Review: ‘Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert,’ starring Matt Murphy, Heather Brown, Ryan Peters, Salvatore Ciulla, Martina Teinert and Matt Gutman

February 19, 2024

by Carla Hay

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert”

Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians and Latin people) talking about the case of the 2012 kidnapping and brutal assault of Mary Barnes and her male roommate from their home in Newport Beach, California.

Culture Clash: The three kidnappers (led by Hossein Nayeri) beat, tortured and cut off the penis of the male roommate (whose identity is not revealed in the documentary) because the kidnappers mistakenly thought that he had about $1 million in cash hidden in California’s Mohave Desert.

Culture Audience: “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about well-known criminal cases, but this docuseries just re-uses a lot of footage that was previously filmed for a March 2020 episode of the ABC newsmagazine series “20/20.”

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” is just a repackaged “20/20” episode that originally aired in March 2020, with expanded and updated commentary from law enforcement officials and attorneys. This is a very lazy documentary. ABC News Studios produces “20/20” and several other news programs and documentaries. Many of the documentaries from ABC News Studios are labeled as original Hulu documentaries because they premiere first on Hulu in the United States. (Outside the U.S., many Hulu programs premiere first on the Disney+ streaming service.) ABC, Hulu and Disney+ are all owned by Disney.

There is no credited director for “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert,” but David Sloan is listed as the documentary’s senior executive producer. On the surface, “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” might seem to be a Hulu original documentary, but the majority of the documentary’s content actually isn’t original because so much it previously aired on or was originally filmed for “20/20” in the show’s Season 42, Episode 21, titled “Catch Me If You Can,” which premiered on March 13, 2020. The previously filmed interviews were conducted in 2019, and are labeled as such in this repackaged documentary that was released in 2025.

The only “new” content includes interviews with two former district attorneys who were involved with the case; the former police detective who was the lead investigator of the case; two defense attorneys; and the “20/20” correspondent who originally reported on the case. All of them give hindsight comments that don’t add anything noteworthy. It’s not a complete “bait and switch” documentary, but there needed to be more transparency that “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” is really an expanded version of a previously aired “20/20” episode. For example, there could have been caption for the 2019 footage that says, “Previously filmed for ’20/20,’ in 2019,” instead of just putting the year that the footage was filmed.

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” has three episodes that tell the story in mostly chronological order. Episode 1, titled “Treasure Hunt,” describes the home invasion and kidnapping. Episode 2, titled “Cat-and-Mouse Trap,” is about the police investigation that included a sting operation where the wife of the kidnapping ringleader cooperated with law enforcement to gather evidence and get him arrested. Episode 3, titled “Weed and Bananas,” has details of the arrest, escape from jail and eventual trial of the mastermind kidnapper.

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” begins by showing Matt Murphy surfing in Orange County, California. Murphy is a former senior district attorney for Orange County and is a familiar face to people who watch a lot of true crime TV shows because he’s been interviewed on many of these shows. Murphy says in a voiceover that the Orange County city of Newport Beach is “like a Beverly Hills by the sea. But it’s also the type of place where people go to steal and sometimes hurt people to get money.” Murphy adds, “When it comes to wanton cruelty, I’ve seen some really bad things, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The cruelty that Murphy is talking about is a home invasion/brutal kidnapping that took place on the night of October 2, 2012. Mary Barnes, originally from New York, had moved to Newport Beach from Florida just a few days earlier to live with William “Bill” Bannon, who was her boyfriend at the time. Bannon shared the four-bedroom Newport Beach house with a roommate, who is only identified in the documentary as Michael S., who worked as a legal marijuana dispensary owner. In 2012, marijuana in California was only legal for medicinal purposes.

Bannon was away on a business trip when the home invasion happened, but Barnes and Michael were at the house. Michael, who was 28 years old at the time and described as a friendly guy, was the real target of the masked kidnappers. Michael and Barnes were tied up with zip ties, blindfolded, and held by gunpoint by three male kidnappers, who hauled them in a white truck and drove about 140 miles east to the Mohave Desert. The documentary has a brief audio interview with Michael S., but he doesn’t reveal anything new, and it’s not clear when this interview took place.

In a 2019 interview originally filmed for “20/20,” Barnes says that the kidnappers kept demanding that Michael give kidnappers the $1 million in cash that the kidnappers said he was hiding. She said one of the kidnappers tried to disguise his identity by pretending to be a Mexican gangster. Cash and jewelry were in the house, but the kidnappers left some of it behind because they were sure that Michael had even more money stashed away in the Mohave Desert.

Michael repeatedly told the kidnappers that he didn’t have $1 million but he had about $100,000 that he could give to them in cash by the next day. He was telling the truth, but the kidnappers didn’t believe him. The kidnappers beat up Michael, kicked him, and used a blowtorch to burn him to try to force him to tell them where the money was buried. Barnes was tied up nearby, and although she couldn’t see what was happening, she could hear this vicious assault.

In the 2019 interview, Barnes remembers hearing the sound of something being cut in a back-and-forth saw direction, while a bound-and-gagged Michael yelled in pain. Barnes found out from the kidnappers had cut off Michael’s penis and had taken the penis with them. The kidnappers also covered Michael with bleach and left him bloodied and unconscious.

It’s unknown if the kidnappers thought that Michael was going to die, but they didn’t inflict this type of violence on Barnes. One of the kidnappers threw the knife and told Barnes that it was her lucky day because they weren’t going to kill her, and if she could find the knife, she could probably cut the zip ties and free herself. The kidnappers then drove off without Barnes being able to see anything about the vehicle except knowing it was a white truck.

Barnes was able to find the knife and cut the zip ties around her leg. And when she ran for help, the first person she saw in this remote area happened to be a Kern County sheriff senior deputy on patrol named Steve Williams, who is interviewed in the documentary. Michael was found bound and gagged and severely injured but still alive when other law enforcement officers and medical help arrived. Michael had no known enemies. And without a good description of the kidnappers or their vehicle, the case was at a standstill.

But then, an observant neighbor who lived near the house where the home invasion took place reported to police that she saw suspicious activity at the house on the day that the home invasion took place. The neighbor, whose name is not revealed in the documentary, said that she saw three men, wearing construction gear in a white truck, go behind the house. The men took a ladder to go into the house, but she didn’t see the men come out of the house, and she didn’t see any construction work being done. The neighbor wrote down the truck’s license plate number and gave it to police.

This clue was an extremely lucky break that investgators needed. The license plate was for a truck registered to Kyle Handley, a marijuana dealer who casually knew Michael. Handley and Michael had gone on a high-roller trip to Las Vegas in the past but had lost touch with each other. Handley saw the large amounts of cash that Michael was spending on this Las Vegas trip and assumed that Michael was a millionaire.

Handley told his longtime friend Hossein Nayeri, another low-level marijuana dealer, about Michael’s supposed wealth. Handler, Nayeri and another friend named Ryan Kevorkian then plotted to kidnap Michael to rob him of at least $1 million in cash. Keep in mind that these criminals never actually had proof that Michael had that amount of cash. They just made that assumption.

Unbeknownst to Michael, these kidnappers had Michael under secret surveillance for several weeks, by using GPS tracking on Michael’s car and by installing hidden cameras on the street outside Michael’s house. The GPS tracked Michael driving to the Mohave Desert on multiple occasions, but these trips to the desert were actually to look at land for a potential real-estate deal—not to bury cash, like the kidnappers wrongly assumed. After Handley’s house was searched with a warrant, investigators found out about this surveillance and so much more, including the fact that Nayeri was the mastermind and chief planner for this home invasion, kidnapping and botched robbery.

This review won’t rehash all the details of this case, but it’s enough to say that there were plenty of twists and turns. Nayeri fled to his native Iran after he found out there was a warrant for his arrest. Iran does not extradite people who are wanted for U.S. criminal charges. With the help of Nayeri’s then-wife Cortney Shegerian, police lured him to the Czech Republic, where he was extradited back to the United States on charges of kidnapping, torture and aggravated mayhem. Nayeri was arrested on November 7, 2013.

Shegerian admitted that she knew about the robbery plans in advance but she claims that she didn’t know that anyone was going to be harmed. In exchange for not being arrested as an accomplice, Shegerian agreed to cooperate with investigators in providing evidence and getting Nayeri arrested. At the time all of this was going on, Shegerian had graduated from law school and had plans to be an attorney.

In a 2019 interview with “20/20” that is shown in this documentary, Shegerian claims that she was an abused wife who was brainwashed, manipulated and threatened by Nayeri, who is seven years older than she is. The former couple began dating when she was 16, and they got married in 2010, when she was 24. Her parents did not approve of Nayeri. Shegerian says that Nayeri kept her estranged and isolated from her family.

“I thought I loved him,” Shegerian says in the interview about Nayeri, whom she describes as cruel and sadistic but also very charismatic and persuasive. She currently works as an employment attorney and is a partner in a law firm in Los Angeles County. After her divorce from Nayeri, she married another man in 2018.

Even while in jail awaiting his trial, Nayeri wanted to evade the charges. On January 22, 2016, 37-year-old Nayeri and two other inmates—20-year-old Jonathan Tieu and 43-year-old Bac Duong—escaped from Orange County Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana, California. The jailbreak inmates filmed themselves escaping. Some of this footage is in the documentary. The three prison escapees were all apprehended a week later in California.

Nayeri was convicted and sentenced in 2019. His accomplices Handley and Kevorkian also received prison sentences. Kevorkian’s ex-wife Naomi Rhodus was charged as an accessory after the fact. All of their courtroom sentences won’t be revealed in this review, in case people want to find out by watching this documentary or by looking at other news reports about this case. “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” doesn’t mention that in March 2023, Nayeri received an additional two years and eight months to his prison sentence because of his 2016 escape from jail.

What these four criminals have in common (besides this notorious case) is that they all knew each other from when they were students at Clovis West High School in Clovis, California, which is in Fresno County, about 275 miles north of Newport Beach. “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” interviews two people who knew Nayeri in high school, where he was on the wrestling team: his former wrestling teammate Paris Ruiz and former Clovis West High School head wrestling coach Brad Zimmer. They both describe Nayeri as being nice, intelligent and well-spoken in high school.

Ruiz and Zimmer say that Nayeri was an Iranian immigrant who was somewhat fanatical about wrestling because Nayeri said wrestling was a massive sport in Iran. They both say that Nayeri told people that his father was a doctor who lived for a while with his wife and children in the United States, but then the father moved back to Iran for reasons that Nayeri did not disclose to many people. Ruiz and Zimmer say that they rarely saw Nayeri’s mother.

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” also delves a little into Nayeri’s past as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp Pendleton in California’s San Diego County. He had problems with authority, so his miltary career was short-lived. The documentary interviews his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Tindal, who dated Nayeri in the 2000s. She says that Nayeri went on a “downward spiral” after he caused the death of his best friend in a 2005 car accident where Nayeri was driving under the influence. Nayeri received a suspended sentence and a five-year probation for this crime.

Other people interviewed in the documentary are Heather Brown, former senior district attorney of Orange County, California; Ryan Peters, the former Newport Police Department detective who was part of the investigaton of the case; Lewis Rosenblum, who is Shegerian’s former attorney; Nayeri’s former defense attorneys Salvatore Ciulla and Martina Teinert; Los Angeles Times reporter Anh Do; and ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman. In 2019, Gutman’s interviewed Nayeri (before he went on trial) in the “20/20” episode about this case. Excerpts from that inteview are in the documentary.

Murphy describes Nayeri as a “psychopath” and is very open about his disgust for this convicted criminal. Gutman looks back on his interview with Nayeri and says he knew that Nayeri was trying to manipulate him the entire time. As an example of how charming Nayeri could be, his former defense attorney Teinert says she never saw the cruel side to him that many other people described. However, she tells a story about how after Nayeri complained about the lunch food in jail, she made a sandwich at home that she was going to give to him, and her husband pointed out that Nayeri was manipulating her.

“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” has the usual true crime documentary use of dramatic music and heightened editing to create suspense in telling the story. But even over three episodes and using a lot of previously filmed footage, this docuseries still comes across as incomplete. There is so much emphasis put on Nayeri, the documentary gives almost no information about his accomplices. For example, there’s no mention of background information for Nayeri’s accomplices, what led these accomplices to a life of crime, and what their arrests were like.

It’s made very clear that Nayeri was the mastermind. However, he didn’t commit these crimes by himself. It’s an absolute failure of this documentary not to look at the entire story and not fully acknowledge that accomplices and enablers were a big part of this case too. After a while, “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” looks like “The Hossein Nayeri Show,” and that emphasis is just too tacky to take.

Hulu premiered “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” on February 4, 2025.