Dr. Shahin Hashtroudi, a 45-year-old psychologist born in Iran and known for work on memory, was shot once in the head and killed in Bethesda, Maryland, on February 24, 1992, after a stranger seeking a car confronted her as she left her office. The attacker took her car from the parking lot and drove off; that same vehicle was later used in a bank robbery in Chantilly, Virginia, linking the theft to a wider pattern of armed thefts and robberies.

Investigators eventually connected the killing to Allan Patterson Newman, a Maryland man with a history of carjackings, bank robberies, and multiple killings. Ballistics linked the handgun Newman carried at arrest to the Hashtroudi shooting. Prosecutors charged him with murder among other crimes; he pleaded guilty, received multiple life sentences and additional time for firearms offenses, and died in custody at Jessup Correctional Institution in 2000. Some later memorial listings give a different death date, February 29, 2000, though most published references place her death in 1992.

If anyone knew Dr. Hashtroudi or has information about her last known movements in Bethesda, please share what can help complete the record.