A Vancouver woman whose mother was murdered in 1989 – and whose father was convicted of the execution-style slaying – revealed in a court filing Monday the name of the man she believes actually killed her mom.
Pooneh Entezari Gray, 55, has spent the past three decades conducting her own investigation into the death of her mother, Eftekhar “Effie” Entezari. Mohammad Entezari, who died in 2019 and was known as Mike, was found guilty of the murder in 1990.
The lawsuit is the culmination of Gray’s exhaustive quest to clear her father’s name and achieve what she considers true justice for her mother.
In the civil-suit filing in Clark County Superior Court, she alleges that Vancouver resident Viktor Pell is the killer. She links him to the crime through DNA that Gray’s team of investigators collected.
The newly updated complaint, originally filed in 2019, does not name the people that Gray believes hired Pell to murder her mother, but it suggests she knows who they are. The filing states: “They conspired to kill Effie to hide their conspiracy to profit from the use of Mike and Effie’s money and resources.”
The Oregonian/OregonLive published a four-part series in 2021 that raised questions about the original police investigation of Effie Entezari’s murder.
Clark County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Aaron Bartlett, who has been tracking the investigative work done by Gray’s team, said he had no comment at this time.
Pell – an immigrant from Iran, like Effie and Mike Entezari – is now 85. He has never been charged in the case and does not have a criminal record in Washington or Oregon.
The new filing calls Pell “a former police officer during the time of the Shah of Iran.”
Reporters from The Oregonian/OregonLive went to Pell’s home near Clark College Wednesday morning, but no one answered the door.
Early on the morning of May 1, 1989, 42-year-old daycare owner Effie Entezari walked to her car in the parking lot of her Vancouver apartment building. “Effie’s killer, Mr. Pell, moved along a narrow walkway, approached her between two cars, and placed a gun close to the left side of her head,” the amended civil suit says. “Effie died instantly from a single gunshot.”
The complaint continues: “What Defendant Pell did not know in 1989 was that he left significant amounts of DNA on the left arm of Effie’s sweater.”
Advances in DNA technology allowed a laboratory two years ago to match the DNA mixture found on the sweater to Pell, which broke the case open, Gray said.
“We have a suspect we believe – and believe we can prove – is the killer,” Renee Rothauge, Gray’s lawyer, told Judge Derek J. Vanderwood in a February court hearing. At the time, Rothauge was requesting a delay in the civil suit in the hope that the Clark County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office would reopen the criminal case.
Along with the DNA breakthrough, Gray’s independent investigation has called into question the state’s expert testimony about the alleged murder weapon, a gun owned by Mike Entezari.
Mike Entezari, a 55-year-old engineering instructor when his wife was murdered, spent 16 years in prison for the crime. He maintained his innocence for the rest of his life.
Based in part on the DNA evidence provided by Gray’s team, which includes private investigators as well as forensics specialists, Clark County prosecutors agreed to allow new ballistics testing using technology that wasn’t available at the time of Mike Entezari’s trial.
Ballistics experts used 3-D imaging and other techniques to analyze the spent bullet that prosecutors in 1990 said killed Effie Entezari.
Those tests, conducted by independent forensics professionals and paid for by Gray, showed that the gun and spent bullet used as evidence in the prosecution do not match, according to Rocky Edwards, one of the firearms examiners who inspected the bullet and Mike Entezari’s gun.
“I was always taught to look for the obvious,” Edwards told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
And the U.S. Army-trained forensic firearms examiner said he found it: the bullet has a deep groove in it, running from one end to the other. Edwards conducted a variety of tests that led him to determine the groove was caused by damage to the barrel.
The barrel of Mike Entezari’s gun, however, is pristine.
“My conclusion,” Edwards said, “is this gun was not used in the homicide.”
Early in the investigation conducted by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office in 1989, detectives realized the importance of ballistics evidence in the case.
Mike and Effie Entezari were in the midst of a divorce at the time of the murder, making Mike Entezari an obvious suspect. But hand swabs and nail scrapings taken about 15 hours after the shooting did not indicate Mike Entezari had recently fired a gun. There was no blood on his clothing. And a handprint found inches from where the shooting occurred did not belong to him.
The 1990 trial of Mike Entezari ended up hinging on the spent .38-caliber bullet found about 30 feet from where Effie was shot.
In a handwritten note dated May 9, 1989 – eight days after the murder – Clark County Sheriff’s Detective Randy O’Toole told Larry Hebert, the Washington state crime laboratory’s chief firearms examiner, that ballistics “at this time is going to be our strongest evidence.” He underlined “evidence.”
Hebert hadn’t yet examined the bullet or Mike Entezari’s gun when O’Toole wrote the note.
When the trial arrived eight months later, two ballistics experts for the defense said the slug was so damaged that it was impossible to match it to Mike Entezari’s gun.
“The information area” on the bullet, one of those experts testified, had been “obliterated.”
But Hebert, testifying for the prosecution, insisted otherwise.
He said he was able to “pick out perhaps 20 to 30 individual [characteristics from the spent bullet] that I would feel correspond very nicely” with his test fires from the gun.
Art Curtis, then the Clark County prosecutor, wanted a definitive statement for the jury. He asked Hebert “how sure” he was that the bullet had been fired from the defendant’s gun.
“I’m absolutely certain,” Hebert said.
More than three decades later – and four years after Mike Entezari’s death – the new ballistics testing casts doubt on Hebert’s findings.
Gray, Rothauge and Edwards met with Bartlett on Tuesday, and they said the meeting with the deputy prosecutor was productive.
Gray said Bartlett – and his boss, Clark County Prosecuting Attorney Tony Golik – should reopen the case.
“Now they know my dad couldn’t have killed my mom with that gun,” she said. “They need to do the right thing.”
She added:
“It was devastating what happened to my family. It’s time there’s justice for my mother and my father.”
While the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office considers the new evidence, the civil suit is moving forward. The amended filing asks for a jury trial.
The suit states that in the months before her 1989 murder, Effie Entezari, newly separated from her husband, befriended a group of local Iranian immigrants who were involved in criminal activities.
Gray believes her mother found out what her new friends were doing, which included stealing from her, and so the conspirators decided they had to kill her.
Clark County Sheriff’s detectives in 1989 did not discover any connection between Effie Entezari and suspected criminals. Gray said sheriff’s detectives from the very beginning of the investigation focused exclusively on her father.
Convinced that Mike Entezari was being railroaded, Gray, then 21, began her own investigation just days after the murder, first by knocking on doors at her mother’s apartment building and asking Effie Entezari’s neighbors if they had seen or remembered anything.
As it turned out, Gray might not have been the only person at that time trying to track down information or evidence concerning Effie Entezari.
After Mike Entezari was arrested and held, a friend of Gray’s from their Fort Vancouver High School days stayed at the Entezari family home when Gray had to go out of town. The friend returned to the house one day to find the front door open. The house looked like it had been searched.
A day or so later, a stranger approached the young woman’s father at a grocery store and told him to “get your daughter out of there,” meaning the Entezari house, Gray’s friend said. (The woman, still unnerved by the experience more than three decades later, asked The Oregonian/OregonLive to withhold her name from publication for her safety.)
A short time later, Gray said her college boyfriend came upon two men going through boxes in a garage where Effie Entezari’s possessions were being kept. When asked what they were doing, the men said nothing and coolly walked away.
