Catching Killers (2021) s02e04 Episode Script

1
Let me rewind.
We have three individuals missing
from the LGTBQ+ community
in 2012.
They were possibly victims of cannibalism.
I had a suspect
but he wasn't our guy.
We exhausted all leads,
and the team had to be disbanded.
Two years later,
I received a phone call.
It's happened again.
I got a phone call from Charles, frantic.
"Oh, my gosh, Josh."
"There's two men missing from the Village,
and it's identical to the disappearance
of our first three missing men."
Tonight on CityNews
Toronto police are calling
the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman
"suspicious."
Selim Esen was last seen
on April 14th near Yonge and Bloor.
Their disappearances follow
several unsolved missing persons cases
going back to 2010.
I was concerned
that there was someone out there
slaughtering and killing people.
Andrew Kinsman
was 6 foot 4 and 230 pounds.
If somebody like that can get taken,
no one is really safe.
A new task force was being created.
It felt like a second chance.
For three years,
it was hanging over our heads,
so now we could
actually finish what we started.
I wanted to go back,
but I was now retired
from the police service,
and I was working in another profession,
and my employer wouldn't let me go back.
It was extremely disappointing,
but when I was told that Dave Dickinson
would be leading the case,
I was extremely excited,
because I know how dedicated Dave is,
and he has this ability
to be able to think outside of the box
and be creative in his investigations,
and this is a case
that definitely needed that.
I had been
at homicide for five years,
and this was the first time
that I was asked to oversee
a missing person investigation.
I was starting fresh,
reviewing missing person files.
Selim and Andrew were both gay men,
they were both, uh, middle-aged,
and they both went missing
from the Village in Toronto,
just like previous disappearances.
Selim had no fixed address,
he was kind of living on the street,
so it was difficult
to get started on Selim Esen.
But Andrew Kinsman
was last seen at his residence,
so we needed to get there
to search for anything
that would help us understand
where Andrew might have gone.
It was creepy entering the apartment,
uh, knowing that he's disappeared.
The shelves were stocked.
It didn't appear
like he was planning on leaving anywhere.
Did something happen here?
Did something happen elsewhere?
Walk into the very south of the apartment.
I found his computer room.
There was a box of old discs
against the south wall,
and just above it was a calendar.
It was on June.
I looked at the 26th,
the day that Andrew Kinsman went missing.
Written on it was "3:00 p.m.,"
and then written below that was "Bruce."
We had to determine
who this Bruce character was,
and was he involved
in the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman?
There were three surveillance cameras
in front of Andrew Kinsman's apartment.
One was across the street,
facing his front door area.
And then two others
were, uh, just west of his apartment.
I retrieved the video surveillance footage
that the initial investigators
had acquired.
And I input the day
that Andrew Kinsman went missing.
I knew that 3:00 p.m.
Andrew Kinsman was supposedly
to meet a Bruce
so I started viewing the video
a little bit earlier,
around 2:45.
3:00 p.m. passes,
and nothing's coming up yet.
The only thing I could see
was a red Dodge across the street.
But then, at 3:07 p.m
an individual leaves
Andrew Kinsman's apartment.
Andrew Kinsman was a large man.
He was approximately 6 foot 4, 6 foot 3,
and you could see that, in the video,
this man towered over the van.
I believe that man was Andrew Kinsman.
The van drives off, uh, eastbound.
I needed to know who was the driver,
who owned that van.
I took a still image
to a Dodge dealership close to us
to see if they recognized
exactly what model it was.
I spoke to the manager,
and he said, "A hundred percent,
that's a 2004
25th Anniversary Edition Dodge Caravan."
It, uh It It blew my mind.
I was ecstatic.
We had the exact year, make, model.
Everything we needed to know about the van
to now go and search for an owner.
I requested driver records
for all the red 2004
Dodge Caravans in Ontario.
I ended up with 6,181 results.
We knew that Andrew Kinsman
had Bruce on the calendar,
so I did a Control-Find
and typed in the name "Bruce."
It limited that list of more than 6,000
down to five Bruces.
I began looking into the background
of each and every one of them.
Four of the five,
there was really nothing.
But then I got to Bruce McArthur.
He was a 66-year-old male,
and he recently had a a pardon
for, uh, a conviction
that he received in 2003,
where he assaulted a male with a pipe.
And in the summer of 2016,
he had been involved
in a violent encounter with another man
in the back of his 2004 Dodge Caravan.
The same Dodge Caravan
that we believe picked up Andrew Kinsman
the last time he is seen.
So, I put surveillance on Bruce McArthur
to track his whereabouts,
and I came into the office,
and, uh, I sat down with the team.
I said, "Hey, guys, I've, uh
Came across this guy,
Bruce McArthur."
Almost immediately,
Josh began snapping his fingers.
And then I said,
"I interviewed that guy back in 2013."
And Dave's head just whipped around,
and he was like, "What?"
Then I said, "Yeah, he even volunteered
to help with the investigation
into the first three missing men."
McArthur said that he had
met Skanda through a friend,
and, uh, he had dated Majeed.
He was very forthcoming
with his information,
made eye contact with me the whole time,
and there was absolutely
no reason to think
there was anything more than him
trying to help out the investigation.
There has been no trace
of 49-year-old Andrew Kinsman
for 25 days now.
Forty-three-year-old
Selim Esen hasn't been seen
since April 15th.
The gay community is on edge.
It's astounding that this has
gone on so long, um, unsolved.
You know, it just It's unsettling.
It's scary. Who's gonna be next?
We don't have any answers.
The last time
51 Division set up a task force
was for this, Project Houston,
the disappearance
of these three men from the Village
between 2010 and 2012.
All these years later,
there is still no trace of them.
I was reading in the paper
every day about the missing men,
and all of these memories
have just come right back
and punched me in the face again.
I was just praying
that the team would have leads
that we just didn't have before
to be able to find out
who was responsible,
before it happens again.
Through surveillance,
we learned Bruce McArthur
was a landscaper.
He tended, uh,
a lot of addresses in midtown Toronto
and tended to high-end residents.
He had set routines and set patterns.
He would landscape
the same properties on a Monday,
a different property on Tuesday.
He was separated from, uh, his wife.
He had adult children
and some grandchildren.
To be honest, he was kind of boring.
There were many drives to and from work
where I talked to myself, thinking,
"Are we Are we sure?
Are we on the right guy?"
"Are we really thinking that this guy
may be responsible
for Andrew Kinsman's murder?"
So, I asked Charles
to see if surveillance video existed
of Bruce McArthur with Andrew Kinsman,
possibly back at his home address.
Bruce McArthur's apartment
was in a very large, multi-story complex.
I went to on-site security to see
what video surveillance was available.
I started off at June 26th,
when Andrew Kinsman went missing.
When I went to view that video,
it it was extremely frustrating.
It had already been,
uh, deleted and written over.
But I was able to start watching video
from a few weeks later
and was able to identify the parking spot
that Bruce McArthur parked at.
Every day, at the same time,
Bruce would leave in the morning,
come home at night.
Running regular hours,
not doing anything out of the ordinary,
going grocery shopping,
bringing food home.
Then August 17th,
I have Bruce McArthur leaving
the apartment complex
in the red Dodge Caravan.
And it doesn't come back that day.
Later the next day, he returns
with a new van.
I was thinking to myself,
"Well, where is the old van?"
"What is going on?"
We needed to do
everything possible to find the van.
At that point, I had a partner
that I was working with, uh, exclusively.
Josh is more, uh, mild-mannered
in comparison to me.
I'm more of a straight shooter,
and I don't take much crap from people.
At that point, we thought Bruce McArthur,
he probably scrapped his van.
So, we came up with a plan.
My partner and I
looked on a map and found
all of the auto wreckers in Toronto.
Josh and I went
to the first wrecking yard.
And the van was not there.
Same with the second wrecking yard.
The third seemed to be abandoned
and out of commission.
Then we went to the fourth wrecking yard.
It's just
lane after lane of wrecked cars.
As far as the eye can see.
We were driving
past hundreds and hundreds.
One after the other, after the other.
And all of a sudden,
my partner startled me.
"It's here, it's here,
it's here, we found it!"
The trunk was open,
and the tires were missing,
but, other than that,
the van was was completely intact.
There were flies
that were attached to the underside.
There were stains on the carpet,
on the inside.
I immediately said,
"Nobody is touching this van."
"We have to seal this up."
I was hoping
that we would find some DNA evidence
that we can actually put
Andrew Kinsman in the van.
It would be a huge step forward
in the investigation.
My phone rang.
It was our biologist
for the Center of Forensic Science.
She told me that she had obtained
Andrew Kinsman's DNA
in blood inside that van.
Now, we can't say for sure
that he got into Bruce McArthur's vehicle.
But the blood,
it was maybe the size
of my pinkie nail.
It would have been easily explainable.
Maybe he cut himself.
It was not enough to arrest Bruce McArthur
for the murder of Mr. Kinsman.
So, we thought, "How do we get
additional evidence linking Bruce McArthur
to any of the missing men?"
Either his cell phone, or on his computer.
We looked at his cell phone,
and he had it with him all the time.
So, we thought, "Okay,
let's try to see what's on his computer."
And I got a warrant
to get into his apartment
when he was at work.
In order for us to track his movements
we had put
a GPS tracking device on his vehicle.
I went to the command center,
where I set up and waited
for Bruce to leave his residence.
On my screens
I watched Bruce McArthur's vehicle
start to move.
I hoped that he would continue
far out of Toronto,
that we wouldn't have to worry about him.
Then, just 20 minutes away
from his apartment
he came to a stop.
We didn't know how long
he was going to be at the address,
but I knew this was our opportunity
to get in
and and attempt to collect evidence.
I watched the entry team making their way
through the lobby and up elevators.
The first thing I did was take pictures.
I wanted to make sure
that when we leave the apartment,
that I put everything back
the way I found it.
Then I gave the go-ahead
to clone the computer.
Patrick informed me they would probably
need three to three and a half hours
to download the entire computer.
I wanted to get
as much as possible from his computer.
Every percentage could be the difference
between finding evidence and and not.
I was looking
through Bruce McArthur's bedroom
and I saw a rope.
I saw gloves, I saw a tape,
and I saw a metal bar.
Could have been
a a murder kit, or a bondage kit.
I took a picture
and took the items out to swab them.
I was pacing in the room,
watching the tracker,
and after an hour and a half
Bruce started driving back
in the direction of his apartment.
I told the team inside the building,
"You've gotta get out."
Everything was frantic.
While the, uh, tech crime investigators
disconnected all their tools
from, uh, Bruce McArthur's computer,
I went through my pictures
to put everything back in its place.
I'm watching Bruce McArthur
move down the Don Valley Parkway.
He's moving closer and closer
to his apartment.
And I'm thinking, "We'll get caught."
If Bruce found out
that we had been in his apartment,
we had ruined everything.
We were able to get out of the apartment
just as Bruce McArthur was minutes away.
Back at the station,
I opened the clone.
There were web history, chats, emails,
and a myriad
of of various different, uh, pictures.
But there was nothing that stood out.
Then I discovered metadata
indicating a vast amount
of photos had been deleted.
It piqued my interest.
But there's hundreds of thousands
of pieces of information,
and one piece on its own
doesn't really show a lot.
But if you can put them all together
you can recover deleted photos.
But that takes a lot of time.
It's extremely frustrating.
I would be getting
two or three hours of sleep.
I brought my own coffee machine in.
I would drink coffee nonstop.
There were times
I didn't even realize I hadn't eaten.
I was searching for weeks,
and nothing's coming up yet.
There's been no trace
of Kinsman since his disappearance.
And another man, Selim Esen,
who disappeared back in April.
Friends and family
have led several searches across the city.
So far, no trace.
Even though
I wasn't part of the investigation,
I was glued to the news,
and I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I n never thought that it would ever
happen to our brother, you know?
You You hear
about people who go missing,
but you never think it's gonna affect you.
I was waiting in anticipation
of what was going to happen next
and if they would finally
get some closure for these families.
You go to bed thinking about Andrew,
we wake up thinking about Andrew.
It's It's all day.
It's It's It's life-consuming.
I was exhausted, I was tired.
I had, um, asked one of my colleagues
if he could continue
going through the data
while I was getting some rest.
My colleague called me up
and, uh, told me,
"Charles, I I think I found photos
of what appeared to be, um, deceased man."
I immediately, uh, drove into work
and viewed the images that were recovered.
There was Selim Esen,
who had disappeared
a few months before Andrew Kinsman.
The way that he was posed
and the way that his body was positioned,
you could clearly make out
that he was deceased.
To see this was, uh, um, heart-wrenching.
You could see Bruce McArthur's bedroom
and the headboard
that was unique, uh, to his bed.
There was a metal pipe,
and and it appeared
that that metal pipe was used
to tighten the ligature
around, uh, Selim's neck,
cutting off oxygen
and ultimately killing him.
I got, uh, goose bumps.
I was holding that metal bar,
and and to see now that this metal bar
is somehow involved in the murder
And, uh, it was
a kind of an eerie feeling.
As the day progresses,
we start finding photographs
of other murdered men.
Many of them
were just wearing, uh, a fur coat.
There were men
who we had no idea had been missing.
It's scary.
Um, you know, it's troubling.
How big is this going to get?
How How many men
are we going to to find?
I was preparing for arrest warrants
and I got a telephone call
from a team surveilling Bruce McArthur.
He had just picked up a man
and was heading back to his address.
I drove very quickly to the address.
My investigators told me
that Bruce McArthur had already made
his way up to the 19th floor.
I went inside McArthur's building
with Dave.
All the elevators except one
was out of service.
We keep hitting the button.
There's an unarmed male
with Bruce McArthur
that's going to be his next victim.
My adrenaline was was
all the way up to the roof.
The elevator finally opened,
and it was packed.
We sardined our way in.
We were stopping on every other floor.
My heart was pounding.
I didn't want anyone dying,
uh, on my watch.
Finally, we got to the 19th floor.
I knock on the door.
Silence.
Then we heard the faint,
"Hello? Who's there?"
I grabbed Bruce McArthur by his wrists
and placed my handcuffs on him.
I tell Bruce that I'm placing you
under arrest for first-degree murder.
I walked towards Bruce McArthur's bedroom.
He had handcuffed the male to his bed
and had put a blind over his face.
This man was going to be
Bruce McArthur's next victim.
We searched his van.
Uh, a fur coat was located
in in the storage area.
It was the same fur coat
that I had seen victims wearing
in the photographs
that we had recovered from the computer.
A metal pipe was located
underneath the driver's seat.
The same pipe
that we had seen in his apartment,
that he had used to strangle his victims.
Bruce McArthur was taken
to the police station.
I had the murder weapon,
but I didn't know where the bodies were.
So, I was kind of mad.
I was kind of angry with him
and was gonna approach my interview
a little bit differently.
I wanted to have my go at him.
I threw down photographs
of the murdered men.
I said to him,
"Tell me who this person is."
"Tell me where I'm gonna find them."
He just did not answer.
"If you've done something with them
that I'll never be able to find them,
at least tell me that
so I can go and tell the families."
He just sat there.
We knew Bruce tended
to landscape properties
that backed onto green space,
properties that backed onto woods.
I thought if Bruce
was gonna dispose of a body,
that's where he would go.
Mallory Crescent was a property
Bruce frequented on a daily basis
and stored his equipment.
My partner had the dog handlers come by
and, uh, search the backyard.
The dogs were just
sniffing around it, sniffing around it,
looking up at the the handler
and, uh, kept focusing on this planter.
When the planter was opened,
I didn't really want to believe my eyes.
You could see
the layers of the soil,
and then you'd see a bone.
Then you'd see more layers,
and then you'd see, like, a foot.
You'd see more layers,
and then there'd be a skull.
The decomposing
remains of six people
have been recovered from planters
seized from this home on Mallory Crescent.
Andrew Kinsman is the only one of the six
whose body parts police have been
able to positively identify so far.
And with backyard excavation
on spots they've identified,
it's likely there will be more victims.
Bruce McArthur worked
in the exact area that I lived.
How did that make you feel?
Sick to my stomach.
Because the person that may be responsible
for the murder of all of these men
could have been
right under my nose the entire time.
We eventually
identified all the men
that Bruce McArthur
had photographs of on his computer.
Soroush Mahmudi was reported missing,
but there was no information
as to what happened to him.
Dean Lisowick was, uh, living
in the shelter system in Toronto.
Dean was never reported missing.
And Kirushna Kanagaratnam,
a refugee claimant from Sri Lanka.
It was presumed by friends
that he was in hiding
for fear that he would be deported.
It was, um, heartbreaking
and, uh,
I felt for the, uh, family and friends
of of everyone who'd been looking
for these these males for years.
McArthur's victims came to Toronto
to start a new life.
They tried to live life to the fullest,
and
Bruce McArthur
took that from them.
I was in the first row.
Um
And just hearing him say "guilty"
over and over and over again
was was a really great, great feeling.
We unfortunately
can never bring these men back,
but, um, I'm hoping
we can start bringing some closure
to the families and the communities.
Bruce McArthur has pled guilty.
I'm not considering it a win.
It's, uh You know,
it's the right outcome.
I was the one that started this,
and I can now close that door.
Sorry.
The emotions, just like now,
were overwhelming.
I was proud of the team.
I was so thankful
that the families finally had closure,
that the community could feel safe again.
And there were no words
that could describe
the sense of relief, as well,
um, that I had that no more men
would now go missing.