The silence hangs for a few seconds before Detective Geoff Dempster asks his next question.
“Hamed, do you know what happened to your sisters?”
Hamed Shafia’s body tenses at the question.
“No,” he says quietly.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
He sits back, trying to avoid the detective’s lingering gaze.
It’s video footage from Hamed Shafia’s first police interrogation on June 30, 2009. He came to the station with his parents to report the disappearance of his three sisters and his father’s first wife in a polygamous marriage. But police have already found the missing Shafia women. Their bodies are floating inside a black Nissan Sentra at the bottom of the Rideau canal at the Kingston Mills locks.
“We have to look at all the possible reasons why these four girls got back into the Nissan at two, three in the morning,” says Dempster. “They had comfortable beds right there and you guys had been driving from Niagara falls for like the last… twelve hours.”
“I have no guess.”
Dempster tries another angle.
“They say everybody has basic needs, right? Number one is shelter,” he says. “number two is food, the food’s right here, you would have drove past it going to the motel.”
Hamed sits quietly.
“Something caused her to go over there and it wasn’t hunger and it wasn’t shelter,” says Dempster. “And it wasn’t because she was looking for the highway ‘cause she drove right past the sign.”
Hamed looks down at the table before answering.
“They must have been, you know, they wanted to just drive,” he says.
The real story of what happened that night was already beginning to unravel.
This week on 16x9, we look at the evidence against Mohammed, Tooba and Hamed Shafia from crime scene to conviction. Lama Nicolas shows us how a perfect storm of witness accounts, cell phone tracking, surveillance and forensics led Hamed and his parents from a tense interrogation room to a first degree murder conviction and life in prison.
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