In the months before his January arrest, Toronto police tailed alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur as he travelled to landscaping gigs, Tim Hortons and fast-food restaurants, tracked his vehicle through the GTA, and covertly entered his apartment to search his room and access his digital files, newly released court documents show.

Unsealed by an Ontario judge Wednesday, the heavily redacted documents provide a partial look at Toronto police’s investigative efforts as they put together the pieces of a sprawling probe — one that would culminate with McArthur charged in the deaths of eight men who disappeared from Toronto’s Gay Village.

The new information pertains to Project Prism, the police task force probing the 2017 disappearances of Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Selim Esen, 44. The released documents are affidavits sworn by police to obtain the court’s authorization to search a home, track an individual, and more, and were unsealed after an application by the Star and other media.

After years of concern within Toronto’s Gay Village about the growing list of missing men, it was the June 2017 disappearance of Kinsman that brought McArthur, a 66-year-old landscaper, into police sights, the documents confirm.

And it was while police investigated McArthur in that case — first as a “person of interest,” then as a murder suspect — that officers began to suspect his allegedly deadly actions may not be confined to the Kinsman case.

“Clearly, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that McArthur could have been involved in the disappearance of Kinsman and possibly four other men, too,” wrote Det. Const. Joel Manherz in an October 2017 affidavit seeking the court’s permission to obtain data from Squirt.org, a gay chat website, to see who McArthur may have been communicating with.

As early as August 2017 police were connecting Kinsman’s disappearance to that of four other men McArthur is now alleged to have killed. Among the similarities noted by investigators: all of the missing men were middle-aged, bearded, frequented The Black Eagle — a bar in the Gay Village — and self-identified as “bears,” defined by police in the documents as “a larger, hairier man who projects an image of rugged masculinity.”

By early December, McArthur was a suspect in Kinsman’s death and a “person of interest” in four other disappearances. The police definition of “person of interest” refers to someone whose background or relationship to the victim warrants further investigation, “but no evidence currently exists to suggest culpability in the commission of the offence,” a police affidavit states.

It was also in December that Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders downplayed the concern that there was a serial killer targeting the Gay Village.

Meaghan Gray, spokesperson for the Toronto Police, said Wednesday that the service stands behind Saunders’ comments, noting that the newly released documents detail “officers’ theories on what may have happened, but as a police service, investigators need evidence to support their theories.”

McArthur is next scheduled to appear in court Friday. The eight men he is accused of killing between 2010 and 2017 are Kinsman, 49, Selim Esen, 44, Skanda Navaratnam, 40, Abdulbasir Faizi, 42, Majeed Kayhan, 58, Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam, 37, Dean Lisowick, 47, and Soroush Mahmudi, 50.

Their remains were found at a Leaside property where McArthur had worked as a landscaper, seven of them inside large planters, the eighth in a forested ravine that was exhaustively searched this summer.

The documents show police brought cadaver dogs to the home on Mallory Cres. two months before McArthur’s arrest, with negative results. A subsequent search on Jan. 19, one day after McArthur’s arrest in the deaths of Kinsman and Esen, led police to suspect there was crucial evidence inside the large planters.

According to one document, cadaver dogs “showed a strong interest” in the planters Jan. 19, but the planters were frozen to the ground and could not be moved. It wasn’t until the next day that police brought heaters to thaw the two largest planters and move them to the garage. They were eventually taken to the coroner’s office for further thawing and processing.

On Jan. 23, the dogs were brought again to the backyard of 53 Mallory Cres., where by now police had set up a tent. Both dogs “made a full indication on the tented area of the backyard, indicating the presence of human decomposition,” one court document reads.

The newly released documents show the extent to which Project Prism investigators drew on the work of a prior task force: Project Houston. That 18-month investigation probed the disappearances of alleged McArthur victims Navaratnam, Faizi, and Kayhan.

Project Houston ended in 2014 after police could find no criminal wrongdoing, and court documents unsealed last week show that during the probe investigators were starting to pick up on a pattern — that South Asian men were going missing from Toronto’s Gay Village — but focused on the wrong suspect.

In a December 2017 affidavit in which McArthur is named as a suspect in Kinsman’s murder, Det. Const. Joel Manherz references previous efforts to find the men in Project Houston. Kinsman, he notes, is the 5th gay male to have “vanished without a trace” from the Gay Village since 2010. “At this point, I believe they may all be related,” Manherz wrote.

All of the men went missing over holidays or special events, he noted: “Navaratnam over Labour Day weekend, Faizi over the Christmas holidays, Kayhan over Thanksgiving weekend, Esen over an Easter weekend and Kinsman over a Pride weekend.”

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It was within six weeks of Kinsman’s June 2017 disappearance that police identified McArthur as a person of interest in his disappearance — though it’s not immediately clear from the heavily redacted documents how this occurred. The documents reference multiple witnesses, including “an anonymous male caller” in July.

At this stage, the investigation into McArthur was ramping up, with officers attempting to retrace and observe his every move.

The tracking of his vehicle, police said in one affidavit, was necessary “to protect the public and police from the dangers of trying to follow the subject — who has proven himself to be a reckless driver” and would also prevent McArthur from realizing he was being watched.

Officers followed as McArthur frequented coffee shops, Loblaws, and “a lot of fast food establishments,” the documents say. His vehicle was “driven extensively on almost a daily basis,” generally leaving at 9 a.m. and returning at 9 p.m., and attending “multiple addresses, sometimes on multiple occasions, in Toronto and Mississauga,” one affidavit reads.

They note McArthur “repeatedly attended Agincourt Mall on the weekends for long periods of time.” During the investigation they learned it was because he was working as the mall’s Santa Claus.

Investigators also spoke to the management of McArthur’s apartment building and obtained a log of the use of his key fob, giving police a picture of his comings and goings from home between June and September of that year, the documents say. They also reviewed the building’s security footage.

Police later obtained a tracking warrant for McArthur’s cellphone, and together with McArthur’s “fob” logs put together a timeline for June 26, 2017, the day Kinsman was believed to have gone missing.

In November, police found Kinsman’s blood inside McArthur’s vehicle, the documents say. The owner of a Courtice auto parts shop previously told the Star that two Toronto investigators came to his shop in September and said they pulled up surveillance video of McArthur selling a maroon Dodge Caravan, which they then seized and towed.

One month later, on Dec. 5, police obtained a warrant to “covertly” search McArthur’s 19th-floor apartment. As first reported by the Star, this involved surrupticiously “cloning” McArthur’s computer, including copying and examining data, hard drives, memory sticks and more in an attempt to find “documents, records, photos, videos, objects or things of any kind.”

The documents say there was a close call the day the warrant was granted: Police had just gained entry to the unit when investigators determined, through tracking and physical surveillance, that McArthur appeared to be on his way home.

Police made another surreptitious entry two days later, going into McArthur’s room to copy devices and do a cursory search of the area, the documents state. Officers arrested McArthur just over a month later.

The documents state that, following the arrest, police seized five mobile phones, three laptops, two desktop computers, three digital cameras and about a dozen USB keys, among other electronic devices, from his apartment.

Wendy Gillis is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and policing. Reach her by email at wgillis@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @wendygillis