The frying pan was the only thing out of place. It lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, apparently knocked from the stove where Andrew Kinsman, a skilled but clumsy cook, could often be heard banging about.

Two days had passed since his neighbours heard the sounds of his cooking, or his familiar footfall on the stairs — heavy and stiff from knee replacements due to cancer. He hadn’t returned text messages or emails. The garbage wasn’t put out, the first time Kinsman, the diligent superintendent of the charming eight-unit building at 71 Winchester St., had ever missed pickup without arranging for a stand-in.

And so, a trio of neighbours used a spare key to go into Kinsman’s apartment at dinner time, two days after the 49-year-old last left his home on the late-June Monday after Pride. On his way out, sporting his usual cargo shorts and shoulder bag, he stopped to return keys a tenant had forgotten in her mailbox, and they chatted about the weekend’s celebrations.

Inside the apartment, the neighbours found Oom, Kinsman’s elderly cat. Through a shared wall, Kinsman’s next-door neighbour could regularly hear the gruff-but-kind man shower his pet with “adoring baby talk,” and he’d always relied on a close friend to catsit. But Kinsman hadn’t called in that favour, and Oom had no food or water. One of Kinsman’s downstairs neighbours placed the frying pan back on the stove, wondering if the cat had knocked it off looking for something to eat.

What they dreaded was now plainly evident. Andrew Kinsman was missing. It was time to call police.

For months that summer, investigators went in and out, sealing and resealing Kinsman’s apartment door with police tape. They seized and searched his iPad. They took a toothbrush for forensic testing. They conducted a bright-light search for blood and other fluids. They took notebooks, USB keys, papers with passwords written on them, old cells phones, SD cards and two Nikon cameras. Inside his closet, they found two boxes containing $130,000. The cash, a likely product of Kinsman’s longtime distrust of banks, was a strong signal he hadn’t left by choice.

On a Friday in mid-August, 53 days since Kinsman was last home, Toronto police Det.-Const. Charles Coffey noticed a calendar on his fridge. In it, Kinsman had marked his appointments for massages and physio to treat a neck injury. There, written in all-caps on the day he disappeared, June 26, 2017, Kinsman had left himself two reminders. “Pay Fido” and, in a smaller print for either 2 or 3 p.m., “Bruce.”

A dedicated task force of officers would later recognize that note for what it was: a critical breakthrough in what would become the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history, a probe that would reach back through eight years of pain and fear in the city’s Gay Village. Over the next few months, the note would set off a chain of discoveries, each building off the last, exposing a tragedy of unthinkable scale that raised urgent questions about how a killer went undetected for so long.

But on the day Coffey found the calendar, the team of officers probing a series of mysterious disappearances from the Village considered it through a clinical lens, as another piece of potential evidence to test or discount. “Bruce” did not yet hold any significance — though this was not Toronto police investigators’ first opportunity to connect the name to the Village’s missing men. No ceremony marked its discovery.

There are few “a-ha” moments in real-life investigations. Under the highly proscribed and procedural investigative system used by Ontario police services in complex probes, officers take a methodical approach to test a possible lead until it is eliminated as irrelevant. They added the name “Bruce” to a list of potential evidence. They would follow where it took them.

What follows is the most-complete account yet of the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur. It is based on more than two dozen interviews with investigators, including Det. David Dickinson and Insp. Hank Idsinga, witnesses and community members, victim impact statements, and thousands of pages of court filings. The majority of the documents are police affidavits filed to obtain warrants, which outline evidence they’ve collected, witness interviews they’ve conducted and investigators’ theories.

In part one: Another man vanishes from the Village.

Read more:

Part two: How the smallest of traces tied Bruce McArthur to the murder of Andrew Kinsman

Part three: How the careful plan to arrest Bruce McArthur came undone in minutes

Part four: Inside the final days of the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history

***

One week after Kinsman’s disorienting disappearance, a search party met up at Jet Fuel, a busy Parliament St. coffee shop, before heading out into the July afternoon. An ever-growing contingent of friends, family and community members had assembled to plaster posters around town and publicize Kinsman’s case, and his face. The posters showed him smiling behind glasses, a big beard and moustache. He’s tall, they said, with short hair and several tattoos — “Queer” was inked onto his right arm. Dozens of searchers had been scouring the city.

That afternoon, Greg Downer, a friend of Kinsman’s, set out on the first of 500 kilometres he would trek searching that summer, with his dog Zoe by his side, according to a statement Downer sent to the media earlier this year. Fellow searchers caught him up on what they knew about Kinsman’s disappearance — and they talked about the others.

Just two months before Kinsman disappeared, an adventurous 44-year-old Turkish man named Selim Esen sent a text to his ex-partner and was never heard from again — “I’m tired and I need money,” he wrote.

Esen, who was in treatment for drug addiction, had still been in daily contact with his former boyfriend. After two weeks with no response, his ex reported his disappearance to police and they put out a press release.

But Esen and Kinsman were only the most recent men to disappear from the Village. Downer and the others discussed the list.

The first was Skandaraj Navaratnam, a lively 40-year-old Sri Lankan with a wide circle of friends and a dog he adored. He was last seen leaving Zipperz, a since-closed Village institution, nearly seven years earlier on Sept. 6, 2010. He was reported missing by his close friend.

Three months after him, 42-year-old Abdulbasir Faizi left his job at a Mississauga printing company and was never seen again. Faizi, who was closeted, was adored by his two girls, aged 6 and 10. He told his wife he was spending time with a friend after his shift and that night he grabbed food in the Village, where he was a regular at the Black Eagle bar — a popular hangout for middle-aged gay men. His 2002 Nissan Sentra was found abandoned in the city, locked, with no signs of foul play.

And in October 2012, 58-year-old Majeed Kayhan was reported missing by his son after he stopped returning his calls. Kayhan, originally from Afghanistan, was a regular at Zipperz, the Black Eagle and Woody’s, another gay bar. His birds were found dead inside his home on Alexander St., in the heart of the Village.

In the 18 months after Kayhan went missing, the Village watched as Toronto police launched, investigated and then closed a special task force into those first three disappearances. They dubbed it Project Houston — as in, “Houston, we have a problem.” It had interviewed dozens of witnesses, conducted canvasses and ground and water searches, checked shelters and hospitals and sought new evidence through court applications. But the efforts failed to return any criminal evidence. The project closed in April 2014.

Some of the posters never came down, and the Village’s fears lingered. And after Downer’s first day of searching, he was convinced by the undeniable similarities in all five cases: all were middle-aged men with beards or stubble, and with the exception of Kinsman, all had brown skin. They were familiar faces in Village streets and bars “that people just stopped seeing,” Downer said.

The searchers “knew we had a serial killer on our hands,” Downer recalled in his statement.

He created a Facebook group for the Kinsman search, then another for missing people from Toronto’s LGBTQ community.

On Aug. 1, Downer and about two hundred people packed inside The 519, an LGBTQ community centre on Church St., to air their concerns and press police for answers.

There representing police was Insp. Peter Code, then the second-in-command of 51 Division, the downtown detachment that includes the Village. He told the crowd there would be a new task force: Toronto police had assembled a team of officers who would be taken off other caseloads to exclusively probe Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances. He urged everyone in the room to continue sharing information.

But for now, he said, there were few answers.

“We do not have a lot of information for you,” Code said. “I understand how frustrating that must be.”

***

The new task force was dubbed “Project Prism.” It assembled inside 51 Division, housed in a refurbished heritage building on Parliament St., a 30-minute walk south of the Village. It was 13 days after the town hall at The 519, nearly two months since Kinsman had gone missing and four months since Esen’s disappearance.

The team had nine officers pulled from within the division and throughout the force. Two investigators — Dets. Barry Radford and Henry Dyck — had taken the lead from the early days of Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances. Three others — Coffey and Det.-Consts. Josh McKenzie and Patrick Platte — had been involved in the Project Houston investigation. They were led by Det. David Dickinson, on loan from the force’s homicide squad.

His involvement didn’t mean police thought Kinsman and Esen had been murdered. Homicide detectives are occasionally tapped to head complex cases outside of death probes, because of their experience with what’s known as “major case management,” a strict organizational system that is employed during investigations into homicides, sexual assaults, some missing persons cases and more. The provincial system was created after a review of police handling of Paul Bernardo, the serial killer and rapist who terrorized Scarborough and later St. Catharines for nearly six years starting in the late 1980s. At one point in its sprawling investigation, Metro Toronto police interviewed Bernardo and submitted samples for forensic DNA testing. Those samples weren’t processed until February 1993, more than 25 months later; during that time, he raped four young women and murdered two others. The review found problems with coordination and communication and recommended a province-wide computerized system that would collect and organize vast amounts of information about a crime, including officer notes, names and locations, witness statements and more.

Dickinson, lean, and in the homicide cop tradition, permanently wearing a suit, would be the primary investigator. It would be his job to assign the team and keep the investigation moving and organized. The 38-year-old was an officer by the age of 20. He spent some of his formative policing years at 51 Division, became a detective and joined the homicide squad in 2014. But Dickinson’s success in laying murder charges had come with mounting court obligations, and he had been taken out of the rotation for new homicide cases. That made him available to manage and direct Prism when he wasn’t in court, and his history with the division meant he already knew some on the team.

During the first meeting, Dickinson laid out the plan. He would designate the officers’ tasks. They would come back for weekly round tables to provide updates and determine next steps. Detail-oriented and driven, he would read every report to ensure work progressed even while he was in court.

McKenzie brought the team up to speed on Project Houston — although Prism officers were not reinvestigating the Houston cases, they needed to know about the three men who’d disappeared years earlier. “We had to keep them in the back of the mind, and be aware of what they were all about, should there be overlap,” Dickinson said. Dyck and Radford also shared what they knew about Kinsman and Esen’s disappearances.

Det.-Const. Joel Manherz, who was new to the case, saw the hurdles ahead. A veteran of the force’s sex crimes unit, Manherz had extensive experience conducting online investigations. In 2013, he was named Toronto’s Officer of the Year for solving a child sex abuse case that dated back more than five decades, recovering the largest cache of self-made child pornography in Canadian history. Hearing the other officers speak, he noted there was little to link Esen and Kinsman’s cases, and no evident launching pad.

“It was hard to feel optimistic,” Manherz recalled in an email to the Star. “There were no obvious leads, (the investigators) were not all familiar with each other and we really needed to find a jumping off point. Something we could sink our teeth into.”

***

Mario Wong, the general sales manager at Downtown Chrysler on Front St. E. at the lip of the Don Valley Parkway, was working on a warm late-August day when he noticed something unusual. Two uniformed Toronto police officers were walking toward him.

Coffey and Det.-Const. Jeff Weatherbee gave few details. They told him they needed help with a case and he saw it, matter-of-factly, as his duty to help. The officers took out a pixelated picture of a red van.

It was a still from surveillance video taken across the street from 71 Winchester. After Kinsman disappeared, police had quickly secured any footage from nearby, before it could be overwritten. Weatherbee had spotted something in the top-right corner of one video showing the street in front of Kinsman’s building. The camera didn’t show the entrance, but it did capture the sidewalk out front. There, at 2:49 p.m. on the June afternoon Kinsman disappeared, a red van could be seen coming to a stop in front of his home.

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The driver parked and waited. At 3:06 p.m., a man wearing a dark green shirt, beige shorts and sandals walked towards the van, then went out of frame. One minute later, a different camera captured him getting into the van’s passenger door. Police believed it was Kinsman. But the video didn’t show his face, nor the driver’s. Crucially, it also didn’t show the van’s license plate. But the vehicle looked like a Dodge Caravan. A salesperson might know more.

Wong looked at the pixelated image. Some models look similar, making it difficult to determine a year. But he saw a unique appearance package. The van had distinctive chrome side trim and no fog lights. Wong recognized it right away.

“That van is a 2004 anniversary edition,” Wong told them. “They only make that van in that year.”

It was a head start — the team had a van and could start trying to find the driver. They wouldn’t have to pull vehicle registry information for an untold number of Ontario drivers with red vans. They could narrow it to one year. Still, out of caution, Dickinson asked the province’s Ministry of Transportation for ownership information for Ontario Dodge Caravans made between 2003 to 2006.

Meanwhile, investigators continued to search Kinsman’s apartment and obtained search warrants for his accounts with dating apps. They acquired Kinsman’s user names and passwords including for the gay dating site Squirt, and logged on.

“You were active 3 hours ago, are you okay l?!?” a confused user messaged on Aug. 10, after Coffey signed onto Kinsman’s account.

The ownership records landed on a USB key on the last day of August. Dickinson was in court, but eager to get home to comb through them and find any leads the team could chase the next day. He pulled up the Excel spreadsheet at his dining room table around 10 p.m.

It revealed 6,181 registered owners. The first thing Dickinson did was search for “Bruce.” Just five owners had that name. Of those, just one had a 20th-anniversary edition Dodge Caravan from 2004. That owner was a 66-year-old man named Bruce McArthur.

Dickinson immediately ran the Bruces through the Toronto police internal database. McArthur’s name was the only one to return a recent run-in with police: an occurrence report from June 20, 2016. In it, a man alleged McArthur had attempted to strangle him during a sexual encounter inside his van.

Dickinson paused. This wasn’t a speeding ticket, or jaywalking, or theft. The report established that McArthur was likely a gay man, someone who had been accused of committing a violent assault, in the back of his van.

A van that matched one parked outside Kinsman’s home the day he was last seen alive.

“It was a big moment for me,” Dickinson recalled.

***

The 911 dispatcher had barely said a word before the man interrupted.

“Yeah, someone just tried to strangle me.”

The man was calling through his in-car speakerphone, from his vehicle parked in a Tim Horton’s lot at Bathurst. St. and Finch Ave. W. Off in the distance, in the evening summer light, a red Dodge Caravan was careening down Bathurst, haphazardly heading into oncoming traffic before swerving into a southbound lane. The caller wanted police to catch the van, and he urgently rattled off its location to the dispatcher. Then he pulled out of the lot to chase it himself.

“OK. Tell me what happened,” the dispatcher said calmly.

“Just get somebody here ...” the man responded.

“I need to know what happened —” she said.

“He tried to strangle me to death,” the man interrupted.

“Who did?” the dispatcher asked. “Who did?”

The caller — the Star is not naming him because he is a victim of an alleged sexual assault — only knew him as Bruce. They’d met, the man told the Star, about five years before after Bruce contacted him on silverdaddies.com, a gay dating site. The man didn’t even have a number for Bruce, who had usually called from a pay phone. The men spent little time together outside of sexual encounters.

Once in about 2014, he said, Bruce invited him over for dinner at a swanky home he was house-sitting. Bruce had made him a rich, creamy pasta dish and made an odd request. He pulled a brown fur coat out of the closet and asked the man to put it on — he wanted to take pictures. The man thought it was weird. He hadn’t wanted to. But he gave in.

More recently, he said, Bruce had begun dropping by unannounced. He showed up at the man’s home, one time still wearing the costume he wore during holiday shifts as Santa Claus at Scarborough’s Agincourt Mall. And he’d twice shown up at the man’s work. He’d never gone inside, but instead left notes under the windshield wipers of the man’s truck.

On June 20, 2016, Bruce was there waiting when the man got home from work. Hungry and in need of a shower, he was annoyed at the surprise. Nonetheless, he said he invited Bruce to come inside, but he declined. He wanted to hook up in the van — “he was insistent on it,” the man said. They agreed to meet up at the Tim Horton’s, and the man took the time to take a shower.

Bruce’s red van was parked on the side of the lot, adjacent to the sidewalk. It was far from secluded, but the van’s windows were dark and reflective so it would be difficult to see inside. The man said he parked a couple spots away, then walked over. Bruce wanted to get into the van immediately. There was construction material inside, but he had taken out a bench to make space to lie down. Bruce had also put down a tarp and, on top of it, that same fur coat from two years earlier. Bruce didn’t want him to get dirty, the man remembered thinking.

He said they had only been kissing for about a minute when Bruce asked him to put his arm behind his back. “I wanna do something,” the man remembered hearing. Then, suddenly and with unexpected force, he said Bruce slammed his hand onto his throat. One arm pressed firmly onto his neck, the other holding his arm, he said Bruce’s hefty bulk pinned his 140-pound body down.

Without warning, he said, he was fighting to live. The man felt his vision closing in with dark spots. In flashes, he said, he could see a terrifying determination and disgust in Bruce’s eyes — looking back as though he were a piece of garbage. Without air, Bruce’s pressure steady and sustained on his back, the man said he felt his eyes bulging out of his head. As his heart raced, he thought of his mother and made a decision. She wasn’t going to bury him.

With every ounce of energy he had left, the man said, he leveraged his body against the ground and pushed himself up, throwing Bruce off. He scrambled out of the van. The first gasp of air was the sweetest he’d ever taken.

Within a minute, he was back in his truck, chasing Bruce down Bathurst. The 911 dispatcher convinced him to stop his pursuit, and he pulled over to the side of the road. An ambulance showed up. He was OK, even if he wouldn’t be able to swallow properly for days. Officers from Toronto police’s 32 Division arrived. They conducted an interview on the spot, and the man said he told them he never wanted Bruce to contact him again.

“Tell Bruce to stay away from me,” he told them. “I’ll kill him.”

Just before 9 p.m., Bruce turned himself in to a Scarborough police station. He told the officers his name was Bruce McArthur, the man in the altercation at Bathurst and Finch, and that there had been a misunderstanding. They drove him back to the 32 Division station in North York. During a videotaped interview, McArthur said the man had asked him to pinch his penis, and he thought that meant he wanted it rough, according to court affidavits. It escalated to strangling, but McArthur claimed it was because he misread the man’s desires.

To investigating officer Det. Paul Gauthier, McArthur appeared genuine and credible, the affidavits state.

McArthur was not charged. He was released unconditionally.

Gauthier has since been charged with professional misconduct in connection to the case. He denies any wrongdoing.

Part two: How the smallest of traces tied Bruce McArthur to the murder of Andrew Kinsman

Edited by Ed Tubb, with files from Kenyon Wallace and the Star archive