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Crime Story Episode 5: Michael Lista

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

SOUNDCLIP

MICHAEL LISTA: For the first time, I think, reporting a crime, I really understood the true terror of what it means for a man to kill the mother of his children. This family will never recover from it. And I wanted to sort of go to that place of being really hurt by it in order to make the story what it needed to be in order to serve Elena.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: On December 1st, 2016, police found the body of Dr. Elena Fric. Her husband, Doctor Mohamed Shamji, was arrested the next day. The murder and the arrest made sensational headlines, with the press obsessing over Shamji, a neurosurgeon whose life took a horrific and shocking turn. Elena's life, her successes and the violence that she endured seemed to slip into the background. Journalist Michael Lister wanted to tell a different story, to give an account that centred around Elena's experience. A year after her murder, he published Love & Death in Toronto Life: An Intimate Study of An Abusive Marriage. He then featured that story in his new book, The Human Scale. Michael, welcome to Crime Story.

MICHAEL LISTA: It's good to be here, Kathleen. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So tell me about Dr. Elena Fric.

MICHAEL LISTA: Sure. So Dr. Elena Fric was a deeply beloved, incredibly accomplished family doctor. Her parents were Croatian immigrants who worked on the auto lines in Windsor. And from the time that she was a young girl, she had ambitions to sort of, you know, live a different kind of life and excelled at school. And besides being, you know, an accomplished doctor, she later went and did a degree in public policy at Duke, where, you know, we spoke to a number of her friends and colleagues. She wasn't simply brilliant, wasn't simply a devoted mother. She was also kind of the life of the party. You know, anyone who met Elena couldn't help, as one person said, couldn't help but sort of falling in love with her. And so she was just a very brilliant, kind, funny human being.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And a very special, lovely person, but whose life ended very violently at the hands of her husband. So tell me about him.

MICHAEL LISTA: So when Elena was working at a hospital in Ottawa, there was like a sort of rec room there. And one day, sort of at the other end of a pool table which they had there, she spotted this man named Mohamed Shamji. And Mohamed Shamji, like Elena, was thought of as a kind of intellectual academic star. He had a very different background than Elena's. Whereas Elena's, you know, was a more working class, blue collar upbringing, Mohamed Shamji came from, you know, essentially Ottawa gentry. His father was a man named Dr. Fareed Shamji, who was a thoracic surgeon who had a… I think it’s a prize named after him at the hospital. And Mohammed went to very elite, prestigious institutions. He went to Ashbury College and then went on to Yale, studied medicine at Queen’s and ended up becoming a neurosurgeon. But he had this side that no one except Elena really saw, which is, you know, despite all his accomplishments, he was an incredibly violent man who almost immediately after he started dating Elena, began abusing her. And like many, many women who are the victims of domestic violence, Elena, for a whole host of complicated reasons, tried to keep it a secret and did a pretty good job, so much so that the people closest to her sort of knew that Mohammed, who was called Mo by his friends and by Elena, that he could be sort of tempestuous and volatile. But they had no idea the history of violence that stalked Elena all her life. And in late November 2016, as Elena was preparing to leave Muhammad, he murdered her one night in their bedroom as one of their daughters was awake and cowering in her room, listening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what actually happened?

MICHAEL LISTA: When we reported the story, we reported that she had died of blunt force trauma, which was only sort of true. Elena used to joke. She joked on social media that her husband, towards the end of their relationship, they both started taking jujitsu. And she posted a picture of him and said, Dr. Mo, he can break your neck and then fix it too. And we found out when he pled guilty that he had broken her neck.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Huh!

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. And then he stuffed her in a suitcase and discarded her like trash on the side of the Humber River in Kleinberg. And it wasn't just a suitcase. It was her suitcase. And it bore a little luggage tag on it that had the ancestral town of where her family is from.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Horrendous.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Her life ended so violently, but we know often that domestic violence starts out kind of slowly and builds. So do we… With your investigation, did you learn about how the domestic violence in her home began? It sort of saw the rolling increases?

MICHAEL LISTA: Yes. So there were sort of two ways that we went about investigating Elena’s life and the sort of story of their violent marriage. I mean, one was through, you know, just sort of conversations with those closest to her. But, you know, what was difficult is that to a lot of the people close to Elena, they only started putting together some of the stories after she had been killed and realized that this little cut she had, that accident she had, they weren't accidents at all. And then the other way that we went about doing it is we went to look in the public record for any interaction with police or the courts. So it started, as you say, as most, almost all domestic violence does, it started small. And at first, it was sort of verbal abuse, calling her names, calling her family names. You could say that it all kind of flows out of this overbearing sort of sense of control that he always was exerting on Elena: what to eat, who their children can hang out with, whether or not she was allowed to get a subscription to The Globe and Mail, which she was not. And then, as it always does, it escalates. So the first concrete example of very serious violence was when they were newly married. Their first child was nine months old and they got into a physical altercation where Mo ended up punching her, hitting her in some way and splitting her lip and threatening her, threatening to kill her. And it resulted in three criminal charges.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what did police charge him with?

MICHAEL LISTA: One was an assault charge and two were threats of uttering bodily harm. Very serious charges. What happened was that Muhammad was about to go to North Carolina, to Duke to do a Ph.D., and Elena, being Elena, decided that well, she wasn't just going to wait around, you know, sort of bum around Durham by herself, not doing anything. She was going to study too. And so she went to go get a Master's degree. And then this assault happened and the charges were laid. And, you know, as is so often the case, the only way that this crime can be prosecuted is if Elena testifies, right, which if she was going to do, I mean, it would mean the end of her marriage, which she was very proud of even though it was… she thought of it as something… I was told that it was something she could fix. This was a fixable problem, right? She never thought of herself as a victim, right? And it would also mean the end of Muhammad's career because if the charges stuck, he wouldn't be able to cross the border and he wouldn't be able to practice medicine. And so in an attempt to sort of keep everything together, fight for this marriage that she still cared about, and then also remember, she's under the control of a violent man, she decided not to proceed with the charges and they were dropped. And then the violence just kept getting worse. And they were together for, you know, another 12 years.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So if she hadn't told anybody and charges were dropped, how did police zero in on the husband quite so quickly?

MICHAEL LISTA: Muhammad ended up pleading guilty to the charges years later. So we didn't see all the evidence. But from what we can tell, I mean, first of all, the first subject in any murder is a spouse, right? Of course, we do know that towards the end of her life, Elena had retained a divorce lawyer and was getting ready to leave him. And part of the reason was that she was now, once she finally decided to leave, she was telling people that he had been violent with her all her life. And her lawyer knew it, Her friends knew it, her family knew it. They didn't all know the totality of it. You know, they all didn't have the same stories, but it was very clear. And as I mentioned earlier, the police interviewed the children and their eldest daughter heard Muhammad killing her. And I deliberately didn't interview the children. I just didn't think it would be proper for me to do it. I also didn't want to imperil the prosecution.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But you did speak to her parents.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You did finally speak to her parents. And I know that it took you a while and there was quite a lot of care that you put into developing the relationship with them. So can you tell me a little bit about sort of the way that you reached out to them and the way that you… the two, the three of you got to the point where you felt you could meet in-person and talk to each other?

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. So, you know, when I started to reach out to people online who were her friends and colleagues who were upset with the early coverage of her, they would all do the same thing. They would say, I'd be willing to speak to you. But first, I have to ask Elena’s parents’ permission, Joe and Anna. And so they knew that this was going on, and they were giving their blessing to friends and then later, her sister to talk. And it was only after they had a sense of how I worked that they were willing to talk. And yet, as you say, we started on the phone and then they were living in Toronto. They were living in Elena and Muhammad's house. The girls were still going to school and they…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How many children did they have?

MICHAEL LISTA: Three. So they had two girls and a little boy. And in order to sort of maintain as normal a life as possible for the kids, so as not to disrupt their routines and stuff like that, they lived in the house while they were trying to sell it. I mean, you know, in the house where Elena was killed. And that's where we would meet at the kitchen table. The girls were at school or sent away when we would talk because they weren’t old enough to sort of understand what was going on. But the little boy was… I think he was just… I don't think he was three yet and he would be there. And we were spending so much time with each other around the kitchen table telling the story not just of her death, but of her life, that one of the last times I went over to see them, you know, the little boy, Elena and Muhammad’s son, was there. And Elena’s mom said to him in this kind of firm but commanding way, say hello to Uncle Michael. And it was one of these moments as a reporter where you're sort of like, oh my God, like have I gotten too close? Like I don't want to be called Uncle Michael. But at the same time, it kind of reflects something that I wasn't sort of willing to admit, that like part of the reason why I think the story ended up being what it is is because I did care that much.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I always wondered why journalism and objectivity got interpreted as not caring.

MICHAEL LISTA: Right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I don't think that's true. And I think that there is a right and wrong on this side of this story.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: There's no objectivity.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so I think we as journalists get so caught up in this idea of how we should behave that we forget that the reason we got into it is because we actually care about humanity. Or most of us.

MICHAEL LISTA: That's it. Yes, being dispassionate doesn't mean being uninterested.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: No. And the best of us are caring and passionate people, I think.

MICHAEL LISTA: I think so.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You mentioned that one of your concerns was interfering with the prosecution and the daughter who was unfortunately a witness. Can you explain that a little bit more? What was your… what were you worried about and what was happening there?

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. So we did most of the interviews on background.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Which means what? Just explain to people what that means.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. So there are different ways in which you can get information and relay it to your reader. You know, on the record is where the reader knows who the source is. We'll often quote directly from them. On background is when, you know, if a source tells me I drive a red car, then I can say he drives a red car, but the reader won't know where the information is coming from and who the source of it is, right? So I did a lot of the story that way in part because, I mean, in magazine writing, we do more sort of reporting on background because it reads sort of better as a sort of piece of non-fiction, as a story. But it was also for practical reason because I was talking to some people whose identity I didn't want to be, you know, revealed because then I didn't want, and this was especially true with the daughter who witnessed the murder to whom I didn't speak. But the reason why I didn't is because I didn't want a defence attorney to be able to say, you know, in this Toronto Life article here, brandishing it at court, you said that you walked into the room and saw your mother being killed at 2:00. But, you know, we know now it wasn't 2:00, it was 1:50, right? You're getting your facts about this wrong. What side of the bed did you say she was on? You just testified five minutes ago to this, and yet you told Toronto Life this, right? Therefore, why should we believe anything you say, right? It's like it's a classic bit of defence lawyering, which, you know, if you're the defendant, you want your lawyer to do. But I didn't want to introduce that avenue of attack, that sort of legal sophistry in order to get Muhammad off. Because if that happened, I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How old was she?

MICHAEL LISTA: Oh, I think by the time the trial came around, she was… I think she was 14.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Still a child.

MICHAEL LISTA: Still a child. But my God, I remember the day going to court when he was sentenced and they were there. And it was the first time I met them. I didn't meet the girls until the sentencing. And she was very small, looked so small. It was in one of those cavernous courtrooms on University Avenue, the big one. Everyone looks small in there. I think they build them like that for a reason, right?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I think so too, yeah.

MICHAEL LISTA: But she looked tiny, but had this immense maturity and resolve, looked so much like a perfect mix of her parents, you know, one of whom killed the other, and she was ready to send him to prison. I just… I've never… It was profoundly moving and I admire her. You know, I'm horrified for what happened to her, but I admire her in a way I don't admire many people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I want to talk about that day. But just quickly, she didn't have to testify because he pled guilty.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yep, he pled guilty to second degree murder. So it's still a life sentence, but he's eligible for parole earlier than he would have been if he had gone to trial and lost. So I think it's he's eligible in 12 years, something like that, instead of 25. Whether or not he'll ever be granted parole is we'll see. I think it's fairly unlikely, but, you know, we'll see.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I read a few incidents where you talk about being in the court that day. I mean, you write very viscerally. You say you saw his daughter for the first time, but it's also the time you saw him for the first time.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So can you tell me what that was like?

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. He… I think these… I think bad guys… bad guys always seem bigger in your mind.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Always.

MICHAEL LISTA: Right? And it's always shocking. I mean, I've been doing this for a while now. It’s always shocking to really see how human they are. So I was sitting on the right side of the courtroom, which is it was weird. It was sort of like this sort of chiral molecule, like this sort of inside out sort of photo negative of like a wedding because all of Elena’s family was sitting on one side and even the reporters were sitting on that side. And then on the left side were Mohammed's family. His parents were there and I think his uncle, and that's pretty much it. And the victim impact statements were read first, right, where a lot of my sources, you know, came up and, you know, said what this murder meant to them and what Elena meant to them. And then Muhammad was given a chance to talk and he was wearing a suit. He was shorter than I had imagined, very thin. He had been thin most of his life because he was a long distance runner, but it looked like he had lost even more weight in prison. In a weird way, not unhandsome man. He looked like someone, again, from the outside, that you wouldn't think of his as being so repellent on the inside. So he turned and he looked to the right to where his children were sitting, and he started to talk to them and he said, I've devastated your lives. I know it must be hard for you to look at me, but I think about you daily. And no words can reflect, you know, the horror and shame I feel, but I'll try. And he had this incredible pinched expression on his face, and then he started to cry. And I couldn't see the expressions of his daughters, but I could see where they got their expressions from. Some of them were from him. And it was just this incredible, terrifying, heartbreaking and deeply human moment. These people loom so large in our imagination, but they are flesh and blood just like us. And they have to stand in a room all by themselves, you know? Anyways, it was deeply, deeply moving.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you described writing the article and then as a bit of a nightmare for you. Why?

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah. So it wasn't my first murder. And, you know, you sort of like to tell yourself, you know, I'm a pro. I'm like a grizzled, seasoned crime reporter. This stuff doesn't bother me. Murders have a weird way of creeping up on you emotionally. And the more information I got, I felt these two competing things. As a reporter, you're like, oh my God, I'm going to get the access I need to do this story justice. This is great. But you're also, you know, you're like an empty cup that's being filled with the pain and anguish of these people who you come to care about. And I could almost like see Elena in my mind after a while, you know? Like I felt like I knew her. And I started to have really bad anxiety about a whole bunch of different stuff. Like I mean, one was getting the story right. Knowing that I had the story, that no other reporter had the sort of access that I had, I knew I had to do it right. And for me, that means making people care. Not just getting it right, right, but it means like making people, making readers really care about it, right? I mean, when you launch one of these stories into the news cycle, there's so much churn. There's so much information. The way I think of reporting is that you're not just competing with other news stories for people's attention. You're competing with like Facebook and TikTok and PlayStation. Like I want this story to have as much adhesive on it that people's eyeballs, once they lay their eyes on them, they can't unpeel them. But then I started to worry about oh my God, like, you know, what if I screw up the prosecution? Like what would I do? Like it was too. And then, you know, the anxiety just sort of became like kind of generalized. And there was a moment when I kind of passed through the sort of the looking glass. And for the first time, I think, reporting a crime, I really understood the true terror of what it means for a man to kill the mother of his children, you know, and how scared Elena must have been and how this family will never recover from it. And I wanted to sort of go to that place of being really hurt by it in order to make the story what it needed to be in order to serve Elena.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Was it worthwhile for you?

MICHAEL LISTA: I think so. I didn't even realize the true crime boom was happening when I sort of… when it was happening around me. You know, I was doing these stories because to me, they are incredibly important. I mean, before the true crime boom, like as reporters, you didn't want to be called a crime journalist. It was like the desk you wanted to get off of.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: No, I liked it. [laughing]

MICHAEL LISTA: [laughing] I could tell. But to me, I always thought it was… I think there's nothing more interesting than what makes people do these horrible things to one another. I mean, to me, it's the same reason why Macbeth is so interesting. You know, every crime in one way or another and our reaction to it as the political reaction, the jurisprudential reaction, the emotional reaction is a reflection of who we are as a people, as a city, as a country, right?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was thinking the exact same thing. I mean, I don't think there's a true… there's a true crime boom in podcasting. There's not a true crime boom in humanity.

MICHAEL LISTA: Right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's always been on the front pages of every newspaper. I mean, we spend so much of our energy trying to figure out how to punish, how to mitigate, how to deal with something that was unfair and somehow make it fair.

MICHAEL LISTA: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I do think that every crime at its core is about who we are as humans.

MICHAEL LISTA: I agree.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so for me, yeah, I know why I like absorbing these stories and I know why I like reporting these stories. But what do you think is important about telling these stories?

MICHAEL LISTA: That's a great question. It seems like such an easy question. Now I'm sort of fumbling around for the right answer. I mean, I like the task of getting the facts right. There's something unimpeachable about it. It's like this is… whatever you think about it, this is what happened. This is the world we inhabit right now, right? To me, you know, I get a little bit nervous when I see some of the true crime products that are the sort of result of the boom where it's a little bit boozy, where it's, you know, a little bit buttoned down, sometimes like a little bit, a little bit too droll for my taste. You know what I mean? I take this as like a sort of very sacred duty doing this kind of work because, you know, when you pass that looking glass and you reach that sort of moment of like terror where you realize what you're really talking about, then I think what happens is that it transforms your approach to not just the way you do your job, but the way you like think about an English sentence, right? I mean, the true crime writers who I've really loved are the ones who can dilate on real people in the way that you describe them, the way that you set the scene, the way that you sort of paint their portrait in the same way that like a fiction writer would with a subject to exist purely in his mind. I want to be that close to people because I think if you want to understand what crime really means, you have to understand that it is about, especially a murder, it is about a human being being obliterated by another human being. It's like… it's like a library being burned to the ground. It's really profound. And so I like doing this job when I can get that close. The only time it's unsatisfying is when I don't get that moment with my sources, with the subject. When I'm just telling a story that doesn't keep me up at night, I’m not interested in it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So would you have approached this story any differently with hindsight now? Do you feel like you did it properly?

MICHAEL LISTA: The story presented, and I don't mean to make this sound too aesthetic, but it presented a sort of stylistic challenge that I've wrestled with. So part of the thing that allowed me to get the access that I did was because I was planning on writing the story in a certain way, which is by making Elena the victim, the centre of the story, the protagonist of her story. Now, this is… it's sometimes called victim centric crime reporting. But for some people, it's for political reasons, right? We shouldn't focus on these horrible people. Instead, we should focus on victims. The reason why I was doing it was not for that political reason, and it wasn't just for the experience of getting the sources I wanted. It was also because I wanted to understand how a marriage like this, how it works. And the only way to do it was to get… I tried to get inside Mohammed's mind. His family refused to speak to us, so the only mind I really had access to was kind of Elena’s. But then once I started writing it, then I started to worry. I was like, oh my God, by making her the protagonist, am I implicating her as like the engine of her own demise? I don't know. I hope… I think I didn’t do it. I hope I didn't do it. But it taught me something sort of true about narrative. I mean, we write crime stories with perpetrators, with villains as the protagonist for a reason, because they are plot machines. They're the ones who make the consequential decisions, right? So there's this kind of like narrative truth about a crime story that you almost can't alter in the way that I tried to hear. So I guess to answer your question more briefly, it's that I think I would have worked harder to try and get Muhammad's family on board and maybe even he himself. But again, any defence attorney worth their salt will not let their client talk to a reporter like while they're awaiting trial. I would have had to sit on it for years, right?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, maybe there's a follow up.

MICHAEL LISTA: Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. Well, Michael, thank you. This has been fascinating.

MICHAEL LISTA: Oh, it's been totally my pleasure.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay.

MICHAEL LISTA: Thank you for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcast’s YouTube channel or by subscribing to CBC Podcast’s Apple True Crime Channel. Next week, I'll be talking to Carole Fisher about her hit podcast, The Girlfriends, and about how a team of women teamed up and put a murderer in prison.

SOUNDCLIP

CAROLE FISHER: This isn't a playful, funny, let's have wine conversation any more. This is about a woman who lost her life.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In addition to early access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound Design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Agaard. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcast’s senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 5

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