DEFENCE FOCUSES ON MAGNOTTA’S ‘FRIEND’
Psychiatrist unfazed by what seems to be a convenient out for the accused
It wasn’t merely two stray cats Luka Magnotta killed about seven months before the slaying of Lin Jun, but rather his own pets.
He’d adopted one cat in July of 2011 and got another for free in October that year, Joel Watts, a forensic psychiatrist testifying for the defence, told Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and a jury Monday.
“He even named them,” Watts said. “Kenny and Jasmin.”
Magnotta belatedly told Watts about killing the cats because of his purported distress.
The first cat he fed to a friend’s python, the second he drowned the next day in the bathtub of his apartment.
Both incidents were videoed and posted online, though Watts said Magnotta told him, using the passive voice of a bystander, that “it makes no sense the videos were put online.”
Both incidents, as well as the earlier videoed death of a cat he suffocated in 2010 with a vacuum cleaner while living in New York, Magnotta blamed on the mysterious Manny Lopez, allegedly a former brutish client of his escort business.
Lopez may or may not even exist — the jurors have seen not a shred of evidence he does, nor it appears has anyone else — but certainly he has functioned as the fall guy for much of the worst conduct Magnotta has admitted.
Interestingly, both Watts and Marie-Frédérique Allard, who also testified for the defence, believe that Manny is or may be real.
As Watts put it, he “is perhaps a real person” but at some point, he said, it may be that “Mr. Magnotta’s experiences of Manny ceased to be real and were actually hallucinatory?”
“I spent quite a bit of time wondering and trying to suss out whether and how real Manny is,” Watts said.
“It’s difficult for me to know how based in reality Manny is,” he said, but nonetheless concluded that he may be a real person.
Magnotta also told Watts that Manny was to blame for what happened on the night of May 25, 2012, when he slit Lin’s throat, dismembered his body and committed various indignities upon it.
As Watts’ 121-page report says, it was Manny who Magnotta says was responsible for directing him from start to finish that night, first telling him to recruit a man for a threesome, then that perhaps Lin was a government agent and finally to dispose of Lin’s body parts as he did.
Magnotta, through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, has acknowledged the “physical part” of the five charges — including first-degree murder — he faces in Lin’s death, but is pleading not guilty by reason of mental disorder, in his case a psychosis secondary to his chronic schizophrenia.
Watts did not seem to have been struck by what looks blindingly obvious to a layman: that Magnotta may have found a convenient way to minimize his responsibility for his actions (Manny made him do it), that not all cat-killings are alike and that killing trusting pets is qualitatively worse.
Similarly, the only evidence contemporaneous with the killing of Lin — particularly the reams of surveillance videotape showing Magnotta as he went about the grim business of body part disposal afterwards — showed him unruffled and cool.
Leclair played several excerpts of the video from Magnotta’s apartment building, during which, in the early-morning hours of May 25, Magnotta made myriad trips to the building’s basement garbage room, disposing of various bloodied bedding in a most studious manner, rearranging the garbage in two big cans and striking poses before the mirrors in the basement bathroom or the building lobby.
With each excerpt, Leclair asked Watts how this factored into his analysis of Magnotta and his eventual diagnosis that he had suffered a psychosis at the time of the homicide.
Invariably, Watts responded that Magnotta “looks relatively calm and normal,” that he “has a very neutral expression,” that “no behaviour seems odd or abnormal,” that he “appeared quite preoccupied with his appearance because he has quite low selfesteem” and that he appeared to check out his backside and had confided to him he sometimes “even put padding in his buttocks” area to fill out his rear.
About one clip at 4:22 a.m. that day, when Magnotta was burying pillows deep in the garbage cans, Watts said, “the behaviour is contemporaneous to the time of Mr. Lin’s murder” so he was trying to see if anything he did argued “for or against” his state of mind.
He noted Magnotta was purposeful, that by shifting the garbage about it could be argued he “was trying to hide” what he was depositing, and that “he doesn’t appear outwardly odd.”
But, he quickly added, “at the same time, I know individuals who have persecutorial thoughts who don’t necessarily have disorganized behaviour.”
A little later that day, at 4:36 a.m., Magnotta walked out of the building with his small black and white puppy, apparently to take him for a pee.
The puppy, of course, ended up dead, and like the kittens, was featured in a video, in the puppy’s case in the dismemberment video Magnotta posted online.
He admitted to Watts that he’d taunted the animal activists enraged by the cat videos, but told him he was “upset” because the activists “were coming at me so hard, I would say anything back.”
He killed the cats, yet he was angry when he was criticized for it, righteous even. In the same way, Watts says in his report, Magnotta has no relationship with his brother because, as he told him, he’s “not honest, he can’t keep secrets and he takes from others.” Besides, Magnotta said, “he has said homophobic things.”
That, in Magnotta World, is really outrageous. Killing and dismembering a man, drowning a couple of cats, offing a puppy, well, he has Manny Lopez for that.