Killer Conversation: Sebastian Burns & Atif Rafay - Part 2
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Before we begin, just a trigger warning. The following episode contains references to graphic physical violence. Please listen with care. Welcome to Killer Conversation, a podcast about the criminal mind. My name is Judy Ryback, and I'm a longtime 48 Hours producer. This is part two of my conversation with Peter Van Sant about his interviews with two convicted killers, Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafai.

Burns and Ruffet were just teenagers when they murdered Ruffet's family, and they might never have been caught were it not for a Canadian sting known as the Mr. Big operation. So, Peter, Mr. Big, what is that? So this was a unit within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an undercover unit that would pose as a organized crime family. And they had the ability, when they had a target,

to get that person entwined in their illegal business, what the target thought would be illegal. One of the undercover officers told me

Peter, we have never had a target who we did not successfully pull into our organized crime family. And he said, I'm talking doctors, lawyers, bankers. They were brilliant at this. And so the house was bugged and an undercover officer hears that Sebastian is going to get his hair cut at a salon in downtown Vancouver.

And they decide this is our moment to make an approach to him. They'd also learned that Sebastian and Atif had been working on a screenplay called The Great Despisers. And it's a story about two young men wrongfully accused of murdering a family. Wow, where did they get that idea, Judy? Where do you think they got that? And so when Sebastian came out of the barber shop...

there was a member of the Mr. Big undercover team waiting who approaches him and says, hey, how's it going? You know, I left my keys in my car here. You know, can you do me a favor? Drive me down to the local hotel. I got an extra set of keys down there. And so the adventure with the Mr. Big team began. Right. They went to a bar and they started talking and forming a relationship. And...

And because they knew about the screenplay, they sort of used that to reel him in, right? Like at some point he said, I know somebody who I think can fund your movie, who can give you money to make your film. Let's go meet him. And that very same night, they went to go meet with Mr. Big, who they called Al, right? Yes. I've met Al. I've interviewed Al in shadow.

All the guys on this undercover team were among the most talented I have ever seen. They looked like character actors out of a Hollywood movie.

And not long after they meet, this mobster Al, Mr. Big, he asked Sebastian to drive a very expensive stolen car from Whistler Mountain outside of Vancouver back to the city. And Sebastian agreed. And after the delivery, Sebastian was paid $200. That made him angry because he wanted a lot more money than that.

But instead of running away from what he thought was a criminal enterprise, Sebastian told them he wanted more money.

Right. This is what, remember I told you, these guys said we always get somebody. Once they see our world, we're able to hook somebody. They know their audience, right? So he and Jimmy Miyoshi, remember his roommate, they agreed to start laundering money for this Mr. Big enterprise. And they were paid $2,000 for that.

oh, these are guys that can't get jobs. They're suddenly raking in the dough. They're going, they're having excitement. They're living on the edge. Right. And Sebastian ends up working for this criminal enterprise for nearly four months. I think we should just clarify that Jimmy Miyoshi was a high school friend who they were living with at the time of the sting operation. So eventually, Sebastian was asked if he was willing to, ready for this, commit murder.

The only reason why I'm talking like that-- if you follow the whole conversation, you'll see he's asking me a lot of questions about how does my conscience handle crime. And this is after he's already confessed to me that he's a murderer himself and after he's also told me that he's worried that I'm a threat to his organization. He's worried that I'm reluctant to work for them. And it was clear that he was worried that I was going to tell them to the police. And the only conceivable purpose-- I told him at this point--

that that wouldn't bother my conscience, but I wouldn't want to do it myself. And he continued to ask me questions. - But you're saying I'd do it, but I wouldn't do it. You're saying, yeah, I'd kill somebody, but you know, I guess I wouldn't kill somebody. Is that what you're saying we should take from that exchange?

Well, what you should take from that exchange is that I was trying to satisfy him that I wasn't going to tell the police what he had just confessed to me. And I also told him, however, that I didn't want to do it. I mean, the sum total— Aren't we getting a glimpse here into the real Sebastian Burns, the man who had murdered a family and is now telling one of these undercover guys—

You're willing to do it again. No, that's completely not true. And if you read the rest of that excerpt, Peter, I think that it will be more clear that what I'm telling him there is that I do not want to do that. So is it true? Did he try to walk away? Did he ever say no to anything? No, he stays. He says because he was afraid of what they would do to him if he didn't.

But we already know that he is delighted. They've heard on these bugging devices. He's delighted by the money that's coming in.

So they tell the boys that they've heard that there's evidence against them in the case in Washington, right? They have a memo that they show them that says that police found hairs and DNA and blood evidence that's going to turn the whole case around. And they tell the boys that they can help get rid of that evidence, right?

This is really convincing stuff. This is very persuasive to him that, oh my God, they've got this evidence and Mr. Big with all his connections can destroy that evidence. But Sebastian has to agree to do something. What is it, Judy? He has to confess to the murders. That's right. And this is very clever. And this is where

You know, in the United States at that time, if there was an undercover operation like this, you tell me, would this be admissible? No, absolutely not. Yeah. You're absolutely right. It would not be admissible. And...

And Sebastian is, you know, he's heading down that drain. It's swirling and he's losing control because now they're going to have to tell Mr. Big exactly what happened to Mr. Big's satisfaction at Atif's family's home.

And eventually, Sebastian and Atif are sitting in a room with Mr. Big. They're unaware that there's a hidden video camera and it's recording every second of their conversation, picture and sound. Now streaming. Hi again. TV's quirkiest crime solver. I'm Elsbeth Tassini. I work with the police. It's on the case. I like my outlandish theories with a heavy dose of evidence.

And ready to go toe-to-toe with a cavalcade of guest stars. Are you saying that this is now a murder investigation? It's starting to look that way. Don't miss a moment of the critically acclaimed hit, Elspeth. All episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and return CBS Fall. That sounds like fun. Obviously, murder's not fun. ♪

So this is Atif's first meeting with Mr. Big and his people. What did they say? What did they tell them about the murders? There's no doubt about it. Sebastian admits to doing the murders, and he details how he did it, beginning with the mother, then the father, then the daughter, all beaten with a bat.

Yeah, the way he confesses on that undercover tape is so matter-of-fact, and at times he even laughs about it. You talk to him about that. Your behavior on that tape, when there's some laughing, did you think that the murder of the Raffae family was some sort of a comedy? No, absolutely not. But we were lying, and I was not thinking about the murder of the Raffae family when I was talking. I was...

trying to pass off a story and for whatever reason i guess the way that the whole ordeal affected me was to get nervous and to kind of giggle a bit and i mean in one sense i was trying to act casual and in another way i was i guess just genuinely giggling nervously you laugh when you say bosman needed a little extra bat work that's sick isn't it

Well, yes. I don't want to split hairs, but the quote is actually a little more effort. I mean, not that it's much better, and I guess that is just splitting hairs, but at the same time, it's a little bit different. That's not any better. Effort is still outrageous. You laugh when you're talking about

killing Bosma. Yeah, well, we were lying. And at that point, I felt very awkward because I didn't know what to say about it to Al because we didn't do it. And I was making up a story and I was chuckling awkwardly because I didn't know what to say. And I was, we had already heard some of the details in the newspaper about what supposedly happened there. And I was just in a really awkward position. And I was just kind of

Chuckling nervously. Sebastian, aren't we looking at you on this videotape? The real Sebastian Burns, the person who planned this murder, killed these people, and has no conscience to the point where you can laugh about it. No, that's completely wrong. No, you are never seeing the real me on any of these tapes, in my opinion.

In my opinion, what an odd thing to say. Sebastian claims he was forced to confess, that he was afraid of what the mob boss might do to him if he didn't. So Atif is there that day and he also confessed, um,

They needed both boys there, right? Yeah, but Atif claims that he also felt trapped in that moment and had no choice that, you know, if they confessed, the mob boss was going to protect him, you know, and destroy that evidence down in Bellevue. And if they didn't, who knows what would have happened to them.

I certainly had no way of dealing with the situation other than the one that was offered by the undercover operatives, whereby somehow they would essentially magically take care of all our problems. And I certainly, I can say that I almost enjoyed the irony of making a false confession in order to obtain a true exoneration. I thought that was kind of neat.

Neat. It was neat making up a story about his murdered family. What can I say? And like Sebastian, he laughed when he talked about the murder of his sister, Bosma. You have declined to discuss the details of these murders during the course of this interview, what you saw inside your own house. And yet in front of two mobsters, you laugh about it and you give complete detail about what happened inside that house. I don't get it.

It's easier to talk about a fiction than it is to about the truth, I think, in that way. I didn't have any emotional feelings about a fake story that I was telling.

He doesn't ever have any emotional feelings, or it doesn't appear that he's emotional. Anyway, to a lot of people, what the Canadian officers did feels like entrapment and coerced confessions. In fact, Sebastian's sister made a documentary about the Mr. Big operation that got Innocence International to take on Atif and Sebastian's case. But all of the appeals were denied.

At the time when I was covering this and the way it was explained in court is that this was an undercover operation that was completely legal in Canada at that time. Eventually, it became illegal, but at that time it was legal. And here in the U.S., there was an exception called the Silver Platter Doctrine, which said that if an operation was legal in the country where it was conducted, it was then admissible here in the United States.

And defense attorneys tried to get the video thrown out, but the judge in Sebastian and Atif's trial allowed jurors to watch it. And on it, the boys confess. Do you think they would have been convicted without those tapes? I am not sure that they would have been convicted with what the neighbors had heard of these killings going on at a time when the boys were seen in a movie theater. Um,

I think there is hung jury was a real possibility or an acquittal was a real possibility. This was the moment. Right. Or there may never have been a trial, right? Those of you who've been listening to all this, what do you think? Right. If that tape had not been played, would these boys have been convicted? Right. I think there's an excellent chance that they would not have been.

So a little over a year after the murders, they tell these Canadian officers that they committed the murders, but it took nearly six years to extradite them. Why? Well, at the heart of this was the death penalty. There is no death penalty for murder in Canada. And the Canadian government said they're not going to extradite the boys until the judge in this case agreed to take, and prosecutors agreed to take the death penalty off the table, which eventually happened. Right. Right.

But both boys were represented by public defenders. And there's kind of a crazy story about how they were pulled off the case. Is it true that Sebastian had sex with one of his attorneys? Yeah. So I'll leave her name out of it. She's been through so much. But he had this dynamic woman attorney that was considered one of the best in the public defender's office.

She had gone to Japan to see Jimmy Miyoshi. Remember, he was Sebastian and Atif's roommate in Vancouver, British Columbia. And Jimmy had been accused of conspiring in the murders, and he made a deal with the state to testify against his friends, and then he moved to Japan.

Well, Sebastian's lawyer flew to Japan to meet with him and she came back. She was incredibly excited because she claimed that Jimmy told her that he felt leaned on to make the deal. And she was excited that

That if she could present this in court, it would completely undermine him as a witness. And I was told by the prosecutor in the case who talked to the guards who watched some of this unfold. She ran into the meeting room. She gives him this big hug. She tells him the news. They hug again. And then the hug immediately progressed forward.

into um removal of clothing um a guard who is watching all of this called two other guards over and because they're on a slightly second floor that they could look down and see this window on the door this small window could see inside and they said do you see what i see okay do you see what i see yeah we all know what that is okay well then let's go break this up and it's a felony

to have sex with an inmate in, in, uh, jail like that. And, uh, she, uh, had her law license suspended. She was taken off the case and she had a partner who was, who was, uh, incredibly bright and talented. And the two of them were, were taken off cause they were a team. So when these two defense attorneys come in, instead of having years of research behind them, they had a few months to get prepared for this. And, uh,

That was devastating to Sebastian and Atif's case.

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So speaking of Jimmy Miyoshi, he had a lot to say in his deposition. He said that Atif told him that he had wanted to kill his family and that he was present when Sebastian killed his mother.

Yeah, he said he'd been present when Sebastian and Atif had discussed their plans to murder the family. And he specifically said he would call them saying that they planned to stay at the Raffaei home for a few days before the murder so their DNA and hair would be explainable when it was discovered during forensic examination. Part of the plan, part of the master plan.

So there was a bit of physical evidence that showed that there might have been someone else involved in the murder, at least of Tariq. What was that?

Well, there was a hair, just a single hair found on the body of Tariq Rafay that didn't belong to anyone in the family or Sebastian. Now, of course, Tariq worked in the outside world and being at work, if somebody had given him a hug or anything else, you could see transference there. But there was also, and this was really strange, there was blood in the garage that was discovered that didn't belong to anyone in the family or to Sebastian. Mm-hmm.

And also then, don't forget the two neighbors who testify that they heard a commotion at the house at a time when the boys were in that movie theater. Right, right.

So Sebastian took the witness stand, which doesn't surprise me at all. What about you? It doesn't surprise me. I'll use that phrase brilliantly stupid. His attorney said, don't do this. We have a chance. There's some reasonable doubt in here and do not do this. And Sebastian insisted. If he was anything like he was in your interview, I can only imagine that the jury thought

Just hated him. Yeah, he had that same attitude. Right. He was very put out while answering questions. And that attitude is of, I'm smarter than you and I'm the one you should believe.

So at his sentencing, Sebastian never showed any remorse, told the jurors they were wrong, and went on for nearly two hours. What did he say? Yeah, I was there. This was a theater in the round, one-man performance. He talked to the judge directly, but also then turned back to talk to the people in the room, all of us that were there.

He insisted he was innocent, repeated himself over and over about why the jury was wrong. He threw his defense team under the bus, called them ineffective. He claimed he didn't know he would testify until the morning of and was unprepared. That's not true. Defense attorney had told me that they had urged him not to do this. He forced them to put him on the stand. He insisted that he had not had his day in court and asked that if he could have a new trial and represent himself.

The judge told him to wrap it up many times. This is what the judge said when he sentenced Sebastian to three consecutive life sentences.

Mr. Burns, you are not immoral. You are amoral. You are an arrogant, convicted killer. You are not a kid, as you so often refer to yourself. You're an adult, and you will be held responsible as an adult for your premeditated, naked, vicious massacre of this family. Of all the mic drops I've ever heard delivered from the bench, that was epic. If I may say, a touch of genius from the judge.

Such as Atif might say, such irony for the two geniuses whose brilliance and arrogance had turned on them and led to their demise. Yes, yes. On the other hand, Atif seemed to get choked up at his sentencing. He didn't admit to his crime, but he showed remorse for his behavior. For the first time, and I had interviewed him and things, I saw some humanity there.

The big question always in a situation like that is, is he sad for what he did or is he sad that he got caught? Right, exactly. And was it genuine or was he just terrified? So they both got three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. And of course, they vowed to fight their wrongful conviction, but they're never getting out, right? Well, it's doubtful now. Sebastian has exhausted all of his appeals.

Atif has one more to go, but I think it is very doubtful that they will ever see life outside of a prison cell. Here's an exchange I had with Atif. How would you describe what has happened to you? I don't know. I guess we'd have to use words like disaster and calamity and

other things. It's very easy to fall into the rut of self-pity and so I try not to think on it too much. Luckily, it's very easy to, I guess, think of other things and fall into a sort of unmindfulness of your present situation. And here's Sebastian. Do you still see the images of their bodies when you think about the Raffaei house, when you think about that night? Can you still see it in your mind's eye?

Is it something you live with, that memory? Truly, I don't know. It was something that was very much with me for, I know, the first year after it happened, especially with the first few weeks. It's been 10 years now. And so in a lot of ways, I'm over it. Why do you think they never turned on each other?

I still believe that they believe, and this is what has sustained them all these years, is that one day they will outsmart the system on appeal. They're down to their last one for Atif. And I don't think Atif could ever have turned on Sebastian, his idol and his mentor. Right.

So today they're both 49 years old. They're still in custody in the Monroe Correctional Complex. Atif was married in 2017, but is now divorced.

Not surprisingly, he seems to have been or is a model prisoner, studying and teaching and writing papers and articles. All we know about Sebastian is that his parents visit him once a month, and according to them, he spent 10 years in solitary confinement.

Well, Peter, we could go on forever, but we won't. Yeah, somebody wrote a book about it. Yes, you did. My relatives bought. Perfectly Executed is the book. I wrote it with Janet Jackson, one of the producers. All right. Thank you again. Yeah, and thanks for reliving this with me. It is one of the most extraordinary cases of my career and one I'll carry with me forever. I can see why.

48 Hours Killer Conversation is hosted and produced by me, Judy Ryback. Our story editor is Maura Walls. Alan Pang oversees recording, mixing, and sound design, fact-checking, and additional production support from Rebecca Laflamme. And special thanks to 48 Hours executive producer Judy Tigard and Paramount Podcast vice president Megan Marcus. 911, search emergency. Yes.

They're dead? They're dead! A Paramount Plus original. She wants to find more young women for him to kill. The untold stories of the real cases. Each one he gets away with, he's emboldened. The FBI can't shake. It's very satisfying to be able to look at a bad guy and go, we never forgot you. An all-new season of FBI True, streaming now on Paramount Plus.

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