On May 1st, 1989, my mom was murdered while she was leaving for work early in the morning
in the parking lot. Since they were going through a divorce my dad was a likely suspect,
so two weeks after the homicide they arrested both my brother and my father. My brother was placed in
juvenile detention, and my father was arrested and subsequently convicted of my mom's homicide.
Voice over: Pooneh never believed her father was guilty. It just didn't make sense. There was no real
evidence that implicated him, and besides, she had reason to believe a new group of friends her mom
had been hanging out with was much more likely to be involved. But while her brother was eventually
released from custody, her father spent the next 16 years in prison. Pooneh: My mom's homicide,
my dad's incarceration, is a big story, and it has a lot of moving parts to it, and we're getting
close to the end of it, and so there are certain things that I won't be able to talk about
until after it's done. Voice over: Right now Pooneh needs to hold some information back
to avoid jeopardizing the work she's been doing since 1989 to prove her father's innocence. It's
too late to make a difference for him - he died in 2019, a dozen years after his release from
prison - but Pooneh wants justice for both of her parents. She's determined to undo what she
says were mistakes or outright malpractice by the Washington State justice system,
and she's determined to hold the real killer to account. Pooneh: You know back in 1989
I went to the funeral home, and I told my mom "I'm going to
get the people that did this to you." While we were in court at my dad's sentencing I told the
D.A. "We're not done, I'm going to be back, you've made a mistake," so I was just really
focused on that. I, I told her I would get the people that killed her and I meant it.
Voice over: When her family was blown apart, Pooneh was a college student at Washington State.
She had no money, but she soon realized she would need a lot of it to fund what would become
her life's mission. Some people want to become wealthy just to be wealthy, and never get there.
Pooneh did get there, but as a byproduct of her relentless focus and determination
to realize her goal. Pooneh: One of the things that happens when you're arrested
and convicted of a homicide, you literally spend your life savings trying to prove your innocence,
and, and that money doesn't go far because lawyers and investigators are really expensive. I didn't
have even enough money to afford cigarettes, and I remember going to, uh, it was Plaid Pantry, I gave
him my debit card and it got declined. I'm like, I just called the bank and I have 14 dollars in
there, I don't know why my debit card declined me. He was kind enough to let me take the cigarettes
and I grabbed the cigarettes and I went home, opened up a bottle of wine and sat in the
middle of my garage looking up and saying, "I need money, I can't do all the things that I need to do
if, if I don't have money," and you cannot fight the state of Washington with no money.
Voice over: She's made enough money now to be able to fund private investigators,
DNA analysis, lawyers, crime scene reconstruction experts and even animators.
Whatever it takes to keep her investigation moving forward.
My dad had always said that the best way to make money is through real estate.
I started saving money and buying dumpy homes and so after work I'd go there and fix them and
rent them out, and as luck would have it, you know, the market started to get better, and
so I had some money. I remember I was opening up a business and my attorney said well
aren't we gonna work on your mom's case? I said we are, but I didn't, the DNA hadn't caught up
yet so I had been working on it on the side, and we'd been getting evidence released and
to the labs for DNA testing and whatnot but I, I said to her, I said, "We're not quite
there yet," and she said "You're building up your war chest aren't you?" And I laughed.
I, I remember her saying that to me on the phone and I said "Yeah, yeah I am." Voice over: All that
work and preparation just might finally pay off. Pooneh thinks she's getting very close to proving
who really killed her mother. Pooneh: I always knew I was going to solve my mom's homicide,
that was never a question. I just didn't think it was going to take 31 years.
It's like playing a game of chess, right, so you're making your moves,
and you're anticipating what the killer is going to do once they see you coming,
you're anticipating what the state of Washington is going to do
once they see you coming, so it's a game of chess. And I literally had three boards set out,
one was for the killer, one was for the state of Washington, there's a third one
at play I'm still working at, but if you can visualize this board game, you're making moves,
you're anticipating what they're going to be doing and then you're making the next move. And I, hey,
I remember looking in the mirror and, after all that time of crying and going "You can't do it" or
um, trying to think it out, and I looked in the mirror and I said "Checkmate."
Voice over: At this point, Pooneh's investigation ultimately hinges on DNA. For a long time the
samples pulled from her mom's sweater just weren't good enough for the available DNA technology,
but as scientific progress has steadily marched forward, that has changed. Pooneh: I knew that
there was no way the D.A. was going to re-open my dad's case. The state of Washington's crime lab
had said that the gun owned by my father matched the bullet that murdered my mom, despite evidence
showing to the contrary and despite two defense experts saying they disagreed, so I knew that
the only way that I was going to be able to get the D.A. to revisit my mom's homicide was
to, through DNA. So in 2013 the detective at Clark County Sheriff's Office sent the clothing in
and they were able to uh get DNA off my mom's clothes, and, and they were instructed to
get DNA off of certain areas. Clearly the left side was of interest because that's where the,
we know that she was approached from the left side, but there was nothing we could do about it
at that point because the DNA that they collected off my mom's sweater was in a mixture form,
they just didn't have the technology in 2013 to be able to separate that, and so we had
to wait. So we kept a real close eye on the technology and finally we got to a point where
we had the technology to look at a mixture, and the lab said the problem was we did not
have enough DNA to be able to do like CODIS you know how like cops will do ancestry stuff
or familial DNA, that wasn't going to be the case in this case I had to have a shooter,
I had to have a suspect. Voice over: After 31 years, she now thinks she has one.
There are a few hurdles left, but she's rapidly closing in on her target. Pooneh: I don't want
my mom's killers to know what's coming. My mom didn't know what was coming, my dad didn't know
what was going to happen. One act, one act of that, however long it took them to
murder my mother, changed our lives forever, so I, I kind of wanted to reciprocate that.
I've thought about it for 31 years, and I'm really looking forward to it.