Bruce McArthur was born in Oshawa, Ontario, on October 8, 1951. He married, had two children, sold socks and underwear as a travelling salesman, and came out in his forties, after which his marriage ended. By the 2000s he ran a one-man landscaping business in Toronto and was a familiar figure in the Church and Wellesley area, where he played Santa Claus at a shopping centre at Christmas. In 2003 he was convicted of assaulting a man with an iron bar and given a conditional sentence. Toronto reporting called him the Village Killer, after the neighbourhood.
Between 2010 and 2017 he killed eight men: Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam, Dean Lisowick, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman. Most were of South Asian or Middle Eastern origin, several were closeted, some were refugees or had no fixed address, and several had no family in Canada to report them missing. He strangled them, photographed the bodies, and dismembered them, distributing the remains in large planters at a house in Leaside where he stored his equipment and did the gardening.
The community knew. From 2010 onwards people in the Village told the police repeatedly that men were vanishing, and were told there was no evidence of a serial killer. Two police projects, Houston in 2012 and Prism in 2017, both failed to identify him, and in 2013 he was actually interviewed as a person of interest and released. In December 2017 the chief of police publicly stated there was no evidence of a serial killer in the Village. He was arrested six weeks later.
He was caught in January 2018 through Andrew Kinsman's diary and a van. Officers went into the flat on January 18 to find a man tied to a bed, alive.
He pleaded guilty on January 29, 2019, to eight counts of first degree murder and was given life with no parole for twenty-five years. An independent review by Justice Gloria Epstein, published in 2021, ran to more than a thousand pages and found systemic failings and bias in how the disappearances of gay men, immigrants and marginalised people had been investigated.