The views and opinions expressed in Cold and Missing are exclusively those of the hosts. All parties mentioned are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Cold and Missing also contains adult themes and languages. Listener discretion is advised. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin-Sulkowski. And I'm your co-host, Eli Sulkowski. And this is Cold and Missing, where we cover cold cases and missing person cases. Hello everyone and welcome back to Cold and Missing.
I'm your host, Ali. And it will just be me this week. If you are following our Instagram account, you know that last week I got really sick. Thank you so much for all the kind comments and support and just understanding that life happens and you know, I had to take care of myself and my body and just kind of rest last week and I wouldn't have been able to really speak on the podcast at all. So I really appreciate your patience and hanging in there with us.
It will just be me coming to you this week. Eli caught what I have and so now he is sick. So we're just passing it around here at the Sulkowski household. So he should be back joining us next week. But until then, I wanted to bring you a new episode. We had some wonderful reviews come in too, which was such a boost for my spirit. So thank you for the kind reviews. I know we are being listened to in road trips right now that people are doing, which is so cool.
So thank you for letting us kind of be a part of your trip, part of your adventure. As I'm recording this, we are entering our third year of Cold and Missing. And in that time, we've done so much together. We've covered so many cases. I'm really excited to see what the third year of Cold and Missing will bring. And thank you for being here. If you've been with us from the beginning, thank you. If you just found us recently, thank you. It all matters. It's all the same.
So thank you for being here. You found it at exactly the right time. All that being said, I think we should just go ahead and jump into this week's case. So we are on a cold case this week. We are going to be covering the cold case of Hasan Rahman. This takes place in November of 2017 in Wichita, Kansas. But first, a little bit about Hasan. Hasan is 26 years old in 2017. He had moved to the United States from Bangladesh in 2011 as an international student.
He was studying mechanical and aerospace engineering at Wichita State. He was considered a model citizen and community member. He would often help other international students adjust to the USA. His friend says, quote, everyone used to know him because of all the possible things he could do for a new student. Anyone who needed help or any community program, he made people happy, end quote. Hasan was also married to a woman named April at this time.
He acted like a father figure to her children from previous relationships. However, his mother, father, and sister were back home in Bangladesh. When Hasan was not in school, he had several part-time jobs, but one of them was delivering pizza with Pizza Hut. Overall, Hafsan was a role model for his community and for other students. He would often encourage them when they felt like their courses were impossible. He believed in everyone, and he was such a source of support.
And now, a timeline of events. On Saturday, November 25, 2017, Hasan is scheduled to work the busy Saturday night at Pizza Hut. Not only was it a Saturday night, but it was also the Saturday after Thanksgiving. So people are ready to order some pizza. Hasan got assigned two deliveries on Saturday night. One is at the 1100 block and the other at the 1300 block of North Williamsburg. This is in the northeast part of Wichita. Hasan grabs the pizzas and heads out for delivery.
It's unclear exactly how much time passes, but before long, Hasan's coworkers become concerned that he hasn't returned from his delivery. After some time, a few of his coworkers go out looking for him, maybe to see if he ran into car trouble or got into an accident. They head to his last two deliveries on North Williamsburg. At the last address, the coworkers find some property belonging to Pizza Hut at this location.
It's unclear exactly what the item is, but his coworkers are sure that Hasan wouldn't have forgotten this item. They pick it up and bring it back to Pizza Hut. Once his coworkers are back at the store, they call police and tell them that it's strange for Hasan to be gone this long and it was not like him at all to just leave halfway through a shift without telling anyone. Police put out a bee on the lookout for Hasan and his car.
The next morning, Sunday, November 26th, a woman in a neighborhood three miles south of Hasan's last delivery is out walking. She's on high alert as there was a double murder in the neighborhood the night before. A mother, Huong Pham, and her 23-year-old son, Cody Ha, had been murdered the night before. The woman walking was only three blocks from where the double homicide took place, which is still unsolved. When at around 11.45 a.m., she notices a car that is parked half-hazardly on the road.
She decided to check the vehicle out, and when she pops the trunk, she finds Hasan's body. She calls the police. When they arrive, they confirm what the horrified woman already knows, that Hasan is dead in the trunk of his own car. He had been shot and placed in the trunk. Police don't say if he was shot before or after he was placed in the trunk. Pretty quickly, police at the scene are able to put together that Hasan and his vehicle were reported missing the night before.
Police start retracing Hasan's movements. They interview his last two pizza deliveries, but police do not think that either of those orders were involved in the crime. Based off of the items his coworker found the night before, they believe that he was attacked near the site of his last delivery. Then he and his car were moved three miles south of the last delivery spot. Those that knew Hasan are shocked by the murder.
His community said that he had no enemies and no reason that anyone would want to hurt him, let alone kill him. A few days after the murder, the date isn't clear, but the pizza delivery topper for Hasan's car was found abandoned three miles south of where the body and car were found.
So just to paint a picture of everything in this case, Wichita is laid out on an XY graph, it looks like, when you look at a map of it, with the X axis being US Route 400 or Kellogg Avenue and the Y axis being Highway 81 or Interstate 35. Hasan's deliveries were in the northeast quadrant. His body was found three miles south, but still in that same quadrant. And then the pizza topper was found three miles south of that, again in that same northeast quadrant.
To me, it appears that whoever is responsible for the crime was headed south to Kellogg Avenue, which would have taken them out of town or connect them to the rest of Wichita very quickly. As police process the car, they are able to determine that nothing is missing from the car or from Hasan. This baffles police as they thought robbery would be a motive in the murder.
Lieutenant Todd O'Giles says, quote, we're looking at other pizza delivery robberies because this was out of the norm from what we usually have. Usually those are handled in a different way. They're handled by youngsters who actually call in the pizza delivery and they take the pizza in cash. This was not one of those. This is out of the ordinary and strange. We're looking at every angle of what could have happened to why this occurred. End quote.
A week after Hasan had been murdered in December of 2017, the Wichita Bangladeshi Association raises funds to try to send Hasan's body back home to Bangladesh to his mother and father and friends and family hold a memorial service for him. Suvesa Shakbordi spoke at the memorial service and said, quote, he has no enemies. I have no idea who would do something like this, but I hope whoever it is will be brought to justice. He was my best friend. I can't imagine life without him.
He was so close to his dream and it's sad to see it taken away from him. End quote. April is reeling from the death of her husband. She says, quote, it's like a nightmare that you can't wake up from and you know I still have some mornings I wake up and there are a couple seconds where I think he's still there and then I realize he's not and realize that this is real. End quote.
The next week, still in December of 2017, it's been two weeks since Hasan's murder, Pizza Hut offers a $10,000 reward for information leading to arrest in Hasan's murder. As 2017 ends and investigators enter 2018, they start to wonder if Hasan's murder is connected with the double homicide of Huong Fam and her son, Cody Ha. This happened just three blocks away from where Hasan's car was found. In this case, they were also shot.
The homeowners association of the neighborhood meet with police as they're on edge after their quiet neighborhood has three murder victims in the same day. Police tell them that they are leaning towards that they are related. There isn't much detail surrounding Huong and Cody's case. What we do know is that Cody, who was 23 years old in 2017, was playing a game online with his friends. They could all hear each other, but they couldn't see each other.
Cody's friends were located in Texas and Canada. The friends who were playing with Cody said that he went to go answer the door when they heard two gunshots very loudly over the headset. However, they were surprised and they weren't sure if what they heard was exactly gunshots, so they try to call Cody's phone and they can just hear it ring through the headset. And about an hour later, they could hear Cody's sister find her brother and mother dead in her mother's bedroom.
According to one of the friends, quote, she was panicking. She was on the phone. She said she didn't want to touch them. She said she didn't feel safe, end quote. In 2019, so it's been two years since Hasan's murder and his wife April still wants answers. She says, quote, I know somebody has to know something. Somebody saw something, heard something, end quote. April tries to keep the memory of Hasan alive for her children, but the photos are painful reminders that there won't be any new ones.
That was the last update that I could find. So that is really all we know about the murder of Hasan Rahman. And for that matter, it's all we know about Huong Pham, and Cody Ha. So if you know anything about those murders, please call Wichita Detectives at 316-268-4407. So that is the case of Hasan Rahman. Just to speak kind of candidly about this case, something that I struggled with was I really wanted to do Hasan's case as a full episode and then do Huong and Cody's case as their own.
But unfortunately, there's just not that much information about Huong and Cody's case. It's really just what I read in here. And police have never officially linked Hasan and Huong and Cody's case. They did mention they're leaning towards it, but they've never officially connected it.
So for me, just kind of reading in between those lines, we know all three of them were shot and for police to be leaning towards them being connected, I would think that the caliber would have to be pretty similar between the three. If it had been completely different guns, different calibers, then maybe they wouldn't be so open about saying that they could possibly be related to each other.
I also wonder if Hasan and Cody, since they were similar in age, if they had any overlap of community or if they had ever ran into each other, if there's any links between Hasan, Huong, and Cody. Was there community overlap? Was there a place frequented by both of them where maybe they knew somebody who worked there? Did their employment ever cross paths? I would wonder if police have been able to establish a connection. So that's one question.
If I could sit down with police and get anything answered, I would want to know more about this possible connection. But kind of shifting the focus back to Hasan's case, one thing that stood out to me was when his coworkers went to look for him, they found what's described as property belonging to Pizza Hut, which is an interesting way to describe an item found. So to me, I would think that this is maybe that pizza bag.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I've worked in some quick service places like this in my life. And our uniforms, we don't give those back when we're done. Maybe it could be a hat too. Sometimes the hats are communal property of Pizza Hut in this case. But the places I've worked, whenever you quit, you kept the hat. You didn't have to give the hat and the shirt back that you've been working in.
So outside of those items, thinking about what a pizza delivery guy has with them, that bag that they use to keep the pizza hut, I think that could be potentially what was left behind because it would be strange for Hasan to just leave that somewhere, to not bring it back to the store, not put it in his car immediately. And that would remain Pizza Hut's property and something that maybe his coworkers would grab and take back.
Police have said they don't believe that any of the deliveries that night were connected with the crime. But I would be curious as to what that last pizza delivery said. Did they hear anything? Had they seen anything that night, any strange cars? Had a car pulled up into the driveway and then backed out and turned around that night? I would be curious as to what was said from that last delivery spot where police do think that Hasan was attacked shortly after the delivery.
You would think that maybe something was heard. I feel like if this happened today, that house would likely have a ring camera, but I don't think that was there in 2017. There's no mention of that. But still, I would be curious if police did look for ring cameras just in the neighborhood to see if it caught anything strange. Because this is a strange case, as police said. Nothing was taken. So robbery does not appear to be a motive.
I'm guessing that all of the money that Hasan had on him when he left the Pizza Hut was still there and his wallet was there. Police didn't mention any of those things missing. So very strange blitz attack. For what reason? What's the motive here? Also, it's curious to me why the topper was removed from the car. I don't understand why that was done. If you wanted to just take it off, they're typically just magnets, especially the neurons. They're just strong magnets that sit on top of the car.
So even if they wanted to take it off so the car wasn't as noticeable or recognizable, you see a Pizza Hut delivery driver in your neighborhood, sure, that's fine. But then you see that car still parked in the same way three hours later. It might stand out to you a little bit more if it didn't have that topper on it. So, yeah, I just wonder if that's the reason it was taken, why it wasn't just left with the car, just throw it inside, throw it on the floorboards.
Yeah, the topper is curious, but it does kind of show the movements from the last delivery to where the car was found to where the topper was found. It does show that steady south movement towards those major roads. And also since the woman who found Hasan's body, since she was able to pop the trunk, I think to me that says that the car was unlocked for her to get in and be able to pop it or the keys were left outside or in the vehicle. They were accessible somehow.
So I would just be curious if I could sit down and know everything about this case, like where the keys found. Since police said nothing was taken, does that mean the keys were left with the car as well or were those taken? Is that something that possibly could link back to Hasan and the murder? There's just a lot of questions in this case, and I think the big one is motive. Not that robbery should ever be a reason to kill anyone.
You shouldn't even be robbing people to begin with, in my opinion. But it does give you the story of like, oh, this happens because of X. But when you take that out of the equation, it's like this was just a random horrific blitz attack. Hasan had no enemies, no personal vendettas. Nobody wanted to hurt him, according to everybody that knew him. So why Hasan? Why this night? Was it an opportunity? Wrong place, wrong time?
If he delivered the pizzas in a different order, would that have changed anything? It's really puzzling and it's extraordinarily sad that this hardworking, smart young man was so senselessly murdered. I really hope that for the future of this case that we're able to get justice for Hasan and for his community, this deeply affected the Bangladeshi community in Wichita. And I imagine it scared a lot of folks too, especially those international students.
He was really like a welcoming figure and it was said that he would have students over to his house for a nice home cooked meal to help them feel more at home. They're thousands of miles away and probably experiencing a bit of culture shock. And he was like this rock that was able to steady them and just show them that like, yes, you can do this. You can adapt. You can learn. You're going to pass your courses, but you can still have a strong connection to community and your culture.
And he was that person for so many, like so many students talked about how important he was in their academic career. And it's really unfair that he didn't get to realize his dream fully. Like his best friend said, he was so close to his dream and to have it snatched away so violently, so senselessly is tragedy. It's tragic. I do think that this case is solvable. I would imagine that there was, you know, DNA swabs, fingerprinting of the car, fingerprinting of the topper.
I want to believe that all of those things were done and they really treated the car as a crime scene immediately since it was. And you know, eventually we'll be able to track down who did this, be it through DNA. I feel like every single week I'm seeing more and more cold cases, old cold cases closed because of DNA evidence that they're able to do through, you know, the genetic genealogy and figuring out family trees and narrowing it down to just a few people.
So I really feel that that's how this case will be solved is kind of through that method. But it wasn't that long ago. And you know, it's kind of a notable time. It's, you know, it's the Saturday after Black Friday, 2017, like there's there's a lot of like notable things. Like if you're visiting family, like for Thanksgiving, you're like, oh, yeah, I was there. So hopefully if somebody remembers something that they saw, that they heard, I hope that they come forward with that information.
And the same in Huong and Cody's case, that they're able to see justice and get some more coverage on the case. But again, if you know anything about the murder of Hasan Rahmsn, Huong Pham or Cody Ha, please call Wichita Detectives at 316-268-4407. And we'll have pictures of Hasan, Huong and Cody up on our Instagram and our website. So if you're not following us, please follow us at Cold and Missing on Instagram will pop right up. And you can stay up to date.
So if something happens to where we're not going to be able to get an episode out that week, then that's where we'll kind of update you and have that information. So please follow us there. I always post. So if you don't see the episode drop, the next place you should go is Instagram. And we'll have transcripts of this episode and others on our website www.coldandmissing.com. So if you or someone you love is hard of hearing, you can find the transcripts there.
And I apologize, my voice is starting to go. But you know, when you're sick and then you talk for a long time, your voice isn't quite up for it yet. But the last thing I'll just say before we go, if you have a second, if you can rate and review us on Apple podcasts or on our website www.coldandmissing.com, it's so helpful. It's so encouraging.
It's really wonderful to get your feedback and to hear from you and to start engaging in that way with the community that we're building here at Cold and Missing. I appreciate you so much for being here. It's truly an honor to be a part of your week and to be part of your routine, whether you listen during your commute or during your workout or while you're cleaning or cooking or whatever it is. It's an honor to like share time with you and space with you. And to bring these cases to you.
It's an honor to tell these stories. I wish I didn't have to. I wish there were no cold cases, no missing people, but since there are, it's an honor to spend time with them and to research them and to be with them in this way. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of Cold and Missing. I'm your host, Allie. Have a good week and stay safe, y'all.