Was Canada's Body Parts Killer Involved In Similar Crime In LA?
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — The gruesome case of a Canadian gay porn star who dismembered a lover before mailing various body parts to people, is eerily similar to an unsolved case in Los Angeles .
In the Los Angeles crime, a man's severed head and hands and feet were found in the Hollywood Hills.
And the Sun reports suspect Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, was living in LA, and working as a gay prostitute, at the time of the LA murder.
Police are now actively investigating to see if the crimes are linked. While police here say it's unknown if Magnotta ever lived in Southern California, police in Montreal confirmed to Canadian reporters that Magnotta lived on the west coast of the United States.
Juan Fernandez, reporting for CBS2 and KCAL9, spoke to Jack Trimarco, a well-known criminal profiler Thursday evening about both cases.
In January, two dog walkers found the remains of 66-year-old Hervey Medellin, a retired airline worker. In Canada, Magnotta is accused of dismembering student Jun Lin. Lin's torso was found in a suitcase and his hands and feet were mailed to various schools in Vancouver; other body parts were mailed to political offices in Ottawa.
Trimarco believes there are enough similarities in the two cases to warrant the possible link. While he says DNA would be a slam dunk, there are other markers that a killer leave behind that could place Magnotta, literally, inside Medellin's apartment or at the Hollywood Hills crime scene. "Criminals may conduct a crime in a similar way and that's their modus operandi. But they also leave behind a signature. And that makes it uniquely theirs."
Magnotta reportedly killed Lin on video and placed the 11-minute snuff movie online. Some media reports suggested Magnotta cannibalized parts of Lin.
Some believe Magnotta was also responsible in the past for posting graphic images of animal cruelty on line (including suffocating kittens with a vacuum cleaner.)
In a statement, released by the Los Angeles Police Department, the LAPD says "our investigators are in contact with Canadian investigators and are trying to determine Magnotta's whereabouts during the time of the Hollywood Hills murder."
Magnotta is in a Berlin jail cell awaiting extradition back to Canada.
