Murder of Jun Lin

Luka Magnotta
Born	Eric Clinton Kirk Newman (1982-07-24) July 24, 1982 Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Other names	Luka Rocco Magnotta Vladimir Romanov Mattia Del Santo
Alma mater	I. E. Weldon Secondary School
Height	1.78 m (5 ft 10 in)

Luka Rocco Magnotta, born as Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, and also known as Vladimir Romanov or Mattia Del Santo, (born July 24, 1982) is an unsuccessful Canadian pornographic actor accused of murdering and dismembering Lin Jun, also known as Justin Lin, a 33-year-old Chinese international student, then mailing his severed limbs to offices of Canadian political parties. After a gruesome video depicting the murder was posted online, Magnotta fled the country becoming the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and prompting an international manhunt. He was apprehended on June 4 in an Internet cafe in Berlin while reading news stories about himself. He was previously sought by animal rights organizations for posting videos of himself torturing kittens.

History

Magnotta, then named Eric Clinton Newman, was born in Scarborough, Ontario. He was raised in Lindsay, Ontario by his grandparents and attended I. E. Weldon Secondary School. He changed his name to Luka Rocco Magnotta on August 12, 2006.

In 2003, Magnotta began to appear in both straight and gay pornographic videos, occasionally working as a stripper and a male escort. He has identified himself at different times as being bisexual or as a heterosexual who was strictly "gay-for-pay", with his only confirmed romantic relationships being with women. Despite being described, both by himself and by the media, as a porn star, his career in porn appears to have been brief and unsuccessful, with only a small handful of video and photo modelling credits and little prominence in the industry; he also appears to have embellished his porn credentials by claiming credit for numerous other videos in which he was not featured.

He also appeared as a pin-up model in a 2005 issue of Toronto's fab magazine, using the pseudonym "Jimmy". In 2007, he was an unsuccessful competitor in OUTtv's reality series COVERguy; while he made only a single appearance on the show and was not selected by the judges to continue in the competition, in his own later writings he often claimed to have been a finalist who left the show due to disagreements with the producers.

In 2005, Magnotta was convicted on three counts of fraud against Sears Canada, The Brick, and 2001 Audio Video after impersonating a woman to purchase $16,900 of goods on a stolen credit card, and received a nine-month conditional sentence with 12 months of probation.

A few news stories emerged in 2007 claiming that he was in a relationship with Karla Homolka, a high-profile Canadian murderer, although Magnotta denied in an interview with the Toronto Sun that he had ever even met her. During the murder investigation, Montreal police initially announced that the pair had dated, but subsequently retracted the statement and acknowledged that they had no new evidence to corroborate the claim.

In 2007, Magnotta declared bankruptcy. The bankruptcy was fully discharged in December 2007.

Internet controversy

According to the Montreal Gazette, Magnotta is alleged to have been the person behind a series of videos of animal cruelty involving cats which were posted to YouTube beginning in 2010, including one which showed a man deliberately suffocating kittens with a vacuum cleaner and one in which a man fed a live kitten to a python. After identifying Magnotta as the likely suspect, animal rights activists offered a reward for "bringing him to justice". Scotland Yard investigated claims that the python video had been shot while Magnotta was living in London in 2011, but denied that the incident had occurred within its jurisdiction, stating that the video had been "posted from somewhere in North America."

Magnotta, or someone connected to him, appears to have maintained an extensive network of profiles on various internet social media and discussion forums, which were used over a period of several years to plant false or unverified news stories depicting him as a celebrity with a large and loyal fan following. These accounts have been credited by the National Post as a possible source of the Homolka claims, as well as false claims that Magnotta spent some time living in Los Angeles as a roommate of Timothy Boham, an adult film actor who was himself convicted of murder in 2009. In addition, these profiles were also responsible for the embellished claims about Magnotta's prominence as a model and porn actor, and also posted numerous other "celebrity gossip" items and opinion pieces on political and social topics. By March 2012, more than two months before Lin's murder, these online personas were already associating Magnotta's name with both necrophilia and serial killing. Magnotta has also been alleged to have potential links to white supremacy groups; the Toronto newspaper Xtra! noted two users on Stormfront who posted manifestos that purportedly expressed Magnotta's views against Chinese and Jewish people, as well as rants about the "slander" and "bullying" he faced from animal rights activists.

In the past, Magnotta had responded to criticisms of him on his personal website, saying that “many hoax websites are created using my image and name, posing as me to seem more believable in respect to the type of audience these websites have." An unidentified family member told the Toronto Sun that Magnotta has a personal history of making up rumours and stories about himself for attention: "He will create a conflict, then he will take himself out and he will deny the content of the story, which he in fact started."

Toronto Sun reporter Joe Warmington, who interviewed Magnotta about the Homolka rumours in 2007, described him as "creepy in more of a seedy side of life way", and an unidentified family member stated "he hurt us when he was younger and we haven't been in contact with him in a while."

Murder of Lin Jun

Lin Jun (Chinese: 林俊 Lín Jùn) (born ca. 1979) also known as Justin Lin, originally from Wuhan, was an international student at Concordia University. He had been reported as missing by his family on May 24, 2012.

On May 29, 2012, a package containing a human foot was delivered to the national headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada, which made headlines around the world. The package, which was opened by Jenni Byrne, director of political operations for the party, was stained with blood and had a foul smell. Later that day, a package containing a human hand was discovered by the Ottawa Police in a Canada Post processing facility, addressed to the Liberal Party, and a suitcase containing a decomposing torso was discovered in the Snowdon area of Montreal by a janitor, left in a garbage pile near the apartment building where Magnotta lived.

On May 30, 2012, it was confirmed that the body parts belonged to the same individual, later identified as Lin Jun, a thirty-three year old Chinese student from Wuhan. Lin had been living in Montreal since July 2011, and was an undergraduate in the engineering and computer science faculty at Concordia University. The suspect in the case was quickly identified as Magnotta, who had by then fled. A warrant was issued by the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) for his arrest, later upgraded to a Canada-wide warrant by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), launching a national manhunt. Initially, police were unable to identify Lin as the victim and had not at that time recovered all parts of the body, which was beheaded and dismembered. A video purportedly showing this killing posted online, which the police stated was authentic, showed an Asian man as the victim. The eleven minute video depicts the murder and dismemberment, as well as scenes of cannibalism and necrophilia.

Police were treating Magnotta's apartment in Montreal as a crime scene. According to La Presse and CTV, a note was found with the package sent to the Conservative Party headquarters, stating that other body parts were sent by mail and that he would kill again. The police are working with Canada Post to investigate the possibility of additional remains in the mail.

On May 31, 2012, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Magnotta at the request of Canadian authorities, and his name and photo were displayed prominently for several days at the top of the homepage of the Interpol website. The Red Notice requested that Magnotta be provisionally arrested pending extradition back to Canada by any Interpol member state. It was later confirmed that he left Canada and went to Paris, France. He was seen boarding a bus destined for Berlin, Germany. The international search for Magnotta ended in Berlin with his arrest.

Arrest

A Canada-wide arrest warrant for Magnotta was issued, later upgraded to an international warrant, accusing him of the following crimes:

1. First degree murder;
2. Committing an indignity to a dead body;
3. Publishing obscene material;
4. Mailing "obscene, indecent, immoral or scurrilous" material; and
5. Criminally harassing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and several (unnamed) members of Parliament.

Magnotta was apprehended by Berlin Police at an internet cafe in the Neukölln district on June 4, 2012. Magnotta tried giving fake names before admiting who he was. His identity was confirmed through fingerprint evidence. He appeared in a Berlin court on June 5, 2012. Magnotta has decided to accept extradition to Canada.

On June 4, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated police in apprehending the suspect.

Friends of Lin Jun expressed relief at the suspect's capture.

International reaction

Reactions in China have been highly critical, with some there believing the murder to be racially motivated. People there have questioned public safety in Canada with the Lin Jun killing being the second high-profile murder of a Chinese student there in slightly over a year. China could not request extradition of Magnotta despite Lin Jun being Chinese.

References

http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/luka-rocco-magnotta/ I first heard of Magnotta in September 2007 when I was Deputy Managing Editor at the Toronto Sun. He was briefly at the centre of a flurry of media attention in Toronto for denying he had been in a relationship with Homolka after her release from prison. He said an anonymous Internet campaign feeding the false rumour was ruining his life.

“I have lost modelling jobs and have been receiving death threats,” Magnotta told talk radio station AM 640.

Among those questioning Magnotta at the time was Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington, who recalled Thursday, “He might have been the creepiest person I ever interviewed.”

Warmington quickly determined during that 2007 interview that Magnotta had no connection to Homolka—but had some serious personal issues of his own to address.

“You spend 10 seconds with him and you easily come to the conclusion it’s all in his own head and all for attention,” Warmington said on Thursday.

Because I had directed the Toronto Sun team that found Karla Homolka in Montreal after her release from prison in 2005, I maintained a professional interest in her post-prison activities. I found the various Internet blog posts and discussions that Magnotta complained were linking him to Homolka. Like Warmington, I quickly concluded there was no basis for believing a connection between Magnotta and Homolka existed. And I also came to the conclusion that Luka Magnotta had probably posted the Internet rumours himself as a publicity-seeking stunt.

There was barely even a chance Magnotta and Homolka were in the same city at the same time, let alone cavorting.

After her release from prison in July 2005, Homolka lived in the Montreal area under the close supervision of her lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais. Homolka’s social milieu was so restricted during that period that she ended up marrying Bordelais’ brother. After she bore a child in early 2007, Homolka left Canada for the French Antilles with her husband and son.

One month before Homolka’s release from prison, Magnotta was convicted on a number of fraud charges in Toronto under his birth name—Eric Clinton Newman. He was sentenced to a nine-month conditional term with nightly curfew, which he served at his mother’s home in Peterborough. He was also put on probation for 12 months.

It was after completing that sentence that Eric Clinton Newman legally changed his name to Luka Rocco Magnotta. And moved to Ottawa. He would later return to Toronto but he did not move to Montreal until long after Karla Homolka had left that city.

That’s where the issue should probably have ended

http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/luka-rocco-magnotta/

External links

• June 5 press briefing by Montreal police (21 minutes)
• Interpol Red Notice for Magnotta