Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all well. I sure do. I know you’re not going to believe it, but we’re nearly at the end of season 16. I know, so we’re going to close it out with another fascinating two-part case from former Orange County Homicide DA, Matt Murphy. If you watch any true crime in the US at all, you see Matt on TV many times. So, the case he brings us today is actually in his new book, The Book of Murder, which I read and loved. So, let me assure you that even if you’ve also read Matt’s book, you don’t want to miss these episodes. Matt recounts the case so well that, let’s say, if you’re listening in the car and you get to your destination before the episode is finished, you’re going to turn off the engine and just stay till the end.

This is a complicated case, not too hard to follow, but complicated because the main suspect thinks of almost everything when he maps out the crime. And this creates loads of follow up for the cops, which makes for a lot of moving pieces. But as you’ll hear, even the most organized criminals make mistakes. As Matt says, this guy is 95% genius and 5% dipshit. And it’s the dipshit part as well as the company he keeps that finally lands the bad guy on the cop’s radar. But even then, it takes years before they can get their hands on this a-hole and get justice for the victims.

The last thing I want to tell you is that Matt talks about torture in this episode as it’s one of the many crimes that were committed in this case. So, Small Town Fam, please take care when listening. Here is Misery.

Hi there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan: I’m Dan.

Dave: I’m Dave.

Paul: And I’m Paul.

Yeardley: And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan: Dave and I are identical twins-

Dave: -and retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul: And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan: Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave: Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul: Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan: And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave: –out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]: Thank you.

Yeardley: Today on Small Town Dicks, my friends. We have the usual suspects. I’m so excited. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: Hello, team. [Yeardley laughs] I didn’t know what else to say.

Yeardley: That’ll do. That’ll do. We have Detective Dave.

Dave: Thrilled to be here.

Yeardley: Thrilled to have you, as always. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul: Hey. Hey. How’s it going? [laughs]

Yeardley: Hey. Hey. It’s so good. Even though I have a slight cold. So, happy that you’re all here. And Small Town Fam, it’s a very exciting day. We are so lucky and so excited to welcome back superstar television star, one of our favorites, former Orange County Homicide DA Matt Murphy.

Matt: Thrilled to be back.

Yeardley: We are so thrilled to see you, Matt. This really is fun. It’s just fun to see people that you’ve admired for a long time and then they come and join you in your own backyard. I don’t know if it gets better than that.

Matt: This is super fun for me. And Paul and I worked together back in the day on the Golden State Killer case.

Yeardley: I know it’s old hat for you guys.

Matt: Old, old hat. No. As I said last time I was on with you guys, my assistant absolutely loves your podcast.

Yeardley: We love Heather.

Matt: Yeah, Heather’s the best.

Yeardley: She’s a treasured part of the Small Town Fam. But, Matt, you have another case for us today. Tell us about how this case came to you.

Matt: So, I got a doozy today. This wound up being my very last trial as a prosecutor. So, I did 26 years in Orange County and the Homicide Unit, I did 17. Orange county is a vertical system, so you get assigned cities, and one of my cities was Newport Beach. So, you handle it from the beginning of the crime all the way to the end. I had Newport, Costa Mesa, Laguna, and Irvine. And I was responsible for all the murders that were committed in those jurisdictions. And so, every once in a while, you get a case that winds up not being a murder, but it’s so diabolical and so twisted that you wind up trying to stay on it just to see to it that justice is done. And this is one of those.

So, I get a call very early in the morning. It is my detectives from Newport. And it was related to a kidnapping where at that point, we weren’t sure whether or not the victim was going to survive. There’s two victims, but the male victim in particular has been severely injured. He’s in shock and he’s in the hospital. And they weren’t sure, if he was going to live or die. So, we’ve got to get a bunch of stuff working between warrants and trying to start piecing this thing together.

Yeardley: What’s the victim’s name?

Matt: His last name has never been released publicly, so I’ll call him Michael. He was an owner of a totally legal, fully licensed marijuana dispensary in the city of Santa Ana. The marijuana world in California is a fascinating thing because for decades and decades it was run totally by criminals. And when I first became a DA, I thought like, this is just stupid of me. I had this cartoon image of what the different drug dealers were like. I thought you’d get the coke dealers, I pictured Miami Vice, the meth dealers. [Yeardley laughs] I pictured like the tweakers running around with no teeth. And the marijuana dealers, I thought those would be like unicorn riding hippies that were peace, love and whatever.

Yeardley: I’m going to say. I don’t think you’re wrong. I think all those people play in that pool, but probably some others as well.

Matt: For sure, for sure. But what I learned along the way, including a bunch of murders that I wound up doing, is that marijuana world, those unicorn riding hippies exist, but they’re a very small percentage. And really there’s a lot of the same vicious, murderous thug criminals that are still involved in that area. So, what happened was California passed this initiative. It originally was a medical marijuana initiative. This is back in the 90s. Now it’s just fully legal like a lot of states. So, you have this end of prohibition thing happening. And so, you’ve got that criminal element. It’s still very strongly present in the marijuana world. But you also have these legitimate business guys or at least semi-legitimate, who come in and the idea was that they’ll pay taxes. And the problem is it is still a federal crime.

So, that F that we see in the FDIC stands for federal. So, what do you do? It’s dual jurisdiction. So, what used to be a state crime is now no longer a state crime, but it’s still a federal crime. So that FDIC, that’s federally insured bank deposits, that means that no banks can deal with the California marijuana business because it’s a federal crime and they’d be aiding and abetting in it. So, the result is these businesses are all cash. They inadvertently, I guess we could call it, they’ve created this recipe for disaster where you’ve got a criminal element. A lot of those guys are getting squeezed out of marijuana world because the margins have been dropped so much. And especially with hydroponic grows that’s indoor growing, like water-based marijuana grows. It’s becoming harder and harder for the criminals that are still very much in the business to turn a profit.

So, Michael was one of the totally legitimate businessmen who came in. He didn’t even smoke pot himself, but he would treat it like a business. He was properly licensed. He would report his income, he would pay his employees, he would honor his contracts. When you’re in that world where there’s still a lot of sketchy, temporary people, and a lot of them are lowlifes, a guy like Michael can suddenly become very successful because everybody wants to do business with him.

Yeardley: About what year are we talking this crime takes place?

Matt: So, it’s 2012, Newport Beach. And Michael has a really nice home that he’s living on the Newport Peninsula. So, for those familiar with Newport Beach, you go over a bridge and you go down this peninsula with like beautiful beach houses one side and then there’s docks and yacht clubs on the other. It’s a very nice part of Orange County. So, he’s got this place, it’s a few houses in from the beach. So, you can sort of picture the scene during the summertime. There’s people in bikinis, there’s surfboards, and Michael’s got a nice like town home. It’s an independent home, but it’s this really nice setup that he shares with a roommate whose girlfriend had just moved out from the East Coast. So, she is staying there while her boyfriend is out of town. So that’s Michael’s roommate.

Michael’s roommate is out and the girlfriend, Mary Barnes, I think it’s like her second or third night in Orange County. And she is awoken at about 2 o’clock in the morning to a guy in a black mask with a gun pointed at her who whispers, “Don’t worry, this isn’t about you.” And they zip tie her, they put a blindfold, it’s like one of those sleeping masks that they duct tape around her head and they throw duct tape over her mouth and they carry her down to what we later learn is a van, but she’s not exactly sure, some kind of car. Michael, on the other hand, he fell asleep on a couch in like a common area of the house. And he’s awoken to somebody beating him in the face with the barrel end of a 12-gauge pump action shotgun.

And he wakes up literally to a beating and they demand the “million dollars.” And he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They tie him up and he’s got some cash in a sock in a drawer. He’s got maybe a couple thousand bucks. And they’re like, “Fuck you, we want the million dollars.” So, they then proceed to drag him out of the house, down the stairs. His hands are bound behind his back, his legs are zip tied together. And they carry him out face down, so his face bangs on every stair on the way down. They throw him in the back of this car, they slam the car doors, and they start driving. And along the way, there’s a driver and there’s two men in the back. Michael can’t see anything and Mary Barnes can’t see anything. But they can hear everything.

And for Michael, he can feel everything because they begin torture him. And they pull out a blowtorch. There’s a taser that they keep putting against his skin. And they keep demanding this million dollars. They also have a rubber hose. They pull his pants down and they’re beating his hip over and over again. And this goes on for hours. And they drive out, and it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Mary Barnes can hear that the road turns into gravel and then dirt. So, they’re out in the middle of nowhere. Turns out later, it’s the Mojave Desert out here in Southern California. And the van stops and they pull them both out. Mary Barnes is still bound, she still can’t see anything. And she has literally listened to the very nice roommate of her boyfriend, tortured for probably two and a half hours.

Yeardley: Oh, my God.

Matt: And they pull him out and they say, “This is your last chance. We know the money’s buried out here.” And he said, “The money is in the safe in my business. Let’s go. And I’ll give you. It’s like $40,000 in cash. I’ll give you that money.” And Michael doesn’t know what they’re talking about regarding this mythical million dollars. And next thing he knows, they pull his pants down and he feels them tie something around the base of his penis. At which point it’s almost like one guy starts and then can’t finish. And then another guy picks up the job and begins singing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And Michael at that point, probably passes out from shock.

Yeardley: So they’re cutting off his penis is what you’re saying?

Matt: Yeah, well. And he doesn’t know this yet, and he’s like, “What are you going to do? Like, cut my dick off? Like, let’s go to the business. I’ll give you every penny that I have.” “Fuck you, we want the million dollars.” And so, they do this. And then they pour bleach all over him. Michael was covered in bleach. He’s in shock. It’s approaching dawn and Mary is sitting there certain she’s about to die. And she thinks they’re going to light him on fire. And then she hears one of them throws something like into the bushes kind of around her feet and says, “That’s a knife. If you can find it, you can free yourself. If you can’t, you can just die out here.” And she hears the van start up and drive off into the night.

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[Break 1]

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So, Mary has lived there for like two days. She has nothing to do with marijuana. Her boyfriend is not in business with the roommate and she doesn’t know who these guys are or what happens. So, she winds up scooching around until she’s able to get her blindfold up above her eye enough that she can kind of see. She finds the knife. Her hands are zip tied behind her back, so she manages to cut the zip ties around her feet so she’s able to move with her legs, but she still can’t get unzip tied from the ones that are behind her back. So, she makes her way over to Michael. She tries to cut the zip ties off of his hands, hoping that then he would be able to free her.

And all she winds up doing, but you can’t see as she’s doing it, she winds up just severely cutting his palm with this knife. So that’s not working. This is a guy who’s been tortured for hours and she still doesn’t know exactly what they did to him. She thinks he’s still alive, but you can imagine he’s in shock. And I think he screamed when she cut his hand. So, way off in the distance in the desert, she sees lights. So, barefooted, she takes off running towards what she thinks is a road. She gets down there. This is just one of those things you can’t make up. The first person she encounters is Deputy Williams, who’s an off-duty sheriff’s deputy in his patrol car on his way to work.

And what he sees is this woman in black pajamas, arms zip tied behind her back, zip ties still dangling off of one of her ankles, frantically trying to flag him down. And whatever this is, he knows it’s going to be really heavy. And this guy’s such a good cop, he gets out. And the instinct of course would be to immediately untie her and find out what’s happening. And this is absolutely the middle of nowhere. So, this woman comes running out of open desert to a highway. He has the presence of mind to take photographs of her before he undid the zip ties. And Mary tells him what happened, gives him as much information as she can, remember she ran through the open desert, and she knows that Michael needs help, and so now they got to find him.

So, Deputy Williams puts Mary Barnes in his patrol car, and they’re able to find an access road, and they get to this gate, and they’re able to find Michael. And again, this deputy took photographs of this every step of the way. So, we have a photograph of the discovery of Michael in real time. And they were able to begin rendering first aid to him. And of course, the first thing they discover is his pants are around his ankles, he’s covered in bleach, and his penis has been severed. There’s a black zip tie on the base of his penis.

And so, they transport him and immediately perform what’s known as a grid search, where a bunch of emergency personnel will basically either stand right next to each other or sometimes even lock elbows and slowly walk through an area, because they know that if you can recover a severed penis, sometimes they can be reattached. So, they perform this search. Everybody involved in this is hoping they can find this man’s severed penis. And it didn’t take long before they realized that they didn’t just cut it off and throw it into the bushes. They actually took it with them.

Yeardley: Oh, my God.

Matt: So, Michael’s penis is gone. They can’t reattach it. And now the investigation begins. And right about this time is when I get the phone call. So, it appears that Michael is going to survive, despite the shock and probably a little bit of hypothermia and everything else. And they ask Michael, who might have done this to you, and he has no clue. And it’s like, “Did you sleep with anybody’s wife?” No. And he had a girlfriend, fiancé that he was very devoted to. He never cheated on her. He never cheated on any business partners. And he’s a guy who pays a fair price, honors his contracts, like, he’s popular in this world, and he has no enemies that he knows of, so he can’t offer anything. So, this is a horrific crime. Michael has no idea who might have done it.

We have no idea what the car was. The suspects were wearing gloves. There’s no DNA. There’s no forensic evidence of who these people might have been found at the scene at all. This is very well planned. We have no license plate for the van. We have nothing. And it’s totally unrelated to Mary Barnes. We’re looking at her boyfriend for a while who’s totally innocent. Had nothing to do with it. We had nothing. So, what they did is the Newport police performed what’s called a canvas. It’s like a due diligence thing that almost never gets anything. All it means is you canvass the area, you knock on the doors of all the neighbors, and you try to find out if anybody saw anything helpful, and what happens? 99 times out of 100, you get a bunch of people who really want to help, and they tell you, yeah, I did hear something. It was the dumpster. Might have been those damn raccoons. Again, I heard a woman screaming in the wrong direction. But my neighbor’s wife is kind of loud when she’s mad at him. And you wind up having to chase down a bunch of red herrings that have nothing to do with your case.

And you almost never get anything on a canvas. So, they go all the houses across the street down, around, and they come to one of the houses behind this townhome. There’s an alley separating them. And I think everybody on this panel is old enough to remember bewitched.

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Matt: I don’t want to age myself. Remember Mrs. Kravitz down the street?

Yeardley: Sure.

Matt: So, there’s a woman who they knock on the door, and this is just one of those classic scenes. So, Newport is, “Hey, we’re looking. There’s a crime committed in the house across the way, hoping against hope.” And they’ve knocked on, I don’t know, 25 different doors by this point, maybe you might have seen something unusual. And she answers the door, and she’s like, as a matter of fact, I did. She said, I saw a white truck. And it looked weird to me because there was three boys in yellow hard hats, but the hard hats looked too new to be real. And that caught my attention. And I saw two of them go up into my neighbor’s house onto their balcony with a ladder. And I don’t remember them coming out, she is talking about Michael’s house.

So, all of a sudden, now, imagine after 25 conversations about raccoons and mad wives, all of a sudden, they’ve got something really good. And it’s like, “Please, ma’am, tell us you can give us a description of the truck.” And they’re hoping, that it’s a white truck or a red truck. And her answer was, [laughs] “I wrote down the license plate. Will that help?”

[laughter]

Yeardley: Yes.

Matt: So, now we’ve got a plate, right? And the plate comes back to a guy named Kyle Handley. And Kyle Handley went to a high school called Clovis West High School in Fresno. And Kyle excelled in high school at exactly nothing-

[laughter]

-except growing and smoking copious amounts of marijuana. Okay, so turns out Kyle was known to Michael. And Kyle Handley had sold some marijuana product over the years to Michael. And Michael had a really good couple of successful years in a row. And he decided at one point that he was going to celebrate by taking some of his more reliable growers that he worked with in this co-op, it was called a co-op back then in California, and take him to Las Vegas to celebrate a successful year. So, he basically treats five or six of these marijuana growers to an awesome weekend in Vegas, and one of them included Kyle Handley.

Yeardley: Just to be clear, Michael is the one who’s organizing this trip to thank his growers.

Matt: Yes. Michael organizes the trip and they go to Vegas. And so, he knows Kyle very well. Kyle, right after they have this Vegas weekend, basically ghosts him and he disappears. And this is in the spring of 2012, just no more contact. Michael didn’t think anything of it because the marijuana world is fundamentally a transient business. People come in and out, they go on to other things, they get degrees, they go to jail, whatever. Tends to be somewhat transitory as far as the people that are in it. So, he doesn’t really think twice about it. And then we go and we do a search warrant on Handley’s house. And they get in. The first thing they do is they pop Handley’s truck, the one that the license plate came back to. And first thing they notice is an overpowering smell of bleach.

And then they go into the house. There’s no furniture in the house. There’s just tons and tons of hydroponic receipts. So, it’s basically like he’s got a futon in there, and he’s got like a couple plates. That’s what they call a grow house. He’s renting this house in the Fountain Valley area of Orange County to grow marijuana. And this truck has got what’s called panda paper on the inside. They use that in the marijuana growing business to get the exact amount of light on the inside. They’ll put this panda paper stuff that blocks light from windows so that they can really sort of like, hone in on the ideal conditions to grow the best bud. So, Kyle has all the bells and whistles you could ever want for a grow house. But we also find a plastic zip tie on a plastic trash bag in his backyard.

Yeardley: And this zip tie, does it look like it matches the one that was used on Michael?

Matt: Yes, it’s very similar in appearance. And so, we arrest Handley and charge him with this kidnapping for the purposes of ransom or robbery. Okay. And in the state of California, when you kidnap somebody for the purposes of robbery or ransom, and there is great bodily injury that happens during the course of that crime, that is a life without possibility of parole offense, as it very much should be, in my opinion. So, basically, somebody tries to kidnap an innocent victim or even a guilty victim, if they die, that person should be on the hook, even if they don’t die. If they live. If there’s great bodily injury visited upon, you’re a victim of a kidnapping, when you do it for the sake of getting money out of it, it’s life without possibility of parole.

So, Handley’s in a whole lot of trouble. But we still don’t know who the other players are. And Handley will not talk. He immediately lawyers up.

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[Break 2]

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So, we know that there’s at least three guys in the van. We want everybody that’s involved in this. And behind the scenes problem for me is that my victim lived. And I’ve got, I think, 25 different murder cases on my caseload at this point. So, it’s like, fascinating case guys, did the warrants, feel horrible for this guy, but I’ve got a bunch of other cases I got to deal with. And I keep trying to give it to my colleague, Heather Brown, who’s assistant head of court of what’s called the felony panel. And that’s run by one of my best friends, this guy Dennis Conway. So, Dennis and Heather have it, but it just keeps getting more and more complicated.

And these are my detectives at Newport, because my homicide guys are working it. And every time I try to get rid of this thing, [laughs] Dennis keeps giving it back to me. [Yeardley laughs] So, we come to an arrangement where it’s like, “Look, I’ll do it, but you got to have Heather help me.” And Heather is absolutely one of the best human beings I know. I mean, she’s one of my closest and dearest friends.

Yeardley: And, Matt, just to be clear, the reason you keep trying to hand it off to Heather is because you are specifically a homicide DA and so you handle murders. And because Michael didn’t actually die, it’s technically not your department, right?

Matt: Right. Yes. So, we’ve got one guy in custody, we got a good case against him, I think. And we got his license plate. He’s clearly involved. We got three guys in the van. He’s got to be one of the guys. Case against him is pretty good, but we still have no clue who the other two guys are. And in addition to the plastic zip tie in Kyle’s truck, there’s a blue nitrile glove found under the seat in Kyle’s truck. So, the zip tie goes to the crime lab for analysis, and the glove goes to the crime lab for analysis. Before long, we get a DNA hit, a complete genetic profile from the blue nitrile glove to a guy named Hossein Nayeri. Nayeri was in the Marine Corps for about a minute and then went AWOL.

And we look into him. Nayeri immigrated to the United States from Iran when he was a little kid. Grew up in the Fresno area, had extended family. His mother was a lawyer in Iran. His father had gone missing after the new regime or the current regime came in. So, he’s got this colorful immigrant history. Goes to Clovis West, the high school in Fresno. He is a friend of Kyle’s, and they’re, in fact, the term thickest thieves kind of fits. And then we look into his background, and we start discovering all kinds of interesting stuff. After he went AWOL from the Marine Corps, he was involved in a rollover traffic collision where one of his very close friends and business partner, this guy Hossein Tusi, wound up getting killed. And Nayeri fled back to Iran when that case was pending.

Yeardley: Was Nayeri driving?

Matt: Yes, Nayeri was the driver. And it was like a DUI homicide type of situation. And Nayeri flees. There’s a bench warrant issued for him. Somehow, he sneaks back into the United States, and he cries and convinces some judge in Fresno to basically put him on probation. Nayeri gets a slap on the wrist. He does virtually no time in that. And he then goes all in in the marijuana world. And somewhere in there, he winds up getting married to a woman named Cortney Shegerian, who we soon discovered was a law student. And we immediately, of course, start looking for Hossein Nayeri. And he’s nowhere to be found. And then as soon as his name came into Newport, one of the detectives was like, “Wait, I’ve heard that name before. And it was a guy in the traffic division. There’d been a high-speed chase two days before this kidnapping.”

Yeardley: Before Michael’s kidnapping?

Matt: Yes, like right before the kidnapping. And the insurance card inside this Chevy Tahoe that was in this high-speed chase. Like, the guy doesn’t stop for a motor officer. High speed chase to Newport, drives onto a little island in Newport Beach called Lido Island. Stops the car and swam for it and actually got away, like, swam through the channel, whoever this dude was. And inside there was insurance information for Hossein Nayeri, even though the car was in his wife’s name, Cortney Shegerian’s name. So, they go back to the tow yard. Car is still there. It has not been reclaimed yet. And they find a whole bunch of tracking devices and little mini spy cameras. They download it and it’s all images of Michael’s house in Newport.

Dan: Oh, my God.

Matt: So all the images are Michael’s house. And they have trackers, like vehicle trackers. And they get the serial numbers from those and they come back to a place called Agriglobe, which is another hydroponic marijuana supply store. Like, their IP address was used for a fake Yahoo account. And these things were all mailed to Kyle Handley’s grow house in Fountain Valley. So, somebody in this Agriglobe place in Fresno orders tracking equipment to Kyle Handley’s place from Agriglobe or their IP address. So, the police get up there, and there is a woman named Naomi Rhodus who works there, who had recently purchased two firearms. One was a 9-millimeter, which is a gun that is very similar to what was described by Mary Barnes during the kidnapping. And a pump action 12-gauge pistol grip, shot gun.

So, we’re still looking for the third guy in the van. We have a partial DNA profile off of the white zip tie that was found in Kyle Handley’s backyard. That does not come back to either Handley or Nayeri. We believe that’s our third guy. So, we’re trying to figure out who that is. Naomi Rhodus had previously been married to a guy named Ryan Kevorkian, who is a CDC prison guard. So, he’s working for the California Department of Corrections. Lost his job because he impregnated a female prisoner, which is frowned upon. So, he gets fired, he’s out of work, and he belonged to 24-Hour Fitness, the gym. So, the detectives who were assigned to go and follow him around, one of them belonged to 24-hour.

So, he just follows him around the gym, goes in, pretends like he’s working out, and stole his towel. His gym towel that they give you at 24 Hour Fitness. Ryan Kevorkian is our third guy.

Yeardley: So, Matt, you get DNA off of this gym towel?

Matt: Yes.

Dan: That’s amazing. That’s really quick thinking from that officer.

Matt: He’s great. So, we’ve got Kyle is in custody. We know Naomi has purchased the shotgun. So, she’s up to her eyeballs on this thing and is ordering stuff from Agriglobe, having it sent to Kyle Handley, the tracking equipment. All these people are stupid, okay? I think I can say that they’re all stupid. Handley is a burnout. Naomi wrote us, we did a sit-down proffer with her and it was frustrating. These people are not brain surgeons, any of them. This is, of course, my opinion. But Nayeri is really smart. And he’s this connecting sort of part of the wagon wheel that connects them all together. He was best friends with Ryan. Hossein Nayeri knew Kyle very closely. Hossein Nayeri’s in the marijuana business with everybody. None of the rest of these people have two brain cells if you rubbed them together. But Nayeri is frigging smart. And Nayeri is now, of course, long gone. And he is back safely in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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[Break 3]

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Yeardley: Matt, if Kyle is the original connection to Michael, who decides that Michael is going to be the target? Why Michael? Especially, if Michael is doing business above board. One would think that he’s not getting any extra money from anyone because he’s doing it the right way. Is it just because he’s an easy mark and he’s a nice guy?

Matt: Yeah. So, this is what we believe happened is once Kyle saw Michael in Vegas, who’s paying for stuff with cash. And they stayed at the Wynn Hotel. I think it’s the nicest hotel in Vegas. So, yeah, they go to the Wynn and they have this awesome weekend. And Michael wasn’t a big gambler, but he’s at the tables and he’s paying for everything in cash. Because it’s a business that is all cash. I mean, I’ve always believed that at some point, Handley sees some wad of cash in Michael’s hand and thought, bingo. And Handley was just a loser. But Nayeri is a bona fide psychopath and they were buddies. So, what we’ve always envisioned is they had that conversation and Nayeri begins hatching the plot.

Yeardley: The million dollars, who made that up?

Matt: That came out of Nayeri’s brain. I don’t know how he calculated the math or the success of the business or how much product he’s moving or whatever, but he was fixated on a million dollars in cash. But we don’t know any of this yet because he’s gone. Handley’s not talking. So, we’ve still got this Chevy Tahoe. And we want to do a search warrant on Nayeri’s home where he lives with Cortney Shegerian. Well, that car was in her name. This is a young woman who has a lot to lose. She’s in law school at the time. Her uncle is actually a famous lawyer in Los Angeles. He’s a big PI guy. He’s become very wealthy and successful. And then she’s got a nice family in Fresno. Her dad is also very successful businessman.

Actually, worked, I believe with the Obama administration for a while in agriculture. So, this is a really successful family. And she met this guy when she was 15 or 16, when he was working as a waiter in a Mimi’s cafe. And she thought he was cute. And he’s like I don’t know, seven or eight years older. And it became this very abusive relationship. And our panel here, you guys all know, like the guys in the one country in the world that will never extradite.

Dave: You don’t have a direct liaison with Tehran’s DA. [Yeardley laughs]

Matt: Normally, I should be able to just pick up a phone and call. So, now it becomes we have this horrific frigging case and our mastermind has gotten away. So, the conventional move is you charge him, you put a warrant in the system and you hope one day he’s stupid enough to come back to the United States, which with a warrant in the system for a mandatory life without possibility of parole sentence, nobody’s ever going to do.

Yeardley: If you do that, you put a warrant in the system and Nayeri, for instance, is in Iran. Is he notified that there is a warrant like that for him?

Matt: I don’t know if there’s a repository they can come and check. But what you can do is you can check the Orange County court database and see if there’s been a case that’s been filed against you that you can do. So, what we do is we bring Cortney in with the idea that she’s going to have to pick up the Chevy Tahoe. It’s in impound because it’s still sitting there from the high-speed chase. So, Ryan Peters, who’s the lead detective, who is a man among men, I love this guy. He is one of the best detectives I ever got to work with. So, he rewrites the property form for returning a car at an impound, where he adds all this language about, I acknowledge the receipt of everything inside. “This is my vehicle. I know what’s in my vehicle. I take possession of it because I’m aware of what it is, what it’s used for,” like, it’s essentially a written confession.

And we make Cortney Shegerian read it on video before she signs it. So, she reads it, she acknowledges it, and it’s essentially, it’s a conspiracy statement. And she reads it, and she signs it. And Ryan Peters says, “Okay, I got good news and bad news.” The bad news is your house is being searched, and obviously you’re not getting this car back. And the good news is I’m going to give you an opportunity to do the right thing. And Ryan Peters reaches out to Cortney’s father. So, he had just this weird hunch that maybe her dad was a decent guy because she appeared to come from a really nice family and she did.

So, Ryan reaches out to her father and says, I’m giving you a courtesy here. Your daughter, even though she was an adult, we believe she’s in way over her head. And they wind up hiring a man named Lou Rosenblum. When I got taken from sexual assault into the homicide unit, I was basically recruited by the head of the homicide unit, who wound up being one of my dearest friends and he was a mentor for my entire time. This man literally taught me almost everything I know about how to prosecute murders. And it was Lou Rosenblum. So, Lou Rosenblum was my boss. And I don’t know if it was through the uncle, but somebody did their research. And the lawyer they called to represent Cortney was Lou Rosenblum. One guy that I would listen to every syllable of every word that he had to say.

The quality of legal work that he did for Cortney Shegerian is remarkable. So, Lou is uniquely situated to have a come to Jesus conversation with Cortney, who has married Hossein, who has been under his spell for the better part of 10 years, and she’s been horrifically abused. And Heather and I and Ryan Peters, so you got a lead detective, and you got two prosecutors on this case who have boundless respect for this defense lawyer who comes in, and basically, Lou says, look, “She needs to do the right thing. Let’s give her a chance. Let’s proffer her, which means let’s sit down and hear what she’s got to say.”

Yeardley: Without promising her anything?

Matt: Yes, Great question. Without promising her anything. But we’ve got the mastermind of this. We want the main player. You always want the main player. It’s like these murder for hire plots, that we hear about the wife who hires the hitman who winds up being a cop. You always turn the slayer against the mastermind. If you can so if you got somebody who’s muscle in a crime, you always try to flip them against the mastermind, even if the mastermind isn’t there. That’s the way these things should work when they’re professionally handled.

Yeardley: And don’t we have a thing in California where you don’t have to testify against your husband, against your married person?

Matt: For domestic violence cases? Yeah. And we also have spousal privilege as well.

Yeardley: Right. But if it’s not domestic violence, let’s say Michael had died, would Cortney be obligated to testify against her husband?

Matt: This is the type of thing where she’s going to testify theoretically, or offer testimony, things she observed. That would be spousal privilege, which is owned by the testifying spouse. So, she has the ability to waive that by herself. But the question is, can we get her there? So, we’re expecting that this woman is going to not cooperate. But I got Lou saying, “Let’s just sit down, do a proffer.” And so, Cortney came to Newport, and she proceeded to tell us literally everything she knew. And I think Lou had her seeing a therapist every single day. It was like deprogramming her from a cult of one. And I’ve got to say, Cortney Shegerian did the right thing. And what she said was that Hossein had been planning this for months. He’d put a tracker on Michael’s car.

Michael had gone out to the place in the desert with some friend for some meaningless real estate opportunity that wound up going nowhere. He didn’t want to buy out there. The friend didn’t buy out there, but his car was there. So, he was driving around this one area where they were looking at potentially investing in old gold mines. It was a nothing trip, but Hossein sees that and says, “Aha. This is where Alibaba’s treasure is buried.”

Yeardley: Oh, my God.

Matt: It’s just like, this guy set up fake email accounts to order this stuff. He had a burner computer. I’ve had cases with burner phones. He bought a burner laptop to download the data from all of these things, but he’s too stupid to realize the money might be in the safe. It’s like 95% really genius, 5% dipshit.

Dave: Yeah, a guy with that kind of money is not going to let it that far out of his sight.

Matt: Yeah, you get a safety deposit box. The bank doesn’t know what you’re putting in those things. But Cortney said it went on for months that Nayeri borrowed her taser to go do it. She knew that Kyle was in it. Kyle was in the [unintelligible ]. They were playing with the tasers. The night before the kidnapping, Kyle parked his truck close to the house in Newport.

Yeardley: Close to Michael’s house.

Matt: Yes. You know, not knowing that Newport Beach uses plate readers. Every time he was in Newport, we’ve got him as they’re changing the batteries on all these cameras, which needed to be changed all the time because they’re cheap little surveillance cameras. They had a van that they got Naomi Rhodus’ friend to rent from Enterprise in Northern California. They took all of these elaborate steps to separate themselves from the instrumentality of the crime. And dipshit Kyle drives down a couple times in his own truck. So, we’ve got his plate hitting off these plate readers over and over again, including the time where he went down there, where the neighbor sees his car. They have a fake van. They’ve got an enterprise van. And he decides it’s inconvenient, too hard to drive. I have no idea. And he took his own truck down there. And that’s when she saw the license plate.

Yeardley: The Mrs. Kravitz character.

Matt: Mrs. Kravitz person. So, now the whole thing becomes we’ve got this horrific crime. Nayeri is in Iran, and he’s got her checking the computers daily to see if we’re onto him yet. And if we have filed a case against him.

Yeardley: Nayeri is trying to get intel from Cortney.

Matt: And he’s getting it from her. And that’s part of our proffer. He’s got Cortney regularly checking the court computer to see if a case has been filed against him. He was also sending her in to watch Handley’s court appearances to see if there’d been any change in Handley’s status to determine whether or not Handley had flipped on him or whether he’s going to hold his mud and not talk. So, he’s directing her to do all this from Iran. And so, we got to get an international extradition. Iran will never honor it. But we begin kicking around the idea, and this is the genius of Lou and Ryan Peters. They start putting together this idea of what if we lure Nayeri out of Iran? What if we lure him to a country that will extradite?

Yeardley: This is like a spy thriller. Okay. Small Town Fam. There is so much going on here, and there is so much more to come. So, we’re going to stop right here. And pick up next week with Part Two. Don’t miss it.

[music]

Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

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The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

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