CBC Breaking News: Murdered University Student Jun Lin’s Head Is Located In Montreal Park.
WARNING: GRAPHIC MATERIAL
CBC News
Posted: Jul 4, 2012 3:12 PM ET
Last Updated: Jul 4, 2012 4:31 PM ET
Jun Lin, a Chinese citizen, was studying at Montreal’s Concordia University. (Facebook)
Luka Rocco Magnotta. (Berlin Police)Montreal authorities have confirmed that a severed human head found in a city park over the weekend belongs to murdered Chinese student Jun Lin.A tip led homicide investigators on Sunday to Angrignon Park, a vast green space in Montreal’s south western region, where they found what appeared to be a human head, near a small lake.Forensic testing on the remains concludes that “what was found is actually related to the 11th homicide on our territory — that is, the Magnotta case,” said Montreal Const. Anie Lemieux.Toronto-area native Luka Magnotta has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other alleged offences in Lin’s death.
Lin was a Chinese national and Canadian resident who was a student at Montreal’s Concordia University until he disappeared in late May.
His torso was found shortly after in a Montreal trash pile, while other body parts were shipped to the offices of Canadian federal political parties and Vancouver schools.
Lin’s head remained missing until Sunday’s grisly discovery.
The 33-year-old student’s family travelled to Canada from China after his death, and have met regularly with Montreal authorities, who said finding the rest of his remains was a priority.
A private service was held last week at Concordia University.
Magnotta was extradited from Berlin, Germany after an international manhunt tracked him down in an internet café, where he was reading online news reports about himself.
The 29-year-old has requested a trial by judge and jury. His 10-day preliminary hearing, scheduled for March 2013, will be preceded by a pre-trial hearing in January.
Globe& Mail Article: Accused Killer Luka Magnotta’s Murder Victim Jun Lin’s Troubled Life.
Mark MacKinnon
Beijing — The Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Jun. 02 2012, 10:36 AM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Jun. 02 2012, 3:21 PM EDT
Lin Jun was a gentle soul, the kind of guy who went to see The Smurfs movie in 3D and who posted photographs of his beloved tabby cat and snowy Montreal street scenes for his friends back home in China to see.
But the photographs and comments posted on his Sina Weibo account (a Chinese microblogging service that’s part Twitter, part Facebook) also reveal hints of a darker side, one that might have drawn him to someone such as Luka Rocco Magnotta, a porn actor and white supremacist who was already famous online for posting a video of his torturing of a kitten.
The 33-year-old Mr. Lin, who police have suggested might have been romantically linked to the man who murdered and dismembered him a week ago, gave himself the nickname “Justin the Villain” on his Weibo account, a moniker that seems at odds with the soft personality that comes through in most of his postings.
But dark thoughts clearly came to Mr. Lin from time to time. On Valentine’s Day last year, he posted a computer-altered photograph of himself with wild purple hair and a cracked face that turns grey around a mouth of broken and missing teeth. “My self-portrait,” he wrote beneath the repulsive image.
In another on-line posting a month before he was murdered, Mr. Lin took a photograph of an empty Montreal subway car. His mystifying caption “midnight cannibalism train,” led some Chinese Internet users to speculate Saturday that he was somehow foreshadowing his own gruesome death. (Police say some of Mr. Lin’s body parts were eaten before his hand and foot were mailed to the offices of political parties in Ottawa. Mr. Magnotta flew out from Montreal to Europe the day after the killing, and is the now target of an international police hunt.)
Mr. Lin also used the online user name Justin Rain, the name of an actor with a minor role in the Twilight vampire saga. And, once in Montreal, he registered the web domain homoBJ.com.
Other images on Mr. Lin’s Weibo page are much more pedestrian: a poster promoting the 3-D version of the movie Titanic, a robot he and his classmates built for a “mascot competition,” and links to romantic French songs, as well as several postings mourning Apple founder Steve Jobs. “We lost Steve Jobs forever” he wrote following Mr. Job’s death last year. “We lost you forever,” a friend replied Saturday on the same page of his Weibo account.
Also pictured on Mr. Lin’s Weibo is a medical bracelet from the Montreal General Hospital, where he was admitted last August after getting his hand caught in a subway door.
Mr. Lin was clearly very lonely, and somewhat narcissistic. He’s alone in nearly all of the photographs posted to his account. In many of them his chiselled body is either partially or fully naked.
He was also brave. Despite the conservatism of Chinese society – where homosexuality was considered a mental illness as recently as 2001 – he was openly and seemingly proudly gay. (That homophobia lingers in China. Scattered among the thousands of posts on Weibo mourning Mr. Lin’s death were a large number suggesting it was his sexuality that lead him into a dangerous situation.)
Born Dec. 30, 1978 in the industrial city of Wuhan, the capital of China’s central Hubei province, he moved to Beijing several years ago and began preparing for his dream of moving to Canada. He studied French at the Alliance Française cultural centre, hoping it would help him qualify for immigration to Quebec.
More than anything else, it was a partner he hoped to find. When the teacher of an entrepreneurial course at Montreal’s Tyark College asked him what his goal in life was, Mr. Lin said his biggest ambition was to find love. “That is what I remember about him. He was in computers, and he was looking for love,” recalled Alexandra Afanase, a fellow student in the Tyark business class.
While he was initially elated to be moving to Canada – “I’m going to Canada!” he posted on May 10, 2010 – Mr. Lin seemed to feel even more isolated after arriving in his new home. At one point, he notes that he’s the oldest person in his class at Concordia. “Suddenly I realized that I am about 10 years older than my classmates. They would have no problem calling me ‘uncle.’ It’s so crushing,” he wrote.
Using his chosen English name, Justin, he studied computer science at Concordia and worked at a convenience store, where he was described as a polite, responsible employee who never missed a shift – until his sudden disappearance last week. But there are hints that life in Montreal didn’t make him as happy as he’d hoped it would.
One of the first photos he put on his Weibo account after arriving in the city is of a sparsely populated street, under which he posed the question: “what kind of life?”
“You don’t have to consider this question any more,” read one of hundreds of replies that were posted today as news of Mr. Lin’s murder spread through China. “Rest in peace.”
Gayblackcanada 