Magnotta now in same medium-security prison as fellow killer Bernardo

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In another shocking secret prison transfer, sadistic sex killer Luka Magnotta – who now goes by the name Violette – has been moved from maximum-security to the same medium-classified institution that now houses serial killer Paul Bernardo, the Toronto Sun has learned.

According to a transfer warrant signed in August 2022 and obtained by the Sun, Magnotta was authorized to be moved from Port Cartier maximum-security prison to La Macaza in Quebec – and he wasn’t going alone. He told a psychiatric team that his husband, whom he married in 2017, would be making the transfer with him.

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Why does this diabolical monster deserve such cushy treatment?

It looks like Magnotta, 41, is now claiming to be transgender and needs the specialized support of a medium-security prison.

“Gay is a choice,” Magnotta is quoted saying in the 2022 assessment. “Trans is who I am.”

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In the partially redacted report by a team at the McGill University Sexual Identity Centre and obtained by the Sun, four doctors recommended “offering space and support to explore around a proper gender identity exploration that would allow Violette to express and present her gender as she sees fit and for her to experience living within this gender identity.”

Perhaps it also allows him more freedom to enjoy his professed hobbies of volleyball and tennis?

The former self-described “international escort and model” is serving a life sentence for the 2012 macabre slaying of Chinese engineering student Jun Lin – a murder committed in his Montreal bachelor apartment which the porn star filmed in excruciatingly horrifying detail and then uploaded online.

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Bent on achieving maximum shock and infamy, Magnotta distributed Lin’s severed body parts across the country, using Canada Post to mail hands and feet in pink tissue paper and black gift bags to politicians in Ottawa and to two schools in Vancouver. He stuffed his victim’s torso and legs in a suitcase that was dumped in a garbage pile and disposed of his head in a wooded park.

After he was arrested while reading about himself at an internet café in Berlin, Germany, the sick killer admitted to the slaying but tried to claim he was not criminally responsible because he was suffering from schizophrenia at the time – a defence the Montreal jury emphatically rejected following a high-profile trial in 2014.

His current diagnosis is severe personality disorder with predominantly narcissistic and histrionic traits. Magnotta identified as bisexual in his intake interview but now says he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body,

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The McGill team was skeptical.

The doctors found he doesn’t meet the criteria for gender dysphoria and instead his feelings were the result of “fragile identity and need to periodically reinvent himself,” as a defence against “internal homophobia” and as a strategy to protect himself from other inmates.

By changing his name again – the former Eric Newman became Luka Magnotta after he was jailed for fraud – and adopting a new gender identity, they suggested he may be “rewriting his story” as he’s done in the past.

“The narrative of being born in the wrong body may be a way for this patient to wipe the slate clean once again,” they wrote, “and reshaping herself to preserve the illusion of specialness (and innocence). ”

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In October 2021, Magnotta told his prison psychiatrist for the first time that he wanted to transition and required female hormones, the report said. He hopes to have vaginoplasty in the “later future.”

The killer couldn’t explain to the team why he wanted to transition now except to say he’s “evolved,” but he assured them that he wasn’t going to change his mind.

It seems he was less than convincing.

The doctors noted that Magnotta uses “pat phrases she repeats, as if rehearsed” to describe his “gender journey.”

While he professed to wanting to be as “feminine as possible” and to sometimes wearing makeup in private, they wrote that he presented as masculine during all three of their interviews – in his hair, clothing, body language and intonation.

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Magnotta also denied experiencing any distress while living as a male in prison.

“There is no evidence or report of any lived incongruence between her sex designation and her gender identity,” the doctors wrote.

No wonder they had their doubts. Was his new gender identity just a ruse to get the transfer out of maximum that he’d been denied so many times before?

If so, it worked. He told the team his transfer would be imminent.

Instead of undergoing physical transition, the McGill report suggested Magnotta deal with his underlying psychological issues in his new setting.

“Ideally she would work with someone she trusts sufficiently to be able to get in touch with her internalized homophobia, understand its roots and how it’s affected her identity development and eventually undo it.

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“She may then be able to find peace and even pride in living as an effeminate gay man, which seems more in keeping with her longitudinal history.”

They also suggested he should work to get over his belief that he could only be loved if he was considered famous and special.

The doctors believed Magnotta’s insatiable need for attention seemed to fuel his crimes. It was after he broke up with his fiancé in 2010, they wrote, that he began posting his infamous cat abuse videos to salve his rejection and “fragile sense of self.”

This pattern of feeding his “infamous internet persona” to bolster his self-worth continued up to the murder, the report suggested, where Magnotta killed not because he was suffering from psychosis but because it was likely another attempt to reshape his image by “specialness through infamy.”

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Magnotta has a less complicated psychological explanation – he blames it all on his tortured upbringing.

Born in Scarborough, Magnotta claims in the report that he was raised by a homophobic Christian fundamentalist family as the oldest of three and alleges he was sexually abused by family members and his childhood was “riddled with abuse and shame.”

Homeschooled, isolated and friendless until Grade 6, he was then bullied “for looking and identifying as gay.” He only felt special as a sex worker, he said, but that line of work was also mired in abuse and degradation.

Is it trite to say too bad, so sad?

So many others have suffered difficult pasts – but they don’t turn into sadistic sex killers who prey on the innocent to achieve the notoriety they crave to fill their empty souls.

Luka Magnotta – or Violette, or whatever name he wants to call himself these days – should have been left to rot in maximum-security where he belongs.

Instead, like school girl killer Bernardo, he’s quietly been transferred to better living arrangements with the hope that the rest of us would never know.

Citing his privacy, Correctional Service Canada refused to confirm his move.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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