That is a surprise to me, but looking at the recon based on the post mortem picture, I can see more Persian features if I'm looking for them. The recons of her with the fuller face definitely look much more white European. She had a bible open in her room, so she could have been a Persian Christian? It seems most of the Christians in Iran are of Assyrian or Armenian descent, but there are also a fair number of converts from Islam. Apparently the Iranian revolution led some Iranians, both in Iran and abroad, to covert. She also may have had no religion and just thought the bible would be a nice touch.
I know a large number of Iranians fled because of the revolution, but there hasn't been any mention of her having an accent when she checked in. So either she was born in the US, moved to the US when still young, or she was good at faking an American accent. The revolution was 17 years before she died. If she was on the younger end of the age range, she would have been a teenager at that time. On the older end, she would have been in her early 30s at that time.
I wonder if picking a very white sounding name was a deliberate move to misdirect, or if her name was similar to that through adoption, marriage, religion ('Mary' might have been deliberate if she was a Persian Christian) or a combination.