This is a case of attention seeking behaviors that escalated to murder.
Luka Magnotta was not his birth name. He was born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman on July 24th 1982 in the Scarboro District of Toronto Ontario. Luka would describe his mother as excessively focused on cleanliness to the extent of locking her children outside the house and subjecting their pet rabbits to fatal cold exposure. Even when he was six or seven his mother forced him to keep wearing diapers. His parents divorced, leading to Luka later moving in with his grandmother. Both his grandmother and younger brother abused him for his effeminate tendencies. We don’t know if that part is necessarily true or not, because Luka said it. His father was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1994 and his parents divorced. He was homeschooled for some time, but he attended a secondary school in Lindsay. Most of his classmates don’t really recall him at all but those that do, reported that he was ‘’awkward and prone to throw tantrums.
In his teenage years he received a schizophrenia diagnosis and by adulthood he was able to receive disability allowance from that diagnosis. Given that he had a family history and a first-degree relative, if he was presenting as a teenager with any sorts of signs and symptoms of psychosis, there may have been a biological genetic explanation i.e. schizophrenia; given that it is a heritable disease, though not entirely heritable. If Luka were using drugs that actually were causing these episodic psychoses, he may not have reported that to the psychiatrist. In retrospect, it does certainly appear to be a bit of a rush to judgment, that he was receiving disability for schizophrenia, particularly knowing that he will go on to work in various ways. He never graduated high school. After high school, he tried to become a model unsuccessfully, started doing gay porn, became a gay escort and a stripper, at one point becoming an escort.
In 2004 Luka first caught the attention of the Toronto police after he befriended a 21- year – old woman, with the mental capacity of a child and convinced her to apply for credit cards. He then racked up $10,000 in unpaid bills. The police quickly caught onto this and he was charged with fraud. However, initially police alleged he sexually assaulted the woman and videotaped it, but the police dropped the charge before the case went to trial. In 2005 Luka pled guilty and was convicted of four fraud charges, before sentencing his lawyer showed the court a medical report revealing that he had significant psychiatric issues. When the judge handed down the sentence he said: ‘‘You have a medical problem and you need to always take medication, if you do not your life is going to get messed up.’’ Luka was then given a nine-month community-service sentence and twelve months of probation. Luka Magnotta’s lawyer at the time later said that the decision changed the course of Luka’s life: ‘’Immeasurably, with huge ramifications to our society, eventually.’’ In early 2006 Luka began dating Barbie a transgendered woman: ‘‘I met Luka Magnotta in January of 2006. It’s funny because the first thing I said was ‘I hope you’re not going to murder me or kill me’ as a joke. The (most) weirdest relationship that I’ve had to be honest. But don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy. He was very sweet and very romantic like. He took me out to captain John’s on our first date.’’ Several months later they broke up. This time he legally changed his name to Luka Rocco Magnotta. He later filed for bankruptcy. He wanted to be somebody. In 2007 we start seeing desperate attempts to appear on television. First was audition for reality show ‘’Cover guy’’ where male models would compete for a cash prize and a magazine cover shoot.
He then auditioned to get cosmetic surgery. He had already had several cosmetic surgeries.
He never got past the auditions.
Luka dropped by the Toronto Suns headquarters in September 2007 to deny online rumors that he was dating Karla Homolka, a woman who along with her husband murdered three teenage girls. She was arrested in 1993 and released in 2005.
Now the rumors that Luka and Carla were dating were completely unfounded and very likely started by Luka himself. He wanted as much attention as possible at all times.
He then continued to try garner attention online, posting comments about himself to create rumors and then using other profiles to deny them. Here he created one of his own YouTube fan pages. Twice in 2008 he lost battles with Wikipedia to keep a page up about himself.
Then in 2010, shortly before Christmas, a video called ‘’One guy two kittens’’ started circulating on discussion boards. The video depicted an unidentified man, whose face was concealed, placing two kittens in a sealed bag and asphyxiated them. Though the video was quickly removed from YouTube animal activists learnt of it and they tried to brought him to justice. Shortly after the video was circulated, Ryan Boyle, a former US soldier became the admin of a Facebook group called ‘’Find the vacuum kitten killer for great justice’’. About 4,000 people signed up, Luka also joined the group under an alias, a $5,000 reward was posted for information leading to the arrest of the vacuum kitten killer. However, he had posed with the cats before and several unique personal items in the video could identify him before the final video. so The group found out who he was quick enough. Still this was not enough to get the police heavily involved. They spent thousands of hours trying to track him down. They collected all evidence, but nothing really happened. About a year later he posted more videos of cats and death.
Over the course of two days May 15 and May 16, 2012 repeated references were made online to a new video, ‘’1 lunatic 1 icepick’’. The video hadn’t even been posted. Luka then wasn’t posting for a few days.
Concordia University student, Jun Lin, failed to show up for his job. Jun Lin was from Wuhan, Chinese exchange student, began dating Luka in 2012. He then vanished.
On May 25th a video surfaced called ‘’1 lunatic 1 icepick’’. In the video Jun is seen tied to a bed frame while being stabbed with a screwdriver and with a kitchen knife to death. His body being dismembered, followed by acts of necrophilia, as the perpetrator used the victim’s severed arm to masturbate. He allegedly indulged in cannibalism. Initially, the police didn’t even believe the video was real. On multiple occasions Interpol, the FBI and the Toronto Police were informed of the video’s existence. For days they ignored the video assuming it was a fake, even when a lawyer was the one trying to bring attention to the video. That was until a janitor found Jones dismembered torso inside a suitcase outside a Montreal apartment building. Four days after the video was posted, on May 29th 2012 a package containing a left foot was delivered to the National Headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada. The package was stained with blood and was marked with a red heart symbol, had a foul smell. Another package containing a left hand was intercepted in a Canada Post processing facility, addressed to the Liberal Party. After finding identifying information among the suitcase and packages, police quickly went to Luka’s apartment.
Luka’s apartment had been mostly emptied before he left. Blood was found on different items, including the mattress, the refrigerator, the table and the bathtub.
Luka ran away to Europe, not only to hide but to have a great time. Canada tried to let transportation services know that Luka was wanted, but by the time they were informed he had already boarded a plane to Paris, France. By the time the police reached his hotel room, he was gone. From there he stayed with random men and took videos of himself as he liked to do. He went to parties and lived as if he wasn’t under run. He was eventually caught in Berlin, Germany when he was found in an internet cafe, reading online news stories about himself. The owner of a cafe recognized him, saw police car in the street and stopped it. Luka Magnotta was arrested on June 4th 2012.
On June 5th 2012 a package containing a right foot was delivered to St. George’s School and another package containing a right hand to False Creek Elementary School in Vancouver.
Luka was then extradited back to Canada on June 18th.
The judge decided that the media would not be allowed in the courtroom. The judge wanted to be certain that Luka would not gain additional notoriety from his video or his actions. In addition, he was kept in solitary confinement. He initially pled not guilty to all charges. However, on April 12th 2013 Luka was indicted on charges of first-degree murder, offering indignities to a human body, distributing obscene materials, using the postal service to distribute obscene materials and criminal harassment.
Luka Magnotta fainted several times during the trial and claimed not to remember much of what was said. The arguments at trial were not about whether Luka Magnotta had committed the murder, all sides agreed he had, but rather about his mental state at the time of the crime. The defense called witnesses to report on Magnotta’s having received the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager and Dr. Watts testifying that Magnotta presently met criteria for schizophrenia, as well as histrionic personality disorder. Dr. Allard and Dr. Watts had diagnosed Magnotta with paranoid schizophrenia.
The crown i.e. prosecution presented the argument that Magnotta’s use of illegal drugs during his teenage years had accounted for symptoms mimicking schizophrenia and called a witness Dr. Paris from Jewish General Hospital who had evaluated Magnotta prior to the murders and had diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder and not schizophrenia and the prosecution’s primary expert witness Dr. Chamberland suggested that Magnotta actually showed signs of antisocial, histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders, with his actions at the time of the murder best explained by histrionic personality disorder.
However, the jury found that despite his mental illness he had known what he was doing. He demonstrated premeditation and was sentenced to life in prison where he remains in maximum security to today.
Still, some people like in many other cases, are his fans. They send him love letters in prison. His fans say they support him against the persecution. One fan online wrote: ‘’Maybe it’s my minds way of coping with the inexplicable dichotomy of beauty and the beast. The extreme beauty of the person versus the extreme ugliness of the alleged act. I don’t know. All I do know is that I feel powerless to control these thoughts and that there is an amazing physical warm sensation when I think of him. Something akin to love.’’
Convicted murderer Luka Magnotta has been transferred from a maximum-security prison to another institution, CTV News has confirmed.
Andrew van der Vaart, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist: ‘’His mental life is defined by people telling him things, because their reactions are all that matter to him.’’ I would add that their reactions do not have to be positive, so therefore every reaction is desirable as long as he is at the center of attention. Dr. Michael H. Stone, MD said that Luka Magnotta is a poster boy for narcissism. Dr. Vaart asked a great question. He asked something along these lines. Did he want admiration or he wanted to be the center of attention? We can make a good argument for narcissistic, antisocial, borderline and histrionic, but it is hard to know because of possibility of psychosis.
People who suffer from histrionic personality disorder are in the same group with disorders such as narcissistic, borderline and antisocial, because all these disorders tend to exhibit dramatic emotional and/or erratic behavior. People with histrionic personality disorders are not typically associated with violence. People with schizophrenia are rarely violent. Substance abuse disorder doubled the risk of violence.
From my perspective, based on the way his crimes escalated, he would be a serial killer, if he did not have histrionic personality disorder. In order to do what he did, during and after the murder, one must be sadistic and remorseless. That has nothing to do with histrionic personality disorder. Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD) disorder is not typically associated with violence on the part of the sufferer, though this can be seen when there is a comorbid disorder, especially antisocial personality disorder (Esbec & Echeburúa, 2010) or where the diagnosis of HPD is inaccurate. Videotaping and posting everything online to get reactions and attention is histrionic personality disorder. During psychotic episode, he could have committed such a crime and behaved in the way he did; but in that case untreated schizophrenia and, most likely, substance abuse disorder led him do it. After many years he does not feel any remorse and therefore it was not the case. Sometimes it appears that society have normalized sadistic murders and murders in general.
