Kamloops lawyer guilty of first-degree murder of former client

A former Kamloops lawyer saw no way out when he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars he improperly hid for a client, so he set out to kill the man and tried hiding the evidence.

A BC judge convicted Rogelio “Butch” Bagabuyo of first-degree murder today, nearly four years after Bagabuyo stabbed Mohd Abdullah ten times at his downtown law office. He was sentenced within an hour of his conviction for Canada’s most serious crime, which is a mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment without parole eligibility for 25 years.

Bagabuyo said nothing before being sentenced, the end of a weeks-long, high-profile trial that included dozens of exhibits and several witnesses, taking place in two courthouses.

The Crown spent much of that time attempting to prove Bagabuyo not only killed Abdullah but that he set out with a detailed plan to lure him to the office, then dispose of the body in March 2022.

Justice Kathleen Ker heard no evidence from the defence, but Bagabuyo’s lawyers argued the killing was manslaughter and his plan was drawn up after the fact. She was not convinced.

“I have no doubt that Mr. Bagabuyo’s actions in this case constitute a planned and deliberate murder,” she said on Feb. 3.

Bagabuyo killed his former friend and client, Abdullah, in March 2022 after a dispute over money.

Abdullah entrusted nearly $800,000 to Bagabuyo years earlier in an effort to hide it from divorce proceedings. Counting on the money for his retirement, Abdullah waited years until his ex-wife died to ramp up his efforts to get the money back.

The arrangement wasn’t typical, nor legal, but Bagabuyo took the extra step of putting the money into his own accounts, then spending all of it before 2019. He delayed Abdullah multiple times over the years, but Abdullah’s patience was running out by February 2022.

He sent a pair of emails to Bagabuyo expressing his growing frustrations with the delays.

“There can be no doubt that upon receiving and reviewing these two emails, Mr. Bagabuyo well knew, to put it colloquially, the jig was about to be up, and he needed to do something about that,” Ker said.

In March 2021, the pair planned to meet at Bagabuyo’s downtown office, where Bagabuyo would stab Abdullah to death and store his body in a plastic bin.

Days later, police would find Abdullah’s body in the tote, strapped down in the back of a rental van.

Though he was charged soon after with indignity to a dead body, he wasn’t charged with first-degree murder until a year later, after a lengthy police investigation.

Kamloops homicide investigators uncovered a to-do list Bagabuyo wrote, seemingly detailing what he had to do in order to hide the body and the crime. They found surveillance footage of Bagabuyo buying the tote bin and other equipment in the days ahead of Abdullah’s death, then hauling the tote from his office into his own vehicle on the day he killed Abdullah.

The incident took place over two hours on the afternoon of March 11, 2021. In that time, Bagabuyo stabbed Abdullah ten times, tied his wrists and ankles, wrapped his body in plastic and stored him in the plastic bin with bags of other evidence. He ratchet-strapped the tote before putting it into his Honda Pilot and cleaned the office.

On his cue card, Bagabuyo’s list reminded himself to turn off GPS on his devices, hide Abdullah’s body, bag the evidence, close his office doors and clean the scene.

“The to-do list on the cue card is a pivotal piece of evidence,” Ker said.

Several witnesses were called during the 2025 trial, including Bagabuyo’s elderly friend Wynand Rautenbach, who rented the utility van and drove it with Bagabuyo in the days after. He and Bagabuyo sought somewhere to bury the tote outside Kamloops, but they failed to find a suitable place in the early spring conditions.

It was Rautenbach’s adult grandson, Jason Robertson, who initially found the body. When Rautenbach returned from a failed effort to find a place to bury the body, Robertson check its cargo, concerned Rautenbach was being “duped” into something suspicious.

He found Abdullah’s body and called police to his grandparents’ Dufferin neighbourhood home on March 17, 2022.

When Bagabuyo was arrested soon after, police found several documents in his jacket, including numerous emails between himself and Abdullah.

The lengthy and complex investigation carried on for months, complicated by the fact Bagabuyo was a lawyer and RCMP brought in a legal referee to field legally-sensitive material.

While Bagabuyo’s defence argued it was a case of manslaughter, not deliberate and planned murder, the evidence overwhelmingly showed Abdullah’s death was no accident nor spur of the moment decision.

Bagabuyo remained on bail until his Feb. 3 conviction.