It started with a frantic call for help from Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay, when the two boys arrived home at just after 2 a.m. on July 13, 1994, and found Rafay’s family brutally beaten to death in their Bellevue, Washington, home. Who would kill this well-liked family in such a horrific way? Police had no physical evidence and no witnesses; the case was a dead end! It was time to bring in Mr. Big! Mr. Big is a covert investigation where undercover detectives create a fictitious criminal gang and seduce their suspects into joining them in their criminal activities, and police would soon gain their suspects' confidence and elicit a confession from them. Burns and Rafay would eventually confess on tape to undercover detectives and be convicted of the three murders of Rafay’s family. In the last 25 years, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) have run more than 350 Mr. Big operations on suspects of crimes where there was no evidence found and have had a 95% success rate in prosecution. It was in July 2014 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that confessions arising from the Mr. Big operations would be considered presumptively inadmissible on another case against Nelson Hart. The Mr. Big Sting in the Hart case was said to have overwhelming inducements, veiled threats of violence, and intimidation and considered an abuse of process by the police. So now what will happen to the hundreds of other cases that have been tried by this unreliable procedure in which the Mr. Big coerced confession was the only evidence used to convict the suspect? This book will cover the cases that have now been brought back into court on appeals based on the Mr. Big operation, and will explain the outcomes.
