Magnotta, born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, had been a sex worker and model who went by various other aliases, including Jimmy, Justin, Angel, Rocco, Vladimir Romanov, Mattia Del Santo, and Kirk Trammel. On May 24, 2012, after answering a Craigslist ad for a submissive bottom into bondage, Lin arrived at Magnotta’s apartment in Montreal’s Snowdon neighbourhood. The following night, an eleven-minute video titled “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” was uploaded to bestgore.com in which Lin, tied to a bed, was stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick and kitchen knife by Magnotta. There was a poster from the film Casablanca on the wall, and “True Faith,” a song by New Order, could be heard playing in the background. Magnotta proceeded to dismember Lin limb by limb and penetrate his corpse. A more extensive version of the video obtained by Canadian police was purported to show Magnotta engaging in acts of cannibalism. On May 26, the day after the video first appeared, an attorney from Montana attempted to report it to the Toronto police, his local sheriff, and the FBI, but in each instance the lead was never pursued. Three mornings later, on May 29, a bloodstained parcel containing the remains of a man’s left foot was delivered to the headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada. Another parcel containing a left hand was discovered by Canada Post workers en route to the Liberal Party’s head offices. Later that same day, the custodian of Magnotta’s apartment building discovered a human torso in a suitcase, lying amidst a pile of uncollected garbage in an alleyway. At 11:33 p.m. that night, police burst through the door of Unit 208 to find it virtually empty, save for a few smears of blood on a mattress, the refrigerator, and the bathtub. On the inside of a closet door was written, in red ink, If you don’t like the reflection. Don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care. The rest of Lin’s body appeared over the coming weeks — on June 5, a right foot appeared in a package sent to St. George’s School and a right hand appeared in a package sent to False Creek Elementary School, both in Vancouver; and on July 1, during Canada Day celebrations, Lin’s head was discovered near a lake in Montreal’s Angrignon Park.

Gia had briefly dated Magnotta ten years earlier. They met at a strip bar he was working at, and he became her first lover since she had begun living as a woman. She said he used to punch his head in the shower sometimes and joke about killing his family, but of course she had assumed it was empty rhetoric. She recalled how once he looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m afraid that when you look into me you’ll see there’s nothing left inside.” She believed he was a profound narcissist and that this had disfigured his sense of reality. Narcissism was something Gia had spent a lot of time thinking about. Her art practice was her own body; she had transformed herself into a kind of living sculpture, and her work concentrated on the muse of herself as a virtual image and cyborg. And though there were other commonalities between Gia and Luka, like their plastic surgeries and sex work, it was narcissism that proved the most fascinating and complex intersection for her. But whereas Gia’s narcissism produced searching works of art that deconstructed consciousness and selfhood, Magnotta’s had made him a psycho killer.