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Christmas is just around the corner here in Norway, and so I thought it proper to publish a Christmas special. There is a serial killer case so recent that my dear listeners might have noticed it pop up in the news just over a year ago. It concerns a man known as the Santa Serial Killer.
And if you are a truly loyal fan of the show, you are very familiar with the case. Usually, I do not return to serial killer cases. But for this Christmas special, I am making an exception. In late April 2018, I published an episode called Bruce MacArthur and Interview with Sasha Reid.
I'm very happy with that episode, but the case of MacArthur never really left my mind. A year and a half has passed since I published that episode, and now MacArthur is sentenced and in prison. We know much more about the case. So, to get as full a picture of the case as possible, I am making a two-part series on MacArthur.
In this part, I will again go into detail about his upbringing and background, as well as some fresh new details. In the second part episode, I will go through all his now known crimes in detail, as well as his trial and conviction. Enjoy. Do you dislike ads in your podcast content? I understand.
But I have audio engineers and bills to pay. And considering the Serial Killer podcast is free to listen to, sometimes I have to present some of my dear sponsors. But I do try to keep the ads to a minimum. So that's why this episode is 100% sponsored ad-free.
This episode would not be possible if it hadn't been for my dear patrons who donate their hard-earned money every month. In return, my patrons get exclusive bonus content on Patreon. This includes episodes on torture, the death penalty, Norwegian Satanists, and a very special version of Monster Mash. More bonus content is coming real soon.
So head on over to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast now to get access. A man named Robert McEacharn sat in front of his television set.
His wife was controlling the channel's surfing, so he had yet to catch the latest news report. His cattle farm was doing well, and he suspected nothing ill when the phone rang. His brother was on the other end, and he sounded agitated and a little out of breath. The brother didn't bother with pleasantries, but instead asked right away if Robert had heard.
When Robert asked what he meant, he should have heard, his brother said a name that he knew very well, Bruce MacArthur. He went on to say that the now sixty-six-year-old MacArthur was none other than the suspected serial killer found in Toronto. He was so far charged with the murder of two men belonging to Toronto's gay community, and they suspected more to come.
Robert felt lightheaded. He had grown up with Bruce. They went to the same one-room schoolhouse outside Woodville, Ontario. But it couldn't be the same Bruce, he thought. It couldn't be the clean-cut Bruce from Palestine Road who tattled on his classmates and sucked up to the teacher. McEakern's wife, a sensible woman, went to the computer and pulled up a photo of the accused.
He had close-cropped white hair and a goatee. Robert called his brother back. It was indeed the Bruce he had known all those years ago. He was certain because the very same Bruce had come into his life again not many months ago. In May of 2017, Robert and his wife had attended an anniversary party for Robert's sister and her husband. And there had been Bruce.
Nothing of the recent encounter had caused Robert to rethink Bruce's character he knew over so many years. He seemed a solid, middle-class guy. So to learn that Bruce, in fact, was in all likelihood a deranged serial killer was a total shock. And this initial shock had just been the beginning.
Since this first revelation, Bruce has been linked to six other murders as well, putting the total known body count to eight. This is just in the period from 2010 to Bruce's arrest in January of 2018. The investigation may eventually spread much further than that.
Most serial murderers begin killing in their mid to late twenties. MacArthur spent at least some of his thirties and forties working as a traveling salesman, pitching socks and underwear across Ontario. He has ties to Oshawa, the Kawartha Lakes area, and other locations across the province.
The potential scope of Bruce MacArthur's reign of murder is terrifying and still unknown. But before we delve into the details of his crimes, let us look at his life. The people left behind from that life, friends, classmates and relatives, are looking back too, wondering who it is they have been staring at for all these years.
Robert McEachin still lives at his house on Palestine Road, about a kilometer away from the worn-down Black Barn at the old farm where Bruce MacArthur grew up. Bruce MacArthur was born on the 8th of October 1951. He spent his childhood with his sister and parents in a sturdy-looking bungalow speckled by black and red bricks near Woodville, Ontario.
It's a pocket of Ontario's Kawartha Lakes region, populated more by farmers than by cottages. It's the sort of rural place where to be considered a local rather than an outsider, you will have to prove a tenure of generations rather than just years of residency. The MacArthur's were among the local families of good pedigree. His parents, Islay and Malcolm Mac MacArthur,
farmed and ran a kind of foster center out of their home. Mary Ann McEachin, a friend of the family who visited regularly during the 1960s and early 70s, said parents from Toronto often sent their troubled children to the MacArthur house to get them away from the trappings of city life. According to Mary, there were always kids coming and going.
At times there were as many as ten children staying at the MacArthur's, and none of them ever complained. For their efforts, the MacArthur's earned a good reputation around town. Robert told reporters that Bruce's father, Mac MacArthur, was regarded in the area as a man who did his work and never bothered anybody.
Robert went to school with Bruce and remembers him as an unremarkable schoolmate. A year younger than Robert, he wasn't small, but he wasn't big either. Just a normal member of the bunch at the schoolhouse, a short walk down the road from the MacArthur farm. Robert's brother, Ron, remembers MacArthur a bit differently.
According to him, Bruce was a teacher's pet, always sucking up to the teachers. He never got into any trouble. Ron says of young Bruce, and I quote, End quote.
From grades nine through twelve, MacArthur was bussed into nearby Fenelon Falls for high school. There were two streams at Fenelon Falls Secondary, a five-year academic program and a four-year arts and technical cohort. Like MacArthur, Tom Barbour was in the four-year stream. He was a pretty prim and proper guy, Barbour said of MacArthur.
When they said he was a landscaper, I thought, geez, that doesn't seem like the guy I knew. End quote. It was at Fennellan Falls that MacArthur met and began dating Janice Campbell. According to one woman who knew them both, it was at Fennellan Falls that MacArthur met and began dating Janice Campbell.
Their graduation photos appear pages apart in the Fenelon Falls yearbook for 1969 to 1970. MacArthur's picture shows a neat-looking, dark-haired young man. His nickname was Snoppy. His favorite pastime was A Good Argument. His ambition was to be successful. As for his probable future, he wrote...
Your guess is as good as mine. When Tom Barbour learned of Bruce's career as a serial killer, he was shocked. To him, Bruce always seemed like a nice kid. Bruce and Janice would spend the next three decades together as a couple. Her picture shows a long-haired young woman with an oval face and a slight smile. Her pet peeve, she wrote, was...
someone who can't decide what they want. As to her probable future, she wrote to die young. The young couple left the area not long after graduation, but they were back often in the mid-1970s, visiting MacArthur's parents, who both fell ill and died relatively young, one not long after the other.
Elva Dahms nursed MacArthur's father after he suffered a brain tumor in the late 70s. When she knew Bruce, he had just started working after finishing school. She described MacArthur as a very good-looking, dark-haired young man. He visited often enough to make an impression with the Dahms, and Elva remembers the young man well, even after 40 years apart.
By 1986, MacArthur and Janice were married with two children, one girl and one boy, and living in a typical suburban block in Oshawa. Bruce turned 35 the year he bought his first Oshawa home. As of 1993, he was working as a salesman for McGregor, Hoisery and Stanfields, placing socks and underwear in Ontario department and clothing stalls.
Joanne Boyd's husband, Ross, worked for several years with MacArthur. She believes MacArthur worked in McGregor's Northern Territory, a job that would have put him on the road, crisscrossing between Ontario towns for most of his working days.
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He left his wife and family in Oshawa in 1998 or 1999 and moved into Toronto proper. Considering Bruce was coming to terms with his own sexuality, this move makes sense. Back then, there was effectively no open gay life to speak of in Oshawa. If you lived in Durham County and you wanted to meet other gay men, you drove into the city.
The 90s were challenging in several ways for the MacArthur family. For one thing, Bruce MacArthur declared bankruptcy in 1999. For another, the 90s marked the beginning of a legal ordeal that continues to dog the family to this day. As a teenager, MacArthur's son, Todd, began making obsessive, obscene phone calls to women he did not know.
In the years since, he has racked up literally dozens of convictions for charges including harassment and making indecent phone calls. In 2014, Todd MacArthur was sentenced to 14 months in jail after he admitted to making multiple obscene phone calls to a complete stranger at her workplace.
According to an agreed statement of facts read into the record at his sentencing, MacArthur found the woman and made repeated references to nude photos of her. He made sexually suggestive comments and asked her if she was wearing panties. During many of the calls, the statement said, he would whisper her name just before he hung up the phone.
Todd MacArthur was already on probation for two similar charges when he committed that offense. His lawyer told the court at the time that he had been diagnosed with, and I quote, telephone scatologia, and that he had been treated for his illness for at least 10 to 15 years.
Todd told his lawyer his condition was linked to depression and might also be associated with his first sexual experience, an explicit conversation he had on the phone with an older woman when he was 11 or 12 years old. Todd MacArthur was warned at the hearing that if he committed the same crime again, he'd be going to federal prison.
But in the fall of 2017, he was charged with new counts of indecent telecommunication, criminal harassment and breach of probation. He was released on bail and ordered to stay with his father, Bruce MacArthur, at his Toronto apartment. Though it might be tempting to link the alleged crimes of the two MacArthur men
There is nothing in the scientific literature at all about serial killers and their children, at least that I have found. After covering many serial killer cases, I have to say that this is the first time I have come across a case where the child of the serial killer also exhibits pathological serial criminal behavior. At Todd MacArthur's first sentencing hearing in 2014,
The Crown referenced his extremely supportive parents and healthy middle-class family. Janice and Bruce split up when Todd was 17, the Crown said, but Todd always maintained positive relationships with both of them and with his mother's new spouse. There are, in other words,
Nothing to suggest Bruce mistreated his children. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Indeed, until recently, Bruce MacArthur seemed to have a somewhat healthy relationship with his ex-wife and family. It is actually not even clear whether they were ever legally divorced. When Janice's parents died in 2007 and 2003...
Bruce MacArthur was referenced in their obituaries as, if not part of the family, then at least an adjunct to it. Janice also made an appearance at the May 2017 anniversary party for MacArthur's sister, and the pair seemed to get along just fine. But some elements of Bruce's violent life had spilled out into the open. In 2001,
He was convicted of assault after he had attacked a man with a metal pipe. He had not been convicted of anything else until his arrest in 2018. But considering this brutal attack, it would be imprudent of officers not to investigate missing persons and cold murder cases going back before 2010.
I am unsure if this is an ongoing effort or not. This is still a very fresh serial killer case. Bruce spent many, many years as a salesman. This puts him on the road for long, extended periods of time with nothing for company except his mind and desires.
and of course prostitutes, hitchhikers, and drifters he might have encountered during his travels. And so it is that we are back just under two years ago, in January 2018.
More than a dozen fiberglass garden planters arrived at the Ontario Forensics Pathology Service, a glassy 660,000 square foot facility in North Toronto. It was a cold winter, even by Canadian standards, and the 400-pound faux rock containers destined for installation in the city that spring were frozen solid.
After letting them thaw for a few days, Dr. Kathy Gruspier began conducting x-rays. When she saw that one of them contained a foreign object, she called Detective Sergeant Hank Idzinga, a hulking homicide cop with the Toronto Police Service. Idzinga's team had helped locate the planters at a private residence on a quiet suburban drive
in Leaside, and shipped them to Dr. Graspier. At a time, Graspier thought there might be something in the planters, but she thought it probable it was just chunks of ice. When the containers had been there for ten days, Detective Idzinger and his team drove back to the lab. The containers had started to emit a foul odor.
In the forensic examination bay, the police watched Dr. Grospierre, saw the planters she had x-rayed in half. She peeled away the sides to reveal a human head, torsos, and limbs. Through dental and fingerprint analyses, Grospierre's team eventually separated seven sets of human remains.
It is hard to overstate how shocking the discovery and its coverage in the press have been in a country where homicide is infrequent and serial killers are almost unheard of.
In order of quantity, criminal charges in Canada predominantly relate to theft and other behaviour that falls under the legal heading of mischief, destruction of property, for example, or preventing a fellow Canadian from enjoying his or her property. In 2016, there were 611 homicide victims in the entire country. For comparison,
Just south of the border in the US, the state of Ohio alone had 627 homicides that same year. The second most recent serial murder case in Canada involved a 51-year-old nurse who lethally injected several elderly patients with insulin between 2007 and 2016.
Homicide is so rare that Dr. Graspierre, a 56-year-old single mother, is the country's only full-time forensic anthropologist. But suddenly, newspapers from the New York Post to the Daily Mail were reporting on a series of murders worthy of a Stephen King novel, in which immigrants' entry into Toronto's gay subculture proved their undoing.
The frothiest tabloid coverage surrounding the case played up its tenuous connection to the horror author's 1975 short story, The Lawnmower Man. What follows is a short plot description of the short story in question. If you plan on reading it yourself, be warned that this contains spoilers.
In the story, the main character is named Harold Parkett, and he is in need of a new lawn mowing service. Harold has been putting off hiring new help for the summer, but when he sees an ad for a mowing service, he calls. A van reading Pastoral Greenery soon pulls up to Parkett's home.
The man working for the service, a hairy, pot-bellied fellow, very much similar to Bruce MacArthur himself, is shown the overgrown back lawn and is hired. Harold is enjoying a rest as he reads the paper, wondering about the lawnmower man mentioning the pagan goddess Circe.
When he hears the lawnmower outside, he goes to the back porch and sees the lawnmower running by itself and the naked lawnmower man following it on all fours and eating the grass. The lawnmower, seemingly on its own, deliberately chases and kills a mole, and Harold faints from the shock of the situation.
When Harold revives, the pot-bellied lawnmower man explains that this new method, introduced by his boss, grants substantial benefits and that he makes sacrificial victims of customers who cannot appreciate the process. Harold, though unnerved, allows the lawnmower man to return to work. As soon as the man is out of sight, Harold desperately calls the police.
but is interrupted by the lawnmower man, who reveals his boss's name, the pagan god Pan. The lawnmower man and the lawnmower itself briefly chases Harold through his living room before brutally slaughtering him. When the police arrive, they conclude that Parkett was murdered and dismembered by a schizophrenic sex maniac.
As they leave, the scent of freshly cut grass hangs strongly in the air.
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Next week I will bring you episode 110 and the conclusion to the story of Bruce MacArthur. Next episode will release just before or on New Year's Eve. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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