Lin Jun & Luka Magnotta: How Were They Connected?

Lin Jun was a 33-year-old Chinese student who was killed by Luka Magnotta in 2012. Magnotta’s kitten torture videos, along with the video he posted of Lin’s murder and dismemberment, are now the subject of the new Netflix docuseries, Don’t F*ck With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.

Jun was a student at Montreal Tyark College when he met Magnotta through a Craigslist ad that Magnotta had posted, advertising sex and bondage. They met for the first time on May 24, 2012. On May 25, Magnotta posted “1 Lunatice 1 Icepick” to a gore site. The ten-minute video shows Magnotta slitting Lin’s throat, then going on to decapitate Lin, dismember him, sodomize his body, and more.

Lin is remembered by his friends and family as a kind and gentle person whose greatest ambition was to find love.

Here’s what you need to know:

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Surveillance Footage of Lin Entering Magnotta’s Apartment Building Represents the Last Image Taken of Him Alive

Lin met Magnotta through a Craigslist ad that offered sex and bondage. He went to Magnotta’s apartment on May 24, 2012, late in the evening, and the surveillance footage of him entering the building was the last footage ever taken of him alive.

Both Lin and Magnotta were romantically attracted to other men. An ex-boyfriend of Lin’s revealed at Magnotta’s murder trial that he and Lin had broken up in the months leading up to May 24, because Lin felt pressure from his family to marry a woman. Feng Lin, 35, travelled from China to testify.  He said, “He was experiencing some pressure from his family and he was kind of obliged to go into a relationship with a girl for an eventual marriage.” He further confirmed that Lin had been previously married and divorced.

The ex also said that he received the last text Lin would ever send, in the evening of May 24. “He was saying good morning to me because it was a time when I just woke up,” he explained.

A friend of Lin’s, Benjamin Xu, lamented to Netflix that all of the retrospective focus is on Magnotta, and none of it is on Lin. “It doesn’t seem fair at all,” he said. “He doesn’t deserve that.”

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Lin Chose ‘Justin’ as His Chosen English Name When He Moved to Canada

Lin moved to Canada in 2010, and enrolled in Concordia University in Montreal. Though he was initially elated to be moving to Canada, his social media posts reflected loneliness, too. He wrote once, “Suddenly I realized that I am about 10 years older than my classmates. They would have no problem calling me ‘uncle.’ It’s so crushing.”

Lin studied computer science at Concordia, and went by “Justin.” A fellow student, Alexandra Afanase, said to The Globe and Mail that Lin was a romantic. “That is what I remember about him,” she said. “He was in computers, and he was looking for love.”

This is a developing post.

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