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An inside look into the Shafia case; police tell how the killers were caught.
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The Canadian Press
KINGSTON, Ont. - When the call first came in on the morning of June 30, 2009 about a car in the locks at Ontario's Kingston Mills, police thought they might have a stolen car on their hands, or maybe even a teenage prank.
They had no way of knowing at that moment that inside the car were the bodies of three sisters and their father's first polygamous wife, the victims of an elaborately planned but clumsily executed "honour killing," the details of which would soon shock people across the country.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, were each found guilty Sunday of four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths.
And Kingston police say now it didn't take long for them to become suspicious of the unlikely proposition it was an accident. Once they turned their attention to the Shafias and started digging into their family dynamics, it became clear quite quickly they were dealing with a chilling multiple murder.
The "honour killing" label would come later, as detectives talked to family, friends, boyfriends, social workers and school authorities, and finally as they listened to the rants straight from Shafia's mouth, placing the value of his honour higher than the value of his daughters' lives.
The morning the car was found, Const. Brent White arrived on scene around 10:30. He thought first of pranksters, because he looked at how the lock gate and a wooden beam formed a small triangle, with barely enough clearance for a vehicle to slip through into the water.
"I'm thinking, 'This is pretty difficult to get that vehicle in that narrow spot,'" he testified. "It had to be driven there on purpose."
Then divers went into the canal to scope out the underwater scene and found four bodies floating in the car. They would be identified as sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52.
The case became a sudden death investigation that fell under the coroner's authority, and police officers began to collect information at the scene, including pieces of broken head light that would soon become the key to the whole case.
At the same time, a couple and their 18-year-old son showed up at the Kingston police station to report three daughters and a woman missing. The Shafia family from Montreal had been staying in Kingston for the night at a motel and when they woke up they discovered three teenage sisters and a woman described as their father's cousin were missing, along with their car.
They said their eldest daughter Zainab had taken the car keys and must have taken the other three for a joy ride that somehow turned tragic.
While police were taking statements from Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed — the police had found a Farsi interpreter to help with the parents' interviews — the Nissan Sentra was being hoisted out of the canal, and some of what police found didn't quite fit with the accident scenario.
The car's ignition and lights were off and it was in first gear with the front seats reclined all the way back and the driver's window open. The findings weren't initially indicative of murder, but they were suspicious.
The angle of the seats would make it nearly impossible to drive, and it certainly wouldn't have been comfortable. Even an inexperienced driver would know they should have the gear shift in D for drive. And all indications were the car fell into the water in the middle of the night. Why were the lights off?
As one of the divers pointed out, why did it appear as though nobody tried to escape through the open window?
The only logical possibility, the Crown would later argue at trial, is that the four victims were already dead, drowned first then put in the car to stage an accident.
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