Mahin Qadiri went looking for her victims at the shrines and cemeteries of Qazvin, where elderly women came to pray and to visit the graves of their families. She watched for the ones wearing gold on their hands, heads and necks, offered them a ride, and killed them for it. She was thirty-two, and Iranian press and courts came to describe her as the first woman in the country's legal history convicted as a serial killer.
She was born in Qazvin in 1977 and married at fourteen. By her early thirties she had two daughters, the younger of them physically disabled, a husband with an addiction, and debts. She told investigators the killings were about money, and later said she had needed it for her daughter's treatment.
The first to die was not a woman. Persian accounts say she killed the elderly man who was her landlord. She was arrested as the only suspect, but she did not confess and the evidence was found insufficient, and she went free. About a year and a half later the body of an elderly woman was found in the open country outside the city. This time there was no trace of the killer.
Four more women followed, in the early months of 2009. The police operation to find the killer ran for 109 days. English-language reports at the time said she drugged her victims and then smothered them, or struck them with an iron bar, and that she told investigators she had taken ideas from Agatha Christie novels, a detail carried by the Guardian and the Telegraph.
She was arrested in the spring of 2009, after an intended victim escaped and went to the police. Most Persian sources give the month as Ordibehesht 1388, which fell in April and May 2009; one account in the newspaper Etemad places the arrest in the autumn of 2008.
The court convicted her of six murders under the Islamic Penal Code. She was the only defendant in the case and was sentenced to death, with a further twenty-four months of discretionary imprisonment and seventy-four lashes for the thefts. Some of the victims' families never accepted that she had acted alone, and said so up to the day of her execution. Mehdi Ebrahimi, who covered the case for the crime news site Rokna and later became its editor, said there had been a news blackout on it that lasted until the end.
She was hanged at Choobindar prison in Qazvin on December 20, 2010. Thirteen years later, when Etemad went looking for her daughter, the young woman refused to be interviewed. Rokna reported in 2021 that a documentary about the case, titled Mahin, had been made.
The count differs between sources. The item carried by AFP from IRNA on the day of the execution spoke of five victims killed between February 2008 and May 2009. Iranian court-based accounts give six, the landlord and five women.