“Detectives' work at issue in slayings.”
Sara Jean Green, Seattle Times

Undercover detectives with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) posed as high-rolling criminals during a monthslong investigation to compile evidence against Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay, two Canadian citizens accused of killing Rafay's parents and sister in Bellevue in July 1994.

According to a defense attorney, the undercover detectives drank with the defendants, took them to strip clubs, threatened to kill them and coerced them into a confession of sorts.

How the RCMP gathered evidence is the crux of the matter for King County Superior Court Judge Charles Mertel who will determine what — if any — evidence will be admitted during the men's aggravated first-degree murder trial.

"One of the issues is, what's allowed here (in evidence gathering) versus what's allowed there" in Canada, Marc Stenchever, one of the attorneys defending Rafay, said during a pretrial hearing yesterday.

During the first day of a hearing that will set the groundwork for what a jury can hear, prosecutors argued that the evidence collected in Canada against the two was to prove they had violated Canadian law — namely that they had conspired in Canada to commit murder and fraud before crossing the border to carry out their plans.

Prosecutors say evidence obtained by the undercover operatives, along with some 4,000 hours of taped conversations, should be admitted because Canadian police initiated their investigation independent of any U.S. law-enforcement agency.

Burns and Rafay both confessed to the killings to undercover detectives, court documents say. An international treaty allows evidence collected in a foreign country to be admitted for a criminal trial here as long as it was collected in accordance with the laws of that country, and the methods of investigation aren't shocking to the judicial system here, court papers say.

Defense attorneys, however, argue that Bellevue police officials enlisted the help of their Canadian counterparts to get evidence through means that would be illegal here, such as bugging the apartment the two men shared in West Vancouver and stealing their car to plant a microphone in it. They also say the RCMP "staged elaborate and sophisticated 'scenarios' " to coerce the two codefendants into making false confessions, according to court documents.

The hearing continues today and tomorrow. Additional pretrial testimony will be heard next month before Mertel rules what evidence will be admitted or suppressed.

Mike Shannon, a retired RCMP corporal, and Gary Bass, the RCMP's assistant commissioner for British Columbia, both testified yesterday that Canadian officials began investigating Rafay and Burns on their own.

The Bellevue triple-slaying case is almost 9 years old — but both defendants have relatively new defense teams. In August, Mertel dismissed Burns' public defender, Theresa Olson, from the case after she was accused of having sex in jail with her client. In April 2002, Rafay asked for, and received, new attorneys because he said he couldn't get along with his old ones.

Burns and Rafay, who were both 18 at the time of the slayings, have been in custody since 1995. Prosecutors said the two high-school classmates from Vancouver, B.C., finished their first year of college, then returned to Bellevue's Somerset neighborhood and killed Rafay's father, mother and sister to cash in on an insurance policy.

The killings occurred July 13, 1994, and Rafay and Burns were each charged with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder a year later.

A trial date is tentatively scheduled for September.