In mid-December last year, as Toronto police inched closer to an arrest in the disappearance of two local men, they called in somebody who once had a relationship with Andrew Kinsman.

During the 30-minute interview at the police station, Bruce Dow was asked several questions he didn’t understand.

In retrospect, he told the Star, the questions made sense in light of stories published on Bruce McArthur.

The 66-year-old landscaper was arrested in January and charged with first-degree murder in the disappearance of Kinsman and Selim Esen. The pair were the subject of Project Prism, a police task force looking into their disappearance.

McArthur was later charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Majeed Kayhan, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Soroush Mahmudi and Dean Lisowick.

Kayhan and Navaratnam were the subjects of Project Houston, a missing persons task force started in 2012 before it wrapped up 18 months later.

Serious concerns about police conduct have prompted an internal professional misconduct investigation. The chief, the mayor and the police board chair are also calling for an external review.

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Concerns arose in recent days with news that McArthur was interviewed by police before. In 2016, a man reported to police that McArthur tried to strangle him during an otherwise consensual interaction. Sources have also told the Star that McArthur was questioned by police around the time that they launched Project Houston.

Kinsman’s friend Candace Shaw said she is “livid” on behalf of a “community who were so clear and so firm in their insistence that something was up.”

“Maybe listen to a community when they have these concerns,” she said. “To just pooh-pooh all the concerns, and then to accuse the community of not doing enough to help with the case . . . when in fact the police were in contact with this man so many times over the years.”

Amid the growing criticism, Dow, who had a brief fling with Kinsman, said the main issue may lie with the higher-ups. He “wasn’t impressed” with the way representatives of the force have communicated with the public, saying there was “obvious insensitivity on the police side.”

But he said the front-line officers he interacted with seemed to be doing their jobs as best they could.

“They were tired, but still caring. I felt like they’d been working on this a long time and were frustrated,” he said, adding that despite their apparent weariness, the detectives remained “very grateful, and they were very kind and very sensitive.”

Dow had been speaking to detectives on and off since late summer, after Kinsman disappeared in June. He had wanted to offer any information he had. Originally, he spoke to police on Facebook, followed by conversations over the phone, he said. Then police suddenly asked Dow to come speak to them.

When he arrived, Dow said two detective constables informed him that his statement would be videotaped, and that anything he said could be used against him in a court of law.

“Honestly, that scared the crap out of me,” he said. “The tone changed, and it was very cut and dry, but I think that’s what they have to do.”

Once that process was over, he said the two detectives were “open,” “supportive” and “genuinely concerned about the case.”

“We spoke quite openly and graphically about a number of things,” Dow said, adding that it was his impression that the officers were “gay-positive.”

“They seemed like people who really wanted to solve the case,” he said. “They wanted to make some headway.”

Roger Stoddard, a manager at a local gay bathhouse Spa Excess, went to 51 Division “three or four years ago,” during Project Houston, to share any information that could help find Navaratnam.

“I know Navaratnam from a previous business where I used to work,” Stoddard said.

His conversation with two detectives was also around half an hour in length.

“I told them what I know and what I’d heard from other people,” he said.

“They showed me photographs of the other two they were investigating, the other two that were missing at the time,” he added in reference to Kayhan and Abdulbasir Faizi, the other subjects of Project Houston.

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Stoddard didn’t recognize either.

“They seemed genuine and interested in investigating it. That’s the impression I got at the time.”

He said he cringed when he heard Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders told the Globe and Mail that “nobody was coming to us with anything.”

“Because yes, we did co-operate, as much as we could at the time,” Stoddard said. “And it seemed like they were being proactive in trying to investigate it. It’s not like they were letting the file sit and gather dust.”

Jean-Guy Cloutier had his first interaction with police four or five days after Navaratnam disappeared in 2010 when he reported him missing to two police officers.

Cloutier and Navaratnam texted each other every morning; not hearing from his “brother” for days, and not being informed of his absence, was unusual.

“(Toronto police) were really, really good,” Cloutier said. “They would actually come to my apartment with a whole bunch of photos, asking ‘Do you know these people?’ and ‘Have you ever seen these people?’ ”

Cloutier would ask police if the men in the photos were suspects but officers never said one way or the other.

“They said that if it is a murder, eventually a body will show up.”

These visits would happen once a year until 2013. Cloutier never doubted police were still interested in finding his friend.

“They were trying to get leads or something to go on, but what they said to me is unless somebody comes forward and give them new evidence, there`s nothing they could do.”

“They assured me the case would never be closed,” Cloutier said. “We’re always going to be looking, they said.”

Until the Star told him that Project Houston had been shut down, Cloutier continued to believe police were still searching for Navaratnam.

“This is where I think I was naive because I didn’t think it was closed,” Cloutier said pausing, before recalling his more recent interaction with the police.

A detective called him half an hour before a news conference held on Feb. 23.

They told him they had found Navaratnam`s remains.

It was a courtesy call, Cloutier said, before they made the news public.

With files from Fatima Syed