Effie Entezari was shot to death outside her Vancouver apartment on the morning of May 1, 1989, amid divorce proceedings, and her husband was convicted of the killing — a conviction his daughter spent more than three decades trying to undo. Now that fight is the subject of a three-part Hulu documentary, The Promise: Finding My Mother's Killer, which follows Pooneh Gray's pursuit of DNA and ballistics evidence she says points not to her father, but to a different man entirely.
Gray has said she promised her dying mother she would find out who did this to her, a vow made in Vancouver, Washington in 1989 that she has said she ultimately fulfilled. As reported by KGW, investigators at the time found a gun in Mike Entezari's car of the same type used in the killing, and a state forensic expert testified that the recovered bullet was an unquestionable match. Mike Entezari was convicted of murdering his wife; OregonLive reports he spent 16 years in prison before his death, while Apple TV's description states he was sentenced to 25 years. He maintained his innocence until he died in 2019, according to OregonLive's reporting, and Gray has said she never believed her father was guilty.
A Yellow Car and a Reopened Trail
Gray has said evidence pointing to the real killer was ignored during the original investigation. KGW's 2021 podcast series, The Yellow Car, took its name from a detail in that original case file: a witness reported seeing a yellow car speeding away from the crime scene. That same year, OregonLive's reporting states, a laboratory matched a DNA mixture found on Effie's sweater to a man named Viktor Pell — a breakthrough that came decades after the murder.
Gray worked with private investigators and forensic consultants to dig up new evidence, and the investigation ultimately uncovered DNA on Effie's sweater years after the killing, per the same reporting. She has said that DNA and ballistics evidence pointed to Pell. As OregonLive reported, Pell had never been charged in the case as of 2023 and had no criminal record in either Washington or Oregon.
Civil Jury Sides With the Daughter
In 2024, Gray filed a civil wrongful-death lawsuit against Pell, and a jury later determined that Pell, then 86, shot and killed Effie Entezari in the parking lot of her Vancouver apartment building on the morning of May 1, 1989, according to OregonLive. Ten of the 12 jurors — the minimum required — answered yes when asked whether Pell caused her death, the outlet reported. Jurors awarded just over $110,000 in economic damages and $4 million in noneconomic damages, a sum KGW has described as more than $4 million in total awarded to Gray.
The Clark County Prosecuting Attorney's Office said after the verdict that it would examine all of the evidence presented at the civil trial against Pell, OregonLive reported, though the criminal case had not been reopened at that time. Gray has said the verdict brought back the memory of telling her mother they had succeeded.
A Separate Lawsuit Over the Original Investigation
Gray also filed a civil lawsuit the previous year against the agencies that handled the original case, naming the Clark County Sheriff's Office and the Washington State Patrol, according to KGW. That lawsuit alleges misconduct related to the original investigation into Effie's murder. Both agencies have declined to comment publicly on the case, citing pending litigation, per KGW's reporting.
The Documentary's Decades-Long Backstory
The Promise: Finding My Mother's Killer is described as a three-part series, with each episode running roughly 60 minutes, built around what Banijay Rights calls the decades-long quest of Iranian-American Pooneh Entezari to find her mother's killer. The series will stream on Hulu in the United States, and according to the same account, Gray spent millions of her own fortune funding the investigation in an effort to clear her father's name. KGW reports the documentary premieres November 2.
The case has already been the subject of years of scrutiny beyond the documentary. The Oregonian and OregonLive published a four-part series in 2021 examining problems with the original police investigation, laying groundwork that would later feed into the DNA findings and the civil trial against Pell.
