When the bodies of four women and girls were pulled from a car in a canal, the community rallied around the grieving family who just seemingly suffered an inexplicable accident.

But the police, from the very start, believed that

they could explain what happened and it was no accident. I'm Charlie and welcome to crime lines.

Hello and welcome to crime lines. This, we have a two-parter and those who listen long enough know that I make episodes two-parters when I don't finish them in time to record. I actually needed to be recording this yesterday, and I still have eight pages of rewrites to do on what will be

part two. So I'm splitting this up into two parts, but it will not be a week between them. You will

be getting part two in a few days, but I fully understand if you are saving this one until part

two comes out, and then you can just enjoy a very long episode.

This is a case I have been wanting to cover for a while. Haley from Haley Gray Research and

True Crime Research Training suggested it to me back in 2021, and I do want to thank her for

sharing her research on the case with me.

This is a family annihilation case, which is an area of interest to me.

Specifically, I'm interested in the different motivations between these types of murders.

I'm going to say off the bat that this case does involve a number of Arabic names as well as French language place names, and I am doing my best to pronounce everything as accurately as I can within my accent and my understanding of how they pronounce their names.

I know my regular listeners are aware that I do

try to get names right, even though I don't always do it. But in case you're new here and you

don't know me or how I do things, I do want to open up with a little explanation that I do look

all of these things up, and I still sometimes get them wrong, but we're all doing the best we can here.

So with that out of the way, let's get into the case. And like a lot of family annihilation cases,

there is going to be a lot of backstory to go over so that we can understand the why behind it.

So we are backing up to September of 1956 when Rona Amir Muhammad was born in Afghanistan.

She was the oldest daughter of an army colonel, and when she was in her late teens, she

attended a wedding where she caught the eye of a woman named Shirin Shafia.

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