An ordinary man of extraordinary beliefs — stealthily radical and rationally unhinged.

The guy on the bus, at the library computer terminal, sitting at Starbucks, strolling through his suburban neighbourhood, writing an exam.

You’d scarcely notice him.

A nobody. A zero.

A mass killer.

Alek Minassian, last seen in public making a bid for suicide-by-cop, wielding his wallet like a gun, tempting a police officer to shoot him. Because, by his own admission, he’d just fulfilled his mission — launching a revolution on behalf of all the unwilling celibates out there, the ForeverAlones, like himself, against the Chads and the Staceys he so envied and loathed.

He’d driven his rented van, one sunny spring morning, and plowed into as many innocent strangers as he could, caroming off bodies along a stretch of north Yonge Street. Young people, old people, more females than males. Leaving a trail of broken bodies, some of whom never knew what hit them.

Seize fame — infamy — as an avenger for incels, every involuntary celibate who’d been rejected by the cool girls, rendered oblivious by the cool boys.

“I felt it was time to take action and not just sit on the side lines and just, ah, fester in my own sadness.”

So this is how we see him now, in a white boiler suit — jail duds — matter-of-factly describing the events of April 23, 2018, mere hours removed from the abomination that upended a city: 10 killed, 16 injured, some critically. Families plunged into grief.

In a second floor interview room at 32 Division, as captured on the police video recording, Minassian is sprawled in a chair, sitting across from an interrogator who identifies himself as Det. Rob Thomas, with the Toronto police sex crimes unit. And right there was the first clue, an anomaly really, because it’s not a homicide investigator conducting the interview.

It’s 10:46 p.m. and Thomas must already know so much more than he lets on. The cop, so amiable and polite, feigns ignorance about the inner workings of stuff like 4chan and R9K and POL — a random online messaging board, the initials standing for “politically incorrect.”

Minassian lawyers up almost immediately, requesting duty counsel but no one has arrived yet. Over the phone, duty counsel has advised him to say nothing until he gets there.

It could have ended right then and there. But Thomas is a clever interviewer. From a starting point of say nothing — “I don’t wish to answer that” in response to banal questions — Thomas gently entices Minassian into an ever-expanding narrative of events. Seduces him. Plays on the 25-year-old’s vanity, cajoles, flatters his intelligence, becomes his confessor. A remarkable skill, the art of the self-implicating interview. And as the minutes turn into hours, Minassian can’t resist.

“You don’t have to answer questions, okay, but you need to understand something here Alek, I still have to ask you questions, okay. I’m not doing this to make you feel intimidated or to make you scared or to say things that you don’t want to hear, okay, but the bottom line is we have a very difficult job to do today and this is a very important matter that we’re dealing with, alright. So I’m going to ask you questions, if you don’t want to answer them, you can tell me you don’t want to answer them or you don’t have to say anything at all. I totally understand that, but as long as we can still maintain that respect that we talked about at the beginning, is that cool?”

From a posture of detachment — “I believe I may have been arrested for something similar to murder,” Minassian says blandly early on when asked about how he came to be in this room — the suspect is lured into a fulsome exposition of motive and intent and earnest explanation, because he clearly wants to be comprehended, to plant his flag here, at the heart of this atrocity.

Yes, of course he understands the meaning of first-degree murder.

“It’s premeditated murder and completely intentional and considered to be what’s known as in cold blood.”

Cautioned repeatedly — because this interview must withstand any legal challenges — Minassian goes on and on and on. He practically revels in his social misfit-ness, articulating the frustrations of an eternal outsider whose positive qualities have never been appreciated, certainly not by the elusive opposite sex.

Thomas deftly induces Minassian to peel back layers but it quickly becomes obvious his resentments, his bitterness, are very close to the surface, particularly towards women. “I would say that sometimes I am a bit upset that they choose to ah date ah obnoxious men instead of a gentleman.”

He is a gentleman.

“Because I feel that ah it’s illogical to be ah dating such men when they can be dating a gentleman instead.”

Thomas, laying on the blandishments: “You’re not a bad-looking guy.”

Minassian: “Thank you.”

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Minassian recalls the moment it struck home, the utter disinterest of women towards him. A Halloween house party in 2013.

“I walked in and attempted to socialize with some ah girls, ah however they all laughed at me and ah held the arms of the ah big guys instead … I felt very angry that they would because I consider myself a supreme gentleman … I was angry that they would um give their love and attention to obnoxious brutes.”

He began to explore, share, his grudges online, on a 4chan message board and other platforms, finding like-minded social media travellers, a community of males seething with umbrage. “The topic is usually ah frustrations … an inability to lose one’s virginity, specifically for young males.”

The incel subculture, he meant, denied both romance and sexual intimacy. The ForeverAlones, in one forum.

Using a code name, on another platform, “we discussed our uh frustrations at um society and being unable to get laid and we were plotting ah timed strikes … on society in order to ah confuse and ah shape the foundations, just to put all the ah normies in a state of panic.”

Normies were a strata below Chads and Staceys, but above the incels, vox populi basically. “We don’t necessarily wish to kill the normies but we do wish to subjugate them in order to make them understand that our type is ah the more superior one.”

It was in these forums, Minassian claimed, that he conversed with a pair of incel hero/martyrs — Elliot Rodgers and Chris Harper-Mercer — self-pitying, misogynistic men who would weaponize their hatred as mass murderers in the U.S. Minassian further alleged he’d communicated with Rodgers mere days before the Californian went on his “mission.” Afterwards: “I felt kind of proud of him for ah his acts of bravery.”

He was inspired. Although the plan, the van attack scheme, didn’t take shape in his brain, says Minassian, until only about a month before the carnage on Yonge Street. Made his preparations — renting a van, Googled map routes — around his exams at Seneca College. Wanted a van that was not so big that he couldn’t manoeuvre it easily across sidewalks but big enough that it would cause considerable damage. Deaths.

“How the foundations of the world would be shooken by this event.”

On the morning of that awful day, Minassian says he woke up around 7 a.m., brushed his teeth, had breakfast, went for a walk, picked up his rental van, posted a Facebook message “stating that the Incel rebellion has already begun.’’

Set forth against an unsuspecting metropolis, a random assortment of pedestrians.

It would end only, Minassian tells Thomas, because somebody splashed a drink on his windshield. He couldn’t see and didn’t want to risk crashing the van, hurting himself.

Just as, when the officer who confronted him couldn’t be goaded into using his gun, Minassian submitted without resistance. “I realized I had not just but to get on the ground because I was probably going to be ah tackled anyway or Tased and if I’m going to live, I’d rather not encounter a physically painful experience, so I decided I have no choice but to admit defeat at that point.”

Defeated but not demoralized or remorseful.

“I feel like ah I accomplished my mission.”

At 4:18:20, on the morning of April 24, the video recorder is turned off.

Minassian will go on trial before a judge alone in February, charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder.