I Might Have Been the Bat

Hesam Moghaddam on True Crime Podcasting, the Narrator Who Takes No Sides, and the Archive No One Knew Existed — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP04

I think about this often, Hesam Moghaddam says toward the end of this conversation. The idea that I could have been Khafash Shab. No guarantee was given to me. Life could have gone a direction where I would be sitting not next to you — but in the seat of the defendant. We were lucky people, probably. That doesn’t make us smarter or better.

That’s a remarkable thing for a true crime podcaster to say. And it is, in miniature, the entire philosophy of Bazkuyi — the Persian-language podcast that Moghaddam has been building case by case, drawing on seventeen years of crime journalism at ISNA news agency, a law degree in criminal law and criminology, and a practice as a working attorney. In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — he explains what Bazkuyi is, how it’s built, and why the narrator deliberately takes no sides.

From Crime Columns to Case Files

Moghaddam’s relationship with criminal justice reporting began in the Khatami era — a period, he argues, that was genuinely formative for Iranian crime journalism. The opening up of the press in the late 1990s led directly to a broadening of what crime coverage could look like: from brief, heavily filtered incident summaries to full pages, interviews with investigators, courtroom access, and a limited but real archive of documented cases.

He credits a network of crime reporters and beat journalists from that era — naming Mohammad Belouri, Ebrahim, and Davoud Safaee, among others — as the people whose patient, often unglamorous work created the documentary foundation that a project like Bazkuyi depends on. Without their legwork in the 1990s and 2000s, many of the archival audio recordings, courtroom photographs, and firsthand witness accounts that make Bazkuyi distinctive simply would not exist.

His own career ran through ISNA for seventeen years — as a reporter, then editor, then head of their social media editorial team — while criminal cases remained a persistent personal interest alongside his institutional work. A law degree in criminal law and criminology deepened the analytical framework. Eventually, both converged in Bazkuyi.

The Narration of Crime in Reverse Gear

Moghaddam describes what he calls the standard mode of crime narration as reverse gear: you start with the scene of the crime — a body discovered, an arrest made — and work backward from there, filling in the context as you trace the story toward its origin. Bazkuyi follows this same basic logic but goes much further back than most accounts do, tracking the lives of everyone involved long before any crime occurred.

The case that best exemplifies this approach, he says, is the Bijeh case — the serial murders of children in the early 2000s, one of the most documented and socially resonant criminal cases in Iran’s recent history. Rather than beginning with the crimes themselves, Moghaddam traced Bijeh’s childhood, the structural conditions of his upbringing, the people who came into contact with him along the way. He reached a point where he could describe Bijeh helping search for missing children he had himself killed — attending their memorial services. Not because this absolves anything. But because understanding how someone becomes capable of that requires holding the full arc of a life in view, not just its worst moment.

“I couldn’t narrate Bijeh neutrally,” he admits, “because children were being killed. But when I got to his childhood — to what happened to him — I genuinely grieved for that child too. I kept thinking: if things had gone differently for him, none of this would have followed.”

Why the Narrator Must Not Take Sides

The most intellectually rigorous section of the episode is Moghaddam’s defense of journalistic impartiality — and his honest account of how difficult that stance actually is when the subject matter involves murdered children or women executed for crimes that remain genuinely contested.

He draws a sharp line between the narrator’s role and the judge’s role. A judge, he says, will always take a side — that is the function of a judge: to weigh evidence and determine guilt. A narrator who takes a side has already decided the verdict before the story is complete. He describes this as a form of professional failure, even when one side of a case is clearly more sympathetic than the other.

“I decided on day one,” he says, “that I am a narrator, not a judge. Getting close to one character — even just in how I describe them — takes the narrator outside the circle of fairness. And fairness is the only thing I have.”

He uses the Shahla Jahed case as his clearest example. A significant portion of the public believes she was wrongly executed. Another portion believes she was guilty. He cannot take a position in either camp — not because he has no views, but because the moment he does, the narration becomes advocacy, and advocacy is not what Bazkuyi is. He adds a more practical concern: many of the people connected to these cases are still alive. Shahla’s case involves a living family with children. Applying pressure to one narrative means applying pressure to those people.

The Monster Distinction — and What the Show Currently Lacks

In one of the episode’s most candid exchanges, Hossein pushes Moghaddam on something a viewer might feel: that Bazkuyi delivers exceptional data — better-sourced, more layered, more archivally complete than anything previously available in Persian-language crime content — but keeps its emotional distance. You never quite feel drawn into solidarity with the victims in the way that the best international true crime does.

Moghaddam agrees, partially. He cites the first season of Monster — the Jeffrey Dahmer docuseries — as a model he admires: each episode inhabits a different perspective, one episode spending its full hour with a deaf victim’s family, another with the perpetrator’s family years after his execution. The emotional proximity shifts because the narrative perspective shifts.

He describes why Bazkuyi hasn’t fully achieved this yet: partly it’s a design choice — maintaining neutrality is genuinely harder with overt emotional framing — and partly it’s a practical constraint. Getting family members of victims to speak requires earning a specific kind of trust that takes time to build, especially when reopening a case means reopening grief. He describes calling someone and saying: I know this closed for you, and I’m about to open it again and probe the wound. That takes extraordinary care.

How the Archive Gets Built

The research process Moghaddam describes is meticulous and deliberately non-linear. He begins with a library phase: searching the Magiran newspaper archive database, academic journals, published criminological research, and university theses on specific cases or offenders. For each major case, there are almost always academic papers — criminologists, psychologists, sociologists who have studied the same events and left a published record.

From there, he follows a chain of references: one article cites a specific interview, which leads to a researcher, who may have an unpublished audio recording. This is how he found a psychologist who had conducted an in-depth interview with Gholamreza Khoshrow — the Night Bat — inside prison: he tracked the reference through a published article, found the researcher at a university counseling center, and discovered that the original audio-visual recording was sitting on a flash drive the researcher could no longer access. They arranged to share it.

The second layer consists of people who were peripherally connected to events — witnesses, neighbors, transportation workers, former acquaintances — found through Instagram hashtags, comments sections, and word of mouth. He describes finding someone who, as a child, rode the bus every day with Khoshrow — and thought of him as the most courteous, pleasant driver on the route. That testimony is not in any official record. But it changes something about how a listener understands the gap between a person’s outward face and their hidden behavior.

“That’s what’s worth something,” he says. “Not the number of blows, not the method. The small testimonies. The view of someone who passed by and never knew.”

One of the Hardest Parts: People Don’t Want to Be Reminded

Moghaddam describes the emotional weight of what it actually takes to collect these testimonies. When he contacts a family member who has spent years trying to forget, and says: I’d like to revisit this — he is doing something he would find genuinely painful if done to him. He tells them in advance: I know this is hard. If you say no, I completely understand. He gives people the option not to speak, even after considerable relationship-building. Many say yes anyway, because they have been waiting, without knowing they were waiting, for someone to say: your account matters.

“In a criminal case,” he says, “the police speak. The judge speaks. The defendant even gets to speak. The victim who is gone never speaks again. Their family goes to court and says they want the harshest punishment. And then that’s it. No one hears their grief.”

This is, he says, one of Bazkuyi’s core purposes: to give testimony to people whose testimony has never been officially received. The microphone serves a function that no court is designed to serve.

The Legal Constraints That Shape What Can Be Said

Moghaddam is unusually candid about the legal landscape within which Bazkuyi operates. Iranian law contains provisions that can make even routine crime reporting legally precarious: publishing the name or image of a defendant before a verdict is final can constitute defamation if done without a judicial order; detailed descriptions of crime methods can theoretically be construed as instruction in how to commit crimes; the privacy protections of all parties to a case — including perpetrators — limit what can be published without formal authorization from the judiciary.

He describes navigating this as walking on a knife’s edge: providing enough detail to serve the public-interest function of the work, while not becoming a mechanism for amplifying fear, teaching methods, or harming living people connected to the cases. This is, he argues, structurally harder than producing a true crime podcast about historical international cases, where no living parties have standing to contest the narration and no domestic legal exposure follows.

He’s explicit about his own protective instincts: he will not expose anyone to legal risk for speaking to him. Where formal interviews aren’t possible, he conducts informal background conversations and draws on them without attribution — always flagging to the source in advance that he will use the information without naming them.

The Oral History of Iranian Crime That Doesn’t Yet Exist

One of the episode’s most forward-looking passages concerns something Moghaddam says he wants to see built, not only for Bazkuyi but for Iranian criminal justice culture more broadly: a documented oral history of criminal cases, drawn from the accounts of the investigators, prosecutors, and judges who lived them — before those people age out of accessibility.

He points to a widely followed Twitter account run by a retired investigative officer, who has been sharing recollections from decades of work without revealing identifying details of the cases. The account’s audience, he says, is enormous — because the appetite for this material is real, and the supply has always been almost nonexistent. He envisions a systematic effort: recording the experiential knowledge of investigators who worked before digital evidence, before forensic science reached its current state, before any of the tools now taken for granted existed — people who solved cases through instinct, observation, and a different kind of craft.

“Their experience,” he says, “is a mountain. And mountains are not moved easily. But if we don’t document them, they disappear with the person.”

On Visibility, and Why He Is Afraid of It

One of the most surprising admissions in the conversation comes when Hossein asks why Bazkuyi isn’t more widely promoted. Moghaddam has seventeen years of media relationships, a network of contacts, an audience that has grown organically to several thousand listeners — and he understands marketing far better than most podcast creators do. So why isn’t he using any of it?

His answer is disarming: he is afraid of being seen. Not for personal reasons, but because his experience as a journalist taught him that once a piece of work becomes widely known, you lose control of how it circulates, who interprets it, who uses it for purposes you didn’t intend. Colleagues came to him after big stories wanting to replicate the process. His method became their template. That experience left him cautious.

“When three thousand people are listening to me, I can manage this,” he says. “When it becomes ten thousand — the control is gone. The story moves on its own. And I’m not sure I want to let go of it yet.”

Hossein challenges this directly: if the point is to give voice to people who haven’t been heard, a smaller audience means fewer people hearing them. Moghaddam concedes the tension and says, simply, that he has more to figure out.

The Cozy Corner — When the Writing Begins

Asked where his own cozy corner is — when he experiences himself at his most creative — Moghaddam’s answer is specific and unconventional for someone who spends most of his working time researching. It’s not the research phase that produces his best thinking. It’s the moment he sits down to write the episode script.

“That moment is extraordinary for me,” he says. “I feel like the best version of myself. The creativity erupts. Not during the investigation — but when I start writing.”

He adds that the practice of writing scripts for Bazkuyi has made him a better attorney. Not because criminal law and true crime overlap — though they do — but because both require the same discipline: the ability to hold a full narrative in mind, anticipate every counter-argument, and find the sentence that is both completely accurate and genuinely persuasive. He describes having told younger journalists the same thing when he was still at ISNA: write as if your text is sitting in front of an investigator who will ask you, sentence by sentence, what you meant by each word. If you can’t answer, don’t publish.

A Dedication

Asked who he’d like to dedicate the conversation to, Moghaddam’s answer comes immediately: his wife. Not just as a spouse, but as a thinking partner, an editorial collaborator, and the person who endures the production process alongside him. Bazkuyi is built at home, without a studio. His wife hears every episode multiple times as it’s being assembled. The content — graphic, emotionally heavy, returning again and again to death and grief — is not material anyone would choose to absorb repeatedly. That she does, and contributes to it, is something he describes as both a gift and something he doesn’t take for granted.