Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Previously on Serial... He left his cell phone in the car with me. Told me he'd call me. Okay, now at this point, you know why he's leaving the car with you? Yes. And why is that? Because he said he was going to kill Heddy. I definitely understand that someone could look at this and say, oh man, you know, he must be lying. It's so coincidental. He told me to speak with Jay, and I was like, okay, because Jay wanted to say hi. So I said hi to Jay, and that's all I can really recall.
This is a Global Kill Link prepaid call from... Adnan Sayed.
An inmate at a Maryland correctional facility. This call will be recorded and monitored. From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. And this, episode 12, is the final week, final episode of season one of this podcast.
It's been a year since I first contacted Adnan, and I'm still talking to him regularly. I'm still asking him the basics. Still thinking, I don't know, that he'll remember something, or maybe he'll just get so frustrated with me that he'll crack. I still want to know what you were doing that afternoon. I want to know who had your phone, and I want to know what you were doing that afternoon. No, I don't remember anything more. This is from Saturday night, just this past Saturday. I mean, we're down to the wire here. Oh, man.
I mean, do I have an ending? Of course I have an ending. We're going to come to an ending today. Plus a smattering of new information, a review of old information cast under different light, and an ending.
In case you haven't noticed, my thoughts about Adnan's case, about who is lying and why, have not been fixed over the course of this story. Several times I have landed on a decision, I've made up my mind, and stayed there with relief. And then, inevitably, I learn something I didn't know before, and I'm upended. Sometimes the reversal takes a few weeks, sometimes it happens within hours.
And what's been astonishing to me is how the back and forth hasn't let up after all of this time, even into this very week. And I kid you not into this very day that I'm writing this because I'm learning new information all the time. For instance, I talked to Don eight months ago. He told me he did not want to talk to me for this story. And then last week he talked to me for this story. He didn't want me to use tape of his voice or his last name, but he said I could use what he said.
Spoiler here, Don does not appear to know what happened to Hay or why it happened to her or whether Adnan is guilty. But it was interesting to hear what he said he remembered about the day Hay disappeared and about her and about the trial. Here's what he told me. Don said Hay was at his house in a town north of Baltimore City on the night of January 12th, the night before she went missing.
He says she wanted to spend the whole next day with him, too. She wanted him to call Woodlawn High School and pretend to be some authority figure, tell the office Hay couldn't be in school that day. She wanted it to be an excused absence rather than just plain hooky. But he didn't. He says he thought she should go to school. And besides, he told her he had to work the next day at 9 a.m. It was supposed to be his day off from the LensCrafters at the Owings Mills Mall, where they both worked. But Don said he'd arranged to fill in for a friend at the store in Hunt Valley.
Don said he and Hay had made plans to meet up later that night of the 13th, after her work shift ended at 10 p.m. When the cops recovered Hay's car, there was a note inside, with Don's name on it. Hey cutie, sorry I couldn't stay. I have to go to a wrestling match at Randallstown High, but I promise to page you as soon as I get home, okay? Till then, take care and drive safely. Always, Hay.
In a PS on the note, Hay mentions a TV interview that had been taped that day. A local station had done a student-athlete segment on her. So the note was written on the 13th, the day she went missing. This note was one of the reasons I'd initially written to Don way back when. Sorry I couldn't stay is confusing. I didn't understand what she planned to do with the note. Put it on his car, maybe, but his car was so far away in Hunt Valley.
But the notes stumped Don, too. He said he didn't know about it until I sent it to him. And he didn't have a guess as to what her plan was for that afternoon. When Hay went missing, Don was one of the first people the cops called. He says he knew immediately he'd be a suspect. He said, quote, He said he immediately made sure he knew where he was.
Quote, when someone calls you up and tells you, have you seen this person? They went missing. They haven't been seen since school. You automatically retrace everything you did that day. Did I see them? Did I hear from them? Did they page me? Did they call me? Where was I at this time? What was I doing at that time? Yeah, unquote. Maybe you're all noting, as I did, that that wasn't Adnan's stated reaction to getting called by the cops on the 13th.
I'm tempted to make a judgment right here, but I'm going to pull the benefit of the doubt. Because Adnan was 17, he was stoned, he's a different person. But noted, right? Also note, however, there was one similarity in how they reacted to Hay's disappearance. You know how Adnan says he doesn't remember calling Hay after the 13th? Guess who else doesn't remember trying to call Hay after the 13th? Don.
Like everyone else, he said he wondered whether maybe she'd gone to California. She told him her father lived there. He says it's not that he didn't think about what had happened or didn't worry. It's just that he didn't know what to do. Don's alibi was solid. His computer-generated time card said he'd arrived at work at 9.02 a.m. on the 13th, taken lunch from 1.10 to 1.42, clocked out at 6 p.m. But Don's manager at the Hunt Valley store was his mom, so that didn't look great.
Don said he was anxious throughout the investigation. Quote, they never, up until the day they arrested Adnan, I had no idea what was going on, he said. They never said, okay, you're cleared as a suspect. It was left hanging, and until they arrested him, I had no idea. I suspected they might try to say that we were in on it together. I didn't know Jay existed until I started listening to the podcast.
Don had met Adnan once. According to Hayes' diary, it was December 23rd. It was a snowy day, and she'd had a minor car accident on the way into work, and she'd called Adnan to come help her out. They were broken up by this time, but he came to the rescue.
In the parking lot outside LensCrafters, Adnan and Don converged. Hay writes, quote, Don and Adnan took a look at my car and told me not to drive it unanimously. Ah, mommy is going to be so mad, but I swear it's not my fault, unquote.
Don told the cops back then that he and Adnan had a perfectly nice conversation. At trial, he said Adnan said something to him like, okay, well, I just want to make sure you were an okay guy. Don told me the same. Quote, we sat and talked and just as everyone else described him, he was very polite, articulate, just really the typical what you would expect of the ex-boyfriend meeting the new boyfriend, sizing each other up. We joked, we spent a good 10, 15 minutes talking after we checked out the car.
At trial, for whatever reason, this episode is firmly timestamped as having happened in January, after Hay and Don had started dating, though it's clear from the diary it was December 23rd. In any case, Don's testimony at both trials, he's the state's witness, is milquetoast. He just says, yeah, I met him. It was cordial.
which made me wonder why the state even called Don. And according to Don, prosecutor Kevin Urich might have been wondering the same thing. Don said, quote,
Adnan, he just, he was very personable. He was funny. He was everything that I already said. He was somebody that I would have hung out with if I knew him in school, unquote. Don's memory is that Yurik yelled at him after both the first and second trials. Oh, he was irate, Don said. When I say yelling, he was literally yelling about it at me. I ran this by Kevin Yurik, but he said he was not authorized to talk about the case. Don says he loved Hay, that he still loves her. It's not something that goes away, he said.
Even though they only officially dated for 13 days, he says she meant a lot to him. She was totally unshy, he said, confident. She pursued him, he said, for all of December. Whenever she saw him at work, he said she'd ask him when he was going to take her out. Constantly, she asked him. Followed him into the lunchroom on his break, pestered him. He was dating someone else at the time, but then that ended. And so on New Year's Eve, they made their first date for the next day.
He fell for her pretty quickly, he says. Quote,
Don said Hay actually changed him, changed the way he thought about himself. He said he'd come off a couple of bad relationships, girls who had cheated on him. Quote, unquote.
I'm sorry that I'm doing it so late in the game here, but I didn't even know that this existed until Friday. Yeah, that's OK. No, that's OK. That's OK. Here's another guy I just heard from. And speaking to him, all of a sudden I was hearing Jay's perspective, or at least this guy's perspective of Jay's perspective. He was scared. I mean, like terrified.
This guy's name is Josh. He asked that I not use his last name. He said he worked with Jay at Southwest Video, the porn store. Josh was 21 at the time. They weren't close friends, he said, but Josh would give Jay rides and they'd smoke weed together, hang out a little bit. Josh said that on the night Jay was first picked up by the cops, so late at night on February 27th into the morning of the 28th,
Jay called him at home and asked him to come into the store because he didn't want to be alone there. He was that scared. He was, I mean, frightened out of his mind and not of the police. Like they were the secondary fear. I mean, he was afraid to go into jail, but not like he was afraid of Adnan, I guess is how you say his name. I don't know. Adnan. Adnan, that's it.
Josh says Jay actually never told him Adnan's name, but Josh has listened to the podcast, so he knows the name now. But back then, he didn't. He says Jay told him he was afraid that people were after him, people connected to the murderer. Across the street from the video store was a parking lot for the Amtrak commuter trains, and the parking lot was usually empty in the evenings.
Well, that particular night, there was a van in that parking lot, which I'm pretty positive had nobody in it. But Jay was afraid. I mean, like to the he was almost in tears. Yeah. He didn't want to go outside. He didn't even want to look out the door because he really thought the van that was across the street was like people waiting to get him.
But the people you're talking about, like, is it only in retrospect that you're thinking it's like Adnan's people? Or did he say that to you at the time? Oh, no, he said it. He said it was, I guess, Adnan had threatened him. Right, but you're saying you didn't know, he never told you the name of the person. I'm just trying to imagine, is it possible that it was somebody else entirely who he was afraid of?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it could have been. But I mean, whoever he was afraid of is obviously the person that committed the crime. Right. But so I'm saying, did you, did he express to you at the time that this was a person with Pakistani relatives? Yeah. Oh, he did. He said that at the time. Yeah, he definitely said, yeah, he definitely said that it was somebody, the guy was Middle Eastern.
Josh says Jay told him it was the ex-boyfriend who'd killed Hay. It was Josh's impression that Jay had called the cops himself that night because he told Josh the cops were coming to get him, and he seemed anxious that it was taking them so long to get there. Josh says Jay was pacing, checking his watch, that he kept asking him to look outside and see if the van was still there. At trial, Jay testifies that the cops showed up at the video store on their own, that he didn't know they were coming.
In his taped interview with the police that same night, February 28th, Jay doesn't mention a white van or that he's terrified of Adnan's people. But he does tell the cops that he talked to Adnan either yesterday or the day before, and that Adnan was threatening him in a general way. Here's tape from that February 28th interview. Detective Ritz talks first. When was the last conversation you had with Adnan? I think that was yesterday or the day before.
And the most recent conversation you had with him, what was the content of that conversation? I had learned that you guys were looking for me. How did you learn that? A lot of people told me, friends of mine told me that you guys were coming to question me. And so I went to him and I said, you know, why don't you get me wrapped up in? And he just told me to calm down, everything will be okay. Where did this conversation take place? I believe it was in front of my house in this closet.
Other than you saying, you know, what the fuck did you do? Why didn't you get me wrapped up in this? What did he say? He just told me, ain't nothing gonna happen. They don't know shit. And just stay cool. Is there anything else said during that conversation? He told me that he knew somebody. I mean, I used to be involved in a lot of illegal activity. And people on the West Side, they told me that... The gist of what he told me was that he knew the West Side hitman. So, I mean, it wasn't...
Okay, so the West Side Hitman? It's so strange. I find Josh's version of Jay's fear so much more believable than Jay's version of Jay's fear.
Which makes me wonder if it's all just in the delivery. When Jay first told Josh weeks before that he knew something about the missing girl who was all over the news, Josh says he didn't believe him. Yeah, I said something about, you know, like him not being really involved or whatever, you know, and then he's like, no, I mean, you don't understand. I helped him bury the body.
And it seemed like he was kind of bragging. And I mean, that's kind of the guy that Jay was. It's not that he bragged about stuff that he did. Sometimes he made up things that he didn't do. And so that's kind of what I thought he was doing. And I was like, why would you say that? Like, why would you tell somebody that you really don't know that well? I guess that's kind of why I didn't believe him. Yeah.
If I had done it, I certainly wouldn't have told me. Right. You know, maybe like my best friend or something like that, but not somebody that you work with at a porn store. The version of the crime that Josh says Jay eventually told him, it's pretty close to the version that Jay's friend Chris told me, too.
That Jay was out somewhere and that Adnan came to him and showed him the body and said something to the effect of, you got to help me. Josh says he can't remember where Jay said he was when this happened, but he is certain the words Best Buy were never attached to the story. Josh went to that Best Buy all the time, and he says he definitely would have remembered that. He said when he heard in the podcast that Chris had mentioned the pool hall thing, that sounded right to him, but he can't say for sure.
Josh says he also had the impression, like Chris, that it had all gone down later in the day, not mid-afternoon. Josh says at first Jay seemed afraid the cops were going to figure out he was involved through fingerprints or DNA or something, but that as time went on, he seemed more and more afraid of the guy who did it, that he was threatening Stephanie. It was, you better keep your mouth shut or else. He says Jay told him the threats were getting more forceful.
To Josh, Jay was so not the type to be involved in a murder. Maybe he tried to act tough, he said, but he wasn't. He said he himself had friends who got in serious fights or who'd been locked up for grand theft auto. But Jay was not in that category at all, he said. He was a nice guy. He just wasn't, he wasn't the type of guy that you, that you really got the sense he could do something real. He wasn't a killer and he wasn't a thug. Mm-hmm.
If anything, he was kind of the opposite. Like, he seemed like he was in way over his head. Yeah. I don't know. I remember feeling bad for him. And was there any point, I mean, I don't mean to sound judgy or something, but, like, was there any point where you're like, well, you should go tell the cops then. If you know who did this, go tell the cops. No, not really. I know that's probably what I should have said, but I didn't really believe him. And, like I said, when it comes to, like,
reputation. You know, on the street, you don't want to be the guy that's like, oh, go snitch. You know, you don't want anybody to see your week and all that stuff. And so I didn't ever say go to the cops because, I mean, that would be like the bitch thing to do.
Josh says what never quite made sense to him, what he never entirely understood, was why Jay would help Adnan bury Hay. Even if I didn't call the cops, I definitely wouldn't, you know, grab a shovel and help him dig a grave. I know. I know. I know. That's what's hard about the story is you just figure, like, there's something that's not computing here. Yeah, no, it definitely never sounded right, which is why I never believed him until the cops actually picked him up.
Josh says he only remembers seeing Jay one more time after that. He thinks maybe Jay came by the store to pick up his check. And when Josh asked him, so what happened? Josh says Jay told him he couldn't talk about it.
In preparation for this episode, Julie and Dana, the producers of this show, went back over everything we had. All the police files, the attorney files, the interviews I've done, the cell records. They did one final sweep just to be sure we'd weighed everything. And because old details can have startling new meaning after a year's worth of research is behind us. They came across a couple of things they wanted me to know.
First and foremost, the Nisha call. I'd ask them, is there any other viable explanation for the Nisha call on a non-cell record? Here's Julie. We had always been under the impression that the Nisha call was a no-way-around-it call. It looks terrible for him. It looks terrible for him. And it's two minutes and 22 seconds. To remind you, the Nisha call is the one that happens at 3.32 p.m. on January 13th. It's that girl Anand had been flirting with who lived near Silver Spring.
And the Nisha call is the one that's always stuck out to me and I think to most people who have looked at Adnan's case closely, because it happens on the afternoon that Hay disappeared at a time when Adnan has said, insisted even, that he was not with his phone, that Jay had his phone while he was in school.
Jay had told the detectives that Adnan had called some girl in Silver Spring that afternoon and briefly put Jay on the phone with her. And that's why the call is so important. Not only does it put Adnan together with his phone in the middle of the afternoon, it puts Adnan together with Jay in the middle of the afternoon. It corroborates Jay's story.
I've always had some suspicion about this call because Nisha said to the cops and at trial that there was a day when Anand put his friend Jay on the phone. But Nisha has consistently said it happened toward the evening at the video store where they worked. Jay didn't have the video store job on January 13th. He started that job at the end of the month.
So I never bought the idea that the 13th was the day she talked to Jay. But even so, it didn't look good for Adnan. Because who was calling Nisha in the middle of the afternoon then? Jay didn't know Nisha. So for me, this call has remained one of the pillars of the case against Adnan. That's what Julie means when she says no way around it. But now I think the Nisha call might be moving from the no way around it, this looks bad for Adnan column into, no, I'm not so sure.
Adnan says Nisha's number was programmed into his cell phone. So he's always said to me, maybe the button got pushed accidentally, like a butt dial, and then the answering machine picked up. The problem with that explanation, besides how convenient it sounds for Adnan, is that there was no answering machine on that line. That's what Nisha says at trial. This call shows up not just on the call log, but on Adnan's AT&T bill. He got charged for it.
So this was our quest, or really Dana and Julie's quest, to find out, is it possible this call would have shown up in a nonce bill even if it went unanswered? This proved so elusive. First, we got one answer, then another, then another, then another. AT&T was not helping us. Then finally, Dana and Julie figured out exactly what they needed to answer this question. An AT&T customer service agreement circa 1999.
They found one in a class action lawsuit against AT&T that included as an exhibit the very document we needed. Luckily, that class action lawsuit was filed in New York. So Dana was able to go down to the and that's the photo you sent. Yeah, that's the old records department. It's so awesome. New York.
Supreme Court or something like that. Yeah. It looked like the Mad Hatter's archive room. Totally. Were you the first humanoid who'd come down in like 15 years? Yeah. They were like, what news do you bring? So Dana goes down there, pulls the service agreement, takes pictures of the contract, sends the first picture. The first picture says on the contract, it says we do not bill for unanswered calls. Oh, wow.
Meaning the Nisha call had to have been answered because it shows up on the bill. But there was fine print to the fine print. And when Dana flipped through the contract to the last page, she found a loophole. The loophole says AT&T won't charge for unanswered calls unless the call isn't terminated within a quote, reasonable time.
So if you call someone and it rings and rings and don't hang up within a reasonable time, AT&T will charge you for that call, even if it's unanswered. So what is a reasonable amount of time? Or rather, an unreasonable amount of time?
That loophole actually still exists today, and the unreasonable amount of time today is 30 seconds or longer they'll charge. We saw one contract from 99 that specified 60 seconds or longer. So it stands to reason that two minutes were probably covered. They probably did charge.
The folks at AT&T told us the only reason a contract would have varied back then in '99 was if the state had passed particular legislation to address it. We didn't find anything in the Maryland rules about it. So after all this work, we feel pretty confident that AT&T would have charged for a call that rang and rang for more than two minutes in Maryland in 1999.
So either way, if it's two minutes and 22 seconds, it's probably unreasonable. It's probably unreasonable. That seems unreasonable. It's an unreasonable amount of time to be listening to a phone ring, I got to say, without it being answered. It's an unreasonable amount of work going into trying to figure this out.
I know that's a long and perhaps way too detailed way of explaining it, but all this adds up to something important. It means the Nisha call could conceivably have been a butt dial that no one answered.
It means there isn't only one explanation for the Nisha call. There are alternative scenarios. It could be that Adnan called Nisha, or it could be that Jay was with somebody else who called Nisha, or maybe Jay or someone else called Nisha by accident, a butt dial, and no one was ever the wiser because no one ever picked up.
And if there are alternative scenarios, then that means the list of things we know, actually definitively know, facts we can show about the evidence against Adnan, that list just got shorter. In a way, the only hard evidence in the case against Adnan is his cell phone record for January 13th. That's what the cops and prosecutors used to corroborate Jay's statements.
So Dana and Julie looked at that same record all over again, the call log and the cell tower map, teased it all apart to see if they could figure out what happened, to figure out if there was anything else I could know about what Jane and Nan were doing that day.
We've talked about the call log a lot already. We already knew it didn't match Jay's explanations of where they went and when. But when Julie looked again, she realized when she tried to assign the calls some semblance of a narrative, her picture of the day crumbled even more. Instead of answering any of her questions, the call log raised bigger ones, such as, was everyone lying about that day?
My original question going into this whole endeavor, this whole story, was either Jay's lying or Adnan's lying. But what if it's not either/or? What if it's both/and? The call log evidence is screwy right from the beginning. Jay said that when he and Adnan met up that morning, when Adnan drove over to Jay's to give him his car, they'd gone shopping at the mall. Adnan has said various things, but not that they went shopping.
What seems most likely, according to what Adnan told his attorney at the time, is that Adnan hung out with Jay until about 12.45, 1 p.m., and then went back to school.
There's a 1207 call and a 1241 call. The first pings a tower out west in Ellicott City. The next pings a tower back east toward Baltimore City. They're pretty far apart from each other. Here's Julie. Going to Ellicott City and then going into Baltimore City, where the phone is pinging off of like Edmondson Avenue area, which is actually sort of near Baltimore.
drug strips, where Hay's car was dumped, that sort of area of Baltimore. That's not mentioned by Adnan. So I don't remember what we did. I know we didn't go shopping. I'm not really sure.
I feel more concerned and suspicious. I feel suspicious of being like, huh, because I can see where the phone was moving. I know Jay's story about Security Square Mall is not true because of the phone, if they had the phone. But I don't think Adnan's is true either. And can I also add that at...
At one point, Jen says to the detectives that she remembers one of those phone calls she answered and talked to Jay, and Jay had said that he was downtown with Adnan. The prosecutor at trial said, we don't really know what they were doing, but it doesn't matter because Hay was in school at that time, alive. And that's true. But still, the phone record tells us that there's something they're not telling us. Why? And is it related to what happened later?
The next call is the incoming 236 call, the supposed Best Buy call from the phone booth that we're pretty solidly convinced wasn't the come and get me call. I do have something of an update there. We have not found evidence of a phone booth outside the Best Buy on the sidewalk, like Jay draws in his map for the cops. But we have now seen two anecdotal reports that there was a payphone inside the vestibule. We
We haven't been able to verify these reports, but we did get a look at the 1994 architectural plans for that Best Buy. And indeed, on the plans, there's a teeny little rectangle in the vestibule on the left as you walk in labeled payphone. So maybe there was one inside. Anyway, back to the call log.
Julie spent a long time thinking about the 321 call. It opened a whole new mystery for her because it's confusing on about three different levels. It's an outgoing call from a non-cell to Jen's house phone.
Jay and Jen both talk about some call that afternoon that comes into her landline. Someone supposedly looking for Jay. Jen says she remembers Jay getting phone calls while he's at her house. Jay says he remembers getting phone calls while at the house. Both of them also reference a landline call. Jay says, I get a call on the landline and that's when I leave.
Meaning, right, this incoming landline call is Adnan calling in looking for Jay. Why would Adnan be calling you on the landline? The whole point of him giving you the cell phone was so that he could call you on the cell phone. It doesn't make any sense. But there is a 321 call there.
made from the cell phone to Jen's house. Here's the second confusing thing. Jay eventually told the cops the 321 call was a call he made to Jen, asking if she knew whether this guy Patrick was around. Jay was looking for weed from Patrick. Jen, by the way, testified this never would have happened, that Jay would never call her asking about Patrick. But anyway. And here's the third thing, the confusing kicker.
Both Jay and Jen also say Jay was at Jen's house until about 3.45 p.m. that day. That also has always confused me. If Jay is still at Jen's house until 3.45, how is he calling Jen's house at 3.21? Why would he be calling the house that he's sitting in? Unless Adnan has the phone. Unless Jay doesn't have the phone. Unless Jay doesn't have the phone. I'm not saying who has the phone. Right. I have no idea who has the phone. Right.
But it leads me to believe that there is a possibility that Jay doesn't have the phone. So what's the evidence that Jay does have the phone? Jen tells the police that she saw Jay with the phone that afternoon. She has an image of the cell phone in her mind sitting on the coffee table at her house. But at 321, the tower that's pinged isn't the one that covers Jen's house. If Jay doesn't have the phone, though, then who has the phone?
And more to the point, if Jade doesn't have the phone, then what was going on that afternoon? Then I have no idea what was going on. There are discrepancies unresolved like this all throughout the afternoon and evening, right up until the end of the night, when there's a big one. We noticed it right at the beginning, and while Adnan's attorney does bring it up at trial, no one dwells on it too long. But it's odd.
Jen and Jay tell different stories about where she picked him up on the night of the 13th and about where and when they got rid of Jay's clothes and boots. Jen says she picked Jay up at Westview Mall, where she saw Adnan too. Jay says that didn't happen. He says she picked him up at his house and that he dumped his clothes that same night, the 13th. The first time he tells it, he says he threw them out in the trash at his own house.
But Jen says she and Jay tossed his clothes in some dumpsters the next day, though there would have been a terrible ice storm happening, maybe. Anyway, pretty different stories. And it hasn't been reconciled. And they actually sort of both kind of dig in on it. Yeah, I know. And commit to it. And somebody's wrong, and I don't believe it's an oversight. But I cannot work my head around what is the...
What is the lie that is minimizing what? Right. What's the utility of which lie? Yeah, what's the utility of which lie? Yeah. You can apply that same question, what's the utility of which lie, to this entire case. There's so much that is murky. All you can do at a certain point is speculate. And believe me, we have.
Dana and Julie and I speculate about all sorts of things. Like crazy, we speculate. Rest assured that in the privacy of our office, we've turned over every possibility, no matter how remote. 99% of what we speculate, I cannot report because, well, we can't back it up. It's speculation. But here's one I can tell you we've recently discussed. We looped and looped all the way back to Motive.
I know I dismissed the motive the state supplied way back in episode two, but we put it back on the table just to see where it took us. Here's what we got. We've always said Adnan was over the breakup. It had been a month already. But just for argument's sake, let's say he wasn't over it. Adnan and Hay had broken up and gotten back together a few times. And when they break up in mid-December, maybe Adnan thinks she'll change her mind again.
They're still friendly. Several people said to me they couldn't tell or didn't even know that Hay and Anon had broken up. Orr said Anon was still referring to her as his girlfriend. Orr said he told them he thought they'd get back together. Don said he never quite knew what the deal was between them. But judging from Hay's diary, by January, her romantic feelings are completely absorbed by Don. Remember, their first date is January 1st.
But maybe Anon didn't feel the full force of how she'd moved on until they got back to school after Christmas break. Here's what Dana realized recently. That first week of school in 99, Anon was absent two out of four days, and then Friday was a snow day. So maybe he doesn't get it, that he's really lost hay until that first or second week back at school. Here's Dana. Maybe that's when reality sets in for him, and maybe that's when...
Yeah, maybe that's when the emotions hit him. And so does kind of lose it. And so maybe he does kind of lose it. But who else says this? Not one of Hayes or Adnan's friends whom I spoke to says they saw it like this at the time. And they don't even speculate now that they're adults that maybe it could have been like this. So who are we to put this theory forward? This is the very obvious problem with speculation, especially of the emotional variety. You can't prove it, so you have to drop it.
So where does this leave us? There's no point in trying to come up with a most likely scenario for what happened to Hay. Because you could posit a hundred scenarios, and so what? Bereft of more facts, better facts, even the soberest most likely scenario holds no more water than the most harebrained. In the equation of Adnan's case, all speculation is equally speculative.
So instead of most likely, how about most logical? Dana has always been very logical about Adnan's case. She's the Mr. Spock of our staff. Her thing is, okay, let's say he didn't do it. But if he didn't do it, then my God, that guy is ridiculously unlucky. I'm going to let her lay it out. Adnan has always said it was his idea to loan Jay the car because he wanted Jay to go get Stephanie a birthday present, right? Yeah.
So that's pretty crappy luck that you loaned this guy who ends up pointing the finger at you for the murder, that you loaned him your car and cell phone the day that your ex-girlfriend goes missing. The next thing is that it seems pretty clear to me that Adnan asked Hay for a ride after school because we've got at least two of their friends saying they overheard him ask for a ride from Hay.
And Adnan himself tells the cop that day he asked her for a ride. And in Jay's first interview with the detectives, he says to them, Adnan's plan was to get in his car by telling her that his car was broken down and asking her for a ride.
Then the next piece of bad luck is the Nisha call. I mean, even if the Nisha call could potentially be a butt dial. Right. It's still... In the realm of possibility, maybe it was a butt dial. But what are the chances? Like, that sucks for you that your phone butt dialed a girl that only you know and would call on this day that your ex-girlfriend goes missing that you happen to loan your car and your phone out to the guy who ends up pointing the finger at you. That sucks. Yeah.
And then the last thing that I think really sucks for him, if he's innocent, is that Jay's story and the cell phone records match up from about 6 o'clock to about 8 o'clock, which is when Jay is saying that you are burying the body. And that's the time of the day when you just have no memory of where you were. And you have your dad saying you were at the mosque.
And maybe Bilal, your youth leader. Who never testifies. Who never testifies at the trial, but testifies at the grand jury. He says he saw him after dark at the mosque on the 13th. But you, Adnan, you don't really remember where you were that evening. And that blank spot in your memory, that's the window of time when Jay's story actually does seem to be corroborated by the cell phone records.
Seem to be corroborated, yes, but Jay's statement only roughly matches the Lincoln Park calls and 8 o'clock calls. Really roughly. The geography matches, but not the timing. But I take her point. So I guess it just, in order to make him completely innocent of this, you just have to think, God, that is, like, you had so many terrible coincidences that day. There were so many. You had such bad luck that day, Anon.
A lot of people see it this way. All of us on staff have heard from people who say just so quickly, oh yeah, he's totally guilty. Newsflash, people lie in murder cases on the witness stand. Whoop-de-doo. And we worried. Did we just spend a year applying excessive scrutiny to a perfectly ordinary case? So we called Jim Trainham back up. He's the former homicide detective we hired to review the investigation. And we asked him, is Adnan's case unremarkable?
If we took a magnifying glass to any murder case, would we find similar questions, similar holes, similar inconsistencies? And Tritum said, no. He said most cases, sure, they have some ambiguity, but overall they're fairly clear. This one is a mess, he said. The holes are bigger than they should be. Other people who review cases, lawyers, a forensic psychologist, they told us the same thing. This case is a mess.
While we've been rabbit-holing in our office, back out in the world, those lawyers from the University of Virginia Law School's Innocence Project Clinic have been coming up with their own most logical explanation, which couldn't be more different from Dana's. I haven't reported anything about it up to now, but over the weekend, there was a development of sorts, so now I can tell you.
Deirdre Enright and her students have a motion in the works to test the DNA from Adnan's case that wasn't tested. The per kit, that's the swabs from Hay's body, the material from under her fingernails, the hairs found on her body. In a motion like this, you have to give a viable reason to test this stuff. You have to show how it could potentially exculpate you. And Deirdre's reason is she thinks the DNA might match some other guy. The path to one of these other guys started way back when Dana and I went down to Charlottesville last February.
Mario, one of her students, started looking online for possible signs of a serial killer, basically.
I'd already told him about another strangling of a young woman who was also found in a Baltimore park, different park. And one thing led to another, and he came upon yet another case, a cold case. I stumbled upon a website that categorized all the unsolved murders in Baltimore County, and she was there. Do you remember her name? I know your computer's not open now. Unfortunately, I do not. Anna Lee's... Her last name was Lee. Lee? Anna Lee's Hyang Sook Lee. I believe she was also Korean.
She was 27 when she was killed, strangled in her apartment in Owings Mills. She was found on December 13th, 1999, exactly 11 months after Hay disappeared. I could see why Mario was interested. So will you look into that now? Absolutely. Then, months later, I got a message to call Deirdre. She said she had huge news. Oh, please pick. Deirdre Enright. Hey, it's Sarah. Sarah! Hello?
Her huge news, and this is attorney huge, not necessarily reporter huge, but anyway, the news was that she'd spoken to someone in the Baltimore County Police Department to ask about this unsolved case of Annalise Lee.
So I'm going to tell you quickly because I have to get on this call at 2.30. Okay. But so I called Sergeant Something. Sergeant Something told her that they now had a suspect for this Owings Mills case from 15 years ago. They tested some old DNA and a match came back to this other guy who'd done other crimes, mostly burglaries. He said, my guy was in prison a lot.
And he said he had a really tiny window of being out and about, and he was very active while he was out and about. And so he said during that time that he was out, we linked him to two rapes and a murder.
And the motive in all of them appeared to be burglary, but he always had sex with people. Okay. And he said that he got out and became active for 14 months. His release date was January 1, 1999. Okay.
Oh my God. Right? So what's his name? He wouldn't tell me his name. Oh, for crying out loud. But I'm already, he accidentally referred to him as Ronald. And did he bury his victims? I didn't, he was like, I think he felt like he was telling me too much already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Deirdre later learned this guy's name was Ronald Lee Moore. Ronald Moore is dead now. He killed himself. But it seems like he committed lots of crimes.
He'd been in prison in Baltimore for a while on assault and burglary convictions. And according to a Baltimore Sun article, in 2007, he was supposed to get transferred to a different jail in Anne Arundel County so he could be prosecuted for a different crime. But the Baltimore officials released him by accident. He was arrested about a month later in Louisiana for burglary. They figured out who he was and that he was wanted back in Maryland. ♪
Anyhow, this is the guy the Baltimore County cops linked through DNA to the death of Annalise in Owings Mills. And this is the guy that Deirdre and her gang are naming in their motion to test the DNA from Adnan's case. It's a long shot that there'll be anything testable in those samples. And it's a long shot that if there is, it'll match anyone but Hay. And most long shoddy of all, that if it does match someone else, that someone else happens to be Ronald Lee Moore.
When I say that to Deirdre, though, as I have several times, she always shoots right back. What makes more sense? That little 17-year-old never been in trouble with the law Adnan killed someone? Or that Ronald Moore, rapist and murderer who got out of prison 13 days before Hay disappeared, that he killed someone? Right, I know, I say. But what about Jay? He knew where Hay's car was. He had to be involved. How does that account for Jay?
And Deirdre says, big picture, Sarah, big picture. Meanwhile, Adnan's post-conviction petition is still alive in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. His attorney, Justin Brown, is working on a way to bring the issue of the Asia alibi before the court again. I spoke to Asia recently. She told me she stands by her memories of seeing Adnan that January afternoon in the public library, and she stands by her affidavit.
For post-conviction purposes, Asia's alibi is still a big deal. It sure would seem to point in effective assistance of counsel. It's funny, though, knowing what we now know about the state's garbled timeline and that Hay was maybe still alive at 2:45 or 3:00 p.m., Asia's library alibi doesn't pack the same punch for me as it once did. Deirdre and Justin Brown have been giving Adnan conflicting advice lately about how best to proceed, what to push for, and when.
But on Saturday, Adnan finally gave Deirdre the go-ahead to file the motion to test the DNA. It was an emotional decision for him. If there's anything about my case, man, I want to know it. You know what I'm saying? No one has to—I don't want anyone to be able to say, well, he didn't want to know, so boom, we went and found out. No, I want to know. And so I called Ms. Deirdre. I said, look, Ms. Deirdre, I want to do the testing. Man, I'm the one that asked for this. You guys had it sitting for 16 years, and you never tested it.
It's impossible, man, for it to be sitting there for 16 years and you guys never tested it. So that's fine. So I want to test it. I want to see what it's been. There's nothing about my case that I'm afraid of.
So back to Adnan's question. Do I have an ending? I was just thinking the other day, I said, I'm pretty sure she probably has people telling her, like, look, you know, you know, this case, he's probably guilty. You're going crazy trying to find out that he's innocent, which you're not going to find because he's guilty. I mean, I don't think you'll ever have a 100% or, you know what I'm saying, any type of certainty about it. The only person in the whole world who can have that is me. And I mean, for what it's worth, whoever did it, you know, you'll never have that. I don't think you will.
Adnan told me all he wanted was to take the narrative back from the prosecution, just as an exercise, so people could see his case without makeup on, look at it in the eye up close, and make their own judgments.
He told me he doesn't think I should weigh in. I think you should just go down the middle. I think you shouldn't really take a side. I mean, I mean, it's not, you know, obviously, you know, my decision or whatever, obviously, is yours. But I'm saying if I was to be you, just go down the middle. Hey, you know, obviously, you know how to narrate it. But I check these things out and these things. These are the things that look bad against them. These are the things that, you know, the state doesn't really have an answer for.
You know what I mean? And I think in a way you could even go point for point. And in a sense, you leave it up to the audience to determine. While I appreciate Adnan's blessing to take a powder, I'm not going to. Dana's right to be skeptical. What are the chances one guy got so unlucky that everything lined up against him just so? Because yes, there's a police file full of information, circumstantial information, that looks bad for Adnan. But let's put another file next to that one, side by side.
In that second file, let's put all the other evidence we have linking Anand to the actual crime, the actual killing. What do we have? What do we know? Not what do we think we know. What do we know? If the call log does not back up Jay's story, if the Nisha call is no longer set in stone, then think about it. What do we got for that file? All we're left with is, Jay knew where the car was. That's it.
And that all by itself, that is not a story. It's a beginning, but it's not a story. It's not enough to me to send anyone to prison for life, nevermind a 17 year old kid. Because you, me, the state of Maryland, based on the information we have before us, I don't believe any of us can say what really happened to Hay. As a juror, I vote to acquit Adnan Syed. I have to acquit. Even if in my heart of hearts, I think Adnan killed Hay, I still have to acquit.
That's what the law requires of jurors. But I'm not a juror. So just as a human being walking down the street next week, what do I think? If you ask me to swear that Adnan Syed is innocent, I couldn't do it. I nursed out. I don't like that I do, but I do. I mean, most of the time, I think he didn't do it.
For big reasons, like the utter lack of evidence, but also small reasons. Things he's said to me just off the cuff, or moments when he's cried on the phone and tried to stifle it so I wouldn't hear. And just the bare fact of why on earth would a guilty man agree to let me do this story, unless he was cocky to the point of delusion. I used to think that when Anand's friends told me, I can't say for sure if he's innocent, but the guy I knew, there's no way he could have done this.
I used to think that was a cop-out, a way to avoid asking yourself uncomfortable, disloyal, disheartening questions. But I think I'm there now, too, and not for lack of asking myself those hard questions, but because as much as I want to be sure, I'm not. When Rabia first told me about Adnan's case, certainty, one way or the other, seemed so attainable.
We just needed to get the right documents, spend enough time, talk to the right people, find his alibi. And then I did find Asia, and she was real, and she remembered, and we all thought, how hard could this possibly be? We just have to keep going. And now, more than a year later, I feel like shaking everyone by the shoulders, like an aggravated cop. Don't tell me Adnan's a nice guy. Don't tell me Jay was scared. Don't tell me who might have made some five-second phone call. Just tell me the facts, ma'am.
Because we didn't have them 15 years ago. And we still don't have them now.
Our score is by Mark Phillips, who also mixed the episode. Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn, who provided additional scoring. Special thanks today to Oliver Munday, David O'Dell, Chris Cunningham, Bennett Epstein, David Raphael, and to our respective spouses, Ben Schreier, Jeff Melman, and Rachel Hammerman. Thank you all.
And thanks to WBEZ and to Goli Sheikhol Islami. A huge thank you to the entire staff of This American Life, most especially to Seth Lind, who gave us operations support throughout the entire season. Thank you.
Our website, where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case, SerialPodcast.org. And if you want updates about Season 2, coming sometime in 2015, please sign up for our email newsletter. That's SerialPodcast.org. In the meantime, we hope you'll listen to our other show, This American Life. It's a radio show and a podcast. ThisAmericanLife.org. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.
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