The first body was found on April 13, 1997, a woman of fifty-four lying in front of Chitgar Park in west Tehran. Three days later a burning corpse turned up in a garden in Karaj; the coroner found knife wounds to the neck and chest and said the fire had been set after death. The dead woman's name was recorded as A'diah. At the end of April the body of a woman of forty-three was found burning beside a construction road in Farahzad, her neck ruptured. By summer there were nine, and Tehran had a name for the man it was hunting: the Vampire, or the Night Bat.
In May police found two burned bodies on the Bakeri Expressway. Azam Sabtnzhad had been stabbed twenty-seven times; her ten-year-old daughter, Munira Kafchi, had been strangled. On June 2 the burned body of Elaha Hematinejad, twenty-four, was found in the Evin district; she had gone to a hospital in Chamran to visit her sister and died the night she came home. A woman of fifty-five was found burned near a highway construction site in west Tehran on June 10, and on June 14 a fifth-year student at the Hamadan dental school was found burned in the same part of the city, her hands and feet broken. The pattern, as the police reconstructed it, was a man in a taxi picking up women and girls at night, driving them to empty ground, raping them, killing them with a knife or by strangling, and setting the bodies alight with gasoline.
Even his name is disputed. Western wire reports called him Ali Reza Khoshruy Kuran Kordiyeh, a taxi driver of twenty-eight. Persian-language accounts give Gholamreza Khoshroo Kuran Kurdieh, born in Faruj in northern Khorasan in 1965, a man who had been arrested for robbery in Nishapur in 1982 and was later held on an allegation of spying for the Soviet Union. By those accounts he had been caught in 1992 with an accomplice, Ali Karimi, after girls reported being robbed and raped by two men, had given the police a false name, Murad Naderi, and had escaped on the way to court; Karimi was hanged. At first the Tehran police chief told television viewers that the killer was an Afghan. Only when his photograph was printed did a relative bring a birth certificate to a newspaper.
Accounts of the arrest differ too. One version has two women escaping from his car and helping police draw a composite, and officers picking him up at a shopping center for acting suspiciously and finding human blood in the car. The Persian press dated the arrest to July 22, 1997, in the Punak area of west Tehran's tenth district.
He was tried in two sessions before the Tehran General Court at the Imam Khomeini judiciary complex, charged with the nine murders, with the attempted murder of a young niece he had shut in a drawer, with escape, theft and rape. According to Persian accounts, he never admitted the killings and blamed an accomplice he named as Hamid Rasuli. He was sentenced to death and to 214 lashes.
The time and place of the execution were made public in advance, and the crowd at the site in west Tehran was put at more than ten thousand. Relatives of the dead women were allowed to deliver lashes themselves. Then, as the crowd shouted "Damn you, you killer," he was led, in a dark green prison uniform, beneath a yellow construction crane, and hoisted into the air with a rope around his neck. Wire services dated the execution August 13, 1997; some later accounts give August 12 or August 22. He left a note that read, in translation, "I am not indebted to anyone, and I am not a creditor, and I ask forgiveness from all."