Soroush Mahmudi, a 50-year-old male immigrant from Iran, was remembered by his wife as a "great guy with a good heart." He had come to Canada as a refugee, first living in Windsor before moving to the Toronto area. For years, he had no family in his new country, but that changed when he met the woman who would become his wife. They married in 2003 and were together for 12 years, eventually settling in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, to be closer to her family.
He worked at a manufacturing plant and lived with his wife and stepson.
In August 2015, Soroush’s life took a devastating turn. He was last seen alive on August 14 near his home. When he failed to return for several days, his wife grew deeply concerned. On August 22, 2015, she officially reported him missing to the Toronto police. For more than two years, she was left to wonder what had happened to her husband. The truth, when it finally came, was a horror she could never have imagined.
The investigation into Soroush's disappearance initially yielded few answers. His case was not immediately linked to a series of disappearances of men from Toronto's Gay Village that had been investigated under police initiatives like Project Houston. Soroush did not fit the established profile of those missing men, who were largely of Middle Eastern descent and associated with the downtown LGBTQ community. However, unbeknownst to his family, Soroush had some past ties to the Church and Wellesley neighborhood.
The break in the case came in January 2018 with the arrest of Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old self-employed landscaper, in connection with two other disappearances. As police delved into McArthur’s activities, the scope of his crimes began to surface. Investigators searched properties where he had worked and made a gruesome discovery at a home in the Leaside neighborhood. They found the dismembered remains of multiple victims hidden inside large planters. On January 29, 2018, police charged McArthur with the murder of Soroush Mahmudi and two other men.
The evidence against McArthur was overwhelming. Soroush’s DNA was found on a coat inside McArthur’s van. This same coat had been used to stage the bodies of other victims in post-mortem photographs, a disturbing ritual the killer performed. An agreed statement of facts later revealed that McArthur had murdered Soroush on or about August 15, 2015, by ligature strangulation. He then photographed Soroush’s body, posing him in the fur coat with his eyes taped open. His dismembered remains were among those recovered from the planters at the Leaside property.
In January 2019, Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, including that of Soroush Mahmudi. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years. The court proceedings brought a painful conclusion for the families of the eight men McArthur killed between 2010 and 2017. Soroush’s wife submitted a victim impact statement describing her ordeal. Learning of her husband’s fate sent her into a state of severe shock. “I locked myself in the bedroom and cried constantly with a lot of anger (and) sadness,” she wrote, conveying the profound and lasting grief of losing the man she loved to such a brutal act of violence.
