When Effie Entezari was found shot to death, execution-style, outside her Vancouver apartment building in 1989, the police immediately zeroed in on her estranged husband.
They arrested Mike Entezari and built their investigation around him. Eight months later a jury convicted Mike of murder, and he was sent to prison.
Effie and Mike’s daughter, Pooneh, a 21-year-old college student at the time, didn’t buy any of it – not the police’s theory about motive, not the forensic evidence, not the whispers in Vancouver’s small Iranian-immigrant community.
She began her own investigation, starting by knocking on the doors of her mother’s neighbors. It was just the beginning.
She would spend the next 30 years trying to exonerate her father and find out who really did kill her mother. The Oregonian/OregonLive examined the murder case and told Pooneh’s story in the 2021 series, “The Obsession,” which won a National Headliner Award.
Now it’s Hollywood’s turn.
On Monday, Hulu premieres “The Promise: Finding My Mother’s Killer,” a three-part documentary series based on the newspaper’s reporting and following Pooneh Entezari Gray through her murder investigation, into her personal life and beyond.
Pooneh kept investigating her mother’s death despite the police detectives in charge of the case dismissing her and then accusing her of being involved in the murder. She continued investigating even after her father, a broken man from his years in prison, died.
She continued her probe until she found the man she believed killed her mother, gathered evidence against him and, in 2024, took that evidence to court.
She gave up decades of her own life for the quest and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the effort.
She has no regrets, noting the promise she made to her mother in the days after the murder.
“I visited my mom every day at the funeral home,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “And I told her, ‘I’m going to get the people who did this to you.’”
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