Rafay Family Murders

Has anyone watched or read anything about this case? I watched the first two episodes of The Confession Tapes on Netflix last week and they covered this story. The point of view is clearly biased because the purpose of the the series is to highlight coercive police tactics which might elicit false confessions.

In July of 1994, the Rafay family had recently moved from Vancouver to Washington state. Cornell freshman Atif Rafay came home for a visit to his parents' new home in Seattle with his best friend from high school, Sebastian Burns. According to the two boys, they went out for the evening and when they returned home, Atif's entire family, including his mother, father and disabled sister, had been brutally murdered. The police quickly came to suspect the boys of committing the murders for a variety of reasons, with their odd behavior in the days and weeks after the crime cementing the belief that they were guilty despite a lack of physical evidence.

The boys returned to Canada within days of the murders but the RCMP got permission to perform surveillance on the boys and to launch an elaborate, undercover "Mr. Big" operation, a Canadian police tactic developed in the 1990s which was intended to elicit confessions under unusual circumstances. It would not have been allowed in the US at the time and a confession elicited through the technique would now be inadmissible in Canadian courts as well. At the time, however, it was considered acceptable in Canada so the RCMP spent months working with Sebastian to convince him that they were high level criminals in a large organization which had the power to help them get rid of the physical evidence which the police supposedly had on them, if they were just willing to confess to their new criminal friends exactly what happened on the night of the murder! Sebastian eventually confessed that he murdered everyone with a baseball bat and brought Atif with him the next day to provide his own confession to the undercover cops, where he explained that although he didn't feel very good about it, he decided that he needed it to happen because he wanted the money to build a life for himself.

Aside from the outrageous(ly successful) tactics used by police in this case to elicit a confession, there were a number of unusual and downright sensationalistic aspects to the story, including a long battle in Canadian court against extradition which delayed the start of the criminal trial until ten years after the murders took place, Sebastian playing a lead role in a play during his senior year of high school where two young men plan the perfect murder (which is, coincidentally, committed with the same weapon used to kill Rafay's family), Sebastian getting caught having sex in his prison cell with his court-appointed lawyer during trial preparation, Sebastian telling a a former girlfriend during high school that he wanted to kill someone because he wanted to know what it was like, and the boys writing a screenplay about two teenagers who are wrongfully accused of murder (for which Sebastian supposedly tried to secure financing from the undercover cops). Their story was in the media constantly for months after the crime and both were eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.

I think the tactics used by the police were very unfair, the media coverage was exceptionally prejudicial and the confessions probably should not have been admitted at trial but my first impression in this case is that they actually were guilty. My judgment is probably heavily biased by a gut instinct in regard to their behavior after the crime, including a 911 call which sounds much more like abysmal dramatics than genuine shock, fear or any other emotional reaction you might expect after coming home to a triple murder. The two of them remind me of Eric and Dylan in some ways and after reading so much about Columbine, I can easily imagine two teenage boys who feel superior to everyone else attempting to get away with murder (and it also reminds me of Leopold and Loeb, whose story inspired the play that Sebastian acted in). While I do think that there was enough evidence to establish a motive and a possible opportunity to commit the murders, I also think that there probably wouldn't have been enough to convict them without the confessions. There were also possible credible leads which were not thoroughly investigated and I think that this is a shame because if they were innocent, it could have exonerated them years ago and if they were guilty, it would not be an ambiguous source of "reasonable doubt" which might eventually contribute to the release of two self-serving murderers.

If you don't have Netflix, there is an episode of Dateline which covers the story as well. I have only watched part of it so I can't say which one is more thorough but so far, Dateline seems to be presenting a more balanced point of view.



After looking into the case a bit (and failing dismally at finding most of the case materials), my instinct is that it is more likely than not that they committed the murders. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts on any aspect of this case, but particularly on the question of their guilt.

It sounds interesting. I wish there were more information about people who murder their family members, like Jeremy Bamber or Marcelo Pesseghini for example.