Montreal police missed Magnotta by weeks: landlord

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This article was published 25/06/2012 (5164 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL — Police were hot on Luka Rocco Magnotta’s trail just weeks before he allegedly killed and dismembered university student Jun Lin, according to a former landlord.

Canadian law enforcement had tracked the 29-year-old porn actor and stripper to a Montreal apartment building as recently as March, says Magnotta’s former landlord. But the query came too late — Magnotta had moved out about two weeks earlier.

While they never explained why they were calling, Toronto police have stated they had already been investigating Magnotta on allegations of animal cruelty for more than a year.

According to the landlord, they nearly found him.

“I think they were on to this guy,” said the superintendent as he stood in front of the apartment building in the city’s blue-collar Point St. Charles district. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

“To myself, I said, ‘I’m glad he’s out because the cops are looking for him now.’ “

The police phone call came roughly two months before Lin’s death in late May. Magnotta has been charged with first-degree murder in the grisly crime, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

His former landlord said he gave up his furnished, second-floor bachelor apartment at the end of February, about two months after moving in. It was an abrupt departure — he only advised the superintendent about a week before he packed up.

Magnotta indicated he was moving back to Toronto. His next known address was the alleged scene of the killing, was only a few kilometres away in west-end Montreal.

“The police called and I told them he left for Toronto,” said the landlord, who added the call came from an Ontario police force — he just couldn’t recall which one.

The Toronto police force confirmed it began investigating Magnotta in February 2011 for animal-abuse allegations. A spokeswoman for the service said it received a complaint about an online video from the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

But Const. Wendy Drummond declined to say how close they got to Magnotta, or even whether investigators were looking to question him.

“I can’t get into that because it is an ongoing case,” Drummond said. “An officer… had been actively pursuing the investigation, but no charges had ever been laid.”

The Ontario SPCA says it filed a complaint with Toronto police in early 2011 after an online video showing a man killing kittens was brought to their attention by animal-welfare groups and members of the public. Magnotta denied being the man in the videos.

Organization spokesman Brad Dewar said the Ontario SPCA has been working alongside Toronto police and the RCMP in an effort to locate the “person of interest” in the videos.

“Obviously, there were concerns for the cruelty and eventual death of the animals in that video,” said Dewar, adding three other online videos surfaced over the following year.

He declined to identify Magnotta as the suspect, citing privacy laws. He did say, however, the suspect was thought to have travelled between several locations in England, the U.S. and Canada, including Montreal.

This prompted the Ontario SPCA to also reach out to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Montreal police.

Magnotta’s former Point St. Charles landlord doesn’t remember seeing Lin around, and said he feels terrible for what happened to Lin. He plans to donate money to a charity created in the university student’s name.

“I want to give something because I feel it, I feel it for the kid. This is so painful,” he said of Lin. “It’s haunting me.”

— The Canadian Press