Nineteen-year-old Sebastian Burns was leaving a haircut appointment in Vancouver, B.C., when a man sporting a long ponytail and cowboy boots asked for help. He said he'd locked his keys in his black Trans Am; could Burns possibly drive him back to his hotel where he had a spare set? Burns agreed.
Kevin P. Casey
Tiffany Burns left her job as a Cleveland
newscaster to make a film about
her brother’s case.
Details
Mr. Big: Harvard Exit, 7 p.m. Tues. June 3; SIFF Cinema, 4:30 p.m. Thurs. June 5. Read Brian Miller’s review.
Seattle International Film Festival Continues through Sun., June 15. Tickets, schedule, and information: www.siff.net and 324-9996.
See our SIFF Guide 2008 for other stories, reviews, and full coverage throughout the fest.
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Back at the hotel, Burns' new friend invited him for a drink. The two talked philosophy and life goals. Burns confided that he and his high-school pal, Atif Rafay, had an idea for making a movie about two teenage boys falsely accused of murder. The man with the ponytail replied that, as it happened, he knew of someone who might like to invest in such a project.
Two days later, he and the investor—we'll call him Mr. Big— arranged a meeting with Burns. They took the teen up to Whistler, where the ponytailed guy and Mr. Big revealed they were criminals. Mr. Ponytail stole a car, then Mr. Big, an apparently senior gangster, pressured Burns into driving it back to Vancouver. Burns did, though he complained the $200 they paid him wasn't enough.
And that was just the beginning of their joint projects. The two men gave Burns bundles of cash and asked him to deposit it in various banks, a task for which they paid him thousands of dollars.
Eventually the talk turned to murder. "I fuckin' toasted a guy," the ponytailed man told Burns at one point. Referring to Mr. Big, he said: "You know how fuckin' solid [he] is?...When it came time for fuckin' court, the person that could finger me, they're not around anymore, so I know that business gets taken care of." Another day, the man got Burns to "stand guard" while he beat the crap out of somebody.
Meanwhile, the two men broached the subject of a gruesome triple murder involving the family of Burns' housemate Atif Rafay. On July 12th, 1994, Rafay's father, mother, and 21-year-old autistic sister had been bludgeoned to death by baseball bats in their Bellevue home. Burns and Rafay, who had come to Vancouver immediately after the crime, were considered the chief suspects by Bellevue police. Rafay stood to gain $500,000 in insurance money from his parents' death.
The two gangsters told Burns they could destroy evidence the Bellevue police department had on the two teenagers—but only if they met Rafay and the two spilled the complete story.
Smiling and laughing in a hotel room one day with their criminal friends, Burns and Rafay owned up to the crime, with Burns described as the muscle for two of the three murders.
"Did you see it happen?" Mr. Big asked Rafay.
"Yeah."
"All three?"
"No, only one."
"Which one?"
"My mom."
He also asked: "How did it feel to kill your parents and knock off your sister?"
"Pretty rotten," Rafay said. "But it was tempered by the fact that I felt it was necessary...I think of it as a sacrifice."
Little did these aspiring filmmakers know that hidden cameras were rolling the whole time, and that the two men they had befriended were actors themselves—undercover agents of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who had staged the whole series of events.
While the Bellevue police department was keeping tabs on the boys, the RCMP had launched its own investigation using a trademark technique dubbed by the Canadian press as a "Mr. Big" operation, after the crime boss who an agent pretends to be. Creating an atmosphere that says crime is OK, flashing around guns and wads of cash, the undercover Mounties attempt to get their targets to talk about past misdeeds.
On that fateful day in 1995, Rafay and Burns appeared to do just that. (The account above is based on the videotape and also on legal documents.) They said they did the deed in their "gonch"—Canadian slang for underwear.
The salacious detail only added to a press frenzy that made the Rafay murder case perhaps second only to the Green River Killer in amount of local ink spilled and footage shot. Here were two exceedingly handsome, affluent, and seemingly arrogant college kids accused of committing an unimaginable crime against the family of one of them. There were immediate comparisons to Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy college kids and self-styled Nietzschean supermen, who in 1924 killed a 14-year-old boy. Rafay and Burns also loved Nietzsche.
The press frenzy continued, on and off, for 10 years, as the case dragged on with a soap opera–like trajectory. A long extradition battle hinged on whether King County prosecutors would promise not to seek the death penalty, as demanded by Canadian officials. Prosecutors eventually concurred. Then, as the trial approached, Burns was caught in a jailhouse sexual encounter with his public defender, Theresa Olson, who famously described the incident as a "hug gone bad." She and her co-counsel were removed from the case.
The CBS program 48 Hours did a special, which also spawned a book, Perfectly Executed. The coverage, like public opinion in general, was not sympathetic to the accused. In the minds of most Seattleites, Rafay and Burns are as guilty as O.J.
