Iran police believe they have caught the country’s first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie. The woman identified only by her first name as Mahin, age 32, has confessed to the murders which were committed between February and May.

The 32-year-old suspect, stands accused of killing at least six people, including five women, according to officials in the city of Qazvin, near Tehran. Mahin’s modus operandi would be to approach her victims, who were mostly females, aged between 50 and 70 years old, and offer to give them a ride in her yellow Renault. Mahin is said to have carefully chosen her victims, targeting elderly and middle-aged women, picking them up at shrines where they had been praying. After offering her victims a lift, Mahin allegedly gave them fruit juice, which she had spiked with an anesthetic to knock them out. She would then suffocate them before stealing their jewelery and other possessions and dumping the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar.

A local police chief in Qazvin said psychologists believed Mahin’s motives could be traced to her troubled relation with her parents in childhood.
“It is likely that the murderer took revenge on women who resembled her mother and were of the same age because of her intense hatred of her own mother,” the police chief, Akbar Hedayati said.

He said, Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two, had been arrested after her last prey – a 60-year-old woman – managed to get away from her car on May 11 and provided the police with major leads. Police said she confessed in custody to killing four such women in Qazvin since January, claiming to have been driven by a desperate need for money after chalking up debts of more than $24,000 (€17,300).
“Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself,” Mohammad Baqer Olfat, the Qazvin prosecutor, told Iranian journalists.

Murder is punishable by death in Iran, which hangs hundreds of people every year.

-article by Robert Tait from Irish Times rewritten and adapted by admin-

The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the past three decades.

In 2004, a somber group of seventeen law enforcement agencies gathered in Oklahoma City. A string of vicious murders along I-40, with most linked to the city, had raised the specter of death riding in the cab of a long-distance trucker.

A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female crime victims, the majority of whom were killed and whose bodies were discarded at truck stops, motels and other roadside locations along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the United States.

The database also has information on scores of truckers who have been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, officials said. Authorities said they do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers.

Ten suspects in 30 homicides have been detained, according to the FBI. One trucker was arrested in Tennessee and charged with four murders. The FBI office in El Paso said it can not comment on the map or specific cases because the cases are not being investigated by the FBI. The office said the FBI’s role is to provide the map for other agencies.

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police “connect the dots” to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

Though many of the dots on the map now appear connected to one another by similarities — such as the killers’ MO – modes of operation — the majority are not connected to any known suspect.

They are potential serial slayings waiting to be solved, the FBI says.

-article by Scott Glover from Los Angeles Times, rewritten and adapted by admin-