Shownotes Transcript
To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Back in November 2012, something strange was happening. Men started disappearing from Toronto's gay village and no one seemed to know why. But then Toronto detectives received a disturbing tip.
A tip that involved cannibals. With no other options, detectives decided to take a closer look. Their search led to a website called Zambian Meat, a site dedicated to this sickening underworld of cannibalism. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 169. The Toronto Village Killer. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs in episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.
To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode. In early November 2012, police in Toronto, Canada received a phone call that seemed to have appeared out of the blue.
The caller asked the Toronto Police Department if he could contact the lead detective on the Skanda Navaratam case. This instantly perked the ears of the Toronto detective. Skanda was a local man from Toronto that went missing about two years earlier in September 2010. He had suddenly disappeared from the village, a community within Toronto known for its prominent LGBTQ plus community.
For the last two years, Toronto detectives have searched for him, but they had no idea what happened to him. 40-year-old Skanda was last seen in the early morning hours of September 6, 2010, leaving Zippers, a popular gay bar in the village.
Other people at Zippers that night said they saw him leave the bar with another man, but no one said who exactly the man was, and maybe many of the witnesses couldn't provide an accurate physical description of him. Once Skanda didn't return home a few days later, a friend reported him missing to the Toronto Police Department.
According to his friend, Skanda left his dog at the friend's house when he went to the bar but never returned. So he knew something was wrong when Skanda never returned to pick up his dog. Over the next several months, the Toronto Police Department followed up on every lead, but nothing turned up. It was like Skanda simply disappeared from the village, and he hadn't been seen or heard from since. So what did this caller know about Skanda?
The caller told Toronto PD he was a detective from Switzerland. So what did a detective halfway across the world want to know about a missing Toronto gay man? Well, according to the Switzerland detective, he had some information about the Skanda case. He said he had enough information to believe Skanda had been kidnapped, murdered, and then eaten by a cannibal.
That's when the phone went silent. For nearly a minute, Toronto detective Debbie Harris couldn't believe what she just heard. A detective from Switzerland had information about one of her missing person cases and it had something to do with cannibals. The detectives from Switzerland said he had come across a website called Zambian Meat and
It was a website entirely dedicated to cannibalism. He said hundreds of people created profiles and logged onto the website to talk all things cannibalism, from finding victims to murdering them to quote-unquote preparing their meat. It was an entire website dedicated to people interested in cannibalism all over the world.
The detective said that while browsing the website Zambian Meat, he came across one particular user that caught his attention. It was a guy with the username ChefMate50. In several of ChefMate50's posts, he said he had kidnapped, murdered, and eaten a brown-skinned man from the village of Toronto sometime between 2009 and 2012.
After a bit of digging around missing person reports, the detective said that he thought the man might have been Skanda. Skanda was Indian, he lived in a gay village in Toronto, and he was last seen in September 2010. Everything seemed to perfectly line up with what Chef Mate 50 said. As soon as Detective Debbie Harris hung up the phone, she thought this sounded insane.
A cannibal might have eaten one of their missing people? A middle-aged man who lived in the gay village? It almost seemed too crazy to consider. But as insane as it sounded, which it did, they knew that they had to investigate it.
Detectives in Toronto immediately hopped onto their computers and typed in Zambian meat. Seconds later, the website loaded. On the very front page of it was a picture of two men roasting a woman's body over a spit. The detectives from Switzerland were right. It was a website entirely dedicated to cannibalism. As soon as the detectives got their bearings after seeing this disturbing front page of the website, they were like,
they started looking for any posts or messages created by Chefmate50. Almost instantly, they found several posts by him. They also discovered that whoever made the username used a Yahoo email account. It was registered under Chefmate50 at Yahoo.com. So with a judge's permission, the detective started looking at data provided by Yahoo Canada associated with that email address.
What they uncovered in the emails was more disturbing than what they saw on the Zambian Meat website. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of emails where Chef Mate 50 talked about cannibalism. He had sent emails to people all over the world talking about kidnapping and torturing them. In many of the emails, he spoke about wanting to eat them and cook their flesh. They were literally hundreds of these types of emails.
Many of these people had also exchanged messages with him. That's the moment detectives in Canada realized there might be a cannibal living and targeting people in Toronto. The Toronto Police Department realized they might have a serious problem on their hand.
Not only the missing person investigation involving Skanda, but they wondered if there could be more victims. Was there a cannibal on the loose? And if there was, they needed to act fast. They needed to figure out who was behind the screen name Chef Mate 50. Yahoo Canada provided the Toronto police with the name registered to that email account. It was James Brunton.
Detectives quickly learned that James Brunton was your typical guy. He was married with a young daughter. He lived in a small town in Ontario, a city northeast of Toronto. He had a job working at a local hockey arena. He also volunteered for a suicide crisis hotline. He spent a lot of his free time working at a call center that received calls from people who needed help.
James Brunton had no criminal record. He seemed like a regular guy. He didn't come across as this crazed cannibal who sent emails all day wanting to torture and eat people. But what exactly does a cannibal look like? Detectives wondered. Could they look like you and me?
Immediately after discovering Chef Mate's 50 true identity, the Toronto police set up a task force called Project Houston. Not only were they tasked with figuring out if their missing person, Skanda, had become a victim of this cannibal, but they also needed to find out if there were other possible victims. And if so, was James Brunton their guy? Was the detectives from Switzerland right?
Homicide detective Debbie Harris led the task force Project Houston. The team's goal was first to see if a cannibal was running around the streets of Toronto. Then was this person James Brunton, a.k.a. Chef Mate 50 from Zambian Meat? Unfortunately, they learned about two other possible victims before they got their answers. While searching the Canadian missing person databases...
The detectives came across two other missing men thought to be connected to Skanda. The first was Abdul Bazir Fazi and the second was Majid Kayan. Fazi went missing from the gay village three months before Skanda and was last seen in December 2010. Kayan was also last seen in the village and disappeared two years later in October 2012.
Both men were brown-skinned, middle-aged, and had dark hair and a short beard. Physically speaking, both of them looked remarkably similar to one another. They also shared a lot of personal characteristics as Skanda, who started this entire investigation. All three men were from Toronto's gay village. Fozzie was 42, and Kyan was a little older at 58. All these men had a lot in common.
So investigators wondered if they all could be connected to the cannibal or Chef Mate 50. And if so, they needed to find evidence linking James Brunton to all three missing men. Detectives decided to create a fake account on Zambian Meat to try and communicate with James Brunton. Once they immersed themselves in the website, they truly felt the gravity of the situation.
Dozens of people identified themselves as long pigs. A long pig was someone who came to the website looking to become a victim. These people wanted to be kidnapped and have their bodies eaten by one of these cannibals. Then some people referenced themselves or referred to themselves as chefs. These people who were considered to be qualified cannibals. These were the chefs.
Then finally, there were master chefs, qualified cannibals who could butcher and prepare the meat. Within this one website, there was an entire subculture that entirely revolved around cannibalism. Chefmate 50, or James Brunton, was simply one of many people who regularly interacted on this website. Once the police had their fake account,
they saw that James was a highly active user on the site. There were dozens of posts where he talked about having eaten human meat before. In several of these posts, he went into a lot of detail about what he did and how he kidnapped the person or how he slaughtered them. He portrayed himself as an expert or a master chef on how to cook, kill, and store human meat.
Detectives then started piecing together who James Brunton really was. They needed to find out if he was in fact this crazed cannibal serial killer who might be responsible for at least three missing men from the gay village, or if he was just an internet weirdo.
Maybe he had posted everything up on the website. We saw all of his posts. But maybe these were just some bizarre and twisted fantasies. Maybe they weren't really real. The Toronto police obtained a search warrant to clone James' computer so that they could look for any evidence linking him to the three missing men. But to clone the computer, they needed to wait for James and his wife to leave the house so that officers could go inside.
While they waited for their opportunity, they got authorization from a judge to get his emails in real time. Then police learned while monitoring his emails in real time that he was going to the U.S. over the Christmas holiday to visit one of his adult daughters. And that's when investigators realized they finally got their chance. On Christmas morning, a dozen police officers showed up at James' house.
They only had permission from the judge to clone his computer so they couldn't search the entire house. And once they downloaded everything from the computer, they sent everything they had to the digital forensics teams for analysis. Everything from videos, photos, and web searches to emails was looked at for anything connecting him to the three missing men.
While they looked through James' emails, they found something that caught their attention. In his emails were hundreds of messages where James talked about owning a cabin in the woods about two hours north of Toronto. In these emails, James bragged about using this cabin to kill people and eat their flesh.
He said he would take his victims to the back part of the cabin where he would hoist them up to drain the blood out of their bodies. He would then cook and eat their meat right there at the cabin. The police were able to track down James's cabin in Bancroft, a small town in Ontario, Canada. When the officers arrived, they thought this could be it.
This could be the smoking gun they needed to finally make an arrest. The cabin was exactly how James described it. First, there was a long beam hung about 20 feet in the air that had hooks and ropes attached to it like you could suspend something from it. Second, there was a large barbecue pit in the back.
Third, right there next to the cabin was a tree with over a dozen shoes hanging from it. And many of the shoes had burn marks on them. Could these be his victim's shoes? Maybe he kept them as some type of trophy. The officers took DNA swabs from the shoes hanging from the tree to compare against some of the missing men. But they didn't get the results that they had expected.
None of the DNA matched the three missing men. The burned shoes didn't belong to any of them. So although the cabin was strange and creepy, there wasn't anything on the property connecting James Brunton to the missing men. Even after all of that, the police still had nothing against him and they were back at square one.
Investigators returned to James' email to see if they could find anything else in there. When they started working through more and more messages, they found even stranger behavior. It was an email conversation between James and a 15-year-old boy. In the emails, the teenager told James that he was willing to become his next victim when he turned 18.
He told James that when he became an adult, he would turn himself over to him so he could slaughter and eat his flesh. The two had even exchanged a quote-unquote contract about this agreement. The police traced the teen's address to a home in Colorado. Officers went to his house to question him about the emails. But when they got there, he said he had no intention of going through with any of it.
He said he thought James was joking around and wasn't planning on meeting him. But according to the 15-year-old, when he told James that he wouldn't go through with this, James asked for nude pictures of him in exchange. Investigators now had enough to arrest James. Now, they couldn't arrest him for the three missing men from Toronto, but they could arrest him on child pornography charges.
He illegally solicited nude pictures from a 15-year-old boy, but they believed that arresting him at that point would jeopardize their entire investigation. If they arrested him on child pornography charges, they might never get the evidence they needed to connect him to the missing men. So instead of arresting him immediately, they returned to his computer to keep digging.
They found a folder of photos and videos on the computer dated May 1st, 2003. When they opened it, they found an alarming video. It was a video James had taken inside the boys' locker room at the hockey arena where he worked. The video shows that James was secretly videotaping the boys in the locker room as they changed.
Now, this was even more evidence to arrest James, but they held off, at least for now. The police decided to create another fake profile on Zambian Meat to try and get Chef Mate 50, a.k.a. James Brunton's attention. This time, after they created the profile, they pretended to be a long pig or someone looking for a cannibal.
Within minutes of making a post, James sent the undercover cop a message. James said that he would take him to his cabin in the woods where he promised to slaughter and eat him exactly like he asked. Once all the details were worked out, the undercover cop agreed to get on a plane and head to Toronto on May 11, 2013.
and James agreed to be the one to pick him up at the airport. On May 11, 2013, almost every available officer with the Toronto Police Department staked out the airport waiting for James to arrive, thinking he was picking up the undercover cop. But there was one major problem with this plan. James Brunton never showed up at the airport, and the plan failed.
At this point, the police had no choice but to arrest James on the child pornography charges. They couldn't afford him to just simply be free in society any longer just in case he victimized another child again. So instead of waiting to get the evidence they needed about the three missing men, they arrested him on charges related to child porn. But after they arrested him, they got something they weren't expecting.
When they asked him about all the cannibal stuff and Zambian meat, he admitted to everything they found in his emails. How he had tasted human flesh. How he had killed people. But none of that was true. He made everything up. It was only a weird, sick, twisted fantasy. And he lied about everything.
This confession was a massive blow to Toronto investigators. They finally had the man they believed was responsible for the three missing men from the gay village in custody, but he wasn't their guy. This was all just an enormous red herring, and without any solid forensic evidence linking him to these appearances, there was nothing they could do but keep investigating.
James Brunton eventually pled guilty to making, processing, and distributing child pornography. He was given credit for time served and sentenced to three years probation. Following that conviction, he was never questioned again about the three missing men. Over the next two years, the Toronto Police continued investigating.
If James Brunton wasn't responsible for the missing men, someone else out there had to be. Until that person could be apprehended, he was free to do it again. And that's exactly what happened. Two years after James Brunton, it happened again. In July 2017, two more men from the gay village mysteriously disappeared.
Their disappearances were almost identical to the three men who had vanished years earlier. Both Andrew Kinsman and Salim Asin were middle-aged men that lived in the village, and they both disappeared under highly unusual circumstances. But their investigations were conducted much differently.
Salim's case was more difficult for investigators because he didn't have a stable or permanent address. So investigators focused on Andrew. He did have an apartment and he was last seen at his apartment on June 26, 2017. The police went to Andrew's apartment to see if they could find anything to help them figure out where he went.
But everything seemed normal. It didn't look like he planned to be gone for a long time. Inside the apartment, the police found Andrew's computer. And slightly above the computer was a calendar. It was still on the month of June. And when the police looked at June 26, the same day he went missing, they saw the words 3 p.m. written on it.
Underneath that, Andrew wrote the name Bruce. Police needed to find out who Bruce was and why Andrew wrote his name on his calendar the same day he disappeared. The police found three separate surveillance cameras positioned around Andrew's apartment. One of the cameras captured Andrew on the day he went missing.
The footage showed Andrew walking out of his apartment at 3.07 p.m. and getting inside a red Dodge Caravan. Although investigators couldn't see the person's face on the surveillance camera, the police were sure it was him. Andrew is a big guy. He was about 6'4", and the person seen leaving Andrew's apartment and getting inside the Caravan towered over the top of the car.
So the police knew Andrew was the person on the video getting into the car. The next step was determining who the red Dodge Caravan belonged to. The police took a still photo pulled from the video to a local Dodge dealership and showed it to one of the managers. The manager identified the car as a red 2004 25th anniversary model of the Dodge Caravan.
Now, armed with the exact year and model of the car Andrew was last seen getting into, they took the next steps to find the owner. They looked up driving records to see every registered red 2004 Dodge Caravan throughout Ontario. They discovered that there were 6,181 registered vehicles that matched this exact description.
Investigators needed to get creative. They knew Andrew wrote on his calendar that he was planning to meet with a guy named Bruce at 3 o'clock p.m. the day he went missing. So the police decided to filter their search of over 6,000 Dodge Caravans to only those with a registered owner with the first name Bruce.
That narrowed the list to five Bruce's who owned that car throughout Ontario. Investigators then looked into the background of all five Bruce's and one of them stood out. His name was Bruce MacArthur. The police discovered that 66-year-old Bruce MacArthur was the only one with a significant criminal background on the list.
In 2003, he was convicted of assaulting someone with a lead pipe. In 2016, he was convicted again for assaulting another man in the back of his 2004 red Dodge Caravan, the same vehicle Andrew was seen getting inside the day he disappeared. But Bruce MacArthur was no stranger to investigators.
Back in 2013, when the department was investigating the three original missing men from the gay village, the police actually interviewed Bruce. Bruce had approached Toronto PD about volunteering in the investigation of the three missing men. He had told detectives that he was a friend of Skanda and he had dated Majid Kayan.
Bruce said that he basically wanted to do everything he could to help try to find these missing men because he knew two of them. So when he came forward, the cops had no reason to suspect anything. They simply thought that Bruce was a concerned citizen who wanted to help in the investigation and knew personally knew two of the victims.
But now, all of these years later, he rose to the top of the suspect list in the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman. Once Bruce MacArthur appeared on the detectives' radar for owning the Red Dodge Caravan, they dug deeper into his personal life. They discovered that Bruce worked as a landscaper. He worked on high-end residential homes in the area. He was separated from his wife and had a couple of adult children and grandchildren.
Overall, Bruce MacArthur led a pretty ordinary life. Nothing about his lifestyle really stood out. He probably lived a life that many people would describe as boring. While a group of detectives conducted daily surveillance on Bruce, another team went to Bruce's apartment building to see if they could find any surveillance footage of Andrew at the apartment.
They needed to find some type of evidence directly linking Andrew to Bruce. But they couldn't find any footage. Everything the building had from the day that Andrew disappeared had already been deleted and rewritten over, so there was nothing. Then detectives had another great idea. They started looking through the tapes on other days to see if they could find anything that stood out. Jackpot.
That's when they found something they could really use. One of the apartment complex's cameras was pointed towards Bruce's parking spot. The camera captured every time Bruce parked or left in his car. On August 17th, the camera captured Bruce leaving the apartment complex in his Dodge.
But it didn't come back that day. And this was highly unusual because Bruce had a very normal regular schedule. The next day, Bruce did return to his parking spot, but he wasn't driving the red Dodge Caravan. Instead, he had a brand new van. So the detectives wondered, where's the red Dodge Caravan?
Toronto PD started searching for the car. They immediately suspected that Bruce had gotten rid of the car. And what better place to ditch the van than a junkyard? Over the next several days, detectives searched every possible salvage yard in the area looking for this 2004 red Dodge Caravan.
Then finally, after searching for three to four days in these yards, they found it. When the officers got to it, the trunk was open and the tires were missing. There were also several large stains on the carpet. But other than that, the van was in good shape.
They immediately got the van and sent it to the forensic lab for testing. They wanted to see if they could find any forensic evidence that placed Andrew inside the van. A few days later, the results came back. The forensic lab had found small traces of blood DNA. When the DNA was tested, it came back as a match to Andrew Kinsman. But the amount of blood was tiny. It was only about the size of a fingernail.
So the detectives knew this wasn't enough forensic evidence to make an arrest. They knew they needed more if they were going to charge him with Andrew's disappearance. Detectives got a warrant to put a GPS tracker on Bruce's car and go inside his apartment to clone his computer looking for more evidence.
The GPS tracker was valuable because it allowed the cops to see when Bruce was far enough away from his apartment so that they could go inside and clone the computer. Once they got inside, they needed about three hours to download the entire computer. They wanted to get everything they could. Videos, photos, web searches, everything.
While the cops were cloning the computer, they found several items that caught their attention throughout the apartment, including gloves, tape, and a metal bar. It almost looked like a kill kit. After downloading Bruce's entire computer to an external hard drive, they took it back for testing. They looked through everything on it, but nothing stood out.
There wasn't any unusual or strange photos, no abnormal web searches, nothing. It wasn't until they started looking through the computer's metadata that they struck investigative gold. Based on the metadata, the detectives could see that thousands of photos had recently been deleted. That's weird. What was Bruce deleting?
Once they pulled the metadata, they found the deleted photos. And the first thing that they could recover was a photo of one of the three original missing men from the gay village, Salim Assam. Right there on Bruce MacArthur's computer was a photo of Salim posed and naked on Bruce's bed. And he was dead.
Investigators were then able to recover hundreds of more deleted photos. Each photo was more disturbing than the previous one. Most showed men tied to Bruce's bed wearing nothing but a fur coat. Others showed men posed and clearly deceased. The police were looking at photos of men they didn't even know. They were men the cops had no idea were missing.
There were literally hundreds of these types of photos. And that's the moment when detectives realized they weren't just looking for the person responsible for kidnapping Andrew Kinsman. They were hunting a serial killer, the Toronto Village Killer. The surveillance team watching Bruce alerted the other detectives that Bruce had just picked up a man and was headed back to the apartment.
The cops knew that they had to act quickly or there could be another victim on their hands. What if Bruce was planning to take this man back to his apartment so that he could kill them like the rest? Was this man about to become another one of the men in these photos? Toronto PD drove as fast as they possibly could back to Bruce's apartment, but Bruce was already inside when they got there.
They stormed the apartment and immediately put Bruce in handcuffs. While Bruce was subdued in the hallway, another team of detectives went straight to the bedroom. Inside the room was a man tied to the bed and blindfolded. If the cops hadn't got there when they did, the man might have been dead.
Bruce MacArthur was taken back to the police station for questioning. By this point, they already had enough evidence to arrest him. They had Andrew's DNA inside the Dodge Caravan, and they had the photos of all the dead men on his computer. The only thing they didn't have were the bodies.
Throughout the interrogation, Bruce wouldn't say a word. Each time the detective asked him about the missing men, he kept his head down and stayed silent. He wouldn't say anything about Andrew Kinsman or the other missing men. Police knew if they were going to be able to link him to any of the other missing men from the gay village, they needed to find the bodies.
even if Bruce wasn't going to help them do that. The detectives knew that Bruce worked as a landscaper on several high-end properties in the area. Many of these homes that he worked on were backed up against either woods or located in remote areas on large properties. So they started to wonder, what better place to get rid of a body than in the woods?
If he did dispose of the bodies, this made perfect sense. One of the first properties the police searched was Mallory Crescent's home in Leaside. Bruce had been doing landscape work on the property for several years and stored a lot of his equipment there. The house was also located in front of a large wooded area.
The police brought with them scent dogs to the property to help search. If any dead bodies had been disposed of on the property, the scent dogs would be able to find them. And they did. When the dogs searched the garage where Bruce kept most of his landscaping tools, the dogs alerted to one of the planters. It was a planter that held some weeds and dirt.
After the dogs were alerted to the planter, the detectives immediately dug through the dirt. After only a couple seconds of digging, they discovered dismembered human body parts. And after more digging, they found more. After searching the entire property in Leaside, the cops found the bodies of six deceased victims. Many were dismembered and their body parts were put in planters with dirt.
Other dismembered body parts were found underground in the woods behind the property. Over the next four months, forensic investigators spent hundreds of hours searching the Leaside house and Bruce MacArthur's apartment. The apartment is where the investigators believed Bruce murdered all of his victims. Ultimately, they collected 1,800 pieces of forensic evidence and took over 18,000 photographs.
The searches of Bruce's apartment and the Leaside house made up the largest forensic investigation conducted by the Toronto Police Service. Based on forensic evidence, the police were able to charge Bruce MacArthur with eight counts of first-degree murder. After all these years, they could finally link the three original missing men from the gay village back to Bruce.
He was responsible for their kidnappings and murders, plus five additional victims for a total of eight. Five of the men shared very similar characteristics. They were middle-aged, had beards, frequently visited the Black Eagle Bar in Toronto's gay village, and were members of the LGBTQ plus community. Many of them disappeared over holiday weekends.
On January 29, 2019, Bruce MacArthur was convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He is 71 years old. The motivation behind the Toronto village killings might never be uncovered, and how Bruce was able to subdue his victims isn't clear. But a couple things are clear. The Toronto village killer targeted gay men.
He often preyed on victims who frequented gay bars and clubs in the area. Once he befriended them, he took them back to his apartment, where he tied them to his bed and murdered them. He often took photographs of them either before or after they were killed. Most of them were photographed wearing nothing but a fur coat. The Toronto Village killings had nothing to do with cannibals or cannibalism.
The murders had everything to do with a serial killer who targeted gay men. And for many years, he got away with it until critical forensic evidence coupled with clever detective work finally identified him. To share your thoughts on this story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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