'Suddenly, there were other cities': The Village podcast expands to Montreal, welcomes a new host

In the latest season of The Village, investigative reporter Francis Plourde takes over from previous host Justin Ling for a deep dive into a series of homicides in Montreal's queer community, expanding the critically-acclaimed series beyond Toronto.   

For an audio version of their conversation, listen to the prologue episode of The Village: The Montreal Murders:

The Village began in 2019 as an investigation into the Toronto Police Service's handling of the Bruce McArthur case. Bruce McArthur was a serial killer who operated in Toronto's Gay Village from 2010 to 2018 and eventually plead guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder. McArthur was interviewed by police in 2013 in connection with the disappearances of three men, but wasn't arrested until after he'd subsequently taken the lives of five more victims. 

The host of seasons one and two of The Village, investigative journalist Justin Ling, wanted to know what went wrong and why the Toronto Police Service failed to solve so many disappearances within a single community in less than a decade. As he was researching the first season of the podcast, more and more unsolved cases came to his attention; some of them became the basis of season two of The Village, which examined the unexplained deaths of Toronto-based trans women Alloura Wells and Cassandra Do.

"It was like peeling away layers of an onion. And suddenly there were other cities. There was Detroit, there was Los Angeles, there was New York, and, notably, there was Montreal, which seemed to experience exactly the same problem," says Ling. 

Ling sat down with fellow journalist Francis Plourde in Montreal's Parc de l'Espoir to discuss the third season of The Village, which is hosted by Plourde.

It was important to Ling that The Village: The Montreal Murders be hosted by somebody from Quebec, as Plourde is. Ling explains, "I really want queer communities in cities around North America, if not around the world, to be doing this work themselves; this archival work, this historical work, this sort of investigative work to figure out what went wrong and how we can avoid it happening in the future."

Ling interviewed Plourde about taking over hosting duties for The Village and whether there may be evidence of a serial killer operating in Montreal as well. Here's part of their conversation.

So I'm really looking forward to this season of the show. It's going to be a bit different. It's not going to be me hosting. It's going to be someone who's actually a little more plugged in to the Quebec community, to the Montreal queer community. Tell me what your approach is going to be here. 

We're going to go back into the eighties, into the nineties. It's just 30 years difference, but it's a world away. The world was a different place, 30 years ago, if you were gay or if you were a lesbian. And that's part of the story that we're going to tell. 

The other thing is that it's not just about murders. It's about a crisis, a health crisis, the same way we see with COVID now. We were in the midst of the AIDS crisis, not just in Montreal, but also elsewhere in North America and Europe as well. 

[The community] was facing discrimination on a daily basis and also violence. Violence was coming on the street, also coming from the police as well, because there were lots of tensions. Those are the stories we're going to tell: a community in crisis, trying to take control of its own narrative. 

The circumstances in a number of those murders were similar. So people were rightly asking themselves, 'Is there a serial killer?'- Francis Plourde

Over this period, you had the failure to deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis on a national and provincial level. You had all of these homicides that you're going to be delving deep into, some of which are still unsolved. And then on top of that, you had this antagonism from police, including a pretty serious raid that a lot of Canadians might not know about. 

You're talking about the Sex Garage raid. It happened here in Montreal in July of 1990. Right at the same moment, the Oka Crisis was happening here. And many people here told us that it was a key moment for the community, for them to come together. 

It had the same kind of impact locally as Stonewall, which happened in 1969 in the U.S. So that's one of the things that we go into deep into this season, because a number of people don't remember that it ever happened. 

One thing we found [in season one] was evidence that a serial killer had targeted the queer community – not just recently, but in the past as well. In the work that you're doing, was there any indication that there may have been serial homicides committed here in Montreal? 

There were certainly talks about a serial killer. At first, the police were denying that it was even a possibility. And then they changed their tune later on. And then they changed their mind again, saying, 'No, there's no serial killer.' 

But in the community, people were thinking about that because there were waves of murders. The circumstances in a number of those murders were similar. So people were rightly asking themselves, 'Is there a serial killer?' 

And to this day, a number of those murders have not been solved. So, there could have been a serial killer that we don't know of – 30 years later, we still don't know.

Can you talk a little bit about what the community did to finally put pressure on the police to take [the deaths in Montreal] seriously? 

Yeah, I think the community owes a lot to a core group of activists – four activists – who really took the murders seriously. They're the ones who pushed for the police to investigate those murders. They pushed for public hearings into the violence against gays and lesbians. 

And those public hearings, we're told, were a game changer for the community. Not just on violence, but also on HIV/AIDS, on marriage equality as well. So all the progress that was made in Quebec in the last 30 years, a lot of people mentioned that we owe this progress to what happened during those public hearings. 

I'm so excited to see what you find. I'm excited to listen to it. And there's even going to be a French language counterpart. 

Yes, there will. We have a different team working on [Le Village : meurtres, combats, fierté]. They're putting their own twist to the story. 

Le Village : meurtres, combats, fierté, hosted by Marie-Eve Tremblay, is available on OHdio.

Written by SK Robert. Produced by Carrie Haber. Q&A edited for length and clarity.