Late in the summer of 2000 women began to disappear from the streets around the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran's holiest city and its busiest pilgrimage center. Afsaneh Karimpour, thirty, the mother of a nine-year-old girl, vanished on August 7. Three days later a woman named Layla was found strangled beneath the Khin-e-Arab road among some tomato plants, and the next day the body of Fariba Rahimpur was found in a yellow burlap sack in the Sagradeshahr neighborhood. Over the next eleven months the bodies kept coming, most of them wrapped in their own veils and left by roads, outside the Iran Khodro plant, on city streets: Massoumeh; Sarah Rahmani, twenty-seven; Azam Abdi, forty-five; Sakineh Kayhanzadeh, fifty; Khadijeh Full Qasri, strangled with a scarf; Marzieh Saadatyan, thirty-five; Maryam and Touba, both thirty-five; Azra Hajizadeh, thirty-one; Maryam Beygi, twenty-eight, found with two women named Shiva and Zahra; Leila, twenty; Mahboubeh Elahi, eighteen; and Zahra Dadkhosravi, thirty-three. The press called them the spider killings, after the way the killer drew women into his home.
The women were poor, many of them addicted, many of them mothers, and most worked in the trade that operated around the shrine. When the count reached nine and the response looked inadequate, the national parliament sent its own team of investigators to Mashhad on April 1, 2001. They weighed a conspiracy of religious zealots, a political plot against the government and a single killer, and some five hundred sex workers were moved out of the city for their safety.
The killer was Saeed Hanaei, thirty-nine, a construction worker and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, married with three children. He was born in Mashhad on April 5, 1962, into a religious family, and his mother beat him as a child, scratching him with her nails and biting him until he bled. He dated his mission to the day a man near the shrine approached his wife as if she were for sale. He began by going after the men who bought sex, gave that up as useless, and turned on the women. He lured them to his home, strangled them, and raped thirteen of them.
In July 2001 a woman he had picked up grew suspicious, fought him off, escaped and went to the police. He was arrested and admitted sixteen killings. Mashhad's bazaar merchants, his friends, spoke up for him. "He did the right thing," one said. "He should have continued." The conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami asked who ought to be judged: those who tried to root out the sickness, or those who stood at the root of the corruption.
His defense rested on the Quran's verse on those who wage war against God and spread corruption through the land, and on the Iranian criminal offense of mofsed-e-filarz, being a corrupter on earth, which carries death. He argued that the women were corrupters and that killing them was lawful. The court of Hojjatoleslam Gholamreza Mansouri rejected the argument, convicted him and sentenced him to hang. Mansouri, himself a hardliner, was removed from the judiciary in 2020 for corruption and died in exile in Romania after a fall from a window.
Hanaei was not sorry. "I am not repentant at all for what I have done," he told the filmmaker Maziar Bahari, who interviewed him, his wife and his son for the documentary And Along Came a Spider. "Had I not been arrested, I'd have wanted to kill 150 of them." He was hanged at dawn in Mashhad Prison in April 2002; the reports at the time gave April 8, and some later accounts give April 17. The case has since been filmed twice more, as Killer Spider in 2020 and as Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider, shot in Jordan and shown in competition at Cannes in 2022.