It must be a homicide investigator's worst nightmare. Anything that could technically go wrong with a murder suspect interview did go wrong when Dets. Michael Barsky and Peter Code spoke to Peer Khairi about the vicious slaying of his wife Randjida. Unbeknownst to them, the video recording shut off less than halfway through their three hour and 20 minute interrogation. Lost was the part where they say the unemployed Afghan immigrant finally confesses to using two knives to kill his wife of 30 years in the family's Etobicoke apartment on March 18, 2008. They were wielded with a vicious rage: Khairi admits slicing open Randjida's throat right through to her spine and stabbing her five times in the chest, abdomen and back. Jurors have heard it was a slow, agonizing death: she would have been conscious for at least five minutes as she choked to death on her own blood, unable to speak or cry for help. It was three days before her 54th birthday. When their interview with Khairi concluded at about 6 a.m., Barsky went to retrieve the DVD only to discover that all the equipment had turned off, leaving him just 77 recorded minutes. He didn't panic, though. He told the jury that he thought he was still okay because he had also taped Khairi with a small digital recorder he'd placed on the table between them. But when he went to play it back, there was nothing there. He didn't know the new external microphone he'd been given had an on-off button. "It was off," he sheepishly admitted. "I have three hours of scratchy noise which was our back-up." His bad luck continued. The two detectives decided not to disclose their technical malfunctions to the accused murderer or his Dari interpreter. Instead, they asked them to return to the interview room for more questions. For the next 23 minutes, Barsky said he had Khairi repeat the "highlights" of what he'd told them while he recorded with his digital recorder. "Our objective was to get that statement," he explained. But the technical gods once again conspired against him: the recording wasn't clear because Khairi and the translator sometimes spoke over each other. So Barsky scrambled to salvage what he could from the technical disaster. He had Code immediately write down everything he could recall of their interview and asked translator Najibueen Shams to do the same. Shams was initially reluctant to write the summary for police. "As an interpreter, you should be impartial and not a witness," he told Khairi's second-degree murder trial. He eventually agreed. His memories of that interview came at the very end of the final day of a long week, but it had jurors suddenly sitting forward in their seats. The Kabul-born interpreter recalled Khairi spoke of how he was so unhappy with his family life since coming to Canada in 2003 that he'd tried to commit suicide. He claimed he was the abused one: he'd recently been in a car accident but no one would help him, his wife wouldn't prepare his meals or do his wash. His oldest son wasn't talking to him and Randjida had told him to stop telling their six children, the youngest was about 18, what they could wear or what they could do. "He wasn't in control, the family was controlling him," Shams recalled of Khairi's list of woes. "He said his wife and his oldest son had beaten him many times in the past and his wife always took the side of his kids against him." The Crown alleges the bitter man murdered Randjida, all of 5-foot-1 and 85 pounds, because his rebellious wife dared to allow their children to stray from the strict ways of their Afghanistan birthplace. Prosecutor Robert Kenny asked Shams if Khairi disclosed what happened on that March day almost five years ago. There may be no recording of what he told them, but it is seared in Shams' memory. "How the fight started, I don't know the details. I don't remember. But when his son left, he killed his wife," the translator recalled softly. "The sentence that always haunts me is he said, 'I took a small knife and a big knife.' He said ...I stabbed her.'" And then he said Khairi added, 'I'm destroyed. My life is wasted.'"

• published: 19 Oct 2012
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