Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. Welcome back to Part Two of Misery. Let me catch you up quickly. Our guest Matt Murphy and law enforcement are called to investigate when a man named Michael and a woman named Mary are kidnapped from their home and driven out to the California desert, where the kidnappers demand $1 million from Michael because they know he has a legal marijuana grow that’s very successful. When Michael says he doesn’t know what million dollars they’re talking about, the kidnappers tie up Michael and Mary, pull Michael’s pants down and proceed to cut off his penis in a brutal, vicious act of torture. When even that doesn’t work and they continue to get nowhere with Michael, the kidnappers flee in a van, leaving Michael and Mary to fend for themselves in the middle of nowhere.

Michael is in shock, but Mary, thanks to her sheer determination, runs to the nearest highway where in what seems like divine intervention, she flags down the only car on the road, which just happens to be a cop. During the investigation, the police identify two main suspects in the crime, Kyle Handley and Hossein Nayeri. Nayeri is the mastermind of the scheme and the one who mutilated Michael. He’s also an Iranian national, and when he realizes the police might be onto him, Nayeri flees back to Iran where he has family and he knows the Iranian authorities will never extradite him to the US. So, at the end of Part One, Matt and his team are trying to figure out how to get around Iran’s lack of cooperation. And they decide that the key lies in getting Nayeri’s long suffering wife Cortney to help them.

Here is Part Two and the conclusion of Misery.

[music]

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: So, Matt, where we left off, you were trying to figure out a way to get Hossein Nayeri out of Iran and into a country that’s friendly toward extradition with the United States.

Matt: Yes. And so that begins to take shape. So, then Cortney, at the end of our proffer, agrees that she’s going to cooperate. So, now it’s very important that we get discovery. And every one of these communications is carefully documented. So, every time she talks to Hossein Nayeri, she’s got to record it, because now she’s basically an agent for law enforcement because she’s agreed to help. And she’s agreed to help because she was driving around with him, planning these cameras. She’s driving around with him, as he’s casing the different places. And there’s another thing, like those moments that when you’re talking to somebody in a conspiracy, when you know they’re telling you the truth is when they add a fact that you don’t know that makes them look terrible.

And we had one of those moments in her proffer, and she said that among the places Hossein was surveilling was Michael’s parents’ house in Westminster in California. He grew up in Orange County. So, Cortney and Nayeri keep driving by Michael’s parents’ house, and the dog was barking. So, Nayeri being a diabolical, evil fricking F decided he was going to poison the dog so that he could change the surveillance batteries and the dog wouldn’t bark. So, Cortney describes how they cooked up poison hamburger patties and he just directed her through the whole thing where they laced these hamburger patties with poison and he fed those to the dog. And the dog’s name was Bailey. He was a black lab. And this is awesome. Bailey absolutely gobbled up all the hamburgers and never even had to go to the vet.

[laughter]

Dan: Iron guts.

Matt: Bailey lived a long, happy black lab life after that.

Dan: I was ready to do the death penalty myself, killing a dog.

Yeardley: [laughs] Sure.

Matt: Yeah. And that’s another thing. Nobody loves dogs more than cops. [Yeardley laughs] There’s nobody in the world that loves dogs more than police officers. So, I’m sitting in a room full of cops as she describes that. And everybody’s like, [Dave laughs] you tried to poison not just a dog, but a black lab.

Dave: Yeah. That’s diabolical.

Matt: Yeah. So that’s information– that’s one of those things that this is a woman who’s in law school. She looks horrible. That makes her look terrible. We didn’t know that. And that came solely from her. And our thoughts on her really began to shift a little bit. When you get a crime that bad, initially, it’s like, I want to take everybody down. I don’t have any sympathy for any of these people. I want to freaking hammer them all. But Cortney, she had the best lawyer in Lou Rosenblum, and he’s working on her to deprogram her. Nayeri’s really smart and he’s super paranoid and he’s very suspicious. So, now how do we get this in motion without tipping him off? And the first thing, Yeardley, you asked the question earlier. If you file a case, is there a way to check? And the answer is yes. Unless you use the old like wax stamp ribbon system that they used a hundred years ago, you can still do that. There’s no law against it.

Yeardley: So, it doesn’t have to be digital. It can just be– [crosstalk]

Matt: It can just be paper. There were warrants and things before there were computers for hundreds of years. So, we talked to the presiding judge and we’re like, “Hey, look, we have a reason to believe Nayeri’s checking the database. So, we’d really like to do this the old-fashioned way. And he thought it was super fun. He’s like, “You know, nobody knows this.” And, there’s an old saying, old men are full of old stories. He’s like, “There’s a drawer.” And I remember back in the olden days, they had the forms and we wound up doing it manually so that Nayeri could continue to check the computer system and not know. Meanwhile, we send Cortney to Nayeri’s uncle’s funeral where she bumps into his sister.

And they’d been talking about after she took the California State Bar exam, that they were going to go and take some fabulous post bar trip. And they talked about going to Spain. Okay, so Spain is in the EU, of course, and this is a little counterintuitive, but maybe it might make sense. A couple of the absolute worst places to try to extradite American criminals from are the UK, France, and for whatever reason, Spain.

Yeardley: So, basically the idea is to use the lure of this trip to Spain with Cortney and Nayeri’s sister to get Nayeri out of Iran.

Matt: Right.

Yeardley: But if Spain is not extradition friendly, how do you do that?

Matt: So, since we’re going to pay for the ticket out of Tehran, if we can lure Hossein out of the Islamic Republic, it means we get to choose the country. And so, we don’t want to send them directly to Spain because they’re iffy. And France is better than the UK, but also not great. And we’re definitely not sending them to the UK. So, I have a conversation with a special agent in charge of Prague, and we have this call, and on that case, and this is going to be a little bit crass, but you’re trying to get federal agencies to help you on something. It’s not a homicide, it’s a kidnap. And you hit bureaucratic roadblocks when you try to get the federal government involved, and you’re trying to get other countries involved.

And the golden key to that was, “Hey, they cut off his penis.” And that would be like, “Okay, what do you need?” So, I talked to the special agent in charge of Prague, and he gave me this whole education on countries in Europe to extradite or not extradite from. And proving that, at least in one moment, the FBI had a sense of humor. They call themselves the “Welcome Home Task Force.” [Yeardley laughs] They are the task force that repatriates wayward American criminals. And so, we got in with those guys, the US Marshal’s office, and the special agent in charge of Prague said, “Here are all the bad countries.” You want to fly them through a country in the former Soviet bloc, because they love and they love Americans, and they understand what a corrupt judiciary really is, and they have faith that anybody they extradite is going to be treated fairly.

Dave: So the thought is to get them on a layover-type thing.

Matt: Get them on a layover, exactly. Because we’re buying the ticket, right? So, we buy a ticket from Tehran to the Czech Republic to route him to Spain, and that’s our plan. And this is like a year in the making where it feels like we’re walking this tightrope, and maybe he’s going to come, maybe he’s not going to come. And we’ve got to keep Cortney and Nayeri’s relationship alive. And we decide that we’re going to enlist the sister.

Yeardley: This is Nayeri’s sister.

Matt: It’s Nayeri’s sister, right. Because if she’s in on this, if she’s on the plane, chances are pretty good.

Yeardley: He won’t get wise to it.

Matt: And, yeah, he’s going to trust them. So, this is a super smart, utterly diabolical guy that we’ve got to get his guard down. And his wife is totally on our side. And she actually kept her word, I think, largely with the help of her father and Lou. And finally, it’s like they deprogrammed her to the point that she was doing the right thing. So, Nayeri gets to the Czech Republic, and Cortney, what she had promised him was $10,000 in cash, that she was going to bring him, an iPod, downloaded a bunch of his favorite music that he couldn’t get in Iran, and some intimate, private time with her. And they had some special language between the two of them of all the fun sex the guy was going to have. And that’s what we did to lure him.

And so instead of his wife, we’ve got like Ivan or whatever a Czech name is waiting for him with one of those Malamute police dogs and [Yeardley laughs] about 20 Czechoslovakian border police with MP5 machine guns.

Yeardley: Awesome. So, Nayeri is finally in custody.

Matt: Yes.

Yeardley: And does that mean that he’s now immediately on his way to the United States, or does this extradition take a while?

Matt: The extradition process in the Czech Republic took a year.

Yeardley: So, Nayeri’s in prison that whole time?

Matt: He’s in solitary confinement in the Czech Republic in a prison built by the Nazis in World War II in Prague.

Yeardley: Jesus.

Matt: Yeah. And so, we get him back. We get him in Orange County Jail. Everything is good. We’re ready to roll. And Hossein Nayeri and two other suspected murderers escape from the Orange County Jail.

Yeardley: Oh.

Matt: Yes. And I get one of the most classic briefings I’ve ever gotten. So, they’re super worried about Heather, my co-counsel, who put this whole thing together. So, now Nayeri also has gun discovery. So, he knows everything that Heather and I did to outsmart him, from the old-fashioned filing, to sending Cortney to the uncle’s funeral, to the conversations with the sister, everything. Now he’s been betrayed by this woman that he was horrifically abusive towards, and we have undone his whole program. And this is a guy who absolutely hates my guts. Nayeri now has read about how we outsmarted him. And when he left, he left two photographs on his bunk. And one was my photo and the other was Heather’s photo.

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[Break 1]

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So, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, it’s a maximum-security facility. When they book them in, they do what’s called a classification process where they’re assigned a colored band. Okay, so red is the most dangerous. That’s like the violent towards staff or other prisoners. Blue is medical. Yellow is that they’re potentially dangerous felons. Orange is they’ve been to state prison before. There is whole colored classification system. The white banders are the lightweights. They’re the ones that are nondangerous towards staff or anybody else. They’re low risk, everything. They’re like, the guys are in there for their DUI convictions and stuff. They give Nayeri a white band classification. This is a guy that’s fled the country twice. He’s got a homicide. He’s got a manslaughter in his background. After all of that, they give him a white band designation and put them in a dorm. And they’re doing counts. They do, I think it’s like one or maybe two counts a day for them versus the higher classification guys that are literally under surveillance in these circular mods 24/7. They put them in a converted gym in a bunk bed with 40 other guys next to a grate. They miss account. And there’s two other guys that miss it too. And one of them was reputed to be a freaking trigger man for an Asian triad criminal organization. Another guy’s a local gangster, both charged with murder in the jail. And what these guys do, it’s straight out of escape from Alcatraz.

They tunnel out from the grate and they somehow get in hacksaws and they hacksaw through all of these bars. Must have taken months. They climb up to the roof of the jail and they rappel off the jail roof. So, we get this briefing after all that work that we put into this. And a lot of people don’t know this. Iran has diplomatic relations with Mexico. They’re both OPEC countries. There is a full-blown embassy for the Islamic nation of Iran about 20 minutes south of the border in Tijuana. And they don’t stop you when you drive into Mexico from San Diego. You just drive in. They don’t check IDs. They don’t do anything. There’s no way in my mind that Hossein Nayeri is not already back in the Islamic Republic of Iran. So, he’s in the wind, he’s in the wind. My picture is on his bunk, which is a little menacing.

Dave: It was a total message.

Matt: And we have the breakdown with the security risk assessment guys. And they’re like, “Heather, we’re going to have a car outside your house. Don’t worry, we’re going to have armed deputies. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, [laughs] we’re going to make sure you’re safe.” She’s like, “Okay, good.” And then the briefing’s like ending. And it’s like, “What about me?” And they’re like, “Yeah, you, drive safe.”

[laughter]

Yeardley: You drive your own.

Matt: So, one day turns into two, turns into three, turns into four. By the way, it’s about two hours from Orange County, the Mexican border, in the middle of the night when they escaped you could probably do it in about 90 minutes if you’re really motivated. They’ve been gone for about 18 hours. When they finally counted their prisoners and realized they were missing three, about 18 hours had elapsed. So, Nayeri literally could have done laps back and forth to the Iranian Embassy in Mexico. There’s no doubt in my mind he’s gone. The guy that we outsmarted has outsmarted us. He got away with it. And then we get one of the missing trio, and this was national news. Their three mugshots, two murderers, and Hossein Nayeri was all over everything.

Then one of the guys turns himself in, trying to collect the reward on himself. And it turns out instead of driving south, these guys went north. And right after that guy, they recaptured him. He turned himself in. Right after this guy turns himself in, we get footage out of the Sacramento area where Nayeri, at 3 in the morning, is walking up the side of the house of somebody with the name of N. Kevorkian and Naomi, who is one of our conspirators, was married to Ryan Kevorkian. So, it’s N. Kevorkian. It was somebody completely different. But they call it in and somebody had the presence of mind and say, “I think this is your escaped guy.” And it was Nayeri.

And Heather again, my super funny friend who’s my co-counsel, we were very upset, and she’s all fired up, and somebody put a microphone in front of her and she’s pissed. And we have nothing to do. The prosecution has nothing to do with the way the sheriffs run their jail. Like, I have no input on how they classify them. She’s like a “fucking white band. Fucking white band. Are you kidding me? Like, it’s like they released Hannibal Lecter.”

[laughter]

That becomes a headline. Heather gets in tons of trouble for that. And then the next day, some homeless guy in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, turns out he’s a news junkie. He calls and he’s like, “Hey, you know that Hannibal Lecter guy you’re looking for? He’s smoking pot in a van here in the park.” And Nayeri gets recaptured.

Yeardley: Shut up. That is amazing.

Matt: So that comes to trial. Nayeri’s lawyer was a guy named Sal Ciulla, who, like Lou, was absolutely top notch, phenomenal trial lawyer.

Yeardley: And now he’s representing Nayeri.

Matt: He was representing him before he escaped, and we’re arraigning him and this thing, CJ1, which is actually in the jail. It’s a special courtroom in the jail, but it wasn’t originally designed that way. So, it’s this tiny little room in a cage that they have these guys in, it’s for the ones that don’t even want to put on a bus. Nayeri he’s gone from lowest security to maximum maximum, maxi security. And they don’t want to transport him. So, we do his re-arraignment after he’s been recaptured in CJ1. So, we go to trial and Nayeri testifies in that. And the goal is you always want the bad guy in violent crime, you want the guy to get angry. And he denied any involvement in this. And he said that this was all Kyle, and that victim owed Kyle a bunch of money.

And Kyle asked him to do some surveillance, but that’s all. And he had nothing to do with the kidnapping, blah, blah, blah. And he insists he was never inside Kyle’s business. So, we got a bunch of film from when we searched Naomi Rhodus’ storage locker, and we found Nayeri’s burner laptop computer. And we found the pump action shotgun that they used. So, we have a little cornucopia, little like box of great evidence that we got from Naomi Rhodus. But among that, we had photos from one of these burner phones that we recovered. They’re pictures of one of those directories, like, business directory with, the plastic letters, you know, that like the dentist’s office have.

Yeardley: Yeah, yeah.

Matt: And they’re in glass. So, Nayeri’s up there and he insists that he never went into the business, never entered the business, was never there, blah, blah, blah. And we’ve got these photos and Heather leans over right in the middle of trial, and she’s like, “Murphy, look at this.” And she shows him his thing. And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s the directory.” She’s like, “No, look, dummy.” And it was his reflection.

Yeardley: He’s reflected in the glass.

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[Break 2]

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Matt: So, when I start my cross, I show the one that you can’t see in your reflection. I’m like, “You sure you didn’t do this? You sure you didn’t go into the business?” I didn’t go into the business. Nayeri was out of his chair at me with, like, question number one. He absolutely hated my guts. I go into this whole plan to make him look angry, and it was like, good afternoon, fuck you.

[laughter]

He’s immediately on it. Oh, my gosh. And so, I show him one of these things and I put it on PowerPoint. And it’s just one that you can’t really see the reflection. So, you did not take that picture? No. And when you caught a defendant in a lie on the stand, it’s the home run of home runs. Because now, they haven’t lied to the cops or the judge or to you. They’re lying to the jury. And you can make a lot of hay out of that. And it’s a stupid lie. I don’t care if he’s in the business or not. Come up with something but he doesn’t, for whatever reason and he is again, 95% genius, 5% dipshittery brain. It’s like Nayeri insists he never went in the business. So, it’s like, he never took this picture.

I don’t know how many times I have to say it. “I didn’t take the picture.” Judge has to stop the proceedings because he won’t answer the questions with me. And then he’d go on to other things, and you ask him questions. Then I come back with photo number two, which you can see a tiny little bit more, but you still can’t see it’s him. And I go through all, like, five or six of these pictures until I get to the one. And I’ve made him lie over and over and over again until he gets to the final one. And it’s like, “It is frigging him”. He’s got hip, like, aviator shades. He’s wearing a shirt that I think we found in the search warrant. It is Hossein Nayeri. And it’s like, “You want to tell us now? This is you. No. You don’t see anything. Nothing to see here.”

So, he got so angry with me. My final question on cross examination was, “Look, we’re all wondering, why didn’t you just leave it there? You guys cut off the penis. Why didn’t you at least give this poor guy a chance to reattach it?” And he’s furious. He goes, “You are done.” I’m like, “I’m done? What do you mean, I’m done?” He’s like, “You. I’ll answer it personally. You are done.” And it’s this super menacing, that was what I really wanted. And then the argument that you pair. Ultimately, in closing our argument with that is, ladies and gentlemen, think about this. I’m a senior deputy district attorney in a courtroom. I’m surrounded by armed police officers. And because he’d escaped, there was like, 10 bailiffs in that courtroom.

And we’ve got all of these professional law enforcement officers and literally sitting in a chair in between a superior court judge and you, a jury that’s going to decide his fate. He threatens the prosecutor. Imagine what that guy is like in the back of a van when he thinks he’s getting a million bucks, and he’s not getting it. Imagine what that guy is acting like when he’s not getting what he wants. When you’re not there and I’m not there. Imagine what Michael was going through. And, yeah, so Nayeri got convicted. He was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. So, hopefully that guy never gets out. But that was an astounding one because he got away with that manslaughter. He got away with going AWOL from the Marines first. They gave him a dishonorable, and he talked his way into a general discharge.

He’d been arrested at least once for domestic violence against Cortney, where he got a diversionary program, didn’t have to do any custody time for that. It was just one break after another, after another. He was afforded every opportunity in the criminal justice system in California. He got away with his high-speed chase. The guy was like Teflon. Nothing would stick. And then he escaped. And for reasons known only to him, instead of going south, he went north and got caught. So, yeah, that is Hossein Nayeri.

Paul: Now, Matt, just educate me from kind of the criminal charges. So, you indicated you’ve got kidnap, robbery, so that brings LWOP, right?

Matt: Yes.

Yeardley: What’s LWOP?

Matt: Life without possibility of parole. There’s an individual charge. I’d never used it in my entire career. It’s kidnapping for the purposes of ransom, resulting in GBI, which stands for great bodily injury.

Dave: So Nayeri, Handley, Naomi Rhodus, and Kevorkian all went to prison for this?

Matt: Yes. So, Kevorkian, I think we gave him 12 years, but he was a puppet in Nayeri’s little puppet show. Naomi Rhodus, she proffered she did local time that was dispo’ed after I retired. So, Heather handled that. And, she had two kids. One of the weird things about the psychopaths, as you guys have known, they’re such control freaks. One of the things that Nayeri liked to do is he never told any other individual person the entire plan. Everybody had their role and bits and pieces, but almost nobody knew that, like, Cortney was going with him to change out the cameras. Cortney did not know that Ryan Kevorkian was the third guy in the car. And she knew him. She socialized with them for years because he was so close to Nayeri. Nayeri called him Mr. Brown like Reservoir Dogs and refused to tell her that he was the third guy.

Dave: I want to go back to the negotiations with Cortney’s attorney, and when it’s clear that Cortney’s not really understanding the gravity of the situation. I’m sure at some point you go into the room with your friend one on one, and you go, “Hey, let me just give you a CliffsNotes on what we’re dealing with and what Cortney is a part of.” And when you explain it to an attorney that you have a relationship with and he knows where you’re coming from, you wish you could be a fly on the wall when her attorney closes the door, you’re outside waiting for that conversation to happen. Was there a big change in the body language with Cortney? Like, “Oh, shit, now I get it.” Okay, now I’m going to play ball? Or did it take a while for her to go, “Okay, I’ll take this seriously?”

Matt: I’m not present for that conversation, so I have it separate. Like, “Hey, this is the evidence we have,” and Lou Rosenblum knows the rules. It’s like by driving around with Nayeri and changing out those batteries and by letting him take her taser. All of that stuff means that Cortney is on the hook. If you do anything to facilitate, encourage, aid or abet as you know, she’s on the hook. She’s looking at life without possibility of parole. So, the behind-the-scenes stuff was with Lou, her dad, I’m sure, more than a therapist or two, trying to get her to understand the gravity. And of course, the fact that she was in law school probably didn’t hurt us either. Like, remember Crim Law? Remember the conspiracy month that you spent learning that? Well, that’s you, and you’re a player in this.

And they actually have a name for it. It’s called the Wagon Wheel Conspiracy. You got one guy in the middle who knows everything. Every one of those spokes is liable for the actions of everybody else. And so, Lou, again, it’s like the guy who taught me that it’s all about doing the right thing, he brought in somebody who is, I think, worthy of redemption. I think. I hope she doesn’t prove me wrong over the years.

Yeardley: Do you actually know what Cortney’s up to these days?

Matt: Yeah, she’s got two babies now. She practices law in Los Angeles. I actually ran into her a couple times professionally, and I’m all for her going on and having a productive life. And you’ve seen that before. A lot of domestic violence cases in general, I went into those cases thinking that everybody was a thumper with some diminutive, innocent woman that was just taking it. And then you understand, after you do a few that there’s really a dynamic a lot of times between those people, and the male is usually physically stronger. But there are plenty of domestic violence situations, male or female, being the victims, where the victim is barely sympathetic.

And she was one of those where the more I learned what a psycho he was and how she met him when she was so young made more and more sense as went on with time, that she really was another one of his victims that had been subjected to horrific domestic violence. And then to step up. It was actually very brave. And, of course, she kept telling us the whole time, “If he finds out I’m doing this, he’s going to kill me.” And so, when Hossein Nayeri escaped, I felt like we really kind of let Cortney down as well, and by we, I mean the law enforcement. the broadest respect. But I still don’t know how the sheriff’s department effed that one up, but they caught him. I always liked working with them. They’re very professional in recapturing them.

Yeardley: Matt, when you decide to scoop Cortney up because she wants to come and get the Tahoe that’s been impounded by police, and during that meeting, you ask her to agree to, if not really technically confess to these things that you all have outlined on this piece of paper that you put in front of her, do you have to mirandize Cortney before she signs that piece of paper? Because does the piece of paper put her in some sort of jeopardy?

Matt: That’s a great question. So, the answer is no, because she’s not in custody at the time. Miranda requires, there’s two elements. It has to be custodial and it has to be an interrogation. So that means questions designed are likely to elicit an incriminating response is the magic language on those things. So, Cortney was not in custody, and so she didn’t have any of the coercive elements of being in custody. She just thought she was getting the car out. And then they, at that point, hadn’t asked her anything. It’s just on a form.

Yeardley: But she’s sort of admitting incriminating things potentially.

Matt: Absolutely. There’s a great line from, gosh, who is it? one of the Supreme Court justices, And I’m forgetting. And it was exactly what you’re saying. It was brilliant. And he said, “People accuse us of splitting hairs. He goes, that’s exactly what we do. We split hairs.” [Yeardley laughs] You’re 100% right. It is semantics, but the words matter in that. The idea is you’ve got to mirandize somebody before you formally interview them. So, if they’re not in custody, you don’t have to give them Miranda. If they’re under coercive circumstances, sometimes that’ll count as custodial. You have to put questions to them designed to elicit an incriminating response. So, there was the question I think was, you got a pen? I think that was about as far as that went. And then they told Cortney, you got to read this. We have to watch you read it before we can release the car.

Yeardley: So, technically not asking her any questions, but crafting statements that you’re asking her to agree to.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting, right? And then almost immediately after we got her John Hancock on that paper, she would have mirandized very quickly after that. So, before they followed up with any interview. And I don’t remember the exact time or how long that was, but everything that she provided to us, as far as substantive information after that point, was all properly mirandized. But here’s another interesting thing. And again, I made no promises to Lou. Lou had to trust me that I would do the right thing. And I had to trust Lou that he was going to keep his client on track. So, it was not until she testified that we granted her immunity. And that’s the way that has to work.

Yeardley: Testified in court or gave you statements in an interview?

Matt: Cortney didn’t get anything so she testified in court. Remember, she gave us the proffer. And it took us almost two years to get Hossein Nayeri back from Iran. But it took the better part of a year of her communicating. I expected that she would either intentionally or inadvertently give something away and she didn’t.

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[Break 3]

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Yeardley: Can I ask you why Michael’s last name was never released?

Matt: You know,we treated it like a sexual assault. And as an office policy, we filed it as Michael S. And then I thought of, the one thing we might be able to give him is maybe just some tiny degree of anonymity.

Yeardley: Yeah, of course. I just was curious.

Matt: Yeah, that’s why we did it.

Dave: I’m glad you brought us a case that kind of talks about these marijuana grows in that business. And in my experience, in the home invasions that I’ve investigated, sometimes they’re the most violent vile crimes that I’ve ever seen.

Matt: Yep, it’s not the unicorn riding hippie. A lot of these guys are vicious, cold-blooded killers. I still to this day, guys, I cannot believe we pulled that one off. That was one of the most fun, like hunts. And I wrote a whole chapter in my book, The Book of Murder, about this case and all the behind-the-scenes workings.

Yeardley: It’s an amazing case. Again, just the tenacity and the sticktoitiveness. It’s not a homicide. It’s not even your department. But it’s a horrific crime and I just love that. I just like it when the good guys win. Thanks for doing that.

Matt: Yeah, thank you. It restores your faith a little bit.

Yeardley: Yeah, it does.

Matt: And like these guys can say, you know, Dan, Dave, and Paul, you walk into these horrific murder scenes and your faith in humanity is challenged. And then immediately the restoration starts. And the crime lab guy comes in, not complaining, at 3 o’clock in the morning and does something brilliant. And the detectives are there and you just work it all the way up. And the prelim judge is awesome. And then the jury is listening and they’re sober and taking their job seriously. Every murder or every horrific case like this starts out with something awful. And then, I finished my career really with a strong belief that the vast majority of humans are good. You know, in this weird, crazy, divisive time in our country, there’s a few areas of common ground, like words like malice aforethought.

That was common day parlance when they first started putting that in. A lot like, we don’t use that today. It sounds archaic, but it just means essentially you decide to do it before you do it.

Yeardley: You meant to do it.

Matt: You meant to do it. That’s all it means. But those laws predate the time of empires and even kings. I think, first cuneiform has something pretty close to the Ten Commandments in it and they talk about murder. The difference between first degree and second-degree murder, those concepts have been evolving without a whole lot of change for thousands of years. And so, this is an area where people really can come together and agree. It’s a place where the good guys are still the good guys and the bad guys are still the bad guys. And I don’t know, maybe all of America can watch a little bit of true crime and listen to your podcast and everybody can just feel little better about everybody else maybe. [Dave laughs] I hope so.

Yeardley: I agree. Thank you so much for that.

Dave: Nice work.

Paul: Yeah, Matt, that was a great job.

Yeardley: 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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Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else.

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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