On Monday, March 5, 2018, Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga of the Toronto police homicide squad displayed a photograph of a dead man at a press conference. Police believed he was another victim of Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old landscaper charged with first-degree murder in six deaths. They did not know his name.
Idsinga said investigators had used numerous methods to identify the man without success. He was releasing the picture, he said, as a “last resort.” Police said the man was dead when the photograph was taken. They would not say when or how they obtained it. Data from the file posted on the police website showed it had been altered, including with tools that erase and smudge parts of an image, the Toronto Star reported. Police sources told the Star that investigators had recovered images of dead men on McArthur’s computer.
Nicki Ward, director of the Church Wellesley Neighbourhood Association, reworked the image herself so people could recognize him more easily. “It’s important to me that the victims be represented with dignity and respect,” she told the Star. The crime writer James Dubro told the Star he felt conflicted about the release.
Police received more than 500 tips, the National Post reported. On April 9 they released a touched-up version of the photograph and a new illustration. Idsinga said police had narrowed their list to 22 possible identities. The man’s name was not on it.
On April 12, police named him: Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37, of Scarborough. He was a Tamil refugee claimant from Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka. Nobody had reported him missing.
Kanagaratnam was born on April 2, 1978, the Star reported, the fourth of six children. A death notice in a Tamil-language newspaper placed his birth in Nainatheevu, a small island off the northern coast of Sri Lanka, and said he attended St. John’s College in Jaffna. He worked in the family’s jewelry store. Kajendthiran Shanmuganathan, who met him on the grounds of an elementary school in Sri Lanka, told the Star he was “an active kid.”
His youngest brother, Sureshkumar, was shot and killed in March 2007 during the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil fighters. The family stopped celebrating birthdays, the Star reported. In May 2010, Kanagaratnam called his mother from Thailand. He had not told the family he was leaving Sri Lanka. He said he was going to Canada by ship and did not know how long the trip would take.
The ship was the MV Sun Sea. The Star reported that it left Thailand on July 5, 2010, carrying 492 Sri Lankan Tamils who intended to claim refugee status. Canadian authorities intercepted it off the coast of British Columbia in August. Everyone aboard was taken into custody. CBC reported that the passengers were held on suspicion that some of them had links to the Tamil Tigers. The Star reported that politicians warned some of the passengers were terrorists, human smugglers or traffickers, and that a poll after their arrival found 60 per cent of Canadians believed the boat should have been turned back.
Fellow passengers told the Star that Kanagaratnam played poker, joined an improvised band that drummed on utensils and nearby surfaces, shared his packaged food and made jokes. Pranavan Thangavel said he talked about the brother who died in the war.
After the ship landed, Kanagaratnam was held first at the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre, the Star reported. He later moved to Ontario, where there is a large Tamil community, and settled in Scarborough. He had distant relatives in the Toronto area and no immediate family in Canada. He took odd jobs, cleaning and moving furniture, and moved from place to place. Sujantharaj Jeyaraj, who was also on the Sun Sea, told the Star: “He went wherever he could find a place to sleep.” Every two months or so he sent his family about $300.
The Immigration and Refugee Board rejected his claim. The Star reported that he was among 107 Sun Sea passengers whose claims were refused, though the exact dates are unclear. He feared that deportation would send him back to Sri Lanka to be killed. “Once his refugee claim was rejected, he thought his life was gone,” Sasitharan Kulasegaram, another refugee, told the Star. Thangavel said that after the rejection “the only way he can live here was to hide himself.”
In 2014, Dinsan Vanniyasingam, another Sun Sea passenger, ran into him at a shopping mall in east Toronto. “He said he was struggling with his immigration status,” Vanniyasingam told the Canadian Press. Kanagaratnam said he planned to reapply. Idsinga told CBC that police had evidence linking him to Toronto as late as 2014.
His mother and cousin told CBC that Kanagaratnam used to phone home daily. In August 2015 he made his last contact with his family. The Star reported that he said little beyond his worry about the rejected claim. Then the calls stopped and his phone no longer worked. Police allege McArthur killed him between September 3 and December 14, 2015, according to court documents cited by the Star.
His family did not report him missing. His cousin, Suthakaran Thanigasalam, told the Star they feared a report would lead Canadian authorities to send him back to Sri Lanka. “That’s why we didn’t report,” he said. They assumed he was in hiding. His mother consulted a religious astrologer months after she last heard his voice, and the astrologer told her he was alive, the Star reported.
On December 8, 2017, Police Chief Mark Saunders held a news conference to dismiss community fears that a serial killer was at work in the Gay Village, The Walrus reported. The Star reported that McArthur was under police surveillance at the time. The next day, December 9, Kanagaratnam’s brother Kiso Kumar posted an appeal on Facebook. The family had not heard from him in a year, he wrote. Thanigasalam later told CBC the family had been looking for him for two years.
On January 18, 2018, police arrested McArthur and charged him with the murders of Andrew Kinsman and Selim Esen. Remains were later found in planters at a Mallory Crescent home in Leaside where McArthur stored his landscaping equipment.
The identification of the man in the photograph came together in the days after April 9. Idsinga said Kanagaratnam’s name came to police as a new tip, and that an international agency helped confirm who he was. Shanmuganathan told the Star he recognized the photograph when it appeared on the news. “It was Kirushnakumar,” he said.
Relatives in Toronto phoned Thanigasalam on the night of April 13, the eve of Tamil New Year’s Day. He and Kanagaratnam’s two older siblings waited until the next day to tell his parents. “We told them he died by accident, a van accident,” Thanigasalam told the Star. Some hours later he told them the truth. Both parents fainted, he said. His mother, Santhanaladchumy Kanagaratnam, 69, told the Star in Tamil, “Why am I alive?”
On April 16, police announced an eighth first-degree murder charge against McArthur. The seven earlier charges were for the deaths of Selim Esen, Andrew Kinsman, Majeed Kayhan, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Skandaraj Navaratnam and Abdulbasir Faizi. Forensic experts had identified Kanagaratnam’s remains among at least seven sets found in large planters at the Leaside property, the Star reported.
Idsinga said that, unlike the other men, Kanagaratnam had no known link to the Gay Village. “He doesn’t quite fit the profile,” the Globe and Mail quoted him as saying. The Globe quoted him saying the case created “a wide open net.” He said that when investigators first identified Lisowick, they had not known Lisowick was well known in the Village. “Whether that comes true with Mr. Kanagaratnam or not, I don’t know,” he said.
The Star reported that multiple people who knew Kanagaratnam did not believe he was gay. Some in the Tamil community said he may have been living on the streets around Church and Wellesley. Others suggested he met McArthur through one of his odd jobs, possibly a landscaping job. The Post reported in March, citing a source close to the investigation, that McArthur changed his pattern after he was interviewed as a witness in Navaratnam’s disappearance. The source said McArthur began to target men he had no links to and whom fewer people would notice missing. After Kanagaratnam was named, the Post said it would no longer publish the photograph out of respect for him.
Idsinga said police were using a Tamil-speaking officer to communicate with the family, and that questions asked through an interpreter were hard to frame without leading. Police gave the family five or six days to grieve before asking more. Police told CBC there was no timeline for returning remains to families. That decision belongs to the coroner’s office.
Gabriel Chand, a Vancouver lawyer who helped many Sun Sea passengers with their claims, said he remembered Kanagaratnam as a man who “wasn’t one of the loud ones.” Immigration and Refugee Board figures cited by the Canadian Press showed that 64 per cent of Sun Sea passengers with finalized claims had been accepted into Canada. “Had he won, he probably would have been around friends,” Chand said. Syed Hussan of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change told CBC that the first thing that happened to Kanagaratnam in Canada was that he was imprisoned, and the last was that he was murdered.
In Jaffna, a white banner on the wall outside a district government building announced his death, with the address of the family home. Inside the home, a framed portrait of him sat on a table covered with a white sheet, among flower petals and candles. Every day 50 or 60 people came to pray, the Star reported, most of them after seeing the news.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam (police spelling); also spelled Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam (Toronto Star, April 20, 2018) |
| Born | April 2, 1978, Nainatheevu (also spelled Nainativu), Sri Lanka |
| Age | 37 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Refugee claimant; odd jobs, including cleaning and moving furniture |
| Date of death | Between September 3 and December 14, 2015 (police allegation, per court documents cited by the Toronto Star) |
| Location | Remains recovered from a planter at a property on Mallory Crescent, Leaside, Toronto |
| Accused | Bruce McArthur, 66, landscaper |
| Charge | First-degree murder (eighth count, laid April 16, 2018) |
| Defence counsel | Edward Royle |
Sources
- Toronto Police Service, News Release no. 40821, April 16, 2018
- The Globe and Mail, April 16, 2018
- Toronto Star, April 16, 2018
- National Post, April 16, 2018
- CBC News, April 17, 2018
- The Canadian Press, April 17, 2018 (as published by the Toronto Sun and Global News)
- Toronto Star, April 20, 2018
- CBC News, April 22, 2018
- Toronto Star, April 11, 2018 (updated)
- Toronto Star, March 6, 2018
- Global News, March 6, 2018
- The Walrus, February 9, 2018
- Time (Associated Press), February 8, 2018
- Facebook post by Kiso Kumar, December 9, 2017
February 2019 Update: Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty to 8 counts of murder, for:
- Andrew Kinsman
- Selim Esen
- Dean Lisowick
- Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam
- Soroush Mahmudi
- Majeed “Hamid” Kayhan
- Abdulbasir Faizi
- Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam
He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Please see our post on What is a “Life Sentence” in Canada for an explanation on the complexity of murder sentences in Canada.
Murder Village Map