Just after midnight on May 12 2006, a man woke up inside of his quiet London suburb to the sound of pounding on his front door.
He immediately got up and went and answered it and he found one of his neighbors standing outside looking completely shocked.
And the neighbor told the man that something horrible had happened to his sister.
And so, right away after hearing this, the man left his house and sprinted down the road towards his sister's house.
And as he was running, he was terrified of what he was going to find, because he was always warning his sister to be more careful, but she never listened.
And then, when he got to his sister's house, the first thing he saw was a trail of blood leading down her driveway.
But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do.
So, if that's of interest to you, the next time the follow button is waiting for a very important piece of mail, make sure you sit outside near their mailbox, wait for it to arrive and then immediately take it and put it in the shredder.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the evening of May 11th 2006, a 29-year-old hairdresser named Nisha Patel Nasri sat down for a rare break in between clients inside of her hair salon in the Wembley district of London.
Nisha had opened up the salon when she was just 18 years old.
And she'd been running it herself for the last 11 years.
And in that time, she'd attracted around 2,000 regular customers, which was already very impressive.
But it was particularly impressive because this was not like a big salon on a bustling city street.
Instead, it was a tiny shop on a quiet residential road way out in the northwest suburbs of London.
She actually ran the salon out of a single room in her brother's house.
But through hard work and sheer talent, she had grown it into a thriving business.
Now, generally speaking, Nisha was glad to be busy, because if she was busy it meant she was making money.
But sometimes like right, this second stopping and kind of kicking back and relaxing for a second when she could felt very welcome.
So she plopped down into a salon chair, she grabbed the morning paper, and she started reading it.
The front page story was about how the government had just released its report on the previous year's July 7th bombings, which were a series of terrorist attacks that had taken place on London's trains and buses during the morning rush hour.
Now it had been almost 10 months since these horrific attacks, but Londoners still did not feel safe.
I mean, because of this attack there was this growing fear of really all types of violent crime that could be visited upon them.
It just felt like this shattered their worldview.
And Nisha, more than most people, could really understand why people felt that way.
In fact, she personally had experienced an attempted home invasion recently.
Just five days ago, when Nisha had been at her house, located about a block away from the salon, she had been making dinner when she had begun to hear the front mail slot rattling.
So on her front door there was a slot that could open up from the outside where the mail person could slide mail into her house.
Now, when Nisha heard this, she didn't immediately panic.
I mean, it's pretty normal for mail to be dropped off through her door, but she was curious.
So she walked to the front of the house and she looked out the window to see who it was.
Was it the mail person?
Was it a neighbor?
Was it a friend?
But when she looked out, it was none of those people.
It were these three men wearing dark clothes who she didn't know who they were, and they were clearly trying to break into her house.
But these men had picked the wrong house to rob because, in addition to being a hairdresser, Nisha was also a special constable, which was basically a part-time volunteer police officer.
So instead of her, you know, hiding or calling for help...
She'd just gone out to confront the men herself.
And they'd been so caught off guard by how confidently she strode out there and called them off that they'd literally just turned and ran away.
Now, even though Nisha had really handled this quite well and basically scared these guys away, it left her feeling really unsettled.
And so that, combined with the lasting trauma that Londoners felt because of the bombings of the year before,
Nisha these days was feeling very much on edge.
However, every time Nisha found herself sort of defaulting to that victim mindset, being fearful that something else terrible is gonna happen to her, she would remind herself that she was a special constable and whatever problems were thrown her way, she would handle him like she always did.
But even though for Nisha that was sort of a confidence booster for other people in Nisha's family, they weren't so thrilled.
She was a special constable.
In particular her older brother Caton, the one who actually owned the house where Nisha ran her salon.
He had pleaded with her not to join the special constable program because he felt like the work was way too dangerous.
There were constantly stories in the papers about attacks on police.
And, unlike full-time officers, special constables were not authorized to use weapons to defend themselves.
But for Nisha, that had never been an issue.
She felt very proud of what she was doing, especially now that everybody was so on edge after the July 7th bombings.
Now was the time for people to continue to step up and keep London safe.
And so she felt like that's what she was doing.
And so, as Nisha finished reading the front page of the paper, she heard a bell jingle on the front door of the salon.
So she tucked the newspaper away, hopped up and went to go greet her next client.
Later that night, around 10pm, Nisha closed up shop and swept the salon floor.
And then, a few minutes later, she heard the front door jingle again and she looked up and saw her husband, whose name was Fadi Nasri, walking in with a paper bag of takeout food.
Nisha instinctively shouted up the stairs for her brother Caton, who had come home from work earlier that evening and had been hanging out in his part of the house since then.
And a moment later, he came down the stairs to join the couple for some food.
Fadi spread out the plastic containers of Indian food on the coffee table in the waiting area.
And Katen began eating, while Fadi went ahead and sat down in Nisha's salon chair to get his haircut.
And Nisha was even more careful than usual with his haircut, because she and her husband were going to their brother's wedding in a couple of days and Nisha and Fadi knew they'd be in all the wedding pictures, and so they wanted to look their best.
While she cut Fadi's hair, she helped her brother talk through preparations for the wedding.
Their mother and father had both passed away years ago, So when it came to big family events like this, the two siblings were kind of on their own.
Caton reminisced about how he'd given Nisha away at her own wedding, which was exactly three years ago yesterday, since their own father couldn't.
Nisha smiled as she continued cutting Fadi's hair.
Thinking about their wedding anniversary reminded her how grateful she was for her husband and the life they'd built together since.
A few months after they'd gotten married, Nisha had loaned Fadi some money to open up a limousine rental company, and his business had really taken off.
And Nisha was proud to see her husband working these long hours and making great money.
It felt like they really were a team two ambitious, successful business owners working together to build a better future.
Once Fadi's haircut was done, Nisha called Katen over, and she gave him a pre-wedding trim as well.
And as she finished up, Katen asked her if maybe she wanted to spend the night here at his house.
He was still rattled by that attempted break-in at Nisha's house a couple of days earlier and he really didn't feel like she was safe in her own home.
But Nisha said, no, we're fine.
So around 11 pm, Nisha and her husband Fadi walked back to their house, which was again right around the corner.
Their house was a cream-colored two-story home with red shingles on the roof.
And along with Fadi's car in the driveway there was a stretch limo and a Humvee parked on the curb that Fadi used for work and which both very much stood out in their middle-class neighborhood.
Nisha unlocked the door and then tossed her phone and keys on the sofa and then went upstairs to get ready for bed.
But while she was in the bathroom washing her face, Fadi popped his head in and told her he was heading out to go meet with his friend, to go play snooker, which is a way of saying pool, but in the UK.
Now, Nisha was not offended that he wanted to go out and see his friend.
Like, that was fine.
But in reality, she and her husband had been talking about wanting to start a family.
And for the most part, they both agreed that now was the time to try to have kids.
And so when she was thinking about tonight, she was thinking, you know, maybe we could, you know, try to have a baby tonight.
But it just seemed like not only tonight but just generally speaking every time there was like a window to you know, try to have a kid.
Fadi was either too tired or he was going out with friends, or it just seemed like he would say he was interested, but then when it was time to actually do the thing, he was nowhere to be found.
And so it seemed like that was happening again tonight.
But it was late and Nisha didn't feel like arguing with her husband.
So she dried her face and just told Fadi to have fun with his friend.
A few minutes later, as Nisha brushed her teeth, she heard the sound of her husband's car pulling out of the driveway.
A little bit later she went downstairs and turned off the lights and locked the doors and then went back upstairs and crawled into bed alone.
But then, about 30 minutes later, right as Nisha is about to fall asleep, she hears these footsteps in her house.
And she didn't hear the sound of her husband return home.
She just hears these footsteps downstairs.
And so she sits up and she's hearing these sounds and she thinks to herself, it could be my husband.
Or because just less than a week ago, somebody tried to break into her house.
She's thinking, are they back?
Has someone broken into my house?
And so not sure who was down there.
She got out of bed, quietly grabbed a flashlight, tiptoed out of her room and then began heading downstairs to see who was in her house.
A few minutes later, one of Nisha's neighbors was woken up by blood-curdling screams in the street outside his house.
He jumped out of bed, went to the window, pulled back the curtain and when he looked out he saw Nisha limping down the street in her nightgown with a flashlight in her hand.
And so the neighbor instinctively called for an ambulance and then rushed outside to help Nisha.
And when he caught up with Nisha, she was hobbling back up her own driveway and he asked her if she was okay and she just choked out that she'd been stabbed.
But before she could say who stabbed her, she collapsed onto the pavement, clutching this bloody spot on her thigh.
At this exact moment, the neighbor looked up from Nisha and he saw a man in a hooded sweatshirt running away down the street.
By this point also, more people were trickling out onto the road and another woman ran over to Nisha and put a towel on her leg and began pressing on the wound.
And then, as soon as the first neighbor who had gone outside and seen Nisha, as soon as he heard the ambulance coming down the road, he stood up and he bolted down the road to go find Nisha's brother and tell him what had happened and what he had seen.
Just moments later, a few minutes before midnight, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Scola felt his pager bus.
He was an experienced detective working out of the Wembley station and that night he was the senior investigator on call in case any major crimes happened.
He'd been hoping he could get through the shift without any emergencies.
But when he called the station to see what that pager buzz was about, he could tell you know, there was clearly an emergency because the dispatcher told him to go to 17 Sudbury Avenue as quickly as possible.
And so Skola hopped in his car, and a few minutes later he pulled up to a very chaotic scene on a residential street.
In the driveway of a cream-colored house with red shingles.
Paramedics were loading this young woman into an ambulance, and police officers were already cordoning off the area with tape to keep a crowd of very rowdy and restless neighbors away.
As Scola walked closer to this house, he saw there was a trail of blood on the driveway.
He flashed his badge to the other officers standing guard around the house and they all lifted the crime scene tape to let him come inside.
One of the officers told Scola there had been a stabbing and the victim, the young woman, was in critical condition.
And while the officers were debriefing him on what they knew so far...
Scola noticed a car pull up out on the street and a man got out of the car and began running towards the house and as he did, he was clearly crying and screaming and just basically hysterical.
As he got close enough, Scola heard this man frantically tell the paramedics that he was the victim's husband, and so Scola saw this happening and just made a mental note to make sure he interviewed that guy as soon as he had any idea what he was dealing with.
Scola looked around and he noticed right away that there was a stretch limousine and also a black Humvee parked in front of this house, which you know.
Obviously those are expensive.
And so you know, maybe those attracted burglars to the house and you know, maybe she was there when burglars went inside.
So wrong place, wrong time.
But when Skola walked up the driveway, past the forensics team who was already taking photos and collecting evidence, he noticed that the front door and the windows near the front door had no signs of forced entry.
There was no damage done.
And then also when Skola went around to the back of the house, the back door, the other entrance into the house, also did not show any sign of forced entry.
And then when Skola went into the house, he noticed that in the living room there was nothing broken or anything out of place.
And in fact, he even saw a wallet and a stack of cash sitting out in the open, totally untouched.
And so even though his initial theory was robbery, it was starting to look less and less likely.
Scola left the living room and went into the kitchen.
And there he noticed there was a butcher block that was clearly missing one of its knives.
And this butcher block was at the very back of the counter, behind a bunch of other items, including a row of champagne glasses that did not look like they had been disturbed.
So he figured that, you know, this knife could not have been taken during a struggle.
Like somebody, you know, fighting with the victim, they grab the knife and then they stab her.
The knife had to have been taken when there was relative peace in the house.
Otherwise those champagne glasses and the other stuff near the butcher's block would have been toppled over.
And they weren't.
And so Scola began to kind of piece together a working theory of what could have happened here.
And what he came up with was the victim, the young woman, must have heard a noise that spooked her.
And so she wound up going into her kitchen and she carefully got her knife to protect herself and then maybe stepped outside to investigate this noise.
And as soon as she got out there, her attacker or whoever was out there making the noises maybe they were trying to break in or something.
They must have seen her.
They get into some sort of altercation.
The knife gets pulled out of her hand and then she is stabbed with her own knife.
Now, of course this was really specific and Skola had no idea if this was true or not, but it would sort of explain away all the anomalies he was seeing so far.
A few minutes later, Skola went outside to speak to some of the neighbors who had gathered in the street.
And one neighbor told Skola that he had actually seen a man in a hooded sweatshirt running away from the scene.
But this neighbor said he had not seen the man's face, so he didn't know who it was.
And so at this point, Skola figured the next thing he would need to do is just speak to the victim once she was stable, because she would obviously be able to give a better description of what happened and who her attacker actually was.
But unfortunately less than an hour later, while Skola was still at the crime scene just kind of taking it all in and asking basic questions and gathering some evidence, he got a call from the hospital.
His stabbing victim, Nisha Patel.
Nasri had actually bled to death on the way to the hospital, which meant this was officially a murder investigation.
The next morning, after Detective Scola was finally done processing the scene, he walked into the Wembley police station and it was unusually quiet.
The other officers looked very somber.
A little bit confused, Scola asked one of his colleagues what was going on here.
And she would tell him that the victim, Nisha from last night's murder, was one of their own.
She was a special constable and plenty of officers in the Wembley station had worked with her.
And so Skola now understood, you know, what a gut punch this really was.
But also, you know, this information was pretty interesting to Skola.
Because at first, he thought Nisha was killed in like a random robbery gone wrong.
But now Skola wondered if this murder was not random at all.
You know, maybe Nisha was being targeted because she was a police officer.
You know, maybe there was a criminal who she had put behind bars or prosecuted in some way that was out to get her.
And when Skola began doing some digging on Nisha and some of her police work, he learned that Nisha had actually had somebody try to break into her house a few days earlier.
There were these three men that she had basically scared off when they had tried to break into her house.
And so now Skoll is thinking, that can't be a coincidence.
And so, right away, a team of officers got to work, trying to figure out the identities of those three men who had attempted to break into Nisha's house the first time.
And so, while the officers did that, Scola headed back to the crime scene to go see if he could find that knife that was missing from the kitchen.
He figured at this point, that had to be the murder weapon.
And if it was, the killer's fingerprints or DNA could be on the knife.
When Scola pulled up on Sudbury Avenue a little bit later, he saw swarms of reporters and TV cameras crowding around the house.
You know where the crime scene tape was still up keeping them back.
And as Scola approached the house, a reporter noticed him and ran towards him with a microphone and began asking him questions.
Namely, did the police have any idea why a special constable had been murdered at her own home?
But Skola brushed the reporter off.
He was not about to talk about this case yet.
He really did not have any information to give up anyways.
And he ducked under the police tape.
Once inside the cordoned off area, Skola saw there were dozens of officers already scouring the area looking for this missing knife, dumping out trash cans and digging through the bushes.
Skola caught one of the investigator's eyes and she kind of shrugged, which Skola took to mean that they hadn't found it yet.
Skola also watched as two other officers hauled this high-powered vacuum out of a truck and over to a storm drain on the curb, and then they turned on this vacuum and began sucking up everything out of the drain, presumably to look for this knife.
Skola walked over to them right as they began sifting through what they had sucked up.
You know, the vacuum had pulled up a whole bunch of stuff between leaves and trash and food wrappers, but ultimately there was no knife.
Scola figured the killer must have dumped this knife somewhere near the crime scene because they couldn't have gotten far before they realized they needed to get rid of it.
And so Scola felt confident that this knife was going to turn up eventually.
They just had to keep on looking.
In the meantime, Skola went back inside the house, where he found a pair of investigators sitting in the living room with Nisha's husband, Fadi.
And Fadi had his phone out, and he was playing a recording of this woman shouting violent threats.
One of the officers who saw Skola pulled him aside and caught him up to speed.
They said that Fadi had a solid alibi for the time of Nisha's murder.
He was with a friend playing snooker a few miles away, and that friend had already confirmed it.
And the officer also told Scola that Fadi had come forward and said that he already had a pretty good idea of who might have killed his wife.
And so Scola sat down on the couch next to Fadi, and Fadi at that point started his story from the beginning.
He said that two months ago, he'd gotten into a feud with a rival limo business owner in Scotland.
He said that he had sold a Humvee to this other company under the condition that after the sale, Fadi could borrow it back for one last job.
But the other company's owner had gone back on the deal and refused to let him borrow the car after the transaction.
So, in a moment of what he was calling poor judgment, Foddy had traveled to Scotland, rented the Humvee under a fake name and driven it all the way back to London.
But then Foddy said while he was driving back to London clearly the other owner figured out what Foddy was up to.
Because they gave Fadi a call, and Fadi recorded the voicemail they left.
And so Fadi played the recording of this other business owner for Skola.
And Skola.
He heard this woman screaming over and over again that she was going to kill Fadi and his wife if he didn't bring her Humvee back.
And as Skola listened, he thought this woman did not sound like she was joking.
This seemed like a real threat.
Now, Fadi said he did return the Humvee.
He gave it back to the business owner, and so she no longer had a reason to kill him and his wife.
Still though, Fadi felt strongly that, you know, this woman really had it out for them, and so he wanted the police to look into her.
And for Scola they really didn't have that many leads to think of, and so he figured he would check it out first.
So he took Fadi's phone to download that audio recording and also all the call logs, and then he promised he would send a team to Scotland to look into this right away.
One afternoon, about a month later, Detective Scola sat in his office alone going over the case files again and again.
He was stressed because the media had been covering Nisha's murder since day one and there was a lot of public pressure to solve this case.
But the police had been investigating it really aggressively for a month but realistically had almost nothing to show for it.
Ever since Scola's last conversation with Fadi, the investigation had been moving very slowly.
Some detectives had gone to Scotland to look into this rival business owner angle who had supposedly threatened Fadi and his wife, but they hadn't found anything notable.
So that lead was looking like a bust.
Also, the homicide team had not been able to identify those three men who had attempted to break into Nisha's house five days before she was killed.
Scola and his team had interviewed Nisha's family, her friends, her neighbors, But so far they had not been able to identify any likely suspects again outside of that business owner in Scotland.
It just didn't seem like there was anyone who would have wanted to hurt Nisha.
She was liked and respected by basically everyone they spoke to.
However, there had been one pretty significant development in the case over the past month, and it was that police had finally found a knife that looked similar to the one missing from Nisha's kitchen.
It was found in a storm drain about a block away from her house.
However, Skola was still waiting for the crime lab to actually determine whether it was the murder weapon or not.
But just then, Skola got a phone call, and it was someone from the crime lab.
And they told him that, after analyzing this knife, they had found traces of Nisha's blood on the blade.
So this definitely was the murder weapon.
For the first time in weeks, Skola felt really optimistic.
He finally had a real piece of hard evidence, a fresh clue here to really lead this investigation.
And now he needed all hands on deck.
So he hung up the phone and then gathered his team for a meeting.
And then, once they were all together, he told the other detectives that they had found the murder weapon, but they had to keep their discovery a secret.
If the killer found out police had this knife, they might panic and flee.
And so to avoid jeopardizing the investigation, Skola wanted to keep the discovery out of the press.
After everybody was aligned on that, the next step in the investigation was that Skola was going to send officers out to collect video from all the security cameras near where the knife had been found.
London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the entire world, with hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras everywhere.
So Scola figured, one of those cameras must have captured the person who dropped that knife into the drain.
The Homicide Squad would spend the rest of the week combing through countless hours of CCTV footage from the area, hoping to find the moment when the knife got dropped in the storm drain.
But it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
However, after about a week of this, another detective eagerly called Scola over to his computer.
He said he had finally found something that could be useful.
And so Scola walked over, and the detective said that the footage he was looking at, which was paused at the moment, was of a CCTV camera taken from a shop that was on the same road as the storm drain.
And so Scola bent down and stared at the screen as the detective hit play on the video.
Now, the storm drain itself was just barely out of frame, but the camera clearly captured the glow of headlights as a car pulled up near the storm drain.
The car stopped there for about seven seconds and even though you cannot see anybody getting out and disposing of a knife into this drain, the car was stopped long enough that somebody could have done that before the car took off again.
But critically, when this car took off again, it passed through this camera's frame very clearly.
And as the car drove past the storefront, the detective paused the camera.
As soon as he did, Scola leaned in closer to get a better look at this car.
Now, the video was dark and grainy, so right away it was impossible to read the license plate on the car.
But despite the graininess, there definitely were a few identifying details Skola could make out.
The car was clearly a gray Audi and there was an antenna in the center of the roof and also one of the lights above the license plate was not working.
Now, Scola knew there were literally tens of thousands of Audis in London.
And so they knew the only way they'd track this one down is by sending officers out into the street to literally look for it.
But really what they're looking for is Audis that have that antenna on the roof and a light that doesn't work in front.
Now, of course, this was going to be extremely time-consuming, but Scola felt like they didn't have a better lead here.
And so they began this process.
And for the next few weeks, that's all they were doing, just out on the streets canvassing for this Audi.
And they didn't find it.
And so, as this investigation was feeling like it was about to hit another dead end, Scola felt like he just couldn't let that happen.
There was too much pressure on him to get this done.
But then suddenly, he thought about something that he'd totally put out of his mind.
Fadi's phone.
They'd actually taken the phone from Fadi two months ago to download that voicemail and also download the call log, but they actually hadn't given it back to Fadi yet.
They were just holding the phone in evidence right now.
Now Scola felt like that audio message on the phone really had not amounted to anything and likely wouldn't.
But Scola figured, you know, why don't we look in that phone to see what else is on there?
You know, maybe there were fresh clues about who might have wanted to hurt Nisha.
So he assigned one of his forensic techs to download everything from Potty's phone onto a drive.
And then, once they had done that, Skola took this drive and he plugged it into his computer and began sorting through all this data.
He saw a photo that caught his eye.
The photo was of a woman's thigh and she was clearly lying in a bed in what looked like a hotel room.
And even with the bright flash and poor camera quality, Skola could tell that the woman's skin was pale, white.
And so it was definitely not Nisha's leg.
After finding this photo on Fadi's phone, Scola immediately drove to Nisha and Fadi's house.
And when Fadi opened the door, Scola stepped inside and showed him the photo and asked him point blank if he was having an affair.
Fadi right away said no, and he insisted he would never do that to Nisha.
And the woman in the picture was literally just a friend.
Now, Scola immediately felt like Fadi was lying.
He did not believe him for a second.
But there was no way to, you know, force Fadi to tell the truth.
And so ultimately, all Skola could do was just leave, get back in his car, go back to the station.
And on the drive there, he wondered to himself if he had sort of just blown that opportunity.
Should he have waited for more solid evidence before confronting Fadi?
But he was also thinking that you know there's so much pressure on him to solve this case.
You know that he just had to make moves like this.
Take some chances.
And so it is what it is.
When Skola got to the precinct, he parked his car and he went in his office to think.
And almost as soon as he sat down, there was a knock at the door.
It was a man named Sid Shenoy who was the family liaison officer who'd been working with Nisha's family.
His job was to support the grieving family and communicate with them throughout the investigation.
And so, as a result of this role he was playing, Sid had created a level of trust with the family that really none of the other detectives had with the family.
And Chenoy, when he walked in the room, told Skola that he'd just gotten a really interesting call from Fadi.
He said Fadi had confessed to something that he'd basically been too afraid to tell Skola in person when he had just been visiting him, you know, a couple minutes ago.
And so Chenoy told Skola that you really ought to call Fadi and let him tell you what he just told me.
And so right away, that's what Skola did.
He called Fadi.
And Fadi.
When he picked up he sounded very nervous and anxious and ashamed, as he broke down and admitted that actually yes, he was having an affair.
He had lied.
He said the leg in the photo belonged to a woman named Laura Makin and she was a Lithuanian sex worker who he'd been seeing for three months before his wife's death.
Fadi said the reason he had lied to Scola is because he didn't want Nisha's family to find out he'd been cheating on her.
But Scola knew there was also another obvious reason to lie here, because an affair would clearly give Fadi a motive to kill his wife.
Fadi had been crossed off the suspect list at this point just based on his alibi.
But this, this affair, now made him look very suspicious.
However, Scola just felt like it just didn't make sense that Fadi would be the killer.
Number one, he did have a strong alibi.
And also two apart from hiding this affair, which you could justify, you could say that obviously he didn't want ripple effect damage on the family or something.
He'd been very cooperative with the investigation.
I mean, he'd given them his phone, which had this damning photo on it.
I mean, he'd sort of been very forthright.
And so a new theory began to take hold in Skola's mind.
You know, if Fadi wasn't the killer, maybe it was possible that his mistress Laura was, or at least was, directly involved in some way.
I mean, she would have all the reason in the world to want to get rid of Nisha.
So on September 1st, almost four months after Nisha was murdered, her husband's mistress, Laura Makin, was brought into the station on suspicion of murder.
In the interrogation room, detectives confronted her with all the evidence they had gathered that showed her relationship with Foddy was not just a casual affair.
The two of them had met at a brothel where Laura was working as a sex worker, but eventually she stopped charging him to see her, which likely meant she must have developed real feelings for him.
And so the detective suggested that.
You know, if Nisha was gone for good, Laura would have Fadi all to herself.
Laura insisted she did not know anything about the murder.
And then she gave them a solid alibi.
But that didn't mean much, because eyewitnesses thought they saw a man in a hooded sweatshirt running away after Nisha was stabbed.
So the working theory was, if Laura was involved in this murder, it was pretty likely that she had hired somebody else to do the dirty work.
However, the detectives did not have real evidence.
And so despite their suspicions, they had to release her.
And then once again, they were back at square one.
However, not long after Laura was allowed to go home, Scola was walking through the precinct when the family liaison officer, Sid Chenoy, came running up behind him.
Chenoy told him that he just had a very interesting conversation with Nisha's brother, Caton.
Caton had told him that after finding out about Fadi's affair, he had been furious.
The whole family was so upset about it.
And Caton said that now that he really had this horrible opinion of Fadi, he felt comfortable sharing something about Fadi that he had been keeping to himself.
Caden told Chenoy that he thought Fadi might not be the professional businessman he pretended to be.
Instead, Caden said that Fadi might actually be involved with something criminal.
According to Caden, Fadi had said there were a lot of sketchy people in his contacts and he was worried about what the police might find on his phone.
But Caton said that Foddy had not been specific about what he meant when he said, sketchy people.
You know, he didn't know what he was saying or why he was involved with them.
And so, after hearing this, Skola told his team to go through Foddy's phone records and run the name of every person who appeared in his call log.
And apart from all the calls back and forth to Laura the mistress, there was one other name that jumped out, a convicted drug dealer named Roger Leslie.
And when Scola saw this, he realized that he might have been approaching this investigation all wrong.
He'd really struggled to find suspects because there was no one who would have wanted to hurt Nisha, who didn't have an alibi.
But now he realized that maybe that was the case because Nisha was not actually the killer's target.
Maybe the target was Fadi.
If Fadi was involved in the drug trade, then anyone could have come after him for any number of reasons.
It could have been a drug deal gone wrong or retribution for a debt he didn't pay, or even maybe a hit by a rival gang.
He didn't know, but there was way more possibilities here.
And the more Skola dug into Fadi, the more suspicious evidence he found.
He learned that before Fadi and Nisha got married, Fadi had run an escort agency.
He closed it down and started a more legitimate business three years ago.
But Scola knew there could be any number of former employees or customers, or customers' wives, who might still have a problem with Vaati.
And then there was that threatening voicemail from the rival limo company.
I mean that whole story made it seem entirely possible that Fadi could easily get wrapped up in very serious business disputes, which meant there could be more disgruntled rivals out there.
Basically, it seemed entirely possible that there were loads of people out there who might have had it out for Fadi, not Nisha.
And so that became the new direction of this investigation.
And so the first person Scola looked into with this new direction was Roger Leslie, the drug dealer who had made a few calls to Foddy.
However, there was one issue that kept Roger from becoming a primary suspect.
He didn't own a gray Audi.
So if he was involved in the murder, he probably didn't work alone.
And so the police set up a trace on Roger Leslie's phone, hoping that his call logs would lead them to an associate who did own a gray Audi.
Eventually, they sure did.
And that person who owned the gray Audi was the missing piece that made the whole puzzle come together.
Based on those call logs and all the other evidence found during this investigation, the following is what police believe happened to Nisha Patel-Nazri on May 11 2006.
Around 1150 PM, just as Nisha was falling asleep, the killer pulled up to her house in the passenger seat of a gray Audi.
The driver waited in the car while the killer got out and crept around to the back of the house.
And as he walked to the back of the house he kept looking in the windows to confirm all the lights were out.
And they were.
And then, when he got to the back door, he pulled out a key he'd managed to get his hands on to open it up.
And then once the door was open, he stepped inside.
The killer slowly moved through the kitchen and then stopped because he heard the floorboards upstairs creaking.
And so he held his breath as he realized that somebody upstairs was making their way downstairs.
They were caught.
The killer didn't know what to do.
They hadn't prepared for this at all.
He thought everybody in the house would be asleep.
So he panicked and he reached over and pulled a knife out of that butcher's block in the kitchen and then ducked behind a wall to hide.
He heard the footsteps getting closer and closer, and he's trying his best to hide.
And then he saw a beam of a flashlight make its way into the kitchen, and then it comes across and lands squarely right on them.
And the person holding that flashlight was Fadi's wife, Nisha.
When Nisha saw the killer, she screamed and ran for the front door.
But the killer knew he could not let her get away because now she'd gotten a clear look at his face and he was caught.
So he chased her outside, out into the driveway, clutching that kitchen knife in his hand.
And about halfway down the driveway, he tackled her and then sunk the knife deep into her thigh.
Nisha actually managed to fight him off despite this gaping wound in her leg, and she scrambled up and began running down the street screaming for help.
And at this point the killer saw lights coming on in the neighbor's houses and his heart was pounding and he knew that Nisha was no longer his biggest problem.
He had to get out of here immediately, before anybody on the block saw his face too.
So he just sprinted back to the Audi where the driver was still waiting for him and he told the driver to go, just take off, drive out of here.
And so the driver.
They did just that, but they were panicked and confused and as they're going around the corner, they're asking the killer, like what just happened.
I mean, as far as the driver knew, they were only here to pick up some ecstasy for a drug deal.
They did not expect anybody to get stabbed.
But the killer just snapped at the driver to stop talking about it because he hadn't expected the night to go this way either.
It was a total mess, and so at this point the killer looked down at the bloody knife that was still in his hand and he realized he had to get rid of it, and so he told the driver to just pull over, and so the driver did.
They pulled over to the curb on this commercial street, just a block away from nisha's house, and the killer quickly opened up the door and threw the knife into a nearby storm drain.
Then he slammed the door shut again, and as the Audi careened down the road, the killer took the driver's cell phone out of the cup holder and called the man who'd hired him to tell him everything that had just gone horribly wrong.
The person he called was the drug dealer, Roger Leslie.
However, when Roger got off that phone call with the killer, Roger immediately called the person who'd hired him.
Roger had actually been hired to pull off a hit, but he didn't want to get his own hands dirty, so he'd outsource the job.
But now, after having spoken to the killer about this botched hit where basically they stabbed her and they had no idea if she actually was going to die or not.
In fact, the last thing they saw was her running down the road screaming for help.
You know now.
Roger knew he would have to explain himself to the actual mastermind of the murder plot, the person who'd given him the key to get inside.
And that person was indeed Fadi Nasri, Nisha's husband.
It turned out that Fadi was involved with a bunch of criminals, but they weren't after him.
They were his friends.
Because even though Fadi pretended to be this successful, legitimate businessman, he really was not.
He was deep in debt, and he'd paid Roger Leslie to kill Nisha for the life insurance money.
That way he could pay his debts and then also run off with his new mistress, Laura.
And so, while Nisha had been wanting to start a family and was starting to sense that maybe Fadi was not fully committed to that idea well, her instincts were good because, it turned out, Fadi did not want to start a family with her.
He wanted to kill her and move on.
According to prosecutors, that earlier break-in at Nisha and Fadi's house a few days before she was killed was very likely either a reconnaissance mission or a failed first attempt to kill Nisha.
In the end, four people were arrested and charged with Nisha's murder.
They were Fadi Nasri Roger Leslie, the hitman who actually stabbed Nisha his name was Jason Jones and the driver of the car, a man named Tony Emanuel.
Now the driver was acquitted, but the other three men were all convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone.
This episode was written by Kate Gallagher.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio.
Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
And just a reminder every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr Ballin Podcast you can also now watch on the Mr Ballin YouTube channel that very same day.
And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.
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Until next time, see ya.
