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.