Luka Rocco Magnotta. Photo: Handout MONTREAL – From the peanut gallery in Quebec courtrooms, you see only the back of a witness, so I’ve no idea if Dr. Joel Watts said this with a straight face, but he certainly sounded earnest.
Watts is a forensic psychiatrist who is now testifying for the defence at the Luka Magnotta trial.
He was being asked Tuesday by prosecutor Louis Bouthillier about an email Magnotta sent a British newspaper about six months before he killed and dismembered the Chinese student named Lin Jun.
In the email, Magnotta alluded to the cat-killing videos that had made him notorious on the web and promised that the next time he made a movie, it would involve “some humans, not just pussys (sic)”.
Wasn’t that a pretty explicit threat to kill a person? Bouthillier asked.
But, Watts replied, in their many interviews Magnotta denied that he had ever wanted to kill people (the email was allegedly meant to scare) and Watts said he wasn’t surprised by the denial.
After all, he said, with what I presume was a straight face, Magnotta “had no history of violent behaviour, except in the context of psychotic behaviour.”
Yet by the time he killed Lin on May 25, 2012 — acts he has admitted here through his lawyer, Luc Leclair — Magnotta, again by his own admission, was a seasoned animal-killer.
He had suffocated two cats in 2010 while he was living in New York and then while living in Montreal, killed two more (his own pets) in the fall of 2011, one by drowning in his bathtub and one by feeding it to a python.
All of the animal killings were videoed and posted online, as Lin’s dismemberment also was.
Watts added that the only time Magnotta was “unable to resist the command hallucinations” in his head, the alleged voices that were part and parcel of his chronic schizophrenia, was on May 24 and 25, 2012, when he brought Lin to his apartment and in short order killed and cut him into 10 pieces.
So then, was he not psychotic when he killed the cats? And what would that say about his mental state? Or was his a psychosis that began in 2010 and endured unabated until 2012? And if it was, would that be a record for the books?
It appears that the defence psychiatrists — Watts was preceded to the witness box by Dr. Marie-Frederique Allard — considered the animal killings only as Magnotta himself had presented the incidents to them.
He told both psychiatrists that he was forced under duress to kill the animals by a mysterious man named Manny Lopez, a former client he met in New York City who soon began to exert sadistic control over him.
By the psychiatrists’ reckoning, if Manny doesn’t exist and didn’t make Magnotta do all this, then he must have been hearing the voices.
For the record, Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer and the jurors have seen not a whit of evidence that Manny ever existed or is a real person. The only references to him came from Magnotta himself, through the two psychiatrists who assessed him.
And in the latter instance in Montreal, when he killed his pets Jasmin and Kenny, Magnotta said a friend of his named Rebecca, who owned the python, was also present when the snake had his cat for lunch.
Yet, by tragic coincidence, Magnotta was unable to provide Watts with a single scrap of contact information for his friend Rebecca or his abuser Manny, though he claimed to have known the latter since 2010.
Of Rebecca, Watts said, “I was never able to get a last name. I asked Mr. Magnotta and he said he didn’t know her last name or how to get in touch.”
And of Manny, Watts said, “I asked Mr. Magnotta on several occasions if he could identify him more or contact him,” but all efforts failed. “I would very much have liked to get a hold of him,” he said. “I was never given any information.”
Yet Allard said she believes Manny is a real person, and Watts, though he hedged his bets, said he may be real.
Similarly, all of Magnotta’s behaviour, both with animals and Lin, is studiously seen by the doctors through the prism of what they accept as the unequivocal evidence of his schizophrenia.
While it’s certainly true that Magnotta has a long history of mental illness, the diagnoses of what that illness is have varied somewhat, even as recently as shortly before the homicide, and the suspicion that he may have been laying it on a bit thick is as old as his first psychiatric records.
Furthermore, Magnotta claims either to not remember the details of what he did to Lin, or to not want to remember because the events are so traumatic to him.
And even this — his lack of recollection or his unwillingness to do so — was attributed by Watts to his illness.
Several times in his evidence, he appeared to bootstrap his opinion that Magnotta was in the midst of a psychotic break.
Once, Watts allowed that Magnotta did sometimes provoke the animal activists who were harassing him, then volunteered, “Again, I see this sort of thing with other individuals who are psychotic.” And when Magnotta told another psychiatrist in Berlin that Manny had started him prostituting with other men, when the fact was he’d been an escort for years, Watts said, “He made that statement in a florid psychotic state.”
Even Magnotta’s mother told Watts that she believed her son had made the cat-killing videos, and that was in the days when he was denying his authorship, and blaming a fellow named Jack.
Jack, Manny, Rebecca: Whether they are real or voices, the one sure thing is that the guy rubbing his crotch with the dead cats isn’t to blame.
Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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