Former clients won’t sell Toronto home tied to alleged killer Bruce McArthur

Share

Karen Fraser is settling back into her home, even as police continue to painstakingly excavate her backyard, searching for victims of an alleged serial killer.

Three weeks ago, she and her partner were forced to leave their north Toronto home when it became the unexpected focal point for one of the country's most grisly serial murders, which have afflicted Toronto's Gay Village. A phalanx of police are methodically digging through their frozen backyard, days after announcing that remains of six individuals were discovered on the property. Police expect to lay further charges against Bruce McArthur, who already faces five counts of first-degree murder in a string of slayings dating back to 2012.

In an interview, Ms. Fraser offered new insight into how Mr. McArthur may have used her backyard to store the remains of his victims, as police allege, and confirmed that Skandaraj Navaratnam, who is still missing, was an employee of the landscaper.

Over the phone from an acquaintance's home in her Leaside neighbourhood, she goes from exasperated sighs to incredulous laughter about the whole situation. She had been staying in the home of friendly strangers, she says, since police first began searching the property in January.

Police have already removed a number of garden planters, which they say hid the remains of six bodies.

Ms. Fraser remembers something peculiar about those planters. Most gardeners, she says, "cheat." For a large planter, like the four- or five-foot tall ones that Mr. McArthur put in her backyard, you would normally fill the bottom with pop bottles or Styrofoam. Ms. Fraser says her gardener didn't do that. She remembers thinking that Mr. McArthur made the expensive decision to fill the full planter with topsoil.

Now, based on the charges, she thinks she knows why he made the decisions he did. "If you want to think he's smart, he did not have to run the risk that anyone was going to knock it over, or move it, it would have been impossible."

Mr. McArthur didn't work in the garden alone, she says. For years, he was joined by his son, among others. Police have not connected his son with the case. But Ms. Fraser and another client who employed Mr. McArthur, who spoke to The Globe and Mail but who asked not to be named, both remember him occasionally bringing along helpers. Some were of Middle Eastern descent, they recall. Ms. Fraser recalls them being "newcomers to Canada," although she's unsure as to whether they were staying with Mr. McArthur or whether he had hired them on as employees.

One of those men sticks out for Ms. Fraser: Skandaraj Navaratnam.

Mr. Navaratnam went missing in 2010, the first of three disappearances that struck the Village between 2010 and 2012. Mr. McArthur has not been charged in relation to Mr. Navaratnam's disappearance, but he is facing a first-degree murder charge for Majeed Kayhan, who was the last of the three to disappear. A friend of Mr. McArthur who previously spoke to The Globe confirmed that Mr. Navaratnam had worked for Mr. McArthur's landscaping business.

Ms. Fraser recalls that Mr. Navaratnam would often crack a smile at her sense of humour.

Mr. McArthur, meanwhile, rarely got her jokes, she says. Mr. Navaratnam "found that entertaining," she remembers.

Ms. Fraser used many of the same words to describe Mr. McArthur as others who knew the 66-year-old – nice, kind, friendly – but said that he wasn't very bright. "Bruce wasn't quick on the uptake," she says. "My God, we never thought he was that sharp."

Ms. Fraser recalls one year where she offered to hook up Mr. McArthur with some plants, hanging impatiens, which were hard to find in Toronto. "He said: 'There's no such thing,'" she recalls, laughing. "Three years later, he says: 'Karen, I just bought hanging impatiens, you should get some.' "

She says these sort of episodes would happen "all the time." Mr. McArthur "could not accept new information, he'd kind of push back," she says.

Ms. Fraser will need to endure the chaos in her backyard, now that she has returned. Police have been heating the ground, burrowing into her backyard foot by foot, using radar technology along the way to try to tell if there are human remains buried. With a sigh, she suspects that the only reason they searched her home at all is because she had given Mr. McArthur a spare key, so he could use the bathroom during his long days in their backyard.

Her return to the home is obviously fraught, but she has no intention to move. The neighbourhood denizen is a fixture in the community, organizing an annual Halloween competition for the sleepy suburban-style area. But even that has been tainted by the investigation. Mr. McArthur had sponsored 2015's Halloween competition, providing a holiday arrangement as a prize for whoever came up with the most elegant and modern Halloween display.