The lawyers for defendant Raymond Williams never denied that he murdered the woman. But they portrayed Williams as so high on drugs that he could not think rationally when he killed Azin Naimi.
The strategy appeared to be to convince the jury that Williams never planned to kill Naimi and was therefore not guilty of first-degree murder, but only of some lesser crime.
The jury didn’t buy that.
Williams, 36, testified that he had been smoking crack cocaine and PCP before the murder the night of last July 18. He said after he realized what had happened, “I felt like I wanted to kill myself.”
After the murder, Williams cleaned up the crime scene, wrapped Naimi’s body in a blanket, drove 12 miles from Bethesda, Maryland, and dumped the body in an alley in Washington, D.C.
The prosecution said the coverup of the slaying was the work of a reasoning mine, not a man foggy and confused by drugs. A psychiatrist testified that a surveillance video showing Williams near the murder site showed a man who was clam with no sign of mental impairment.
The 45-year-old Naimi was noted for her skill in restoring centuries-old Russian art works.
She had been living with her mother in North Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, for the previous year and half. When she did not come back from her studio three blocks away on that Sunday evening, her mother, Mary Bazargan, got worried. Police began a search on Monday and found Naimi’s body in an alley near the US Capitol. But they determined that the scene of the crime had been her studio.
Video surveillance showed Naimi walking toward her office door at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday. In her office, she encountered 35-year-old Raymond Williams, the building handyman.
With no clear motive, Williams allegedly brutally attacked Naimi, beating her and stabbing her to death with a pair of scissors. The killer even thrust the scissors into one of her ear canals and broke two of her ribs. The killer then used a mop and towels to try to clean up the blood, which could still be seen later with forensic chemicals. Blood was also found later in Williams’ car. The killer disposed of the body in a Washington alley outside a residence that police say Williams telephoned about 3 1/2 hours after Naimi went to her studio.
Police said Naimi’s body was found with her pants pulled down, but they did not say if she had been sexually assaulted.
Naimi was born in Iran. She was a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London and had also studied art in Italy. At one time, she owned two galleries in the United States—one on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles—but she had sold both of them. She reportedly spoke five languages.
Tony Kurtz, who leased the studio to Naimi and employed Williams, called Williams good-natured and said, “This is the last thing I would expect from him.”
As for Naimi, whom he hired to restore paintings, Kurtz said, “Azin was driven by goodness.” According to her mother, Naimi gave food, blankets and money to the homeless and donated much of her earnings from her restoration work to such causes as Haiti relief.