The trial…

JURY selection for the Kingston Mills murder trial began on the morning of October 11, 2011. Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger had been selected as the presiding judge. Maranger, with his attention to detail, patience, and good humour, would turn out to be the perfect choice to guide this complicated trial.

Canadian jury trials require 12 jurors, as well as two alternates who are dismissed once the trial begins. The 14th and final person was selected on the afternoon of October 13 — seven men and seven women — as the three accused watched the Canadian justice system unfold from their seats in the glass prisoners' box.

The Crown attorneys on the case, Laurie Lacelle and Gerard Laarhuis, signalled loud and clear that while this was a quadruple murder trial — with Tooba Mohammad Yahya, Mohammad Shafia, and Hamed Shafia each charged with four counts of murder — the killings were motivated by honour based on cultural influences the elder Shafias had brought with them from the Greater Middle East.

Each of the accused had their own lawyer. Mohammad Shafia would be represented by Kingston attorney Peter Kemp. Tooba had also selected a Kingston lawyer, David Crowe. Several months before the trial began, Hamed changed lawyers, hiring Patrick McCann from Ottawa.

During pre-trial motions, McCann would take exception to the Crown's plan to call University of Toronto professor Shahrzad Mojab as an expert on Middle Eastern honour killings. The Crown had crucial evidence from the wiretaps in the family van in which Shafia calls his daughters "whores," declaring that "there is no value in life without honour." The Crown needed someone like Mojab to help put the remarks into cultural context — essentially to show that the family's honour had been stained by the girls' relationships with boys, and that they had to be killed to cleanse that dishonour. In the end, Maranger allowed Mojab to testify.

Other ground rules were established for the coming months of the trial. Media were not to transmit stories from the courtroom using social media. The identities of the three surviving children and their images were not to appear in any stories or broadcasts. And at one point in the proceedings, the entire court would be transported to Kingston Mills so the jurors could see firsthand the place where the bodies were discovered and where the Crown alleged an appalling set of murders had been committed.

Daily workings of the court depended on the smooth running of the translation services. Each day, three interpreters at the trial translated from Farsi to English and English to Farsi, depending on who was speaking at the time. At various points during the trial, French and Spanish were being translated simultaneously into Farsi and English. Headsets provided in the court were an absolute essential for following the proceedings. In the end, the interpreters' fees totalled $298,000. Upgrades to the courtroom and courthouse, including the multilingual interpretation booths, the prisoners' box large enough to hold the three accused, and the new audio-visual system cost $216,000. This was a high-profile case and everything had to be functioning perfectly.

The trial opened the morning of October 20, 2011. Dozens of members of the public and representatives from a dozen or more newspapers, magazines, television, and radio queued up to get into the main courtroom. About half an hour before the scheduled 10 am start, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis strode across the upstairs foyer between the courtroom and the Crown's offices. Wished good luck by a bystander, Laarhuis turned and said, "We don't need luck, we need justice."

The long-awaited trial got off to a shaky start. As the 12 jurors walked into the courtroom, one man stood out because of the white Toronto Maple Leafs hockey jersey he was wearing. He stood to address the judge.

"The stress is just killing me," the man said.

"That's good enough for me," replied the judge, dismissing him from duty. The female alternate was then added to the official jury of 12, tipping the balance to seven women and five men. The second alternate was also sent home and Maranger gave the jurors their instructions for the trial.

Then Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle positioned a lectern in front of the jury, laid out the pages with her opening remarks, and launched into a detailed explanation of the case that was succinct and disturbing in its description of what she called "the planned and pre-meditated murders of their family members."

Lacelle outlined the family's history of moving around the world, what Rona's diary would reveal about life in the home, the physical and mental abuse that occurred, the girls' relationships that got them in trouble with their parents, the school reports, and Zainab's sudden departure from the home.

Then she outlined the facts pointing to a conspiracy to murder: the Google searches, the cellphone records, the late-night encounter at the Kingston East Motel, the police interviews and interrogations, hours of wiretaps, post-mortems on the bodies, the unfolding Kingston Police investigation, and the chilling theory that the car containing the four bodies did not just roll into the canal but was pushed in by someone driving the second family vehicle.

"At the close of the case, after all the evidence has been heard, the Crown will ask you to find Tooba, Shafia, and Hamed guilty of the murders of Rona, Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti," said Lacelle.

Then Laarhuis called the Crown's first witness, Kingston Police forensic identification officer Julia Moore.

Julia Moore was the police photographer of record at Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009. On her photographic tour of the Mills, she came across the three shards of plastic in the grass on the opposite side of the rocky outcrop from the lock itself. Moore photographed a black scuff mark on the side of the curb along Kingston Mills Road. She found another five pieces of plastic at the side of the lock, where the car appeared to have entered the water, and photographed them. There were also the two plastic letters, an S and an E. At the edge of the lock, Moore took pictures of striations that appeared to be freshly cut into the stone wall. The locks along the Rideau Canal were made of hand-carved stone brought from nearby quarries in the late-1820s.

A series of photos was shown of the black Nissan being hoisted out of the water by a crane. Moore had photographed the back end of the car with the S and E missing from the word "Sentra." Moore testified about the control settings in the car: the headlight switch was off, as was the wiper switch; the key was in the ignition but in the off setting; the car was in the lowest gear; the ceiling light switch was off — and, perhaps oddest of all, the two front seats were reclined far back.