Accused serial killer Charles Kembo is spinning a bizarre tale in his own defence about sexual taboos and a dissolute party life featuring aliases, drug abuse, petty crime, money-laundering and non-stop dissembling.
He couldn’t remember the date of his marriage or his son Grant’s birth, mixed up the times of other key events, and claimed to have once paid $65,000 to a ring of extortionists to free a wife he supposedly never lived with.
His lawyer, Don Morrison, told the B.C. Supreme Court jury of three women and nine men that the 41-year-old former refugee from Malawi was "a fraudster not a murderer."
He urged them to keep an open mind.
They will need one because there was no doubt after Kembo’s first day in the witness box Tuesday that he was a con man – an admitted and unmitigated liar, cheat and thief.
In the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, incriminating surveillance recordings and seemingly culpable statements made to police, Kembo offered only a brazen denial to the allegations he murdered his wife, her daughter, his mistress and his best friend.
"I have never killed anybody in my life – never, ever," he insisted calmly. "I have never laid a hand on a woman or even a friend for that matter. Never."
Kembo began the day on the stand in a dark, sombre mood but that gave way later to small smiles and the occasional smirk – either from pride or embarrassment – as he acknowledged widespread international financial shenanigans and a spate of crimes.
From the moment he arrived in Canada in 1989 as a refugee, Kembo has been hustling and scamming.
He freely used phoney names, invented corporate identities and established a skein of overseas banks to facilitate his legerdemain.
The only time he acknowledged feeling a pang of conscience since his arrest in 2005, the only time he felt real remorse during police interrogations he said, was when they mentioned his stepdaughter Rita Yeung.
"For starters," Kembo told the jury, speaking slowly in a sonorous voice, "I spoke about a lot of things in the interviews but … what I was talking about when I spoke about shame was the sexual relations between Rita and I. That was something that had been a secret until that time … when I was discovered, the shame was unbearable. In my culture incest is … in Malawi where I come from, incest is a big taboo."
He said they had begun an affair while he was tutoring Rita at the age of about 18; she was 20 when she was killed.
He would have the jury believe her death, like the other three, was just another odd coincidence in his unique life.
At 15, Kembo said he was expelled from high school for organizing a student protest. It was such "an embarrassment" to his father, he ran away from home, travelling first to neighbouring Tanzania and then to Burundi.
Accepted by Canada as a refugee, he arrived in Toronto in September 1989 at the age of 17. He immediately got a student loan and enrolled in an engineering program at Centennial College but was soon grifting.
Less than a year after he came to Canada, Kembo’s two older brothers died in a car accident in Malawi.
The tragedy so shook him, he maintained, he dropped out of school and embraced a life of drugs and petty crime.
He fled Toronto in mid-1992 with two friends, embarking on a small-time crime spree, hitting Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Jasper, Edmonton and finally Vancouver.
At each stop, he said they were "living [the] fast life, partying, doing drugs, having fun … . Petty crimes, frauds, break and entering, anything to make money for more drugs, more partying and not having to face reality."
Kembo had a slew of criminal convictions throughout the 1990s for theft, fraud, impersonation, break and enter – he was on probation, in jail, and on conditional sentence. None of it made a difference.
He maintained all that changed in 1998 after his little sister was accepted to a prestigious school. Kembo testified it gave him the impetus to go to rehab and get an online business degree.
All he really did was change his MO – graduating from petty theft and B&Es to commercial larceny and confidence scams.
Kembo said he first met his future wife, Margaret Yeung, in 1998, noticing her at the Templeton secondary school playing fields. She lived in his apartment building and they struck up a friendship.
When her mother in Hong Kong died, he offered her money to go home to the funeral.
"It was just a natural thing," Kembo said. "We were still friends but I guess that was the turning point of our relationship. A couple of days after that we went on a date."
Yeung went to Hong Kong and Kembo said she called him from there to say she was pregnant.
"I don’t recall being ready to hear that news," he said with an ingratiating smile, as if to say, you know how it is.
"We got into a little fight about that … After I spoke with family and friends, I was okay with it."
Their son Grant was born in 2000, but Kembo couldn’t give an exact date. He said he married Yeung in "either 2000 or 2001" after the birth.
"She asked to get married and I didn’t want to disappoint her," Kembo said with another smile.
It was during this time he maintained bank accounts in numerous institutions in Denmark, Latvia and Malawi. He had personal and corporate accounts under his name as well as aliases.
He told the court his illicit activity even led to Leung and him being kidnapped. He said he was forced to pay about $65,000 in ransom to win her release.
According to Kembo, he was clearing $25,000 to $30,000 a month from his legal business activities and another $50,000 a month in money laundering.
That is up until he was arrested in 2005 and charged with the four murders.
He has been in custody since – for four years and eight months.
His testimony continues.
imulgrew@vancouversun.com
(Full disclosure: I met and interviewed Kembo in 2006. I was subpoenaed by the Crown, testified last month at the trial and the tape of our interview was played for the jury.)
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