Warning: This article contains graphic details.

To his friends and clients, Bruce McArthur was a gregarious white-haired landscaper who brought beauty to upscale Toronto neighbourhoods.

But that pleasant demeanour masked a smouldering malevolence. He’s been charged with six counts of first-degree murder, accused of luring and murdering men, time and again.

This is the story of a man who, under the nose of police in the heart of Toronto, is accused of dismembering and burying his victims; a master of duplicity who beguiled his friends and, despite the red flags, plied his deadly deceit in a trusting community.

It’s an evolving portrait of evil, told through interviews, court documents and media reports, that depicts an alleged serial killer who, as one expert suggests, embodies “a level of brazenness” that is “very, very rare.”

If the allegations prove true, so adroit was McArthur at concealing his butchery — a murderous spree that experts fear could stretch back decades — that even as the body count climbed, he remained a generous bon vivant hosting lively dinner gatherings and partying publicly.

These days, McArthur is being held at the Toronto South Detention Centre in segregation and under constant suicide watch. The charges against him haven’t been proven in court. He has made pretrial court appearances via video link — the next is on April 11 — looking wan and tired with pronounced deep shadows under his eyes. He has spoken only to state his name and to thank the court.

It was on a dreary January day that McArthur’s alleged past was revealed. A light snow had fallen, further shrouding the body parts he’s accused of concealing in Leaside planters, and not far away two women fretted. They wondered why their close friend Bruce hadn’t arrived as expected to pick them up for lunch.

The women began, unsuccessfully, texting and phoning, concerned he’d suffered a heart attack or a medical episode from his diabetes.

They contacted McArthur’s roommate, worried that “something serious has happened.”

“We were fearing he was in a terrible accident,” said one of the friends at the time. “It was my 65th birthday (the previous day). He brought me four dozen roses and a gorgeous pair of earrings. He helps me around the house ... he’s the kindest person I’ve ever known.”

Police had arrested the 66-year-old McArthur that Jan. 18 morning, bursting into his Thorncliffe Park apartment after they saw a young man enter the unit. Police, who had McArthur under surveillance, feared for the visitor’s life.

They found him in the apartment, bound, restrained to a bed, but unharmed.

That afternoon, police revealed that McArthur was facing two counts of first-degree murder. Investigators also said they anticipated laying more murder charges.

Long-held fears within the Gay Village were confirmed. Toronto had a serial killer, an idea police had previously dismissed. A murderer whose alleged male victims all had a connection to the community.

While graphic details of the case have become part of the city’s daily news cycle — the body parts, the tales of trophy photos, the sexual liaisons turned horrifyingly violent — another longtime friend of McArthur’s recalls being stunned when he first heard the news.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God! How’s Bruce going to react to that? They’ve arrested somebody with the same name,” he recalls.

“It wasn’t until I started reading about it that I thought, ‘Holy crap, this is Bruce.’ It was an absolute shock. If the concept is hiding in plain sight, he did it.”

Many of those who spent time with McArthur — and he had a large social circle — would speak only on assurances of anonymity, as they did not want their names associated with the case. All expressed an inability to reconcile the ghastly stories they were hearing with the amiable pal they remembered sharing a coffee with at the Second Cup or a drink at the Black Eagle.

Ruddy-faced and portly, not unlike the Santa he portrayed at Agincourt Mall, there is a seemingly benign, everyman quality to McArthur that allowed him to socialize undetected in the village, an area of the city McArthur was temporarily barred from in 2003 by the courts after he pleaded guilty to attacking a male sex worker with a metal pipe.

A police source told the Star that in 2016, a man reported to police that McArthur tried to strangle him during a consensual sexual encounter, and that McArthur went to police himself and was questioned, but let go.

Sources have told the Star that McArthur was also questioned by police around the launch of Project Houston. That was an investigation into three missing men from the Gay Village which began in November 2012.

Those closest to McArthur saw no hint of malice, no telltale signs of roiling anger or aggression. No suggestion that the number of victims would edge upward with numbing regularity.

The list of dead since 2010 is soul crushing.

McArthur is charged with the murders of Andrew Kinsman, 49; Selim Esen, 44; Majeed Kayhan, 59; Soroush Mahmudi, 50; Dean Lisowick, 47; and Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam, 40.

Navaratnam disappeared on Sept. 6, 2010, two weeks after McArthur’s daughter was married in Windsor. Navaratnam had a romantic relationship with McArthur in the 2000s, according to reports, and was listed as a friend on McArthur’s Facebook page.

Another man, Abdulbasir Faizi, 42, disappeared on Dec. 29, 2010. No charges have been filed in that case. Kayhan disappeared in 2012, Mahmudi in 2015. The other three were allegedly murdered last year or, in the case of Lisowick, possibly in late 2016.

In a rare occurrence, police recently released a photo of a deceased man they believe to be a seventh victim. They hope someone can identify him. Police won’t say where the photo originated. But sources have told the Star that investigators have recovered evidence that includes digital images linked to McArthur.

Police uncovered the remains of seven people hidden in large planters at a Leaside home where McArthur worked. One was identified as Kinsman through fingerprint analysis while the remains of Navaratnam and Mahmudi were identified through dental records. Police are hoping to identify the other four through DNA, a more time-consuming process.

Those planters were on the Mallory Cres. property of Karen Fraser and Ron Smith. The couple had an agreement with McArthur. He would tend to their lawn and garden and they would let him store equipment for his landscaping company, Artistic Design, in their garage. Police expanded the search to 30 properties connected to that business and reportedly plan on returning to those properties with cadaver dogs after the spring thaw.

The killing spree is stunning in both the macabre nature of the crimes and the depraved manner utilized to dispose of the bodies.

Michael Arntfield, a criminology professor at the University of Western Ontario, believes the McArthur case represents a “watershed in Canadian crime” that will force both the police and the public to rethink how serial murderers are viewed and how those crimes are investigated.

Arntfield says this string of murders “busts decade-long trends.”

For starters, McArthur is too old, Arntfield says. Serial killing is typically a young man’s game. With testosterone diminishing, serial killers usually age out or retire long before they hit their 60s.

In other serial murder sprees, dismemberment occurs in only about four per cent of cases and, then, its purpose is almost exclusively to make a body easier to dispose of, not as part of a “very sadistic” fantasy. It’s even more unusual, the criminologist continues, when the bodies of the deceased, or body parts, are transported and concealed. When that does happen it is almost never in a city.

By hiding the body parts in planters and giving them to people, Arntfield says the perpetrator “choose a level of brazenness and fantasy that I’ve not really seen in a long time and is very, very rare.”

Most serial killers begin their carnage at a much younger age which means, says Arntfield, this “could be the longest run of a serial killer on record; not only in Canada but anywhere.”

“I’d suggest police need to look back at least 35 years,” he says.

Police are indeed combing back through unexplained deaths or disappearances across the province, and internationally, that could be linked to McArthur. Investigators say the widening probe could take years.

The ability to present a mostly happy, affable face to the world, no matter what depravity might be within, likely helped McArthur to function so effectively and secretly.

He was a frequent albeit unremarkable face in village bars such as Woody’s and the now-closed Zipperz. Bar owner Harry Singh said McArthur earned the nickname “Santa” with his patrons.

Rick Stubbert, the manager at Statlers bar on Church St., regularly saw McArthur through the Baskin Robbins storefront window across the street, deep in discussion with a group of his elderly friends. The accused killer was also a morning regular at Church Bistro 555 where he’d order the “Big Bear” breakfast or a tandoori chicken omelette with extra spice.

McArthur sometimes had nighttime trysts at the Black Eagle, a leather bar on Church St. That’s where he met one man who became a casual sex partner about three years ago.

“I would say it was very garden variety sex. Basically, it was one of us giving the other a blow job … Nothing menacing, nothing uncomfortable, nothing aggressive,” said the man, who wished to remain anonymous.

He said many of McArthur’s alleged victims spent time at the Black Eagle, and Andrew Kinsman at one point was a bartender there.

Police confirmed that McArthur had a sexual relationship with Kinsman. It is not known what relationship he had with most of his other alleged victims.

Before his arrest, McArthur was in an on-again, off-again relationship characterized as manipulative by the man’s friend, Geoffrey Davis. The Star’s attempts to reach the boyfriend were unsuccessful.

“The relationship that he and Bruce had was very tumultuous. Bruce was very controlling and very manipulative,” said Davis. “(He) loved Bruce. (He) was so torn up by breaking up with Bruce … (He) was having an extremely hard time letting go.”

The boyfriend’s cellphone and apartment, which was being renovated, were at one point searched by police, Davis said. During renovations, when the two men were not in a relationship, McArthur would still tell his ex “what material to use, like what colours, what tiles to put, and this and that.”

“Someone who is not my boyfriend, not my partner, not living together, telling me what colours to paint my walls in my house, that to me is a little bit freaking controlling,” Davis said.

This controlling attitude extended to BDSM (Bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) sex-play.

For years, he was registered on Recon, a dating site for “gay men into leather, rubber, BDSM and kink.” McArthur was also on multiple gay dating websites, like BearForest and DaddyHunt. “Romantic at heart but don’t let that scare you off,” is a line he used on at least two websites, accompanied by several photos of himself smiling at different angles.

On the dating app Scruff, he advertised looking for men “that have a kinky side.”

“Enjoy finding a guys (sic) buttons and then pushing them to your limits,” his profile specified.

Using his SilverDaddies account, McArthur connected with one man — a closeted, Middle Eastern man living in Toronto, who declined to share his name for fear of backlash from his family back home — and arranged to meet at Spa Excess, a gay bathhouse in the village. The two had sex in the bathhouse, but the relationship didn’t go further due to how rough McArthur’s sexual preferences were, the man told the Star.

Another man, Jorge Manuel da Costa, connected with McArthur on a gay dating app about a year and a half ago. McArthur asked about da Costa’s Portuguese ethnicity, explaining he liked dark-skinned men, da Costa says.

Then the messages took a stark turn for him.

“(He) started to talk about, ‘have you been chained, and cuffed, and gagged,’ and I said ‘What!’ I completely blocked him right away,” da Costa said. “Now I look back … I think I was saved.”

There were, in retrospect, other hints that there were brutal undertones to McArthur’s behaviour even if he kept it hidden from his closer friends. Stories have surfaced of dates turned violent.

One of the most graphic was shared by Sean Cribbin in an interview with broadcasters Shaun Proulx and Arlene Bynon and posted on the website of Global News. He told of a sexual encounter with McArthur that Cribbin believes was a near-death experience.

After connecting on a dating app, the two men got together last July at McArthur’s apartment while his roommate was out. The consensual liaison involving bondage and submission role-playing turned terrifying, Cribbin says, when McArthur didn’t respect his limits or acknowledge his safe words.

“That’s the only memory I have from it, just this overall, ‘I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe,’” said Cribbin, noting that McArthur was cutting off his airway “with his penis, with his hands, with his body weight sitting on my chest.”

Cribbin says he became unconscious. He believes the return of McArthur’s roommate “interrupted ... his ritual” saving him from whatever McArthur may have had planned.

The police called Cribbin the day after McArthur was arrested for the first two murders. Cribbin said he realized there were photographs of him and the detective asked if he’d seen any cameras in McArthur’s 19th-floor apartment, where the accused reportedly lived for the last 10 years.

“I didn’t remember any cameras, but then when (the interview with police) was winding down, I knew at this point there were photos of me. (The detective) said to me that I was bound. I was in pretty much, for lack of a better term ... a kill position.

“It hadn’t dawned on me until we got further along in the conversation how much danger I was in that day and how close I was to not coming back.”

Peter Vronsky, who has studied and written books on serial murderers, says “serial killing is essentially about the need to control” and that type of sex play would have allowed a killer “to take control of his victim without alerting his victim.

“Sexual play and bondage is not that rare so it’s not necessarily going to surprise people. So it’s very easy for him to lure a partner who is willing to play at it. Then once he’s restrained his partner, he has now gained control over the victim and it goes from there.”

The fact that an accused serial killer could easily blend into a community from which he was collecting his victims is consistent with older offenders, says Arntfield. He said these murderers are known as “trappers,” killers who minimize the output needed to acquire victims.

“A trapper is someone who will ingratiate themselves in a given community, whether it’s an online group or a dating website or a certain social scene and will use a ruse or a con to lure their victims into a compromising situation,” he explains.

“It’s just easier for them. They play off their age and the fact they can present themselves as more innocuous ... older offenders tend to lack the virility that allows them to go out and troll a park or to spend all night driving highways.”

On the surface, McArthur’s early years are the picture of small-town normalcy. He grew up on a family farm in tiny Woodville, in Kawartha Lakes, about 60 kilometres north of Oshawa. All the kids, and there were usually about 24 to 30 from Grade 1 to Grade 8, attended the same one-room schoolhouse, a short walk from the McArthur farm.

Robert MacEachern was one grade ahead of McArthur at the school and still farms in the area. The McArthurs were farmers too. MacEachern remembers young Bruce as a kid without disciplinary issues who progressed well in school and had a beautiful singing voice, at least good enough to enter and win competitions as a solo artist. He’d also did his fair share of labour on the family farm.

“He wasn’t a big, rough bully kid,” recalls MacEachern.

The McArthurs had two children, Bruce and his sister Sandra, and the parents also brought in foster children — often as many as six to 10 — so it was a busy household.

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“There was nothing weird about him, nothing to indicate that he’d be in trouble in life,” said MacEachern. “Nothing to indicate there was something like that going on in his head.”

Arntfield says some paraphilias are rooted in childhood trauma that results in a person placing “great erotic value on destructive and humiliating behaviour.” A paraphilia is a condition characterized by an atypical sexual desire such as exhibitionism, voyeurism or necrophilia. The person forms a connection between the unusual behaviour and intense sexual arousal.

There are about 500 types of paraphilias. Some are harmless. Some are criminal paraphilias, as seen in the majority of serial killers, Arntfield says.

“What happens (for some people) is that you’re imprinted with a certain way of looking at intimacy to the point that rather than wanting someone to enjoy you, you enjoy that they’re terrified of you. Instead of sex being consensual, you would rather terrify people and have them plead for you not to kill them.”

McArthur moved on to Fenelon Falls Secondary, for a four-year stint notable mostly because it was there that he began dating Janice Campbell, who would become his wife. A handsome, dark-haired student, McArthur was nicknamed “Snoppy,” according to the school yearbook. His favourite pastime was “a good argument.” His ambition was “to be successful” and his probable future? “Your guess is as good as mine,” it said beside his class of 1970 grad photo.

McArthur lost his parents when they were relatively young. His mother, Islay Mary McArthur, died in 1978 at the age of 49. Her husband, Malcolm, died three years later at 57.

McArthur worked as a travelling salesman for McGregor Socks across Ontario, on the road by himself, starting around 1978 after leaving a job with Eaton’s as an assistant in the buying department.

“He was just a regular guy — obviously not, but he was just a regular guy,” recalls John Foot, who worked with McArthur at Eaton’s from 1973 to ’78. Foot, who lived in England for a while, even hosted McArthur and his wife Janice for two to three weeks in London in about 1980.

“He wasn’t bad-tempered. He always had a smile on his face. We all worked in the same area so you’d see him every day. He never betrayed a hint of a temper where you’d say, ‘Oh, he’s moody’ or ‘He’s bad tempered.’ There was nothing that ever would have indicated that he’s an odd guy.”

In 1979, Bruce and Janice, by then his wife, moved into a house on Ormond Dr. in Oshawa and the McArthur family grew. A daughter, Melanie, was followed by a son, Todd, born in 1981. Then, in 1986 when Bruce was 35, the couple bought a red-brick house on a corner lot of Cartref Ave. and lived Oshawa’s suburban life.

Oddly, given Bruce McArthur’s future profession, the neighbour remembers that it was Janice who mowed the lawn and tended to the yard at the Cartref house.

“He did not garden ... She did all the work,” he recalled.

Bruce and Janice returned frequently to the Woodville area, where his sister still lives.

“He was quite a churchgoer in the area, him and his wife,” recounted a family friend. “I guess he always went for Christmas, still, with the kids and stuff.”

An emotional Sandy Burton, McArthur’s sister, told the Star after the arrest: “He’s a wonderful brother and father and grandfather and friend. And it’s not in his nature to do anything like this. He would do anything for anyone. He’s that kind of a person. He would not kill anybody.”

McArthur also worked for Stanfield’s, the underwear and clothing company, servicing department stores in the GTA. Sometime in the 1990s his employment in the clothing trade came to an end and McArthur’s life apparently began to unravel.

McArthur mortgaged the Cartref house for $156,710 in 1997. Then, in 1999, declaring assets of $190,000 and liabilities of $277,812, he filed a proposal under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to pay off his outstanding debt. He and Janice then sold their Oshawa property in 2000.

It was around that time too that Todd was getting into trouble for obsessively making obscene phone calls to random women.

Todd was sentenced to about 14 months in jail in 2014 for making obscene phone calls to a Kitchener woman from his Oshawa home, repeatedly making crude sexual remarks to her, the Waterloo Region Record reported at the time. His lawyer said at sentencing that Todd was diagnosed with “telephone scatalogia” and can’t stop making obscene calls.

“Intensive counselling may be an understatement,” Crown attorney Fraser McCracken said in court.

The Record reported in 2014 that Todd had more than two dozen convictions for harassing calls and criminal harassment.

Court records in Oshawa show that last October, he was committed to stand trial on charges of making indecent phone calls and breach of probation. The trial hasn’t yet been scheduled. His father was previously listed as his surety as part of his bail conditions.

“We’ve been through enough. We’re also victims,” Todd told reporters after a court appearance in February. “We’ve been through too much. It’s been hell. No more comment.”

It’s believed Bruce McArthur came out as gay in the late 1990s and left his family to move into Toronto. Janice, the neighbour recalls, kept the house on her own for more than a year before it was eventually sold.

A former friend of Todd’s remembers McArthur’s new home in Toronto as a three-bedroom condo, which he shared with his roommate and where Todd had a room. One night when the friend, who asked to remain anonymous, visited Todd while his father was out, he made a startling discovery in the bathroom attached to McArthur’s room.

“There was a collage of developed photos of naked men with erections,” he told the Star, saying most of the men appeared to be “East Indian” and that Todd said they were men his father knew.

The topic of the photos came up at breakfast, the friend said, and the elder McArthur just “laughed it off ... (He) wasn’t hiding them from anyone. They were in plain sight.”

Multiple attempts to reach members of McArthur’s family to be interviewed for this story were either unsuccessful or declined.

Vronsky, the author, says there is often a life-changing event that acts as a trigger to someone who already has the propensity and fantasies of serial killing to act on their fantasies.

“It could be anything from the loss of a job, to the breakdown of a marriage, some career failure, even injuries. That could be the trigger,” he explains.

“But this fantasy to kill begins very early in childhood. Experts certainly argue about what the reasons are. The most common kind of model of child fantasy developing into serial killing fantasy is the trauma model where a child might be molested or traumatized, there’s some sort of familial breakdown.

“The child then withdraws into fantasies of control and revenge. It could be happening as early as the age of 5 or 6, pre-puberty. Once they go through puberty, they began to sexualize these fantasies of control and revenge.”

Soon after arriving in Toronto, on Halloween in 2001, McArthur attacked a male sex worker and hit him numerous times with a metal pipe that, he acknowledged, he often carried with him. McArthur, who voluntarily went to the police station almost immediately after the attack, said he didn’t know why he did it. He later pleaded guilty in court to charges of assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm.

“My life’s been kind of a mess in the last year and a half, knowing what’s going to happen and what’s happened to me,” McArthur told the court at his sentencing in April 2003.

“I’d like to apologize to the victim ... I wouldn’t know what to say, other than I’m sorry for all the pain and anger I’ve caused him.”

As part of his conditional sentence, McArthur was barred from an area that included the Gay Village. The Crown’s main concern was keeping him away from male sex workers.

According to sex worker advocates, McArthur is not on any of the three major lists which flag clients to avoid for sex workers, including the Bad Date Coalition List.

This doesn’t surprise Monica Forrester, program co-ordinator at Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project.

“There’s really nowhere for male sex workers to be supported around keeping safe,” she said.

McArthur was also ordered in 2003 to seek counselling for mental health issues, particularly for anger management. It was also revealed in court that McArthur was taking Dilantin, an antiseizure medication. McArthur was ordered specifically not to possess amyl nitrates or “poppers,” which can serve as a muscle relaxant and are sometimes taken before sex.

McArthur was eventually granted a pardon for the 2003 conviction.

Arntfield, a former cop, is not surprised that McArthur was involved in a violent altercation shortly after moving to Toronto, considering the dramatic changes in his life at the time.

With serial killers, there is often a “tipping point ... where they move from this contemplative stage of murder to actually doing it or where they had murdered for many years, stopped and then resumed because something happened to trigger those emotions.”

Serial killers don’t necessarily restrict themselves to one particular group of victims, Western prof Arntfield said.

“We see this among the most sadistic of offenders,” explains Arntfield, noting that “any body will do.”

He cites the case of Canadian Clifford Olson, who in 1980 to 1981, sexually assaulted, tortured and killed eight girls and three boys between the ages of 9 and 18.

The horror of body parts hidden in a place where a killer could visit them is sometimes part of the sexual fantasy and the desire to control for a serial killer, says Arntfield.

“Putting them in such a conspicuous location where only he knew (where they were) and then gifting them to unwitting participants in this macabre game he’s playing is very much about power,” he says. “It’s about toying with people. Very sadistic.”

The ability to revisit the bodies, says Arntfield, is a trait seen in some of the most prolific serial killers. Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer who in 2003 plead guilty to 48 murders in Washington State, would hide bodies of his victims in a forested area and then return to perform a sex act with the corpses.

“When you see excessive effort put into something, creating a visual or doing something that has no value added to the crime and, in fact, poses additional risk forensically, you know it is strictly in service to a fantasy that means nothing to anybody but the killer,” says Arntfield.

“In his mind, the small chance that someone would look in there and he would be caught was worth the trade off of the excitement it offered him.”

Why McArthur allegedly buried severed human remains in such a visible place may be answered at trial, but that is likely years away. For now, McArthur's defence team will work its way through reams of evidence from the Crown, which turned over what is likely the first of many packages of disclosure documents at a Wednesday court date. One such packet could contain more than 10,000 pages, given how complex this case is, the Crown attorney said.

McArthur appeared at that College Park court date again via video link from jail, shoulders slumped in a bright orange jumpsuit as he stood before the camera, eyes glancing to the side. It's impossible to say how long the cycle — of grisly police revelations, charges, victims, and an accused being summoned in front of a camera before returning to his cell — could go on.

A guard stood by the door of the brightly lit jail room as McArthur made his brief appearance on camera, and then ushered him back to his cell; the man who once hid in plain sight now under constant observation.