The internet has its own daily dose of “cute videos” to offer with kittens being one of the major stars of this genre. But one such kitten video posted in 2010 by one Luka Rocco Magnotta was not cute, to say the least, and would lead some cat enthusiasts to the discovery of a grisly crime. Magnotta was a Canadian actor who appeared in low-budget gay adult movies and was later charged with first-degree murder of a Chinese student, Jun Lin, whose corpse dismembered and then mailed the severed body parts to political party offices in Ottawa as reported by Rolling Stone.
The video titled 1 Boy 2 Kittens was enough for some Facebook users to launch a mission to find the boy with a green hoodie, apparently in his 20s, appearing in it as he wrapped two kittens in a plastic bag and sucked out air with a vacuum cleaner, suffocating them to death.
A year and a half later, these amateur sleuths saw their fear being played out live in a video on their screens with the same boy killing a human this time.
In 2019, Australian filmmaker Mark Lewis adapted the story for his award-winning Netflix true-crime documentary ‘Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer’.
From here on, the story splits into two parts.
Part 1: The Case Of Cat-Killing Videos
Enraged internet users were directed to a dedicated Facebook group to find this boy, Rolling Stone stated in one of its 2014 articles. “This isn’t the first time, it’s not gonna be the last time, and this is gonna get progressively worse,” group member Joe Panz quotes his psychologist sister as saying, about the boy, in the Netflix documentary cited above.
Devising the next plan of action, the members started pursuing visual clues — a wolverine bedsheet, pack of cigarettes, electrical outlets, and the vacuum cleaner. But that did not help them go anywhere. No one was able to catch hold of him, or even his name.
“The person you’re looking for, his name is Luka Magnotta,” Deanna Thompson and other group members received this message one fine day from a “sock puppet account”, narrates Thompson in the true-crime documentary. “Luka Magnotta, hit Enter”, and eventually the citizen sleuths were able to locate him through one of his photos taken at his Toronto apartment.
They started a file on Magnotta, and the police went to the apartment only to find out that he had moved out two years ago.
The netizens’ movement started to turn cold until Magnotta uploaded more cat killing videos — a cat being fed to a python, a kitten drowned in a bathtub, another one locked in a cage and set on fire — and the trail resumed.
In an interview to a Sun UK reporter Alex West in December 2011, Magnotta denied allegations that he killed the kittens. On December 12, the Sun received an email from someone calling himself John Kilbride (the name of one of the infamous Moors victims), reported Rolling Stone.
“So, I have to disappear for a while, until people quit bothering me. But next time you hear from me it will be in a movie I am producing that will have some humans in it, not just pussies. I will, however, send you a copy of the new video im going to be making. Once you kill and taste blood it’s impossible to stop.”
Part 2: Headless Torso, Severed Body Parts
On May 29, 2012, residents of an apartment building at 5720 Decarie Boulevard in Canada’s Montreal complained of a foul smell. A janitor discovered a suitcase behind the building and inside was a headless torso of a man.
The same day, the Conservative Party of Canada headquarters in Ottawa received a mail package containing a human foot while a parcel sent to the Liberal Party Headquarters in the same city contained a human hand.
Police probe was launched and as they zeroed in on the suspect, an arrest warrant was issued for Magnotta. Meanwhile, Jun Lin’s friend Benjamin Xu came to know about the rumours of a video of “an Asian guy getting killed”, he says in the Netflix documentary. As Benjamin watched the ‘1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick’ video, and the police ran through the list of missing people, the victim was identified as that of Jun.
Jun, 33, was a Chinese student at Concordia University, who the authorities claimed met Magnotta through the Men seeking Men section of Craigslist under an alias, mentioned in the Rolling Stone report. Jun was shy and not openly gay, and that’s why he came to Canada, Benjamin says in the documentary.
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Magnotta, Interpol’s ‘Most Wanted’
While Magnotta was on the run, he became one of Interpol’s most wanted as investigators joined forces with the internet sleuths to piece together his movement. A week later, Kadir Anlayisli was working at his job in an internet cafe in Germany’s Berlin one morning when a man walked in and said, “Bonjour, Internet.”
Anlayisli recognised the face but could not recollect where he had seen him before. But once his eyes fell on the man's computer as he viewed articles about a Montreal killer that Anlayisli had also read about, he immediately knew the man in front of him was Luka Magnotta.
The internet cafe employee informed the police who then confronted Magnotta. “You got me,” he said after initially faking his name, the Rolling Stone report stated.
Magnotta was taken into custody on June 18, 2012, and flown back to Canada via military transport.
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The Trial
In December 2014, Magnotta was sentenced to life imprisonment for first degree murder with no possibility of parole for 25 years. He was sentenced to another 19 years for the four other charges he was convicted of, reported CBC News. The longer version of the video included acts of cannibalism, Montreal Police Commander Ian Lafreniere said in the Rolling Stone report.
"I will never see his smiling face on video chat or hear about his new accomplishments or hear his laugh. Lin Jun's birthday is on Dec. 30 and he will never be there for his birthday or ours," CBC News quoted Jun’s father Diran Lin as saying.
A Montreal Gazette report dated June 21, 2016 stated that Magnotta was going to tie the knot with fellow inmate Anthony Jolin in Quebec’s Pont-Cartier prison where he has been serving his sentence.