What did luka magnotta do to cats

The Netflix documentary Don’t F*** With Cats explores the harrowing story of Luka Magnotta, a murderer convicted of the brutal killing of a Chinese student in Canada.

Prior to the grisly murder, Magnotta gained online notoriety after posting a series of videos which featured him torturing and killing cats.

These acts of animal cruelty brought him to the attention of a group of cat-loving activists on Facebook, whose armchair sleuthing – and the role it eventually played in tracking him down – provides the basis for the Netflix series.

Here’s what you need to know about Magnotta, and how he was finally brought to justice.

Find The Kitten Vacuumer

Magnotta was born Eric Newman on 24 July 1982 in Ontario, Canada, and became a stripper escort, as well as appearing in pornographic videos, in his early 20s.

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He changed his name to Luka Rocco Magnotta in 2006, a year after being convicted of fraud and impersonation over a credit card scam.

In 2010, he posted a series of videos to YouTube involving acts of extreme animal cruelty against cats, including one clip titled “1 Boy 2 Kittens” in which he suffocated two animals with a vacuum cleaner.

This video prompted widespread revulsion online, and led to the creation of the Find The Kitten Vacuumer Facebook group, which attracted a significant following.

The online community included Deanna Thompson and John Green, who are featured prominently as talking heads in Don’t F*** With Cats.

In January 2011, Magnotta was identified as the source of the cat videos by Facebook users, and animal rights groups offered a reward of $5,000 to apprehend him – Toronto police began to investigate him shortly after.

As the notoriety around the cat torture videos developed, Magnotta deliberately left breadcrumbs for the online detectives seeking to bring him to justice, leading them down dead ends with fake Facebook accounts.

A further clip featured a cat being fed to a python alive, which led to him being confronted by a journalist from The Sun in London. The newspaper reported that it then warned the Met Police over Magnotta, but were informed that it was outside its jurisdiction.

The Sun also printed an email allegedly written by him, which warned: “I’ll be back — and this time the victims won’t be animals.”

The murder of Lin Jun

On 29 May 2012, police received reports that Lin Jun, a Chinese international student at Montreal’s Concordia University, had gone missing – he had last been seen on 24 May.

A graphic 11-minute video titled “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” was uploaded to a controversial website specialising in violent content on 25 May. It depicted a naked man being stabbed to death and dismembered, before being subject to acts of necrophilia.

At the same time that police found out Lin was missing, various body parts were sent in packages to political parties in Canada. A left foot was sent to the Conservative Party’s headquarters, while a left hand was intercepted en-route to the Liberal Party.

A decomposing torso was then discovered inside a suitcase left in an alleyway behind an apartment block in Montreal, with a police search of the area unearthing human remains, bloody clothes and ID papers. The torso matched the dismembered body parts, and the victim was identified as Lin.

Magnotta had been renting in the block for four months, and a search of his abandoned apartment revealed blood on several items, sparking a nationwide manhunt – with the online community of animal rights sleuths handing police their dossier of information.

Police discovered that the suspect had fled to France immediately after the murder, and he was added to Interpol’s most wanted list.

He was eventually discovered in an internet cafe in Berlin on 4 June, where he was reading online news stories about himself, and was arrested by German police before being extradited to Canada on 18 June.

Charged with first-degree murder and various other offences including offering indignities to a human body and using the postal service to distribute obscene materials, Magnotta pleaded not guilty.

He admitted all acts of which he was accused, but claimed diminished responsibility due to mental disorders, with his lawyer arguing that he was in a psychotic state when he killed Lin.

Magnotta claimed that he had been forced into the murder and torturing cats by a man called Manuel Lopez – with his mother Anna Youkin repeating the assertion in the Netflix documentary. However, there is no evidence that such a man ever existed.

Despite his protestations, following a 12-week trial and eight days of jury deliberations, the killer was found guilty of all charges.

Magnotta received an automatic life sentence for Jun Lin’s murder, with no chance of parole for 25 years, and was sentenced to an additional 19 years for his further offences. The 37-year-old is serving out his sentence at the Archambault Institution in Quebec.

The bizarrely named docu-series focuses on convicted Canadian murderer Luka Magnotta, who killed, dismembered and cannibalised Chinese student Jun Lin, before posting footage of the slaughter online. Like most killers,

While sitting in an internet cafe in Berlin, scrolling through news articles about his own twisted crimes, police surrounded Magnotta. They had him cornered.

“You got me,” Magnotta said, as he was placed in handcuffs.

Magnotta’s extradition back home to Canada was a huge military mission, costing $417,000 to fly him to Montreal on a private jet.

“How can we bring him back to Montreal on a commercial flight with other people sitting on board?” Montreal police commander Ian Lafrenière said at the time. When he landed, hundreds of members of international press were waiting to catch a glimpse of the runaway killer.

In December 2014, two years after he was arrested, Luka Rocco Magnotta was found guilty of first-degree murder.

He is currently serving a mandatory life sentence and will be eligible for parole after 25 years. After the release of Netflix’s three-part docu-series on Magnotta, reports emerged about the comfortable life the convicted killer was living behind bars.

The Toronto Sun reported Magnotta signed up to a prison dating site in 2015 named Inmates Connect and met fellow convicted murderer Anthony Jolin. Like Magnotta, Jolin is serving a life sentence for murder.

He killed a Halifax teenager who planned to testify against him in court and stabbed another inmate to death in 2003.

The couple married in 2017, but were denied time alone in the prison’s private room.

In all the fascination over Magnotta’s depravity, there is a forgotten victim: Jun Lin. The murdered student was killed simply so Magnotta could have the attention he craved so much.

“It causes me great pain to know that my son’s legacy is to be remembered as a victim,” Jun’s grieving father said.

“He not only suffered in his murder but will be humiliated for each time his name is mentioned and it hurts me deeply and will hurt me forever.”

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