Bruce McArthur: The Toronto Gay Village Murders

Killer Queens is a new series of historical fiction books based on true stories. The series explores the world of murder in the gay community, whether the victims or the killers themselves and sometimes both, are homosexual. While the previous books looked at murders in the gay communities of Germany, England, and the United States, this fourth edition of the series visits Canada-a country that has embraced the gay community overall.

In January 2019, Bruce McArthur, a 67-year-old Canadian landscaper, was convicted of eight first-degree murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the seven years between 2010 and 2017, McArthur preyed on men from Toronto's gay community and managed to avoid any detection by carefully cutting the bodies of his victims into pieces and burying them in the pot planters and grounds of his landscaping customers.

His victims included Selim Esen, Andrew Kinsman, Majeed Kayhan, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Kirushna Kanagaratnam. Additional charges were later placed on McArthur after an expanded investigation of hundreds of missing persons and deaths during those years.

During the first two years of gay men going missing, the LGBTQ community of Toronto suspected that there was someone stalking men in their community. The police didn't feel there was any evidence of this until, in 2012, 42-year-old Faizi, 40-year-old Navaratnam, and 58-year-old Kayhan went missing. By November of that year, police launched an investigation called "Houston "into the gay men who were missing. After two years with no results, they closed the investigation.

Three years later, in 2017, after 49-year-old Kinsman and 44-year-old Esen went missing, police launched another Prism investigation. The police spent four months discovering the remains of each victim and forensically identifying them. When the study finally ended, there were over 1800 pieces of evidence from searches of over 100 properties. McArthur's reign of terror in the gay village of Toronto finally ended on January 17, 2018, when police arrested and eventually charged him with the eight murders.