The Village tackles the police investigation into serial killer Bruce McArthur, and uses the case as a springboard to re-investigate a slew of unsolved murders in Toronto’s Gay Village, going back to 1975. The series uncovers new details of cold cases, brings the stories to life, and pieces together decades of police repression of the queer community. It ultimately tries to answer the question: Who killed these men? And why weren’t these cases solved?
The podcast broke new investigative ground by unearthing and reinvestigating over a dozen cases from the late 1970s, where it was believed there was another serial killer that had gotten away. Reporting unearthed that there were likely a range of suspects and culprits for the 1970s murders, that it wasn’t likely one singular killer. This outcome in many ways was a more frightening one — that many people likely got away with targeting and killing gay men in 1970 and later. Similar patterns were seen in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Montreal, Sydney, Australia — that strings of murders against the LGBT community have a pattern of going unsolved and often under-investigated.
