Neighbor testifies she heard hammering on night Rafays killed

By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

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Julie Rackley was in bed reading when she heard a muffled hammering sound coming from somewhere outside her window.

It wasn't until later that she realized what she heard could have been the sounds of someone killing her next-door neighbors.

"It was repetitive, and it went on long enough that I found it irritating," Rackley testified yesterday in the aggravated-first-degree-murder trial of Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns, two young men accused of bludgeoning Rafay's parents and sister with a baseball bat more than nine years ago, ostensibly to cash in on an approximately $350,000 inheritance.

Rackley said the sounds began around 9:45 p.m. on July 12, 1994, and ended at 10:15 p.m. It was too dark for someone to be working outside, Rackley said, and at the time she thought someone might have been hanging pictures.

She didn't think to call police because "there was nothing that sounded frightening, scary or foreboding — there were no gunshots, no screaming." Rackley heard no other sounds between 10:15 and 11 p.m., when she turned off her light to go to sleep.

After Rackley learned from newspaper reports that Tariq Rafay, his wife, Sultana, and their daughter Basma had been bludgeoned to death, she contacted police, believing the noises she had heard that night were more sinister than she first had thought.

The timing of the sounds is important because defense attorneys have argued that during the time frame Rackley identified, Rafay and Burns were at a movie.

Police and prosecutors, however, say the killings occurred between 10 p.m. and midnight — and that the defendants had enough time between the movie and a trip to downtown Seattle to commit the crimes.

During opening statements last month, the state seemed to imply that the time discrepancy would prove insignificant when all the evidence was considered.

Before Rackley took the stand yesterday to continue testimony she began last week, King County Superior Court Judge Charles Mertel again quashed a defense motion requesting that jurors be allowed to hear about tips from confidential informants.

The informants indicated to officials that a radical Muslim group might have targeted Tariq Rafay, Atif's father, because of his nonviolent interpretation of the Quran.

Before the trial started last month, Mertel ruled the evidence couldn't be admitted because the defense hadn't adequately connected the tips to the crimes.

Defense attorneys asked him to reconsider.

Jeff Robinson, one of Burns' lawyers, argued that police didn't thoroughly investigate the tips and implored Mertel to "let us exercise our Constitutional right to put on a defense and impeach the evidence the Bellevue Police Department is going to put on."

Law-enforcement officials received three credible tips in the weeks after the slayings, Robinson said.

But deputy prosecutor Roger Davidheiser said allowing the jury to hear that evidence would "lead to speculation that if the tips were followed up on, it would have revealed another suspect."

Davidheiser acknowledged that the state hasn't been able to identify DNA profiles for a hair found next to Tariq Rafay's body or a fingerprint found in a downstairs shower, but he argued "a lone fingerprint and a lone hair are meaningless" and don't mean whoever they belonged to was in the house at the time of the slayings.

The judge, in handing down his ruling, said he struggled with his decision but worried about defense "efforts to back-door other suspect evidence" and to put the police investigation on trial.

The trial continues today.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com

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