Warning: The following story contains graphic details. A court-imposed publication ban prohibits media from copying or broadcasting any evidence showing body parts or known to contain body parts.
MONTREAL — It’s not clear whether Luka Magnotta was aware his calm, unemotional actions were being recorded on video. Five cameras ran 24 hours per day in the building where he rented the dingy bachelor apartment that would become the scene of one of the country’s most notorious crimes.
The Montreal court released the footage Montreal police investigators recovered from those cameras, providing a haunting timeline of the hours and days that passed from the fateful moment Jun Lin walked into the Montreal building with his killer in May 2012, until Magnotta left the building for good to take off for Paris less than 48 hours later.
WATCH: Luka Magnotta and Jun Lin arrive together at Magnotta’s rented apartment on Decarie Blvd. in Montreal just after 10 p.m. on May 24, 2012.
READ MORE: Magnotta brought home mystery man a week before killing, court hears
Crown witness Montreal police homicide investigator Claudette Hamlin presented the sequences Monday and last Thursday.
The first glimpse the tapes show of Magnotta was recorded at 9:32 p.m. on May 24, 2012. He was dressed in a white shirt, walking toward the mail boxes next to the front doors. He seemed to lean for a moment on a wall, then went outside.
Less than an hour later, around 10:20, he was back with Lin. Lin wore a yellow t-shirt with shorts and a baseball cap. Magnotta held the door and entered behind Lin.
The footage spans hours, showing Magnotta moving slowly through the halls of the apartment building, repeatedly throwing items out in the building’s garbage bins, and taking the time to order food from a pizza restaurant.
WATCH: Pizza delivery man enters the building at about 6:30 on May 25, a time coinciding with the order time indicated on a receipt found among the items Magnotta dumped in the trash.
Magnotta changed his outfit several times, the most morbid of which was when he emerged from his apartment wearing what looked exactly like the yellow shirt Lin had worn less than four hours earlier. Wearing the yellow shirt, Magnotta left the building and returned seven minutes later, when he took a moment to check himself out in the large mirrors covering two walls in the lobby.
WATCH: Luka Magnotta leaves his apartment building alone, several hours after arriving with Jun Lin, wearing a yellow t-shirt that appears to be the same shirt Lin wore when arriving with Magnotta.
For almost two hours, the cameras caught Magnotta repeatedly going into the basement, to the basement garbage bins —throwing out full garbage bags, pillows, clothing and bottles.
Shortly after 6 a.m., the building’s janitor went through the garbage and took out the recycling, apparently oblivious as to what he was carrying.
The cameras showed Magnotta leaving the building two hours later, wearing a tight top and a cap similar to the one Lin had the night before. Again, he checked himself out in the mirrors.
WATCH: Luka Magnotta checks the trash area in his apartment building several hours after throwing away a number of bags and items.
Over the next several hours of May 25, 2012, the cameras took footage of Magnotta leaving and entering the building over and over, several times wearing the striped white and red tank top familiarized through his booking photo.
He brought some plastic shopping bags into the building. He lugged out some black garbage bags, appearing stretched from the weight of their contents. The basement camera caught him back at the garbage bins, this time only to look at them, not dump anything in. When he saw the bags he’d left early that morning were gone, he briefly looked around the basement, then left.
WATCH: Luka Magnotta leaves the apartment with a small black dog and returns minutes later. The dog was later found dead among the trash left outside the apartment building.
Inside his small apartment, Magnotta also had a puppy, possibly the same small black and white dog seen in the snuff film Magnotta took of his crime and posted online. He is seen leaving his building with the puppy at 4:35 a.m. May 25, returning two minutes later.
Investigators found that dog days later dead, in one of the dozens of garbage bags searched outside the Montreal apartment building.
Comments