Psychiatrist Gilles Chamberland, right, is shown during a break for the trial of Luka Magnotta at the Montreal courthouse on Nov. 18, 2014. Photo: Dario Ayala/Postmedia News/Files MONTREAL — It is Luka Magnotta’s behaviour before and after he killed and dismembered Lin Jun that tells the tale about his state of mind.
And that behaviour — much of it conveniently captured on the surveillance video that is such a feature of modern life — tells at least one forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Gilles Chamberland, that Magnotta “knew this (the homicide) was wrong.”
“There’s nothing here telling me he didn’t know the acts were wrong.”
Dr. Chamberland, who was testifying for the prosecution, said Tuesday there are few instances on the record to show that if Magnotta was suffering from schizophrenia, as defence doctors say, that “his illness prevented him from doing what he wanted to do,” whether travelling or working as an escort.
“So if he is schizophrenic,” Dr. Chamberland said, “schizophrenia doesn’t seem to have had an impact on his life.
“You may be organized and functioning and be schizophrenic,” he said, ”but if you take for granted there are psychotic aspects (to the killing of Lin), and you look at his behaviours before and after, even if he was schizophrenic, he knew this was wrong.”
It was a dramatic finish to Dr. Chamberland’s four days in the witness box giving his evidence-in-chief. He was called by prosecutor Louis Bouthillier.
Dr. Chamberland was denied the chance to interview the 32-year-old Magnotta, and was frank from the get-go about how that handicapped any assessment of him and his mental state.
But it didn’t prevent him from reviewing the reports of two defence psychiatrists who spent hours and hours with Magnotta, from doing a paper review of the case, or from coming to some hard common-sense conclusions.
He relied chiefly upon the reams of video in the case.
Unusually high-quality video from the sophisticated system at the low-rent apartment building where Magnotta was living showed him entering with Lin on the evening of May 24, 2012.
Lin was never again seen alive.
Luka Magnotta has been charged in the slaying of student Lin Jun (pictured). THE CANADIAN PRESS/HANDOUT/FACEBOOK
But throughout the early morning hours of May 25, Magnotta was captured casually disposing of bloodied bedding and Lin’s arms and legs. So nonchalant was Magnotta, frequently pausing to check his pout and his rear in the lobby mirror, that he might have been disposing of kitchen waste, not the remnants of a human being.
Magnotta, who is pleading not guilty by dint of mental disorder, has admitted through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, the “physical acts” of the five charges he faces.
But in extensive interviews with the two defence psychiatrists, Magnotta gave differing versions of what led him to the killing — but generally, he blamed voices telling him Lin was a government agent — and claimed to have virtually no memory of the actual details.
That claim, Dr. Chamberland said, is impossible to square with the detailed directions Magnotta indirectly provided to Montreal police and which led them in July of 2012 to Lin’s head in a local park.
The severed head of the 33-year-old student from China was found in tall grass by one of several ponds in the park; the police were given explicit instructions (“walk left on the pathway,” “once you get to the bottom of the pond,” etc.) to locate it.
“This appears to be a very detailed memory,” Dr. Chamberland said, and at odds with Magnotta’s claim “he didn’t remember anything.”
The park isn’t close to Magnotta’s apartment, and Dr. Chamberland wondered aloud about how Magnotta may have paraded about the city, perhaps even travelling on the metro, with Lin’s head in hand.
A sketch of Luka Rocco Magnotta watching the proceedings at his first-degree murder trial in Montreal. MIKE McLAUGHLIN/THE CANADIAN PRESS/FILES
Dr. Chamberland suggested that perhaps Magnotta was planning to visit it again. “It looks like he disposed of the head in a manner so he could find it again, in the future,” he said.
He also pointed to Magnotta’s killing of his black-and-white puppy — he had placed the dog at Lin’s corpse and incorporated it into his notorious dismemberment video — and his ordering pizza that night as evidence that he wasn’t in the grips of psychosis or delusion.
The puppy’s slaying, Dr. Chamberland said, can’t be explained either by delusion or fear, and Magnotta offered no explanation to either defence psychiatrist. The killing fits with the profile of someone who “wants a fresh start” by moving to Paris, not someone who is riven by paranoia.
And if, as Magnotta claimed, he was terrified government agents were after him, the notion of “calling a stranger to deliver a pizza does not fit.”
Dr. Chamberland has told Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors repeatedly that there are two possible explanations for what Magnotta did.
One, the defence favourite, is that he is a longtime schizophrenic who either fell into psychosis or at least into the grasp of his illness, and thus couldn’t appreciate what he was doing or know it was wrong.
The other, which Dr. Chamberland prefers, is that Magnotta suffers from a personality disorder, which is not an illness but rather a set of characteristics hardwired into one’s personality, and that the killing was merely the nadir of a man who had craved attention his whole life and done whatever it took to get it.
As Dr. Chamberland put it once, referring to cat-killing videos Magnotta posted online in 2010 and 2011, “He was working on his image.”
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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