In January, more than a dozen fiberglass garden planters arrived at the Ontario Forensics Pathology Service, a glassy, 660,000-square-foot facility in North Toronto. It was a cold winter, even by Canadian standards, and the 400-pound faux-rock containers—destined for installation in the city that spring—were frozen solid. After letting them thaw for a few days, Dr. Kathy Gruspier began conducting X-rays. When she saw that one of them contained a foreign object, she called Detective-Sergeant Hank Idsinga, a hulking homicide cop with the Toronto Police Service. Idsinga’s team had helped locate the planters at a private residence on a quiet suburban drive in Leaside and shipped them to Gruspier. “I think there’s going to be something in these planters,” Idsinga remembers Gruspier saying. “But it could just be a chunk of ice, I don’t know.” He and his team drove to the lab. By then, the containers had been there for 10 days and were starting to emit a foul odor. In the forensic-examination bay, the police watched Gruspier saw the planter she had X-rayed in half. She peeled away the sides to reveal a human head, torsos, and limbs. Through dental and fingerprint analyses, Gruspier’s team eventually separated seven sets of remains.

It is hard to overstate how shocking the discovery and its coverage in the press have been in a country where homicide is infrequent and serial killers are almost unheard of. In order of quantity, criminal charges in Canada predominantly relate to theft and other behavior that falls under the legal heading of “mischief”—destruction of property, for example, or preventing a fellow Canadian from enjoying his or her property. In 2016, there were 611 homicide victims in the entire country. (The state of Ohio had 627 that year.) The most recent serial-murder case involved a 51-year-old nurse who lethally injected several elderly patients with insulin between 2007 and 2016. Homicide is so rare that Gruspier, a 56-year-old single mom, is the country’s only full-time forensic anthropologist. But suddenly, newspapers from the New York Post to the Daily Mail were reporting on a series of murders worthy of a Stephen King novel in which immigrants’ entry into Toronto’s gay subculture proved their undoing. The frothiest tabloid coverage surrounding the case played up its tenuous connection to the horror author’s 1975 short story, “The Lawnmower Man.”

As the winter gave way to spring, investigators continued to sort through their grisly yield. By early June their case had grown to include eight victims. Six of them—Skandaraj Navaratnam, Majeed Kayhan, Abdulbasir Faizi, Soroush Mahmudi, Selim Esen, and Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam—were of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. Navaratnam was a 40-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil refugee; Kayhan was a 58-year-old Afghani man, who was married and had a son; Faizi, 42, had been born in Afghanistan but emigrated from Iran, and was married and had a family; Mahmudi, 50, was from Iran and lived with his Sri Lankan wife and stepson; and Esen, 44, was a Turkish citizen. More than half of Toronto’s 2.7 million residents identify as a visible minority: around 15 percent are South Asian, and 1 percent come from the Middle East. The city is known for its inclusiveness, but it can still be a challenging place for new Canadian citizens. Nearly all of the men—as well as two other victims, Dean Lisowick, 47, and Andrew Kinsman, 49—had disappeared from the Church and Wellesley neighborhood, also known as Toronto’s Gay Village, between 2010 and 2017. Though the area’s history as an L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly enclave dates back years, of late, gentrification in the Village has driven up the cost of rent, and the area mainly functions now as a meeting place for people who connect online and come into town for drinks. Several of the victims’ families have said they didn’t know of their loved ones’ visits to the Village at all, that the men were leading double lives.

In November 2012, a month after Kayhan’s disappearance, the Toronto Police Service convened a task force to find out what had happened. Within a few months, they had uncovered clues to suggest Navaratnam had met with foul play. The leads, which initially pointed to an online cannibalism ring, were dismissed as fantastical and eventually ruled out, but they brought Idsinga, a 30-year police veteran, onto the case. Investigators began by interviewing Navaratnam’s friends. According to multiple reports, this included a then 60-year-old landscape designer, Bruce McArthur. (Toronto police refuse to confirm whether they spoke with McArthur at that time.) Known as “Santa” for his seasonal employment at a shopping mall, McArthur was a twinkle-eyed grandfather who liked tropical birds and hated Donald Trump. Born in rural Ontario in 1951, he graduated from Fenelon Falls Secondary School, married his high-school sweetheart, and became a salesman, first at Stanfield’s and then at McGregor Socks, both Canadian garment manufacturers. The couple had a son and a daughter, now grown.