May 14, 2021
After 38 years, police have arrested a sex offender in the death of an Iranian student who was attending the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) when she was killed in 1983.
Bud Leroy Christensen, now 67, was awaiting extradition from Nebraska to the Pottawatomie County Jail in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on a first-degree murder charge, The Omaha World-Herald reported. During a court hearing, he waived his right to fight extradition.
Fishermen found the body of Firozeh Dehghanpour, who was in her mid-20s, on August 14, 1983, under a bridge north of Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Authorities at the time suspected she was killed somewhere else by someone she knew. In the month after the slaying, detectives interviewed Dehghanpour’s acquaintances and took fingerprints and hair samples from more than 100 university students of Middle Eastern descent. The effort yielded nothing.
An autopsy found that Dehghanpour had bled to death from several cuts to her throat and four abdominal stab wounds. She also had been beaten.
Pottawattamie County sheriff’s deputies had said Dehghanpour died elsewhere and that she was not “sexually attacked,” although her corpse was unclothed.
Omaha police detectives at the time suspected that Dehghanpour had been killed by someone she knew because her personal belongings and papers were with her body. “If she’d been grabbed off the street,” Officer Gregory Thompson said at the time, “you’d think she would have dropped all that stuff.”
Sgt. Jim Doty, of the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office, began looking into the case again after Steve Martin, a friend of Dehghanpour contacted him last year.
Martin, a business student at UNO in the early 1980s who now lives in Nevada, said he called Omaha and Council Bluffs police over the years to ask about the investigation into his friend’s death.
Sgt. Doty said DNA analysis of previously collected evidence matched with Chris-tensen’s and additional evidence confirmed Christensen as a suspect. He would have been 30 at the time of the murder.
Martin, now 62, said he was stunned when notified someone had been arrested. He said he had never heard of Christensen.
“It kept gnawing at my stomach,” Martin said. “I was upset about this for a long time. I just kept trying to push it over the years.”
Martin said Dehghanpour was a brilliant math student. “Everything about this young woman was grand. She was destined for wonderful things in her life. She was the best,” he said. “All the students were in admiration and awe at her math skill sets.”
Martin now is petitioning UNO to issue a posthumous degree to Dehghanpour, 38 years after her slaying.
Christensen is listed on the Nebraska Sex Offender Registry as a lifetime offender with at least three sex crime convictions.