10 things we learned from the weekend papers about the body-parts case

With an international manhunt underway for Luka Rocca Magnotta, the weekend papers worked overtime to fill in details surrounding the case of the fugitive who police allege is responsible for the heinous killing and dismemberment of Lin Jun, a foreign student in Montreal.

Here is just some of what journalists have turned up:

1. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has talked to Chinese officials about the case. “I just spoke to China’s ambassador to Canada to convey my deep condolences on the senseless killing of Chinese student Jun Lin,” read a message sent Friday through Baird’s Twitter account.
2. Lin was in Montreal to attend school, but his real goal was to find love. A three-byline story in the Globe and Mail suggests the Chinese native’s stated ambition was to marry. “He was in computers, and he was looking for love,” a former classmate told the Globe team.
3. Lin’s online presence was complicated. A second Globe story reported from Beijing reports that while the student went to see The Smurfs movie in 3D and liked to post cat photos on social media, his Internet persona also revealed a troubled side. Reports the Globe’s Mark MacKinnon from Beijing: “On Valentine’s Day last year, he posted a computer-altered photograph of himself with wild purple hair and a cracked face that turns grey around a mouth of broken and missing teeth. ‘My self-portrait,’ he wrote beneath the repulsive image.”
4. Lin loved nothing more than to go to dinner with friends. “Korean barbecue was his favourite,” reports Andrew Chung of the Toronto Star.
5. Magnotta may be in London — at least according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.  Based on what evidence? Dated vacation photos, it seems.
6. Or he could be in France. The Montreal Gazette says French police are hot on Magnotta’s trail — at least according to the Paris newspaper Libération.
7. Magnotta has been linked to far-right U.S. white supremacists, the National Post reports. Stewart Bell explains that the blog Anti-Racist Canada found posts about Magnotta on a site linked to a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
8. Magnotta is a “liar,” a “nut job” and the product of a “dysfunctional family,” a relative in Peterborough told the QMI agency. Just going by the headlines, this news can hardly come as a surprise.
9. Magnotta was also “definitely creepy,” says U.K. Sun reporter Alex West who was interviewed by the Toronto Sun.
10. While Magnotta may have been all those things, what he was not — according to the National Post — was a gay porn star or even a legitimate model: “Instead, beyond the murder suspect’s highly crafted Internet persona is evidence that a boy, little noticed by classmates during his tumultuous Southern Ontario upbringing, slowly descended into petty crime, purported animal cruelty, and now, alleged murder and dismemberment.”