Luka Magnotta's prison paradise Killer says prison is
pizza parties, facials, and garden walks
MONTREAL — MONTREAL - Smoothies, suntanning, pizza parties, music, movies,
fitness, facials, and fantasies about sex with British royalty and Hollywood
hunks.
Hard time seems to suit murderer Luka Magnotta just fine -- at least according
to his jailhouse letters.
"Our doors are open 90% of the time so for me I feel like I'm in a university
setting," he wrote in one of many letters to a friend.
Magnotta is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years for
killing and hacking up Jun Lin, 33, in Montreal, then mailing his body parts
across the country.
These days he mails letters, lots of them.
"He is a prolific writer of letters to friends," explains a friend who's
received personal letters and letters Magnotta instructed to be put in a stamped
envelope and sent to others.
In his most recent correspondence to the friend, the 33-year-old killer writes
of working seven days in the prison kitchen and then relaxing with art, music,
sports and reading.
"I just bought Celine Dion's album and a lot of others. I have a stereo and a
portable for when I suntan outside."
Correctional Service of Canada would not comment on Magnotta specifically, but
said in an e-mail to the Sun that inmates are allowed certain amenities such as
TVs and stereos.
Federal inmates are also allowed to wear their own clothes, "provided they are
approved by the institutional head," a spokesman wrote.
Exclusive pictures from inside prison show a relaxed Magnotta dressed in casual
clothes, including a Versace shirt and stylish sunglasses, with ear buds,
surrounded by other inmates, including pedophile Jonathan Lafrance-Rivard.
The pictures also show the killer posing by his artwork and posters, including
one of Marilyn Monroe, on the walls of his cell, which looks more like a dorm
room.
Magnotta, who was born Eric Clint Kirk Newman, describes learning French and his
many other educational opportunities.
If Magnotta has done any reflection or feels any remorse for killing and carving
up Lin, he doesn't mention it in the handwritten letters the Sun obtained. Nor
does he offer an explanation for his heinous crimes.
In fact, he describes himself as mostly enjoying a blissful summer camp-like
experience behind bars at Archambault Institution, 40 minutes northwest of
Montreal. Sources say he was recently transferred from the medium-security
prison to the maximum-security Port-Cartier prison, which a friend says he likes
even more because it's bigger and has more amenities.
Aside from complaints about some guards and doctors -- and the chocolate
selection -- he seemed to enjoy his time at Archambault.
In fact, he ends his upbeat letters with farewell messages like: "Love Forever
your delicious Little Cupcake XOXOXOXO."
MONTREAL — Luka Magnotta sketches, paints, writes and reads, and is
"obsessed" with schoolgirl killer Karla Homolka, according to a friend.
The Canadian flag and a courthouse are on the right and three Quebec fleurs-delis
to the left. But in the centre of the piece of art is Magnotta depicted as blind
Lady Justice in a white sleeveless dress with a sword in one hand and scales in
the other.
A common theme in Luka Magnotta's drawings and paintings is ... Luka Magnotta.
His works are in demand among his friends and family and the locked-up killer
produces lots of them.
"When I go to painting class I'll try to make you another one but everyone is
pestering me to do one for them so it might take a while," Magnotta promises a
friend in a letter.
In another letter, Magnotta asks the friend to send art to his mom. "Tell her I
love her."
The works provide a stunning look into the mind of the notorious murderer, who
filmed himself killing and hacking up Chinese student Jun Lin, 33.
His trial heard of past diagnoses of schizophrenia, borderline personality
disorder and narcissism, but it's not something he likes to talk about.
He tells friends he isn't a "sick" person and gets quite hurt when people
suggest otherwise.
Yet he regularly mentions Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in phone
conversations.
"He is obsessed with her and has said he is hopeful she will visit him in
prison," the friend said. "I told him that is not going to happen."
Contrary to what was reported in the media, Magnotta is adamant in his letters
he was never put on suicide watch.
A picture of Magnotta's cell at Archambault Institution outside Montreal shows
him posing next to paintings and drawings with slogans such as "Unbreakable,"
"Still the One," "Let them eat cake," "Your opinion means absolutely nothing to
me," "Diamonds are my best friend" and "I am not afraid."
The defiance expressed in some of the pieces doesn't surprise Magnotta's pal.
"He's very mistrustful," the friend said. "He's very paranoid about being taped
or listened to."
In addition to Magnotta's bizarre commentary on justice, the Sun was provided a
second drawing, called Three Brothers, which shows three men, all with the same
face, walking together along a path carrying buckets. Another piece shows
Magnotta as a boy with his grandfather near a lake.
Christie Blatchford: Luka
Magnotta video of killing and dismemberment of Lin Jun ghastly beyond
description
MONTREAL — As his notorious 1 Lunatic 1
Icepick video was played Thursday for the jurors at his murder trial, Luka
Magnotta himself, bent over low from the waist, his gaze studiously averted from
courtroom screens, all but disappeared from sight in the prisoner’s box.
Ten minutes and 22 seconds later, with the video finished and Quebec Superior
Court Justice Guy Cournoyer calling for an immediate recess, Magnotta got slowly
to his feet for the departure of the jury, as courtroom etiquette here dictates.
As the last of the jurors filed past him en route to their jury room, he
delicately touched a finger to his left eye, as if wiping away tears.
It was enraging if entirely typical: Many of those charged with such crimes
refuse to look at their handiwork, the inferences hanging in the air that, what,
they are filled with regret? Shame? Sorrow?
My own view is that the old retail maxim, “If you break it, you buy it,” should
also apply to accused criminals, in particular to Magnotta, who after all has
admitted killing and dismembering the shy Chinese student Lin Jun.
He broke Lin, in other words.
The least he could have done is squarely face what he did; if you break it, you
must own it.
Luc Leclair, Magnotta’s lawyer, told the jurors at the start of the trial that
his client admits the “physical part” of the five offences with which he is
charged. Those charges include first-degree murder, indignity to a human body,
the making and posting online of 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick (the video was known by
several names but this is the most infamous) and the mailing about of Lin’s
hands and feet.
But Leclair said Magnotta should be found not criminally responsible because of
the severe mental illness he purportedly suffers: Thus his not guilty plea.
The 32-year-old’s mental state at and around the time of the May 25, 2012,
homicide is the only real issue for the jurors.
The video is ghastly beyond description, and for that I am grateful.
As someone smarter than me said, it was as though Magnotta was randomly picking
through a big box of all the perverse and repellent things he could think of to
do to a human body — so there was a lot of methodical stabbing to the chest; now
some cutting on the abdomen, once in a sort of tick-tack-toe pattern; here and
there some faux-humping of the corpse.
It is mercifully unclear if the actual homicide was captured on the video,
though several times Magnotta had the camera linger at the gaping wound to Lin’s
throat and later, after he decapitated him, on his severed head.
Also mercifully, the jurors learned last week from forensic pathologist Dr. Yann
Daze that all but one of Lin’s litany of wounds — the exception the slashing of
his throat, which was likely the cause of death — were inflicted after death.
If this knowledge didn’t diminish the macabre nature of what was done to the
body of the 33-year-old Lin, it was of considerable comfort to remember that he
was alive for virtually none of it.
Throughout the video, shot at Magnotta’s grimy studio apartment, he appeared to
take considerable care that his own face was never visible. He was always
wearing hoodies — one black or dark blue, and one purple.
The dismemberment was done to music, and this either was playing at the time or
Magnotta later added a soundtrack — True Faith, by the ‘80s British band New
Order.
Equally disturbing was what Magnotta did on camera to a live human being.
The video began with a gloved Magnotta straddling the naked motionless body of a
man tied with rope to a bed, above which was Magnotta’s Casablanca poster.
The man was blindfolded; he appeared dead or unconscious.
But then he suddenly lifted his head, and a leg, and was clearly trying to move,
was struggling. The next shot was of Magnotta stabbing a body.
At the time 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick hit the web — and Magnotta appears to
have posted it to three different “gore” sites — the widespread assumption was
this first man was also Lin.
It was only here at trial that for the first time in public prosecutor Louis
Bouthillier revealed that the man was someone else, a still-unidentified
stranger who appears to have served as Magnotta’s dress rehearsal.
Jurors have seen surveillance video of this man entering Magnotta’s apartment
building on May 18, but unlike Lin, he left alive the next day, albeit in a
noticeably dazed condition.
As Magnotta’s attack on Lin’s body wore on, it was almost as though he was
running out of party tricks, and turned to the most bizarre in his repertoire.
It was at this point that he put a black and white puppy — the jurors have
heard, from a man who several times hired Magnotta as an escort in Montreal,
that once he brought along a young puppy of this description — at Lin’s severed
torso.
The puppy was found, dead, in the dozens of bags of garbage Magnotta put out for
collection, some holding Lin’s severed legs and arms.
Magnotta then went at Lin’s buttocks with a knife and fork.
The final shots showed one of Lin’s arms in Magnotta’s freezer, his head on the
floor, and Magnotta lying naked on the bed, with a severed arm, still with its
hand, faux-masturbating: He had finally run out of gas.
It is instructive, about the nature of man and beast, to remember that the puppy
was placed in position before its own death, while the only thing that may have
put Magnotta there, at the wheel of his own freak show, was an alleged mental
illness.
