“Was Greed Motive In Rafay Slayings? — Suspects Didn't Adopt Life Of Luxury”
Susan Byrnes, Seattle Times 6/08/95

The only evidence of the high life at the run-down, wood-frame house where Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns lived for the past year is a shiny black 1995 Mustang convertible in the driveway.

A mattress on the roof, a rabbit in a cage on the cluttered balcony and a yard that has never been tended, neighbors say, are truer clues to how the young men lived for the past year.

"The place is a disaster," said Mike Thompson, who lives across the street from the rental house in a North Vancouver, B.C., neighborhood. "It looks like a slum."

Rafay and Burns, both 19, face three counts of aggravated murder in the bludgeoning deaths of Rafay's parents and sister last summer in Bellevue. King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng said the two killed Tariq, Sultana and Basma Rafay with an aluminum baseball bat out of "greed, pure and simple" in hopes of sharing $350,000 inherited from the Rafay estate.

But relatives and acquaintances said there were few signs that material possessions were ever of great interest to the young men. Aside from the newly purchased convertible, neighbors added, there was nothing flashy about Burns and Rafay.

"They were in T-shirts and jeans all the time," said Ellen Bjornsen, who lives next door. "There was garbage all out front and a Dumpster sitting out there filled with junk."

Charging papers allege the young men acknowledged the money motive in a tape obtained during an undercover operation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "They expected to profit from the sale of the Rafay residence and from the family's life insurance policies," the charges allege.

"Defendant Burns seemed somewhat chagrined by the defendants' failure to realize a greater profit from the murders and admitted that in retrospect, the financial inducement had been rather trivial," prosecutors continued.

Bellevue Police spokesman Jack McDonald would not elaborate on how police concluded the motive was greed except to say that inheritance remained the most plausible explanation throughout the yearlong investigation.

"Atif never called to ask how the investigation was going," McDonald said. "Instead, he asked his attorney to call and ask what's going on with the house."

Relatives still reeling from the arrest of Tariq Rafay's only son are struggling to deal with the possibility their loved ones were killed for money.

"It's not a big amount," said Atif's uncle Tahir Rafay. "Would somebody murder for $350,000?"

At the time of the slayings, the Rafay estate in the United States was worth an estimated $200,000, according to Rafay's probate attorney, Jo Frey. That included a life-insurance policy of $120,000, equity in the house worth $50,000 and a savings account of about $30,000, Frey said.

She estimated that an additional life-insurance policy in Canada was worth more than $100,000. Rafay's probate attorney in Vancouver refused to say whether his client had received any money.

About $20,000 of the U.S. estate was squandered on mortgage payments while the house sat empty, first during police investigations, then during repairs, Frey said. The house was also discounted by $10,000 when it was listed for sale because of the nature of the crime committed there.

Money from the savings account was used to pay funeral expenses, household bills and a deductible for Basma Rafay's brief stay at the hospital, where she died.

Because the house had not sold and the U.S. estate was still unsettled, Atif Rafay had received almost nothing when he was arrested Monday, except minimal living expenses from the savings account. Under state law, if found to have willfully contributed to the deaths of those he stood to inherit from, he would inherit nothing.

Neighbors guessed that Rafay sold the family's Honda and Toyota to purchase the new Mustang, since the older cars were no longer at the house.

Frey, who talked to Atif Rafay dozens of times in the past year, said he hardly seemed rushed to sign papers or send bills.

"On the contrary," Frey said. "Sometimes he'd sit on stuff for a month. It was very frustrating. He never did really indicate he was in any hurry."

Rafay's freshman roommate at Cornell University, Dan Hutchison, said his friend never talked about cars or travel or fancy clothes.

"Atif was not into money for the sake of money," said Hutchison, who attended high school with Burns and Rafay in West Vancouver. "That's the last thing he would do something for, material possessions.

"He wanted to be a movie producer," Hutchison said. "He basically spent most of his time talking about that and watching movies all day."

Hutchison said Burns was also a movie buff and the two may have planned to produce a movie together one day. Atif's uncle, Tahir Rafay, said that several months after the slayings, Atif mentioned he would like to travel to Pakistan to make a movie.

"Atif was a very brilliant student," another uncle, Arif Rafay, said by phone from his home in eastern Canada. "He would've earned a lot of money himself in a very short time."

Relatives said Atif Rafay's father was careful with money, but that the teenager never had to work and his family always provided whatever he needed.

"He wanted a computer and he got a computer," Tahir Rafay said. "I don't think he was deprived."

If he was unhappy with his lot in life, relatives said, Atif Rafay never complained.

As painful as it was to hear prosecutors assign greed as the motive, relatives said, the theory wasn't impossible to fathom.

"It's not millions," Tahir Rafay said of his older brother's estate. "But money has been a problem for centuries. Right from the beginning of mankind there was greed."