The murder of Jun Lin
It started online with videos of cats. It ended with a snuff film and dismembered body parts mailed to schools and the offices of local political parties.
Luka Magnotta is one of those criminals whose story played out across the internet. From the videos he posted to the community of amateur sleuths who tracked him down and the documentary on his crimes, Don’t F**k with Cats, that inspired endless commentary and discussion across social media. There were even internet rumours that he had dated killer Karla Homolka (rumours he started himself). Perhaps fittingly, it was while reading stories about himself in an internet café that Magnotta was finally caught.
His crimes are well known and well documented. So how did the man, born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, go from cat killer to cannibal, inspiring internet infamy?
1. His background
Like many future killers, Magnotta’s upbringing wasn’t an easy one. His father suffered from schizophrenia and his mother was a germaphobe who would make Magnotta scrub his hands raw when washing. He himself spent time in mental hospitals and in 2002, was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He dropped out of high school and attempted to find a career as a model and actor, while working as an escort, stripper, and porn actor. In 2007, he auditioned for the Canadian modelling reality show COVERguy. Then he had plastic surgery and a year later, auditioned for another show: Plastic Makes Perfect. By all accounts, he was desperate for fame.
2. The cat videos
Magnotta first attracted online attention when he started posting videos of cats—and not the cute, funny kind. In 2010, a series of videos were posted online in which Magnotta suffocated and drowned kittens.
These weren’t his first crimes. He had already been convicted of fraud in 2004, after racking up $17,000 on a friend’s credit card, and in 2005, he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman.
3. The backlash
The videos inspired internet outrage and soon, a community of amateur sleuths, via Facebook, were working together to try to find the man behind the videos. A tip led them to Luka Magnotta, a man who had inspired countless fan sites (fan sites he had created, as it would later turn out). They even located Magnotta’s apartment complex in Toronto, thanks to GPS data and Google Maps.
In the meantime, Magnotta posted another video: one in which he fed a cat to a snake. He started hinting he might graduate to humans.
4. Jun Lin
Jun Lin was a 33-year-old student who had moved to Canada in 2010. He was studying computer science and engineering at Concordia University. Online, he’d post pictures of his cat and talk about feeling lonely — he had only been in Canada for a couple of years and was older than most of his classmates. A fellow student told The Globe and Mail he was ‘looking for love’.
Lin was gay, but an ex of his, Feng Lin, reported at Magnotta’s trial that he felt pressure from his family to marry a woman. The two had broken up in the months leading up to his death.
5. The Craigslist ad
In 2012, Magnotta had put an ad on Craigslist looking for sex and bondage. Lin responded and they met on 24th May. Security footage captured them entering Magnotta’s building that evening. That night, Lin sent a text to his ex at the time he would have been waking up to say good morning. It was the last text that Lin ever sent.
6. The snuff video
A day after the two met, Magnotta posted another video. This one was called ‘1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick’. The video captured the savage murder of Jun Lin. In it, Magnotta stabbed Lin, who was tied up, with an ice pick, before performing necrophiliac acts and dismembering the body.
Viewers reported seeing acts of cannibalism. A dog also appeared in the video. Hours later, Magnotta booked a round-trip ticket for a flight from Montreal to Paris.
7. Discovery of the crime
By May, viewers of the video were attempting to report the crime to police, but their reports were largely dismissed as authorities believed the video was fake. By then, Magnotta had already started disposing of the body. CCTV captured him throwing bags into the bin while wearing Lin’s t-shirt.
On 29th May in Montreal, Mike Nadeau, who worked as a janitor, found a suitcase that had been sitting outside for days. He’d ignored it before, but now, the suitcase was emitting a foul smell. When he opened it, he found a man’s torso inside.
In Ottawa, a parcel was delivered to a Conservative party’s office. It was soaked with blood. Inside, there was a human foot.
Later, in a postal sorting office in Ottawa, a package addressed to the Liberal party's headquarters was found. It contained a hand. Other body parts were sent to elementary schools.
8. The arrest
Police believed Magnotta had travelled to Europe. He’d even written blog posts detailing how he might disappear. In practice, he went clubbing, continued to use his mobile phone, and hooked up with other men.
Once CCTV caught him in Germany, authorities were able to arrest him in an internet café in Berlin on 4th June, where he was sitting reading stories about himself.
9. The conviction
In 2014, a jury found Magnotta guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and the maximum length sentences for the other crimes he was charged with, including publishing obscene materials, committing an indignity on a body, and criminally harassing the prime minister. He filed an appeal, but later dropped it.
He remains in a maximum-security prison in Quebec.
10. The other conviction
It wasn’t just the perpetrator of these sadistic crimes who found himself in court. A Canadian web entrepreneur named Mark Marek also wound up with a conviction in connection with the infamous ‘1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick’ video.
Marek ran the now-defunct website BestGore.com, which more than lived up to its name by offering visitors a cornucopia of gruesome and shocking content, including graphic accident footage and videos of surgeries and mutilations. His decision to host the snuff video depicting the murder and dismemberment of Jun Lin put Marek squarely on the radar of detectives, and in 2013 he was charged with ‘corrupting morals'.
It was a charge not often seen in the Canadian legal system. In fact, one of the cops working on the case told the press how the prosecutors ‘hadn’t heard of that charge’ and this was very probably ‘the first time that it’s ever been laid in Edmonton’.
Marek eventually decided to plead guilty, while continuing to portray himself as a free speech martyr and even posed outside the courtroom with duct tape over his mouth. Although he could technically have wound up with a two-year jail term, he got away relatively lightly with three months of house arrest plus community service.
11. The unusual inspirations
An incorrigible fantasist, Magnotta created numerous online aliases to big up his reputation and ‘fame’. This extended to spreading completely untrue rumours that he was related to the iconic actor River Phoenix and that he’d been romantically involved with the notorious serial killer Karla Homolka.
But arguably his most outlandish and significant claim was that he’d only perpetrated his twisted crimes because he’d been coerced by a certain Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Lopez. According to Magnotta, this mysterious figure was a former sex client who’d exerted a nefarious influence on his life, and threatened to kill Magnotta if he didn’t film himself killing animals and, eventually, Jun Lin.
As well as selling the videos on the dark web for a fortune, Manny had allegedly been beating and threatening Magnotta into doing his bidding for years. There was just one problem with Magnotta’s account – Manny didn’t exist.
Investigators have found no evidence of a dark puppet master figure in Magnotta’s life. Instead, Manny seems to be nothing more than a homage to the 90s erotic thriller Basic Instinct. In the film, a never-seen character named Manny Vasquez is the ex-fiancé of femme fatale Catherine Tramell, whose surname Magnotta adopted as one of his many aliases (Kirk Tramell).
Even more disturbingly, the murder of Jun Lin – where Lin was restrained, straddled and stabbed by Magnotta – seems to have been directly inspired by a near-identical killing from Basic Instinct. Magnotta even went as far as painting his weapon, a screwdriver, entirely silver, presumably to resemble the ice pick wielded in the film.
12. The mother’s belief
One person who has previously backed Magnotta’s yarn about his spectral controller is his mother, Anna Yourkin. In an interview with tabloid news organisation TMZ in 2020, she reiterated her belief that a third hand, glimpsed in one of the cat-killing videos, belonged to the mysterious Manny.
‘There's a third hand you can see,’ she emphasised. ‘So, there's my son's two hands and there's a third hand. So, you can’t see a face, so it’s unidentifiable, but Manny was there. My son had phoned me and told me. So, I'm assuming that that hand is Manny Lopez's hand.’
Yourkin, who has published a memoir called My Son, The Killer, has said she’s ‘come to terms with the fact’ that he was ‘convicted of first-degree murder’, but has also maintained that he is ‘a wonderful human being’.
13. The other person
If Manny wasn’t the owner of the hand seen in the cat-killing video, who was? It’s a question that has pervaded online forums ever since the case came to public attention, and the explanation seems to relate to the other animal in the video: a large python.
According to John Green, one of the Magnotta-seeking sleuths featured in the Don’t F**k with Cats documentary, the other person glimpsed in the video was one of Magnotta’s neighbours, who’d come over to admire the python but wasn’t present when Magnotta fed the cat to the snake.
Other online commentators have offered the alternative theory that Magnotta may have openly solicited a python owner through a site like Craigslist, offering to provide it with food in the form of a cat. The truth will perhaps never be known for sure.
14. The wedding behind bars
Magnotta seems to have been having a pretty relaxed time in prison, telling one writer that he spends his days playing video games, doing art classes, and exercising. What’s more, he’s tied the knot with another prisoner – a convicted killer named Anthony Jolin.
A habitual criminal, Jolin was doing time for robbery when he stabbed another inmate to death in a shower back in 2003. He and Magnotta met through a prison penpal network and married in 2017.
