The night before…

IN the very early hours of June 30, about seven hours before canal staff made the chilling discovery at Kingston Mills, the phone rang in Robert Miller's bedroom. Miller was the manager of the Kingston East Motel and lived in the apartment behind the office, on call night and day. The man on the speaker phone asked Miller if he could book some rooms for the night. Miller checked the clock beside the phone. It was 2 am. He asked the man to wait, got dressed, and unlocked the office door. Waiting for him were a short and stocky man in his fifties and a younger, taller, slim man with dark hair.

"They were both speaking and said they needed two rooms," recalled Miller. They wanted two rooms with two beds in each. The manager asked how many guests would be staying. There was a limit on the number of people allowed in each room. "The initial answer was six," Miller testified. "The younger gentleman said, 'There might be nine of us.' They sort of looked at each other and [then] said six. They settled on six people. I said, 'Will that be three for each room?' and they agreed." The two men conversed in a language Miller didn't recognize.

Rooms 18 and 19 at the Kingston East Motel each contained two queen-sized beds, a television, and mini-fridge. The younger man, Hamed Shafia, filled out the registration forms while his father, Mohammad, took the keys and went over to the rooms. Hamed paid in cash then left the office. Miller stood at the desk and filled in the registration book.

While he was still at the counter, Miller looked out the office window and saw the SUV the men had just arrived in backing away from the building. The only way in and out of the motel grounds was along the driveway running past the front office. Miller said he got a brief glimpse of the driver. It appeared to be the younger man. Miller thought this was strange. Barely 20 minutes had elapsed since the pair had first appeared at the office door.

Stranger still to Miller was the direction in which the SUV headed when it got out to Highway 15 — it went north toward Highway 401.

"It struck me as a little odd someone would come in at two in the morning and leave and go back toward the highway," he testified. A right turn would have taken them toward downtown Kingston and a Tim Hortons restaurant a couple of kilometres away from the motel that would be open at that hour.

His interest piqued, Miller decided to stay up for a while to see when the SUV returned. He played a video card game until deciding it was time to turn in. He had to be back on duty at 6 am. The last thing he did was check the time on his computer. It was 2:26 am and the vehicle still hadn't returned.

"I can see right down the line where the parking lot is," Miller told the court. "They would be driving back more or less in front of me." Why, he wondered, would two late-night travellers book two rooms for six people and then, why, almost immediately, would one of them drive off into the night again?

Miller and his wife were up at 5:45 that morning. He had a coffee and a cigarette before settling into the routine of the day. Motel guests began to check out and housekeeper Christine Bolarinho arrived to clean the rooms.

At about 8:30, Mohammad Shafia, the older man, appeared at the office asking to buy a $10 phone card so he could make a long-distance call. Shafia asked Miller if he could place the call for him from the office to a number with a 514 area code — the exchange for Montreal. Miller called but got a cellphone message and told Shafia there was no answer. He wrote on a piece of paper the directions for placing calls from the rooms.

Shortly afterward, Miller left to go into Kingston. When he got back, the housekeeper told him there was still no activity in rooms 18 and 19 and the 11 am checkout time was fast approaching. Miller went down to room 19. Mohammad Shafia came outside and asked if they could have the room for another half hour because their son was coming to pick them up. Miller looked into the room and saw a dark-haired woman, likely in her 40s, lying down facing the window, her head at the foot of the bed. He didn't see anyone else in the room.

The SUV the men had arrived in the night before was not in the parking lot. Miller was working on the playground equipment when he noticed a "van-type vehicle come to the motel and park in front of 18 and 19."

Throughout the morning, Christine Bolarinho noticed people peeking out through the curtains of room 19. Every time she went by she could see the face of Mohammad Shafia, who would quickly pull the curtains shut. Bolarinho said this behaviour was repeated at least half a dozen times. Finally, she knocked on the door and talked to the woman, asking if they needed towels or any other amenities. This was Tooba Mohammad Yahya.

"She replied, no, her son was sleeping. Possibly after he showered they would need towels."

Later, Bolarinho said she saw a teenaged boy come out of the other room, number 18, around the same time a minivan arrived in the parking lot. A young girl, described by the housekeeper as about eight years old, came out of room 19. Bolarhino smiled and spoke to her, but the mother told her to go back into the room.

"The next thing, I seen the van come into the lot," Bolarhino told the court. "The older gentleman and the boy driving the van went into the office." Bolarhino wandered into the office, too. They were arranging to take the rooms for a second night, but they wanted it at a cheaper price.

"To me they were trying to get a lower rate on the room — the older gentleman [was]. I thought maybe there was a mention of it twice."

Once again, Hamed filled out the motel forms. But this time it was his father who paid — again in cash. Shafia had, indeed, asked if there was a discount. Miller told him no, just the standard rate.

Bolarhino, who had been working at the Kingston East for three years, found the encounters with the Shafias different from those with most other guests. "It was like nobody made eye contact with myself. When they walked by, they were straight ahead, head down," she recalled. "I just found them, not odd, but not typical tourists I dealt with."

Miller was asked at the trial if he had seen anyone else staying in rooms 18 and 19 that day. Just one after the minivan arrived, he said. It was a young girl Miller thought to be about six years old. At some point on the morning of June 30, the van left the motel. Miller didn't see them go and he would not see the vehicle or the guests at the motel again, even though they'd rented the rooms for another night.

The next people occupying rooms 18 and 19 of the Kingston East Motel would be police forensics identification officers.