When a flurry of police activity hit the well-to-do neighbourhood of Bennington Heights in Toronto, homeowners couldn’t help but peer through their soft silky curtains at the scores of patrol cars and forensic vans parked down their leafy, tree-lined streets.

The centre of the commotion was 53 Mallory Crescent, owned by the sweet and unassuming couple, Ron and Karen Fraser. As teams of forensic investigators swamped in white hazmat suits invaded their home, all the pair could do was to look on in horror as they learned that the plant pots being carried out from their garden had been hiding human remains.

But who was the criminal who had been depositing victims in their backyard between 2010 and 2017? Their supposedly jovial gardener, Bruce McArthur.

Behind his friendly exterior belied a master manipulator who had preying and murdering men from Toronto’s gay village, many of whom were immigrants of Asian or Middle-Eastern descent, for nearly a decade.

But while McArthur’s reputation as a potentially dangerous man amongst the LGBTQ+ community in the city was widely established, numerous failings and cultural misconceptions prevented the serial killer – who also worked as a shopping centre Father Christmas – from being brought to justice.

Now, award-winning journalist Mobeen Azhar is delving into a community that is still grieving to explore the unanswered questions around McArthur and his numerous crimes, for new BBC Three mini-series, Santa Claus the Serial Killer.

‘It was a case that got personal quite quickly,’ Azhar explains to Metro.co.uk ahead of the true crime doc launch. ‘Like many of McArthur’s victims, I’m a gay man with brown skin and so I started thinking how this happened and what the motivation may be.’

It was the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman after Toronto Pride in 2017 that triggered the series of events that put McArthur behind bars. A tall, handsome man with a vivacious personality, Andrew, 49, was a regular face around the city’s gay village, having moved to the area in his 20s. In the series, friends of Andrew describe him as the ‘opposite’ of vulnerable – dependable, with a presence that was easily felt.

So when he abruptly vanished without a trace on 26 June just two days after Pride celebrations, friends were alarmed. An avid social media user, Andrew’s phone was switched off – and panic soon started to set in. When friends accessed his apartment they discovered Andrew had left his 17-year-old cat, which he doted on, without food, water or medicine.

Mobeen Azhar heads to Toronto’s gay village to try and understand the crimes of Bruce McArthur (Picture: BBC)

At the time, the Toronto Police didn’t have a dedicated missing persons unit, but due to the growing press attention around Andrew’s disappearance in addition to lobbying by the LGBTQ+ community, an investigative team was formed. By this time, he had been missing for two months.

Observations of CCTV footage close to his home house saw community activist Andrew get into a red Dodge caravan at 3pm. It matched a time that had been marked on the calendar, which simply read ‘Bruce’.

The police linked this to Bruce McArthur, and were alerted to how he had taken a vehicle matching this description to a scrapyard. When the caravan was found – not yet scrapped, still untidy and full of old coffee cups – forensics tested the vehicle and found traces of blood that matched Andrew’s DNA.

Bruce McArthur murdered eight people and hid the bodies in plant pots (Picture: Reuters)

While this still wasn’t enough evidence to issue an arrest for McArthur, it allowed the police to put him under surveillance.

The investigating team then managed to copy some information on their suspect’s hard drive – and what they found left them floored.

Not only did McArthur have 18 photos of Andrew’s dead body in the back of his van, but he also had pictures of Selim Essen, another man from Toronto’s gay village, who had gone missing two months before Andrew had. In the photos, Selim was dead, lying in his killer’s bed.

When McArthur was arrested, police still hadn’t recovered any bodies, and so gained search warrants for properties that McArthur regularly visited as a gardener and landscaper. This search took officers to Mallory Crescent which was just a short distance from his flat. There, authorities found the dismembered bodies of eight victims stuffed into plant pots.

The bodies were found in the wealthy, suburban district, Bennington Heights (Picture: Toronto Star via Getty Images)

McArthur mutilated his victims and hid their body parts in plant pots (Picture: Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Karen still lives with her husband at the house where the human remains of Bruce’s eight victims were discovered (Picture: BBC)

‘His rituals were certainly grim,’ Azhar explains. ‘McArthur liked mementos of his crimes. He took a picture of one decapitated body. In other instances, he’d put cigars in his victim’s mouths, putting them in a fur coat, making them pose.

‘He would move the body parts around in those plant pots. He’d sit amongst those pots and eat his lunch “with” his victims. It was bizarre and grim, and massively disturbing.’

Even though such horrors were found in that back garden, Karen and Ron still live at 53 Mallory Crescent.

‘Am I comfortable that they were there and that I often watered those pots? No, absolutely not, but the flesh pieces are not the men,’ Karen tells Metro.co.uk.

‘I am haunted by images that come to my mind of the victims’ last moments. The images would be with me wherever I moved to.

‘[But] I have been very happy living in this place. Why would I let Bruce McArthur take it away?’

In January 2019, McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, meaning no subsequent trial followed, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for at least 25 years. He has never spoken publicly about his actions, or what motivated him to commit murder.

Bruce McArthur preyed on vulnerable men, such as Dean Lisowick, who did not have a fixed abode when he was murdered (Picture: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

His reluctance to speak out – not even to express remorse – has meant a lot of his victim’s loved ones have been left with unanswered questions, particularly about why he chose to target the men he did.

‘It was a really long process to gain trust to get people to talk,’ Azhar explains. ‘But so many people wanted to contribute to a cultural conversation about all of our communities and how we make each other sager.’

One person who speaks in the documentary about his encounter with McArthur is Josh. He met the killer in 2012 while he was working as a sex worker, hooking up after McArthur responded to his advert on Craigslist.

‘He seemed like any other [client],’ Josh tells Metro.co.uk. ‘He seemed normal, friendly.

‘There were some [red flags]. He wanted me to come over without even knowing the price first. He also didn’t seem to care whether I was a bottom or a top.

‘But though I said I was a top, he was super aggressive. I was kinda confused.’

Josh remembers McArthur’s pleasant demeanour quickly melting away when they started to have sex, being grabbed hard and pushed to the point that Josh started to worry he was in danger.

Even 10 years after his encounter with McArthur, Josh – who left Toronto shortly afterwards – can viscerally remember the incident, saying he almost has ‘PTSD’ from events.

McArthur is thought to have killed most of his victims within his flat, where he lived on the 19th floor (Picture: Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Josh encountered Bruce McArthur when he was working as a sex worker in Toronto (Picture: BBC)

McArthur mostly operated in the gay village in Toronto (Picture: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

‘When I learned he was a serial killer I honestly started to think I had actually died and just hadn’t realised it yet, or that I would close my eyes and open them at any point and I would be right back there and no time had passed,’ he says.

Josh believes the only reason he was saved was because his partner at the time knew of his whereabouts.

‘He flipped out when I said me and my boyfriend keep track of each other,’ Josh recalls in the documentary. ‘Looking back, I think it was because he was planning to kill me.’

Josh was having a particularly difficult time during this period – he had been thrown out by his mother and was living on the streets, after his family did not agree with his sexuality or his drug use (he was addicted to crystal meth at the time).

McArthur is believed to prey on those, like Josh, who were particularly helpless, exploiting these vulnerabilities in order to keep his crimes under wraps for so long.

Skandaraj ‘Skanda’ Navaratnam, widely thought to be McArthur’s first victim in 2010, had fled alone from Sri Lanka, where he had been tortured. He had had an on-off sexual relationship with McArthur for around 10 years. But as a refugee in Canada, he had no family around him and it took friends a few days to realise he’d gone missing. 

Other victims of McArthur included Dean Lisowick in 2016 – a homeless sex worker and former drug addict, who was never reported missing.

Then there was Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam. As a Sri Lankan asylum seeker on a deportation order, many friends of his chose not to report him missing to avoid getting him into trouble.

Soroush Mahmudi, a refugee from Iran with no family in the country, was also killed by McArthur in 2014.

Some of Bruce’s victims were immigrants or asylum seekers, who had come to Toronto on their own. Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam was murdered by Bruce, and was never reported missing out of fears he could face deportation. This shot is from his memorial service (Picture: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

The LGBTQ+ community in Toronto is still hurting following McArthur’s conviction (Picture: Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

McArthur’s second victim, Abdulbasir ‘Basir’ Faizi, killed in late 2010, was similarly vulnerable. Married with a wife and children, Basir was leading a double life where he regularly visited Toronto’s gay village for sex.

His disappearance was initially picked up by the Peel Police Department, where he lived with his family. The detective investigating believed there was a link between Basir and Skanda, both being gay men of colour last seen in Toronto – however, she claims that her suggestions were dismissed by Toronto Police (they dispute this, claiming they have no record of this interaction).

For Azhar, it’s too simple to blame the police for failings in stopping McArthur throughout his killing spree. That’s not to say significant errors weren’t made – the police were slow to link the disappearance of multiple men from the Toronto gay district, and have been rightly criticised for failing to fully investigate until Andrew Kinsman – a white man – vanished.

However, Azhar describes a ‘cocktail of factors’ at play that allowed McArthur to kill unimpeded for nearly a decade.

‘We can’t pretend history wouldn’t have played a part,’ he explains. ‘We may see Toronto as this liberal bastion – but it doesn’t take away the fact that many people in the LGBTQ+ community often feel overpoliced and under protected by law enforcement, which may have prevented people reporting crime.’

The documentary also shows McArthur as a master manipulator and a sociopath: he was first arrested by police in 2001 after he attacked an actor with a metal bar. However, he turned himself into the police immediately, which gave him the opportunity to shape a narrative. McArthur did this on several occasions; a few years later, after he tried to strangle a sex worker, he sped to the nearest police station to frame the act as a sex game gone wrong.

However, while McArthur’s reputation amongst the LGBTQ+ community as a potentially dangerous man was fairly well known, he was never investigated for any wrongdoing until 2017.

Many people in the LGBTQ+ community often feel overpoliced and under protected by law enforcement

Azhar suggests cultural misunderstandings and sensitivities prevented the killer from being exposed sooner.

‘People can make assumptions and lack compassion sometimes,’ he says. ‘When I was looking at the murder of Majeed Kayhan, I spoke to people he associated with in the gay community and they said they assumed that, because he was an Afghan man living a double life, his family honour killed him, and they didn’t want to get involved. But then when I spoke to his family, even now, they refuse to believe he was gay.

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‘We live in an era that is so fraught and people are so extreme in their views, but on the other hand, we are so scared of upsetting other people.

‘It’s really simple – we just need to be more compassionate with each other,’ Azhar continues. ‘As gay people, we need to check in with each other and be open. There can’t be these cultural sensitivities. If someone goes missing from an immigrant community, you have to be able to ring the alarm.

‘And if you believe someone has been honour killed, you should be calling the f***ing police.’

Santa Claus the Serial Killer begins Sunday at 9pm on BBC Three.

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‘He seemed like any other guy – friendly, even’