This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Bruce McArthur, the Canadian serial killer who preyed on the Toronto gay community for nearly a decade, has been given eight concurrent life sentences. He will not be eligible for parole until he is 91.

'Pain has no borders': loved ones recall victims of Toronto serial killer Read more

Passing sentence on Friday, Judge John McMahon described McArthur’s behaviour as “pure evil” and said he would have kept killing if he had not been apprehended by the police.

McMahon recognized McArthur’s guilty plea, but said it was highly unlikely he would ever be released on parole. “Although Mr McArthur has taken responsibility of his actions, there has been no evidence of remorse,” he said.

McArthur, 67, pleaded guilty last week to the first-degree murders of Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Dean Lisowick, Skandaraj (Skanda) Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam.

McArthur targeted men living on the margins of Canadian society, and their disappearances initially attracted little attention.

“All of the victims were vulnerable individuals … the accused exploited their vulnerabilities, whether immigration concerns, mental health challenges, or leading secret double lives,” said McMahon.

The judge acknowledged the devastating loss suffered by families and friends. “This court cannot give them what they want most: to have their loved one back,” he said.

McArthur, a well-known figure in Toronto’s gay bars, strangled and dismembered his victims.

During a sentencing hearing last week, the court heard that he also staged photos of some of his victims after they died, posing their corpses in a fur coat and hat and placing cigars in their mouths.

In submissions to the judge, assistant crown attorney Craig Harper said the term “serial killer” was “woefully inadequate to describe his moral blameworthiness … and heinousness of the offences”.

The crown also successfully requested that McArthur’s previous conviction for assault in 2003 be included in sentencing consideration. “The certainty that Mr McArthur will never leave prison is a fit result,” said Harper.

McArthur’s attorney, James Miglin, agreed that his crimes warranted the most serious consequences, but argued that the lack of even a “faint hope” of parole for half a century was unnecessarily harsh, given McArthur’s age and prior guilty plea.

McArthur, a married father of two, left his wife in the 1990s and moved from Oshawa in Ontario to Toronto.

His victims disappeared between 2010 and 2017. Most were of Middle Eastern or south Asian descent; several had struggled with addiction and homelessness. Most had frequented Toronto’s Gay Village, but several of them were not openly gay.

McArthur was arrested in January 2018. He was initially accused of killing six men and burying their remains in large flower planters at the home of a client where he stored tools for his landscaping business. More remains were later found in a ravine behind the house.

How alleged Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur went unnoticed Read more

McArthur declined to make any statement before the court. “I’ve spoken with my counsel and I don’t want to say anything,” he said.

McArthur’s sentencing was also tempered by revelations in court that police had missed a signifiant opportunity to detain McArthur in 2016, after he was accused of attempting to strangle a man in his van, but released without charge.

Sergeant Paul Gauthier has been charged with insubordination and neglect of duty in relation to the incident. Gauthier has said he is a “scapegoat” and rejected the accusations.

Toronto’s police chief, Mark Saunders, welcomed the sentence, saying: “I do not see [McArthur] in a public setting ever again.”

Saunders dismissed the suggestion that police could have acted sooner to arrest McArthur. “We have the luxury of hindsight right now,” he said.

But he acknowledged that the force needed to work to rebuild broken trust with the city’s LGBT community and pledged to cooperate with an inquiry into how police handle missing persons cases. “Our work is not done.”

• This article was amended on 11 February 2019. The main photo is not of McArthur’s home, as stated in an earlier caption.