The Witness
Devil in the Desert
ABC News
4.6 • 625 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In January of 2013, as Detective Ryan Peters inched forward in his investigation into the kidnapping |
| 0:07.1 | of Michael and his roommate Mary Barnes, it dawned on him. Newport Police had a potential lead |
| 0:14.3 | right under their nose. A Chevy Tahoe, a car involved in a high-speed chase months earlier. |
| 0:24.1 | Police had spotted the Tahoe speeding through Newport Beach in the pre-dawn hours of September 26, 2012. |
| 0:31.8 | After a chase, the officers lost sight of the vehicle. |
| 0:36.3 | They found it later that night dumped on Balboa Island. |
| 0:40.3 | It's a residential community in Newport Harbor, and the driver, he'd vanished. |
| 0:46.4 | Itah was registered to a Courtney Shigarian. Her husband was Hussein Nairi, whose DNA had just shown up on a glove found in Kyle Hanley's car. |
| 0:58.8 | Now, Detective Ryan Peters knew that the Chevy Tahoe might have nothing to do with his kidnapping and torture investigation, |
| 1:07.3 | but at this point, he couldn't leave any stone unturned. |
| 1:11.6 | I don't want to ignore anything and I want to fully invest all my time into every possible lead. |
| 1:18.6 | I go and write a search warrant for the car, knowing that it's, you know, a long shot. |
| 1:23.6 | Detective Peters Hunt for answers led him to the impound lot. He began to rake through the car. |
| 1:31.0 | Inside, he found some gift cards, keys, and paperwork. But then, he found something that changed |
| 1:39.0 | the course of the entire investigation. I pull out this little box. I'm looking at it, I'm like, what is this thing? |
| 1:46.0 | And I realize it's a micro-mini-camera, and then I pull out another one from underneath the seat, |
| 1:52.0 | and it's another micro-mini-camera. |
| 1:54.0 | And then I pull out like a small little case with two magnets on it, |
| 1:58.0 | and immediately realize this is a tracker. |
| 2:08.7 | A GPS tracking device and two hidden cameras. Detective Peters emptied the car and took the box of stuff back to his office so that he could examine it more closely later. |
| 2:14.6 | It turned out that those little devices had recorded hundreds of hours of footage over a period of months. |
| 2:22.3 | And when he studied the footage itself, his jaw dropped. |
... |
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