On June 26, 2017, Andrew Kinsman, forty-nine, the superintendent of his building in Toronto's Cabbagetown and a volunteer known as a stable and responsible man, was seen for the last time. Two days later friends let themselves into his apartment. He would never have gone away without telling anyone, they said, or left his cat and his medication behind, and the next day they reported him missing. On his calendar for June 26 was the name Bruce. Surveillance video outside his building showed him getting into a red vehicle. The picture showed no plate and no clear face, but the chrome siding identified it as a 2004 Dodge Caravan.
Kinsman had known Bruce McArthur for at least a decade, from his time as a bartender at The Black Eagle, had been seen carrying debris on one of McArthur's landscaping jobs in 2011, and had had a sexual relationship with him. At the end of July 2017 Toronto police set up a task force, Project Prism, to investigate the disappearances of Kinsman and Selim Esen and any links to earlier cases. By late August or September they had matched the van to McArthur. It was gone from his home; on October 3 officers found it at Dom's Auto Parts in Courtice, where the owner had bought it on September 16. DNA from Kinsman and Esen was found inside, and on December 4 police got a warrant to search McArthur's apartment in Thorncliffe Park covertly.
Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur was born on October 8, 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario, and raised on a farm in Argyle in the Kawartha Lakes, where his parents also fostered troubled children from Toronto. He married his high school girlfriend, Janice Campbell, worked at Eaton's and then as a traveling salesman for McGregor Socks, had two children in Oshawa, and was active in his church while hiding his homosexuality. He began having affairs with men in the early 1990s, separated from his wife in 1997, went bankrupt in 1999 and moved to Toronto, where he took up landscaping and became a regular in the bars of Church and Wellesley.
On October 31, 2001, he followed an actor and model, Mark Henderson, into his apartment after being invited to see his Halloween costume, and struck him several times from behind with an iron pipe he often carried. He turned himself in, pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm, and on April 11, 2003, received a conditional sentence of two years less a day, with house arrest, a curfew, three years' probation, a ban from the Village except for work and medical visits, and orders to give his DNA and undergo counseling. In 2014 he was granted a record suspension, and most records of the case had been destroyed in 2010 under police retention policy.
The first man he killed was Skandaraj Navaratnam, forty, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka with no family in Canada, who had been McArthur's lover and had worked for his landscaping business; he left the bar Zippers with an unknown man early on September 6, 2010. Abdulbasir Faizi, forty-two, an immigrant from Afghanistan who was not out to his family and had been working overtime to buy Christmas presents for his two daughters, disappeared on December 28, 2010; his car was found on Moore Avenue, which connects to the Leaside house where McArthur kept his equipment. Majeed Kayhan, fifty-eight, also from Afghanistan and the son of a Muslim cleric, was last seen in the Village on October 18, 2012. In November 2012 police set up Project Houston to investigate Navaratnam's disappearance, linked it to Faizi and Kayhan by June 2013, and closed it with no evidence of a crime or a suspect.
Soroush Mahmudi, fifty, a refugee from Iran who worked in a manufacturing plant and lived with his wife in Scarborough, was killed on or about August 15, 2015. Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, thirty-seven, one of 492 Tamil refugees who arrived on the MV Sun Sea in 2010, who had gone into hiding after a deportation order and worked as a cleaner and mover, was killed on or about January 6, 2016, and was never reported missing. Dean Lisowick, forty-three or forty-four, who had lived on and off in the Scott Mission shelter since 2003 and was trying to find more work as a cleaner or laborer, was killed on or about April 23, 2016, and was never reported missing either. Selim Esen, forty-four, a Turkish national who had just completed a peer counseling course at St. Stephen's Community House, where McArthur was also a trusted client, was killed on or about April 16, 2017. Then Andrew Kinsman. Six of the eight were from South Asia or the Middle East; most had beards, and several moved between temporary homes or kept parts of their lives secret.
On December 8, 2017, Police Chief Mark Saunders told the community, "The evidence today tells us there's not a serial killer." On January 18, 2018, officers watching McArthur saw a young man go into his apartment and, believing his life was in danger, went in and arrested McArthur. He was sixty-six. Police searched five properties that day. The remains of seven men were found in large planters at the house on Mallory Crescent in Leaside, and Kayhan's in a ravine behind it. He was charged with all eight murders.
On January 29, 2019, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder in Ontario Superior Court and was sentenced to life with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years. He is the most prolific known serial killer in Toronto's history and the oldest known serial killer in Canada. In April 2021 the Independent Civilian Review into Missing Person Investigations, led by the retired judge Gloria Epstein, found systemic discrimination in the Toronto Police Service's handling of the disappearances and made 151 recommendations. The interim chief, James Ramer, apologized for the inexcusable failings and agreed to implement them all.