Deep Dive
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Previously on Serial... I just remember he had told my daughter he had seen...
the body of a girl in the trunk of some vehicle. I think the guy's name was maybe Adnan. This is a Global Cell Link prepaid call from Adnan Sayed, an inmate at a Maryland correctional facility. From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.
I heard about this other case of a kid named Justin Wolfe. Actually, Adnan mentioned the case to me kind of in passing. I can't remember how he heard about it. He reads a lot of different stuff in prison. Anyway, we've been talking about the cell records and how they were used in Adnan's case. And Adnan said that in this other case of Justin Wolfe, cell records had also been used against him. But then Justin Wolfe's conviction was overturned in part because of the cell records.
So I looked up this case of Justin Wolf just to see. And on paper, I have to say, it's sort of uncanny how many similarities there are with Adnan's case. All young people, first of all. Justin Wolf was a suburban kid, 18, football player. People thought of him as a good kid, though he was selling pot and hanging around with some tougher types. This next part's different, obviously. He was convicted in the 2001 murder of a drug dealer who was shot nine times. ♪
Justin Wolf was not the shooter. The shooter was a slightly older friend of Wolf's named Owen Barber, who got a deal in exchange for testifying against Justin Wolf. Owen Barber told the cops that Justin Wolf had hired him to kill the drug dealer. Wolf was sentenced to death in Virginia. Wolf's trial attorney later gave up his law license after the bar had initiated disciplinary charges against him for, this is the technical term, being a crappy lawyer. Oh, and there was a witness who was never heard from.
Other than that, totally different case. Anyhow, eventually Owen Barber recanted. He said Justin Wolfe had nothing to do with the murder. He'd only implicated Wolfe to avoid a death sentence for himself. So I read all about this and thought, let me talk to the lawyer who helped figure out the flaws in the state's case against Justin Wolfe. Maybe she has some tips about how we should be looking at the cell records differently in Adnan's case. I looked her up. Her name is Deirdre Enright, and she works at the University of Virginia School of Law.
She runs their Innocence Project Clinic there. They do what innocence projects do. They reinvestigate old cases to see if someone's been wrongfully convicted. I called her and asked how she dealt with the cell records in the Justin Wolf case, and she was kind of so-so on that topic. She gave me a couple of names to try. No great insights, though.
But man, on every other topic, I found her so helpful. She started asking me about Anand's case, and I ended up sending her a summary I'd made of the detective's reports. And then the next time we talked, I asked if she'd mind going to a studio. Hey, you know, I read your synopsis of your, just to jump right into your case. Okay. I have a million questions for you, but it's very, very thin.
Oh, the state's case. Yeah. After I started reading all the all the what you had, I started thinking, so so everybody here is in high school, right? And why is Don doesn't appear to be of interest to anyone?
Don was Hay's new boyfriend. The police considered his alibi ironclad. He was working at LensCrafters all day. But see, this is how it is with Deirdre. A conversation with her never seems to begin exactly. It's already there, ongoing, her thoughts churning, and you just kind of join in when you're ready and hope you can keep up. She is not a small talker or a beater round of bushes. You discuss whatever it is you came to discuss, full on, looking at squarely in the face. She has no time for bullshit.
And not because she's above it or anything, but because she actually has no time. She's one of the busiest and most curious people I've ever met.
When you first talked to me about this case, the first thing I thought is, okay, do we have a jailhouse informant? Do we have a person who got way too sweet of a deal? Or when I read through your police notes, your summary of your police notes, I just kept going back to motive and thinking that's a big black hole for me. I still don't understand why –
you want this girl dead because she broke up with you. People break up with people all the time. And I can't – and I'm a little concerned about racial profiling here. Oh, really? On the part of – in other words, he's a Pakistani Muslim and – Right. And people are saying his dark side and his – there was some notation about he was very controlling. And I thought – I wonder if he was really very controlling. Yeah.
And so there's that. Then a little bit I had – the cell phone thing for us and Justin Wolf is that they used the cell phone records to say – they cabin out the period of time when the shooter is driving to the place where the victim is and shooting him and then coming back.
And so they put those up on a board in the courtroom and say, look at this. He calls him right before he commits the murder and he calls him right after he commits the murder. And then you get everybody's phone records, right? All these kids that are buying pot and smoking pot and selling pot. And everybody's calling each other all the time. So then you stop and stand back and say –
Well, so what are they trying to say? That Justin Wolf and these kids, these upper middle class kids, are so stupid that they –
get in a car and call and say, okay, I'm on my way to murder him. Okay, I just murdered him. I'm coming back now. I just murdered him. You know what I mean? Like, who does that? And so, you know, now all these witnesses are saying, oh no, we were just all calling each other to buy pot. Like, those calls that are infused with meaning by the prosecution's theory have no meaning in space. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, like, do you get cases, like, because in Anand's case, I feel like
From what I can tell, you know, there's not sort of gross negligence or malfeasance or something on the part of the detectives or the state's attorney's office. Like everyone seems to be doing their job, you know, responsibly. Just doesn't seem like there's an obvious like, oh, they never looked at the new boyfriend or, oh, they never questioned the guy who found the body. Like it seems like a.
And Adnan himself is not supplying anything super useful to say, like, here's why I can prove I didn't do this. Like he has said out front, like, I can't give you like some clinching piece of information or evidence that's going to solve this. Like, I wish I could, but I just don't have it. Like, I don't know. I don't know how to prove this. You know, that's that's I love hearing that because somewhere along the line, I started realizing that when you have an innocent client, you
They are the least helpful people in the whole world because they don't know. They have no idea. Like as soon as I realize I have an innocent client and that's the situation, I think like, okay, well, I'll talk to you again when I've solved it because I'm not going to need you here. Because what's happening with Adnan is where I'll find something out that looks kind of bad for him and I'll come to him with it and be like –
why it does seem like you maybe made this phone call in the middle of the afternoon at a time when you're saying you were at track, but the phone number is to someone who only you knew and Jay didn't know. And so like, there's this phone call with this girl, Nisha, and it's like this glaring thing to me in the middle of the phone record where I'm like, that's the one that kind of looks bad for you. Like, explain that to me. How do you explain that call to me? And then his answer is so...
kind of mealy or not so satisfying where he's just like, I don't I can't explain it. Like maybe it was a butt dial and like a machine picked up. And I'm like, but she's testifying that there's no machine on it. And he's just like, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. But like, I didn't I didn't have the phone like I was a track. And I'm just like, I want to be like, no, explain it. Like, you should have an answer. They can't. That's not surprising to you? Not at all.
So there was a case that I had, the federal capital murder case, right, where my client, Daryl Rice, right, charged with killing two women hikers in the Shenandoah National Park and blah, blah, blah. They filed a motion saying the motive in this case was hatred. It was a he hated lesbians. That's why he murdered these two women. So Daryl Rice was easy for me, not in the beginning, because his answers weren't self-serving and helpful the way you'd think they were.
He's had time to think about this. Why doesn't he have a better answer than that? And then I started to realize because he hasn't been thinking about this because he didn't murder anybody. And so, like, I remember one day I had in there maps, right, to show him –
Like where the crime scene was versus where the lodge was versus where mile marker 42 point, you know. And so I put this all out on a table and get my reading glasses. And then I said, so when you would camp there, can you show me where you were? And then he was like, okay, well, I didn't camp there. I would ride bikes there. And of course, I'm like...
Okay, well, whatever. That, you know, who cares? Whatever. You've been in the park before. And then finally I said, but in relation to the crime scene. And then he looked at me and it was so simple. But he said, well, I don't know where the crime scene was. So can you show me that? And I remember thinking, of course, I'm like everybody else.
I think he knows where the crime scene is, right? How many, like, do you only take on cases where it's super clear to everyone involved, like on your side of the bar, or the bench rather, I guess, that this
This person is innocent or wrongfully convicted. Or do you take cases where like you really don't know and you start down a road and like three quarters of your cases turns out like, yeah, he probably did it. So let's not take on that one. Or do you are you only working with cases where you're pretty sure from the get go? Well, we don't know at the get go because we're the people that decide whether it's going to be it's going to go or not.
So it goes every different way, right? Sometimes we start down the road and very quickly we talk to four witnesses, all of whom say, no, it was absolutely him. They have no reason to lie. You know, we quickly realize, okay, we're being had here.
So we are in the weeds about a lot of things for a long time until we figured it out. So like today, we had team meetings for our four clinic cases. And those are four cases, you know, two of whom we...
are sure already, two of whom were just trying to figure it out. But your guy went to a jury, which, you know, that's relatively unusual. And I'm assuming he went to a jury because he was saying, I didn't do this. Right. Right. And so sometimes people say, I did some of this, but I didn't do all of this. So I'm going to trial. But he wasn't saying that. Yeah, he's always said the same thing, which is like, I had nothing to do with this.
Right. Which, I don't know, people, you know, a lot of lawyers say, oh, they're all guilty, they're all guilty. I generally feel like, especially for most of my career, I was dealing with people, I wasn't a director at an innocence project. And I had a very clear sense of which of my clients did what. And that's because they told me, like, you know. So I put some stock in people saying I didn't do it and staying with that. You do. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Now, you know, I know some people would say I'm naive, but I also think like I've been doing this work for a really long time. I don't think naive is a good word for me. You know what I mean? So, I mean, I feel like because I feel like I'm having this experience where.
I'll read something or I'll do an interview and I'm like, okay, yeah, there's no way he did. It just doesn't add up. It doesn't add up. And then I'll, and then the very next day I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. Look at the phone call to Nisha. Well, yes, yes. Or like, you know, oh, this friend said that he, you know, behaved this way during the relationship. But this other girl I just talked to last night was like, no, he was really overbearing and possessive. And I'm like, wait, oh my God, maybe he did, you know?
Right. Do you have that – like does that still happen to you or do you just – Oh, I now actually teach that. I tell people all the time you are juggling and everything's in the air and you're frozen. And you have to stay there until you're just – you've eliminated all questions. Right.
Because if you come down or catch one and get attached to it, you're going to make the same mistakes that law enforcement do. And I think, too, when you keep going, like what happens to me is that I reach a tipping point where I have answered questions to my satisfaction and I have answers for everything. And my answers are better than law enforcement's answers. So when I read what you've given me, I just think,
You guys just don't have it. You just didn't – nobody's really doing anything bad. People are trying to run down their leads and talk to people, but they don't have enough to go forward, but they do anyhow, right? So people – so you've got bad feelings and you've got Jay changing his story. Like I look at this as this is just a case that wasn't ready to be brought. You don't have enough to put Adnan away. Like not to me. You don't.
Yeah, but doesn't the fact that they did put him away mean that they had enough to put him away? Well, and yeah, they would say yes and I would say no. And the reason I say that is because I look at this and think law enforcement and prosecutors and defense attorneys, we all we act like if a jury will convict, then that's fine. And I think those of us who know a good case from a bad case should know that even if we can get a jury to convict, it doesn't mean we necessarily should ask them to do that.
So does it not happen to you anymore where you're just like one day you think like, oh, he did it. And the next day you think, oh, no, he didn't. Oh, yeah. No. For the first however many months thinking, oh, yeah, of course it's him. Oh, no, it's not him. But –
In order to revisit it in any kind of careful way, you have to revisit everything, right? And the good and the bad and whatever, and look at it with, you know, an eyebrow up. And sometimes it's going to stay exactly the way it is, and it's unsatisfying. I know, that's my fear, is I'm going to get through all this and just be like, I don't know. Yeah, and you might, and I can't pretend that that...
I just thought of something that I think we should do unless you don't want to do it and you can just think about this. So just today, one of my teams, and it's one of my better teams because it's a kid who had a law student who has summered at the FBI office.
Right.
That's really – Well, I literally just thought of it when I was sitting here thinking, you know, it's a lot of legwork. Huh. If we had a team of five students, we could get those things done, you know, with people that are being supervised. So think about that. I'm totally hooked. I did think about it. I said, yes, go ahead.
I went down to Charlottesville to see how they were getting along. Here is the sound of a law clinic getting ready to consider a new case.
That's a scanner scanning its little scanner heart out. It's manned by anyone Deirdre can grab, her students mostly. A couple of her kids come by the office, she gets one of her daughters scanning. You said the scanner smells good? Yeah. It smells like laundry and ink. And I don't actually know what laundry smells like. That's Deirdre. So now what we do usually, and when we get our cases, is we collect what mom has, what the inmate has, what is in the court file, what...
Paper everywhere. That's what we do is collect all the paper and then do exactly what they're doing and then put the team and we say, take a weekend and read it all.
Post-conviction work often involves going back and looking at physical evidence in a case. Some innocence projects only work with cases that have DNA evidence, for instance. Deirdre's group isn't one of those, but still, she'll definitely take it if she can get it. At one point, Deirdre reads a printout of an email regarding evidence in Adnan's case. So this is an email in 2008 from the Baltimore police saying that
He believes items from this case have been destroyed, but he doesn't have a document saying that that is true, so he can't be 100% sure. And he's the evidence control unit person. So, yeah, that's not good. I think there's two things to think about. There's a statute usually in every state about evidence retention and that you can't destroy evidence until a case is over and done with.
doesn't mean they always honor it. The other thing I'm thinking about is I can't tell you the number of cases where somebody says, I think it's gone. And then you go and you be annoying and you poke around and say, can I come back there and look? And they say, okay, we'll look. And then somebody goes, oh, here it is. Like, so it's not fatal. So do you see how I refuse to accept anything? It's true. I can't think of anyone more optimistic than Deirdre.
Which, I don't know, I would have guessed that after doing this kind of work for decades and knowing how rare it is to reverse a conviction, you'd naturally settle in as a pessimist. But maybe the opposite is true, that because your chances are so low, you have to look on the bright side in order to do this work at all. Otherwise, you couldn't function.
Once Deirdre and her students digest this massive amount of paper, the next step is to decide what they've got on their hands. The first thing they do, says Deirdre, is to give Adnan back the presumption of innocence. That's kind of a profound thing when you think about it. It's supposed to happen the first time around, at trial. But it seems like no one in the profession really believes that it does. Because you can't help it. As a juror, you figure the guy sitting behind the defense table must have done something wrong.
So Deirdre's team starts with the premise that he didn't do it. And then they see where that road takes them. If where they end up is that they think maybe Adnan really is innocent, then they have to figure out if there's any way they can prove that in court. The answer to that could definitely be no. Because the evidence is gone. The people won't change their minds. There's no legal remedy. It's just those things are just after time. Those things are usually harder to get to.
As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn't their guy. He's not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further and say to the state, not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy. The truth is when you can give the answer of who it is, it makes it a whole lot easier on everybody else to walk away and do this thing that no one ever wants to do.
And usually there's some logical explanation, right? There is a guy. There is a serial killer. There's somebody who's motivated. There's somebody who hated hay. Like, usually there's something. So you don't have to, but I always tell people, you have to. Of course, after looking everything over, Deirdre and her team might well decide that maybe Adnan is guilty, in which case they would quietly pack up the files and just keep their mouths shut.
But what I'm saying is like that could happen here in Adnan's case. Like you could look at it and be like, it looks like he did it. Say it to me. I mean, not to the world. Right. I would say it to you. I would say it to Adnan, but I wouldn't say it to anyone else. I'll let you do that. Four weeks later, I checked back in with Deirdre and two of her students, Katie Clifford and Mario Paya. They'd read through all the files. Do you guys, do any of you guys think Adnan's guilty? No.
No. I wouldn't be – I wouldn't have been able to find him guilty with this. No. This is one of the things that was very odd when I first started reading this case was how precisely he was convicted under this amount of material. But no, I do not see him as being guilty at this point. I would just – at this point, knowing what I know, I would say –
I guess I'd have to put him in the person of interest category because he was an old boyfriend. But even that, I would think, like, but I see no evidence that he was mad. Mountains of reasonable doubt. Yeah. This surprised me. Somehow I thought at least one or two of them would end up on the fence. But they all sounded so forthright. They said the big things that troubled them were the same things that troubled me, namely Jay's shifting statements to police and how the cell tower information didn't fully match Jay's narrative.
But the other stuff they seized on was stuff I hadn't paid much attention to at all: the forensic reports. Or rather, the relative lack of forensic reports. This is Katie. Because in our files, we have a lot of things, evidence they collected that sent off, and we don't have reports for everything. And we are curious about the results that we don't have and whether or not those exist and just why they're not in the files that we have. The liquor bottle, for one. That bottle of Coronet VSQ brandy that was found right near Hay's body.
A lab report says they recovered nucleated epithelial cells from the mouth of the bottle and from the cap. But that's all. It just says, quote, retained for future possible analysis, unquote. But the future never came. They never tested those cells for DNA.
Then Mario didn't like the report on the fibers. Two fibers, one reddish that was found near Hay's head, and one that I think was fluorescent blue, it's a little hard to tell from the report, that was found underneath her in the soil. Mario didn't think they were tested against enough samples. For instance, they weren't tested against a rope that was also found right near the body. I would think that you would be able to compare the fibers to the rope or compare the fibers to whatever you can get your hands on. And, um...
And I didn't actually see that ever get tested. The fibers were tested against some things, but nothing came back of significance. And then the fact of the fibers just kind of went away. As for the rope, which from a photo looks sort of like a laundry line, it wasn't tested at all for anything. Deirdre says that kind of thing happens a lot, where investigators will say, oh, that item we collected? It's not relevant. It's not connected to what happened, so there's no point in testing.
So another case that I had, anything that didn't match the perp or the suspect that they had, they just ignored it, right? And they would say, well, that's outside the crime scene. That's really not inside the crime scene. So those beer cans over there, we're not going to test there because that's too far away. We're going to call that outside the crime scene. And when I talked to DNA experts about that, they were saying, yeah, I mean, if you swab that and you get some skin cells or saliva, and
and it's just random, you get no hit on anybody, well, then it's neither here nor there. But they were saying, but if you put it in and you get a hit on a serial killer, right, or one of two other people who killed Asian women within a year in Baltimore, well, now we've got enough to charge and convict somebody. So what you call relevant and irrelevant, you can only do once you have a test result.
Finally, Deirdre and Katie and Mario were all confused by the swabs that were taken from Hay's body. The medical examiner had done what's known as a PERC kit. It stands for Physical Evidence Recovery Kit. It's a standard procedure in a rape case, but it's also done in some murder cases. There was no evidence Hay was sexually assaulted, but they did the swabs just the same. The medical examiner's report says they came back, quote, negative for spermatozoa, unquote. But that's about it.
Which seemed very thin to Deirdre, that these swabs weren't examined more thoroughly, that they were never tested for DNA. Which is just weird. That's just, that seems very strange to me in a case like this. That seems very strange to you. You almost always submit that for DNA testing. Okay. And that's what we're not seeing is a lab report that says, you know, if it came back, and that's the other, being loosey-goosey about whether it's, you know,
Not Jay, not Adnan. You know, that's strange. Right. So, OK. So is that something that you guys would want to get tested? Absolutely. Yes. Deidre, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but this certainly seems to be quite a bit to get started.
Do you have any metric of how hopeful slash hopeless this one looks at this point in terms of finding out something useful and usable?
Mario is shaking his head. That's because he's a pro-government, right-wing, Republican operative. It's pretty easy here. I'm teasing. Please don't put that on the video. I checked with Mario. He said it was fine. You know, it's always an outside shot. Always. But there's enough here. I guess what I'm saying is there's enough here that you...
think it's worth asking these questions. You know what I mean? Like, do you guys independently feel like, no, something went wrong here? Or is this just like, well, we're sort of humoring you, the reporter? No, I would look at this as this, I would have a team on this case saying, keep going. I see. They all seemed so hopeful, so sure that with enough digging, they were going to shake something loose. But I was more skeptical.
I mean, I felt like I'd been in that same mindset for so many months, and I hadn't found anything that absolutely tipped the scale in Adnan's favor. Anyhow, Deirdre noticed. Sarah, you sound really down on Adnan today. I don't know. Yeah, you're... I do. I go up and down. I go up and down. Sometimes I'm totally with him, and then other times I'm like, I don't know, dude. This doesn't... Why? Why can't you remember anything? Why is this nothing...
I don't know. And then I just go back to like, why can't you account for this day of all days? You knew it was an important day. You got a call from a cop that day asking where your ex-girlfriend was. Surely you must have gone over it before six weeks had passed. Surely. Yeah. I don't have that reaction, but I see what you're saying. Yeah.
And then I just am aware of like, what if he is this amazing sociopath and that's just like I'm being played, you know? I mean, I don't get that sense, but he – I mean, he's really charming. He's really smart. He's really – he's funny. And you're like, yeah, and he could totally be a sociopath.
But see, here's where I go with that. Like in my 26 years of doing this, I pray for a sociopath because I never get those guys. I get the innocent ones and I get these dumb. So me and my friend smoke crack for three days and we drank five bottles of whatever. And then we got a plan. That's who I get all the time. So I think like the odds of you getting the charming sociopath, you're just not that lucky. Yeah.
Very few times have I had a client, and the ones who really did it, and they have serious mental issues, and they're not sociopathy. They're schizophrenia or florid psychosis because of a whatever. I just think the odds of him being that and no one having detected any signs of it until he kills his girlfriend, who he's moved on from. So...
Deirdre and her gang, they've got to stick with stuff they can bring to a court. Forensics, mostly. And they're on the lookout for another explanation entirely. Maybe a nun had nothing to do with this at all. Maybe it was a serial killer. Maybe there's a clue from another Baltimore cold case. They're like explorers headed for a bold new world. Me, I'm going to stay right here at home with my little garden spade and keep scraping at the thing that confuses me most. Jay, next time on Serial.
Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas and me. Emily Condon is our production and operations manager. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Fact-checking by Karen Fregala-Smith. Administrative help from Elise Bergersen. 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, and sign up for our weekly emails, SerialPodcast.org.
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