A week before her death, Azin told her mother, “I must make my coffin ready.”
Alarmed, Bazargan asked what she meant. Azin said she had “seen” it, then added—as though to reassure her mother—that a faithful Christian must always be prepared to meet her maker.
“She said that the Lord was telling her to sell her stuff and give the money away,” recalls Elizabeth Reid, a friend from Saints Peter and Paul who lives in Prince George’s County. “It was as if she knew she wasn’t going to need them.”
Reid had recently converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, and Azin gave her an antique silver and amber Orthodox cross the second time they met.
In the final months of her life, Azin also befriended the man who would kill her: 36-year-old Raymond Williams of Kensington, who worked at The Art Warehouse as a carpenter, picture hanger and driver. At his trial, Williams described Azin as his spiritual adviser, and said they had discussed the Bible.
“She was a very good person,” he said softly. “She was always concerned about my smoking cigarettes, and eventually I didn’t smoke around her. She saw me drinking beer with my co-workers and she’d always tell me it was bad for me.”
Bazargan often went with her daughter to services at Saints Peter and Paul, where she enjoyed the beauty of the gilded frescoes and the sung liturgy as well as the friendliness of the parishioners, many of whom had roots in the Middle East. Having stopped practicing Islam years earlier, Bazargan’s personal creed amounted to a belief in ethical thoughts, words and deeds. “But I always told my children that they must find their own spiritual path,” she says.
For his part, Mehrouz found solace in long-haul truck driving. “I’d be on the road for months at a time…,” he says. “It was a kind of soul-searching.”
Out of touch with his sister for a while, he had begun communicating again via email. Even so, his decision to visit “came out of nowhere,” he says. Except “I was suddenly in a better place. And I’m totally grateful for that.”
Bazargan calls her prodigal son’s return just days before her daughter’s death “a miracle I will never understand.”
That Sunday, July 18, Bazargan and her two children went to church. They were invited to dinner at the home of Bazargan’s brother that evening. But Azin decided to work on her book instead. Around 7 p.m. she set out for The Art Warehouse, where she kept her reference materials, taking only her keys and cellphone.
By 10 p.m., Bazargan had returned home feeling unwell. Surprised that Azin wasn’t back, she and her son went to the warehouse but found it dark and locked.
Around 11 p.m., Mehrouz tried to persuade his mother to go to bed, saying that Azin was, after all, 45 and had the right to go out at night if she wished. “If she’s 20 minutes late, she calls me,” Bazargan replied. She asked the apartment concierge to call the police, who said that an adult must be gone 24 hours before a missing-person report can be filed.
Bazargan called several area hospitals next. “That night, I learned what Jane Doe means,” she says. She returned to the lobby and insisted that the police be called again. Finally, at 2:45 a.m., the police relented and a missing-person report was filed. Police found Azin’s body with her cellphone later that morning. They identified her using the phone’s call list.
At The Art Warehouse, nothing appeared amiss until Detective Jennifer Greer noticed tiny spatters of blood on a door frame and a white plastic chair. Forensic chemicals revealed that blood originally had covered the warehouse floor.
Surveillance video showed Azin entering the warehouse at 7:30 p.m., but never leaving. There was also footage of Williams entering the building that afternoon, and driving away about 9 p.m. in the company’s SUV.
Early in the morning on July 20, police knocked on the door of the Kensington town house Williams shared with his girlfriend. Williams escaped through a back window, but was quickly arrested in a nearby park. He confessed almost immediately to killing Azin.
On July 25, 2010, thunderstorms knocked out power across the region. Still, more than 600 mourners filled the candle-lit Saints Peter and Paul for Azin’s funeral. Former Rep. Connie Morella, Bazargan’s longtime friend, gave the eulogy. President Barack Obama and Rep. Chris Van Hollen sent letters of condolence. In Tehran and paralyzed by a stroke, Azin’s father remains unaware of his daughter’s death, Bazargan says.
After the service “we shared cups of the honey-dusted wheat that symbolizes the new life that rises from the ashes of the grave,” parishioner Caroline Lanston later wrote in the parish newsletter. “Someone had arrayed Azin’s paintings across the parish hall stage, and all of us looked at them. …We marveled at their brightness.”
The four-day trial of Raymond Williams began nearly a year later, on June 20, 2011. When arrested, Williams said he wasn’t using drugs. But his defense would claim that he was high on PCP the day of the slaying.
Defense attorney Alan Drew took the unusual step of addressing the court as if he were PCP itself: “I went with Raymond Williams to The Art Warehouse, and he smoked me and my friend, cocaine,” Drew said in an eerie voice. “Like he’d done from the time he was 16 or 17.”
Delusional by the time Azin entered the studio, Drew said, Williams grabbed a nearby scissors and stabbed her, barely comprehending who she was. The defense argued that he should be found guilty only of second-degree murder. Williams’ confused state of mind and his subsequent horror after the high dissipated, the attorney said, led to the panicked attempt to hide his crime.
Stephen Chaikin, the assistant state’s attorney, countered that Williams’ meticulous cleaning of the crime scene showed that even if he had been smoking, he wasn’t deranged. Rather, he was upset after a fight with his girlfriend, who sometimes wore makeup to cover the bruises he inflicted. Williams’ father had served a life sentence for murdering a woman, and the son had a history of violence that included two armed robberies.
Williams wasn’t supposed to be in the warehouse that night; he went there to do drugs. Confronted by Azin, the prosecution said, Williams attacked, then realized there was no turning back, that he had to finish her off and hide the evidence. His lack of remorse, Chaikin argued, was apparent in the fact that he later went to the movies with his girlfriend.
After four hours of deliberation, the jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder. On Oct. 13, 2011, Circuit Court Judge Joseph A. Dugan Jr. sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, adding dryly, “You’ve earned it, sir.”
A year and a half after Azin’s death, the living room of Bazargan’s small apartment is bright with her daughter’s work: reproductions of French landscapes, an oil portrait of Bazargan as a beautiful young woman, which Azin painted from a photo as a birthday present.
Unable to concentrate at the travel agency she once owned, Bazargan closed it and struggles financially, friends say, though like Azin, she is a generous hostess, plying visitors with fragrant Persian dishes, tea, oranges and chocolate.
During the week in January that would have marked Azin’s 47th birthday, visitors stream in and out of the apartment. Some are Iranian Christian converts, like Azin’s 15-year-old niece, Melody, who idolized her and now wants to study criminal law, and Cyress, a handsome 28-year-old who owns an auto-body shop in Rockville and wears a 400-year-old cross Azin gave him. Many visitors who have lost friends or relatives to the Iranian regime believe the government there is behind Azin’s death, and ask that their full names not be published.
Chaikin sees no evidence of conspiracy, but says he understands the desire to find a deeper reason behind a killing that was so senseless. He maintains a warm friendship with Bazargan, as do Rados and the Rev. Alistair So, rector of All Hallows Parish in South River, Md., where Azin painted a mural for the 150-year-old church.
“I never imagined having so many friends who are priests,” Bazargan says.
Mehrouz is currently living with his mother. Like her, he seeks comfort in Azin’s steadfast faith, wearing a tattoo of an Orthodox cross on his calf. Recently, Nancy Souza, who worked at Azin’s gallery as a teenager, got in touch with him and they have become close friends.
Elizabeth Reid asked Bazargan to be godmother to her fifth child, named Azin, and at the baby’s baptism, Bazargan, too, was baptized in the Orthodox church. She shows off pictures of her goddaughter as well as photos of her daughter as a toddler in a Tehran garden.
Bazargan believes that her daughter’s gentle spirit watches over this child, who laughs and runs into her arms whenever they meet. “In Baby Azin’s smile and hug I feel Azin,” Bazargan says. “I don’t know how this connection could happen, but I know that it’s real.”
Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda and is a frequent contributor to the magazine.
