S01 - Ep. 4: Inconsistencies
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Brought to you by the Capital One Venture Card. Earn unlimited double miles on every purchase every day, and you can use those miles on any travel purchase. Plus, earn unlimited 5x miles on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel. Your next trip is closer than you think with the Venture Card from Capital One. Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Previously on Serial. While you're digging in Lincoln Park to bury your body, you're going to find somebody else's. That's Lincoln Park.

I walked along the edge of the log expecting to find a body real soon. I never saw one. Lincoln Park, I'm like, where is that? Do you even know where it is? Have you ever been there? Went shopping with a friend of mine, an ex-friend of mine, Adnan. You know, it was not abnormal for me to leave school to go do something and then come back. This is a Global Townlink prepaid call from... Adnan Sayed. An inmate at... A Maryland Correctional...

From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. Remember how last time I ended by saying that the detectives had other leads in this case besides Mr. S., the guy who found Hay's body? That they were also starting to look at Adnan? Well, the reason we know that is because of this memo. The memo was dated 12 February 1999. It's from Detective Darrell Massey to Detective Greg McGillivary.

This memo he's talking about is regarding an anonymous call. That's Detective Ritz on the witness stand at trial. He's talking about how they got this anonymous call three days after Hay's body was found. The call came in to Detective Massey, a Baltimore County cop. The caller must have had an accent of some kind because Massey's report describes him as an Asian male, 18 to 21 years old, though it's unclear whether Asian in this case means East Asian like Korean or South Asian like Pakistani.

But anyway, a mystery caller says, look at the ex-boyfriend. The caller further advised that the boyfriend has taken the victim to Lincoln Park on past occasions for sexual encounter. Prior to concluding the phone interview, the caller further stated that the victim broke off their relationship with her boyfriend about a week before she was reported missing.

The caller hangs up. Then, a few minutes later, the same guy calls back and says, "Oh yeah, by the way..." This time, the caller remembered about a year ago, the suspect informed a friend of his, parentheses, "Basr Ali," Asian male, 17, end of parentheses. If he ever hurt his girlfriend, he would drive her car into a lake. This time, the caller mentions a friend of Adnan's, Basr Ali. Actually, the name of this friend is Yasir Ali.

The caller says, Yasser might know something. Hangs up again. The cops can't trace the call. It's out of range. Three days after the anonymous call, the detectives go meet with Yasser Ali at a pizza hut. Yasser says, I didn't make that call. I don't know anything. Their notes from that conversation say, quote, if Adnan wanted to get rid of the car, where would he do so? Ali indicated somewhere in the woods, possibly in Centennial Lake or the Inner Harbor, unquote.

No one has ever gotten to the bottom of who made this anonymous call. The cops didn't figure it out. Anand's attorney didn't figure it out. I've tried to figure it out, too. For a while, I couldn't let it go. Because it seemed to me that whoever made this call, he must be the key to the whole thing. But so far, I only have guesses that I can't responsibly say out loud.

Anyway, the day after the Pizza Hut talk on February 16th, the detectives do some paperwork that will ultimately crack the whole case open for them. They get a subpoena for Adnan's cell phone records. The results of that subpoena include a list of all the calls dialed and received on Adnan's phone on January 13th, the day he disappeared. That list will become arguably the most important piece of paper among all the thousands in this case.

It'll become their map. And they'll follow it, call by call by call, like footprints that end up at Adnan's front door. If you look at that call log from January 13th, there are 34 calls that day. Obviously, the first thing they have to do is figure out who all the phone numbers belong to. Home, cell, and pager numbers. Once they do, they realize, wait a minute, one person was called six times that day, much more often than anyone else.

That person is an 18-year-old girl named Jennifer Pusateri. Jen is not a friend of Adnan's. She's a friend of Jay's. Remember, Jay had Adnan's car that day and his new cell phone. He says, Jen, you gotta swear you won't tell nobody what I'm about to tell you. That's Jen talking to detectives about the night of January 13th. And I was like...

All right. He's like, but I got to tell you, I got to tell somebody I can't, you know? And I was like, all right, what's up, babe? He's like, um, Adnan killed Hay. And that's when I was just like, whoa, what do you mean Adnan killed Hay? Why? What? How? When? Where? You know? If you want to figure out this case with me, now is the time to start paying close attention. Because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing.

This interview with Jen happens on February 27th, 1999. The day before, on the 26th, the cops had gone to find Jen at her house. They explained they'd like her to come downtown to talk. Jen is thoroughly wigged out. She says she can't right now. She's busy maybe later. Then Jen and a friend go see Jay. He's at work at a video store. She tells Jay, the police want to talk to me. What do I do?

At trial, Jen says, quote, So Jen goes downtown to see the cops later that night, and she lies to them, says she doesn't know anything. I've seen the detective's notes from that interview, and they're remarkably uninteresting. But by the time she left that night, Jen thought it was possible she was about to get charged.

At trial, she said the last thing Detective McGillivary said to her that night was, quote, everyone's a suspect and no one's a suspect. So the next day she goes back to the detectives. This time she's got reinforcements. She's got an attorney with her, plus her mom. They turn on a tape recorder. Who, what, where, when, why? When you asked why, what did he say? He said that Adam said that he broke his heart. Did he say anything else? No. When you asked him how, what did he say?

Said that he strangled her. So Jen gives them a motive. Hay broke Adnan's heart. And a method. He strangled her, which of course they already knew. But then Jen's information gets a little muddier. Did you ask him where it happened? He told me... He told me... This is what he told me. He told me... Jay asked me what we should do. He said, do you think we should go to the police now and tell them right now? And I said, I don't know. I said...

What was your involvement? Were you involved? And he said, no. He said, Adnan showed me her body and asked me if I would help him bury her body. And I said, well, what did you do? Did you help him? Do you know where the body is? No, I just took him to some place in the city and I dropped him off. Then I went down, picked him up from a different place in the city, and then I don't remember where he said they went.

I said, how did he do this? You know, when, you know, like, when was this done? And he didn't know when. What did he say? Yeah, he said that he strangled her in Best Buy parking lot. Did he say that? But I don't know how he got to Best Buy parking lot or anything like that.

Jay has told her, I saw the body in the trunk of a car. Adnan asked me to help bury her, but I didn't. I refused. I took him someplace and later picked him up someplace at some chick's house. And he tells her that all this went down at the Best Buy parking lot off Security Boulevard, about a mile from Woodlawn High School.

Jay and Jen were close friends at this time, winter of 99, talking or hanging out almost every day. They'd known each other since elementary school, and they were in the same class at Woodlawn. They'd graduated the year before, in 98. Now Jen was a freshman at UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She was studying biochemistry. She was in a sorority. When Hay disappeared, Jen was on winter break. She was working part-time as a lifeguard. And Jay was also working. One of his jobs was at F&M, a discount store.

Jen said on January 13th, she and Jay had been hanging out earlier in the afternoon at her house after she got home from work. Then Jen says Jay left her house sometime between 3.45 and 4.15. They'd planned to meet later that evening. But then Jen had gotten a message Jay was running late. He wanted her to pick him up in the parking lot of Westview Mall around 8 p.m. She goes there and she sees them together. She sees Jay get out of Anand's car. Anand says hi to her. She says he seems to be acting normal. He says he's not doing well.

Jay gets in her car, and that's when he tells her about the murder. After they'd driven a little ways, Jay mentions shovels, the shovels Adnan had used to dig in the park to bury Hay, that they were Jay's shovels from his house. Jay mentioned to me that he knew where Adnan dumped the shovel, or shovels.

I don't know how many there were, but he mentioned to me that he knew where Adnan put the shovels. Jen tells them she drives Jay back to Westview Mall, to the dumpsters back there, so that Jay can retrieve the shovels and wipe the handles clean in case of fingerprints. After that, Jay came back out of my car, and he was really shaken up. He was completely shaken up. He was like, you have to take me to go see my girlfriend now.

The next day, Jen says she drove Jay to the F&M store, the same one where he worked, so that he could throw out the clothes and boots he was wearing the previous night. He pitched them into a dumpster behind the store. One of the cops points out, for a guy who's telling you he didn't kill anyone and didn't help dispose of a body, he sure is taking a lot of precautions. He clarifies, Jay wasn't along when the body was buried. Jay wasn't along when the body was buried.

In my opinion, no. In my understanding, Jay... He's throwing away all of his clothes and he's wiping fingerprints off his shoulders and things of that nature. Yeah. What do you think, man? Well, it wasn't until today that I thought, I mean, I just don't think that Jay, I don't think that Jay would lie to me, first of all. And like, I don't know. Unless I don't pay Jay a good sum of money, I really don't see Jay helping me.

Finally, the cop asks, were Adnan and Jay best friends? And Jen says, oh no, more like casual acquaintances. Once the detectives talk to Jen, everything happens very fast. That same night, the detectives go get Jay at the video store where he works. It's actually a porn video store, which come trial, Adnan's attorney will stress with relish at every opportunity.

Anyway, the cops bring him down to homicide. By the time they turn on the tape recorder, it's 1.30 in the morning on February 28th. I am willing to answer questions and do not want an attorney at this time. My decision to answer questions... So they get Jay in the interview room, and initially he pulls a Jen. He tells them nothing, more or less. Says he'd walked to the mall that day, gotten his girlfriend a bracelet for her birthday, hung around with Jen's younger brother, talked to Adnan sometime in the afternoon. And then after two pages of notes like that, it says...

All right, I come clean. At least that's what I think it says. The detective's handwriting is messy. So maybe it says a bright eye came down. In any case, around 20 minutes later, they start taping and Jay tells them a whole different story. One that more or less matches Jen's except for one major difference. One major piece of information about this crime that the cops are still missing.

They do not know where Hay's car is. They've been looking all over the place for it. They can't find it. Now, Jay tells them he knows where it is. No problem. Yes, sir.

So that's huge for them. Jay will take them to the car. And he does. Once they're finished at headquarters, they all drive out in the middle of the night to where the car is parked, on a grassy hill behind some row houses off Edmondson Avenue. Within a few hours, they'll have a warrant for Adnan's arrest.

Anand, of course, says Jay's story isn't true. But he says he doesn't know why Jay would lie, either.

He says when he first heard Ritson McGillivary mention Jay's name in connection with his own arrest, he was just confused. And the same guy, McGillivary, he kind of like snorted like, huh, you know what we're talking about. No, I mean, I had no idea. And the reaction that he gave me was like, stop playing dumb.

It's not like there was some secret feud between Jay and Adnan, at least not that I know of. There was no drug deal gone wrong, neither had bad-mouthed the other or stolen the other's girlfriend. To hear Adnan tell it, it sounds like they didn't even know each other very well. When I first asked him what their friendship was like, what Jay was like as a person, Adnan really had to reach. He was like, um, Jay worked? He wasn't that into sports. Okay, I knew he generally kind of listened to, like,

I don't want to say white people music, but he, like, listened to, like, rock and roll, things like that, like heavy metal. I guess, you know, I can't really... I mean, just, you know, just, like...

We wouldn't necessarily be kicking it per se, as Adnan speak for, yes, we smoked weed together, but we weren't close. However, Adnan was close with Stephanie, Jay's girlfriend. Very close.

And Adnan says that's the only thing he can think of now that might have turned Jay against him. Stephanie was smart. She was a top athlete at the school. She was beautiful by any standard. She looked like a model. She came from a family of achievers who did not approve of Jay but had no problem with Adnan. So maybe Stephanie's relationship with Adnan, how affectionate they were with each other, the constant talking on the phone, the prom prince and princess stuff, maybe that was gnawing at Jay.

Christina was Adnan's lawyer. Mm-hmm.

Anand says he didn't feel betrayed by Jay exactly, because again, they weren't good enough friends for betrayal. He says it was more a feeling of injustice. So, but with Jay, it was more so kind of like, I don't know, in my mind, I was kind of like,

Maybe the police are putting him up to this. Maybe somehow he got caught up. For a minute, I thought maybe he tried to claim the reward money and he got caught up in the situation. So in my heart, I kind of like don't know. I don't know. There's a part of me that I don't want to make an accusation against someone else. But it's like, you know, not being sure of it because, you know, obviously it's happened to me.

A year after Adnan was arrested and the case came to trial, Jay walked up to the witness stand. And there was a moment when Adnan muttered something to him. He says he couldn't help himself. The judge called the attorneys up to the bench. Quote, I was just informed by my sheriff that the defendant made a comment to the witness as the witness approached the stand, indicating that he was pathetic, the judge said. I want to advise Mr. Syed that up until now, he has been perfect. Don't spoil it.

Jay, why would that man call you a criminal outlaw?

I'm the criminal element of Woodlawn, he says. Is that a real or perceived reputation? I quote, perceived as like how a student body sees you. You know, I mean, teachers who really know me know that I'm not like that, but, you know, you get a certain reputation. Because of the contacts you have with helping him get his marijuana, he thinks that you're in that element that you'd be willing to assist him and

In her closing argument at trial, Prosecutor Casey Murphy posed this why-him question to the jury about Jay. Think about it, she said. Do you really believe that the defendant, meaning Adnan, could go to one of his upstanding magnet school honor student friends or a friend from the mosque to assist him with this act? Of course not.

He needed someone who behaved a little more dangerously than those people. He needed someone who took risks. The defendant hopes that you will look at Jay and say, I don't believe him. That is why the defendant chose Jay. Because if something went wrong, the defendant could point the finger at Jay.

This idea, this is what Jay is more or less trying to communicate to the cops. But they ask him, if you're actually not the type of guy who knows where to bury a body, then why did you help? Why didn't you go to the police instead? He gives you his car keys. He gives you his cell phone. He tells you a time that he's going to call you that he's going to kill her. And you do absolutely nothing. Help me understand your train of thought of why you do absolutely nothing at that point. Um...

Adnan knows a lot of things about me, like the effect of criminal activities. So, I mean, it wasn't... You're selling marijuana, right?

So if I go to the cops and say, "Hey, this guy's gonna kill her." He'll say, "Well, no, I'm not. He's crazy. But there's this drug dealer and this is where he gets his shit from and this is who he deals with and he's got a rap sheet this long and go get his ass." Well, you've never been arrested but one time. Well, one time. You don't really have a rap sheet. On the records, one time. But I got my ass kicked plenty of times more than that one arrest.

I mean, seriously, man, I've been coming home and people whipped out guns and made me lay in the street in the snow, walking in my own house, just so they can say I was the wrong dude, you know what I mean? Yeah. I didn't... No.

In my mind, I don't think to the presence of let's call the cops. That never crossed my mind. I could be getting shot at and I wouldn't be let's call the cops. Okay, they say. So if you didn't want to go to the police yourself, how about making an anonymous call then? You could have done it right after he shows you the body as you're leaving the Best Buy parking lot. You're driving off the parking lot. Why don't you stop your car and say, call the police and say someone has just committed a murder. There's a body in the trunk of the car.

I just fear. You don't understand how it is. Who are you afraid of? If you make an anonymous phone call, you could give a description of her car. You give them the tag number of the car. Can we stop for a second? Yes. Can you stop that? Well, if you have any questions, you can ask me on tape. I don't understand this amount of questions. Well, I'm trying to understand why you go through all this. First, it was just like shock, and then after that, it...

I was part of it, so I mean, I couldn't run all the cops. I'm trying to understand, Jay, what he has over you or your involvement in this is beyond belief other than you being afraid of the police. Either he has paid you something or... Like I said, he knows that I sold drugs. I mean, that was, I mean, he could get me locked up for that. I mean, I'm sure if I ratted him out for killing Hayes, he wouldn't hesitate to turn me over for selling drugs.

He says, "I just feel bad about it. That's all I got to say."

The cops have a struggle with Jay. I have a struggle with Jay. He's the biggest mystery of this whole case for me. The cops interview him at least four times that I know about. Two of those are on tape. And Jay also tells this story at trial, not once but twice, because the first proceeding ended in a mistrial. So at least, say, six times he's told what happened. And each time, some details shift.

Some of these discrepancies seem small to me and understandable, but some are significant and confounding. And that distance between where a certain detail starts and where it ends up, how far it slides, and why it slides. I've spent untold hours trying to measure that distance, trying to weigh it for clues as to what might actually be true. For example, this is from taped interview number one. The cops are asking about what he and Anand did that morning of the 13th.

Now, here's taped interview number two from March 15th, two weeks later. That's a different mall, Security Square Mall, a couple miles away. I put this one in the category of probably not a big deal, right? Maybe Jay misspoke when he said Westview initially. And there are a bunch of little things like this.

For example, when they're driving around that afternoon after they've ditched Hay's car at the I-70 park and ride. At the first trial, Jay says they both got high in Adnan's car. At the second trial, he says only he smoked. Adnan didn't want to. Then there are more significant changes. But still, you can chalk them up to Jay trying to protect his friends. Or trying to protect himself. In the first taped interview, Jay says they're grabbing some food at a restaurant when Officer Adcock calls Adnan asking if he's seen Hay.

The next time he tells it, he says that when that call comes, they're at a friend's apartment, a friend whose father happens to be a homicide detective in another county. Jay tells the cops he'd actually been to her house three different times that day, but he didn't want to get her in trouble. In the first taped statement, Jay says he refused to help dig a grave for Hay. Two weeks later, he says they both dug the hole. But then there are other changes, bigger changes, where it's harder to judge why the details shift. This one, for instance.

In the first taped interview, Jay says Adnan only told him that same day that he was going to kill Hay. Two weeks later, Jay says that Adnan had started talking about it beforehand, four or five days before. I think I'm going to kill her. Yeah, he said he said that a lot. I conversated with him several occasions. He said that. And he says Adnan enlisted his help with the murder on the 12th, the night before Hay disappeared. In this version, Jay tells Jen about it in advance, too.

But by the time Jay testifies at trial, he goes back to the first version again, that he knew nothing until the day of, and that he didn't really take it seriously. There's so many more of these. There's a whole side trip Adnan and Jay supposedly take that afternoon after Hay's been killed to smoke some weed in Patapsco State Park. That trip disappears by trial, just drops out of the narrative.

And Jay's whereabouts in between the time he drops Adnan back at school at midday and when he meets back up with him later that afternoon. The stories about where he is are so messy and so confusing that I can't even keep the different versions straight. But none of these discrepancies gives me or I think the cops as much pause as this next one. This is the mother of what the cops call Jay's inconsistencies. It's about where Adnan first showed him Hay's body in the trunk of a car.

Here's from taped interview number one. Jay says Adnan called him about 3.45 p.m. saying, come pick me up. A strip is a small outdoor drug market, just like a block where you can buy drugs.

Jay tells the cops that it takes him about 15 or 20 minutes to get to the location on Edmondson. And later, when the cops drive out with Jay to get Hay's car, Jay shows them this spot on Edmondson Avenue. It's just a few blocks from where they ditched Hay's car, he said. Now, listen to what he says on March 15th. And while en route to your house, you received a phone call from Adnan on his cell phone, which is in your possession. And the conversation was what? Um...

That bitch is dead. Come and get me. I'm at Best Buy. Best Buy. Just like Jen had originally told them. This is a problem for the cops, this change. Because it's not something you forget. Where you were when you saw a dead body in the trunk of a car. It's not a slip of the tongue. And it's not clear what the calculation is. Edmondson Avenue versus the Best Buy parking lot. What's the advantage of one place over the other? Why tell this lie?

Maybe he's just saying it because it matches Jen's story. Or did he lie to Jen in the first place and then forget? I have a friend who's worked for a long time in the Baltimore judicial system. She knows a lot of cops. And she reminded me when I was telling her about this case, cops are the most skeptical people in the world. They pretty much assume everyone is lying to them all the time. Ritz and McGillivray aren't newbies. McGillivray came from a law enforcement family. His father had been captain of the homicide unit, in fact.

And Ritz was known in the department and in the state's attorney's office as a skilled and meticulous investigator. So they're not suckers. They're taking careful note of the changes in Jay's stories. It's why they keep going back to him, to clear up the inconsistencies. In the second taped interview, McGillivray confronts Jay, ticking off a list of the main things he's lied to them about. And Jay admits to all the lies. But even so, what struck me is that they don't really press him on any of it.

The most forceful McGillivary gets is in this exchange about the location of the trunk pop. He actually killed her at Nespi. To my knowledge. To your knowledge. Yes. You weren't present for that. No, sir. Why did you lie about the location? I figured there was cameras there or...

Jay is saying, "I figured there were security cameras at Best Buy, so that's why I lied. Because I didn't want to be associated with it." What is he talking about? This is nonsensical.

When he told the Edmondson Avenue version, he was already deeply associated with it. And if there were cameras at Best Buy parking lot, wouldn't that help his story? If they showed Hay's car or Adnan walking around or putting Hay's body in the trunk. But McGillivary lets it go, moves on to another point.

And just so you know, as best as we can tell from workers at the store and from the former landlord, there probably weren't security cameras in the Best Buy parking lot back in 1999. And there's certainly no mention of any security footage in the police reports. At the end of both of Jay's tape statements, the detectives kind of come out with it. Are you telling us the truth right now?

On February 28th, after Jay has told them off-tape that he doesn't know anything about the murder, Ritz points out, your story has completely changed since you first came in this room. All the information that you provided during this interview, has it been the complete truth? It's the best of my knowledge. And then Jay reinforces it. All right, I believe that concludes this interview. I've been as honest as I possibly can remember being truthfully honest. Okay.

But of course, two weeks later, big swaths of his story have changed. So McGillivray asked him again on March 15th. Do you take the interview that you've given us right now? Is that the truth? To the best that I can possibly humanly, at this point in time, remember, that is the truth. Did you kill Hayley? No, sir, I did not. Were you there when Adnan killed Hayley? No, sir, I did not. No, sir, I did not.

I put it to Bill Ritz when I talked to him briefly on the phone. Jay's story kept changing. You were catching the inconsistencies, and he was having to explain them and clean up his story. So what ultimately made you believe him? Ritz said they believed Jay's story because, quote, we were able to investigate and corroborate what he was saying, unquote. So how exactly did they corroborate it? Next time 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. Fact-checking by Karen Fregala-Smith. Our theme music is composed by Nick Thorburn. Scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips, who also mixed our show. Special thanks to Gregory Collins, Rich Orris, and Lou Teddy. Our website, where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case. And you can sign up for our weekly emails, serialpodcast.org.

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