Police allege Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, a man with a controversial past, is behind the grisly crime. He is also known by the names Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov.
Late Wednesday night, media reports indicated a letter was attached to the severed foot delivered to the Conservatives' headquarters. The note said four more body parts had been mailed out. Both police and postal officials are said to be working now to track down these grotesque parcels.
The letter also stated the killer would strike again.
Magnotta is not known to the police, but the name is well-circulated on the Internet as belonging to a bisexual model and porn star, allegedly appearing in kitten killing videos posted online.
Magnotta was rumoured to have romantic ties to Karla Homolka, the ex-wife of school girl killer Paul Bernardo. He denied the allegation in a 2007 interview with the Toronto Sun.
The discovery of the macabre crime, which may have been videotaped and posted online, began Tuesday when a suitcase containing a male torso was found outside a Montreal apartment building.
Meanwhile in Ottawa, employees at the Conservative party headquarters just blocks away from Parliament Hill received a blood-splattered package containing a severed foot.
Authorities later intercepted a second package, addressed to the Liberal party, containing a severed hand at a Canada Post distribution centre.
Police found another hand and foot in the Montreal apartment, but warned more body parts could still be delivered.
“There are pieces of the body that are missing. Some body parts were sent by mail, one to the Conservative party headquarters, these are all pieces of evidence to us,” said SPVM (Montreal Police) spokesman Ian Lafreniere in French. “There were other body parts sent by mail and the police are still investigating.”
Police are not releasing the name of the victim, a white man, as body parts are still at large.
Montreal police spent the night and part of Wednesday morning searching an apartment near where the torso was found, a crime scene Lafreniere called “difficult.”
Inside the apartment were a blood-stained mattress, bloodied bed sheets and spots of blood on the carpet.
Richard Payette lives across the hall from the suspect’s apartment and said he woke up to detectives and a pungent odour.
“I never smelled dead body (before), but I’ve smelled bad meat,” Payette said. “If I go by my sense of smell, it certainly wasn’t just hamburgers.”
Payette said he did not know Magnotta well, but described him as a quiet, Caucasian man, who spoke English and often wore a black wig. The last time Payette saw the man was about three days ago.
The man who discovered the torso-laden luggage told Global News it had been laying out for nearly a week when he decided to open it.
“Every time I passed by it smelled very bad and there were flies around it. I took a closer look and there were maggots coming out, worms coming out,” said Mike Nadeau.
Nadeau and another neighbour decided to cut the lock and see what the suitcase contained.
Magnotta has also been the subject of an international social media campaign for allegedly killing kittens, videotaping their deaths and posting the videos online.
Luka Rocco Magnotta spent the past five years furiously denying Internet rumours that peg him as a kitten torturer with romantic ties to sex killer Karla Homolka.
Those accusations pale to the ones being made now.
Magnotta, a 29-year-old self-described porn star,
is wanted in connection with the gruesome discovery of severed human body parts in Montreal and Ottawa this week. A Canada-wide manhunt is on after Montreal police named him as the key suspect Wednesday.
A shocking 10-minute video posted online Friday appears to show the murder, beheading and dismemberment of a young Asian man in an apartment. Police sources said the video — which is part of the ongoing investigation — appears to be authentic.
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Luka Rocco Magnotta’s Internet trail is long, but it’s hard to know what’s real. Even his name isn’t the one he was born with: He was Eric Clinton Kirk Newman until he legally changed his identity on Aug. 12, 2006.
The slender 29-year-old Canadian has gone by other names, too, such as Vladimir Romanov and Mattia Del Santo, in his life on the Web, as a model and as a bisexual adult-film performer.On the Internet, he billed himself as a star, as someone who was famous enough to date celebrities and even serial killers, such as Karla Homolka.
Most recently – until he was named on Wednesday as the prime suspect in a gruesome murder in Montreal – he was best known as the alleged “Vacuum Kitten Killer,” dubbed so by a Facebook group started in December, 2010, to track down the man responsible for posting a kittens-killing video on YouTube.
“We spent 18 months warning the police … and what did they do?” group member Rob Lynn, who lives in England, wrote online shortly after Montreal police revealed Mr. Magnotta was wanted in connection with the slaying of a man, whose body was severed and a part of it, a foot, mailed to Conservative Party headquarters. A hand, meanwhile, was destined for Liberal Party offices.
Family members in Ontario declined to comment Wednesday on the allegations against Magnotta. An aunt would only say, “I’m ashamed that he’s related.”
Property records indicate a relative lives in a brick, two-storey house in Peterborough, Ont. People inside the home Wednesday evening called police after reporters knocked on the door persistently.
“She’s intimidated, afraid, it’s all news to her today, too – all these things unfolding,” said Peterborough police office Dan MacLean, who arrived on the scene to ask reporters to stay off the property.
He said his police force is playing a peripheral role in the wider investigation, only checking out a couple of addresses in the area northeast of Toronto.
Magnotta grew up in Toronto, but appears to have lived in Los Angeles at some point, according to a Facebook page set up in his name. His Internet fame seems to be self-created.
“Luka Magntta [sic] is a Canadian male model who has become world famous through his photographs and television appearances,” states a posting on the page, which includes a list of his interests: travel, restaurants, culture and “surrounding myself with good people.”
A Toronto Sun reporter interviewed Mr. Magnotta in September, 2007, in Toronto. A rumour that he’d dated school-girl killer Karla Homolka had been circulating online.
“I want to set the record straight,” Mr. Magnotta said in the interview, appearing groggy and shaking as he spoke. “I not only have never dated Karla, I have never even met her.”
He insisted it was a smear campaign against him, but the animal-rights Facebook group formed to catch the “Vacuum Kitten Killer” claims this and other falsehoods were started and spread by Mr. Magnotta.
“He posts across the Internet, in iNews, blogs and forums in an effort to increase his fame,” the Facebook group wrote in a report detailing its sleuthing into Magnotta’s Web presence. “He tries to link himself to celebrities by commenting on articles featuring them, saying, ‘She is dating Luka Magnotta, just so you know.’ ”
His favourite celebrities included Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and James Dean, his idol. Mr. Magnotta has claimed to have undergone cosmetic surgery to look more like the iconic American 1950s film actor.
Of late, Magnotta seemed to be fixated on the Russian mafia. Images of the Russian mob and videos of people being killed in Russia were posted on his many Facebook accounts, according to the animal-rights group.
In a short biography accompanying his shirtless picture in the Toronto-based gay lifestyle magazine fab, Mr. Magnotta (who went by the name Jimmy) said he was born in Russia and hoped to become a police officer one day.
“I don’t want to do traffic tickets,” the write-up stated. “I am thinking vice or homicide.”
Over the years, Magnotta has claimed to live in numerous cities: Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego and Moscow. In a June, 2009, blog posted under the name Rocco Magnotta and titled, “How to completely disappear and never be found,” he apparently wrote that he was tired of “the constant harassment” and was leaving the country for good.
In an interview with Magnotta published on NowPublic in August, 2010, the man said he began in the adult-film industry when he was 20 years old, performing in webcam shows in Los Angeles. He said he had appeared in more than a dozen movies and many magazines under different stage names.
He noted that he knew his modelling and adult-film days were nearing an end, and said he was thinking of pursuing criminal law or psychology afterwards.
“You have to realize that after age 30, your career is basically over,” he reportedly said. “Time is the biggest enemy.”
and So goes the story of this publicity seeker that failing to get famous enough by killing animals and torturing them graduated to killing and dismembering a human being. Isn’t that the way all homicidal maniacs start from? killing the squirrel and up their killing chain. adamfoxie*
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