Honour on Trial (3 page)

"I can see right down the line where the parking lot is," Miller told the court. "They would be driving back more or less in front of me." Why, he wondered, would two late-night travellers book two rooms for six people and then, why, almost immediately, would one of them drive off into the night again?

Miller and his wife were up at 5:45 that morning. He had a coffee and a cigarette before settling into the routine of the day. Motel guests began to check out and housekeeper Christine Bolarinho arrived to clean the rooms.

At about 8:30, Mohammad Shafia, the older man, appeared at the office asking to buy a $10 phone card so he could make a long-distance call. Shafia asked Miller if he could place the call for him from the office to a number with a 514 area code — the exchange for Montreal. Miller called but got a cellphone message and told Shafia there was no answer. He wrote on a piece of paper the directions for placing calls from the rooms.

Shortly afterward, Miller left to go into Kingston. When he got back, the housekeeper told him there was still no activity in rooms 18 and 19 and the 11 am checkout time was fast approaching. Miller went down to room 19. Mohammad Shafia came outside and asked if they could have the room for another half hour because their son was coming to pick them up. Miller looked into the room and saw a dark-haired woman, likely in her 40s, lying down facing the window, her head at the foot of the bed. He didn't see anyone else in the room.

The SUV the men had arrived in the night before was not in the parking lot. Miller was working on the playground equipment when he noticed a "van-type vehicle come to the motel and park in front of 18 and 19."

Throughout the morning, Christine Bolarinho noticed people peeking out through the curtains of room 19. Every time she went by she could see the face of Mohammad Shafia, who would quickly pull the curtains shut. Bolarinho said this behaviour was repeated at least half a dozen times. Finally, she knocked on the door and talked to the woman, asking if they needed towels or any other amenities. This was Tooba Mohammad Yahya.

"She replied, no, her son was sleeping. Possibly after he showered they would need towels."

Later, Bolarinho said she saw a teenaged boy come out of the other room, number 18, around the same time a minivan arrived in the parking lot. A young girl, described by the housekeeper as about eight years old, came out of room 19. Bolarhino smiled and spoke to her, but the mother told her to go back into the room.

"The next thing, I seen the van come into the lot," Bolarhino told the court. "The older gentleman and the boy driving the van went into the office." Bolarhino wandered into the office, too. They were arranging to take the rooms for a second night, but they wanted it at a cheaper price.

"To me they were trying to get a lower rate on the room — the older gentleman [was]. I thought maybe there was a mention of it twice."

Once again, Hamed filled out the motel forms. But this time it was his father who paid — again in cash. Shafia had, indeed, asked if there was a discount. Miller told him no, just the standard rate.

Bolarhino, who had been working at the Kingston East for three years, found the encounters with the Shafias different from those with most other guests. "It was like nobody made eye contact with myself. When they walked by, they were straight ahead, head down," she recalled. "I just found them, not odd, but not typical tourists I dealt with."

Miller was asked at the trial if he had seen anyone else staying in rooms 18 and 19 that day. Just one after the minivan arrived, he said. It was a young girl Miller thought to be about six years old. At some point on the morning of June 30, the van left the motel. Miller didn't see them go and he would not see the vehicle or the guests at the motel again, even though they'd rented the rooms for another night.

The next people occupying rooms 18 and 19 of the Kingston East Motel would be police forensics identification officers.

The report…

BARBARA Webb was the receptionist on duty at the Kingston Police station on June 30, 2009, when three people walked into the spacious, modern foyer around 12:30 pm and approached her glassed-in work area. The two men came forward while the woman hung back in the lobby.

"They came to the front desk to make a missing person report," said Webb.

The younger man, Hamed, did the talking while his father Mohammad listened. "He told me that his two sisters were missing and they were in a Nissan."

Webb already knew about the situation being investigated at Kingston Mills. "As soon as they mentioned it," Webb said, "I asked them to take a seat. I knew [police] had found a vehicle underwater — a Nissan."

Webb asked the Shafias for more information. "The son said, actually, there were four people missing," recalled Webb. Hamed listed his three sisters and "a woman." The young man said something to his father in an undetermined language, "then he said it's his dad's cousin. She's about 50 years old." They told Webb they were staying at a motel on Highway 15 and that "they woke up this morning and the car was gone and the girls were gone."

At around the same time the Shafias arrived at police headquarters, Detective Constable Geoff Dempster was coming in to work. Dempster's scheduled shift was 2 pm to midnight, but he'd gotten a call around noon from Detective Guy Forbes, alerting him to the discovery of a car containing two bodies in the water at Kingston Mills. Dempster's superior officer, Chris Scott, told him to head out to the Mills to conduct interviews. Dempster was headed off by Barbara Webb who told him that Detective Brian Pete was in the foyer talking to three people believed to be connected with the underwater Nissan.

Dempster and Pete decided to bring the family to the victim-witness office where they would have more privacy. "I realized at that point we were going to be making a next of kin notification to them," recalled Dempster.

Hamed was speaking and translating for his parents. He told Dempster they were supposed to check out of the Kingston East Motel at 11 am but that his sisters and their 50-year-old "aunt" had disappeared. Hamed confirmed three digits on the Nissan licence plate.

"Hamed was telling me there were four people missing," said Dempster. The detective decided then he would have to break the bad news to the Shafias that their family members were likely dead. He arranged for a Persian-speaking interpreter to come to the station and translate.

The detective moved quickly to support the Shafias in their time of loss, arranging for volunteers from the victim referral service. The next step would also be difficult, but necessary: to question Mohammad, Hamed, and Tooba and gather as much information as possible about what had transpired over the previous day.

Dempster also learned from Hamed that they had dropped off three other siblings at a Tim Hortons on Highway 15 while they came to make the missing persons report. Hamed and Tooba drove back to get them, returning to the police station just after 2 pm.

Back at the scene…

OUT at Kingston Mills, events were moving rapidly. There was a hole in the usual Kingston Police line-up that day. Detective Mike Boyles, the sergeant in charge of the major crimes unit, was out of town on training. In an unusual turn of events, Chris Scott and the head of the detective division, Inspector Brian Begbie, both drove out to Kingston Mills. "That was so bizarre," Scott would later recall, "[that] a staff sergeant and inspector would both go out to a scene."

As Kingston Police would learn over the next two and a half years, however, there was nothing usual about the Kingston Mills murder case.

Scott and Detective Steve Koopman drove together to the scene at around 11:30 am. By this time the temperature had risen to a cool-but-comfortable 21-22ºC with clear skies and a gentle breeze. Koopman had been working on a murder case but suggested to Begbie that he, too, could help with the field investigation at the Mills. Begbie initially said no, but relented. Koopman would prove to be indispensable to the case, eventually writing a 400-page report tracing the Shafias' cellphone use in the days leading up to the deaths.

Taking control of the scene, Chris Scott began widening the parameters of the investigation. He learned about the two boats that had been moored overnight at the upper dock of Kingston Mills. Both had left before police could question them, heading north to the lockstation at Lower Brewers Mills. Scott ordered the locks at both Kingston and Brewers shut down and dispatched two detectives to intercept the boats.

Unfortunately, those interviews proved unfruitful. Though the people on the sailboat and houseboat had been sleeping just metres away from where the car had gone into the water, they'd heard nothing unusual.

Scott and his team also began assessing the situation based on the information brought to the surface by John Moore. One body could mean that the occupant had lost control of the vehicle and had an unlucky accident. On the other hand, the Quebec licence plate on the black Nissan Sentra might point to bikers from Montreal coming down Highway 401 to dispose of some bodies.

As the body count in the submerged car increased, so did the perimeter that Scott ordered secured around the site. All potential crime scenes are contaminated to some degree. This was a very public place where boaters, tourists, and locals came all hours of the day and night to fish or picnic or watch the boats pass through.

Some of the potential evidence had already been shifted — most notably the plastic letters, S and E, picked up off the stone lock wall and placed by staff on the top of the lock gate. In hindsight, Kingston Police also realized that driving their cruisers through the green gate onto the grassy area next to the lock had been a mistake that could potentially have covered up tracks left in the damp lawn from the night before.

By noon, with the number of confirmed victims still at two, police at Kingston Mills were told that the Shafias had walked into the Kingston Police station and reported four family members and a Nissan Sentra missing. Police knew by then that the car was registered to the Shafias. But where were the other two missing people? The diver had only seen two bodies. Did they float off into the lake? Were they even in the car?

"That's when we started to key in: Where are they?" recalled Koopman.

Late in the afternoon of June 30, Ontario Provincial Police diver Glenn Newell confirmed the third and fourth bodies inside the car. Newell had been on a dive in the Orillia area when he got the call to assist Kingston Police. He arrived at the Mills at 4:10 in the afternoon, was briefed by city police at the scene, then set up a dive plan.

Newell's first request was to have canal staff fill the top lock. The submerged car was outside the lock, butted up against the massive wooden gate. Water was streaming into the lock. He needed it topped up to equalize the pressure on either side of the gate and slow the current passing around the car.

Newell also set up the communications system needed to videotape the underwater scene and allow him to talk through his dive mask, which was wired with a microphone. He suited up and went into the water, carrying the hand-held lens for the video system.

Visibility in Colonel By Lake was about 15 ft that day. Using the camera lens, Newell carefully documented the scene, approaching the car from above. Video images later played in court showed the rear passenger side of the car wedged against the lock gate. The video moves from the dent in the right-front hood and scrapes and a dent on the left-front bumper to the open driver's side front window.

Then a shadowy image of a person's head resting against the door post shows briefly, and Newell takes the camera to the back of the car. The rear left window is down about an inch; the rear left taillight is damaged; then the Quebec licence plate comes into view — 699 ZCD. Swimming back along the passenger side of the car, Newell thought he could see three or four bodies inside.

"They were all piled on top of each other, almost. It was very strange," he said, describing the eerie underwater tableau. "It was difficult to tell which person would have been driving the vehicle."

Newell offered the court the same observation made by navy diver John Moore: "Most cases when you have a window wide open, people are trying to get out. In this case, it didn't seem that was even an option."

The officer, a 24-year veteran with the OPP dive unit, noted that no objects inside the car — including cellphones and a blanket — had gotten outside, an indication that there wasn't much force created by the water entering the cabin of the vehicle. A blue stuffed teddy bear sat in the back window, still and cold and soaked through.

"It didn't sink at any rate of speed or force that would blow everything out of it," he said.

Newell estimated the rate at which the vehicle would have sunk. "When a car sinks, the front end is heaviest. It will sink nose first. Once the car hits the bottom, it slows down the speed [at] which the vehicle sinks," he said, estimating a time of about "a couple of minutes" for the Nissan to fully come to rest on the bottom.

On land, meanwhile, the route the car had followed to its final resting place was becoming even more puzzling for police investigators. They needed to determine right away if the green gate near where the car fell into the water could have been unlocked overnight.

"If that gate was open, it becomes plausible that [the] car had gone through there into the locks," Scott Chris said in an interview following the trial. If the car had entered through that gate, it would support the family's later claim that the four women had gone for a joyride and accidentally found their way into the water.

Police were already one step ahead. "That was addressed at the time," said Scott. "The lock staff were emphatic about [the gate] being locked."

Newell's dive would bring more troubling questions to the surface. For instance, the car was facing the direction from which it appeared to have entered the water. This was odd, said Newell. "The car was in first gear , but to be wedged the way it was, it should have been in reverse." In a Nissan with an automatic transmission, first gear is usually only used on steep or mountainous roads. As well, several times during his court testimony, Newell noted how difficult it was to tell from the positions of the four bodies who would have been driving. None of the women had been wearing seatbelts.