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.
Former Gay Porn Star, Cat Killer, & Accused Murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta Is Dangerous & Fled Canada!!!
WARNING: The following story contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.
OTTAWA — The nation’s most wanted man, Luka Rocco Magnotta, once described in an Internet blog post how to disappear completely and never be found.
The central suspect in a gruesome Montreal murder — a dismembered foot from the victim was mailed to Conservative Party headquarters in downtown Ottawa — Magnotta, 29, once offered step-by-step instruction on starting a new life in another country.
“A minimum of four months is really necessary to carry out the heroic actions necessary to leave your old life behind,” he wrote in 2009.
Magnotta, a former male prostitute and porn film actor, said it was necessary to slowly withdraw from all social circles; acquire two sets of false identification; convert all assets to cash; then take a bus to a chosen destination after selling a car somewhere else to mislead authorities.
The game plan for his own disappearance is part of Magnotta’s enormous digital presence.
It will now be the difficult task of police investigators to sort fact from fiction.
Already, Montreal police have confirmed one of the many bizarre elements of Magnotta’s online profile: that he once dated notorious sex killer Karla Homolka.
Magnotta — he was born Eric Newman — has in the past denied any connection to Homolka. “I just wish it would stop,” Magnotta told a reporter in September 2007. “I wish they would leave me alone.” Luka Magnotta is an Internet spectre. He is an inveterate blogger and a man of a dozen Facebook pages.
He’s also among the Internet’s most notorious fiends, accused of asphyxiating kittens in a plastic bag, drowning another and feeding still another to a python. The cruelties were videotaped and posted online.
The face of the perpetrator in those videos cannot be seen, but Magnotta was later identified as the culprit by a Facebook group dedicated to establishing the identity of the so-called Vacuum Bag Kitten Killer.
Magnotta has denied those accusations, but the charges follow him across his many Facebook pages.
“I have been surrounded by haters for years,” he has posted. “They come into my life … see that I have so much more than them going for me … they get jealous and try to bring me down.”
He once told his Internet enemies that he would vanish: “In the near future, I can’t wait to completely disappear and never be found again. A tropical island sounds nice. So, losers, stop writing about me and get a life.”
More recently, he has been linked to a sickening “snuff video” that shows someone dressed in black repeatedly stabbing a man on a bed.
Police in Montreal found a headless, limbless torso in a suitcase on Tuesday near the apartment building where Magnotta lived in the Snowdon district of Montreal. The police have a video of the crime.
Police have said the torso belongs to the same person whose foot and hand were discovered in Ottawa. The severed foot was delivered to Conservative Party headquarters, while the severed hand was in another package found at the Ottawa Postal Terminal.
In Montreal, Magnotta’s neighbours said he lived in the low-income apartment building for about four months, but kept to himself.
“It was like I was talking to the wall,” Richard Payette, who lives across from Magnotta’s second-floor apartment, told the Montreal Gazette. “I never heard a peep from him.”
Magnotta, he said, disappeared a few days ago.
A few residents were sitting on the apartment building’s front stairway several days ago, he said, when they saw Magnotta leave the building and walk south down Décarie Blvd. He appeared to be wearing a strange wig. Someone joked about Magnotta “having a bad hair day.”
Derek MacKinnon, another resident of the building, said he believes he might have been the last person to talk to Magnotta before he disappeared.
MacKinnon, an actor who appeared in several horror films in the ’80s, said Magnotta sat down with him on the front stairway to the building, where they discussed acting.
“He invited me to his apartment,” MacKinnon said of his conversation with Magnotta. “It was the first time he had ever talked to me. I’m glad I didn’t accept.
“He wanted to know how to get into legitimate films. He was bothered by what he had done in the past. He wanted to know if working in gay porns was something they would hold against you (in the mainstream movie industry).”
Magnotta’s own blog posts suggest he has worked as a male prostitute, bisexual porn actor and model. He admits to having cosmetic surgery to cover acne scars and hair implants to improve his career opportunities.
Often, he refers online to his own desirability. “Every day I thank God for giving me my looks and brains,” he posted in August 2010, not long after moving to Miami.
Pictures posted on his MySpace page, meanwhile, document his travels across Europe. He’s often pictured alone, but in several photos is seen standing beside a woman identified as an ex-girlfriend.
Some of the pictures were taken by Nicholas Monaco, a Miami-based photographer who met Magnotta in New York four years ago.
“He wanted somebody to take a couple shots of him just in the city,” the 31-year-old photographer told the Citizen.
The pair met near Madison Square Garden and spent about 45 minutes together. Magnotta told Monaco he was a model and paid the photographer $100 in exchange for digital copies of the pictures, which show the accused killer standing in front of the famous arena and exiting a subway station.
“He was kind of a creepy person, you know,” said Monaco.
Magnotta was born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman in Scarborough, Ontario on July 24, 1982.
According to information published in the Ontario Gazette, the professed fan of mafia movies legally changed his name to Luka Rocco Magnotta in July 2006.
Magnotta appeared in at least two issues of fab, the Toronto-based sister magazine to the gay and lesbian alternative newspaper Xtra.
In 2005, Magnotta, who identified himself as Russian-born “Jimmy,” posed shirtless as the magazine’s “fab boy” pin-up model. He told the magazine he hoped to become a police officer.
“I don’t want to do traffic tickets,” he said. “I am thinking vice or homicide.”
With files from Paul Cherry and the Montreal Gazette
Gayblackcanada 