Identity of 'Body Parts Murder' Victim Revealed as Manhunt for Porn Star Suspect Moves to France
A 33-year-old Chinese man has been identified as the victim of the brutal "body parts" slaying that took place in Montreal last week.
Lin Jun of Wuhan, Hubei, was reportedly a Concordia University student at the time of his murder. A Montreal Police spokesman said Lin and prime suspect Luka Rocco Magnotta were "engaged in sort of a relation," but would not elaborate.
Lin's family says it lost contact with him on May 24th — one day before his torso was found in a suitcase outside Magnotta's apartment building in the city's Snowdon district. Officials believe Magnotta fled that very same day to France, where a fugitive search is currently being conducted according to local law-enforcement sources.
"There is no country in the world that is not talking about him," Montreal police Cmdr. Ian Lafrenière is quoted as saying. "There's a lot of heat on him. There's a lot of pressure on him, so we believe that it's going to be hard for him."
Meanwhile, disturbing new information continues to surface about the alleged killer.
An online trail dating back several years paint Magnotta — a self-proclaimed gay porn star who was born Eric Newman in Scarborough, Ontario — as a sadistic scofflaw with a penchant for recording his disturbing exploits.
Indeed a video purporting to be of Lin's torture and dismemberment surfaced online last week on the website Best Gore, but has since been removed. It allegedly depicts a man performing sex acts on a mutilated corpse as well as consuming parts of it and letting a dog feast on the rest.
Magnotta has long been accused of abusing animals for fun and posting footage of the cruelty. UK's Sun claimed today that it warned Scotland Yard about Magnotta months ago after the 29-year-old allegedly wrote the tabloid an email saying he'll "be back — and this time the victims won't be animals."
Elsewhere online Magnotta claimed to be bi-polar and said he had spent time in a mental institution after he "started hearing voices."
He was linked romantically to notorious serial killer Karla Homolka, a claim he has repeatedly denied. The Homolka-Magnotta connection was initially confirmed by police, but officials have since reversed course, saying they had no proof the rumors were true.
Magnotta was also apparently mentioned on the white supremacist website Stormfront.org last year. A post published on May 27th, 2011, referred to Magnotta as "an open white supremacist," and said he had been driven out of a Canada due to "his views on white supremacy."
Being forced to flee is something of a running theme for Magnotta, who, in 2009, penned a post for Digital Journal entitled "How to Completely Disappear and Never Be Found."
