Luka Magnotta, above, is pleading not guilty by dint of mental disorder to five charges, including first-degree murder, in the May 25, 2012, slaying and dismemberment of Chinese student Jun Lin. Photo: The Canadian Press/Handout MONTREAL — As it is in so many criminal cases, where the accused blames the victim for the whole dreadful business, so did it finally come to pass at the Luka Magnotta trial.
Indirectly, through the testimony of the forensic psychiatrist hired by his lawyer to assess him, Magnotta Tuesday spoke to Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors.
He is pleading not guilty by dint of mental disorder to five charges, including first-degree murder, in the May 25, 2012, slaying and dismemberment of Chinese student Lin Jun.
First, Magnotta told Marie-Frederique Allard in their numerous chats this year, Lin agreed to have bondage sex with him.
He’d posted an ad on Craigslist, Magnotta said, seeking a partner for bondage, and after Lin replied to it, they met at a Metro station.
And it was he who was first to be tied to the bed, Magnotta said, and it was Lin who was the rough one. Why, Magnotta told Allard, he had to tell him “to slow down, but Lin started to hit him behind the head.”
And Lin, he told Allard, agreed to the filming of the sex, though as it happens, there is no sex on either of the videos in evidence, only grotesque indignity.
Of course, as he told Allard and which she accepted as gospel, he was also hearing voices at that time, and that night, particularly, when he and Lin took a break, Magnotta said he looked out the window of his apartment and “saw a black car and began to believe Lin was an agent of the government.”
Next thing he knew, Allard said, “he found himself with the body of Lin. He acknowledged having killed him by slitting his throat.”
In later sessions, Magnotta told her the voices said F— it!, Cut it! or Stab it!, such that he felt “something was taking over his body, forcing him to act.”
Alas, he never managed to explain why it was he had masturbated with Lin’s arm (“I didn’t really receive an answer,” Allard said), or why he took a knife and fork to Lin’s buttocks (“He didn’t really explain everything he did,” she said), or why he had drowned his own puppy, the same one he’d posed by Lin’s body. (“He gave no real reason for this,” Allard said, “it was weird: He just drowned his dog, he just did it, he killed his dog.”)
There were also holes you could drive a truck through in some of what he told Allard, instances where either the common-sense inference available to the jurors or the hard evidence before them defeats Magnotta’s claims.
If, for instance, Magnotta’s account of the sex with Lin is possible — nobody really knows the truth of another’s sexual predilections — the notion of the 33-year-old Lin, who was described as shy by his former boyfriend and friends and who was still a closeted gay man to his parents back in China, cheerfully agreeing to be videoed by a complete stranger is at least unlikely.
Similarly, Magnotta also admitted to Allard that he was the kitten killer much sought after in 2011 by animal activists who objected to his online videos of the killings and that he himself had started the online rumours that he was dating convicted felon Karla Homolka.
In this context, he told the psychiatrist that he’d sent a vicious message to a London newspaper in 2011 in which he warned “The next time you hear from me it will be in a movie I am producing. That will have some humans in it, not just pussys [sic].”
He sent the email in part because he was furious the newspaper’s reporter, Alex West, had secretly audio-taped an interview with him on Dec. 6 that year.
“He was very mad he had been recorded,” Allard said, “and he decided to send the email.”
But there’s no way Magnotta could have known West had recorded the interview; that tidbit would have emerged in routine Crown disclosure to the defence, long after Magnotta had fired off his haughty note.
Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier, in his opening statement seven weeks ago, told the jurors the email was evidence of Magnotta’s plan to kill someone — six months in advance.
Magnotta only ever took a portion of responsibility for his actions.
Even in admitting he was the kitten killer, for example, he blamed a mysterious man, Manny Lopez, for making him do it. This man, Magnotta told Allard, was a client of his escort business who had become violent and abusive, once kidnapped him and who forced him into sex videos and to kill cats.
“When we see him killing animals,” Allard said, “Mr. Lopez was with him.”
She said in a later interview, Magnotta also “told me he was with Manny” when he killed Lin. “I believe Mr. Lopez really exists,” she said, “but it’s hard to distinguish to what extent he was involved in these events.”
The jurors have heard not a scintilla of evidence Lopez ever existed.
Allard was testifying as a defence witness for the third consecutive day.
She diagnosed Magnotta as a paranoid schizophrenic who, despite meeting the two-pronged legal test for sanity (in that he could appreciate “the nature and quality” of his act and knew right from wrong), was at the time of the homicide in the grips of a psychosis that prevented him from applying that knowledge.
She was also convinced that Magnotta wasn’t faking or exaggerating symptoms such as hearing voices.
Mind you, as she said, “You can look at this another way. … One may, one could think he is narcissistic and he wants to call attention (to himself) and to be the centre of everything, that he’s just setting up the stage for his murder of Jun Lin.”
Magnotta told her that when he was dumping Lin’s severed head at Montreal’s Parc Angrignon, “he wanted to do some kind of religious ceremony” because “he wanted Mr. Lin to rest in peace.”
Alas, some people passed by at that moment, so he left without doing it: Easy come, easy go.
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