Reply All - Introducing: Conviction - The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Alex chats with Habiba Nosheen about her new show, Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan.  Listen to all the episodes of the show here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2XquJlPU9ibLYZMH0ZzFwA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Alex. We are working on some more Reply All Stories. We have a new one from a manual that's coming out very soon. But in the meantime, we've got something from our colleagues at Gimlet. Hello. Hi, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. This is Habiba Nishin.

She's an investigative reporter. And she's the host of Season 3 of Conviction, which is a show that digs into a big crime story every season. I'm recording. I think we're good. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And I recorded this interview with her from, deep within my closet at home.

Thanks for doing this. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. We just put out the last episode today, so I feel like I don't know what to do with myself right now. Yeah, I was just about to ask you, what are you going to do with yourself? I've started watching Bridgeton, and I have to do laundry. Oh, my God, I have to do laundry, too.

Habiba spent the last three years working on a story about a woman named Niseaba Hassan, who went missing. And the crazy thing is, her disappearance went unreported for almost a decade. And the only reason that Habiba found out about it was because she received an anonymous email years after Naseba went missing. Yeah. So in the spring of 2019, I found myself reading an anonymous email from a tipster who essentially said,

there's a woman who's missing and there's a lot more to her story than that's been reported. And I think it's worth looking into. I'm happy to talk to you, but I must remain anonymous from my own. safety. Wow. I mean, we get a lot of emails that are like, this is life or death for me. This is very important. What was it about that email that jumped out at you that made you want to pursue this story? You know, it was short. And most of those emails that you're like look into this, like, they're long, rambling essays about people's lives and you're just trying to sort through in this person, in this email, wrote names, dates, things that I could eat. And I could

easily verify within a few minutes in a Google search. And that was really helpful to know, no, this person is talking about a real thing that happened. And also the intrigue of like, why are you writing to me? Like, what are you looking for? The deeper Habiba went into the story, the more it turned out that she and Saba, the woman who disappeared had in common. They're both first generation Canadian immigrants. They both grew up in very strict Muslim households.

And they both ran away from those homes as teenagers. When I began to see the parallels in my life and Naseba's life, I felt like the only way for me to tell it in a way that was honest and meaningful was to say, hey, I know what this is like. And this is an experience that's incredibly hard to talk about. because there's so many ways to fall into the stereotype when you're telling a story about Muslim women. We are just sort of represented in this like cliche stereotype ways where we're always oppressed. And if we ever say and tell our story about any kind of abuse or violence,

it just gets hijacked to justify the racist views people have of the Muslim community. Right. So you just don't, you just don't say anything. And I think the opportunity to tell that story in a way that I hope represents the life of Naseba in a complicated way because it was, I just, that that feels to me like the most fulfilling thing. Where can people listen to this? Spotify. All right.

It's season three of Conviction, and there are eight episodes, and they're all available now. Thank you so much, Abiva. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Alex. We'll have the first episode of Conviction, the disappearance of Naseba Hassan, after the break. On the morning of October 31, 2016, police descend on a farm in southern Ontario. For the next five days, dozens of officers in bright green high-visibility jackets spread out over a massive property. some on horses, some on foot. They search every inch of the barn,

dig up the fields and go through the woods, with a hope that the walls, the trees, and the grass might betray the secrets that they've held for nearly 10 years. So you're looking for a body? We are looking for evidence, and the body would be one thing. This is the detective in charge of the search, speaking to reporters.

Tomorrow what's going to be happening is the OPP are going to be coming with ground penetrating radar and the cadaver dogs. We're going to have the drone flying over as well. What they were hoping for was anything that might help them solve the mystery of what happened to a 26-year-old. Naseba Hassan, who one day just vanished. We believe that Naseba has met with foul play. this was the last place she was known to be alive, it's a good starting point for us. When this search was happening,

I had no idea it was going on. I'd never heard of Naseba Hassan, had never set my eyes on this farm in Hamilton, Ontario. In fact, I didn't see the name Naseba Hassan until three years after the search when I found myself reading an email from an anonymous sender in the spring of 2019.

So I should say, I'm an investigative reporter, and I get a lot of emails telling me to investigate things. You know, like how the Canadian Prime Minister is using secret technology to control people's minds, stuff like that. But this email was different. It was short, to the point, the sender tells me that they have information about Naseba Hassan, the missing woman, and implies that they know what happened to her, but that they're scared to come forward because they fear for their safety. The day I received this email

is the first time Nuseba Hassan enters my world. And I enter hers. From Spotify and Gimlet Media, I'm Habibah Noshin. And this is a disappearance of Nuseba Hassan. Hassan was 26 years old when she was last seen. She was dropped off here one night and she was gone the next morning. I said, oh, where is she?

And he's like, oh, she's gone. So what do you mean she's gone? I just remember the panic in her voice. And she saw the van, and then she just went flying, like, bolted. And the van started going after. Boy, this is very suspicious. Very suspicious. I don't think I can relax in my life.

I need to know where she is. I'm not a day goes by. Where is she? There are a lot of people who don't want me to tell. you this story, because it's filled with secrets, secrets that some people have spent a lifetime protecting. And for a long time, the secrets in this story were safely hidden, partly by accident, and partly because of the pain that revealing them would cause. And all these secrets could have easily stayed hidden if someone from the past hadn't set out to solve a different kind of

secret. A secret about the hidden identity of the woman who gave birth to her. So that's where I want to start this story. I knew that I was born to a young unmarried mother. Then that's basically all I knew. This is a woman I'll call Yasmin. She's 21 years old, the same age her birth mother was when she gave her up. We're not using her real name for reasons that will become clear later. For as long as Yasmin could remember, she knew she was adopted. And for as long as she could remember, she'd wanted to find her birth mother. I didn't know whether she was rich or poor, or if she had addiction issues or not. And you knew nothing. Like, you don't know her first name. You weren't given that. Nothing. Yasmine is black, just like her adoptive parent. But Yasmin's skin tone

is a lot lighter, which, she says, made it harder to hide the fact that. that she was adopted. Whenever I would have friends and other black friends and they would meet my parents and they're like, why are both your parents dark and you're this color? Why aren't you the same skin color as your brother? From day one, I can remember. It was always when, okay, we need to start figuring out who is who here. This is Jackie, Jasmine's adoptive mother, also not her real name. I talked to them together. Jackie told me that even as a child, Yasmeen always wanted to know the answer to this one question. Always this question, who's my biological mother?

Most of what Jackie was able to tell Yasmin about her birth mother came from a file they had been given at the time of the adoption. 30 or so pages of information about Yasmin's previous life. Doctor visits she's had. And there was also a scrapbook from the foster family she had briefly stayed with. Yasmin says it was when she turned 14. she started to examine the file to find out what was in it

and what wasn't. I opened it up and I had dates. I had the address of where she lived and I knew the country that her family was from, which is Jordan. The file is from CAS, which stands for Children's Aid Society. It's not exactly a government body but they work on behalf of the government

to oversee adoptions in parts of Canada. And many of the documents in the file are written by a caseworker at Children's Aid and addressed directly to Yasmin. I wonder if you could read this. In this page where it says birth mother, when I read it, when you were born, your birth mother had recently turned 19 years of age. Your birth mother was described by a friend as a very attractive woman. She was about 5 foot 5, tall and very slim, weighing only about 100 pounds.

She had wide, brown, wide, bright brown eyes. Her hair was thick and wavy, dark brown to black, worn shoulder length at this time, sometimes covered with a bandana. She had a wide smile. There's also this description of Yasmin, as a toddler. You were described of having some wicked little temper tantrums if you didn't get your way. These lasted a couple of minutes of earth-shattering screaming. Your birth mother apparently had few or no support.

who would have been significant relationships to you. The file gave Yasmin a few concrete facts. Her birth father was from Jamaica, and her birth mom was from Jordan. Her birth mother had Yasmin when she was 19, meaning she was probably born in 1980, and she was raising Yasmin alone. Her birth mother had requested a closed adoption,

so some of the facts that Yasmin wanted the most weren't in the file. her birth mother's name, her exact date of birth, or pictures of her, details that could have helped Yasmin track her down. And in fact, reading through the file just added new mysteries for Yasmin about her mother. For example, usually when children are given up for adoption voluntarily, it's when they're still infants. But Yasmin was two years old and seemingly very well cared for for by her mother. The caseworkers, they were very impressed by how well she took care of me. She would, like, come to CAS appointments and I would be well dressed. I was well nourished.

Whenever I got sick, she took me to the hospital. She took me to program. She took me to daycare. She tried her best. I mean, she basically, like, it was very abrupt how she dropped me off. How do you feel about that? confused by it because by all means she could have given me up right after she gave birth to me. But no, she kept me for about two years and it was very obvious that she cared. She loved me and from them she just, she did the hardest thing she could possibly do, which was give up her child. What made this even more mysterious is how little Yasmin's birth mother. had been willing to say about why she was giving her up.

The file describes her as, quote, guarded, defensive, and unwilling to open up, to the point of it being a bit odd. She was very hesitant. That's what it said in the report, like verbatim. Like, she was very hesitant to, like, share her current situation. She said, I can no longer properly care for her,

or she just surrendered me. She found it hard to raise a child without any supports or, sorry, without any supports. And CS was like, okay, we'll help you, we'll give you the names of programs. We can refer to you to social assistance if you needed or public housing if you needed. Because the thing about children's aid, if there's no abuse, going on or neglect, which there was none, they try their best to keep biological kids with their parents. They go out of their way to do it.

Like, that's what they're there for. Then she kept saying, nope, nope, nope, and they were completely perplexed. Jackie says that Yasmin's biological mom had taken such good care of her that children's aid was convinced that it was only a matter of time before she would come back for her. And yet, that didn't happen. Shortly after Yasmin's birth mother dropped her off,

CAS stopped hearing from her. The file says they even put an ad in the local newspaper trying to find her. No luck. After Jackie adopted Yasmin, they never heard from her biological mother. Although, there was this one mysterious package that came from children's aid

with a note to Yasmin that said, quote, from your biological family. So I was about five years old. My parents received a teddy bear and some candies in the mail. And, like, the teddy bear was all worn now. Like, I played with it once, and it tore apart,

and we had to throw it away, and the candies were just old, and they looked, like, expired and sticky, and, yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Did it give you hope that, maybe she will try to reach out again? As a kid? Yeah.

Yeah, it gave me hope that, like, best case scenario, you always think as a kid, oh, once I turn 16, 18, I'm going to meet her, and it's all going to be hugs, and what is it from that movie? The color purple where Whoopi Goldberg is meeting up with her sister that she hasn't seen since she's a kid, and it's going to be like that,

and they're just instant connection. and happy crying and flower feels, but no. For Yasmin as a 14-year-old, looking through the adoption file just deepened the mystery of her mother. Why had her mother spent two years caring for her, supporting her, feeding her, and by all accounts loving her, only to give her up so suddenly.

Hanging over all that was the question, where was her birth mother now? Trying to find the identity of the woman who gave birth to her consumed Yasmin. So much so that she became a junior investigator of sorts, pouring over every detail in her adoption file. I had the address of where she lived, and I would just go on 4-1-1, go on white pages on the internet,

and just look most common surnames in Jordan, most common surnames in Arabic, and I would just look that up. She would even try amateur forensics on materials in the file. For example, she had this immunization card from when she was a baby with her original birth name, but the last name had been blacked out by children's aid. I tried taking rubbing alcohol to get rid of the permanent record

to see through the pen scratching, but I couldn't. Yeah, at one point I thought I saw a Z or a G, So I was looking for last names with Z or G, and I couldn't find anything. You always didn't investigating on the internet. Yeah, just snooping. Mom says I'm computer savvy, but really I just use Google search, burner accounts on Facebook and Twitter. What's your burner?

Yeah. What does that mean? Just because I don't really use social media, so it's basically just a phone. Facebook account with a fake name. Yasmin fell in love with TV crime shows. And when she started university, she enrolled in psychology with an interest in forensics. And Yasmin wasn't searching alone. Her mother, Jackie, also started digging.

You said you did your own investigation. Yes. I guess it runs in the family. What did you do? When did you start? Oh, since one of the thing that I always did is, Every year I always call CAS. I was updated my file just to see it was anybody who contacted anybody want to know

because I want to make sure that they knew. My address is still the same. My phone number is still the same. We're not hesitant at all. If there's ever a phone call, let us know, right? Because I always believe that for the way I know this person took care of this child, one day, there's no way she was not going to want to come in and just say, okay, how is she doing and where she is?

So can I contact her? And then I engaged in an investigator when she was 16. So you hired a private investigator. And what happened? What did he say? No trace, no trace of anything. It's the worst $2,000 I've ever spent in my life. What would you've done?

Oh, I would, my thinking was I was going to raise both of them. I was so ready. I was ready to, we were going to be a. After all these years, Jackie and Yasmin still knew next to nothing. They didn't know Yasmin's birth mother's name, didn't have a photo, or a date of birth. They both started to prepare for the chance that they'll never know more. Never be able to help Yasmin answer all her questions. But then, everything changed.

That's right after the break. I picture all the ways Yasmin has tried to retrace her biological. mother's life over the years. Studying every detail in her adoption file, reading it over and over again, searching for clues. For an adopted child and their family, those few pages in the adoption file can be priceless.

They can help your adopted child find their place in the world to help them hold on to anything that's tangible about their previous life. I know this. because I'm an adoptive mother. And just like Yasmin, my little girl was given up under mysterious circumstances. All I know is a date and the street corner where my daughter was left as a newborn baby. I also don't know who her birth parents are or why they gave her up.

When I adopted her, I wasn't even given her date of birth. I was asked just to make it up. There's so many nights when everyone has gone to sleep, that I opened my laptop, and I searched that street corner where she was found over and over again, sometimes for hours, hoping some new detail will emerge that will help me solve the mystery of where my daughter came from.

So yeah, believe me, I get the urge and the desperation of wanting to know, of wanting so badly to give your adopted daughters The one thing you can't. The truth. The truth about the woman who gave birth to her. In January of 2017, a couple of weeks before Yasmin's 18th birthday, she was doing her regular Google search.

You know, with the keywords, Jordanian, woman, Hamilton. But this time, there was a hit. Today I have important information in regards to a missing person investigation. The Hamilton Police Service, Homicide Unit is actively investigating the disappearance of Nuseba Hassan. So remember that big police search that was on the news?

That's what came up when Yasmin searched this time. I saw the Hamilton Spectator article. Hamilton woman missing for over 10 years. She stands approximately 5 foot 4. She has a slim build. She has brown eyes and black hair. The woman in the article, she was wearing. in 1980.

Jordanian descent. She had a baby at a wedlock, okay. And then I saw her face, and then I'm like, holy shit. She looks like me. The eye shape. The lip shape. I'm like, oh, my God, okay. Like, that's, like, almost I was like, oh, my God,

she's prettier than I imagined. I'm like, and then I saw the name Nusiba Hassan, and I'm like, oh, my God. I was just speechless. Just... This is who I'm looking at. If Yasmin's hunch was right, then she finally had something she had wanted her entire life.

A picture of her birth mother. And most importantly, a name. Naseba Hassan. At the bottom of the article was contact details for the detective working the case. Another person, looking for the woman Yasmin had been obsessed with trying to track down. So I wrote down the name of the detective on my little notebook that was at the end of the article and then just called the detective to ask him a couple questions. Yes, this 17-year-old with a love for crime shows calls up a detective, hoping to interrogate him about what he knows.

He said, oh, sorry, I can't speak to you. You're under the age of a majority. And then I'm like, okay, whatever. I'm turning 18 and a couple days, I'll just wait. As she's waiting, she decides not to mention any of this to her adoptive mother, Jackie. After all, what if her instincts were wrong? She needed proof that Naseba was her biological mom. But what Yasmine had no way of knowing is that Jackie had the exact same epiphany. I'm sorry, detectives in Hamilton and are now looking into the 2006 disappearance of Naseba Hassan. A couple of months earlier, Jackie had been driving.

down the highway when she heard something on the radio that made her years perk up. The police say that Hassan is of Jordanian descent. She's about five feet, four inches tall with a slim build. The news report mentioned the same keywords. Jordanian, woman, Hamilton. Hamilton police urging anyone with information about his aunt's disappearance to give them a call. The minute she heard it, Jackie made a call to the Hamilton Police Department. When you got that call, what did you think? It was the last person who thought we'd be reaching out, especially given the circumstances. This is Detective Peter Tom. He's the lead investigator on Naseba's case at the time.

And he remembers when Jackie called. Jack came across this in the media and told me, I think this is my adoptive daughter's mother. And I believe it's the birth mother that you're investigating her disappearance. And, you know, here's her age. And I also said where I adopted her from and how long she was in the system for her, and then the detective says, are you ready for this? I said, yeah, I said, it is her. And I said, what? Jackie wondered, how am I going to tell this to my daughter? Before I adopted my daughter,

I had to take these adoption classes where you were told how important it was to come up with the script for how to tell your child their story. What you might say to a four-year-old and how you might add to that script as the child gets older. But nothing in those classes would have prepared me for something like this. How do you break the news to your daughter that the woman who gave birth to her is missing and the police are looking for her? There's just no script for that.

So Jackie agonizes over the exact right words to tell Yasmin. And with Yasmin's 18th birthday just a few days away, Jackie decides she needs to talk to her. Yasmin remembers just how awkward her mom was about it. You walked into my room and you were like, okay, now that you're turning 18, are you sure you want to do to search? And I'm like, yeah, obviously. And she said, oh, do you know anything at all? Like, do you still look up on the internet?

And I'm like, okay, yeah, here's this article. This looks really. And you had the biggest, like, I don't know what that is. I'm like, you have no idea if that's her. she looks nothing like you. And then I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to call the detective anyway. I turned 18 on a couple of days. So I kind of had to stumble out and say, okay, no, I don't know what you talk about.

I've never seen this article. After a few minutes of agonizing, she realized she had to tell Yasmin the truth, that the missing woman in the news is her birth mother. We went back downstairs, and I told her, okay, now I began talking to the detective. And then mom broke down and said it's her. Do you recall what goes through your mind? Just a look on my mom's face, just the pain, just the defeat in her face, like, it is her. It's like news of hearing that someone's dead, but we don't know if they're dead.

There's no trace of them. And that, hearing that from mom, that it was her, I wasn't just, stumbling on some random news article about something and we cried for just ugly sobbing for about half an hour. You're crying right now? It's like grieving basically. You're grieving someone that you never knew. You don't have any pictures, you don't have any memories, you have nothing. You just have what they gave you, which was my life. this was kind of a relief. Yasmin now knew there was a reason

why Nusseba hadn't tried to reach out. It wasn't because she didn't love Yasmin. But realizing all this also changed how Yasmin feels about looking for her birth mother. What was once just an obsession of a little girl who wanted to know the name of her birth mother has led her to an investigation of what could be a crime?

Yasme knew she was in way over her head. It had been two years since she found the article about Naseba. And it didn't seem like there had been any movement in the case. But maybe there was another way she could find out what happened. Maybe she could alert someone about the disappearance of Naseba. Someone who would know how to investigate. Someone like an investigative reporter. someone like me.

So yeah, Yasmin was the sender of that cryptic email about Naseba that I found myself reading in the spring of 2019. The email that kicked this whole thing off for me. When I first read that email, I wanted to find out more about the sender, even something as basic as, where was this email sent from? Usually you can track that by looking at the IP address of an email. But Yasmin was a step ahead. She covered her tracks, making it impossible for me to figure out her location.

I did it through, like, encrypted browser. I used it for tour. I don't know many 21-year-olds who do that. Why did you do that? Mostly it was fear. Like, fear of basically what happened in Nuseba. It was just you're there one day and gone to next. Is there a part of you that's scared?

Yep. It's part of the reason why I'm choosing to remain private. If there is something to be scared of, then... You were going to say, if what? If there is someone out there that did do harm to her and they're walking around the community, like nothing happened, that is scary. Yasmin's fear was,

whoever may have harmed Naseba, what if they found out that she had a daughter? Would they come after her too? I've been an investigative reporter for more than a decade, and I worked on all kinds of stories. So at first, Naseba's case didn't seem that complicated. I figured I just need a few weeks to get to the bottom of this. But little did I know

that it would take me into a three-year journey and bring me to stories of transnational kids, Knapping, SWAT teams, allegations of abuse and violence. And at the center of it all, a large family, big secrets, and a missing woman. On the next episode of the disappearance of Naseba Hassan, we enter the world of Naseba and hear two wildly different explanations about what happened to her. We are considering this to be a murder investigation. What do you mean?

Like, she's out there. No one can say otherwise to me. I won't hear it. Conviction, the disappearance of Naseba Hassan, is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production. The show is hosted and reported by me, Habiba Noshin. Additional reporting and fact-checking by Kelly Bennett. This episode was produced by Alyssa Eads. Our producers are Hannah Harris Green, Chris Neri, and Anya Schultz.

Our supervising producer is Matthew Nelson. Our editors are Alex Bloomberg, Colin Campbell, and Heather Evans. Original music, scoring, sound design, and mixing by Catherine Anderson. Music supervision by Liz Fulton. Archival audio, courtesy of CTV and CBC. If you have any information about Noseba or this case, I would love to hear from you. You can reach me at Habiba.noshin at gmail.com. That's H-A-B-I-B-A dot N-O-S-H-E-E-N at gmail.com.

Special thanks to Nazanin Raph Sanjani, Chelsea Gomez, Lydia Pullgreen, Caitlin Kenney, Connie Walker, Brendan, Brendan, Brendan Klinkenberg. Jen Hahn. Jesse Hart. Talia Rockman. Matt Collie. Jay Colburn.

Iris Fisher. Natalie Russell. Whitney Potter. Rachel Strom. Pescent Matur. Edward McGee. Sharon Michiehi. And Asmaid Khan.

Thank you for listening.