The Confession Tapes (2017) s01e01 Episode Script
True East, Part 1
They're comin' to lock your ass up.
Yours and your friend's.
Now, if you want my help you have to do as I say, and things are gonna be done proper.
If you don't want it, you can tell me right now - and you're gonna deny ever knowing me.
- Well, I want your help.
It's gonna save you and your friend's ass from jail.
- But you're gonna pay me in the end.
- Yeah.
Fuck, you got yourself in a pile of shit, man.
How'd you fucking do three people at once? Tell me what went on, and I'll tell you how I'll take care of your problem.
- What are you reporting? - Uh, there's, uh I need, uh, an ambulance.
Okay.
What's the problem there? There's been some kind of break-in.
I Okay, well, just calm down.
What's the problem? The The two My friend, his mom and dad are We think they're dead.
- Just calm down.
- I don't think it's safe here.
- I want We'll be outside.
- Okay, go ahead and go outside.
- Please, fast! Okay? - They're on the way.
- Okay.
- They're on the way.
- We'll be outside.
- Okay, go ahead.
Approximately 2:30 in the morning, I got a phone call.
My boss asked me to respond to the Rafay residence, which was in the Somerset area of Bellevue.
They had just moved in, so there was a lot of boxes.
In the family room downstairs, we found Mrs.
Rafay facedown on the ground.
She had blunt force trauma to the head.
From that room, we went upstairs to Dr.
Rafay's room.
There was blood spatter, brain matter The entire room was covered in debris from the murder of Dr.
Rafay.
And then we went into Basma Rafay's room, the daughter of Dr.
Rafay.
She was still alive.
And she later died at the hospital that morning.
The two people that found them were Atif Rafay, the son, and his best friend, Sebastian Burns.
They were our only witnesses.
When they took them down to the police department, that was the first time that it was kind of an eye-opener as to who these people really were.
At the time, we didn't understand how the world worked.
I don't know how to describe it.
But when you're a teenager, anything seems possible.
We started dating in grade 12 and dated throughout first year of college.
Sebastian, he was bright.
He was a good student but a lazy student.
He was someone who liked to talk and debate and share and tell you how he felt.
And then Atif, he was such an achiever.
His parents were highly educated.
She had a master's degree.
And Dr.
Rafay had his doctorate in engineering.
So both of Atif's parents were very accomplished.
I think that they're the reason that he went to a school like Cornell.
That's what was expected of him, and he was happy to fulfill that role.
Atif's sister had been disabled by a childhood bout of spinal meningitis.
And so, Atif's mother really looked after her.
Sebastian and Atif were very good friends.
And they were guys that didn't look like they would be friends with each other.
These guys are culturally different.
They're an odd pair.
The Rafay family lived in North Vancouver.
So they had just moved to Bellevue.
And Sebastian had been living in Vancouver.
And he actually visited Atif.
Atif had been attending Cornell University.
It was his mom who actually had been calling saying, "Come down and visit.
" So they had been in the house for five days.
And then this one night that they actually went out, then this tragedy happens.
So we took an entire statement from Burns and Rafay.
In checking those alibis, everybody remembered them.
They left their home about 8:30 in the evening.
They went down to a Keg restaurant, and after they went there, they went across the street to The Lion King, to watch a movie.
Loren, you're employed by the Factoria Cinemas.
- Is that correct? - Yeah.
And one of those persons you said you recognized? I'm almost positive that I saw him 'cause he was wearing an army jacket.
How certain are you of the guy? I'm positive I saw him.
After they went to The Lion King, they said they went over to Seattle.
Drove over there to an all-night diner.
And you recall seeing these guys before? Yeah, they asked about the clubs in the area, and one wanted to know what time it closed.
And after they left there, they went to find a club.
And after they left the club, they then came home.
People act differently when they've seen trauma.
But they acted very strange.
Atif Rafay, he was just very nonchalant about what had happened.
He had saw his mom, she was dead.
He ran upstairs, found his dad.
There wasn't anything he could do.
He heard his sister in the room next door to his dad.
I said, "Well, did you check on her?" And he says, "No, I didn't check on her.
" "Why wouldn't you check on her if you knew she was alive?" And he said, "Well, I There was nothing I could do.
" In fact, I think he even said, "I can't even put on a Band-Aid, okay? All I know is somebody had taken my Walkman," from a shelf in his room.
And a VCR was missing from the family room.
You just saw your dad slaughtered.
You just saw your mom slaughtered.
And you're telling me that someone stole your Walkman? And Sebastian Burns, he was very put out about even having to talk to police.
He was feeling that, "I already talked to the police.
I already told them what happened.
" It became clear.
It's like, "He's been up all night.
He's probably tired.
He just saw a horrific murder scene.
What we need to do is wrap this up.
" So we put them up in a hotel, gave them our pager numbers and our contact numbers, and said, "We'll be in touch with you.
Let's get some sleep.
" I didn't know exactly when they were gonna come home.
Their plans were a little loose.
So I had been phoning the Burns house.
And one morning, um, my parents woke me up.
They told me that they had read in the newspaper that Atif's family had been murdered.
And it occurred to me that the Burns may not know.
So I phoned Mr.
Burns.
And he answered the phone, and he sort of joked and said, "Sebastian isn't home yet.
" And I said I was sort of sobbing into the phone, and I said, "You haven't heard.
" Sebastian finally called us around It was after nine o'clock in the evening.
And I said, "Hi.
Are you? What's your status? Like, are you in custody or anything of that nature?" And he said, "No, we're in a motel.
" So I said, "Well, I, you know I think I'd like to come down and pick you guys up and bring you 'cause I guess you can't go back to the house.
So you've got no place to stay.
" And he said, "No, we can't leave without letting the police know.
" As soon as the murders happened, they were taken in by the Bellevue Police Department and sequestered.
They were in a dingy motel room for three days and just questioned at the Bellevue police's discretion for that time period.
Initially, when you're taking these statements, you're just kinda, like, getting this information.
But, as you're kinda sitting back and looking at it again, you go, "I wanna take another look at this.
Something isn't making any sense.
" Sebastian Burns makes the 911 call.
There's been some kind of break-in! Those words weren't very significant to me in the beginning.
A break-in refers to a burglary of some sort, not a murder.
And when you look at this home, it was a staged burglary.
In a room that Sebastian Burns was staying in, there were legal boxes.
So when you first walk in, it looks like somebody had been rummaging through documents and things.
But if you really look closely at it, the boxes hadn't been gone through at all.
They'd just been knocked over.
And then you take the alibi, The Keg restaurant.
And the waiter there goes, "Oh, yeah.
Definitely remember them because they ordered a salad and some wine.
" I think they were ordering wine so that the guy would ask for ID and remember that there was two Canadians that came in here and ordered wine with a salad.
At the all-night diner in Seattle, they remembered them there because the waitress said that they ordered just a Coke and some fries.
"And they left me a ten-dollar tip.
" And when they went to The Weathered Wall, which was a nightclub, that guy remembered them because he said, "I looked at my watch, 20 minutes to 2:00.
We were just getting ready to close.
" He said, "I wouldn't let 'em in.
" It's all these little pieces that you start putting-- Individually, they're not too meaningful.
But you start putting them all together and you have a very organized plan on how they were going to commit a murder.
The next day, we went to locate them, went to the hotel, and they were just gone.
Carol had the moxie to phone the Canadian consulate to make sure that the Bellevue police had, indeed, been consulted about this move back to Vancouver.
And they had.
Once they got home, the Bellevue police leaked not leaked told the press that Sebastian and Atif had fled, which was the first of many dirty tactics that sent the signal that this was not gonna go well.
So we reported in the media No, we didn't report in the media.
So It was reported in the media that Burns and Rafay had fled to Canada.
And, for all I knew, they were fleeing, they were getting away from Bellevue, basically, as fast as they can.
But, to be frank with you at the time, we didn't have any reason not to let 'em go to I mean, we They were free to go wherever they wanted.
But they were just gone.
They got back here around five o'clock.
We had the television news on from Seattle at that time because I'd been trying to follow what had been going on.
And blow me down, it was coverage of the funeral.
Members of the Rafay family gathered at the Northgate Mosque today.
Rafay's 18-year-old son, who found the bodies, was not there and has declined to speak.
Atif was just-- I'd never seen him with that much of an emotional outburst.
He just said, "Those bastards!" Clearly upset that he hadn't participated in the ceremony for the interment of his entire family.
And the cops had just not told him.
Can I just interrupt? He flew at the TV, screaming, when he found out his father and mother and sister had been buried without him even knowing there was a funeral.
Everybody who's remotely familiar with the Muslim faith knows you must bury the dead in three days.
And the family members are responsible for washing the bodies and preparing them for burial.
The notion that Atif Rafay didn't have any idea about that is the craziest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard in my life.
That's just one funeral, by the way.
There was also a memorial service in British Columbia some months later.
And Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay went to the building.
As they walked up the door, a news reporter asked them the question: Atif, why won't you talk to the police? Atif, why won't you talk to the police? And with that question, they turned around, laughing, ran back to the parking lot get into a car.
And they drove away.
Seeing that kind of thing, right away, you think, "Oh, these guys, they must be murderers.
They don't care about the killing.
" When, in fact, that's an example of the way kids behave after terrible, shocking events.
You could see there was stuff going on that was completely inappropriate.
But if you're gonna be a serious killer, the first thing you're gonna do is stand by the grave and cry.
When I see the way they were behaving, I think these guys, A, were a couple of goofballs.
But, B, they were in shock at what had happened.
And there's no standard of behavior after something like that.
Why would Atif Rafay come home and murder his entire family? That, on the face of it, seemed very odd and unusual and compelling, as a journalist.
Ninety-eight percent of the reporters and the coverage was very, very skeptical of their innocence.
And that was all of these doubts and information that was sort of seeded by police.
They were absolutely demonized in the press.
They became just criminal mastermind archetypes.
They weren't the stupid kids that we knew them to be.
They were They were evil geniuses in the press.
And it inspired a lot of hatred in the public.
When we were trying to learn about who Burns and Rafay are, we saw in his high school yearbook, he was in a play called The Rope about two college kids who commit the perfect murder.
I mean, that does grab your attention.
And so, I went out and rented the movie.
And I To me, I was shocked at even how closely they physically resembled Burns and Rafay in the movie.
And the fact that they were involved in Nietzsche and philosophies.
These were very well-read boys.
Atif sent me many essays that he has written.
So I was very impressed by his writing style, especially, and his literary mind.
I developed a crush on him, I would say.
And then, over time, we have become a couple.
The aspects of Nietzsche that were appealing to them were just things about freedom of spirit and freedom of thought and very beautiful philosophies that I think a lot of people love if they actually take the time to read it.
As I understood, Nietzsche believed in that there was a superman theory where there were people who were elevated above others.
And they were superior beings to others.
And, from what I know of Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay I think they fit into that, and I think they believed that.
They had characters that people were put off by.
The Bellevue police didn't want these two guys to get the better of them.
The motive, of course, the police said, was money and life insurance.
As I recall there were three policies.
Now, the American policy paid off right away.
And we called and said, "Hey, they're suspects in a murder case.
" They go, "Have they been charged?" "No.
" "Then we're paying.
" And, sure enough, they did seem to go on a bit of a spending spree, those two.
They purchased a Mustang convertible and went on sort of a road trip.
Again, not exactly what you might expect, but they chose to do it.
The RCMP, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they are the equivalent of the FBI.
At some point, they learned that in the United States, three murders had been committed presumably by two Canadian citizens, and a determination was made that they should open their own investigation.
Burns and Rafay were living with their high school friend, Jimmy Miyoshi, blaring their music and staying up all night.
The RCMP had put wires in the house so that they could listen to their conversations.
It didn't take long for them to figure out that the suspects, the targets in their investigation, were bright kids.
And that led them to come to the conclusion that traditional police methods were not going to work with these two.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed an undercover investigative technique called "The Mr.
Big Technique," that they deploy or they use, normally, in cold murder cases.
But they have a suspect.
They just don't have enough evidence to lay charge.
What they'll do is, the police officers disguise themselves as underworld figures.
Eventually, the target becomes aware that he's dealing with what he thinks are criminals.
They'll get to a point where they'll say, "Gee, we overheard somewhere that you're suspected of a murder.
" And they'll tell their target that he's got a meeting with Mr.
Big.
And Mr.
Big is the head of the criminal organization.
And the crime boss starts telling them things like, "We know that you committed a murder.
And now you've put our whole organization in jeopardy by associating with us.
So just tell us what happened.
Tell us what happened.
" These undercover sting operations take months to unfold.
And they've got one mission.
And that mission is to extract a confession.
Once I became familiar with the operation that was conducted in this case, it was then that I got to know Gary and Al.
They are extraordinarily talented.
They are very dedicated.
And they make a very complicated job look extremely easy.
Once the wire is in the house, there are people who are listening to it.
And they just heard them say "Burns is getting his hair cut at Crimpers at four o'clock on Tuesday.
" So they have people in place to follow him when he leaves.
They see where he parks his car.
That allows the undercover operators to position their vehicle next to him.
And so that when he comes out, just, out of the blue, he walks up and there is the undercover operator, Gary, waiting for him.
Gary told Burns that he had locked his keys in his car and asked if he could help him out.
"Would you mind giving me a ride?" He'll give him $100 for his time.
Burns says, "No problem.
" And Gary convinces Sebastian to go down to the bar and have a drink.
And they start a conversation.
If there's fuckin'-- If there's money to be made - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
- You know? I'd fuckin' much easier make - five bucks doin' this than doin' that.
- Yeah.
But the thing is, you make a dollar doin' this.
- You make a hundred dollars doin' that.
- Yeah.
You gotta fuckin' weigh your options, you know? Well You're a fuckin' young, unemployed kid.
You're gonna now fuckin' do some big-time opportunities without knowing you're capable of doing them.
Yeah, I understand.
For the next four months, Gary and Al introduced different scenarios that allowed Burns to believe that these two were involved in a criminal enterprise.
And all of that was done to dissuade them of any notion that they might have that Gary and Al were cops.
What do you think we're into? I don't know.
I guess cars, guns, drugs, heists.
I don't know.
How many crimes can I think of? No, you're looking at it wrong right there.
You're looking at it as crimes.
It's not crimes.
They're fucking opportunities.
And, on a couple of those scenarios, Miyoshi was along with Burns.
For example, they brought a bag full of cash down.
They had Jimmy Miyoshi and Burns counting the money, making sure they put it in piles of less than $10,000.
Another scenario had an undercover operator come in and throw two guns on the counter.
He says, "Don't touch those.
They're a little 'warm,' if you know what I mean.
" If he's gonna use it, tell him to throw it into the salt right away, 'cause she's pretty hot, like she's I don't mean hot stolen, I mean still warm.
You know what I'm sayin'? So, one of the occasions, Gary took Burns to a situation where he went inside and, you know, allowed Burns to believe that he had beat the hell outta some guy who was inside, scuffed his knuckles up on the carpet.
They were allowed to believe that violence could be used, if necessary, to conduct their business.
They were allowed to believe that if they had to kill somebody, they would.
I'll tell ya somethin' else.
You wanted to know what I fuckin' did my time for? I fuckin' toasted a guy.
You know how I-- fuckin' how solid Al is? When it came time for fuckin' court, the person that could finger me? They're not around anymore.
Sebastian didn't have the same kind of knowledge or savoir faire that Atif did.
And he can't see other people being deceptive.
He was not able to gauge the situation very well.
And the RCMP understood who the better target was.
I've read about you lots in the last fuckin' week.
Because I made a point to find out about you.
You know something? That's why you're here tonight.
So, what I've read about you says you're a fuckin' smart man.
- Yup.
- That's what I want.
Sebastian was seen as a killer.
And other people actually suspected up here that he was.
And he didn't have much of a life.
He couldn't get a job or anything like that.
So when he's approached by these mobsters that said, "We'll be able to help you out.
You can become part of this gang," it's attractive to him.
You're either gonna fuckin' work for me and fuckin' get involved makin' money and it'll be total fuckin' trust where you don't fuck me and I don't fuck you.
At some point, they said to him, "You are gonna have to tell us about what you did down in Washington.
" What's your role in that triple homicide? They think that I am the murderer.
Why? Because they didn't have anyone else.
- Because, uh - What's that? Because we were at the house for a few days, and they don't have any other leads.
And it's not I'm not worried about it because forensically or whatever, they don't have a particular big case.
But they made it into a big deal.
Sebastian denied many, many times that he had anything to do with the killing of the Rafays.
But they were gangsters.
And he wanted to impress them.
Okay, stop the fuckin' bullshit there.
Stop the bullshit there.
Right now, you're out-and-out fucking lying to me.
I'm not goddamn lying to you.
The fuckin' report I fuckin' read fuckin' basically spells out black-and-white that the police fuckin' know you killed these people.
So I'm not putting up with this bullshit.
You're lying to me now or fucking, uh you come back and found these fuckin' bodies.
You must think I come down with last night's rain.
Maybe you start thinkin' that about me And this fucking You're misunderstanding me, okay? You're misunderstanding.
All right? Then make it clear so I won't misunderstand you.
Because I'm not having fuckin' my ass get bit here.
The other evidence that was flowing in, at the very time, not just, "Oh, there's these two strange kids sitting in front of me.
They must've done it," real, solid evidence was coming in.
There was a suggestion that Atif Rafay's family was murdered by a fundamentalist Islamic person, who took offense to Mr.
Rafay's more moderate stance on Islam.
Atif's father had given lectures and speeches and about Islam in the Western context.
And, apparently, that had offended some people who were, you know, more conservative Muslims.
And the police did have some information pointing them in that direction.
As an engineer, he discovered a miscalculation.
Tariq Rafay had a theory about True East being a degree or two different than what Muslims in this country, and perhaps all over the world, were were practicing.
But Tariq was suggesting they should move their prayer mats, the one or one-and-a-half degree, when they say their prayers.
He discovered that the mosques in Canada were not facing Mecca.
In the eyes of a fundamentalist, perhaps, that would have been upsetting the apple cart.
There were three categories of tips that came in to the Bellevue police shortly after the murder.
These were leads that were endorsed by other police organizations.
One of the tips was a Canadian RCMP officer named Galina.
He said that his informant told him that there was a hit ordered on a Pakistani family living in Bellevue, Washington.
And he said he received that information before the Rafay family was murdered.
So once he learned of the murders, he thought, "Oh, I have relevant information.
" And he went down to the Bellevue police and told them about this.
The next tip was the Seattle police, who contacted the Bellevue police and told them that they believed an organization called Al-Fuqra was involved in the death of the Rafays.
Al-Fuqra is a U.
S.
-based terrorist organization.
It's inconceivable to me that somebody would come in and beat the brains out of three human beings over one man's belief that True East was one-and-a-half degrees off on the compass.
The killing of the Rafay family was so vicious.
In my view, it has nothing to do with Islam or the Muslim religion.
I think it has to do with the way people take these ideas to an extreme.
It's extremism.
That kind of violence related to this community and that area was probably just very alien to Detective Thompson.
And it didn't resonate with him.
And he probably didn't really know how to follow up on it.
In the post 9/11 world, would they have pursued this line of investigative inquiry? Almost certainly they would have pursued it with more vigor.
But this took place years before 9/11, and they didn't go there.
The best quality information that's ever come forward on this case was the FBI contacted the Bellevue Police and informed them that one of their informants had information about the Rafay murders and was going to come to the Bellevue Police Department and give that information.
The FBI informant told them that he, himself, personally knew an imam who lived in the area who had ordered the murder of Dr.
Rafay and his family.
And he knew the two men that he says actually went and committed the murders.
Then he went on to tell them that he was with one of those men.
And the man opened the trunk of his car and the informant saw a baseball bat.
And because of the way this guy behaved, the informant drew the conclusion that that was the murder weapon.
That was only a few days after the murders.
The Bellevue police, at that time, did not know that the Rafays were killed with a baseball bat.
Some months later, the Bellevue police, through sound recreations determined that the Rafay family was murdered with a baseball bat.
That's not a coincidence.
And this FBI informant did not come to them with vague information.
He gave them the names of the people that he believed were responsible for these murders.
He gave where they worked.
He gave their addresses.
He gave phone numbers.
He also provided them with photographs.
I think that's one of the most appalling things about this case to me is that they did not take that information more seriously.
They kind of described this informant dismissively as if he were crazy or something because he gave them a long list of names.
But if you're talking about an entire extremist organization, there's probably going to be a long list of names.
And maybe you should follow up on some of those names.
But that was not done.
In every murder case, people come forward with information all the time.
Could you investigate every single tip to the nth degree? Yeah, you can.
But the reality is you have to come back to where the evidence is and follow the evidence.
And that will lead you to the real killers.
There's all kinds of physical and forensic evidence that actually points away from the two boys.
It doesn't point to any other specific individuals because there were no other suspects that the police actually took seriously.
There's a couple items of DNA evidence.
So in Dr.
Rafay's room, there is a hair which doesn't belong to any of the victims and not Sebastian and not Atif.
And then there's also bloodstains in the garage of the house.
And again, the DNA in those bloodstains don't match Sebastian, don't match Atif.
In addition, the police were able to pinpoint the time of the murder.
They interviewed both of the neighbors independently.
I started to think about it, and I realized that I had heard a hammering sound that night, when I was up reading.
I heard, like, a construction project next door.
I didn't really know the neighbors that well.
The neighbors both pinpointed the same timeframe.
I think it was about 9:30, 9:35 or so.
It could've been a little sooner than that.
It could've been as early as 9:15.
Can you give me a window of time when that 20 minutes of sound was occurring? It would definitely be between ten minutes to 9:00 and 9:35.
But, at that time, Sebastian and Atif were seen, and it has been confirmed they were at that movie theater.
So all of this focused effort of the police department yielded evidence that proved Sebastian and Atif's innocence.
You can always look at other outside things.
But it always comes back to Burns and Rafay.
One of the things we know for certain is that the killer showered.
There's a chemical that we sprayed inside that shower downstairs, and it just lit up with blood from Dr.
Rafay.
There were 22 hairs in the bottom of that shower, in the corners and in the sides and in the base of the shower.
So the last person who showered was the killer.
And 22 hairs in that shower belong to Sebastian Burns.
We found their underwear in the washing machine that had been run through a spin cycle and it had already been washed.
It was just underwear.
And it only fit Burns and Rafay.
And we thought, "Well, that's really strange.
" But we sent that in for testing, and there was nothing on there.
So the physical evidence that we had in Bellevue, it wasn't enough to arrest them.
They had these two kids in their sights, and they were gonna put these two guys away, by whatever means necessary.
And they chose, with the help of Canadian police, to use an investigative technique that's illegal in the U.
S.
The time is 6:45, and the date is, uh Fuck, I don't know what the date is.
It's the 18th? Yeah, I thought so.
I didn't wanna say the wrong thing.
Okay, start over.
Okay, the time is 6:45, July 18th, 1995 in Victoria.
The "Estate" file.
The Bellevue police, in coordination with the RCMP, issued a press release about how they were going to test the DNA.
It was not an actual reflection of what was going on in the case.
It was to create the false world that Mr.
Big was creating for Sebastian so that he would think that they were going to be convicted.
So you been reading the paper lately? - Yeah, most of it.
- What do you think? It's nothing new, I guess.
And that was timed for the Mr.
Big sting.
I'm gonna show you somethin'.
You never fuckin' saw this from me.
One of the last scenarios involved the undercover operator showing them some bogus memo that the RCMP had prepared, saying that there was both hair evidence and DNA evidence that had been collected from the crime scene.
All of which is true.
The memo said that, as a result of this new evidence, that they were preparing to file charges against the two of them, which was not true.
"Red fabric fibers found in the shower that are mixed with Burns' hair.
" Like I mean That That could have been, like, almost from any time.
You know what I mean? Like, 'cause I can't say that Obviously, they're referring to the murder, right? Well, no, but what I'm saying is that I I mean, that could have been there from, like, two days before even.
- Like, it doesn't sound like it - Yeah, but hold it.
The night you showered after the murder, did you wash yourself with red towels? - Um I don't even know.
- What do you mean you don't know? I don't know, like I don't remember what what fucking color the towels were there.
Sebastian didn't understand how there could be DNA on anything from him.
Especially if you're innocent, why would there be any DNA found or anything that would tie him to the murders? So he didn't believe it.
And he kept trying to explain that that's impossible.
"These things didn't happen.
I don't believe that that could be the case.
" "Blood stains located in the garage.
" I don't know shit about bloodstains in the garage.
- I don't know a fucking thing.
- I don't know.
You were there.
Like, if I knew, I could fuckin' probably tell you.
I don't know, and I can't start asking all these questions.
- Yeah.
- Until I fuckin' know.
- And that's the bottom line.
- Well, okay, but I mean There There is this possibility there can be things I don't know about That, like, they're basically fabricating to look like they count, you know what I mean? I don't believe they're sending a report to the lab, or whatever this is asking to fabricate fuckin' evidence.
Plenty of people are convicted on false and bad evidence or manipulated evidence or factoids.
Burns, by that time, was certain that they were just targets, that people were trying to pin it on them, no matter what.
So if they have evidence that is going to be used, even though they know they're innocent, they know they can be convicted falsely of a crime if people put up some kind of evidence.
So them being curious about what evidence they have is no surprise.
I would be.
I'm accused of a murder, and I know that the police department is coming after me, they wanna convict me.
And now this mob guy says, "I can find out what they have.
" I would wanna know, even though I'm innocent.
You know, I Just some things I can't help you with, like some stains on boxer shorts from the washer.
I don't know what the fuck that is, okay? If you were a suspect in a murder case, would you even be associating with somebody who you think were criminals? Or would you just like, "Look, I didn't do anything.
" Listen to me.
I've got a way.
It's all gonna be set up to take care of the lab.
You see what I'm saying? The memo was fake, but then they said, "Our thugs, our minions with tentacles everywhere, can get rid of that information if you just confess.
" Tell me what went on, and I'll tell you how I'll take care of your problem.
They told them that they're coming to get him and then followed up with, "You better spill it now because we'll make sure that you're not arrested.
" So when'd you fuckin' do the dirty deed? Um during the movie.
Yours and your friend's.
Now, if you want my help you have to do as I say, and things are gonna be done proper.
If you don't want it, you can tell me right now - and you're gonna deny ever knowing me.
- Well, I want your help.
It's gonna save you and your friend's ass from jail.
- But you're gonna pay me in the end.
- Yeah.
Fuck, you got yourself in a pile of shit, man.
How'd you fucking do three people at once? Tell me what went on, and I'll tell you how I'll take care of your problem.
- What are you reporting? - Uh, there's, uh I need, uh, an ambulance.
Okay.
What's the problem there? There's been some kind of break-in.
I Okay, well, just calm down.
What's the problem? The The two My friend, his mom and dad are We think they're dead.
- Just calm down.
- I don't think it's safe here.
- I want We'll be outside.
- Okay, go ahead and go outside.
- Please, fast! Okay? - They're on the way.
- Okay.
- They're on the way.
- We'll be outside.
- Okay, go ahead.
Approximately 2:30 in the morning, I got a phone call.
My boss asked me to respond to the Rafay residence, which was in the Somerset area of Bellevue.
They had just moved in, so there was a lot of boxes.
In the family room downstairs, we found Mrs.
Rafay facedown on the ground.
She had blunt force trauma to the head.
From that room, we went upstairs to Dr.
Rafay's room.
There was blood spatter, brain matter The entire room was covered in debris from the murder of Dr.
Rafay.
And then we went into Basma Rafay's room, the daughter of Dr.
Rafay.
She was still alive.
And she later died at the hospital that morning.
The two people that found them were Atif Rafay, the son, and his best friend, Sebastian Burns.
They were our only witnesses.
When they took them down to the police department, that was the first time that it was kind of an eye-opener as to who these people really were.
At the time, we didn't understand how the world worked.
I don't know how to describe it.
But when you're a teenager, anything seems possible.
We started dating in grade 12 and dated throughout first year of college.
Sebastian, he was bright.
He was a good student but a lazy student.
He was someone who liked to talk and debate and share and tell you how he felt.
And then Atif, he was such an achiever.
His parents were highly educated.
She had a master's degree.
And Dr.
Rafay had his doctorate in engineering.
So both of Atif's parents were very accomplished.
I think that they're the reason that he went to a school like Cornell.
That's what was expected of him, and he was happy to fulfill that role.
Atif's sister had been disabled by a childhood bout of spinal meningitis.
And so, Atif's mother really looked after her.
Sebastian and Atif were very good friends.
And they were guys that didn't look like they would be friends with each other.
These guys are culturally different.
They're an odd pair.
The Rafay family lived in North Vancouver.
So they had just moved to Bellevue.
And Sebastian had been living in Vancouver.
And he actually visited Atif.
Atif had been attending Cornell University.
It was his mom who actually had been calling saying, "Come down and visit.
" So they had been in the house for five days.
And then this one night that they actually went out, then this tragedy happens.
So we took an entire statement from Burns and Rafay.
In checking those alibis, everybody remembered them.
They left their home about 8:30 in the evening.
They went down to a Keg restaurant, and after they went there, they went across the street to The Lion King, to watch a movie.
Loren, you're employed by the Factoria Cinemas.
- Is that correct? - Yeah.
And one of those persons you said you recognized? I'm almost positive that I saw him 'cause he was wearing an army jacket.
How certain are you of the guy? I'm positive I saw him.
After they went to The Lion King, they said they went over to Seattle.
Drove over there to an all-night diner.
And you recall seeing these guys before? Yeah, they asked about the clubs in the area, and one wanted to know what time it closed.
And after they left there, they went to find a club.
And after they left the club, they then came home.
People act differently when they've seen trauma.
But they acted very strange.
Atif Rafay, he was just very nonchalant about what had happened.
He had saw his mom, she was dead.
He ran upstairs, found his dad.
There wasn't anything he could do.
He heard his sister in the room next door to his dad.
I said, "Well, did you check on her?" And he says, "No, I didn't check on her.
" "Why wouldn't you check on her if you knew she was alive?" And he said, "Well, I There was nothing I could do.
" In fact, I think he even said, "I can't even put on a Band-Aid, okay? All I know is somebody had taken my Walkman," from a shelf in his room.
And a VCR was missing from the family room.
You just saw your dad slaughtered.
You just saw your mom slaughtered.
And you're telling me that someone stole your Walkman? And Sebastian Burns, he was very put out about even having to talk to police.
He was feeling that, "I already talked to the police.
I already told them what happened.
" It became clear.
It's like, "He's been up all night.
He's probably tired.
He just saw a horrific murder scene.
What we need to do is wrap this up.
" So we put them up in a hotel, gave them our pager numbers and our contact numbers, and said, "We'll be in touch with you.
Let's get some sleep.
" I didn't know exactly when they were gonna come home.
Their plans were a little loose.
So I had been phoning the Burns house.
And one morning, um, my parents woke me up.
They told me that they had read in the newspaper that Atif's family had been murdered.
And it occurred to me that the Burns may not know.
So I phoned Mr.
Burns.
And he answered the phone, and he sort of joked and said, "Sebastian isn't home yet.
" And I said I was sort of sobbing into the phone, and I said, "You haven't heard.
" Sebastian finally called us around It was after nine o'clock in the evening.
And I said, "Hi.
Are you? What's your status? Like, are you in custody or anything of that nature?" And he said, "No, we're in a motel.
" So I said, "Well, I, you know I think I'd like to come down and pick you guys up and bring you 'cause I guess you can't go back to the house.
So you've got no place to stay.
" And he said, "No, we can't leave without letting the police know.
" As soon as the murders happened, they were taken in by the Bellevue Police Department and sequestered.
They were in a dingy motel room for three days and just questioned at the Bellevue police's discretion for that time period.
Initially, when you're taking these statements, you're just kinda, like, getting this information.
But, as you're kinda sitting back and looking at it again, you go, "I wanna take another look at this.
Something isn't making any sense.
" Sebastian Burns makes the 911 call.
There's been some kind of break-in! Those words weren't very significant to me in the beginning.
A break-in refers to a burglary of some sort, not a murder.
And when you look at this home, it was a staged burglary.
In a room that Sebastian Burns was staying in, there were legal boxes.
So when you first walk in, it looks like somebody had been rummaging through documents and things.
But if you really look closely at it, the boxes hadn't been gone through at all.
They'd just been knocked over.
And then you take the alibi, The Keg restaurant.
And the waiter there goes, "Oh, yeah.
Definitely remember them because they ordered a salad and some wine.
" I think they were ordering wine so that the guy would ask for ID and remember that there was two Canadians that came in here and ordered wine with a salad.
At the all-night diner in Seattle, they remembered them there because the waitress said that they ordered just a Coke and some fries.
"And they left me a ten-dollar tip.
" And when they went to The Weathered Wall, which was a nightclub, that guy remembered them because he said, "I looked at my watch, 20 minutes to 2:00.
We were just getting ready to close.
" He said, "I wouldn't let 'em in.
" It's all these little pieces that you start putting-- Individually, they're not too meaningful.
But you start putting them all together and you have a very organized plan on how they were going to commit a murder.
The next day, we went to locate them, went to the hotel, and they were just gone.
Carol had the moxie to phone the Canadian consulate to make sure that the Bellevue police had, indeed, been consulted about this move back to Vancouver.
And they had.
Once they got home, the Bellevue police leaked not leaked told the press that Sebastian and Atif had fled, which was the first of many dirty tactics that sent the signal that this was not gonna go well.
So we reported in the media No, we didn't report in the media.
So It was reported in the media that Burns and Rafay had fled to Canada.
And, for all I knew, they were fleeing, they were getting away from Bellevue, basically, as fast as they can.
But, to be frank with you at the time, we didn't have any reason not to let 'em go to I mean, we They were free to go wherever they wanted.
But they were just gone.
They got back here around five o'clock.
We had the television news on from Seattle at that time because I'd been trying to follow what had been going on.
And blow me down, it was coverage of the funeral.
Members of the Rafay family gathered at the Northgate Mosque today.
Rafay's 18-year-old son, who found the bodies, was not there and has declined to speak.
Atif was just-- I'd never seen him with that much of an emotional outburst.
He just said, "Those bastards!" Clearly upset that he hadn't participated in the ceremony for the interment of his entire family.
And the cops had just not told him.
Can I just interrupt? He flew at the TV, screaming, when he found out his father and mother and sister had been buried without him even knowing there was a funeral.
Everybody who's remotely familiar with the Muslim faith knows you must bury the dead in three days.
And the family members are responsible for washing the bodies and preparing them for burial.
The notion that Atif Rafay didn't have any idea about that is the craziest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard in my life.
That's just one funeral, by the way.
There was also a memorial service in British Columbia some months later.
And Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay went to the building.
As they walked up the door, a news reporter asked them the question: Atif, why won't you talk to the police? Atif, why won't you talk to the police? And with that question, they turned around, laughing, ran back to the parking lot get into a car.
And they drove away.
Seeing that kind of thing, right away, you think, "Oh, these guys, they must be murderers.
They don't care about the killing.
" When, in fact, that's an example of the way kids behave after terrible, shocking events.
You could see there was stuff going on that was completely inappropriate.
But if you're gonna be a serious killer, the first thing you're gonna do is stand by the grave and cry.
When I see the way they were behaving, I think these guys, A, were a couple of goofballs.
But, B, they were in shock at what had happened.
And there's no standard of behavior after something like that.
Why would Atif Rafay come home and murder his entire family? That, on the face of it, seemed very odd and unusual and compelling, as a journalist.
Ninety-eight percent of the reporters and the coverage was very, very skeptical of their innocence.
And that was all of these doubts and information that was sort of seeded by police.
They were absolutely demonized in the press.
They became just criminal mastermind archetypes.
They weren't the stupid kids that we knew them to be.
They were They were evil geniuses in the press.
And it inspired a lot of hatred in the public.
When we were trying to learn about who Burns and Rafay are, we saw in his high school yearbook, he was in a play called The Rope about two college kids who commit the perfect murder.
I mean, that does grab your attention.
And so, I went out and rented the movie.
And I To me, I was shocked at even how closely they physically resembled Burns and Rafay in the movie.
And the fact that they were involved in Nietzsche and philosophies.
These were very well-read boys.
Atif sent me many essays that he has written.
So I was very impressed by his writing style, especially, and his literary mind.
I developed a crush on him, I would say.
And then, over time, we have become a couple.
The aspects of Nietzsche that were appealing to them were just things about freedom of spirit and freedom of thought and very beautiful philosophies that I think a lot of people love if they actually take the time to read it.
As I understood, Nietzsche believed in that there was a superman theory where there were people who were elevated above others.
And they were superior beings to others.
And, from what I know of Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay I think they fit into that, and I think they believed that.
They had characters that people were put off by.
The Bellevue police didn't want these two guys to get the better of them.
The motive, of course, the police said, was money and life insurance.
As I recall there were three policies.
Now, the American policy paid off right away.
And we called and said, "Hey, they're suspects in a murder case.
" They go, "Have they been charged?" "No.
" "Then we're paying.
" And, sure enough, they did seem to go on a bit of a spending spree, those two.
They purchased a Mustang convertible and went on sort of a road trip.
Again, not exactly what you might expect, but they chose to do it.
The RCMP, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they are the equivalent of the FBI.
At some point, they learned that in the United States, three murders had been committed presumably by two Canadian citizens, and a determination was made that they should open their own investigation.
Burns and Rafay were living with their high school friend, Jimmy Miyoshi, blaring their music and staying up all night.
The RCMP had put wires in the house so that they could listen to their conversations.
It didn't take long for them to figure out that the suspects, the targets in their investigation, were bright kids.
And that led them to come to the conclusion that traditional police methods were not going to work with these two.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed an undercover investigative technique called "The Mr.
Big Technique," that they deploy or they use, normally, in cold murder cases.
But they have a suspect.
They just don't have enough evidence to lay charge.
What they'll do is, the police officers disguise themselves as underworld figures.
Eventually, the target becomes aware that he's dealing with what he thinks are criminals.
They'll get to a point where they'll say, "Gee, we overheard somewhere that you're suspected of a murder.
" And they'll tell their target that he's got a meeting with Mr.
Big.
And Mr.
Big is the head of the criminal organization.
And the crime boss starts telling them things like, "We know that you committed a murder.
And now you've put our whole organization in jeopardy by associating with us.
So just tell us what happened.
Tell us what happened.
" These undercover sting operations take months to unfold.
And they've got one mission.
And that mission is to extract a confession.
Once I became familiar with the operation that was conducted in this case, it was then that I got to know Gary and Al.
They are extraordinarily talented.
They are very dedicated.
And they make a very complicated job look extremely easy.
Once the wire is in the house, there are people who are listening to it.
And they just heard them say "Burns is getting his hair cut at Crimpers at four o'clock on Tuesday.
" So they have people in place to follow him when he leaves.
They see where he parks his car.
That allows the undercover operators to position their vehicle next to him.
And so that when he comes out, just, out of the blue, he walks up and there is the undercover operator, Gary, waiting for him.
Gary told Burns that he had locked his keys in his car and asked if he could help him out.
"Would you mind giving me a ride?" He'll give him $100 for his time.
Burns says, "No problem.
" And Gary convinces Sebastian to go down to the bar and have a drink.
And they start a conversation.
If there's fuckin'-- If there's money to be made - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
- You know? I'd fuckin' much easier make - five bucks doin' this than doin' that.
- Yeah.
But the thing is, you make a dollar doin' this.
- You make a hundred dollars doin' that.
- Yeah.
You gotta fuckin' weigh your options, you know? Well You're a fuckin' young, unemployed kid.
You're gonna now fuckin' do some big-time opportunities without knowing you're capable of doing them.
Yeah, I understand.
For the next four months, Gary and Al introduced different scenarios that allowed Burns to believe that these two were involved in a criminal enterprise.
And all of that was done to dissuade them of any notion that they might have that Gary and Al were cops.
What do you think we're into? I don't know.
I guess cars, guns, drugs, heists.
I don't know.
How many crimes can I think of? No, you're looking at it wrong right there.
You're looking at it as crimes.
It's not crimes.
They're fucking opportunities.
And, on a couple of those scenarios, Miyoshi was along with Burns.
For example, they brought a bag full of cash down.
They had Jimmy Miyoshi and Burns counting the money, making sure they put it in piles of less than $10,000.
Another scenario had an undercover operator come in and throw two guns on the counter.
He says, "Don't touch those.
They're a little 'warm,' if you know what I mean.
" If he's gonna use it, tell him to throw it into the salt right away, 'cause she's pretty hot, like she's I don't mean hot stolen, I mean still warm.
You know what I'm sayin'? So, one of the occasions, Gary took Burns to a situation where he went inside and, you know, allowed Burns to believe that he had beat the hell outta some guy who was inside, scuffed his knuckles up on the carpet.
They were allowed to believe that violence could be used, if necessary, to conduct their business.
They were allowed to believe that if they had to kill somebody, they would.
I'll tell ya somethin' else.
You wanted to know what I fuckin' did my time for? I fuckin' toasted a guy.
You know how I-- fuckin' how solid Al is? When it came time for fuckin' court, the person that could finger me? They're not around anymore.
Sebastian didn't have the same kind of knowledge or savoir faire that Atif did.
And he can't see other people being deceptive.
He was not able to gauge the situation very well.
And the RCMP understood who the better target was.
I've read about you lots in the last fuckin' week.
Because I made a point to find out about you.
You know something? That's why you're here tonight.
So, what I've read about you says you're a fuckin' smart man.
- Yup.
- That's what I want.
Sebastian was seen as a killer.
And other people actually suspected up here that he was.
And he didn't have much of a life.
He couldn't get a job or anything like that.
So when he's approached by these mobsters that said, "We'll be able to help you out.
You can become part of this gang," it's attractive to him.
You're either gonna fuckin' work for me and fuckin' get involved makin' money and it'll be total fuckin' trust where you don't fuck me and I don't fuck you.
At some point, they said to him, "You are gonna have to tell us about what you did down in Washington.
" What's your role in that triple homicide? They think that I am the murderer.
Why? Because they didn't have anyone else.
- Because, uh - What's that? Because we were at the house for a few days, and they don't have any other leads.
And it's not I'm not worried about it because forensically or whatever, they don't have a particular big case.
But they made it into a big deal.
Sebastian denied many, many times that he had anything to do with the killing of the Rafays.
But they were gangsters.
And he wanted to impress them.
Okay, stop the fuckin' bullshit there.
Stop the bullshit there.
Right now, you're out-and-out fucking lying to me.
I'm not goddamn lying to you.
The fuckin' report I fuckin' read fuckin' basically spells out black-and-white that the police fuckin' know you killed these people.
So I'm not putting up with this bullshit.
You're lying to me now or fucking, uh you come back and found these fuckin' bodies.
You must think I come down with last night's rain.
Maybe you start thinkin' that about me And this fucking You're misunderstanding me, okay? You're misunderstanding.
All right? Then make it clear so I won't misunderstand you.
Because I'm not having fuckin' my ass get bit here.
The other evidence that was flowing in, at the very time, not just, "Oh, there's these two strange kids sitting in front of me.
They must've done it," real, solid evidence was coming in.
There was a suggestion that Atif Rafay's family was murdered by a fundamentalist Islamic person, who took offense to Mr.
Rafay's more moderate stance on Islam.
Atif's father had given lectures and speeches and about Islam in the Western context.
And, apparently, that had offended some people who were, you know, more conservative Muslims.
And the police did have some information pointing them in that direction.
As an engineer, he discovered a miscalculation.
Tariq Rafay had a theory about True East being a degree or two different than what Muslims in this country, and perhaps all over the world, were were practicing.
But Tariq was suggesting they should move their prayer mats, the one or one-and-a-half degree, when they say their prayers.
He discovered that the mosques in Canada were not facing Mecca.
In the eyes of a fundamentalist, perhaps, that would have been upsetting the apple cart.
There were three categories of tips that came in to the Bellevue police shortly after the murder.
These were leads that were endorsed by other police organizations.
One of the tips was a Canadian RCMP officer named Galina.
He said that his informant told him that there was a hit ordered on a Pakistani family living in Bellevue, Washington.
And he said he received that information before the Rafay family was murdered.
So once he learned of the murders, he thought, "Oh, I have relevant information.
" And he went down to the Bellevue police and told them about this.
The next tip was the Seattle police, who contacted the Bellevue police and told them that they believed an organization called Al-Fuqra was involved in the death of the Rafays.
Al-Fuqra is a U.
S.
-based terrorist organization.
It's inconceivable to me that somebody would come in and beat the brains out of three human beings over one man's belief that True East was one-and-a-half degrees off on the compass.
The killing of the Rafay family was so vicious.
In my view, it has nothing to do with Islam or the Muslim religion.
I think it has to do with the way people take these ideas to an extreme.
It's extremism.
That kind of violence related to this community and that area was probably just very alien to Detective Thompson.
And it didn't resonate with him.
And he probably didn't really know how to follow up on it.
In the post 9/11 world, would they have pursued this line of investigative inquiry? Almost certainly they would have pursued it with more vigor.
But this took place years before 9/11, and they didn't go there.
The best quality information that's ever come forward on this case was the FBI contacted the Bellevue Police and informed them that one of their informants had information about the Rafay murders and was going to come to the Bellevue Police Department and give that information.
The FBI informant told them that he, himself, personally knew an imam who lived in the area who had ordered the murder of Dr.
Rafay and his family.
And he knew the two men that he says actually went and committed the murders.
Then he went on to tell them that he was with one of those men.
And the man opened the trunk of his car and the informant saw a baseball bat.
And because of the way this guy behaved, the informant drew the conclusion that that was the murder weapon.
That was only a few days after the murders.
The Bellevue police, at that time, did not know that the Rafays were killed with a baseball bat.
Some months later, the Bellevue police, through sound recreations determined that the Rafay family was murdered with a baseball bat.
That's not a coincidence.
And this FBI informant did not come to them with vague information.
He gave them the names of the people that he believed were responsible for these murders.
He gave where they worked.
He gave their addresses.
He gave phone numbers.
He also provided them with photographs.
I think that's one of the most appalling things about this case to me is that they did not take that information more seriously.
They kind of described this informant dismissively as if he were crazy or something because he gave them a long list of names.
But if you're talking about an entire extremist organization, there's probably going to be a long list of names.
And maybe you should follow up on some of those names.
But that was not done.
In every murder case, people come forward with information all the time.
Could you investigate every single tip to the nth degree? Yeah, you can.
But the reality is you have to come back to where the evidence is and follow the evidence.
And that will lead you to the real killers.
There's all kinds of physical and forensic evidence that actually points away from the two boys.
It doesn't point to any other specific individuals because there were no other suspects that the police actually took seriously.
There's a couple items of DNA evidence.
So in Dr.
Rafay's room, there is a hair which doesn't belong to any of the victims and not Sebastian and not Atif.
And then there's also bloodstains in the garage of the house.
And again, the DNA in those bloodstains don't match Sebastian, don't match Atif.
In addition, the police were able to pinpoint the time of the murder.
They interviewed both of the neighbors independently.
I started to think about it, and I realized that I had heard a hammering sound that night, when I was up reading.
I heard, like, a construction project next door.
I didn't really know the neighbors that well.
The neighbors both pinpointed the same timeframe.
I think it was about 9:30, 9:35 or so.
It could've been a little sooner than that.
It could've been as early as 9:15.
Can you give me a window of time when that 20 minutes of sound was occurring? It would definitely be between ten minutes to 9:00 and 9:35.
But, at that time, Sebastian and Atif were seen, and it has been confirmed they were at that movie theater.
So all of this focused effort of the police department yielded evidence that proved Sebastian and Atif's innocence.
You can always look at other outside things.
But it always comes back to Burns and Rafay.
One of the things we know for certain is that the killer showered.
There's a chemical that we sprayed inside that shower downstairs, and it just lit up with blood from Dr.
Rafay.
There were 22 hairs in the bottom of that shower, in the corners and in the sides and in the base of the shower.
So the last person who showered was the killer.
And 22 hairs in that shower belong to Sebastian Burns.
We found their underwear in the washing machine that had been run through a spin cycle and it had already been washed.
It was just underwear.
And it only fit Burns and Rafay.
And we thought, "Well, that's really strange.
" But we sent that in for testing, and there was nothing on there.
So the physical evidence that we had in Bellevue, it wasn't enough to arrest them.
They had these two kids in their sights, and they were gonna put these two guys away, by whatever means necessary.
And they chose, with the help of Canadian police, to use an investigative technique that's illegal in the U.
S.
The time is 6:45, and the date is, uh Fuck, I don't know what the date is.
It's the 18th? Yeah, I thought so.
I didn't wanna say the wrong thing.
Okay, start over.
Okay, the time is 6:45, July 18th, 1995 in Victoria.
The "Estate" file.
The Bellevue police, in coordination with the RCMP, issued a press release about how they were going to test the DNA.
It was not an actual reflection of what was going on in the case.
It was to create the false world that Mr.
Big was creating for Sebastian so that he would think that they were going to be convicted.
So you been reading the paper lately? - Yeah, most of it.
- What do you think? It's nothing new, I guess.
And that was timed for the Mr.
Big sting.
I'm gonna show you somethin'.
You never fuckin' saw this from me.
One of the last scenarios involved the undercover operator showing them some bogus memo that the RCMP had prepared, saying that there was both hair evidence and DNA evidence that had been collected from the crime scene.
All of which is true.
The memo said that, as a result of this new evidence, that they were preparing to file charges against the two of them, which was not true.
"Red fabric fibers found in the shower that are mixed with Burns' hair.
" Like I mean That That could have been, like, almost from any time.
You know what I mean? Like, 'cause I can't say that Obviously, they're referring to the murder, right? Well, no, but what I'm saying is that I I mean, that could have been there from, like, two days before even.
- Like, it doesn't sound like it - Yeah, but hold it.
The night you showered after the murder, did you wash yourself with red towels? - Um I don't even know.
- What do you mean you don't know? I don't know, like I don't remember what what fucking color the towels were there.
Sebastian didn't understand how there could be DNA on anything from him.
Especially if you're innocent, why would there be any DNA found or anything that would tie him to the murders? So he didn't believe it.
And he kept trying to explain that that's impossible.
"These things didn't happen.
I don't believe that that could be the case.
" "Blood stains located in the garage.
" I don't know shit about bloodstains in the garage.
- I don't know a fucking thing.
- I don't know.
You were there.
Like, if I knew, I could fuckin' probably tell you.
I don't know, and I can't start asking all these questions.
- Yeah.
- Until I fuckin' know.
- And that's the bottom line.
- Well, okay, but I mean There There is this possibility there can be things I don't know about That, like, they're basically fabricating to look like they count, you know what I mean? I don't believe they're sending a report to the lab, or whatever this is asking to fabricate fuckin' evidence.
Plenty of people are convicted on false and bad evidence or manipulated evidence or factoids.
Burns, by that time, was certain that they were just targets, that people were trying to pin it on them, no matter what.
So if they have evidence that is going to be used, even though they know they're innocent, they know they can be convicted falsely of a crime if people put up some kind of evidence.
So them being curious about what evidence they have is no surprise.
I would be.
I'm accused of a murder, and I know that the police department is coming after me, they wanna convict me.
And now this mob guy says, "I can find out what they have.
" I would wanna know, even though I'm innocent.
You know, I Just some things I can't help you with, like some stains on boxer shorts from the washer.
I don't know what the fuck that is, okay? If you were a suspect in a murder case, would you even be associating with somebody who you think were criminals? Or would you just like, "Look, I didn't do anything.
" Listen to me.
I've got a way.
It's all gonna be set up to take care of the lab.
You see what I'm saying? The memo was fake, but then they said, "Our thugs, our minions with tentacles everywhere, can get rid of that information if you just confess.
" Tell me what went on, and I'll tell you how I'll take care of your problem.
They told them that they're coming to get him and then followed up with, "You better spill it now because we'll make sure that you're not arrested.
" So when'd you fuckin' do the dirty deed? Um during the movie.