Did Toronto serial killer seal his own fate when he picked Andrew Kinsman as his victim?
Kinsman was gay, but he did not fit the profile of other missing men – he was a beloved and loyal friend to many in the gay community, and they noticed his absence immediately
One was homeless, smoked crack cocaine and worked as a prostitute. Another was from a conservative Muslim family and hid the fact that he was gay from his family. Another was a recent immigrant with a drug problem.
Some of the known and suspected victims of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur fit a pattern: people on the margins of Canadian society whose disappearance attracted little attention.
But then Andrew Kinsman vanished. The 49-year-old LGBQT activist and former bartender in Toronto had many friends. When he suddenly went missing the day after Toronto’s Gay pride parade, his friends noticed quickly, and so did the police.
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He was well known. When we saw his face on missing posters we were like ‘What is going on here?’
“There’s a part of me that says Bruce wanted to get caught because he broke that pattern of preying on the vulnerable,” said Haran Vijayanathan, a community activist and the executive director of the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention in Toronto.