http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Acc...394/story.html
Charles Kembo "killed these people for profit and their identities," Crown prosecutor Jennifer Oulton said.
Photograph by: photo illustration, Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER — The Crown alleged at the opening of a murder trial Tuesday that the man accused of killing four people profited from his crimes.
"The motive was financial," prosecutor Jennifer Oulton said during her opening address to a jury. "He killed these people for profit and their identities."
She added one of the Crown's most important witnesses will be a forensic chartered accountant, who will explain how the accused, Charles Kembo, used the identities of the victims to open up bank accounts, credit cards and establish companies.
"The identities of all four victims were worth money," Oulton told the jury.
"His primary motive for killing these people was profiting from these identities," she said.
In one case, he said, he received more $220,000 worth of benefits in the first year by using the name of his wife, Margaret Kembo, who was last seen on Dec. 31, 2002.
Charles Kembo, the last person to see his wife alive, claimed she told him she was going to live in a Buddhist monastery. He told others she had moved to Hong Kong to look after her sick father, that she was assisting on a movie project in Brunei, working on a sugar factory renovation in Africa or was working in Shanghai as a business consultant.
At the time, Charles Kembo had a teenage stepdaughter and a three-year-old son with Margaret Kembo.
The children, after their mother disappeared, came to live with Kembo and his common-law wife, Genevieve Camara, and their infant daughter, Claire.
The Crown alleged that Charles Kembo used to his wife's name to obtain five credit cards, to file a false ICBC claim, false UIC claims, false GST claims and false income tax returns for three years ending in 2004.
The prosecutor said the Crown will prove that the accused also paid for and took out an $850,000 life insurance on his business partner, Ardon Bernard Samuel, 36, whose body was found in a pile of leaves in a park at Quilchena Park at Maple and 29th Avenue on Nov. 5, 2003.
The man's penis was cut off and put in his pants along with four notes, which contained crude messages with racist overtones (Samuel was black).
The Crown says the notes were a red herring to distract police from who would benefit from Samuel's death.
The prosecutor said the beneficiary of the insurance policy was Kembo's then three-year-old son. The boy now is nine.
Kembo, 40, is also accused of killing his stepdaughter and a mistress:
- Siu Yin Ma, 55, the alleged mistress, whose body was found stuffed in a hockey bag in a slough near the Massey tunnel in November 2004.
- Rita Yeung, 21, stepdaughter, whose body was dumped in the Fraser River days before Kembo's arrest in July 2005.
The Crown alleged that a shovel was found in the water with the bar code that linked Kembo buying a shovel the day of the murder.
"Mr. Kembo represented himself to the world and to his victims as a rich, successful businessman," the prosecutor told the jury. "He drove an expensive car, a Land Rover, and he dressed well."
And to perpetuate this illusion of himself, he used many business names and aliases, the Crown said.
Kembo used the business names Capital Trust and variations of the name, such as Capital Trust Group and Capital Trust Corp., but the names were never registered in B.C. and did not have a bank account, the prosecutor said.
Oulton pointed out the Crown will show that Kembo's Capital Trust had a website with uncanny similarities between a real company called Capital Trust in New York.
Kembo also used the aliases Eli Kembo, Charles Gwazah, Charles Campbell, Matt Elliot Campbell, James MacAuley and Gary Gandhi.
Kembo, originally a refugee from the African country of Malawi who came to Canada in 1989, maintains he is innocent.
In an interview The Vancouver Sun three years ago, the accused man said: "My connection to these people is quite innocent."
The trial is expected to hear from more than 150 witnesses and last six to eight months.
The case is considered so complex that computer screens have been installed in the courtroom at the Vancouver Law Courts so the jury and the trial judge can follow the Crown's presentation of evidence.
The case is expected to include hundreds of documents and bank records.
Kembo's defence lawyers are former prosecutors Don Morrison and Georgia Docolas.
The prosecution team includes Oulton Hank Reiner and Maura McGivern
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