Jun Lin, also known as Justin, was born in Wuhan, China, on December 30, 1978. His parents were Diran and Du Lin, and they kept a private life. They later had a daughter named “Mei Mei”.
From early on, Jun Lin’s family recalled his dream of moving to Canada. He wanted it so much that he took French lessons in China. This helped his chances of getting approved for immigration to Canada.
In 2010, he moved to Canada and enrolled at Concordia University in Montreal to study computer engineering. He worked part-time at a convenience store to support himself. Friends described Jun as quiet, respectful, and focused.
Jun was gay but had not shared this information with his family back in China. He had also been married to a woman before, but that ended before he left the mainland. In Canada, he lived openly as a gay man.
Still, his family pushed him to consider marrying again someday. After a recent breakup, Jun began to use dating apps to meet men. In one encounter, Jun met a man with many names.
Some called him ‘Jimmy’. Others knew him as ‘Angel’. His online profile was ‘Vladimir Romanov.’ His official name was Luka Rocco Magnotta.
Meeting Luka Magnotta
Luka had built a false image online over the years. He was born as Eric Clinton Kirk Newman from Scarborough, Ontario, on July 24, 1982.
His mother was Anna Yourkin, and his father was Donald Newman. He also had three siblings.
Luka’s parents divorced when he was about 10. They had a chaotic dynamic, as Donald had schizophrenia. His mother was also abusive. Luka would later state that his mother once locked him out of the house and left their pet rabbits outside to freeze.
After the divorce, Luka’s grandmother raised him. In early adulthood, Luka faced mental illness and money problems. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia, and he began to receive disability payments to help with income.
Luka then quit high school, before finishing grade 11, and tried to work as a model and actor. He did get work as an escort, stripper, and porn actor. In 2007, he tried out for the Canadian modelling show ‘COVER-guy’ and got plastic surgery. A year later, he auditioned for ‘Plastic Makes Perfect’. He craved fame, but his work mostly went ignored.
Luka built a new identity over time. He used fake names and made dozens of fake social media profiles. These accounts praised him and spread the kinds of rumours he wanted to be true. He even faked a story about dating the killer Karla Homolka, which the police proved to be false.
In 2005, a court charged and convicted Luka of fraud. He had tricked a woman with mental challenges into getting credit cards from retailers. These, he used for himself. Luka continued to post wild claims and rumours about himself on social media and forums.
Luka also wrote to newspapers complaining about fake stories written about him. These came from pseudo-social media accounts he himself had created. This made it seem as if the media were tormenting him. He created his own fame alone.
Luka also had a morbid penchant for posting absurd videos, showing animal cruelty.
In one video, he uploaded a video called ‘1 boy 2 kittens,’ where he suffocated them. In another, a python eating a live cat. People online paid attention to this, and amateur investigators tried to stop him.
They feared that he would start harming people next.
Torture, Gore, and Murder
In 2012, Luka posted an ad on Craigslist. He was seeking a partner for sex and bondage, and Jun Lin replied with interest. The two men met on May 24, and the security video showed them entering the building where Luka lived.
In the surveillance video, Luka held the door open, and Jun Lin walked through the glass doors shortly after 10:20 p.m. on May 24. He then stepped off camera.
Around midnight, Jun’s ex-boyfriend Feng Lin got a “goodnight” text from Jun. This would be Lin’s last text. Police officials would later say they believe that Luka gave Jun wine with sedatives sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. When the sedatives started to work, Luka tied Jun to the bed.
In the early hours of May 25, cameras caught Luka carrying a suitcase and a garbage bag. He made 16 trips to the basement garbage room. At 2:06 a.m. on May 25, the surveillance video shows Luka now wearing Jun’s yellow shirt, which Jun Lin had been wearing just hours before.
When Jun did not report to work later on that day, his boss grew worried. Kankan Huang, Jun Lin’s employer, knew something was wrong when his only worker missed his shift.
After Jun failed to report for work on May 25, his friends checked on him but found no sign of him. Days went by. On May 29, the police had officially listed him as missing. By then, an 11-minute video was quickly garnering views on the dark corners of the web. It was uploaded anonymously to ‘BestGore.com’. The title read ‘One Lunatic, One Ice Pick’.
The video started with the 1987 New Order song ‘True Faith’. A nude man, who was Jun Lin, lay spread out on a bed. He was tied and blindfolded. A Casablanca movie poster hung above his head. Luka Magnotta stood beside him in dark clothing.
The video then faded out. It returned to show Luka straddling Jun Lin. Luka temporarily gets up, and the bound Jun Lin moves about a little. The video cuts again. When it started again, it showed Luka gripping an ice pick and stabbing Jun Lin several times.
The video showed him cutting off Jun Lin’s head as well as his arms. Luka played with the head for a while and acted out sex with the torso. After that, he used Lin’s dismembered hand to masturbate. Luka then used a fork and knife to slice into Jun Lin’s flesh and eat it. Luka also let his puppy gnaw on Jun Lin’s body.
Hours after posting the video on ‘BestGore.com’, Magnotta booked a round-trip flight from Montreal to Paris. The site, which has since been taken down, often showed gruesome content like accident videos, surgeries, and body cuts.
Viewers who watched ‘One Lunatic, One Ice Pick’ began messaging the police about Magnotta’s crime. These reports were ignored, as the police assumed it was a fake video. Over the next few days, a bad smell began to seep out of an apartment at Montreal’s 5720 Decarie Boulevard. Frightened tenants called the superintendent and janitor.
On May 29 in Montreal, janitor Mike Nadeau finally decided to check a suitcase that had sat for days in a garbage patch behind the building. When he opened it, he spotted a man’s torso inside and immediately contacted the police.
The Investigation
Montreal police’s major crimes unit would find dismembered human limbs, a dead puppy, bloody clothes, a hammer, knives, a small circular saw, electronics, and an ID with the name ‘Luka Magnotta’ in the suitcase.
The officers also watched the footage from the building’s surveillance cameras. They saw a male figure going in and out of Luka’s apartment repeatedly during the early morning hours of May 25. The figure then called a cab and left his apartment on the night of May 26.
Luka’s old landlord expressed his shock at what the police found in his apartment. He called Luka Magnotta an “ordinary Joe Blow” who rented a unit for $550 a month. The landlord noted that Mr Magnotta “stayed quiet and spoke with an Eastern European accent.”
The landlord said Luka left his furnished second-floor bachelor apartment at the end of February, though he had moved in about two months before. He gave the superintendent just a week’s notice before packing up and leaving.
Building superintendent Eric Schorer remembered almost vomiting from the smell when he first opened the door to Luka’s apartment after he left. “I almost heaved,” Mr Schorer exclaimed, “It was the smell of death.”
It appeared that Luka sent care packages of Jun Lin’s remains to different destinations. On May 29, a package arrived at the Conservative Party of Canada headquarters. It held a severed human foot.
Another package was sent to the Liberal Party. It contained a hand. Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said staff opened the bloodstained box, and a foul odour immediately escaped. “It was such a horrible odour, I’m sure many of us will not forget it.” Police were called at once, and when they opened the rest of the package, they found a human foot inside.
Luka Magnotta fled Canada hours after murdering Jun Lin. The killer left the twisted poem “Roses are red. Violets are blue. The police will need dental records to identify you” with one of the packages containing some part of Lin’s remains.
On May 31, 2012, Interpol issued a red notice concerning Luka Magnotta, with his name and photo on their homepage.
Luka immediately became one of the world’s most wanted men, and French police tracked his phone to a hotel in Bagnolet. When they raided the place, Luka had already left, and all the officers found were adult magazines, a bath bag, and a fake passport with the name Kirk Trammell.
On June 4th, Luka had taken a bus to Berlin, Germany, and entered an internet cafe. One of the attendants recognised him and quietly notified the German police, who arrived and arrested Luka minutes later.
At first, Luka gave fake names, but soon admitted his real name. His fingerprints matched as well. He did not fight extradition. On June 18, Canadian officials flew to Germany and took Luka back to Montreal on a military plane. Upon arriving in Canada, Luka was temporarily confined at the Rivière-des-Prairies detention centre.
Two days later, Jun Lin’s family flew from China to Montreal. Concordia University’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association also established a fund to cover the family’s costs. Jun Lin was cremated on July 11, 2012, and his ashes were interred at Montreal’s Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.
Trial and Justice for Jun Lin
In 2014, the trial of Luka Magnotta started. It would last 12 weeks and have 66 witnesses across three countries. Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, also known as Luka Rocco Magnotta, faced five charges, including the mailing of obscene items and first-degree murder. Luka admitted to the killing of Jun Lin but pleaded not guilty on the grounds of mental illness.
His lawyer, Luke LeClaire, claimed that his client’s actions were influenced by ‘Manny’- a violent character Luka supposedly met in 2010 when he worked as an escort in New York.
Manny came often and liked violent sex involving BDSM and torture fantasies. His demands would sometimes push Luka into a psychotic state.
Luka could not provide any details, such as address or phone records, related to Manny. This helped the jury to conclude that Manny was a fictitious character. The defence also called Luka’s father as a witness.
Donald Newman stressed his son’s isolated and troubled childhood, intimating that his own paranoid schizophrenia may have adversely impacted his son.
Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournois told the jury of eight women and four men, “He admits to the acts … your job is to decide whether he understood what he was doing when he committed them.” Prosecutors asserted that Luka knew precisely what he was doing when he killed Jun Lin.
They countered LeClaire’s claims by revealing that six months before murdering Jun Lin, Luka e-mailed a British journalist promising that he intended to kill a human being and record it on film. Crown prosecutor Louis Bouthillier proclaimed, “We have good evidence of premeditation and that the crime was planned and deliberate.”
The trial lasted 10 more weeks, and the victim’s father, Diran Lin, came from China to follow the proceedings. Jun Lin’s ex-partner, Feng Lin, testified that he and Lin dated from late 2010 to mid-May 2012. Feng, a manager in a software company, also revealed that their breakup came due to pressure from Lin’s family to marry and settle down.
Feng Lin referred to Jun Lin, 33, “a fitness fan who did not smoke, drink, or do drugs.” Feng Lin, speaking through a Mandarin translator, maintained that neither he nor Jun Lin was interested in ‘bondage play’.
Jun Lin’s father issued the following impact statement: “The night Lin Jun died, parts of many other people died in one way or another…we do not want to tell our story because it is too sad to repeat. We cannot talk about Lin Jun without talking about his murder. The murder that robbed us not only of Lin Jun but our ability to think about him without feeling pain and shame…”
On December 15, 2014, the jury began deliberations, and eight days later, they gave a full guilty verdict on all charges. Luka Magnotta received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. He also got 19 years on the other counts to be served concurrently.
Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer praised the jury. He said the case “was by all standards unique” and noted that the jury “rose to the occasion and proved that real and substantive justice is a reality.” Luka Magnotta later tried to appeal the sentence but abandoned it less than two months later.
In 2013, Mark Marek, who ran the now-defunct ‘BestGore.com’, which had hosted the ‘1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick’ video, was charged with ‘corrupting public morals’. He was sentenced to three months of house arrest and community service.
Luka Rocco Magnotta is currently serving his life sentence at Port-Cartier prison in Quebec. Jun Lin’s family has opted to maintain its privacy after his murder and the sentencing of Luka Magnotta.
