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Previously on Serial.
He kind of just always generally annoyed me because just the constant paging her if she was out. Each time that she ended the relationship or took a break, it was never a thing where I was like pestering her or like going to her house, knocking on the door. He said to me that he was going to tell her his car was broken down and ask her for a ride. This is a Global Tell Link prepaid call from... Adnan Sayed.
An inmate asked for Maryland Correctional Facility. From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. The cops who investigated the murder of Heyman Lee were both experienced Baltimore City detectives. Their names were Ritz and McGillivray. Bill Ritz and Greg McGillivray. And how I wish right now that I could play you tape of their perspective on this case. But they didn't want to be interviewed.
When Bill Ritz finally turned me down after six weeks of back and forth, he said he didn't see the point. The case has been adjudicated, he said. What good would it do? I also spoke on the phone briefly to McGillivary, and he said just a few sentences to me, and one of them was, "'Beyond question, he did it.'" Meaning, Adnan did it. He didn't hem or haw or hesitate. He remembered the case right away. "'Beyond question, he did it.'" How did they arrive at that level of certainty?
Before Hay's body was found, this was a missing person case. She disappeared January 13th. And the investigation starts out a little slowly, which makes sense to me. She's not a small child. She's 18. She's got a car, which is also missing. That first day, the police call around to her friends. They talk to Aisha, to Adnan. Remember, that's when he tells them he's supposed to get a ride from her, but didn't. The next day, they call around to hospitals, hotels, motels. They check the area around the high school parking lot where she was last seen.
You can see from their reports that they immediately hone in on the most time-worn explanation for such disappearances: the boyfriends, current and former. That first day, they call Don, her new guy. They check the area around his house, which is in another county northeast of Baltimore. Over the next two weeks, they keep going back to Don and to Adnan, asking more questions.
They check Don's alibi. He was indeed at work at the LensCrafters store the day Hay went missing, his manager tells them. And they talk to Adnan's track coach to check Adnan's alibi. And it's inconclusive. The coach tells them he can't be sure Adnan practiced that day. They don't take attendance. On February 6th, they do that awful foreboding thing you see on TV sometimes. They take a team of dogs to check the wooded areas and fields around Woodlawn High School. They used Hay's curling iron for a scent.
On February 8th, they make a report saying they're going to check Hay's computer, her AOL account, for clues. And then, on February 9th, their search stops. And a new suspect emerges. Testing 1-2-3. Testing 1-2-3. This is taped from a police interview of the man who finds Hay. He's a little hard to hear on the tape. He's soft-spoken. I'm going to call this man Mr. S. I don't want to use his full name for reasons I promise will become clear.
Mr. S works in the maintenance department at a local school. I think I may have discovered a body in Lincoln Park. "I think I may have discovered a body in Lincoln Park," he says. Before I get to the slightly off-kilter story about how Mr. S discovered this body, just a word here about Lincoln Park. It's actually spelled "Leakin Park," L-E-A-K-I-N. But almost everyone in Baltimore pronounces it "Linkin Park." It's huge, over a thousand acres on the western edge of Baltimore City.
It's got a reputation, and not for the beauty of its woods or its trails or its nature center. What it's known for, sadly, is dead bodies. Mention Lincoln Park to people from Baltimore, as I often did, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get a comment like this. While you're digging in Lincoln Park to bury your body, you're going to find somebody else's. That's Lincoln Park. When I told the rental car guy in West Baltimore I was working on a story about a girl who was found in Lincoln Park, he said, Oh yeah? My uncle was found dead in Lincoln Park.
A macabre website dedicated to Baltimore murders lists 68 bodies found there since 1946, though the list is missing at least seven years of stats, so that number is probably low. A lot of law-abiding Baltimoreans, they don't even really know where Leakin Park is.
Rabia Chowdhury, that family friend of Adnan's who first contacted me about this case, when she was explaining it to me, she said, Yeah, and how is Adnan supposed to get to Lincoln Park so fast? It's like an hour into the city. Lincoln Park is nowhere near the school. Her brother Saad, Adnan's best friend, he didn't know anything about Lincoln Park either. After Adnan had initially got arrested, when I was on the phone with him talking like when he was locked up, I was like,
I'm like, where is that? Do you even know where it is? Have you ever been there? And he's like, I have never been there. I don't even know where it is. So, I mean, living around here, we don't know, but it's somewhere in the inner city.
Where Hay was found is in fact less than three miles from where Saad and Rabia are sitting right now in an office across the street from Woodlawn High School. It's about a seven-minute drive. They have no idea. We wouldn't go there. We'd go to the harbor or somewhere nice, but yeah, there's no reason for us to go there. I'm explaining all this just to say that the simple fact that Hay was found in Lincoln Park, for a lot of people, that alone made it not look innocent. Like, what's a nice boy like you doing in a park like this?
So now, Mr. S., he also told the cops he'd never been to that part of Lincoln Park before, though he did seem to know that people go fishing back there. Here's what he told the cops.
At his job, he'd gotten a work order to shave down a door. But the school didn't have the tool he needed, a plane. He had one at home, though. So during his lunch hour, he said he drove his truck home, got the plane from his basement, and before he left, grabbed some sustenance out of the fridge. I grabbed the beer out of my refrigerator. It was a 20-channel Spudweiser. And I was drinking it on my way back to school when I broke down.
So he's drinking this 22-ounce Budweiser, and he's heading back to work, and his route to the college is through Leakin Park. And suddenly he has to pee badly, he says.
He stops on Franklin Town Road. He's about three miles from work. There's a small pull-off and some concrete barriers, and he walks back in there. Quite a ways, it seems like, for a guy who just has to pee. Later, they'd measure. 127 feet back into the woods is where he goes. This next tape is a little upsetting. And I got back that way. I was urinating. I looked down. I seen something look like hair. Something was covered in dirt.
They're suspicious of Mr. S., who by this time has become a suspect in the case.
This tape was made on February 18th, nine days after Mr. S reported finding the body. They're going over the details carefully because there are parts of his story that are a little weird. One of them is this thing about the fallen tree. 127 feet back into the woods, there was a fallen tree, essentially a 40-foot log, lying more or less parallel to the road. On the other side of the log, if you'd kept going, you'd have gotten to a stream with the unfortunate name of Dead Run.
Hay's body was buried right behind this log on the stream side. If you were standing on the street side of the log, so on the other side, it's not at all obvious that you'd notice her. So his story about why he stopped where he stopped, it doesn't quite seem right. Here's Bill Ritz. When you're walking back to this area where you finally stop, why did you pick that particular area?
Well, as a matter of fact, I didn't pick your hair. I was going to go back further, except for when I seen, you know, the hair. That's when I left that one. You said you were going to actually go back further? Yes. In this part of the tape, you get a sense of how Ritz and McGillivary operate together, or at least what I've gathered from listening to a bunch of these interviews. McGillivary starts out all nonjudgmental. Just tell me your story. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Then Ritz comes in and says something like, "Just help me understand here," and asks some harder questions, exposing weaknesses in the narrative. Then McGillivary will come back in, but now it's a tougher McGillivary, and he's asking direct, sometimes harsh questions that seem like they'd be good at pushing someone off balance. Like this one, sort of out of the blue. Have you ever been inside that girl's car before? Oh, no. No. Never.
Back to the fallen tree. Here Ritz is saying, wait, I thought you told McGillivary you stopped at the log to pee. But now you're saying you were on your way farther back? Stop there, you said before that you were getting ready to urinate. And then that's when you looked in and discovered the hair. Yes. And now you're saying you're going to actually go back further? Before I discovered it. Before you discovered it. Mm-hmm.
Maybe I'm a little bit confused. As you're standing on the south side of the tree, between a tree and the road... This doesn't ever get cleared up, really, and they sort of let it go. But a bunch of things are fishy. The path he takes back into the woods, it doesn't really lead to the log. So why does he end up there? He didn't need to head toward the log to find a hidden spot to pee. There are so many other choices. And if you're walking through brush and brambles, wouldn't you sort of naturally avoid a big log you'd need to step over?
What they're trying to get at is, did you really just stumble on this body? Or were you looking for this body because you already knew where it was? That is a reasonable question. Because Hay's body wasn't just hard to spot. It was nearly impossible to spot. All right, we're in the state's attorney's office. We just got delivered the first box of what they're saying is disclosable under...
whatever public information act that I did. I didn't understand how camouflaged the body was until I saw photos of the crime scene, the way Mr. S. found it, before they removed the body. I was in the state's attorney's office in Baltimore. I went there with a crime reporter from the Baltimore Sun. His name is Justin George. I've been talking to Justin about the story, and he's interested in maybe writing about it too. We opened a packet of photos together. Some of them were awful to see, as you'd imagine.
There was one where you could make out a bit of black hair amid dirt and leaves. How did he notice that? How can you notice the body? I don't understand that either. I mean, it's pretty well covered. Yeah, there's barely anything showing. Wait, are we supposed to be looking at something there? What is that? Is that her? That's all he saw? Yeah, that looks to be part of the body. Yeah, I expected it to be more visible than it is.
Justin and I weren't the only ones who had this reaction. The city's surveyor, a guy named Philip Budemeyer, went out to the burial site to measure the distance from the road. This was before they disinterred her. Here's Budemeyer testifying at trial. When I arrived at the site where the body was, there was a log on the ground approximately 40 feet long. I stepped over the log. I walked along the edge of the log expecting to find a body real soon. I never saw one.
At which time, had I taken one more step, I would have walked on the grave site where the body was. And at that point, there were others on the scene? Yes, ma'am. It was a lot of people there. And at some point, did somebody point out to you the exact location? Yes, ma'am. A detective pointed to the site. I looked down at the ground, and I said, well, I don't see anybody.
It wasn't freshly disturbed. It was not freshly disturbed. No. Yeah, it just blended in with the natural surroundings of the ground. So here's a guy who's looking for the body, who knows where it's supposed to be, who can see that there are a bunch of people standing around it, and still he can't find it. So does it seem reasonable that Mr. S., who apparently wasn't looking for anything except a secluded place to pee, would have discovered it just like that? The other thing that's a little odd is this business of having to pee.
The spot where Mr. S stops is only a few miles from his house, and only a few more miles from his work. Yet he can't wait. Here's Detective Ritz questioning Mr. S again. While you were at home, did you have to urinate or use the bathroom at all? No, I didn't feel like I had to go at the time. So within seven or eight minutes, how much of the 22-ounce beer had you consumed? I think it was almost empty. It was almost empty? And at that seven, eight-minute period, you had to go to the bathroom? It was...
Yes. Is it an urgent need? Yes, it was. Yet Mr. S says he never actually does pee in the woods. Says he ends up waiting until he gets to work. Which, okay, maybe that makes sense. You've had a shock. But why would he walk so far in in the first place if he was just trying to have a quick pee? And why was he studying the ground? Ritz asks him about this. You got out of your vehicle and ventured back into the woods. Um...
When we were at the remeasured, it was actually 127 feet off the roadway. As you're walking along, why are you looking down at the ground? Are you looking every step that you take? I'm going to stumble. So you wouldn't stumble? Uh-huh. 10, 11, 12. On a freezing day back in February of this year, we went out to Leakin Park. We wanted to know whether it was strange that he had gone so far back into the woods. Like, what did 127 feet from the road look like? Yeah.
My producer Dana was with me, and so was Justin George from the Baltimore Sun. Right at the place where Mr. S had entered the woods, right at the road, Justin noticed a sign. What's that? You should look at it. I mean, the sign says a lot. It said, this area patrolled. Dumpers will be prosecuted. But you could barely read it. It's hard to read a sign that's covered in graffiti and pierced with seven bullet holes. And in fact, the cops found 20 cartridge casings in right about this spot when they collected evidence in 1999.
Still, I thought the park itself was quite lovely. Brambles and trees. It's rocky near the stream. It's uneven terrain. It's not hilly, but it's not flat either. It's not nearly as creepy as I imagined it. I think it is at night. At night? Yeah, I think at dusk. I think it is. It's very bleak. 21, 22, 23. We walked in what we figured was about 127 feet. Justin paced it out by the yard. 42. Be right about there.
We actually wander around for a while, trying to find the right spot. Finally, I remember that we have a hand-drawn map of the site from that surveyor, Budemeyer, who testified. 40-foot long, 15-inch log on the ground. Once we get to the right location, it dawns on all of us. 127 feet back doesn't feel all that far if you're looking for privacy. You can still see the cars on the road from where we're standing. So if he's peeing, if he's peeing, yeah. I mean, at least you'd want to come this far.
There's not a lot of foliage, so yeah. There's nothing. Yeah, I mean, there's some dead leaves or whatever, but yeah, you can totally see the cars. So actually, that doesn't seem that weird to me. Suddenly, Mr. S.'s story seems eminently more believable. While we're in the woods, I fill Justin in on the evidence they collected here. Right near the body was a liquor bottle from which they got cellular material and never tested, and a rope that was never tested, as far as I know, as far as I know.
And then up at the road they found a condom and a condom wrapper, but I think the condom was still rolled. Like, I don't think it was a used condom necessarily. And they found a bunch of shell casings. They found bullets and shell casings and stuff from two different guns. And they found blockbuster video, two blockbuster video, like, cases.
But by the body was, I think the only thing that it got right from the area of the body was the liquor bottle and the rope. I know, it sounds like a game of Clue, except for the condom part. As for the liquor bottle, back at the taped interview with Mr. S., detectives Ritz and McGillivray want to find out if this guy could be the source of that liquor bottle.
Did you drink anything else besides beer, they ask? Yeah, he says. What? Whiskey. What kind? Windsor Canadian whiskey. What denomination? Maybe half a pint. Did you ever take a bottle into the car with you also, a half a pint? Would you ever take that in the car? Keep you warm. Sometimes. Keep you warm. Take a nip here and there. Yes. Yes. Okay.
Now Ritz comes in. We've collected evidence, he says, cans and bottles from the crime scene. We're going to test them. He's bluffing here, and they never do test. Are we going to find your DNA on one of those bottles, he asks? Maybe you threw a bottle out the window when you were driving past, coming home from work? If so, you better tell us now. And it's important we know about it because what we're going to do is analyze that and come back six months or a month from now or three weeks from now and say, we have evidence that you were deceptive with us.
that we have DNA proof that you were there. And then you say, oh, Detective Ritz, I forgot. Because I'd gone fishing out there that weekend. I told you people go fishing out there. And now, you know, I told you I drank half a pint and I threw a bottle of them. So like I said, take a minute and think if there are any of the items that I described, whiskey bottles, beer bottles, soda cans, or anything like that where you may have discarded in that general area.
He says, I'm not sure, could have, but I'm not positive, because I know I throw a lot of bottles out the window. Ah. Ritz asks, what bottles? Beer bottles. Whiskey, maybe? It's possible, he says. Anything else? Well, for a while he switched to rum. What rum? Dark rum, Bacardi. Finally, McGillivray can't stand it. He just starts listing different kinds of booze. No gin? No.
Just cheap stuff, yeah. Brandy. Brandy was the answer they were looking for. The bottle they found near Hayes' body was Coronet VSQ Brandy, 200 milliliters. And Mr. S., he blew right past it.
Consider for a moment, if Mr. S was just trying to relieve his bladder in peace that February day, minding his own business, and then he sees this terrible, sad sight, and he does the right thing, tells the cops, shows them where she's buried. Well, how horrible now that they're so suspicious of him, that they're considering that maybe either he did it or he knows who did. How terrifying for Mr. S. After all, he seems like a nice, quiet guy, cooperative, doesn't appear to be a brandy drinker.
Again, I can only go by the reports and files, but my guess is the reason the cops are holding on to Mr. S as a suspect is because Mr. S has a little bit of a record, which isn't necessarily a big deal. But, and here's the part of the story where I'm hoping you'll understand why I'm not using his name, Mr. S is a streaker and not the frat party kind, the freaky kind. ♪
He's got indecent exposure charges, to borrow a phrase from Adnan's defense attorney, under circumstances that Bazar does not even begin to define. Mr. S is arrested May of 94 for running about naked in a residential neighborhood. Two years later, March of 96, he's spotted wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, white sneakers, and nothing else.
The officer writes, The officer chases down Mr. S onto I-95. Mr. S jumps some chain-link fences, the kind with razor wire at the top, ends up in the hospital. It gets worse, or better, depending on whether you enjoy police reports as much as I do.
December 7th of 1998, so barely two months before Mr. S. finds Hay's body, there's this. At around noon, during what I have to imagine is Mr. S.'s lunch break, a lady named Margaret is driving along, and here's the report. Quote,
And this lady, Margaret, is a police officer in uniform. She chases him, but he runs down into the metro stop. Margaret finds his work clothes in a pile and takes them, which means unless Mr. S has a second outfit stashed someplace, he is riding back to work in the altogether.
And there's another twist to this incident. The same day he flashes Margaret, so December 7th, 98, Mr. S. files his own police report. There's been a theft, he says, from his car. Someone's taken his cell phone, his money, his keys, his work clothes. But you and I, we know who has all of it. Officer Margaret. Streaking isn't a violent crime, or necessarily a sexual one. And there's no evidence that Hay was sexually assaulted anyway.
But you can imagine both sets of eyebrows rising on Ritz and McGillivary's faces when they see these reports. It's strange behavior. They never ask Mr. S about it on tape, but I figure he knew they knew, and they knew he knew they knew. The same day they interview him on tape, February 18th, they also give him a polygraph test, which he fails. Deception indicated as a conclusion.
But the tester also said Mr. S seemed to be nervous because apparently he had an important meeting with a realtor that day. His wife is expecting him to pick her up. So the tester recommends a do-over. About a week later, they give him another polygraph, this time with different questions. For instance, do you know if that girl you found died because she was hit with a tire iron? I guess that's a thing. This time, the result is no deception indicated. He passes. And very quickly, Mr. S fades from their view.
Here's what my own thoughts were when I learned about Mr. S. I didn't really think, oh, maybe he did it. Maybe he killed Hay. But I did wonder if maybe he'd heard something about the crime and about where she was buried. Because it did seem a tad unbelievable to me that he spotted her the way he said he did. One theory I had was maybe one of his stepkids or a neighbor had told him about the body. Because maybe they'd heard about it through other kids at school.
And maybe Mr. S., just as a good Samaritan, thought, someone needs to go find this girl and tell the cops. But he doesn't want to say he's heard about it beforehand because he doesn't want to get anyone else in trouble. Mr. S. didn't want to talk to me. After I made several requests, he asked if I'd please leave him alone. Fair enough.
I tried every which way to figure out if he knew, or anyone in his family knew Adnan or Jay or any of the people Jay had told about the murder, and vice versa, whether any of them had ever heard of Mr. S. I found no connections. The closest I got was, bear with me, I found out that Mr. S.'s sister-in-law was a math teacher at Woodlawn back in 1999 when all this happened. So I called her. "'Hey' was her student,' she said. "'An excellent student. Top of the line.'"
But she didn't think Mr. S knew anything about the crime before he found the body. She put her husband on the phone, Mr. S's younger half-brother. And he said, you know what's crazy? I used to live next door to the kid that did it. That was back when Adnan was nine or ten. He said he used to throw the football around with him. And he always seemed like a nice kid. But again, he said he thought his brother stumbled on the body by accident. Then he paused and chuckled and said, I think he was running through the woods streaking. And that's how he found it.
When I told him that apparently he had stopped to take a pee, he said, that's possible too. So maybe Mr. S is telling the truth. After all, why would a guy who's been in trouble repeatedly for indecent exposure seek out a dead girl, thus inevitably inviting more police contact to rain down upon him? Mr. S wasn't the detective's only lead in this case. We know they're also looking at the boyfriends. And while I don't exactly know why their suspicions about Adnan start to percolate,
I have an educated guess. Next week on Serial. Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas and me. Emily Connon is our production and operations manager. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Editing help from Nancy Updike. Fact-checking by Karen Fregala-Smith. Special thanks today to Natasha Lesser, Lou Teddy, Scott Calvert, and Dave Rosenthal and Andy Rosen from The Baltimore Sun.
Our theme music is composed by Nick Thorburn, scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips, who also mixed our show. Our website, where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case, SerialPodcast.org. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. The best relationships are the ones where people feel comfortable being themselves. They're with people who really see someone for who they are.
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