The Globe and Mail Justin Ling Published April 13, 2021
MARK BLINCH/Reuters
The Toronto Police Service needs a culture shift to deal with “profound systemic failures” that led to serial killer Bruce McArthur stalking the city’s LGBTQ community for nearly eight years before being caught, according to an external review into the police investigation.
The review, by retired Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Gloria Epstein, was launched in 2018 to examine how police handled the cases of eight men Mr. McArthur murdered between 2010 and 2017 in the city’s Gay Village. It was expanded to look at two cases from 2017: the botched search for Tess Richey, and Alloura Wells, a transgender woman whose death remains unexplained.
Published Tuesday, April 13, 2021 5:32AM EDT Last Updated Tuesday, April 13, 2021 4:53PM EDT A long-awaited independent review has found “serious flaws” in how the Toronto police force handled a number of missing persons investigations in the city’s Gay Village and is calling for a new approach that would shift some of the responsibility for handling these files onto civilians and community agencies. Retired Ontario Court of Appeal justice Gloria Epstein was asked to conduct the review back in 2018 amid public criticism that police had not done enough in response to a number of missing person reports in the Village. The probe wasn’t initially supposed to include the case of serial killer Bruce McArthur as it was before the courts at the time. But its scope was later widened after McArthur plead guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder.
How police may have missed a chance to catch serial killer Bruce McArthur in 2013
Toronto police didn’t check Bruce McArthur’s criminal record in 2013 before or after interviewing him despite possessing evidence connecting the now convicted serial killer to three missing men, according to a new independent review.
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Bruce McArthur, a landscaper, killed eight men with ties to Toronto s gay village. (Facebook)
A woman has recalled the shocking moment she realised gay Canadian serial killer Bruce McArthur had buried seven men in her flowerbeds.
McArthur was arrested in 2018, and found guilty of killing and dismembering eight men between 2010 and 2017, after luring them from Toronto’s Gay Village.
The 69-year-old later staged photos with some of the corpses, dressing them up in fur coats and putting cigars in their mouths.
Karen Fraser and her husband Ron Smith had been friendly with McArthur for years, and would let him store tools in their garage in exchange for him cutting their grass.
Epstein dedicated the report to Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Dean Lisowick, Skandaraj (Skanda) Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam – who McArthur killed – along with Alloura Wells, a trans woman found dead in a ravine in 2017 and Tess Richey, a young woman whose body was found in an outdoor stairwell by her mother after police failed to locate her.
Epstein concluded that while a number officers worked hard to investigate the disappearances, others had “misconceptions or stereotypical ideas” about the gay community – and that these perceptions hampered the search fo the killer.
At the same time, investigators “failed to appreciate” the barriers that “prevented some witnesses from coming forward”– including a deep mistrust of police in marginalized communities and a long history of criminalization of the LGBTQ+ communities.