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Chief Ramer committed the department to fulfilling the review’s recommendations, and said that the force has already established a central missing persons unit and would review all open cases back to 1919.
The report cited a number of police investigations, including one by a force in a Toronto suburb, that touched on Mr. McArthur’s killings. But a widespread rejection within Toronto’s police force of a provincial major case-management database meant that a lot of evidence went unshared — including interviews with Mr. McArthur.
That made it impossible to for subsequent inquiries to connect the dots.
The first major investigation into the deaths of three of Mr. McArthur’s victims was prompted by a tip from law enforcement in Switzerland. It indicated that an Ontario man might have been part of an international cannibalism ring and that he may have killed one of Mr. McArthur victims. Evidence gathered in that investigation connected all three victims to Mr. McArthur.
But, the review found, that investigation was plagued with “tunnel vision,” focusing entirely on the cannibalism claims. After they were eventually dismissed as the grisly fantasies of the man identified by the Swiss, who was charged with child pornography offenses, the investigators left it at that, the review found.
Other investigators, including some of those who interviewed Mr. McArthur, did not check databases for his criminal history or, in one case, dismissed his record as irrelevant because of the time that had passed.
In 2016, Mr. McArthur was arrested after a man said Mr. McArthur had choked him during sex. He was released, the review said, after the police concluded that “McArthur honestly, though mistakenly, believed” the man had consented. No effort was made to re-interview the accuser before officers drew that conclusion.
Ultimately, the investigation that finally led to Mr. McArthur was only set off by the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman, the last of his murder victims. A public campaign by family and friends of Mr. Kinsman, who was white, pushed the police into action.
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