Devil in the Desert: Getaway

Speaker 1 This is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Devil in the Desert.

Speaker 1 Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow Devil in the Desert on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the episode.

Speaker 2 I am so excited for this spa day.

Speaker 1 Candles lit, music on, hot tub warm and ready.

Speaker 2 And then my chronic hives come back. Again, in the middle of my spa day.

Speaker 4 What a wet blanket.

Speaker 6 Looks like another spell of itchy red skin.

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Speaker 8 With Courtney Shigeria now actively helping them, investigators had developed a scheme to lure her husband, Hussein Nayeri, out of Iran.

Speaker 9 Hello.

Speaker 10 Hi, babe.

Speaker 8 The plan involved the daily phone calls that had resumed between Courtney and Nayeri.

Speaker 10 Mastaki!

Speaker 9 Mastaki!

Speaker 10 Where have you been?

Speaker 8 Every time they spoke, without Nayeri knowing it, Courtney would tape every word of their conversations.

Speaker 8 I feel great.

Speaker 10 Are you drunk?

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 10 You're listening to Bob Marley.

Speaker 8 She had a small handheld recorder about five inches long, and she would put her phone on speaker and then hit record.

Speaker 8 All of it was for the Newport Beach police detectives, because as soon as the call was over, Courtney would immediately upload the file and send it to them.

Speaker 10 I have a question. How are you on you? I am so good.
I'm not an answer. Oh, you do?

Speaker 10 You said so short.

Speaker 8 hundreds of hellos, goodbyes. I love you.

Speaker 8 The investigators heard them all and applied pressure on Courtney. Get Nayeri where we want him.

Speaker 10 Are you okay? Dream about me. And let's talk about whether let's talk about a plan to see each other.
I miss you.

Speaker 8 In the tapes, Nayeri's mood swings wildly. It's pretty fing cruel, don't you think? I could feel a little bit fing abandoned by you if you didn't fing know that by now.
He was angry.

Speaker 8 He was despondent.

Speaker 10 Baby, I'm sorry. Why are you crying?

Speaker 8 He was suspicious.

Speaker 10 David says, What? Tell me. I love you.
Tell me.

Speaker 10 You say that.

Speaker 10 You don't think I?

Speaker 10 You're not. I'm not the same person that I used to know.
That you used to know. Why do you say that? What are you talking about?

Speaker 8 No matter which Hussein was at the other end of the line, for six months, Courtney had no choice but to pick up the phone.

Speaker 10 I love you, Hussain. I don't know what else.

Speaker 8 Over and over and over.

Speaker 10 Give them rest.

Speaker 8 Love you, buddy.

Speaker 10 Love you too. Call me later.

Speaker 9 Thank you.

Speaker 10 I'll call you.

Speaker 10 I'm right, Joe. I'll talk to you later, okay?

Speaker 10 I love you. Bye.

Speaker 8 The reason Courtney had no choice but to keep picking up the phone, it was her chance to prove to Newport Beach police detectives that she was on their side.

Speaker 8 She had to help them catch Nayeri or risk being charged alongside him. And she knew that the investigators didn't have a lot of faith in her to get the job done.

Speaker 5 They think any, you know, second I'm going to tip him off. They're like, she's going to be loyal to him.
That's how she always is. You know, there's no hope for her.

Speaker 8 She just had to keep going.

Speaker 8 And as the weeks wore into months, she used those calls to draw Nayeri further and further into the plan that detectives had conjured up.

Speaker 11 The trap was set.

Speaker 8 This is how it would work. Courtney would persuade Nayeri to meet her for a vacation.
But what he didn't know was that law enforcement would use that trip to lure him out of hiding and arrest him.

Speaker 8 That's when Nayeri's great escape would come to an end.

Speaker 12 If investigators could pull it off.

Speaker 8 From ABC News, this is Devil of the Desert,

Speaker 8 episode 5,

Speaker 13 Getaway.

Speaker 8 When Courtney raised the idea of a vacation with Nayeri, it didn't come out of the blue.

Speaker 8 Between October of 2012, when he fled to Iran, and May of the following year, when she had her interview with Newport Beach Police, she had traveled to see him a couple of times.

Speaker 8 And I asked her about those trips back in 2019.

Speaker 8 When was the first time you actually went to visit him somewhere?

Speaker 5 In

Speaker 5 fall, and so like I want to say December of 2012. I went to Turkey to see him, only for a few days, but it basically just bring him stuff.

Speaker 5 I mean, everything was just about bringing him whatever it is that he wanted.

Speaker 8 She'd also visited him in Dubai. She brought him medicine, electronics, clothes, and a lot of cash.

Speaker 5 I took like over $50,000 before.

Speaker 8 Oh, so not like a few hundred bucks each time.

Speaker 4 We're talking about

Speaker 14 money.

Speaker 5 Yeah, money, lots of money.

Speaker 8 These trips all happened before her dad, her lawyer, and investigators sat her down, gave her a come to Jesus moment, told her, help the investigation or face the consequences.

Speaker 8 After that, Courtney quit Nayeri cold turkey. No calls, no messages, no more trips.

Speaker 8 But the arrangement with investigators meant that she had to reassume the role of being the faithful wife, and that meant daily phone calls.

Speaker 8 Only this time they were recorded, and Newport Beach police detectives were listening to every minute.

Speaker 8 They were looking for suspicious sounds or cuts in the tape. They didn't trust Courtney, not entirely.
And they wanted to make sure that she wasn't playing double agent.

Speaker 8 Even Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy was listening in, and he began to understand how the relationship had developed the way it had.

Speaker 13 We've all been in romantic relationships. We all know like the dynamics of people.
And, you know, it's a fascinating thing. And you can see almost like, you know, the conversations they'd had.

Speaker 13 You almost hear that 16-year-old girl in some of the communications between them.

Speaker 13 And, you know, and you can also just, you can, you can just feel the power that this man felt like he had over Courtney as their communication goes on.

Speaker 13 And this is days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months. And I'm still thinking she's going to tip him off.

Speaker 8 Now, Courtney had to plan a new trip with Nayeri, all while pretending that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. First, she had to find a way of introducing the idea naturally.

Speaker 8 They'd always talked about taking a trip after she took the bar exam. When she did in the summer of 2013, she reminded Nayeri of their plan.

Speaker 10 Steggy's dad, the bar is over. It's time for us to start making our plans.
And, you know,

Speaker 10 we got to get ourselves together here now. The bar is over.

Speaker 8 Next, she had to find a place to go to, anywhere to get him out of Iran.

Speaker 8 But But there, she had a stroke of luck. Nayeri's sister wants to go to Spain.
Courtney raised it carefully. This is coming from me, but your sister wants to go to Spain.

Speaker 8 Courtney offered that as an idea for a group trip.

Speaker 10 I propose that we push the Spain trip back. I push the Spain trip back with your sister.
You meet us in Spain. We spend time all together.

Speaker 10 You and I can stay later, or and she can go back after two weeks, or you and I can leave and go somewhere else after that. You know what I mean, whatever.
But I think there's massive value.

Speaker 10 Are you listening to me?

Speaker 5 I laid that on his sister that she wanted to go there. I was like, You've never been there.
You know, he's like, Okay, that all made sense to him.

Speaker 10 I mean, I know you're not feeling good, but Hossein, we got, I mean, don't I want to travel with you in Europe? Don't you want to travel with me in Europe? Like, I don't understand the problem here.

Speaker 8 Nayeri agreed to meet Courtney and his sister in Spain in early November 2013. He started requesting the items he wanted the women to bring to him.

Speaker 8 Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown thought that this was promising. Investigators needed Nayeri to feel like this trip was no different than any of the others.

Speaker 6 She was going to bring him, you know, like $20,000 in cash and a new cell phone, and they were going to party and

Speaker 6 enjoy Spain and travel around and, you know, enjoy the sights and be all together again because she missed him so much.

Speaker 6 And they would FaceTime and we got your money, babe, and your sister's going to carry 10 because you can only travel with a certain amount of cash on you.

Speaker 6 And so all that was done in an attempt to

Speaker 6 put his guard down and get him to get on that plane.

Speaker 8 But Courtney's calls were just part of the plan. Matt Murphy was also trying to figure out which country would be willing to help them extradite Nayeri if he landed on their soil.

Speaker 13 There's an international thing called Blue Notices, which is an international agreement regarding criminal extradition.

Speaker 8 Blue Notices are used by Interpol, a cooperative police group with members all over the world. They help police in different countries trace suspects as they cross borders.

Speaker 8 Iran is part of the Blue Notice system. So the normal course of action would be for U.S.
officials to contact officials there, ask them to find Nayeri, and keep tabs on him.

Speaker 8 Then, when they were ready, U.S. police would issue what's called a red notice, and those Iranian officials would swoop in to arrest Nayeri on their behalf.
Or at least, that's how it should work.

Speaker 13 So Iran technically is a party to this agreement, but everybody knows that

Speaker 13 they don't answer to American law enforcement. In fact, they sort of delight in sticking their thumb in the eye of, you know, police officers here.

Speaker 8 That's why investigators needed Nayeri to get out of Iran and into a country that would help the U.S. with a quick extradition.

Speaker 8 As it turned out, when they started looking at countries near Spain, it wasn't a very long list.

Speaker 13 The U.K. is really bad about extraditing criminals back to the United States, and so is France.

Speaker 8 France had a track record here, actually. In the 1970s, a man named Ira Einhorn murdered his girlfriend in Philadelphia, skipped bail, and headed to France.

Speaker 8 It took 20 years for France to send Ira Einhorn back to face justice. Investigators had to be careful not to make an Einhorn out of Nayeri.

Speaker 8 Matt Murphy learned that Spain wasn't a slam dunk for extradition either. So he started talking to FBI attachés, people who do exactly this type of extradition work for a living.

Speaker 8 He needed to know where was a good place to send Nayeri for the quickest, easiest extradition. And he learned something surprising.

Speaker 13 Lo and behold, the best countries to extradite from are the former Soviet bloc, and one of them is the Czech Republic, which is actually Prague is a big hub for people flying into Europe from the Middle East.

Speaker 13 And I didn't know that.

Speaker 8 The investigators made contact with officials in the Czech Republic, and after months of back and forth, Czech police agreed to help.

Speaker 8 Now, here was the plan. Nayeri would fly from Iran with a planned stopover in the Czech capital, Prague.

Speaker 8 And as he stepped off the airplane looking for his onward connection to Madrid, and of course his vacation with Courtney, armed Czech border police would arrest him.

Speaker 8 It was complicated and it all hinged on everyone playing their part perfectly, including Courtney, who after six months of informant work flew to Spain in late October of 2013.

Speaker 8 Completely oblivious to the plan taking place right under her nose was Nayeri's sister, who had come along too. And the women had a whole itinerary planned while they waited for Nayeri to meet them.

Speaker 8 They went to see flamenco dancers in Seville, Picasso paintings in Malaga. On the surface, it was the trip of a lifetime.
Underneath, Courtney was frantic. Were you nervous?

Speaker 5 Oh, I was just sick every day.

Speaker 8 Courtney liked Nayeri's sister, but now she was constantly lying to her, acting as though Nayeri would be joining them in a couple of days. Having his sister with her also posed a new problem.

Speaker 8 She couldn't record her daily phone calls with Nayeri. What would his sister think if she saw Courtney set up her mini recorder every time her brother called?

Speaker 8 From the perspective of investigators back in California, these days were critical. Everything was riding on Nayeri getting on that plane from Iran.
And now, Courtney was on the dark side of the moon.

Speaker 8 No signals coming back. They just had to wait and rely on the thin bridge of trust they had built with her.

Speaker 8 Nayeri was supposed to leave Iran early in the morning of November 7th, 2013. But in the hours leading up to the flight, Courtney started to get a bad feeling.

Speaker 8 He was uncharacteristically quiet.

Speaker 5 I kept calling him, calling him. He's not answering.
I'm like, oh my God, he's not going to be on this plane. Everyone's going to think I tipped him off.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm thinking to myself, all of this work that I've done is going down the drain. Everyone's going to think that I tipped him off.
And I hadn't. I mean, my heart is pounding out of my chest.

Speaker 5 And, you know, everyone's like, have you heard from him? Have you heard from me? Is he on the plane? No answer, no answer. I'm thinking, oh my God, this is like the worst possible scenario.

Speaker 5 Finally, he calls me, and I'll never forget, I was at an outdoor restaurant, and he's like, Oh, I'm so sorry, I overslept. It's okay, I'm driving myself to the airport right now.

Speaker 5 I'll be there, I'll see you, you know, very soon. And I just say, Okay, I can't wait to see you.

Speaker 8 Nayeri made his flight, and just as investigators had planned, Czech border police were there to meet him in Prague, right in the terminal.

Speaker 8 They immediately arrested him. There's a picture of this moment, Nayeri's face and shoulders from the side, staring straight ahead.

Speaker 8 It was an image that Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy thought a lot about in the years after this moment.

Speaker 13 He thinks that he's going to meet his beautiful young wife in Spain. And instead, what Hussein Nayeri gets, it's a bunch of hard-nosed, no-nonsense Czech border police with one of those police dogs.

Speaker 13 not the reception that he was looking for. And they arrested him.
And there's a photo of him in line as he learned that, oh my God, I'm being arrested. And it is awesome.

Speaker 13 And it's like, and at that moment, this diabolical genius that put together this whole thing, despite his mistakes, this guy who hurt so many people, we knew we had outsmarted him.

Speaker 8 Nayeri was taken for processing by the Czech police.

Speaker 8 They told him there and then that the reason he was detained was because of his suspected involvement in a kidnapping in California the year before.

Speaker 8 An FBI agent came to see him and told him, honestly, I don't know what your rights are here. He read him his American rights and asked him, Did you have anything to do with this kidnapping?

Speaker 8 Nayeri said no.

Speaker 8 Did he know the police were looking for him? No again.

Speaker 8 Nayeri answered the FBI agent's questions and only offered one of his own. Could he tell Courtney that he has been detained? Little did he realize his wife already knew.

Speaker 14 What was that feeling like?

Speaker 5 I mean, it was

Speaker 5 such a relief.

Speaker 8 With Nayeri safely in custody and after a half a year of informant work, Courtney could finally relax.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was like cathartic. I felt like

Speaker 5 for the first time, I was safe. I felt like people believed me.
I think it was Heather Brown asked, like, oh, how's, you know, how's Courtney doing?

Speaker 5 And maybe said something like, oh, you know, we're proud of her. Something positive, you know, in that first positive thing I had heard for that six months, which I totally understand why, but.

Speaker 5 I just felt such like a, like, oh my God, okay, everyone believes me. Like they, they understand.

Speaker 5 It felt like a step in the right direction

Speaker 8 after nayeri was arrested there was a period of calm courtney was back in california she'd just passed the bar and was beginning a promising law career without nayeri her whole life was reopening around her

Speaker 8 while nayeri was taken to pancrats a victorian era jail in prague that looks like a fortress.

Speaker 8 Inside, the cells were cramped, the beds rusty, old, and prisoners were locked in their rooms for up to 23 hours a day.

Speaker 8 Hot showers were permitted only twice a week, but were limited to five minutes at a time.

Speaker 8 And that was where Nayeri waited for nearly a year while his extradition to the U.S. was processed.

Speaker 8 While he was in the Czech jail, Nayeri wrote to Courtney. He said he was worried sick because he hadn't heard from her.
He told her he loved her more than anything.

Speaker 8 Eventually, he did get a message from her, but not the one he was expecting. Courtney sent a package.
Inside were divorce papers.

Speaker 8 When his extradition was finally arranged, Nayeri was sent back to California to face trial. While he waited for his court date, they booked him into the Orange County Jail.

Speaker 8 He was back where he started, just 15 miles from the house where michael and mary were kidnapped even less from the house he had shared with courtney as newlyweds

Speaker 5 what did it feel like to have jose nayeri back just a few miles from where you're living scary but i mean you know it was scary he sent me a birthday card which was really scary because

Speaker 5 it meant he knew where yeah he met he knew where i was and his lawyer at the time called where i was working and you know tried to get me to talk to him. And that felt really invasive and scary.

Speaker 5 And like, oh my God, they're reaching out. And I assumed that they didn't know at that time.
They hadn't received all the information about the fact that I had worked with law enforcement.

Speaker 5 And I knew that was coming. And I thought, oh my God, all of this attempt is now going to turn into massive hatred as soon as that happens.

Speaker 8 Nayeri knowing about Courtney's involvement in his capture was inevitable. It's how cases like these work.

Speaker 8 The defense team is entitled to ask for evidence that the government has gathered against them, and the government has to hand it over. It's called the Brady Rule.

Speaker 8 The Brady materials would include Courtney's proffer and the taped phone calls. The day was going to come when Nayeri would know everything.

Speaker 8 Courtney had talked about it with one of the police officers, Detective Krollman, while they were planning the Prague sting operation.

Speaker 5 And I said to him, I said, you know,

Speaker 5 if Hussein ever finds out,

Speaker 5 or when he finds out that

Speaker 5 I've done all this and I've been reporting him, and this was all a setup for him to get arrested, you know, if he ever gets out, he's going to kill me. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm dead. I'm dead.
I'm done. If he ever finds out and he has a chance, he'll kill me.
And, you know, Detective Cromwell was like, well, he's, you know, he's not going to get out.

Speaker 5 You don't have to worry about that.

Speaker 8 After the birthday card in the fall of 2014, Courtney didn't hear from Nayeri again.

Speaker 8 The date for the trial was set, February 23rd, 2016. Heather Brown and Matt Murphy had been working long hours to get their case ready.

Speaker 8 Murphy had been involved in hundreds of cases at this point in his career, over 100 trials. But Nayeri had gotten under his skin, and he wanted to get everything just right.

Speaker 8 And by late January of 2016, it looked like things were finally falling into place

Speaker 8 until all of a sudden, they weren't.

Speaker 6 I was laying there in bed at night, and it was probably around midnight, and I had fallen asleep with my cell phone on my chest.

Speaker 6 And I felt, you know, my phone vibrate. And when I looked at my text, it was Ryan Peters.

Speaker 6 And when I read that text that said, Hosan Nayeri and two others just escaped from Orange County Jail,

Speaker 6 I sprang out of bed.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I was literally like, oh my God, are you kidding me right now?

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Speaker 13 It started with a phone call in the early hours of the morning.

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Speaker 8 On January 22nd, 2016, The morning count at the Orange County Jail was at 5 a.m. That was the last time the jail officers could say they saw Nayeri and the two other escapees.

Speaker 8 The day was like any other until 8 o'clock that night. The evening count was about to happen when a fight broke out in the area of the jail that Nayeri was housed in.

Speaker 8 It was a crowded dormitory with row upon row of bunk beds. The fight delayed the body count.
When the fight was over and the count resumed, there were three fewer inmates than there should have been.

Speaker 8 And now, those inmates had a 16-hour head start.

Speaker 8 Local news station KABC was one of the first to cover the escape.

Speaker 18 37-year-old Hossein Nayeri, 20-year-old Jonathan Chu, and 43-year-old Bog Young were all awaiting trial for violent crimes. The Sheriff's Department calls it a well-planned escape.

Speaker 8 Obviously, if you have seen these people, we would ask that you call our hotline, or more importantly, if you see them, call 911.

Speaker 8 The jail officers checked the beds and belongings of the missing men, and they found something shocking. On Nayeri's bunk, they discovered two pieces of paper, just ordinary printer paper.

Speaker 8 On one was a picture of Matt Murphy. On the other, of Heather Brown.

Speaker 8 Prisoners do not have unrestricted access to the internet or computers, and certainly not color printers.

Speaker 8 These pictures, they required planning and people on the outside that were willing to help Nayeri.

Speaker 8 It was a message to the very people who were supposed to face him in court a few weeks later. Now a court date was the least of their worries.

Speaker 8 Heather and Matt were woken up in the middle of the night and taken down to the DA's office. They were told they'd be sending officers to watch their homes.
That's when it really dawned on Heather.

Speaker 8 They were in danger.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 6 Like he could come after me.

Speaker 6 That was a really

Speaker 6 frightening moment for me and my family.

Speaker 6 It was

Speaker 6 it kind of just shook

Speaker 6 You know me a bit. You know, I was sitting there with a loaded gun worried, you know, he's gonna pop out of the bushes or something and you know hurt my children or me and take pleasure in it.

Speaker 6 And that was frightening.

Speaker 8 As scared as Heather was for her family, there was one person she worried about more.

Speaker 6 I was terrified for Courtney.

Speaker 8 Heather knew that by now, Nayeri's defense had access to the evidence files.

Speaker 8 Nayeri would know that the stopover in Prague and his year in Czech jail was part of a plan carried out by the woman he loved. Heather asked, has anyone called Courtney yet?

Speaker 6 Called her, no answer. I called her attorney, no answer.
I left messages.

Speaker 6 I ended up calling the LAPD and I asked if they could send a unit over to her house to like wake her up and tell her to get out of Dodge.

Speaker 5 Police knock on my door. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
This is like 5:30 in the morning at my apartment. I didn't even look at my phone.

Speaker 5 I just got up and I, you know, went to the door and opened the door. There's two officers there.
They're like, can we talk to Courtney Shigerian? That's me. Do you know Hossein Nayeri? Of course.

Speaker 5 Well, did you know that he escaped from jail? And I became hysterical. I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe this.
I'm losing my mind.

Speaker 8 The officers told her, get dressed. You're coming with us.

Speaker 8 Courtney went down to the station where she sat in the police department kitchenette, waiting to hear something, anything, about where Nayeri was.

Speaker 8 There was a TV on the wall, and when they turned it on, Nayeri's mugshot filled the screen.

Speaker 5 This is like all that's rolling rolling back and forth is all of this, you know, on the news. My brother, you know, comes and my dad comes, and we're just, no one knows what to do.

Speaker 8 And you're still sitting in the police station.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we're sitting at the police station.

Speaker 8 Because that's the only place that people think is safe enough for you.

Speaker 5 Everyone's like, don't go, you can't go home.

Speaker 8 So she didn't. She ended up checking into a hotel.
He knew where she lived, where she worked. Everywhere was dangerous.

Speaker 8 While Courtney waited, investigators tried to understand how Nayeri had escaped again.

Speaker 8 There are some things that became very public in the days after the escape. One was the geography of the Orange County Jail.

Speaker 8 For a start, the jail is smack in the downtown area of Santa Ana, a city that has been swallowed by the sprawling edges of greater Los Angeles.

Speaker 8 It's a five-story block of brutalist cubes arranged next to each other. No visible windows, just sharp corners of beige concrete.

Speaker 8 The second thing that people got to know about the jail were the issues of overcrowding it had been facing in the months before the escape.

Speaker 8 State inmates had been transferred into county jails across California, and Orange County was no different.

Speaker 8 The jail was understaffed, overcrowded, and struggling to cope.

Speaker 8 Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy said that the third thing that everyone learned about the jail was about its plumbing system.

Speaker 13 In every jail cell, there's a toilet and a sink, which means in every prisoner jail, there's some system where plumbers can get in behind the cells and work on pipes and valves and whatever else is required for plumbing.

Speaker 13 And Orange County Jail is no different. It was built in the 60s and it's old.
And he's in this dormitory that I think used to be a gymnasium. And, you know, there's bunk beds in there.

Speaker 13 And his bed is right next to a friggin' grate. And Hussein Nayeri pulled an escape from Alcatraz.

Speaker 8 Escape from Alcatraz. It was a 1979 Clint Eastwood film where the main character manages to tunnel out of his jail cell by accessing the central plumbing system through a grate.

Speaker 8 It was as though Nayeri used that film. as a manual.

Speaker 8 First, he smuggled in a hacksaw blade to cut through the grate behind his bed.

Speaker 8 The three escapees then squeezed into a maintenance shaft, which they used to climb up onto a big flat section of the roof.

Speaker 8 Then, using bed sheets knotted together, they rappelled down the building and into the outside world. Murphy says that this part of the plan, this is the real reason.
it works so well.

Speaker 13 Nobody's thinking that we have to guard the roof against somebody escaping from one of these dorms.

Speaker 13 So like getting out on the ground level, there's a million safeguards, but going up into the sky is not something that the facility was really designed to prevent.

Speaker 8 The whole process took months. And once again, even though there were three escapees involved, investigators thought it had all the hallmarks of a Hussein Nayeri masterminded plan.

Speaker 8 It involved cunning, and though Matt Murphy hates to hand it to him, intelligence to pull it off.

Speaker 13 He managed to somehow get a hacksaw blade, actually multiple hacksaw blades,

Speaker 13 smuggled into the jail. We still don't know how.

Speaker 13 He's got to figure out the routine of the sheriffs. He's got to figure out how often the count is.

Speaker 13 He's got to get through the grate, but do it in a way that he can put the grate back up so nobody can see it.

Speaker 13 He's got to make sure that nobody in the dormitory rats him out, which means he's got to get, first of all, he's got to intimidate everybody else in this dorm because every single person in there had to know what he was doing.

Speaker 13 Okay. I mean, I hate to say it.
I hate to compliment on it. What he did is brilliant.

Speaker 8 The escape route and the methods were obvious, but there was one question that remained unanswered.

Speaker 13 I mean, Heather and I wanted to know, how in God's name did this guy get our photographs in the jail?

Speaker 8 For that part of the plan, Nayeri had help.

Speaker 8 Investigators discovered that Nayeri had taken English as a second language classes, 240 hours of them during his time in the jail.

Speaker 8 For a person who'd been speaking English fluently for 20 years, it seemed unusual.

Speaker 13 Nayeri had managed to manipulate an ESL teacher in the jail and basically got her to fall in love with them.

Speaker 8 The ESL teacher was arrested and questioned about her role in the escape. She told police, I did help Nayeri.
She said that she was the one who printed the pictures that he left on his bed.

Speaker 8 He also asked her for a screenshot of Google Maps showing the aerial view of the jail, which she gave him. But she didn't know it was for an escape, she said.

Speaker 8 He told her it was because he wanted to see how close his lawyer's office was. It was across the street from the jail, but really, it allowed Nayeri to map his route over the roof.

Speaker 8 But she said she didn't give him any of the tools used for the escape. In fact, when Nayeri asked for a cell phone, she refused.

Speaker 8 Investigators had to decide how much they could believe the story she was telling.

Speaker 13 Sheriffs are very interested in potentially prosecuting this woman who appears to have helped Nayeri escape.

Speaker 13 And what they're basing that on are a series of letters that were also found in Nayeri's stuff.

Speaker 8 They were love letters, apparently written by the ESL teacher. They talked about her hopes for the future together.
It seemed incriminating.

Speaker 8 Like, why wouldn't you try to help your boyfriend escape from jail if you love him this much?

Speaker 13 Something about the letter struck my eye.

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 13 the handwriting looked familiar to me. And it's like, wait a minute, where have I seen this before?

Speaker 8 Murphy dug through the case file for the kidnapping, and he found what he was looking for. Nayeri's journals, seized in one of the police searches.

Speaker 8 Murphy placed the letters that were signed by the ESL teacher next to the journals.

Speaker 13 And I compare them, and immediately it is obvious these letters that were left for law enforcement to find were actually written by Hussein Nayeri.

Speaker 13 They made it look like the ESL teacher helped him escape.

Speaker 8 The ESL teacher was released with no charges. Investigators chalked her up, not as an accomplice, but rather another victim of Nayeri's charm offensive.

Speaker 13 So if there isn't a little vignette into the mind of this vindictive guy, as soon as he manipulates her, he makes her think that he loves her.

Speaker 13 He gets her to do his bidding up to the point where she's like, wait a second, you want a cell phone? And she refused to do it, and then he Fs her over on his way out the door. That is Hussein Nayeri.

Speaker 8 That is Hussein Nayeri.

Speaker 4 Or rather, it was.

Speaker 8 Because even though the investigators knew how he escaped, he was still gone. And they had no idea how to get him back.

Speaker 8 And as the hours passed, the race was on to find Nayeri and the other escapees before they could do any more harm or before Nayeri managed to cross international borders again.

Speaker 13 Orange County is located about two hours from the Mexican border.

Speaker 8 Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy is from Southern California. He knows how long it takes to get from the jail to the border.
About two hours, two and a half if you're driving slow.

Speaker 8 And he also knows that in Mexico, there is an Iranian embassy, in his mind, ready to accept Nayeri with open arms.

Speaker 13 Okay, so there is no way in my mind that this guy is not on a plane back to Tehran eating peanuts and laughing.

Speaker 8 But they didn't go south to Mexico. They went north.

Speaker 2 Of all the people to escape, this wasn't a guy who stole a car.

Speaker 6 This is someone who's capable of the most atrocious, heinous acts, and people are in harm's way.

Speaker 16 Nayeri filmed a good portion of the escape.

Speaker 8 We had this footage and we thought, how could we get this out there?

Speaker 8 That's next on the final episode of Devil in the Desert.

Speaker 8 Devil in the Desert is a production of ABC Audio, ABC News Studios, and 2020. Hosted by me, Matt Gutman, this series was produced by Madeline Wood, Amy Padula, and Kiara Powell.

Speaker 8 Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Music and mixing by Evan Viola.

Speaker 8 Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dendas, Janice Johnston, Eamon McNiff, Jake Lefferman, Katie Muldowney, Chris Donovan, and Michelle Margulies.

Speaker 8 Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer.

Speaker 3 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 8 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they? A massive twist.

Speaker 17 At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 3 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.