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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Suspect obsessed with serial killers: ex-girlfriend

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 06/1/2012 1:00 AM

PETER RAY / THE CANADIAN PRESS Luka Rocco Magnotta�s neighbour Richard Payette talks to media in Montreal Thursday. (CP)

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MONTREAL -- A story on a gay-and-lesbian news site reports an old girlfriend of Luka Rocco Magnotta describing him as a narcissist desperate for attention who spoke constantly about serial killers and was obsessed with Karla Homolka.

"He always wanted to be famous," the story on the Xtra! news site quoted the girlfirend saying under a pseudonym.

"I guess now he is."

Meanwhile, a Montana lawyer says Canadian and American law-enforcement officials ignored him when he came across a gruesome online video of what looked like the murder and dismemberment of an unidentified man.

Montana lawyer Roger Renville said he was surfing the Internet Saturday when he found the 10-minute video on an Alberta-based website. His find is now believed to be at the centre of the bizzare case in Montreal in which a man was allegedly murdered and parts of his body mailed out to political offices in Ottawa.

Renville said a poster in the background matched another video that pointed to a Canadian man, so Renville called police in Toronto. But he says the official on the other end wasn't interested.

"He told me that what I was seeing was almost certainly fake -- that special effects were very good," Renville recalled Thursday.

"He told me my story didn't make sense and 'Why would a killer film his own crime and then post it on the Internet?'

"I asked him to at least give me an email address and I would at least send him the link to the video and he said 'no.' "

The website, reportedly run by Mark Marek of Edmonton, still had the video up as of Thursday. Marek has said he originally thought it was a bad joke and could have been made by someone with access to dead bodies.

French-language paper La Presse quoted Marek as saying he wouldn't take the video down because to do so would be like hiding your head in the sand about a real event.

Edmonton police say they have not received any complaints about the video and are not involved in the investigation.

"It is not illegal for these websites to share this video so apparently law-enforcement agencies can't force anyone to take it down unless of course the individual was involved in the crime," said Patricia Thenu from the Edmonton Police Service.

Meanwhile, a neighbour in the apartment building where Magnotta lived says he saw the suspected killer taking a box to the post office last Friday, four days before body parts turned up in the mail in Ottawa.

The neighbour, Richard Payette, said the box looked like the type that would be used to package hockey skates. He said he saw Magnotta carry it out of the building around 11 a.m. that day.

Much of the police investigation has focused on that apartment complex, in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood.

-- The Canadian Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 1, 2012 A17