By Chris Bartholomew
We see it all the time in movies and books; 'Inspired by real events,' 'Based on a true story.'
Here is one story inspired by fiction, Agatha Christie no less. It seems that lovely little Miss Marple inspired one serial killer, a woman in Iran, to be careful in her choosing of victims, and in not leaving any clues by targeting elderly and middle-aged women and offering them rides home after picking them up at shrines in the city where they had been praying.
She is also said to have admitted to earlier murders of her former landlord and an aunt.
Known only as Mahin she has been accused of killing at least six people, five of them women (the landlord was a man.) After offering the victims a ride, she gave them something to make them sleep, and then suffocated them. One was beaten to death with an iron after waking up. She would rob them of their possessions, and then dump them.
Agatha Christie was popular in Iran; she had visited Iran several times and used it as the setting for one of her stories, The House at Shiraz.
A 60-year-old woman who had read about the murders told police she had escaped from a light-colored Renault after becoming suspicious of a female driver. After checking cars matching that description, their attention was drawn to Mahin by records showing she had been fined following a recent road accident.
This is the first female serial killer in Iran.
Editor's note: this was written in May 2009, days after the arrest, when the woman was known to the press only by her first name. She is Mahin Qadiri, born in Qazvin in 1977, and she has a full entry in this archive. She was convicted on six counts of murder and six of robbery and hanged at Qazvin Central Prison on December 20, 2010. The Agatha Christie detail is not a flourish of the reporting: it comes from her own confession, and was carried at the time by the Guardian and the Telegraph. The article's count is right and its arithmetic is right, the man among the six being the 2006 victim, though most English-language accounts settle on five because they follow a single agency item published on the day of her execution; the archive follows the court figure of six. One thing the article could not have known is the part of the case that matters most. The 2006 killing brought an immediate arrest and a murder charge, and the court acquitted her for want of evidence. The five women died three years after that, between February and May 2009. On the description of her as the first Iranian woman convicted as a serial killer, that is how she is generally described and the archive puts it the same way.