# The Suitcase: She Was Alive When It Took Off

An episode of [Skinwalker: Horror Stories](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/6785756522), 20 Jul 2026, 22 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72735369/0032.mp3

The Suitcase: She Was Alive When It Took Off A tan, soft-sided suitcase sat unclaimed on a Los Angeles International Airport carousel. An airport worker tried to lift it, but its unexpected weight nearly pulled him off his feet, revealing a horrifying secret inside. What unspeakable act did its contents reveal, and who was the man who checked it in Frankfurt, his hands trembling, hours earlier? In this episode, we uncover the chilling story of a young woman found inside a suitcase at LAX. The investigation reveals a complex web of clues, from the unusual cause of death to the surprising origin of her clothing, all pointing to a desperate journey and a tragic end. Case: Unidentified Woman in Suitcase Location: Los Angeles International Airport Date: January 7, 1985 Detective: Don Ravens Cause of Death: Asphyxiation and multiple traumatic injuries - An airport worker discovered a body inside an unclaimed, tan, soft-sided suitcase on a Monday afternoon in January. - The suitcase was significantly heavier than expected, leading the worker to call the police. - Detective Don Ravens of the LAPD's Pacific Division arrived at approximately 3:45 PM. - The medical examiner's report indicated the young woman died from asphyxiation and injuries consistent with blunt force over several hours. - Labels on her clothing were translated from Farsi, suggesting a connection to Iran and a flight originating from Frankfurt. To listen ad-free and access premium episodes, start your 30-day free trial at obomedia.com. OBOMEDIA presents real horror stories a scary story podcast for the late night hours. Every episode is horror narration done right: true scary stories and horror stories based on true events, told from the first chilling minute. Expect disturbing true stories, disturbing horror stories and dark true horror stories drawn from real testimonies. Some nights bring camping horror stories, forest horror stories and road horror stories; others bring home alone horror stories, haunted stories, eerie stories, strange stories and unsettling tales true creepy stories and creepy encounters that never made the news. Press play on our late night horror stories and late night scary stories, from storytime horror to a full horror stories compilation or scary stories compilation real scary stories, scary stories based on true events, and dark stories to keep the lights on. © 2026 Created with OBOMEDIA technology. All rights reserved. This episode and its content (audio, text and related materials) are the property of their respective creator and are distributed under the OBOMEDIA name on platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts. Reproduction, distribution, editing or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited. For permissions, licensing and business inquiries: business@obomedia

## Transcript

[0:03] Speaker 1: At two in the afternoon on a Monday in January,
[0:07] Speaker 1: an airport worker at Los Angeles International reached down to
[0:10] Speaker 1: grab an unclaimed suitcase sitting alone on a carousel, tan colored,
[0:17] Speaker 1: soft sided, no tags. He expected the usual heft of
[0:21] Speaker 1: clothes and toiletries. Instead, the bag nearly pulled him off
[0:26] Speaker 1: his feet. He set it down, looked at it for
[0:29] Speaker 1: a moment. Then he unzipped it just far enough to
[0:31] Speaker 1: see what was inside. He called the police. There's something
[0:35] Speaker 1: about that image that never quite leaves you once you
[0:38] Speaker 1: hear it. A bag that no one claimed, a weight
[0:42] Speaker 1: that didn't make sense, A worker who probably just wanted
[0:46] Speaker 1: to finish his shift and go home, standing alone in
[0:52] Speaker 1: a terminal that had already emptied out, holding open a
[0:55] Speaker 1: zipper he wished he had never touched. This is the
[0:58] Speaker 1: story of what was inside them suitcase, and of the
[1:02] Speaker 1: man who checked it at the counter in frankfort eleven
[1:04] Speaker 1: hours earlier. Hands trembling, eyes fixed on the belt as
[1:10] Speaker 1: it carried the bag through the rubber curtain and out
[1:13] Speaker 1: of sight. He stood there long after it disappeared. He
[1:18] Speaker 1: couldn't seem to make himself walk away. Whatever he had
[1:22] Speaker 1: just done, he already knew he couldn't undo it. There
[1:26] Speaker 1: is something about this case that stayed with me long
[1:28] Speaker 1: after I first came across it. Not the horror of
[1:32] Speaker 1: the suitcase, something quieter than that, Something about two people
[1:37] Speaker 1: trying to cross a border together, and what it costs
[1:40] Speaker 1: when the only way across is a choice no one
[1:43] Speaker 1: should have to make. Los Angeles International Airport on the
[1:47] Speaker 1: afternoon of January seventh, nineteen eighty five was not a
[1:51] Speaker 1: place anyone noticed. Thousands of bags moved through that terminal
[1:56] Speaker 1: every day, from Frankfort, from Soul, from Tokyo, stacked on carts,
[2:03] Speaker 1: dragged by handles, heaved onto carousels that never stopped spinning.
[2:09] Speaker 1: No one looked twice at a suitcase. This one sat alone.
[2:13] Speaker 1: The Luftanza carousel had cleared out by the time a
[2:16] Speaker 1: worker for the airline spotted it. Tan soft sided, medium sized,
[2:22] Speaker 1: no luggage tag, no address label, no name. He tried
[2:27] Speaker 1: to lift it and couldn't get it fully off the
[2:30] Speaker 1: ground on the first attempt. The bag was far heavier
[2:35] Speaker 1: than it had any right to be. He unzipped it
[2:38] Speaker 1: a few inches, then stopped. He called for help. Then
[2:42] Speaker 1: he called the police. Detective Don Ravens of the LAPD's
[2:48] Speaker 1: Pacific Division arrived at roughly a quarter to four that afternoon.
[2:52] Speaker 1: He was a methodical man, the kind who worked a
[2:55] Speaker 1: scene slowly and wrote everything down. He looked at the
[2:58] Speaker 1: bag on the carousel, He looked at the opening the
[3:03] Speaker 1: worker had made, and then he made a decision that
[3:06] Speaker 1: said something about his instincts. He did not move the body.
[3:11] Speaker 1: He sent the suit case with the young woman still
[3:14] Speaker 1: inside it directly to the county medical examiner. She was young,
[3:20] Speaker 1: That much was clear. Her face showed no visible signs
[3:23] Speaker 1: of a struggle, no obvious wounds, nothing that immediately announced
[3:28] Speaker 1: how she had died. She had no identification on her,
[3:32] Speaker 1: no wallet, no passport, no paper of any kind. She
[3:37] Speaker 1: had arrived inside a bag that bore no label, in
[3:40] Speaker 1: a terminal that served flights from three continents, and she
[3:44] Speaker 1: had not brought a single document to tell any one
[3:46] Speaker 1: who she was. Every detective has a case that settles
[3:50] Speaker 1: into the back of the mind and refuses to leave.
[3:53] Speaker 1: Ravens had just found his. The medical examiner's report reached
[3:57] Speaker 1: him the following morning. The fine were not simple. The
[4:02] Speaker 1: young woman had died from a combination of asphyxiation and
[4:06] Speaker 1: multiple traumatic injuries to the body, injuries consistent with blunt
[4:10] Speaker 1: force repeated over an extended period of time, not a
[4:13] Speaker 1: single blow, not an execution. The damage had accumulated over
[4:18] Speaker 1: hours while she was still alive, suggesting the weight of
[4:22] Speaker 1: luggage shifting and compressing against her in a dark, pressurized
[4:26] Speaker 1: cargo hold for the duration of an eleven hour flight.
[4:30] Speaker 1: She had been alive when the plane took off, she
[4:33] Speaker 1: had not been alive when it landed. Ravens Now had
[4:36] Speaker 1: a cause of death and nothing else, no name, no origin,
[4:43] Speaker 1: no flight manifest that placed her there. The suitcase had
[4:46] Speaker 1: no tags, because whoever packed it had made sure of that.
[4:52] Speaker 1: The only things she had with her were the clothes
[4:54] Speaker 1: on her body, and those, it turned out, would become
[4:58] Speaker 1: the first real clue. He sat with the garments in
[5:02] Speaker 1: the evidence room and examined each label individually, the stitching
[5:07] Speaker 1: on the sweater, the waistband of the trousers, the inside
[5:11] Speaker 1: of the blouse. Every label was printed in a script
[5:15] Speaker 1: he didn't recognize at first glance. It wasn't Spanish, it
[5:19] Speaker 1: wasn't Korean, it wasn't Japanese. He had the labels translated.
[5:25] Speaker 1: They were Farsie. Every single piece of clothing had been
[5:28] Speaker 1: manufactured in Iran. That detail changed the shape of the
[5:32] Speaker 1: investigation entirely. The Lufthansa carousels served flights from Frankfort from
[5:38] Speaker 1: South Korea from Japan. There was no direct flight from
[5:42] Speaker 1: Iran that day, which meant she hadn't come from Tehran.
[5:46] Speaker 1: She had come from somewhere else, a connecting point, a stopover,
[5:51] Speaker 1: a city, where some one had put her inside a
[5:53] Speaker 1: bag and checked her through to Los Angeles like ordinary luggage.
[5:58] Speaker 1: Ravens wrote that down and looked at the three flight
[6:00] Speaker 1: origins again. Frankfurt, Soul Tokyo. He circled Frankfort, Shoal Tokyo.
[6:11] Speaker 1: He circled Frankfort. The autopsy report arrived on Raven's desk
[6:16] Speaker 1: on Tuesday morning, the eighth of January. He read it twice.
[6:22] Speaker 1: Catan Safawi had not died quickly. The medical examiner documented
[6:27] Speaker 1: traumatic injuries across her entire body, bruising consistent with repeated
[6:31] Speaker 1: blunt force applied over several hours, not a single blow.
[6:36] Speaker 1: The luggage stacked above her and the cargo hold had
[6:39] Speaker 1: shifted during the flight, and with every patch of turbulence,
[6:42] Speaker 1: every banking turn over the Atlantic, the weight had come
[6:45] Speaker 1: down on her again. She had been alive at takeoff.
[6:49] Speaker 1: She was not alive at landing. The flight from Frankfort
[6:52] Speaker 1: to Los Angeles takes approximately eleven hours. Ravens had worked
[6:57] Speaker 1: homicides for years. He had a framework for cases like this,
[7:02] Speaker 1: and he applied it immediately. A young woman no identification
[7:07] Speaker 1: folded into a piece of luggage smuggled across an international border.
[7:11] Speaker 1: The framework had a name, human trafficking. Someone had transported
[7:17] Speaker 1: her against her will, something had gone wrong in the
[7:20] Speaker 1: cargo hold, and whoever had checked that bag had disappeared
[7:24] Speaker 1: into the terminal before anyone found her. That was the theory.
[7:29] Speaker 1: It was rational, it was supported by the physical evidence,
[7:32] Speaker 1: and it was almost entirely wrong. The first crack appeared
[7:38] Speaker 1: when Ravens traced the carousel. Three international flights had used
[7:42] Speaker 1: that arrival's lane on the seventh of January, one from Frankfurt,
[7:46] Speaker 1: one from Soul, one from Tokyo. No flights from Lima,
[7:51] Speaker 1: Peru had touched that terminal that day. That mattered because
[7:55] Speaker 1: a man named Juan Espinosa had already called in a
[7:59] Speaker 1: missing person report from Lima. His daughter, he said, had
[8:03] Speaker 1: been traveling and had not arrived Ravens sent his information
[8:07] Speaker 1: to the right departments, held the connection open for exactly
[8:11] Speaker 1: as long as the evidence allowed, and then let it go.
[8:16] Speaker 1: The route didn't work. Espinosa's daughter had not come through
[8:20] Speaker 1: that carousel. Catan saw we had three flights, Frankfurt, Soul, Tokyo.
[8:28] Speaker 1: Ravens narrowed it by geography and flight capacity, but he
[8:32] Speaker 1: still had no name, no passport, no country of origin.
[8:36] Speaker 1: He needed something inside the suit case that could speak
[8:39] Speaker 1: for her, since she could not speak for herself. He
[8:43] Speaker 1: went back to the evidence room and worked methodically through
[8:46] Speaker 1: her clothing, a blue sweater, a gray pair of trousers,
[8:51] Speaker 1: a blouse with a small floral print. He turned each
[8:54] Speaker 1: piece inside out, ran a gloved finger along every seam,
[8:58] Speaker 1: lifted every collar. The labels were printed in a script
[9:01] Speaker 1: he could not read. He brought in a translator. The
[9:05] Speaker 1: labels were in Farsi. Every single garment had been manufactured
[9:09] Speaker 1: in Iran. That shifted the calculation. Frankfort made sense now.
[9:14] Speaker 1: Germany had a significant Iranian expatriate community, and Frankfurt International
[9:19] Speaker 1: was a major transit point for travelers moving between Iran
[9:23] Speaker 1: and the United States. The Soul and Tokyo flights fell away.
[9:29] Speaker 1: Ravens had his origin point and it was eleven hours
[9:32] Speaker 1: from Los Angeles by air. He still had no name,
[9:37] Speaker 1: he still had no suspect, and the case was aging.
[9:40] Speaker 1: By Thursday morning, the tenth of January, Ravens had done
[9:44] Speaker 1: what detectives do when evidence stops moving. He gave an
[9:49] Speaker 1: interview to the Los Angeles Times. He described the case
[9:53] Speaker 1: in careful terms, outlined what was known and acknowledged what
[9:57] Speaker 1: was not. The reporter asked him directtion whether the woman
[10:00] Speaker 1: would ever be identified. Ravens thought about it, the lack
[10:06] Speaker 1: of documentation, the stripped labels on the bag itself, the
[10:10] Speaker 1: international tangle of jurisdictions and visa records, and he gave
[10:14] Speaker 1: an honest answer. He said, don't be too surprised if
[10:20] Speaker 1: you never find out where she came from or who
[10:22] Speaker 1: she is. Those words were printed, they were read, and
[10:28] Speaker 1: within hours of their publication, the case solved itself in
[10:31] Speaker 1: Sacramento in a way that Ravens could not have anticipated
[10:34] Speaker 1: and could not have prevented. That same Thursday morning, before
[10:39] Speaker 1: six o'clock, a man named Mahmoud Ayazi opened the door
[10:43] Speaker 1: of an apartment on the north side of Sacramento and
[10:46] Speaker 1: stepped out into the dark. His roommate, a man named Hattie,
[10:51] Speaker 1: heard the door. He had been sleeping badly for three days,
[10:55] Speaker 1: or not sleeping at all, because Mahmood had not been
[10:58] Speaker 1: sleeping either. Since Hatty had picked him up at the
[11:03] Speaker 1: Sacramento airport on Monday evening. Mahmood had moved through the
[11:07] Speaker 1: apartment like something was chasing him from inside his own head.
[11:11] Speaker 1: He did not eat consistently, He did not answer questions directly.
[11:16] Speaker 1: He sat in rooms and stared at walls, and when
[11:20] Speaker 1: Hattie tried to talk to him, the responses came back wrong,
[11:24] Speaker 1: too short, too distant, the words of a person who
[11:28] Speaker 1: had already left the conversation before it started. Mahmud said
[11:33] Speaker 1: four words before he walked out that Thursday morning. On
[11:36] Speaker 1: going out, then the door closed. Hattie lay there in
[11:41] Speaker 1: the dark and felt something he could not name. Not
[11:45] Speaker 1: fear exactly, more like the specific dread of knowing that
[11:50] Speaker 1: a thing is already done and you are only waiting
[11:53] Speaker 1: to learn what it was. He did not follow. He
[11:56] Speaker 1: has had to live with that. Just under two hours later,
[12:00] Speaker 1: police in Sacramento found Mamua Yazi in a parking lot
[12:04] Speaker 1: he had died of a self inflicted gunshot wound. In
[12:07] Speaker 1: the passenger seat beside him, arranged as if placed there deliberately,
[12:12] Speaker 1: were two Iranian passports and a Lufthansa airline's ticket. Ravens
[12:16] Speaker 1: received the call from the Sacramento detective that morning. A
[12:20] Speaker 1: courier brought the passports to his office. By noon, he
[12:24] Speaker 1: opened the first one. The photograph inside showed a young
[12:28] Speaker 1: woman twenty years old. Dark eyes, the formal expression people
[12:33] Speaker 1: wear in official documents when they are trying to look composed.
[12:38] Speaker 1: Her name printed in the document was Catan Safawi. The
[12:42] Speaker 1: Jane Doe had a name. She had always had a name.
[12:47] Speaker 1: What happened in Frankfort is the part of this case
[12:49] Speaker 1: that rational explanations can reach but cannot fully hold. Mahmood
[12:55] Speaker 1: and Catan Safali Ayazi had married recently. They were trying
[12:59] Speaker 1: to leave Rant together. The country was in the grip
[13:02] Speaker 1: of the Islamic Revolution, and the circumstances that drove people
[13:06] Speaker 1: out in those years were not abstract. They were immediate
[13:09] Speaker 1: and specific and dangerous. Mahmoud had secured travel documents, Katan
[13:16] Speaker 1: had not the details of why her visa failed, which
[13:19] Speaker 1: bureaucratic wall she ran into in frankfort are not part
[13:23] Speaker 1: of the record. What is part of the record is
[13:25] Speaker 1: what happened next. She got into the suit case voluntarily.
[13:30] Speaker 1: That sentence requires a moment to settle. There was no coercion.
[13:35] Speaker 1: Mahmud did not force her, did not lock her in,
[13:38] Speaker 1: did not deceive her about what she was agreeing to.
[13:41] Speaker 1: Catan's SAPPHOLEI, twenty years old, made a decision. She looked
[13:46] Speaker 1: at the alternative being sent back, being separated from her husband,
[13:51] Speaker 1: returning alone to a country in revolution, and she chose
[13:54] Speaker 1: the inside of a soft sided tan suit case on
[13:58] Speaker 1: a Lufthansa flight. She chose it because she trusted that
[14:01] Speaker 1: she would arrive. She chose it because the space was survivable.
[14:06] Speaker 1: She chose it because the person checking that bag would
[14:08] Speaker 1: be on the other side when it came out. What
[14:11] Speaker 1: she could not account for was the cargo hold. She
[14:14] Speaker 1: could not account for the weight of luggage loaded above her,
[14:17] Speaker 1: or the way that weight redistributes over eleven hours of
[14:20] Speaker 1: flight at altitude. She could not account for the turbulence
[14:24] Speaker 1: over the Atlantic. In January, the medical Examiner's report documented
[14:29] Speaker 1: what those eleven hours did to her body. Hour by hour,
[14:33] Speaker 1: injury by injury. She was conscious at take off. At
[14:38] Speaker 1: some point during the flight, she was not la Mud
[14:41] Speaker 1: landed at Lax and went to the carousel. He found
[14:44] Speaker 1: the tan suitcase. He opened it. What he saw ended
[14:48] Speaker 1: something in him. Not just grief, though grief was there,
[14:53] Speaker 1: but the specific collapse of a person who made a
[14:55] Speaker 1: plan that killed the person they loved most. He pulled
[14:59] Speaker 1: the tags off the bag. He walked away from the carousel.
[15:03] Speaker 1: He left her there alone on the belt because there
[15:06] Speaker 1: was nothing else he could do and no version of
[15:08] Speaker 1: staying that he could live inside. He collected his other luggage,
[15:13] Speaker 1: He cleared customs, He flew to Sacramento. He sat in
[15:17] Speaker 1: an apartment for three days with the weight of what
[15:20] Speaker 1: he knew, and on the fourth morning he made the
[15:23] Speaker 1: same kind of decision that Catan had made in Frankfort.
[15:27] Speaker 1: The last deliberate thing he did was place two passports
[15:30] Speaker 1: on the passenger seat beside him, hers and his, so
[15:35] Speaker 1: that whoever found him would find her too. Every rational
[15:38] Speaker 1: framework that Ravens applied to this case, trafficking, murder, organized
[15:44] Speaker 1: crime a third party, was structurally correct and factually wrong.
[15:49] Speaker 1: The evidence pointed in a direction that made sense, and
[15:53] Speaker 1: the truth was something that made a different kind of
[15:55] Speaker 1: sense entirely, not criminal sense, human sense, the almost unbearable kind.
[16:03] Speaker 1: When investigators searched Mahmoud's apartment after his death, they found
[16:07] Speaker 1: a small book bound by hand. Inside were photographs from
[16:12] Speaker 1: a wedding, an Iranian wedding formal and warm, the kind
[16:16] Speaker 1: of photographs people pack carefully because they represent the life
[16:19] Speaker 1: they are moving toward. Mahmoud had carried that book from
[16:23] Speaker 1: Iran to Frankfort, to Los Angeles to Sacramento. He had
[16:27] Speaker 1: been carrying it the whole time he and Katan left
[16:31] Speaker 1: Iran by different roots and arrived in the same place.
[16:35] Speaker 1: They were repatriated to Iran together, traveling the same path
[16:39] Speaker 1: back Frankfort and then home, that only one of them
[16:43] Speaker 1: had been able to take alive. When the Sacramento detective
[16:46] Speaker 1: called Ravens that Thursday morning, Ravens had been awake for hours.
[16:51] Speaker 1: The interview he gave the Los Angeles Times had already
[16:54] Speaker 1: gone to print. The last line sat there in black ink.
[16:58] Speaker 1: Don't be too surprised if you never find doubt where
[17:00] Speaker 1: she came from or who she is. The case had
[17:04] Speaker 1: broken open before the paper even hit the doorsteps. The
[17:08] Speaker 1: two Iranian passports came to Ravens by courier. He opened
[17:12] Speaker 1: the first one and looked at the photograph. Then he
[17:15] Speaker 1: looked at the photograph of the woman from the suitcase,
[17:18] Speaker 1: the same face. He had his answer, and it had
[17:22] Speaker 1: arrived without him. Her name was Katan Safawi, twenty years old.
[17:28] Speaker 1: She had been Mahmoud, a Yazi's wife. What the investigators
[17:32] Speaker 1: found in Mahmoud's Sacramento apartment was a small bound book,
[17:37] Speaker 1: not documents, not money, a book of photographs from a wedding,
[17:42] Speaker 1: an Iranian wedding, the kind with embroidered fabric and formal
[17:46] Speaker 1: poses and the specific brightness of a day. People in
[17:49] Speaker 1: tend to remember. Mahmoud had carried that book through Tehran,
[17:53] Speaker 1: through Frankfurt, through eleven hours in the air above the Atlantic,
[17:59] Speaker 1: and into a country he had never reached before. It
[18:02] Speaker 1: was the one thing he brought that had no practical purpose.
[18:05] Speaker 1: It was the one thing that explained everything. The question
[18:09] Speaker 1: that no investigator could answer, and no court ever had
[18:13] Speaker 1: to answer, was the one Caton answered herself. In Frankfort.
[18:17] Speaker 1: She was blocked. Her visa did not clear. Mahmood had
[18:21] Speaker 1: papers and a flight. She had a choice stay behind
[18:26] Speaker 1: alone in a country that was not hers, or fold
[18:29] Speaker 1: herself into a piece of luggage and trust that the
[18:32] Speaker 1: other side of eleven hours would be worth it. She
[18:35] Speaker 1: chose the suitcase. No one coerced her, no one forced
[18:40] Speaker 1: the latch. What the cargo hold did to her was
[18:43] Speaker 1: not Mahmoud's plan. Luggage shifts during turbulence weight redistributes. Eleven
[18:49] Speaker 1: hours is a long time for a human body to
[18:52] Speaker 1: absorb that kind of pressure in the dark, in a
[18:55] Speaker 1: pressurized space not built for breathing. The autopsy documented injury
[19:00] Speaker 1: consistent with repeated compression across multiple hours, meaning she was
[19:04] Speaker 1: alive at take off and the hold itself was what
[19:07] Speaker 1: killed her. Mamoud did not know this until he opened
[19:10] Speaker 1: the suit case at the La X carousel and saw
[19:13] Speaker 1: what had come out the other side of the crossing
[19:15] Speaker 1: he had planned for both of them. He pulled the
[19:18] Speaker 1: tags off the bag, he walked away. There is no
[19:22] Speaker 1: rational account of what those three days in Sacramento felt like.
[19:26] Speaker 1: Had he watched him pace, watched him sleep badly, watched
[19:30] Speaker 1: him stop eating. Had he heard the door open and
[19:33] Speaker 1: close before six in the morning on January tenth heard
[19:37] Speaker 1: Mahmoud say only that he was going out. That was
[19:40] Speaker 1: the last thing Mahmoud said to any one in the
[19:43] Speaker 1: parking lot. He left the passports in plain sight, both
[19:47] Speaker 1: of them his and Cottons on the seat beside him
[19:52] Speaker 1: with the Lufthansa ticket. It reads like a confession and
[19:56] Speaker 1: a direction at the same time. Find her, find me,
[20:01] Speaker 1: put us together. Whether that was the intention cannot be confirmed,
[20:05] Speaker 1: but that is what the evidence did. It found her,
[20:08] Speaker 1: it named her, It sent them both back. The repatriation
[20:13] Speaker 1: followed the same route in reverse frankfort tear on the
[20:19] Speaker 1: same corridor Mahmood had taken, trying to bring her forward,
[20:22] Speaker 1: this time carrying them both home. No trial, no sentencing,
[20:29] Speaker 1: no legal finding of intent. The case was closed not
[20:33] Speaker 1: because it was solved in any satisfying sense, but because
[20:37] Speaker 1: both people at its center were gone and there was
[20:40] Speaker 1: nothing left to prosecute. There is something that stayed with
[20:44] Speaker 1: me about this case that I haven't been able to shake.
[20:47] Speaker 1: It's not the horror of the cargo hold, though that
[20:50] Speaker 1: is real. It's the wedding book. Mahmood packed it through everything,
[20:56] Speaker 1: the delays in Frankfurt, the terror at check in, the
[21:00] Speaker 1: eleven hours the three days of silence in Sacramento. That
[21:04] Speaker 1: book made the whole journey. It was the only object
[21:07] Speaker 1: he carried that was about her while she was still alive.
[21:11] Speaker 1: After she wasn't, it became the thing that proved who
[21:14] Speaker 1: she was to the people who found it. Katansafawi was identified,
[21:19] Speaker 1: she was given her name back. The case closed, And
[21:23] Speaker 1: yet the question that opened this story, what was in
[21:27] Speaker 1: that suitcase that mattered enough to carry it that way,
[21:30] Speaker 1: turns out not to have a clean answer. What was
[21:34] Speaker 1: in the suitcase was a twenty year old woman who
[21:37] Speaker 1: decided that love and a new country on the other
[21:40] Speaker 1: side of a border were worth the risk of a dark,
[21:42] Speaker 1: pressurized hole for eleven hours. She made that calculation herself.
[21:48] Speaker 1: She was wrong about the odds, she was not wrong
[21:50] Speaker 1: about what she wanted. Both of them are buried in Iran,
[21:54] Speaker 1: now the country they were trying to leave. The route
[21:58] Speaker 1: that was supposed to go one way went both ways
[22:00] Speaker 1: in the end, carrying neither of them were they meant
[22:03] Speaker 1: to go. The suitcase was to statle colored, soft sided,
[22:07] Speaker 1: and it had no tags. By the time anyone opened it,
[22:11] Speaker 1: it sat alone on a carousel in lax On the
[22:14] Speaker 1: afternoon of January seventh, nineteen eighty five, in a terminal
[22:18] Speaker 1: full of people who had all arrived somewhere. She was
[22:22] Speaker 1: the only one who hadn't. This show is made by Obomedia.

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