“You’re halfway to heaven but just a mile out of hell.”

The homicide cop is thinking of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics from the song “Better Days.”

Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga has reached for The Boss before, when talking about his investigations over 13 years on the elite murder squad.

But never has he had a case like this, unprecedented in its breadth and links: “It’s a serial killer. Alleged serial killer. He’s taken some steps to cover his tracks. We have to uncover these victims and identify these victims.”

When Idsinga announced on Monday that police had laid three further first-degree murder charges against Bruce McArthur, bringing the total to five, he warned, chillingly, that there were likely more slain men out there, their dismembered remains scattered around the GTA.

Gay men. Familiar men from the Gay Village in downtown Toronto. Some out, some in. Men, mostly, of Middle Eastern descent, middle-aged. The pattern, however, does not hold for two of the men now identified, suggesting the killing ground, the target group of victims, may be broader.

But what everyone had feared, dreaded, and what police had refused to bluntly call by its name – serial murder – has now been formally confirmed.

It had been gnawing at the alarmed gay community for years, with the unexplained disappearance of men who frequented the area dating back to at least 2010.

It’s been eating away at Idsinga too, consuming every waking hour for months and at one point, two weeks ago, a 72-hour stretch of intense investigation with no sleep at all. “Fourteen, 15-hour days, every day, late into the night. A ton of hours.”

Just to assure the public how fervently detectives have been chasing the clues and preparing their case.

Read more:

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For Idsinga, who appears so calm on the surface, who’s brought to book some of the worst killers in Toronto since 2005, this investigation has touched a nerve.

“Hard to spit it out,” he told the Star yesterday afternoon. “It’s infuriating for one thing, which might be a little bit of a bizarre reaction. But you’re so angry that this has happened, right in this city.’’

He recounts an incident that occurred right after his initial press conference, in which he disclosed the arrest of McArthur. “I was walking down Carlton St. after breakfast and a guy stopped me. He recognized me. He said, ‘I just wanted to thank you for doing what you do,’ and then he started crying. And I thought, ‘You know what? I know exactly how you feel.’

“You’re happy about it (the arrest) but at the same time you’ve got all this chaos at your feet that you have to deal with and piece together. You’ve just got to keep plowing through it.’’

Then he mentioned the Springsteen lyrics.

“That’s a pretty appropriate way to put it when you’re dealing with a case like this.”

Ground Zero for the search of victims, for now, is concentrated on a Leaside address, where a police tent protects the scene and the forensics team scouring the property for evidence. They’re thawing the frozen ground before any serious excavation can be conducted.

But flower planters have been removed already – more than a dozen from this address and (it’s unclear) possibly others. Skeletal bones from three individuals were discovered in the bottom of the planters.

The owner of that Mallory Cres. residence had previously told the Star how McArthur, who stored equipment at the property, had of his own volition planted flowers in the pots. “All of our pots around the house were suddenly filled with beautiful flowers.”

And, gruesomely, something else.

The retrieved remains have yet to be identified, and it appears they might not even be from among the five men who account for the murder charges laid: Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman, whose deaths McArthur was charged with a fortnight ago, and the males named as murdered yesterday by Idsinga – Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Dean Lisowick.

McArthur, a 66-year-old self-employed landscaper, appeared at College Park court Monday morning, charged with the three further murders.

“We believe there are more,” Idsinga told reporters. “I have no idea how many more there are going to be.”

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A dozen detectives constitute the core of Project Prism. But scores more – forensic technicians, the K9 squad, officers trolling the accused’s social media accounts and phone records, cops guarding various crime scenes, a renowned psychiatrist with expertise in serial murderers – are involved in the massive investigative undertaking. “I’ve seen large-scale investigations before with dozens and dozens of officers working on them. We’ve never seen anything quite like this, with the number of crime scenes that we have to process and guard and with the judicial authorization required.”

It has been a ghastly part of Idsinga’s job to be there, at the Centre for Forensic Sciences, when the bones are removed from the soil in which they were buried and placed on a morgue table.

“It’s sickening. One of the officers who was with me said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look disgusted before.’ It was kind of a combination of being infuriated and just disgusted at what was unfolding before us.”

Forensic experts take over the evidence scrutinizing from there. Nothing so declarative as fingerprints, of course.

“No, no. You’re looking at bones,” says Idsinga. “Very little flesh. It’s skeletal remains. So you’re looking for any previous broken bones that we know about, any previous injuries that would still show up on the remains. And just trying to piece them together.’’

It’s possible to retrieve DNA from bones, sometimes. “Some bones you can. There might be a little bit of flesh on the some of the bones where they might be able to get it from. But now we have to back to all these missing persons.”

Dozens of missing persons, from the years when a serial killer may have been quietly going about his abominable business in Toronto and elsewhere.

“The majority of them we do have DNA,” for comparison, explains Idsinga, “whether it’s something they’ve left behind or whether we’ve had to go to family members to get samples.’’ He’s referring to relatives who came forward when their loved ones disappeared. “Some of them have dental records. Hopefully we’ll be able to identify all these remains and get them back to their families.”

The waiting game is horrible for them. There have yet been no remains identified and returned to their families.

One of the victims identified Monday, 47-year-old Lisowick – believed to have been murdered between May of 2016 and July of 2017 – had been living at a Toronto shelter. No one had ever reported him missing.

“Bouncing from shelter to shelter,’’ says Idsinga.

The homicide cop, who was for about six months part of the original missing investigation – Project Houston – takes pains to explain that detectives had no evidence to link the disappearances and no evidence that a crime had been committed. One from among the vanished showed up in 2014, perfectly fine. Another washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario last year. He was a suicide.

“You never know what the end result is going to be. Just because somebody’s missing doesn’t mean they’ve been murdered. First you have to establish that there’s been a criminal offense and then decide what his role is in that offense being investigated. Was he a suspect, was he a witness, was he a victim?

“We still have those outstanding men from Project Houston. Until we can establish that McArthur had some role in their death, if they are dead, then we’re not going to lay any charges yet.”

Other victims, Idsinga noted, may have been visiting the city, perhaps for Pride week, and reported missing in their home towns. Those threads need to be yanked as well.

Idsinga said Project Prism has poured through McArthur’s client files and interviewed home owners attached to about 30 properties. Most have been cleared of any further interest.

“We haven’t excavated anything yet. We have two yards that we’d like to excavate. One of them is the Mallory address. We’re thawing the ground so that’s going to take some time to excavate. We do have another yard in the city of Toronto. We don’t know if or when we’re going to excavate that yard. That might depend on what we find at Mallory.”

At this stage, forensic technicians haven’t even finished their down-to-the-nubs search of McArthur’s Thorncliffe Park apartment.

The grind is slow. It will be meticulous. Idsinga won’t discuss the evidence that brought detectives to McArthur.

His immediate hope, last night, was making it home at a reasonable hour.

“It’s my wife’s birthday. I’d like to have dinner with her.”

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.