BURNS & RAFAY

Cold Case Murder Mysteries

True Crime

3.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2020

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the night of July 12, 1994, friends Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay left the Rafay family’s Bellevue, WA home for some fun out on the town. When they returned hours later, however, what they discovered inside the house was nothing less than a massacre. Atif’s parents, along with his sister, had been brutally murdered with a baseball bat by at least one unknown assailant during a break-in.

As the investigation proceeded, police began to suspect the teens might have been involved, which is something they vehemently denied. Without sufficient evidence to press charges, the RCMP intervened with a controversial tactic called Mr. Big to extract a confession. It’s illegal in the US where the crime occurred, but the suspects were both Canadian citizens who fled to their home country in the aftermath of the crime.

Soon enough, the pair found themselves convicted of the crime. But in the years since, other motives and facts, combined with insufficient physical evidence, have cast doubt upon the result in this case. It seems there might have been others who wanted the family dead. So, is it possible the wrong men are in prison? Did the authorities force a false confession?

Join host Ryan Kraus for a psychological dissection of the controversial Burns & Rafay case in an effort to understand what really happened.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host Ryan Kraus bringing you inside the world of another fascinating yet tragic crime.
0:14.0	The Rafe family murders. In 1994, Tariq Rafe, a structural engineer and his wife
0:21.2	Saltana, a nutritionist, moved from Vancouver, Canada to Bellevue, Washington.
0:27.0	Their son, Atif, was a gifted 18-year-old college freshman completing his first year away at Cornell, while their 20-year-old autistic daughter,
0:35.6	Basma, lived at home with the family. Bellevue is an upscale suburb of Seattle,
0:41.6	sandwich between Lake Washington and Lake Samamish. suburb of
0:43.7	East of Seattle, the
0:44.7	the Seattle, of course, being infamous as the location
0:48.1	where Ted Bundy abducted and murdered both Denise Nasland
0:51.3	and Channes-odd in the same day back in July 1974.
0:56.7	The Rafe family lived on the north side of Vancouver, but left the country to live in Pakistan
1:02.2	from 1984 to 1989. After returning,
1:06.4	Atif Rufe met a fellow student named Sebastian Burns in high school
1:10.9	and the two would go on to become best friends.
1:14.0	Burns attended Capolano College in British Columbia in his freshman year,
1:19.0	and while not the academic superstar Atif was, he was accomplished in his own right. The two were very articulate
1:26.5	young men with seemingly bright futures. They shared a love of film and philosophy, specifically the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Atif was interested
1:37.2	in pursuing cognitive studies at Cornell as a means of broadening his scope of understanding.
1:43.0	In July 1994, while home on summer break, a Tief stayed with his parents in Bellevue and
1:49.7	Sebastian came down from BC to join them.
1:53.0	A teeth had a bedroom in the home, and Sebastian stayed in a room that seems to have doubled as a guest
1:59.0	room and an office.
	...

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