Dateline Originals - Motive for Murder - Ep. 5: Something Hinky

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

A routine traffic stop leads to a break in the case.This episode was originally published on May 28, 2020. 

During her much too short life, Gelare Bagherzade was loved by friends and family for a lot of reasons. She was deeply supportive of those she cared about. She was smart, intelligent, and engaging. And she was passionate about, well, just about everything. For those who knew and loved her, the trait that stuck out more than any other was her voice. Her friend Kathy Soltani told us Gelleray always used her voice like an instrument, generating a mood, commanding attention, and at full volume, no matter the topic.

Super loud. Super loud, yes. Very animated. She couldn't hide her feelings. About anything? About Iran? About the traffic? About anything. There were some who suspected Galaret's raised voice might have played a role in getting her killed. Specifically, the thinking went,

the culprit could be the Iranian government. You'll remember how outspoken she'd been at political rallies in Texas, directing her outrage at what was happening in her native country. We now know 30-year-old Gelareh Begirzadeh was an activist, part of a group against the current Iranian government. We're learning more about Gelarei Bagherzadeh and what she stood for as an activist. She was part of Zabad Houston, a local Iranian organization that supports the Green Movement against the current Iranian government. Investigators in Houston did not ignore that possibility. They checked with the FBI.

The bureau hadn't heard anything about it. So they asked around in the local Iranian-American community. And the only talk there involved the same shock and sadness her family and friends were feeling. We looked, but there was nothing that suggested that the Iranian government had anything to do with this. It was a dead end. Investigators still wondered if Gelleray's big voice could have gotten her in trouble in a different way.

Maybe this wasn't about something she said in public. Maybe it was a private interaction that got her killed. So the investigation turned closer to home. Ever since his twin, Cody, had been murdered, Corey Beavers had been wondering about his brother's new marriage and whether that had played a deadly part in all of this. He believed Nasreen's father, Ali Ersan, did not want to see his daughter Nasreen with Cody and might have chosen to end the relationship permanently. That certainly sounds like a motive for Cody's murder, except it doesn't really explain anything about Galleray's. She and Ali Ersan didn't know one another.

They'd never met. Now, Cody and Galleray definitely knew one another, so could the two killings somehow be an unrelated coincidence? That just didn't seem possible. Law enforcement had a mystery to unravel. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and you're listening to Motive for Murder, the latest podcast from Dateline. For the moment, when it came to both murders, investigators still had no hard answers. Yet, at the same time, Nasreen was sharing some alarming stories about her father's behavior. Stories about his stalking, about his abuse. Investigators were finding all of it believable, except being a strict if not

tyrannical father does not by itself make someone a murderer. The sad truth was this, no evidence tied any suspect to either of the murder scenes. Nazreen had told a wild tale, and it was a lot to absorb. If Nasreen's father, Ali Ersan, was involved, had he left any trail at all that investigators could follow? Sergeant Doucet and his team would have to play their cards just right to find out. And for that, investigators needed a way into the rural compound where Ali Ersan lived with his family. Now they thought maybe they'd found one. Before Cody's murder, back when Nezrin's father was looking for her, she took out a protective order against him.

No surprise, really, like a lot of protective orders, it didn't work. Here's Sergeant Doucet again. And her father had contacted her, which violated the terms of the protective order. Yes. And when somebody does that, that makes it easier to get a search warrant. We had to articulate that to a judge in Montgomery County and found probable cause to do it.

They found that probable cause in Ersan's own behavior. Ali Ersan apparently couldn't stop himself from coming after his daughter. And that turned out to be the proverbial double-edged sword. Because his compulsion also allowed investigators to get that much closer to Mr. Ersan. The search warrant came straight from that. And investigators now had a legal way into that house. When we arrived, parked in front, approached the house, the windows had dark screens on them, and you could hear talking, chatter. And we approached that. And from an officer safety standard, it was a nightmare.

Because there's no cover, no concealment when you approach the front door of that house. There were several windows. And you're hearing these people chattering. You know, we didn't know what to expect. Officers knocked on the door. One of Ersan's seven daughters answered and said her father wasn't home. Investigators didn't want to serve their warrant just yet

because they wanted to be sure Ersan wouldn't show up and interfere with their work. So instead, they left a business card and asked if Ersan would give them a call. Of course, investigators did not expect a call back, but they were wrong. Ersan did call. In order to keep Ersan away from his house while officers searched it and the rest of his property, Sergeant Doucet asked Ersan down to the station to talk.

Whether it was bravado, a foolish mistake, or whether he genuinely had nothing to hide, Ersan agreed. And Doucet's colleagues served and executed that search warrant. We searched his main residence. His wife actually gave consent for two other properties that he owned

that were nearby. And we did recover a dismantled handgun from one of those properties. And it was in a bag and it was very dirty. Could that handgun have been used in one of the murders? It was unclear in that moment. They also found a few things that seemed provocative. Wigs, gloves, ski masks, and an envelope with curious writing on it. Officers found it in the glove compartment of a vehicle parked on Ersan's property. Investigators also found an avalanche of papers just about everywhere. There was a lot of it. They kept documents.

I mean, we removed boxes and boxes of documents out of the house. The attic was full. The command post was set up there, and it was a long search. Very involved. Sorting through all of it would take some time and some help. As they searched, Sergeant Doucet had Ali Ersan in an interview room at the station. And he still talks to you?

He did. No attorney? No attorney. Doucet asked Ersan about his relationship with his daughter, Nazreen. He came across as the poor, helpful father that his daughter had ran away from home

and he was merely trying to find her and bring her home. Ali makes it clear that despite all the bad blood and everything that's happened so far, Nazarene is still walking in his home. Yes. He wants her to come home. Yes. Be part of the family again.

Yes, that's correct. You believe him? Not at all. This meeting with Ali Ersan is where those long hours of interrogating and then debriefing Nasreen really started to pay off. Because she'd already told Sergeant Doucet exactly what to expect out of her father in a police interview. She said he'd be calm, evasive, and that he would flip every single accusation back to the person who accused him. I was there due to the murder of Cody Beavers, and that's what I was investigating. Doucet asked her son if he knew Cody, his son-in-law, who had just been murdered.

And he said no. He had never seen him. He just knew of it. He had heard the name. I mean, he distanced himself tremendously. It quickly became clear Ali Ersan wasn't going to incriminate himself in any wrongdoing of any kind. He said he didn't know the guy. He was sorry that happened to him, but he didn't know anything about it, denied any knowledge of it.

So, just to recap, Ersan blamed his daughter, Nazreen, for pretty much all his problems. She'd run away. He was worried about her and who she was hanging around with. Ersan blamed his daughter, Nasreen, for pretty much all his problems. She'd run away. He was worried about her and who she was hanging around with. And all he really wanted, as her dad, was for her to come home. Furthermore, Ersan said he'd never even met Cody. But even so, Duce reported, Ersan said he felt awful for what had happened to him. All right, so that interview really doesn't bear a whole lot of fruit.

No. Ali Ersan was free to go. But investigators began to go through the things they'd taken from the house, including all those boxes of papers. Inside were all kinds of statements from Social Security, from credit cards, from welfare. And that fit something Nasreen had already told Doucet. Her father, she said, was a con man, a scammer who knew how to work the system. And the documents he saved implicated him. A lot. Yes. They'd all been delivered to a row of multiple mailboxes at the end of the Ersan driveway. Those documents weren't just addressed to Ali Ersan, but also to his wife and children.

To the detective, it seemed Ersan was bilking the government in whatever way he could, and for a lot of money. This sort of thing falls outside the jurisdiction of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, so Sergeant Doucet called the feds. Carlos Acosta, C-A-R-L-O-S, last name is A-C-O-S-T-A. I am a special agent with the FBI. Luckily for Acosta and Doucet, Nasreen had given them plenty of information to help guide their investigation. We knew that some of the allegations that Nasreen had brought forward were that her father, since he entered the United States throughout her lifetime that she was aware of, was involved in multiple frauds, from local frauds to federal frauds.

The story began decades earlier. Ersan first came to the United States in 1979 from Jordan and married Nezrin's mother, a young woman who was blind. She told investigators Ersan physically and sexually abused her for years. While that was happening, she said they had four children together. And while he and his first wife were still married, Ersan brought over a second wife from Jordan. She was just a teenager at the time.

With his second wife, named Shmu, Ersan had eight more kids. He had 12 children. And because of his children, he was able to receive government benefits. Social Security isn't just a program for seniors. Kids can draw benefits too if their parent dies or is disabled. So Ali Ersan lied and claimed he was disabled.

To be clear, he was not. But that lie delivered a monthly government check, not just to him, but in his children's names as well. That's how Ali Ersan kept his large family afloat. Here's Special Agent Acosta again. He would make false statements on Social Security documents, and he claimed that his income was very low, several thousand dollars below the threshold for public assistance. Specifically, he would claim that his income was approximately $2,000 to $3,000 a year. I don't know where you live, but $2,000 to $3,000 a year is not enough for any American to live on, let alone a large family. Claiming he made only $3,000 a year meant that Ali Ersan received even more government money.

According to authorities, he didn't stop there. Because after Nasreen ran away in 2011... Mr. Ersan opened credit cards in Nasreen's name and maxed those out to the limit. He did the same thing with several of his other children, and with a few people who apparently did not actually exist. And there was this. Virtually every time he flew on a commercial airline, Ersan would file claims about lost luggage that never really

happened. The airlines or their insurance carriers would reimburse him. And even with those monies in his bank account, Ali Ersan also claimed poverty at his own mosque in Conroe, Texas. He'd ask for charity there. But you get the idea. For his part, Ersan insisted he'd never done anything wrong. He said all those benefits were legally obtained and that he deserved them. But to investigators, Ersan looked like a master defrauder. And from his schemes, he seemed to have brought in some significant income from the government and a lot of other sources. FBI agent Carlos Acosta. Over the years, he had accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in his account.

I asked Duce about it. He didn't miss an angle, did he? No, sir. There was a pattern. As you can imagine, all those claims Nasreen had made about her father required a lot of manpower to investigate. Ducey and Acosta had assembled a sizable and muscular task force using multiple law enforcement agencies, local, state, and federal. Well, once the FBI became involved, we formed a task force,

which included the Social Security Administration, Office Inspector General, Homeland Security Investigations. We had a special agent assigned from both of those agencies, along with our state partners, which was Montgomery County Sheriff's Department, the Harris County Sheriff's Department, and HPD. That task force kept trying to connect the dots between Galleray and Cody's murders, even as they worked the fraud case. While we're working that case, we are also gathering evidence on the two homicides in 2012. We're trying to prove those as well. Here's Ducey again. In the end, was it easier to prove credit card fraud and Social Security fraud against Ali than any murder charge? Yes.

Maybe a lot easier. Yes. On May 23, 2014, Ali Ersan was charged in federal court with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., theft of public money, and benefits fraud. His second wife, Shmue, was also charged. Nasreen's sister, Nadia, as well. Facing up to 10 years in prison, they all took deals. Ersan pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and was eventually sentenced to 45 months behind bars.

Shmue and Nadia were convicted of providing false statements in association with the fraud scheme. They got 24 months in prison. As part of their deals, all those other white-collar charges against them were dismissed. Ultimately, they pled guilty. And those are all felonies? Yes.

Ali Ersan was in federal lockup, but for fraud. So then what about the murders? Sometimes in a murder investigation, the pieces come together slowly. That can be excruciating for the families involved. Often police might have a suspect and they think they know what happened. The problem is proving it. It's a metaphor as surreal as it is familiar. A puzzle. Detectives know exactly what the finished image looks like.

They just don't have all the pieces to put together. And that job becomes even tougher when the connection between killer and victim defies a certain logic. Most victims are killed by someone they know. Gelare Bagherzadeh and Ali Ersan had never met. So what exactly was she to him? Her boyfriend, Corey, thought he had that answer. It all stemmed, he believed, from a brief telephone conversation between Gelleray and Ersan.

Could a phone call somehow tie everything together? We'll get to that phone call in a minute. First, though, back to the evidence collected at the Ersan compound. The searches that produced evidence against Ersan and his family for fraud did not seem to yield much in terms of the murder investigations. The gun recovered was dismantled. It couldn't be matched to either crime. So the task force cast a wider net and turned up something very interesting. We did an offline search of all Ersan's vehicles,

of the license plate's numbers, and found that that vehicle had been stopped on the day of Galleray's murder. And it was stopped in Conroe, Montgomery County, by a DPS trooper. Stopped for speeding. He was stopped for speeding, and the DPS trooper's vehicle had dash cam.

We made arrangements to get that, and we were able to look at that video and find that Ali Ersan was driving that vehicle. The car on the dash cam video was a silver sedan. To be specific, a silver Toyota Camry. Mr. Ali Ersan was behind the wheel, his wife next to him, one of his sons in the back seat. We'll come on over here for me. Remember, witnesses reported a car with that description speeding away after Galleray was shot.

Now, there's a lot of silver cars in Texas. Correct. But it does make you think. It does. It does. What type of diabetic are you? Ersan told the trooper he was speeding because he was diabetic and needed sugar. And when the trooper approached him, had Ersan step out of the vehicle. And Ersan was not able to stand on his own two feet. He went to his knees immediately, shaking.

And the trooper, you know, on the video asked him, are you okay? And he said he had low blood sugar and he needed a soda. That turned out to be another lie. There's no evidence Ali Ersan ever had diabetes. Now here's what really made that traffic stop so interesting to Sergeant Doucet. The time and the place where Ersan was pulled over. It's a location roughly between the Ersan home

and the scene of Galaret's murder. And the timing. Well, that put the car in exactly the spot the Ersan family should have been if they'd driven away from the crime scene seconds after Galeray was shot. So it's not proof, but it does kind of make you wonder. It does. That night, after the traffic stop, Ali Ersan was allowed to go on home. For some reason, the gods of law enforcement were smiling on that trooper.

Because for years, he held onto the dash cam video. Why, you ask? Just something about the stop seemed hinky. His instincts made a huge difference. And the video record of the traffic stop was a pivotal break. Because it put Ali Ersan potentially at the scene of Galaret's murder. And now back to that phone call. The one Corey Beavers thinks might explain the connection between Ali Ersan and Galaret Bagherzadeh.

It's a story that's so emblematic of who Galeray was. It shows how strong-willed she was, how moral, and how unafraid. If it hadn't been for the tragedy tied to it, this is a story that would only make you love Galeray more. It begins with Ali Ersan harassing his daughter, Nazreen, after she fled his home. Ali was calling all the classmates, trying to find out, like, school schedule, where the classrooms were that semester and whatnot. And at one point, he had called Gelleray, and she kind of just told him off and said, like, you know, I'm not stupid. I know what it is that you're trying to do. You're trying to find out where your daughter is and when and where she'll be so that you can do something.

And you need to stop calling everybody and just let her live her life. She's old enough, you know, to do her own thing at this point. You're not in charge of her anymore. With one simple phone call, Galleray had insulted Ali Ersan. So he called her again. About a month later, she came to our house. And she had a missed phone call on her phone. Eventually, Ali and Gelleray were connected.

And she said hello. And then she started, like, yelling at him in Farsi. And my understanding would be that she was cursing him out. And then when they got off the phone, I said, you know, what happened? What did he say? And I think she was talking to Nadia. And then he took the phone away from her and he said, is this that Iranian bitch?

And then that's when she just like went off on him. And then he hung up on her. Were you worried at the end of that? I mean, this sounds like typical Gellerite. She wasn't taking anything from anybody. Right. Were you worried at all that she was antagonizing this guy? The only reason why I wasn't worried

is because I felt like he had so many other people that he would go after before he went after her. There were all these other people that upset him. She would, surely she was on that list, but it would be further down. Just a few weeks after that fateful phone call, Galleray was gunned down. In May 2014, the Harris County District Attorney charged Ali Ersan with Galleray's murder. Next time on the final episode of Motive for Murder, investigators discover some damning evidence at Ersan's compound

as they pursue charges against him in the murder of his son-in-law, Cody Beavers. And we will interview someone else, someone at the center of his son-in-law, Cody Beavers. And we will interview someone else, someone at the center of this case, Ali Irsan. I'll ask him some unpleasant questions, including one about a third homicide we haven't mentioned up until now. I want to talk about your son-in-law who was killed, not Cody Beavers.

The other one.