Catching Killers (2021) s02e03 Episode Script

1
4:00 in the morning,
the alarm goes off,
so that I can be at work at 5:30.
When I arrive at the station,
uh, put my coffee down,
and the phone rang.
The person on the other end
with a very strong accent
but a very quiet voice said,
"Are you the lead investigator
on the Skanda Navaratnam
missing person case?"
Now, the moment he said that to me,
I have to tell you,
my stomach dropped.
I first heard of Skanda Navaratnam
two years earlier
when he was reported missing.
For months, we searched for Skanda,
and we never found out
what happened to him.
He definitely got, um, inside my head.
The person on the other end then said
he was a detective from Bern, Switzerland.
He told me he had information
that Skanda had been kidnapped, murdered,
and then eaten by a cannibal.
My stomach is so nervous doing this.
I hate being in front of a camera.
It's worse than being
in the hot seat in court.
I'm telling you,
I just am not comfortable.
- It doesn't come across.
- Okay.
- So, is everyone good to crack on?
- We're good to crack on.
When I joined the police service,
I was 18.
Anyone who has to call 911 is gonna be
in one of the worst moments of their life,
and if I could be that police officer
that comforts them for a moment,
that's what I wanted to do.
When I received that phone call
from Bern, Switzerland,
I was working in the Village,
the heart of the Toronto LGBTQ+ community.
The detective had come across
a website called Zambian Meat,
a website about cannibalism.
On the website,
he started to speak
to the member in Toronto.
The username was Chefmate50.
Chefmate50 told him
that he'd kidnapped, murdered and eaten
a brown-skinned man
from the Village, in Toronto,
somewhere between 2009 and 2011.
The detective narrowed it down
to possibly being Skanda Navaratnam.
My gut is saying, "This is ridiculous."
But then my head is saying,
"Well, if there was,
even in the remotest possibilities,
a cannibal living in
or around the city of Toronto,
I had I had to investigate that."
I start typing in "Z-A-M-B-I-A-N Meat."
Right on the front page of the website
was two men,
and they were roasting a woman on a spit.
I couldn't get my head around
what I was actually seeing on the screen.
I was shocked.
I was absolutely taken back
at the fact that these websites existed.
I had to find out who Chefmate50 was.
The username had
an associated email address
of chefmate50@yahoo.com
Later in the evening,
after getting judicial authorizations,
I was able to review some of the emails
that were provided through Yahoo Canada.
And as I started opening up the second,
and the third, and the fourth emails,
my jaw was dropping.
I had Chefmate50, um, sending emails
to people all over the world,
talking about
how he wanted to torture them,
how he wanted to eat them.
I told Homicide, "I need to see you.
There's possibly a cannibal
right here in Toronto."
Next day, I walked in the room
full of the Toronto Police Homicide Unit.
There's this, you know, aura around them.
I'm in my, you know,
normal store-bought suit,
and they all look so professional.
They have cuff links with their initials,
and they all use the same tailor.
I was anxious
as to whether or not they would say,
"Okay, you have enough
to move forward in this investigation."
But as they're going through
the briefing package,
and they're seeing some of the content
of some of the emails,
you can see them
slowly slinking down in their seats.
And they went from
these detectives who'd seen everything
to the same feelings that I had.
This overwhelming, uh,
feeling of, "Is this really happening?"
I had a name through Yahoo Canada
for the person
depicting himself as Chefmate50.
It was James Brunton.
James Brunton
was a family man who was married,
who had a daughter.
He lived in a very suburban neighborhood
in Peterborough, Ontario,
which is northeast of Toronto.
And he had no criminal record.
He worked at the local hockey arena.
He also, uh, volunteered
on a telephone hotline,
uh, for people who were suicidal.
And he seemed, on the surface,
uh, to be someone
who was committed to his community.
But there was no definition
of what a cannibal should look like.
Homicide determined that
it would be good to have a team set up,
and I was assigned
as the lead investigator
on what was called Project Houston.
I was extremely excited in the fact
that they've taken me seriously,
but now I've got to work in a way
that I have never done before.
The first thing I had to determine was,
"Are there any other missing men
I should be aware of and looking for?"
So, I went to the Canadian
National Missing Persons database.
I immediately identified a second person.
Abdul "Basir" Faizi,
who'd gone missing
in December 2010 from the gay village,
just three months after Skanda.
I took a look at the photo
of this missing person
and of Skanda Navaratnam.
They were both brown-skinned,
they were both middle-aged,
they both had dark hair,
they both had mustaches,
they both had a small beard.
I went back to the database,
and I found a third missing person.
Majeed Kayhan,
missing from the gay village
two years later, in October of 2012.
I'm looking and thinking, "Oh, boy."
I felt in my gut
that it was the same person
that was responsible
for whatever happened to the three men,
but without any bodies,
I had no concrete evidence
that there was a serial killer out there.
I needed to see if there was any evidence
linking James Brunton to the missing men.
I needed an IT person who was tech-savvy,
who could create a profile
and enter Zambian Meat.
We're in business.
Never done it before. Yeah, it's strange.
But it's interesting. It's neat.
The first person
I thought of was Charles Coffey.
When you're a kid,
you see the exciting movies and shows,
and investigations
were always like a puzzle.
I've always loved that aspect of it,
and always dreamed
about being a police officer.
I received a phone call
from Detective Harris,
and she explained to me
how Skanda, Faizi and Kayhan,
three missing males,
were possibly victims of cannibalism.
It's It's a topic
that you don't realize is real,
and being asked
to investigate such a topic,
I was I was excited,
but I was also disturbed,
realizing that
there was cannibalism out there.
The next day,
I was able to create an account
and successfully became
a member of Zambian Meat.
There was people who were
looking to be killed or slaughtered,
as well as people
who were performing the slaughtering.
I was able to create
a glossary defining the hierarchy.
A "Long Pig,"
which is a potential willing victim, uh,
a "Chef," which is, uh,
considered a qualified cannibal,
and a "Master Chef,"
which is a qualified cannibal,
uh, can butcher and prepare meat.
It's, uh
You know, it's extremely surreal.
I don't know how else to explain it.
Brunton used the username Chefmate50,
explaining that he was the real thing,
that he has tasted
and consumed human meat.
Uh, he would go into great detail
on how he had performed
the slaughtering of of human beings.
Descriptions on how to properly kill,
cook, and store, uh, human flesh.
It was very direct, uh, very intricate,
very knowledgeable.
I needed to get
more information on James Brunton
to prove if this man was dangerous,
or just a sick fantasist.
We needed to get into his home
and clone his computer,
so that we could
forensically go through it.
For weeks, we were trying
to get in the house surreptitiously,
and there was never an opportunity.
Either James was there himself
or his wife was there.
I would be working
from 7:00 in the morning
to 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning every day.
I'd been setting up teams,
going out doing surveillance.
There was a lapse of eight days
where I just didn't see my daughter.
When I was 28, Julia was born.
Her and I were on our own, uh,
from when she was one year old.
I raised her, um, as a single mother,
and, uh, she's
You know, she's everything.
When I came home,
I would open her door
and just quietly walk in.
I just wanted to see her,
I wanted to lie next to her.
I would just take that deep breath in,
and it would have that scent of her,
and that scent was so calming for me.
Julia and I would plan to do things,
but as the investigation progressed,
the more time I spent at work,
and the less time I spent with Julia.
In December,
I received judicial authorization
to get all of Brunton's emails
in real time.
I saw an email about James
going to visit his daughter with his wife
down in the United States for Christmas.
Finally, that was our opportunity
to safely get into the house without
being discovered and clone the computer.
But this was gonna be the first Christmas
since the day that Julia was born
that I wasn't going to spend with her,
and it was just destroying me inside.
I walked in the door,
and she was waiting for me.
She can just pick up
my demeanor right away,
and she's like, "What's wrong?"
And then I told her,
"Honey, I'm not gonna be able
to be here tomorrow for Christmas,
and I'm really, really sorry."
I know I started crying.
Um
You know, I I kept feeling
like I was disappointing her.
I had to leave my house
at 4:00 in the morning.
I'd got about four hours' sleep,
and up and out the door I went.
I drove to the car park
close to Brunton's house.
We had our mobile support teams there,
tech crime teams there,
we have our locksmiths there.
Emotionally, I was drained,
but you always have to put a game face on.
I started handing coffees out
and saying Merry Christmas to everyone.
Got a few
"Merry Fucking Christmases" back.
They don't want to be there.
They wanna be at home with their families.
I stay out in the parking lot
while the tech team
sneak through the back lane
and get in through the door.
We didn't have warrants
to search the entire home,
so we started mirroring the hard drive
from his computer onto an external drive.
I was certainly hopeful
that we'd find something on the computer
because if it was just
holiday snaps and innocent photos,
I had ruined
my Christmas Day with my daughter
for nothing.
Once the tech support team
were able to clone the computer,
that information was extracted
and brought back to Charles.
There's hundreds of thousands
of pieces of information.
Chats, uh, emails, um,
photos, videos, web searches.
Going through Brunton's emails,
I came across a, uh, conversation
where, uh, he had described a cabin
two and a half hours north of Toronto,
with a large room, three chairs.
He talked about having killed people
in the back portion of the cabin.
And there was talk about a hoist
to allow bodies
to have their blood drained.
It was almost shock and awe.
Like, "Is this real?"
This was big.
We had a location
where Brunton allegedly committed murder.
We now had to determine,
"Where is this cabin?"
We threw a large map of the area
on the table,
and we did a large circle
two and a half hours from Toronto.
But it's hunting a needle in a haystack.
You're talking hundreds of square miles.
As I was looking
at all of these possible areas,
I thought back to Skanda's phone records.
It showed that he'd made a call
from the Bancroft area
just two days before he went missing.
Bancroft's a two-and-a-half-hour drive
north of Toronto
with a lot of dense woods surrounding it.
This could be the place.
We got police drones
flying above the trees
looking for any glimpse
of where the cabin might be
within that area of Bancroft.
But the trees were so close together,
it was difficult to get
a good look at some of the cabins.
We have to put boots on the ground
and get people out there,
and try to find hard evidence
that links Brunton
to any of these missing men.
Debbie was saying
we have to go find this cabin,
and I was already
kind of putting my hand up.
That's something
that I would totally be into doing.
Josh McKenzie
had been my partner for three years.
- You're comfortable, Josh?
- I'm good.
Josh is a farm boy.
He can survive in in his snowshoes
and tracing through the wilderness.
Debbie's one
of the hardest-working people
I ever worked with.
She always treated me like an equal,
you know,
allowing me to run cases on my own
and give me experience,
and really helped
shape me as an investigator.
I always liked
the work outside of the office.
I liked going out,
finding things, figuring things out.
I drove to Bancroft
with another investigator.
We got out of the car and started walking.
It's very remote.
You know, it's trees everywhere.
I saw one purple ribbon tied on a tree.
And looked and saw
a second one a couple of trees down.
Somebody was trying to create a path
leading somewhere more secluded.
We took a few steps.
A gunshot ricocheted through the trees
and then suddenly stopped,
and it was completely quiet.
It's not hunting season.
There's no reason why
we should be hearing gunshots.
I remember looking at my phone,
and we didn't have any cell phone service.
I started thinking, "Oh, man,
should we need to call for backup
or need help in any way,
we couldn't do that."
I was taking slower and slower steps
when I saw a long beam suspended
probably about 15 to 20 feet in the air.
It had hooks on it
and ropes to a pulley system
that you could raise to different heights
and suspend, really,
whatever you wanted on it.
Behind the pulley system,
there was a cabin.
The other investigator and I,
we separated,
making sure that we had
all of our surroundings covered.
I looked through the window.
I saw a table and three chairs,
just like the one
that was described in Brunton's emails.
There was a fire pit
at the back of the building,
and on top of that,
there was a piece of an iron fence.
Like a massive grate for a barbecue.
Near the fire pit,
there was a number of boots and shoes
just nailed to this tree.
Some of those shoes
had burn marks on the toes.
My mind started spinning at that point.
I found this spot
where I was able to get
one bar of cell phone service.
My phone rings,
and I pick it up, and it's Josh.
He's like,
"Deb, you're not gonna believe this,
but there are pairs of boots,
and they're all just
hanging from this tree."
I knew what he was thinking,
and he knew what I was thinking as well.
You know, were these mementos?
Were these shoes from men
who have now been, um, cannibalized?
I told Josh to gather the shoes
so I could extrapolate some DNA
to see whether they match
any of the three missing men.
A few days later,
I was going through some of the emails
that were on Brunton's computer.
I could see that Josh McKenzie
was getting up and walking towards me.
The DNA from all of the shoes was negative
for any of our missing men
or anyone in the national data bank.
We still didn't have any hard evidence
to move forward in the investigation.
Every time I spoke to a family member
or a friend of one of the missing persons,
they were wanting answers.
I couldn't give them those answers,
and that, internally,
was constantly causing pressure.
At work, I was very stoic,
but the moment I got home,
I wasn't as tolerant
or as patient as I should be.
Julia would just wanna
tell me something simple,
um, you know, about her day,
and I would just block it out,
or I wouldn't have the time to listen,
and I would turn it into an argument.
In those moments,
she would just say, "It's okay,"
and she would give me a hug,
and I would just break down.
I spent the next couple months
searching through Brunton's computer
for evidence.
I'd wake up and during breakfast,
I'd already be thinking about the case.
It's some of the most disturbing material
anyone will ever see.
I couldn't talk to my wife
about the investigation.
She never really fully understood
what I was going through.
I'm not gonna bring my family
into such a warped, horrific world.
I discovered a series of emails
in which Brunton was, uh,
conversing with a, uh a young male.
In these conversations,
I uncovered a contract
that was from October, uh, 2009.
"I, being of sound mind and body,
and fully understanding
of all the consequences,
do hereby enter into an agreement
with a person known
as Chefmate from Zambian,
hereafter known as Master.
It is agreed that after my 18th birthday,
I will enter into his hands
and place myself in his full control."
"After that,
Master can have my body
to butcher and eat as desired."
Just absolutely disgusting.
This boy is one year younger
than my daughter.
And this predator is preying on him.
Just
Yeah.
How can any human being
ever speak to somebody like that,
let alone take advantage
of someone who's only 15 years old?
Makes me sick.
Through help
with our Sexual Exploitation Unit,
we traced the teenager's address
to a home in Colorado.
Thank God he was alive.
He explained that he had no intentions
on going through with the contract.
But Brunton pressured
the teenager to commit,
and when the teenager refused,
Brunton asked him
to send pictures of him naked.
Child pornography
is one of the most heinous crimes
that a person can do,
and I remember being angered by that. Um
I was personally angered.
That gave me thought
to further investigate everything
and see if there was
any more evidence relating to that.
I opened a file from 2003, May 1st.
I started realizing
I was looking at a video
of inside a locker room
of a hockey, uh, arena with young males.
They were changing in and out
of their hockey gear
and into their clothes,
and, um, Brunton was filming them
while they were changing.
These boys,
they're in a hockey rink
where they feel that they're safe
and in a safe environment,
and you have
this predator in the changeroom
taking advantage of their trust.
This was child pornography
and child exploitation,
and I now had grounds for an arrest.
But if I arrested Brunton right now,
I may never get the evidence that I need
to connect Brunton
to the three missing men.
It was killing me inside.
And knowing what he was doing
in the ice hockey arenas,
time was no longer on our side.
Our plan of action
was to get an undercover officer
to go onto Zambian Meat,
to pretend to be a Long Pig,
someone who wants to give himself up
and be eaten by a Master Chef.
The moment the profile
went live on Zambian Meat,
Chefmate50 sent our profile an email
asking to speak to him.
Brunton told our undercover officer
he wanted to take him
to his cabin in the woods,
where he promised
to slaughter and then eat him.
Our undercover officer agreed
to everything that Brunton wanted
and gave details of a flight
he'd be taking into Toronto
on the morning of May 11th, 2013.
It's like, "We've got him, he's coming,
we're gonna get the answers we want."
I'm so excited at this moment
that all of this will finally happen
after all of these months
of investigation.
On the day of the takedown,
everything was in place.
Outside of the airport,
I had hostage negotiators,
I had SWAT teams on standby,
and I had snipers up on the roof
in case the undercover officer
was put in jeopardy
while getting into the car with Brunton.
We had mobile support teams
out in Peterborough
so that they could keep an eye
on Brunton's home,
and everyone was reporting back
to myself over the radio
so that at any given time,
I would know what was happening
in all of these different locations.
I was anxious and excited
at the same time.
Brunton drove out of his driveway,
he went directly to the 115 highway.
We had our mobile support teams
following him.
He got onto Highway 401,
which is exactly the route
you would need to do
to get to the airport.
And then all of a sudden,
the mobile team tells us
he's turned off the highway.
And I'm thinking,
"Why is he turning off the highway?
What's going on?"
Brunton turned
into a parking lot of a mall.
So, the mobile team followed behind him.
They're letting me know
Brunton's in the washroom.
I'm thinking, "Okay, it was a pit stop.
He's gonna get back in his car,
and he's gonna continue to the airport."
I'm getting real-time information
from the mobile team
that Brunton is leaving the mall.
He's passed the 401 West exit.
He's now getting on the 401 East.
I'm thinking, "What?
He's coming to the airport,
he's gotta go west, not east."
What's happened?
Did he spot the mobile team?
Or did he get cold feet?
They follow Brunton
right back to his house.
He goes inside,
and he doesn't come back out.
I felt defeated.
But we can't let him
still stay out in the public
when we know what he's doing
in regards to child exploitation
and child pornography.
We have to arrest him now.
We have to effect the arrest.
Brunton was arrested in his house
and brought to the station.
In the last 48 hours,
I would have been lucky
if I had two hours' sleep.
I'm thriving on adrenaline at this point.
As I'm walking towards the interview room,
I know that Brunton is waiting
on the other side of that door.
I didn't know what to expect,
what personality I would see.
Is he the husband and father,
or is he Master Chef?
He's got his head down,
and he's got
his hands crossed on the table.
And he's not looking at me.
I said,
"We have evidence from your computers
that you've been filming boys
in the hockey arenas out in Peterborough."
I'm reading off what his charges were,
and he had no reaction.
"We have evidence that
you're involved in a cannibal website.
We have evidence, virtually,
that you've admitted to killing somebody."
You could see his whole demeanor change.
Like he was proud of it.
He said that he had admitted to killing,
he had admitted to eating human flesh,
but it was all fantasy-based,
and that he'd never really done that.
I didn't wanna believe him.
But I couldn't prove otherwise.
It's extremely frustrating,
because we still don't have
the answers that we're looking for.
I had the officers come in
and take him to his cell.
I watched him walk out,
and I still wondered,
"Are we gonna find anything at the home?"
The entire house
was forensically examined.
What was located was more evidence
in relation to child pornography
and child exploitation charges,
but nothing in relation
to the three missing men.
Learning that,
that was hard.
I was thinking to myself,
"Now what? Like, where else do we go?
What else do we look at?
How are we gonna solve this?"
Sixty-five-year-old
James Alex Brunton
walked out of court today
after being sentenced
for making, possessing,
and distributing child pornography.
I really have nothing to say.
I'm, uh, very sorry for what happened
for my wife and family.
Today, he was sentenced to
time served plus three years' probation.
There was nothing that linked
Brunton to the three missing men.
Did I want there to be something?
Absolutely.
Did I want to find
some closure for those families?
Absolutely.
But Brunton wasn't our guy.
The case had taken a toll on me.
Meanwhile, you know,
I had a daughter at home
who was also needing her mother,
and I wasn't there
as much as I should have been.
Um, and that was pulling.
That was pulling on me.
It was just the best decision
for us as a family
for me to retire from policing.
I would still go back
to the Village quite often.
I still couldn't let go
of the missing men.
They continually haunted me.
I wanted that closure
for the community and for the families,
and selfishly, for myself as well.
I'd been away
from the police service for two years.
I'm relaxing with Julia,
we're watching some TV
when I received a phone call
from my boss from the time
that I was investigating the missing men.
He said,
"It's happened again."