Killer Conversation: Sebastian Burns & Atif Rafay - Part 1

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Speaker 3 Before we begin, just a trigger warning. The following episode contains references to graphic physical violence.
Please listen with care.

Speaker 4 Let's be honest, you've been portrayed as a monster. Yes.
Evil, maniacal,

Speaker 4 plotting, a murderer.

Speaker 4 Are you those things? No.

Speaker 3 Welcome to Killer Conversation, a podcast about the criminal mind. My name is Judy Ryback, and I'm a longtime 48 Hours producer, so I like to think I know a thing or three about killers.

Speaker 3 In this episode, Peter Van Sant and I will take a deep dive into two interviews he did with convicted killers, teenagers who murdered three people for money and the thrill of it back in 1994.

Speaker 3 A decade later, they agreed to be interviewed exclusively by Peter for 48 hours.

Speaker 4 Did you hold that bat in your hands and kill those three people? No, I didn't.

Speaker 3 Sebastian Burns has been described as the mastermind who used a metal baseball bat to kill his buddy Atif Raffay's mother, father, and sister while Atif stood by.

Speaker 4 Atif, did you and Sebastian Burns meticulously plan the murder of your family?

Speaker 5 Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 Hi, Peter. Good to see you again.
Thanks so much for joining me. So this was such a high-profile case.
You covered it twice for 48 hours and wrote a book about it. Tell us how you got involved.

Speaker 4 Sometimes it's the simplest of ways. The house where this occurred was about a mile and a half from the house where I grew up in.
This was in Bellevue, Washington.

Speaker 4 And a great source that I'd used over the years, my mother, called to tell me about it. And I immediately did everything I could to try to land this assignment.

Speaker 4 So from the very beginning, it was, I had really kind of a personal stake in this.

Speaker 3 I think I know the answer to this question, but I want to hear you say it. What was it about this case?

Speaker 4 Oh, man, this story had everything. You've got two best friends.
They're young. They're meticulous plotters, vicious, heartless characters that some fiction writer could not have come up with.

Speaker 4 The two of them met in high school in Vancouver, Canada. And in all the years I had lived in Bellevue, there had never been an unsolved murder case.

Speaker 3 So both of these boys were Canadian citizens at the time, right? I mean, the Raffais were living in Washington, but they were Canadians.

Speaker 3 So this case drew international attention, and yet you were the only journalist who Sebastian and Atif agreed to interview with. How did you get that interview? Why 48 hours?

Speaker 4 Well, first, 48 does have a great reputation of honestly telling these stories and wanting to hear from both sides and respecting the whole process.

Speaker 4 But it has to go back to my producers on this one, Jenna Jackson, Guyanne Kashishian, and Nancy Kramer,

Speaker 4 who lived, dedicated their lives. This six-month-long trial, we had someone there virtually every day.
And so they met the defense attorneys. They developed relationships.

Speaker 4 They met Sebastian's parents. And Atifs, of course, were dead.
And they developed some trust. And as a Seattle, that connected with a lot of people.
I grew up there. I knew the area.

Speaker 4 I knew Vancouver, Canada really well. And I think all of that.
came together and we managed to land the interviews.

Speaker 3 Amazing. I know what that's like to sit through long trials and gain everyone's trust.

Speaker 3 So they are both remorseless killers, but so different. Sebastian seems diabolical.
Atif is so aloof. How did you prepare for two very different interviews?

Speaker 4 Well, in both cases, you know, we had the the ability to dig into these police reports. We watched the undercover videos, which were haunting.

Speaker 4 We interviewed investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys. You know, they all were very open with sharing information with us, and I can't thank them enough.

Speaker 4 Sebastian was cocky and condescending, and people said he was the mastermind, and he just would look at you and couldn't help it, but look down upon you, even though he's wearing an orange jumpsuit, even though he's the one behind bars.

Speaker 4 I was the fool in the room, I felt, when I was talking to him, and I knew knew I had to be direct and really well prepared because he would correct me on any fact.

Speaker 4 Atif was his devoted follower. He was a very soft-spoken intellectual

Speaker 4 who, if you believe what investigators have concluded in this case, he stood by while his best friend in the world savagely beat his family to death. with a baseball bat.

Speaker 4 So I honestly didn't know what to expect with him because when you first greet him, he's very well-mannered. But as you get into a conversation, he loves to turn it into verbal combat.

Speaker 4 And he wants to impress you with

Speaker 4 his array of weapons

Speaker 4 with the English language. And so it's fascinating to sit with him.
And he found that to be almost a contest.

Speaker 4 A debate in a way that he, in his mind, he could never lose.

Speaker 3 You talked to them separately in the jail where they were awaiting sentencing. Tell me about that day.

Speaker 4 It was so weird. It was a vibe that I have never encountered in any other

Speaker 4 interview with a killer. Arrogance just filled the air, no remorse, not taking any responsibility for these horrors.
Occasionally they would smile in a way that was exasperating.

Speaker 4 I mean, I even said at one time in the interview to Sebastian, what do you think this is funny? Because he'd have a smile on his face.

Speaker 4 And so in that way, it was a real out-of-body experience for me as a journalist.

Speaker 4 Did you ever think to yourself that because of your superior intelligence, the rules of society did not apply to you?

Speaker 4 No, and I really didn't sincerely think in those terms at all.

Speaker 4 As he put it, my superior intelligence.

Speaker 4 Like I said, I used to make a lot of wise cracks. And

Speaker 4 No, I didn't think like that.

Speaker 3 How would you describe Sebastian in a word?

Speaker 4 I have to use words, unfortunately, but handsome, charming when he chose to be, smart, someone who could have accomplished great things in life.

Speaker 4 Sebastian, he became a member of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. And there's this picture of him getting an award by Prince Edward, you know, and his parents were so proud.

Speaker 4 He expected to be a lawyer in life, he said, because he loved to be so argumentative. He He was raised

Speaker 4 in a really great home, a very sophisticated upper middle-class family. Mom and dad were very well educated.
They lived in West Vancouver, British Columbia. It was a very, very desirable neighborhood.

Speaker 4 It was a place where Sebastian and his sister Tiffany, they'd wake up the parents in the morning on Christmas morning playing their cellos, you know, a Christmas. song to to wake them up.

Speaker 4 Sister Tiffany was a real successful woman in her own right. She was a television reporter and anchor at the CBS station in Cleveland and working her way up in a very promising career.

Speaker 3 How would you describe Atif in a word?

Speaker 4 Compliant. That's the way he was with

Speaker 4 Sebastian.

Speaker 3 Atif had been accepted at Cornell University, which is currently ranked number 11 in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
He was impressive and he knew it.

Speaker 4 And I know you've heard this many times, but the notion is two arrogant, smug, self-absorbed young men who saw themselves as intellectually superior planned the perfect murder so that you could financially benefit from it and achieve the things, in your own words, that you wanted to achieve in life.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I know. It's such a compelling tabloid narrative, but like many tabloid narratives, it's fatuous and foolish and false.
And

Speaker 5 it's

Speaker 5 that particular line about achieving the things that I want to do in life, I think that if any discerning person looks at that, they will see the empty abstractions of someone who is trying to come up with some kind of justification for something that he didn't do and couldn't justify.

Speaker 3 My goodness, his smugness is palpable and he has a smile on his face the whole time. What made these two friends, Peter?

Speaker 4 I guess

Speaker 4 there are similarities in intellect, but they're the odd couple. One was the leader, one was the follower.
They were both quirky.

Speaker 4 They

Speaker 4 gravitated toward each other in high school. Both were fans of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was Hitler's favorite philosopher, by the way.
Nietzsche

Speaker 4 had this theory of Übermensch, the superman who could impose his own morality, his own will upon the weak through strength and dominance.

Speaker 4 I think they saw themselves as supermen.

Speaker 3 Were there any signs when they were in high school that either of them might be capable of a crime like this?

Speaker 4 Yeah, when we were doing interviews in Vancouver, there was a woman we spoke to who was a good friend of Sebastian's, in fact, a girlfriend.

Speaker 4 And she told authorities, Sebastian had told her, that he wanted to know what it was like to kill someone.

Speaker 4 Are you saying that you are incapable of committing murder? Yes, absolutely. You are.
Then how do you explain what you said to your friend, Nazgul Schifty, six months before these murders?

Speaker 4 I'd like to kill somebody someday. I think I'd like to know what it feels like.
I think I might find it rather enjoyable.

Speaker 4 That was a sarcasm that I made. First of all, I want to be clear.
That's not a verbatim quote. Nobody knows what the verbatim quote is.

Speaker 4 That was a sarcasm that was made at some point when I was 17 years old. I was reminded of it for the first time just this last March.
Okay?

Speaker 3 Why would he even say a thing like that? Like, who says a thing like that? What was he testing her?

Speaker 4 Yeah, look, this girlfriend, that quote was burned into her mind. She was very bright.
And I think that was maybe a word or two off. But

Speaker 4 note the analysis he has to give us about

Speaker 4 it's not exactly verbatim, but she was absolutely certain that's what it what what he said. And it also sent a chill up her spine.

Speaker 4 But also as an uber mensch, he could say and do whatever he wanted to.

Speaker 4 And get this, in the high school yearbook, Sebastian had described himself as a titan with furious contempt for the petty strictures of plebeians.

Speaker 4 And Atif wrote, Hearing the cries of the plebs below, Atif descended through the clouds and gazed bemusedly at the petty struggles of those around him and laughed.

Speaker 4 Again, brilliant immaturity, wordplay, used for shock.

Speaker 3 Okay, let's talk about the murders. According to authorities, sometime in the late evening of July 12th, 1994, Sebastian used a metal baseball bat to bludgeon Atif's parents and his sister.

Speaker 3 While Atif basically stood by, he may even have been watching at some points. You've seen a lot of crime scene photos, Peter.
We both have. How do you think these compare?

Speaker 4 These crime scene pictures were among the most gruesome I had ever seen, particularly Atif's father. The first picture I saw was of Sultana Rafae, Atif's mother.

Speaker 4 Who would have known that Sultana at that time of day would have been down unpacking boxes because they had moved into this new house? Latif would know that.

Speaker 4 And it's believed that she was attacked first. Her head was crushed from behind.
She probably had no idea that this killer was approaching her. She's lying on her stomach.

Speaker 4 Fascinating that, too, that her head was covered in a scarf.

Speaker 4 And investigators will tell you that when a killer knows the victim, and particularly if it's someone close to them, that they often cover the head because they just don't want to look in the face.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 And so we move on then upstairs. The killer then moved upstairs, and Tariq, Atif's father, 56 years old at the time, he was sleeping on his back back

Speaker 4 and his head was pulverized by several dozen blows, at least,

Speaker 4 investigators believe. And this was as savage a rage killing as I have ever seen.

Speaker 4 The third one was Basma. She's 20 years old.
Why would they save Basma for last? Well, she couldn't talk.

Speaker 4 And she was autistic.

Speaker 4 And the killer entered her room. And this turned into a bit of a struggle because she was physically strong, and she was running and trying to get away and was being hit.

Speaker 4 And one neighbor heard, and this is so disturbing, what he described as a mooing sound coming from inside the Raffay house. And we know today,

Speaker 4 and investigators believe, that noise was Bosma crying out as she fought for her life.

Speaker 4 When investigators got into the room, they noticed she had defensive wounds all over her hands.

Speaker 4 Her skull had been smashed in, and many of her teeth had been knocked out. So this was a terrifying, horrible, drawn-out

Speaker 4 death for Bosma.

Speaker 3 So incredibly brutal. I mean, one of the detectives said somebody went off the deep end and once they started killing either enjoyed it or couldn't stop themselves.

Speaker 3 Two neighbors even heard the pounding of the bat.

Speaker 4 Yeah, one thought they were must be putting up big paintings because they were having to hit the wall so hard.

Speaker 3 Why would Sebastian be so brutal about these killings?

Speaker 4 This is something that I don't really have the answer for this one.

Speaker 4 People have often wondered, and the investigators did on this, considering what Sebastian had talked about killing and wondering what it was like that this was a thrill killer. Right.

Speaker 4 We know that Sebastian had starred in a high school play called Rope, which was turned into a movie.

Speaker 3 One of my favorite films.

Speaker 4 Mine too, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The play and his film are about two young friends, much like Sebastian and Atif, who strangle a friend with a rope for the thrill of it.

Speaker 3 Right, to see what it's like.

Speaker 4 And so there's similarities between what what he acted out on stage and what was occurring in that house.

Speaker 3 Okay, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about why prosecutors think Sebastian and Atif committed these horrible murders.
The answer is chilling on so many levels.

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Speaker 3 The senior deputy prosecutor on the case against Sebastian Burns and Atif Raffay called the murders absolutely savage. What reason did they have to commit these gruesome murders?

Speaker 4 Well, we know Sebastian had expressed an interest in killing someone someday to see what it felt like. And in this case,

Speaker 4 Atif's parents had some money and they had life insurance as well. And I think money did play a role in this.
And Atif had this difficult relationship with his father who was deeply religious.

Speaker 4 And he'd also expressed kind of a resentment of his autistic sister, Basma. He called her gross and said he never really liked her.

Speaker 4 And prosecutors said that he would mock and he would mimic her in front of her.

Speaker 4 So money,

Speaker 4 that to me, I think is at the heart of this. I think you're right.

Speaker 4 And with Atif saying at one point that he wanted to be able to live the life he wanted to live and the money would allow him to do that. Right, right.

Speaker 3 You asked Atif about his relationship with his family and his answer left me cold.

Speaker 4 How would you describe your relationship with your parents?

Speaker 5 I was closer to my mom than probably anyone I ever have been or will ever be close to.

Speaker 5 I loved both my parents. I admired my father.

Speaker 5 I had we had a

Speaker 5 I mean at the same time we had

Speaker 5 all kinds of arguments

Speaker 5 which I enjoyed having and which I suspect they enjoyed having as well.

Speaker 5 We had

Speaker 5 I guess I mean it's hard to sum up the relationship that a person has with one's parents because it's

Speaker 5 in one sense

Speaker 5 the closest and most basic sort of relationship that you'll ever have. It constitutes who you are as a human being.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I mean.

Speaker 4 Did you love your mom and dad? Yes. Yes.
Did you love your sister?

Speaker 5 I would have to say that I didn't really have a relationship with my sister.

Speaker 5 And so I think that if I were to say that I loved my sister, I would sort of be demeaning the feelings that I had for my parents.

Speaker 3 That is so strange.

Speaker 3 And he was very honest about not loving his sister. What were you thinking in that moment?

Speaker 4 It's just a coldness that

Speaker 4 if you dehumanize, it's easier to kill.

Speaker 3 Okay, so these murders were very well thought out, clearly not well enough to keep them out of prison, but there was a lot of planning that went into these murders. What was the plan?

Speaker 4 The idea was to be out for the evening in a very noticeable way because they went to a restaurant called the Keg. By the way, Keg is, you know, five miles from where I grew up.
I went there

Speaker 4 while I was covering this case just to have dinner there and see the place.

Speaker 4 And that's in Factoria, Washington, which is right off the interstate near Bellevue. That's where the movie complex was, where they went to see the Lion King.

Speaker 4 And a waiter would later tell police that he remembered the two underage Canadians trying to order wine. So they did something that would draw attention where they'd have to show ID, right?

Speaker 4 And then when they get to the movie theater, when Sebastian was buying his movie tickets, he goes, hey, you like my shirt? And his shirt had a big cartoon character, some Milkman character on it.

Speaker 4 And the ticket taker remembered Sebastian. Yeah, this.
odd guy said, hey, take a look at my t-shirt. Again, he's registering in people's minds.
He's creating a memory that he was there.

Speaker 4 And Atif was wearing an army jacket. Once inside the movie theater, people said that they were obnoxious.
They were drawing attention to themselves. They were talking loudly.

Speaker 4 At one point, one of them went up to the screen and tried to pull the movie curtains apart. Again, get everyone's attention.
Yeah, I remember those guys. I saw them there.

Speaker 4 Then after they snuck out, they committed the crimes. Investigators believe that after the murder, the boys went out on this

Speaker 4 tour of eateries to

Speaker 4 try to draw attention to themselves as much as they could. So people would remember them if investigators came to question employees.

Speaker 4 And their first stop was a diner where they paid with a $10 bill for basically about a $3 meal and leaving a $7 tip. And the waitress remembered them.

Speaker 4 And they end up also then going out to a nightclub that was closing at 2 a.m. and they demanded to be let in, but they were not.

Speaker 4 Again, people would remember, yeah, those two boys, they were shouting at us, let us into the club.

Speaker 4 Everywhere they went, they wanted to create a memory with an employee that if authorities came and remember over and over, the police questioned the neighbors in the hopes that they would change their timelines.

Speaker 4 Because for investigators, this was a big problem.

Speaker 4 On one side of the Raffae house, there was a woman named Julie, and she was a very meticulous woman who every night went through a routine that began at a certain time, where, as I recall, she put in a load of wash and

Speaker 4 then put it in the dryer, and then she would read for a particular amount of time, usually even the same amount of pages each night.

Speaker 4 And she would look at her clock and she would go to bed at exactly the same time.

Speaker 4 And based on her story,

Speaker 4 the boys were at that movie theater at the time that she was an ear witness to the murders inside the Raffae house. When she heard all of this noise coming from there, the boys weren't there.

Speaker 4 They were at the movie theater. And that is not disputed.

Speaker 3 So she heard pounding at a time when those boys were allegedly spotted at the movie theater.

Speaker 4 Yeah, this is before any of the encounters with the waitresses and everything else.

Speaker 4 She never changed her timeline, but investigators just simply said, well, we're going to say and we'll say in court that we just think she's wrong.

Speaker 4 She just had her times wrong, even though she won't change them, that she was wrong. But it created an opening for the defense.

Speaker 3 And there was another neighbor who heard it and believed it was also at the same time.

Speaker 3 So Sebastian and Atif claimed they entered the Raffay family home at around 2 a.m. and that Sebastian was the first to see Atif's mother lying in a pool of blood.

Speaker 3 They admit that they never touched her, they didn't even bother to see if she was still alive or try to help her.

Speaker 4 How do you know she's still not breathing? How do you not turn her over to check if she's breathing? To see if there's something you could do? I don't know.

Speaker 4 I don't know. And

Speaker 4 I don't know. And maybe that was a really cowardly thing to do.
It was just a reflex.

Speaker 4 I cannot describe to you how shocking it was. Just how completely

Speaker 4 confounding it was.

Speaker 4 And there was nothing sensical about my reaction at all.

Speaker 4 It's been alleged you didn't want to touch the body because you didn't want to get blood on you.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 that would wreck your alibi, would wreck the stage that you had set there

Speaker 4 to fool police.

Speaker 4 That's completely wrong.

Speaker 3 I mean, if you're not the killer, you're trying to save that person, right? You don't care if you get blood on you.

Speaker 4 Right, right, absolutely.

Speaker 3 During the investigation, Sebastian was caught on tape saying that he was naked when he committed the murders. What's that all about?

Speaker 4 Well, think about it. If you're wearing clothes, you're going to get blood spatter on those clothing.
That can turn into evidence.

Speaker 4 And investigators concluded fairly early on, and this is just one of the bizarre things, never heard of this before in any murder case I've covered, that the killer stepped into the shower and took a shower.

Speaker 4 And what did investigators find in that shower stall? On the drain, there were 21 hairs recovered, and they were all from Sebastian Burns.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 walls of of the shower had blood on them. It was Tessa, and that was Tariq Raffaez, Atif's dad.

Speaker 4 But what killer would step in to take a shower, particularly if it was a stranger, because that killer would have known, hmm, Atif's not here. He could come home.

Speaker 4 I better get out of this house as quickly as possible. Good point.
What killer would step in to take a shower if that killer didn't know there wasn't anyone left to come home?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 4 Because Atif was there. He He was alive.
He was already there. And he was one of the two killers.

Speaker 3 So they discover Atif's mother and then Sebastian calls 911. When the police arrived,

Speaker 3 Atif's sister, Basma, was still alive. They could hear her moaning.
The boys would have heard her too, and you asked them why they didn't try to save Basma's life. Let's listen to Atif.

Speaker 4 Your sister was in the other room. You knew she was injured.
You could hear her moaning. How do you not go in and give first aid? You could have saved your sister's life.

Speaker 5 Well, for one, I don't really know first aid, and I didn't even think of it.

Speaker 4 I didn't even. You're a bright guy.
If someone's bleeding, you know how to stop bleeding, right? You're right.

Speaker 4 You know that for the average person, it sounds terrible that you didn't go in there. It sounds like you wanted her to die.

Speaker 5 Well, I suppose that if I had planned these murders, I would certainly certainly have rushed in and made heroic efforts to save her.

Speaker 5 Unfortunately, I had not planned these murders. I didn't commit these murders, and Sebastian didn't either.
And

Speaker 5 I acted in a cowardly and shameful way, which I felt ashamed of even in the days immediately following, and have never since

Speaker 5 ceased feeling shameful of.

Speaker 5 But those were my reactions under pressure, I guess.

Speaker 3 Oh, Peter, where to start? It was a decision. It wasn't a decision.
If he had planned the murders, but unfortunately, he didn't plan the murders. Is this a confession of sorts?

Speaker 4 I'm not quite sure. I mean, so in other words, yeah, I did, he uh planned it, Sebastian did.
I would have done a much better job.

Speaker 4 Uh, it's it's stupid that that answer is so clumsy and so void of of humanity.

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Speaker 3 Okay, so Peter, police focused on the boys from the very beginning. Why?

Speaker 4 Well, let's go down the list. You know, they discovered the bodies.
The murders didn't look like a robbery gone bad.

Speaker 4 They both talked about there must have been a break, and there were no signs of any forced entry at the house. There was an overkill situation.
No burglar would do something like that.

Speaker 4 And cops became even more suspicious when the night after the murder, Sebastian and Atif were spotted at a local video store renting movies.

Speaker 4 They didn't seem at all phased by the gruesome murder scene they had discovered. And police were also struck by how many details they remembered about their night out on the town.

Speaker 4 Remember all the waitresses and all the things. But they couldn't recall what they did when they got home and found Atif's family beaten to death.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they weren't exactly acting like teenagers who were in a state of shock. So let's talk about the defense for a minute.

Speaker 3 The boys and their defense team believed that Atif's father was assassinated and that his wife and daughter were collateral damage. What can you tell us about that?

Speaker 4 Well, Atif's father, Tariq, he was prominent and active in the local Muslim community, and he offended more conservative Muslims. And how is that?

Speaker 4 Well, as an engineer, Tariq Rafay, he calculated true East and determined that all the mosques in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada were not properly facing Mecca.

Speaker 4 You know, and Muslims must pray toward Mecca. And this is crucial.

Speaker 4 And so he said everyone was going to have to move their prayer mats one degree. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but for some, this could be blasphemous.
This could be how,

Speaker 4 how dare you? You're telling us that we've been praying in the wrong direction.

Speaker 4 And Bellevue police ended up getting three tips that the murders may have been related to fundamentalists who wanted Tariq and his family dead.

Speaker 4 A Canadian officer told them that an informant had warned him that there was a hit out on an East Indian family in Bellevue. Now, the Rafay family, they're not East Indians.
They're from Pakistan.

Speaker 4 But still, the context and the nature of that tip is strongly suggesting that

Speaker 4 they could have been the targets.

Speaker 3 Right. Also, the Seattle Police Intelligence Division reported that they believed the family may have been killed by an extremist group called Al-Fukrah.

Speaker 3 And an FBI informant told them that he knew an imam who ordered the murders and knew a man who said he committed the murders.

Speaker 3 He said he even saw a baseball bat in the trunk of his car and believed that that was the murder weapon.

Speaker 3 The cuts hadn't even publicized that the weapon was a metal baseball bat yet.

Speaker 4 I mean, all this is just so intriguing.

Speaker 3 It seems like the Bellevue police kind of like blew that all off. Do you think it's possible that they just didn't pay attention to that at all?

Speaker 4 I believe with all that has happened in the world, this would be checked out. And at the time, I think it wasn't properly checked out.

Speaker 3 On the day that Atif Rafay's parents and his sister were laid to rest, Atif was nowhere to be found.

Speaker 3 He and his buddy Sebastian Burns were on a bus on their way to Sebastian's home in Vancouver, Canada.

Speaker 4 My dad was very worried about what the Bellevue police were doing.

Speaker 4 He'd called a friend of his who was a lawyer. He told his friend some of the things that the police had been saying to him.
And it was pretty clear that the police were treating us as suspects.

Speaker 4 His friend, who was a lawyer, said, if it was my kid, I'd drive down there tonight and pick him up myself.

Speaker 4 My dad asked me, did I want him to come and drive down that night and pick him up myself after he told me that? And I told him, no, it's okay. We'll catch a bus back the next day.

Speaker 4 But he was very concerned that we'd come back to Canada as soon as possible.

Speaker 3 How did the Bellevue police feel about their prime suspects fleeing the country?

Speaker 4 This is a part of the story that really drives me freaking crazy.

Speaker 4 They didn't have

Speaker 4 any basis to continue holding them. They'd been interviewed numerous times.
And the truth is they didn't flee. These boys didn't flee.

Speaker 4 A representative from the Canadian consulate informed the Bellevue Police of their plans that the boys would be picked up by their father and taken back to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Speaker 4 And they said, is that all right? And they were told, yes, it's all right. She then tells the boys, this consulate officer tells the boys it's okay to go, and they leave.

Speaker 4 That is many things in this world, but that is not fleeing.

Speaker 3 But the media reported it as them fleeing, which did not make them look good. So there wasn't enough evidence to hold them.

Speaker 3 When they got to Canada, did Sebastian's family believe that the boys were innocent?

Speaker 4 Oh, absolutely. They believed this was an impossibility that this could have happened.

Speaker 4 They believed they were innocent and they were just being set upon by a police department in a wealthy community that was under enormous pressure to solve this case.

Speaker 3 But again, the boys didn't really help themselves at all. They behaved very badly.
They used money from the Raffae family estate to rent and then buy a Mustang convertible and go on a road trip.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and there was a memorial service for the Raffay family in Vancouver.

Speaker 4 It was covered by media from around the world and the boys were there and they decided to, when they came out of the mosque, to to run to a car and they were laughing and covering up their faces and it was just a shocking, shocking moment.

Speaker 4 What was so funny, Atif

Speaker 5 I guess, you know, it was the media that was funny and it was it was the sheer grotesqueness of, I mean, these were people who were literally chasing me down to ask me why won't you cooper cooperate with the police

Speaker 5 I guess the sheer gall I suppose of being chased down at a memorial service and asked questions by reporters who really cared nothing I suspect for my family for the murders for anything but getting a rise essentially out of me

Speaker 5 it just

Speaker 5 It just seemed absolutely grotesque and I suppose I couldn't help laughing at it.

Speaker 3 You know, when I watched the clips of that memorial service, it looked to me like Sebastian gave the finger to one of the camera crews. And they just looked like rock stars walking into some venue.

Speaker 3 It was just bizarre. But, you know, what's interesting is to some people, they actually look like traumatized teenagers.

Speaker 3 Some people people believe that if they were trying to get away with murder, they would have been crying and acting, you know, upset and

Speaker 3 weeping at the grave sites, not acting like the idiots that they were acting like.

Speaker 3 Do you think they were in shock?

Speaker 4 Well, there was a behavioral expert who was ready to testify for the defense, but this man was never called.

Speaker 4 And he said that this goofy, bizarre behavior is actually common in extremely traumatic events with boys whose brains aren't yet fully formed, that you'll get that kind of behavior.

Speaker 3 So no matter what people believed about these boys, they became clearly notorious. It seems like everybody knew who they were and what they were suspected of doing.

Speaker 4 I mean, Sebastian testified that

Speaker 4 he now is almost like the best, he and Atif were the best known men in British Columbia because of all the media coverage. He couldn't get a job and he couldn't go back to college.

Speaker 4 And Atif couldn't get back to school due to the attention of this case.

Speaker 4 So they ended up, they rent a house in Vancouver with two high school friends, including a close friend who ends up playing an important role in this case, Jimmy Miyoshi.

Speaker 4 And they would play loud music all night long. People would call the RCMP the

Speaker 3 Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And the RCMP at this point decides, you know, let's open up our own investigation.

Speaker 3 Right. And so they decide to bug the house that the boys were living in.
They also bugged Sebastian's cell phone. And

Speaker 3 yeah, and they realized that they were smart boys and that they had to be smarter than the boys. So they used

Speaker 3 what was called in Canada at that point, the Mr. Big operation.

Speaker 4 Detective Bob Thompson told us you had committed the perfect murder. There was no evidence at the house linking you to this crime.

Speaker 4 And if you hadn't gone back to Canada and gotten involved in this undercover operation,

Speaker 4 you never would have been arrested. Do you think about that?

Speaker 5 Oh, I think about that often.

Speaker 3 And that sting operation would prove to be the boy's undoing. That's next time on Killer Conversation.

Speaker 3 48 Hours Killer Conversation is hosted and produced by me, Judy Ryback. Our story editor is Maura Walls.

Speaker 3 Alan Pang oversees recording, mixing, and sound design, fact-checking, and additional production support from Rebecca LaFlum.

Speaker 3 And special thanks to 48 Hours executive producer Judy Tygard and Paramount Podcast Vice President Megan Marcus.

Speaker 3 Follow and listen to Killer Conversation on the Free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you liked this episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Speaker 3 Follow Killer Conversation on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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