After a young woman is found dead, police are quick to identify her killer. Gathering the proof wasn't quite as fast. A phone, a camera, and a police informant would prove pivotal to this case. View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/the-stingCan’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts of Anatomy of Murder?
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anna Siga-Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
In this digital age, our phones have become our constant companions. And whether it's a blessing or a curse, it also means that rarely are any of us without a camera.
Chapter 2: What role does digital evidence play in modern investigations?
And those cameras, they're always rolling, constantly capturing all of the outrageous, the mundane, the inspiring, and the shocking moments of everyday life.
And if you've ever scrolled social media and watched a supercut of people falling down or a tense confrontation in a parking lot, you probably know what we're talking about. These days, it seems like our every misstep is just destined to be captured on video and shared with the world.
But what happens when a camera captures something even darker? We've probably all seen the shaky footage of an escalating conflict, but rarely do we think about the real life violence that may have followed or the very real consequences when a camera may be the only witness to a murder.
I'm Brian Porter. I'm the Commonwealth's attorney for the city of Alexandria, Virginia.
You may recognize the voice of Brian Porter, who has been a guest on AOM before. Let's see if you can remember which episode now. Brian started his career as a police officer in Washington, D.C., and in his hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, before deciding he wanted to be a lawyer.
Then I graduated from law school and immediately transferred over from being a police officer to being an assistant Commonwealth's attorney doing traffic cases. And I've been a prosecutor ever since. This is my 24th year as a prosecutor. And I have done basically every kind of case you could imagine as a prosecutor, working my way up through the ranks.
I ended up kind of focusing on gang offenses, firearms offenses, complex drug distribution cases, and then homicides.
Brian has been the elected prosecutor in Alexandria since 2014, and in that role, he has overseen a large number of homicides, including the one that occurred in January of 2019 that set a template for how digital evidence could be used effectively in criminal investigations.
On a cold January night, a young woman was returning to the apartment she shared with her roommate, Sumaya Ahmed, in a multi-story residential complex in the city of Alexandria.
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Chapter 3: Who was Sumaya Ahmed and what happened to her?
She and Sumaya were friends as well as roommates, but they didn't see each other every day because they had different work schedules. So as she turned the lock in the apartment door, she didn't know if Sumaya would be home or not.
But as soon as she entered the apartment, she knew something was terribly wrong.
She smelled a strong odor coming from Samaya's room. So she made entry and she discovered that Samaya was dead.
There was blood staining the bed where Samaya's body was found. What appeared to be a severe injury to her head. Her shocked roommate immediately retreated from the bedroom and dialed 911.
First responders arrived at the fifth floor apartment within minutes. But sadly, there was nothing they could do.
They got to the bedroom and they saw Samaya dead. A lot of blood. The blood had coagulated and was not fresh, which led them to believe that she had been dead for some time and her body was cold to the touch.
It was also clear that Samaya, who was just 35 years old, had not experienced a natural death.
They weren't sure what had occurred, but it looked to be consistent with a gunshot wound, and that was pretty quickly confirmed that she had suffered a gunshot wound inside of her mouth, as though the gun had been placed inside of her mouth.
Common Sense suggested that Samaya's fatal injury might have been self-inflicted, but to investigators at the scene, it quickly became clear that her death was not the result of a suicide.
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Chapter 4: What evidence pointed to Sumaya's boyfriend as a suspect?
And so investigators' first job was to begin their victimology. Who was Samaya Ahmed? And who did she know that might have wanted her dead?
Samaya hailed from Egypt. She was bilingual. She had been in the United States for some period of time. I think she had gotten into the States maybe five or six years before her death.
Samaya had legally immigrated to the United States in pursuit of an education and a career.
She was a hard worker. She worked at the airport. She had maintained several jobs, trying to make sure that she had enough money to pay rent.
According to her roommate, Sumaya did not drink, didn't do drugs, and as far as she knew, did not engage in any behavior that would put her life at risk.
And so initially, investigators hoped that physical evidence might hold some clues as to who may have been behind her brutal murder.
So the autopsy, of course, in these situations is done as close as possible. From the outside, the autopsy confirmed that there was a significant amount of blood in the mouth and nose area and also dripping from the area of the back of her head.
The medical examiner who conducted the autopsy also confirmed that rigor mortis had set in, which helped us kind of narrow down the timeframe as being a little bit longer than we normally see when a body is located.
The medical examiner also confirmed what investigators had observed at the scene, that Soumaya had died of an intraoral gunshot wound. But there was also something unusual about her catastrophic injury.
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Chapter 5: How was Sumaya's cellphone crucial to the investigation?
But it would be something belonging to Samaya herself that would convince police that he was more than just a bad boyfriend. He might just be a killer.
In January of 2019, a 35-year-old woman named Sumaya Ahmed was found murdered in her apartment, killed by a single intraoral gunshot to the head.
Her married boyfriend was immediately on investigators' radar as a person of interest. And while Sumaya's roommate described a man with a temper, a drinking habit, and a gun, investigators were still looking for hard evidence that could tie CanCam to the scene of the crime.
And as investigators the world over have learned in this day and age, there's no better piece of evidence than the victim's cell phone.
Samaya's cell phone was located at the scene next to her body. So the cell phone was recovered and that ended up becoming a very integral part of the investigation because of the evidence that was contained upon it.
As we have seen in previous stories, cell phones can provide everything from a victim's location, an archive of texts between the victim and any potential suspects, and of course, photos and videos that might be relevant to the investigation.
But as a prosecutor, I will tell you that getting access to this digital information, well, it takes multiple steps and is often not a quick or straightforward thing to get.
I think most lay people probably assume that it's a very simple and easy affair for law enforcement to obtain all of the contents of a cell phone. But actually, it's a two-step process, both of which can be somewhat difficult. The first, of course, is you have to obtain legal process.
In this case, because we had probable cause to believe a homicide occurred, getting a search warrant for the phone was relatively easy. But the next is you have to obtain access.
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Chapter 6: What did the videos on Sumaya's phone reveal?
We were able to get into the phone and the electronic guys had been able to download the videos and extract them so that we could view them. Very quickly, Daniel Cancam became the primary suspect.
One video in particular shows both Samaya and Cancam in the bedroom where Samaya was killed.
It clearly shows Samaya wearing the same clothes in which she was found when her body was located. And it also was date and time stamped at almost the exact time we believe she was killed.
The camera was being held by Samaya and very deliberately aimed at Can-Can, almost offensively. The couple was in the middle of an argument, and while it's not totally clear why she was filming, whether it was to protect herself or maybe just to show him later, but the exchange between them was most definitely confrontational.
The video shows a very sober Samaya and a very drunk Daniel Can-Can involved in a dispute about him leaving his wife and about the way he treats Samaya.
Investigators already had video proof that CanCam's car had been seen outside the apartment building on the night of the murder. But this video put him inside the apartment, time-stamped within the hour of her estimated time of death.
So, Anastasia, I think it would be good for us if we mention that we have the video, we've seen it, but we've chosen not to use any of it because of the violent nature of what's being shown.
but also of huge evidentiary value to investigators, was how CanCam was dressed.
The other thing that's really important about the video is that CanCam is dressed in his security garb. So for all intents and purposes, he's dressed like a law enforcement officer. He has the pants on that many law enforcement officers wear nowadays. He has boots on. He has an external bullet-resistant vest and a carrier. He even had a fake badge attached to that.
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Chapter 7: How did investigators handle Daniel CanCam's interrogation?
He also lied about the clothing that Samaya was wearing when he left her apartment, which was important because in reality, the clothing that she had on was the same clothing that we could see in the video and also the same clothing that she was wearing when her body was discovered.
During his statement, CanCam was careful to include just enough truth to make his story sound believable as to why he would have been at Samaya's apartment on the night she was murdered.
He definitely had the personality that he thought he could talk his way out of anything. He admitted that he was with her the night before. He admitted that he went into her apartment. But the things that would really be important to the murder, he lied about.
But CanCam's biggest lie had to do with the gun seen on that video, the gun that police believed was likely the murder weapon.
Because he and Samaya had both worked a security detail, they were both armed. He actually would provide her with a firearm and she would wear a gun belt. And he insisted that she had his Glock the entire evening.
But on the cell phone video that we had, and of course, which he did not know that we had, we could clearly see that his Glock was on his person, in his external holster, on his gun belt, at all times relevant to this argument he was having with Samaya.
Incidentally, that 9mm Glock was consistent with Samaya's fatal gunshot wound. And while police did not yet have it in their possession to prove it was the murder weapon, it was clear that CanCam was trying to distance himself from it.
His opinion of his own intellect, I think, was that he was smarter than everybody. He had concocted a story that he thought would cover him, but he did not understand that electronic evidence would be his downfall.
CanCam also thought he was the smartest guy in the room, but he actually was his own worst enemy.
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