TORONTO, January 29 -- Accused serial killer Bruce McArthur has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of eight men, admitting to killings that began in 2010 and continued until late 2017. The plea, entered in Superior court before Justice McMahon Tuesday morning, brings to a close a tragic and disturbing case that was unprecedented in this city, and a sprawling police investigation that brought praise and ardent criticism to Toronto police. The 67-year-old self-employed landscaper — who was a familiar face in Toronto’s Church and Wellesley area, known as the Gay Village — was arrested in January 2018. Police charged him with first-degree murder in the deaths of two men, but alleged he killed others. “We believe he is responsible for the deaths of other men,” Insp. Hank Idsinga, a lead homicide detective on the case, said at a hastily called news conference Jan. 18, 2018, hours after McArthur’s arrest from the Thorncliffe Park apartment he shared with a roommate. The news followed long-held suspicion within Toronto’s Gay Village that a serial killer had been preying on their community, concerns denied by Toronto police up until weeks before McArthur was charged. And it marked only the beginning of an extensive police probe that crossed international lines and became the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history. McArthur has admitted to killing: Andrew Kinsman, 49; Selim Esen, 44; Majeed Kayhan, 58; Soroush Mahmudi, 50; Dean Lisowick, 47; Skandaraj (Skanda) Navaratnam, 40, Abdulbasir Faizi, 42, and Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam, 37. Many of the men had ties to the Gay Village and were of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Toronto police continue to probe historic murders, looking for any connection to McArthur, who grew up on a farm in smalltown Ontario and, in the late 1970s, worked alone as a traveling salesman. But no links have been announced by police. McArthur was 58 years old at the time of his first alleged murder in 2010 — an anomaly in serial killers, who are typically much younger men. McArthur married his high school girlfriend then is believed to have come out as gay in the 1990s, moving to Toronto from his family home in Oshawa. He frequented the city’s Gay Village and was registered on male dating sites, posting on one that he enjoyed finding a guy’s “buttons and then pushing them to your limits.” At the outset of the police investigation into McArthur, scores of officers were brought in from police services across Ontario to search properties across the Greater Toronto Area, many owned by clients of Artistic Design, McArthur’s landscaping company.
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