant in custody, it feels less safe. It feels less trustworthy. It feels less like home and family,” she said.

“For many of the men who knew the defendant, there is no safe place anymore.”

Lisowick’s daughter Emily Bourgeois never knew her biological father, but always wanted to one day bump into him.

In a statement read out by a Crown lawyer, as she listened to the hearing by phone, she said she hoped she would learn he turned his life around, that he had a happy home and a family.

“I will now always have to live with knowing I will never have a relationship with my father because of what happened.”