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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Where's the money? Where's the money? Tell us where the money is. Michael woke up to those exact words and a shotgun pointed at his face. A moment that seemed straight out of a movie unfolded in the dead of night.
But this was Newport Beach, California, a coastal town known for being both rich and safe. Violent crimes like this just doesn't happen there. The two ski-mast men beat Michael, zip-tied him, tortured him, and then drove him to the Mojave Desert, where they left him for dead. But against all odds, he survived. And the manhunt to find his attackers was on.
This is Forensic Tales, episode number 202, Orange County Manhunt, part one. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
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In October 2012, a 28-year-old man woke up on his couch in sunny Newport Beach, California, to a shotgun barrel pointed straight at his face. Around midnight, three men broke into his upscale Orange County home. It's not exactly the kind of neighborhood known for midnight break-ins or home invasions.
Two men wearing ski masks started beating the 28-year-old business owner before he could even realize what was happening. He was dead asleep when the men broke in. The first guy hit him over the head with a shotgun barrel, while the second man put him in a chokehold. For the next several long minutes, the two men almost beat him to death while he lay on the couch. The 28-year-old, who we're going to call Michael for the rest of this episode, to help preserve his real identity,
was then zip-tied around his ankles and wrists. The intruders dragged him downstairs as his head hit almost every step on the way down. When all three of them, the two intruders and Michael, reached the bottom of the staircase, they threw Michael on the ground next to his roommate, Mary, a 53-year-old woman. When Michael purchased the home, he often rented out rooms to other people.
and Mary just so happened to be living there at the time of the home invasion. Mary was also zip-tied around her ankles and wrists and blindfolded with a piece of duct tape over her face so she couldn't see or scream. These mysterious men treated Mary a little bit different than they did Michael. She was also woken up by someone wearing a ski mask pointing a shotgun in her face.
But when she opened her eyes, the man told her, this is not about you. Don't try to fight and you won't get hurt. This invasion was all about Michael. Mary just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The men kept shouting, where's the money? Where's the money? Tell us where the money is. Michael told them he had about $2,000 in cash hidden in a sock upstairs in his bedroom.
But the men weren't satisfied with that. They were after a lot more money than just two grand. They knew Michael had a lot more than that. Or so they thought. Mary and Michael could hear the men rummaging through the house, opening and slamming doors. Within minutes, they went through the almost entire house, looking for only one thing. Money. But after searching everything high and low, they didn't find what they were after.
While Mary and Michael lay on the floors zip-tied with zip ties, one of the intruders drove Michael's black Maserati out of the garage and a white cargo van pulled in. The three men threw Mary and Michael onto the floor of the cargo van, causing part of Michael's blindfold to come up a bit so he could see, but he wasn't able to make out much.
He didn't recognize the white cargo van. All he saw was a glimpse of a panda paper, a common symbol used in the marijuana industry. Life after that moment would never be the same, especially for Michael. The three men drove around Newport Beach for a while and stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank. After that, the men drove two hours outside the city to a remote desert.
As they drove, the men insisted that Michael turn over the money, not just the $2,000 he offered back at the house. They wanted millions of dollars. But where did these guys think that Michael had millions of dollars? If the money wasn't inside his house, then where was it? Well, according to the men, Michael had the money buried in the remote desert. Whoever these kidnappers were did their homework.
This wasn't a random attack committed by random strangers. They knew Michael. Several times throughout the long car ride, they threatened Michael and told them that he would hurt all of his loved ones if he didn't tell them where he buried all the money. They knew his girlfriend had red hair and drove a Jetta, and they knew where his parents lived. They kept saying over and over again, where did you bury the money?
But Michael had no idea what they were talking about. Yes, he had a successful business. He owned a relatively nice home in Newport Beach, one of the nicest towns in Southern California. He did drive a fancy car, but he didn't have anywhere near a million dollars, especially not in cash on him. And he certainly didn't bury it anywhere, let alone in a remote desert.
So he kept saying, I don't know, which only made the guys even madder. When they arrived in the desert, the kidnappers opened the back of the cargo van and threw Mary and Michael to the ground. Mary's first thought was that the men were going to shoot and kill him. That's why they drove him out to the middle of nowhere. It would be the perfect place for an execution. But that's not what happened.
Instead of shooting either of them, they did something far worse. Something that's probably only ever talked about in a horror film. Now, full disclosure, this next part of the story is extremely graphic. But there's no other way to describe exactly what happened next. And it describes perfectly who these men were and what they were capable of.
They took Michael's pants off right when he got kicked out of the car. They then placed a zip tie around the base of what I'll describe as his manhood and then cut it off. After that, once they had completely sexually mutilated him, the men then poured bleach all over his body, burning every inch of him. The bleach burned all of his open wounds and cuts.
They then used a blowtorch to burn different parts of his body. At one point, they even brought out a stun gun to shock him. Now, during this torture, because there's no other way to describe it,
Michael practically begged these men just to shoot him. That would be far less painful than what he was going through. He would have said basically anything just to have them stop. But they didn't stop. They seemed to enjoy what they were doing far more than simply shooting him. Plus, they didn't seem like they were trying to kill him. Sure, they could have, but murder wasn't necessarily on their to-do list.
Before returning to the van and driving away, the men told Mary this, we're going to throw this knife and if you can get to it and cut through your zip ties, then today's your lucky day. After that, the three men drove away, leaving Michael and Mary alone in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Michael, severely injured, penis cut off, bleach covering his entire body, bruised, badly beaten, on the verge of death. And Mary, his roommate, was blindfolded and zip-tied, trying to find the knife and go get help. Long after the three men drove away, leaving Mary and Michael for dead, a Kern County Sheriff's deputy was on his way to work and spotted Mary along the side of Highway 14.
She was still zip-tied, but had managed to get the blindfold off her face. She had also somehow managed to find her way to the side of the highway. Mary then told the officer everything that happened. She then jumped inside the deputy's truck and drove straight to Michael. When he arrived, he immediately called additional officers and paramedics.
When the paramedics arrived, they cut away Michael's bleach-soaked clothes and immediately transported both of them to the Antelope Valley Hospital. And beyond everyone's wildest dreams, Michael survived. And so did Mary. They were still alive even after being tortured and left for dead in the middle of the desert.
Although, in case you're wondering, they were never able to recover Michael's penis so that doctors could try and reattach it. It was never found. The manhunt for the three kidnappers was on. It was a search unlike anyone had ever seen in Orange County, especially in this nice neighborhood. So the investigation was led by the Orange County Sheriff's Department because Michael and Mary were kidnapped from their Newport Beach home in Orange County.
investigators knew one thing right away. They were dealing with some severe, hardcore criminals. What else could explain that level of violence and torture? But before they could answer that question, they needed to answer two other really important questions. Why were these people after Michael's money? And did he in fact have all this money buried in the desert? The answer to the second question is pretty straightforward.
As it turned out, Michael didn't have any money buried in the desert. But he did have money elsewhere, which could help answer the first question. 28-year-old Michael owned and operated a legal marijuana dispensary business in Orange County. Like 22 other states in the U.S., California allows people to own and operate their own marijuana businesses.
Marijuana is legal in these 23 states, including California. But here's the problem. Recreational marijuana is still against federal law in the states. So even if a state allows people to use and sell marijuana legally, it's still considered illegal in the eyes of the federal government. Well, this is a tricky situation for marijuana business owners to try and navigate, especially when it comes to their money.
So for business owners like our victim, Michael, they usually have a lot of cash on them. Marijuana is simply a cash-heavy business. Businesses can't put their money in a federally insured bank because the federal government doesn't recognize the business as legal. So someone like Michael would have typically a lot of cash on him pretty much at all times.
So the police wondered, was that the reason the kidnappers targeted him? Was it the marijuana business money that they were after? But Michael certainly didn't fit the profile of someone having three men torture him almost to death for simply owning a marijuana business. He certainly wasn't the only one who owned this type of business. Sure, he was known to have a lot of cash on him because he couldn't use the banks, but
But he didn't have a criminal record. He didn't associate with any known criminals. He certainly didn't make friends with the type of people the police believed kidnapped and attacked him. By all accounts, his business was doing quite well. It catered to an upscale clientele in the heart of Orange County, California. And it had roughly 30 employees and dealt with at least 100 vendors.
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A team of detectives went to Michael's condo in Newport Beach. A crime like this was completely unheard of in this part of upscale Orange County, California. Newport Beach just simply doesn't see these types of crimes. So when detectives got to his neighborhood, their first thing was to go door to door and find out if any of his neighbors had either heard or seen anything.
Maybe one of these houses had a ring doorbell camera or even a security system that might have caught something. Now, sometimes the cops get lucky and a neighbor turns over a critical piece of information. But most of the time, these types of neighborhood canvases don't really turn anything up. Even if someone does hear something strange, many people don't want to get involved because
especially when it comes to the cops. But this case was different. Luckily, investigators found a neighbor who saw something. Not only did she remember seeing a strange vehicle in her neighborhood the night that Michael and Mary were kidnapped, but she thought the car was so strange that she decided to write down the license plate.
She had no way of knowing it then, but her split-second decision to write down that license plate flipped this entire investigation upside down. The neighbor told detectives that she was sitting at home when she heard what sounded like a ladder falling. She said she got up and went to look out the window to see what was happening. She said she saw three men standing in the street, one wearing a construction hat.
But it was too late for anyone to be doing any type of construction. It was almost midnight. She said the man was just positioning the ladder against the side of her back neighbor's house, but never seemed to climb the ladder. So it seemed like they were simply pretending to work. She described them as white or possibly Hispanic and most likely in their 30s.
She then handed over the piece of paper with the license plate number CA37063C1. For investigators, this lined up with everything they already knew. Plus, it also filled in a few gaps. The neighbors saw three men. Mary and Michael were kidnapped by three men. She thought they might be Hispanic.
Well, I haven't mentioned this yet, but Mary told investigators they sometimes spoke in broken up Spanish. It was, again, broken Spanish, and it almost sounded like they were trying to fake their accents at some point, but still, this lined up.
The neighbor saw the men near Michael's condo pretending to set up the ladder, and the license plate number that the neighbor wrote down was from a white cargo van. And we already know that Michael and Mary were kidnapped using a white cargo van. Plus, they matched the physical description in the neighborhood. So it all added up.
For Orange County Sheriff's deputies, this was like winning the lotto. A potential witness, a license plate number, strange men in the neighborhood that night. It was like one in a million. Detectives ran the license plate through DMV records and found out the car was registered to a guy named Kyle Handley.
a local marijuana grower and supplier to Michael's business. So the two of them knew each other at the very least. So four days after the attack and kidnapping, Kyle was arrested on October 6th and a search warrant was executed on his house. Then the forensic evidence started rolling in. Inside Kyle Hanley's house, investigators found a bleach spattered sweatshirt,
Clue number one, Michael's kidnappers doused him in bleach. But this was sort of a problem from a forensic collection standpoint. Not only does bleach clean up spills, but it's also extremely effective at removing DNA evidence. Out back, the authorities found a large black trash bag filled with white towels stained with both blood and bleach and a single pair of cut zip ties. Clue number two,
When they searched the inside of Kyle's van, they were instantly hit with the strong scent of bleach. It was almost like the entire car had been washed down with bleach from the inside out. The van was clean except for one key item. A pair of blue nitrile gloves had been left behind on the floor. Clue number three. Once everything was bagged, the items were sent to the Orange County Crime Lab for DNA testing.
They wanted to find out if the blood on the sweatshirt or towels belonged to their victim, Michael, or if the zip ties had either Mary's or Michael's DNA on it. There was also the chance that the blue glove found inside the van had some important forensic evidence. But again, there was one big problem, the bleach. If there was ever DNA or any other type of critical evidence on them, the bleach might have eliminated it.
While they waited for the forensic testing, detectives started to piece together Kyle Hanley and Michael's relationship. Before the kidnapping, Kyle was a relatively small-time pot grower. Most of the pot he grew was inside his house, and one of his clients was Michael. Michael's business would sometimes buy marijuana from Kyle. But outside business, they also seemed to have somewhat of a friendship, at least at some point.
The two of them would often travel to Las Vegas together, where they would go to nightclubs. They gambled together, playing poker and blackjack. But all of that seemed to stop in the spring of 2012 after they returned from one of these Vegas trips. During that time, Kyle seemed to vanish from Michael's life. They stopped talking and they stopped hanging out. The cops believed that's when Kyle and the other mystery men started planning the attack.
But why? Why would Kyle suddenly turn on his once friend and someone he did business with, he sold marijuana to? Orange County detectives discovered that the cameras used to surveil Michael had been sent to Kyle's home. Law enforcement license plate readers repeatedly had registered Kyle's truck near Michael's home in the months leading up to the kidnapping.
More evidence, he was at least one of the three men involved. So at this point, the cops feel pretty good that Kyle Hanley was in fact involved. But who were the other men? Kyle didn't do this alone. And he certainly wasn't the brains behind this entire operation. Kyle was just your stereotypical small-time business grower and, well, stoner. So who was the mastermind?
Once detectives got the forensic testing results back, they got who they believed was the mastermind behind everything. 33-year-old Usain Nayeri. When the crime lab tested the blue latex glove found inside Kyle's car for DNA, they got a hit. It was for a guy named Usain Nayeri, or Adam as he sometimes called, a longtime friend of Kyle Hanley.
So detectives now have two guys they think are involved. Kyle, the guy who sold marijuana to Michael, and now his friend Adam Nyeri. But Nyeri and our victim Michael didn't seem to know each other, at least not personally like Kyle did. Orange County detectives learned that our second guy, Adam Nyeri, might have wanted a piece of the action when it came to the legal marijuana business.
Simply put, he wanted the type of success that Michael had. So sometime before the kidnapping, Adam and his longtime friend Kyle started to grow their own strain of marijuana. At first, they tried to sell some of it to Michael, just like Kyle had done in the past with his own strain. But Michael didn't like the kind of marijuana he and Adam were growing together, so he didn't want to buy any of it for the business.
According to Michael, he didn't think that it was, quote, pure enough and his upscale clients wouldn't like it. Well, that didn't sit well with Adam. He knew just how much money marijuana business owners were making in Orange County, and he wanted a piece of it. He wanted to be rich and successful just like Michael. And if he couldn't get rich by growing and selling his own marijuana to Michael, he
then he would have to get rich off him some other way. Before Michael's kidnapping, 33-year-old Adam Nyeri was living with his wife Courtney in the nearby community of Newport Bluffs, an upscale gated community not far from Newport Beach where Michael was kidnapped. Although Adam met and started dating Courtney when she was just a teenager and he was on probation for a previous felony conviction, the two got married in 2010.
At first, not even Courtney's parents knew about the marriage, but the two quickly became the it couple. Courtney went to law school and Adam sort of turned into this good looking guy who always had money on him. Although no one knew exactly how he was ever making money, he just always seemed to have money on him. But Orange County detectives quickly learned that Adam had a dark side. He had a temper.
According to court documents, in an early 2011 incident, Adam allegedly put his wife, Courtney, into a chokehold after an argument. Courtney called the cops and Adam was arrested. But not long after, the two reconciled and Adam pled down to a misdemeanor charge of assault and was ordered to complete a handful of domestic violence classes.
Based on interviews with some of Adam's friends, Orange County detectives believed that Adam had become convinced that this Michael guy was rolling in the dough. Maybe it was because of his friend, Kyle Hadley, had said so. Maybe he heard it through the grapevine. Or perhaps it was some delusion he had come up with in his own head. But regardless of how Adam found out or believed that he had found out,
He had convinced himself that Michael was filthy rich from this successful legal marijuana business. And he became obsessed with making just as much money, the kind of money he thought Michael was making. Over the next several months, Adam occupied his time by trying to figure out everything about Michael. He wanted to know his daily and weekly routine.
Everything from when he stopped into the marijuana business to what he did on his days off. And most importantly, where he kept all the cash. Adam understood that being the owner of a lawful marijuana enterprise, Michael most likely didn't use a bank. He didn't put his money in a bank. So he knew it wouldn't be uncommon for someone like Michael to carry around a lot of cash.
Maybe he laundered the money in another legal business so that it could eventually end up in the bank. Or maybe he was old school and kept it underneath his mattress. It didn't matter where Michael hid his money. Adam just needed to find it. By February of that year, Adam had convinced his wife, Courtney, to use her law school Lexus account to perform a background check on Michael.
He started buying GPS trackers so he could monitor every one of Michael's movements. He planted one in his car. Adam's first theory for the presumed cash stash was that the money was at Michael's parents' house in Huntington Beach, California, a city a few miles away from Newport Beach. If he couldn't put the money in a bank, maybe he asked his parents to hold on to it.
Or if the federal government decided to raid the marijuana business or Michael's house, they wouldn't find any of the cash. What better place to store millions of dollars than at your parents' house? So Adam set up security cameras at Michael's parents' house to see if that's where the money was hidden. With the cameras installed, Adam could stalk every movement. If the money was hidden there, he would find out. But there was one big problem.
Bailey, a big black lab in Pitbull mix. So when Adam showed up to install the hidden cameras at Michael's parents' house in Huntington Beach, Bailey, the parent's dog, kept barking at him and he couldn't do it. That's when Adam decided to go back home, buy hamburger patties, and poison them with fertilizer so that he could feed them to Michael's parent's dog, Bailey.
Adam did exactly that, poisoned the dog, and then installed the cameras. Now, fortunately for my fellow dog lovers, poor sweet Bailey survived the poisoning. Once Adam realized Michael wasn't hiding any money at his parents' house in Huntington Beach, he decided to install cameras around Michael's Newport Beach home.
He didn't think that's where the cash was, but at least the cameras meant that he could keep a better eye on Michael. But he never really saw anything. No large amounts of money were either coming in or out of the condo. Adam then devised his final theory about the money. Michael was burying it in the desert.
Adam and Kyle had already installed a GPS tracker on Michael's car so that they could basically monitor every single one of his movements. And one day, Adam thought he had finally figured something out. He watched on the GPS tracker that Michael had driven out to the Mojave Desert one day and thought he was driving around in a circle in one particular area.
Bingo. Michael must have buried his millions of dollars from the marijuana business in this part of the desert. Why else would he drive out to the middle of nowhere and drive around in circles? Once he came up with that theory, the plan to kidnap Michael was officially set into motion. The elaborate preparation officially began.
First, Adam bought a taser, an effective weapon to quickly gain control over someone without really hurting them. Next, Adam bought a gun, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He also obtained a pump-action shotgun that one of his friends had purchased for him. Next came the blowtorch.
According to Adam's wife, Courtney, she came home one day and found Kyle and Adam in the garage messing around with the blowtorch. Adam would pretend to use it and burn Kyle while he pretended to be hurt. Finally, the ski mask and the fake construction outfits showed up at Adam and Courtney's house. Before Kyle and Adam could execute their plan, the unexpected happened.
And the entire operation almost blew up in both of their faces when Adam was nearly arrested. Around midnight on the night of September 26th, a speeding gray Chevy Tahoe sped past a Newport Beach police officer. The driver was going well over 70 miles per hour when the speed limit was only 50. So the cops threw on his lights and started chasing the Chevy Tahoe.
The cop didn't know it then, but the driver was Adam Nyeri. Inside the car, Adam had more than $30,000 in cash and over five ounces of marijuana. Instead of pulling over for the cops, Adam put his foot on the gas pedal and drove even faster. At one point, he was going over 100 miles per hour through the residential neighborhoods of Newport Beach. The chase went across the entire town.
No matter how fast the cop was going, he couldn't seem to catch up with Adam. Neither could the additional squad cars or even the helicopter that was called in. Eventually, the cops lost sight of the Tahoe and Adam was able to ditch the car on the side of the road, taking the marijuana and the over $30,000 in cash with him. When the cops ran the license plates, they learned that it was registered to Adam's wife, Courtney.
So later that night, a couple of police officers knocked on her front door and told her that a car registered under her name had been involved in a high-speed pursuit with the police. Now, at first, she admitted that her husband had borrowed the car earlier that night, but she said she didn't know where he was going, and she didn't know where he was now. But after a little bit of time, after a while, her story seemed to change, and
She then said the car might have been stolen. So the police told her that she needed to go down to the police station to officially file a report that the car had been stolen if her husband Adam didn't take it like she basically originally said. So after all of this happened, a police chase and the cops showing up at Adam and Courtney's doorstep,
Adam Nyeri had somehow managed to get away and avoid being arrested that night. Not even the unexpected police chase could stop Adam from his plans to kidnap Michael and find the hidden money. This has been part one of the Orange County Manhunt. Part two and the rest of this story will appear in next week's episode. Tune in next Monday for the unbelievable ending.
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