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Mom Who Vanished from Louisiana Home Killed By Hitmen Hired By Her Ex After Divorce Settlement
When Tahereh Ghassemi finally made it to the United States from Iran to reunite with her husband Hamid Ghassemi and their son, she was in for a shock.
Tahereh Ghassemi wanted nothing more than to one day live the American dream — but it ended up costing her life.
Born in Iran, Tahereh married young to charismatic Hamid Ghassemi. Shortly after discovering she was pregnant, Hamid traveled to the United States to study.
He promised to bring his wife and son to America as soon as he could to fulfill her lifelong dream, according to "The Ultimate Betrayal" episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
In America, Hamid thrived, first opening a pizza shop and then opening a successful luxury car dealership in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
When his son Hamed, named in honor of his father, turned 18, Hamid arranged for the teen to come to the U.S.
Tahereh stayed behind until her son Hamed was able to bring her over to America 10 years later, in 2005. But the idyllic life she'd dreamed of was not to be, and Tahereh would soon discover a devastating betrayal with deadly consequences.
Tahereh Ghassemi moves in with her son
After moving to the United States, Tahereh and her son settled into a comfortable house together in one of Baton Rouge's better neighborhoods.
Tahereh — who quickly learned English and had worked her way up to become a manager at a local Walmart — doted on her son, often cooking him meals and managing the house.
But the intense attention proved to be too much for Hamed, who felt his mother was smothering him.
“It was to the point that I was feeling like my mom wanted me to just like work and come and stay at the house and do nothing else,” he said.
The tension between the two had grown so intense a decade after Ghassemi arrived in America, that on April 10, 2015, Hamed, then 38, sent his mother a scathing text message, swearing in Farsi and threatening to move out.
“It was just a constant fight,” Hamed admitted.
When did Tahereh Ghassemi disappear?
Hamed told Dateline that on the night of April 11, 2015, he decided to skip dinner at home with his mom, and instead go to meet friends for drinks and sushi.
When he came home, he found a pot of rice still cooking on the stove, but no sign of his mother or her car.
“I kind of thought about it and said, ‘OK, maybe she left without turning the pot off,’” Hamed recalled.
Nothing else seemed amiss in the house except that his bedspread was missing. Hamed told Dateline that Tahereh had mentioned she'd planned to buy him a new one, so he wasn’t overly concerned.
Hamed said he believed that his mom had likely just gone to visit a friend, but when she wasn’t back by the next day and he found her purse still in the house, he called the Walmart she worked at. Someone there told him that his mom came to work that day, so he figured that she was just upset with him for missing dinner and was keeping her distance.
But after Tahereh didn’t return for a second night in a row and her friends said they hadn't heard from her, Hamed drove to Walmart himself and spoke with the manager. After looking at the store’s records, the manager discovered that Tahereh had not been to work as the employee Hamed had reached on the phone the day before had told him. That meant that Tahereh had now been missing for two days.
“Right away I contacted the police and the police came to my house,” Hamed said.
Given the tension between Hamed and his mother, Todd Morris, then a captain with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Department, said Hamed became a person of interest in the baffling disappearance.
But authorities also took a close look at another man in Tahereh’s life after surveillance footage from businesses behind Tarereh’s home captured a distinctive Chevy Tahoe in the area around the time she disappeared. Two employees at Hamid’s car dealership recognized the vehicle and told the sheriff’s office that they believed the car had come from their car lot.
What happened to Tahereh Ghassemi and Hamid Ghassemi's marriage?
Investigators learned that after moving to the United States, Hamid had secretly gotten married not once, but twice, while his unsuspecting wife was on the other side of the world.
When she finally made it to the United States in 2005, she discovered her husband was married to another woman and never really wanted her to move to the U.S. and disrupt his new life.
“She was so heartbroken,” one of Tahereh’s close friends recalled of the stunning betrayal.
The marriage quickly crumbled and a divorce battle dragged on for nearly eight years, as Hamid tried to fight any financial ramifications for him.
“He just didn’t want to give her a nickel,” her attorney Thomas Gibbs recalled.
Just three months before she disappeared, a court ordered Hamid to pay Tahereh more than $1 million and hand over two residential homes as part of the divorce settlement.
Despite the ordeal, Hamid insisted that he had nothing to do with Tahereh's disappearance and told investigators that he was praying for her safe return.
Investigators get break in Tahereh Ghassemi case
With both men in Tahereh's life under the microscope, authorities finally got the break they needed in the case after looking into her ex-husband Hamid’s phone records. They discovered an unusual 17-second call just after midnight the night Tahereh disappeared, from a phone number he’d never called before.
They traced the call to Tyler Ashpaugh, a 20-year-old who had recently moved to Baton Rouge after getting kicked out of school in Wisconsin.
During a deep dive into Ashpaugh’s digital history, they discovered his Google Maps history showed he’d been to a remote area in St. Helena Parish shortly after Tahereh disappeared.
Investigators went to the location and found polyester stuffing on the ground that could have come from a comforter. They followed the stuffing into the woods and found what looked like a freshly dug grave. There, they discovered Tahereh’s body buried in the ground, with the missing comforter wrapped around her.
What happened to Tahereh Ghassemi?
Authorities brought Ashpaugh in for questioning, and although he initially denied having anything to do with the crime, he ultimately confessed to kidnapping and killing Tahereh.
He claimed that he and his friend Skyler Williams had been hired by Daniel Richter, a mechanic at Tahereh's ex-husband Hamid’s car dealership. According to Ashpaugh’s account, he and Williams hid outside Tahereh’s home before overpowering her when she went out to get something from her car. They dragged her back into her home, where Richter joined, and the three injected her in the neck with a syringe of insulin they believed would kill her.
“She was unconscious on the floor,” East Baton Rouge Assistant District Attorney Dana Cummings explained. “At that point, they wrapped her up in Hamed’s comforter and loaded her in the back of her own car.”
The men drove her to the woods, but when they opened the trunk and heard her moaning, Ashpaugh shot her in the head, he told investigators.
Ashpaugh claimed he and the others were carrying out the hit for Hamid, who later paid them $10,000 after the deed was done.
Arrests made in Tahereh Ghassemi's killing
All four men were arrested.
Tahereh’s son Hamed was forced to deal with the “very, very heavy” news that his mother was dead and his dad was being accused of orchestrating the crime.
“Everything was gone. At that moment, just everything was gone,” Hamed told Dateline. “All the world came crashing down and now I just realized that I was left alone.”
Hamed would later learn that his father had wanted him dead too, so that he could recoup the money he lost in the divorce.
If Hamed hadn’t skipped out on dinner that night, he would have likely suffered the same fate as his mom.
Prosecutors initially offered Ashpaugh a deal in exchange for his testimony, but after he was found dead in his cell from a fentanyl overdose, they agreed to a deal with Richter instead. In exchange for his testimony against Hamid, he pled guilty to manslaughter and was given a 30-year sentence.
What happened to Hamid Ghassemi?
Hamid went on trial in August of 2023, at the age of 72, and was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of his ex-wife. He was sentenced to life behind bars.
Williams pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was given a 30-year sentence.
In the aftermath of the murder, Hamed has tried to pick up the pieces of his life. He’s married to an Iranian woman he once knew as a child, fulfilling the dreams his mom once had for him, and now owns his own car dealership — although he operates the business his own way.
“My way of doing business and his way are completely different,” Hamed said of his father.
