Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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I think, like, the odds of you getting the charming sociopath, you're just not that lucky. 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. I said, what was your involvement? Were you involved? And he said no. Before, you stated that you'd be willing to take us out and show us where the vehicle's parked. No problem. Are you still willing to do that? Yes. This is a Global Telelink prepaid call from...
Adnan Syed. An inmate at a Maryland correctional facility. This call will be recorded and monitored. Okay. My name is Miss Stella Armstrong, Baltimore, Maryland. And you were a juror on the Adnan Syed case, right? Yes, I was. From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.
I wanted to know from Stella Armstrong why she voted to convict Adnan Syed. She immediately talked about Jay, that she believed him. Like I said, it's been a while, but I remember the one young man who was supposedly his friend who had enabled him to move the body. Right. And that struck me that why would you admit to doing something that drastic if you hadn't done it?
You know what I mean? For what reason? What was he going to gain from that? He still had to go to jail. Yeah. Actually, he didn't go to jail. Oh, he didn't? The friend didn't? No. Oh. He walked.
That's strange. That's strange. I asked Stella the same thing I ask anyone who's come in contact with Jay. What is Jay's deal? And by that, I don't mean his plea deal, that he pled guilty to accessory after the fact in a first-degree murder, testified against a nun, and got no prison time as a result. I'll talk more about that in another episode. What I mean is, what did you make of Jay? Which, of course, is code for, what am I supposed to make of Jay?
How did he come across sitting up there on the witness stand? What was his demeanor on the stand? Like, what kind of kid did he seem like? He seemed like he was streetwise. I hope that's the best way to put it. He seemed like he, you know, got around in the neighborhoods or he was able to take care of himself. He reminded me of
He would be that friend if you got in trouble, you would call. You know what I mean? Say if I was back in high school and somebody was bothering me, he'd remind me of somebody I would call to help me. Like if somebody was fighting me or... So it was believable to you that he would be that guy for Adnan. Like he would be the guy that Adnan would turn to. Yeah. Yeah. That was my impression. And, you know, because we all have somebody in our life like that, you know.
that you may know a cousin or a relative who, if something go wrong, you think you can call to help you. You know, when you just said that, I just did a very quick scan of all of my contacts and my family. And I feel like I can't think of one, but they're all so useless. We won't say they're all so useless.
The Jay that Stella saw at trial, he was wearing a tie, sometimes a jacket. He's handsome, he's tall and thin. You can see in the trial video how he has to bend over a little each time he speaks into the microphone in front of him. Since Jay's credibility was the state's case, Adnan's attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, tried to rip it to shreds. That essentially was her defense.
She uses the word truth and lie as often as possible in her cross-examination. There are many exchanges like this one. Gutierrez asks him, quote,
Jay says: I was not telling them everything, no. You were not. And what you were telling them were lies, were they not? Some. So the answer to my question is yes, I was not telling the truth. Is it not? Objection. Sustained. Gutierrez asks Jay about Best Buy, about how Jen Pusateri told him there were security cameras in the parking lot and at the entrance.
Objection. Objection. Objection.
The defense attorney tried to make him... Well, basically, she was trying to show that Jay killed her and was blaming it on Adnan. That's what I remember. Nothing led us to believe that...
He had a motive to kill Miss Lee. Yeah. That really stayed with me because she was so adamant that he was a liar. Right. You just didn't buy that he was lying about it. I didn't buy that it was a lie. I bought the fact that he was telling the truth about what happened at that moment.
Jay took the stand on five different days during the second trial. And this must have been a harrowing, nerve-wracking stretch in his life. But large swaths of the trial itself are really boring. Not just the procedural stuff, that's always boring. But the cross-examination is boring, even of the star witness.
One defense attorney I talked to said that boringness can be a strategy. She said lawyers know that people can only pay close attention for so long, 45 minutes, an hour, before they start to flag. So it's not theatrics that gets people to crack. It's tedium, which would explain so much of what Gutierrez was doing if, in fact, that's what she was doing.
She spends a lot of time on streets, for instance, the trajectories of different roads, whether they travel northeast or northwest, whether their names change as they cross from the city into the county, on buildings, how they're situated. And that Best Buy is a boxy structure with the Best Buy logo at an angle, is it not? Yes, ma'am. And it's pretty.
visible from security bill of rights, right? Yes, ma'am. Right, and that's
Jay doesn't crack, though. He is alert. He is polite. He stays with her. He stays with her when she's calm and soothing and boring, and he stays with her when she gets a little more shouty.
He sticks to the yes ma'am, no ma'am answers, which, if I had to guess, is probably 75% of what Jay says in Cross. There's a part where Gutierrez tries to suggest that Jay was cheating on his girlfriend Stephanie with Jen Pusateri. If you were stepping out on Stephanie, that would have impacted on your relationship, would it have not? With who? With anyone. With Stephanie? If you were stepping out...
Stephanie, you understand what that term means, don't you? Yes, ma'am. If you had another girlfriend, anyone, any name, anywhere, that would have been Patrick. And Stephanie, would it have not? I don't know. That's probably it. If you were stepping out with any girl, any name, from any location,
Even when he gets irritated, Jay is civil. "'Excuse me, Your Honor,' he says when Gutierrez gets loud. "'Could you ask her to stop yelling in my ear, please?' Gutierrez died a few years after this trial, so I can't ask her, but I have to think nothing she's doing here is accidental."
She was a successful, sought-after defense attorney. She was aggressive. And obviously the courtroom is no place for pulling punches. But you've got to wonder whether moments like this hurt Adnan's case rather than helped it. Because Jay seems like the underdog. It's Baltimore. Half the jury is Black. Seven out of twelve, actually. Jay probably comes off as a nice young man, and this white lady is yelling at him.
Sometimes, unwittingly or not, Jay's testimony is almost poetic. He says he told Jen Pusateri to be honest with the detectives because, quote, When he's asked why he didn't warn Hay that Anon wanted to kill her, he says it was because he didn't think Anon was serious. Quote,
And when he's asked why the image of Hay in the trunk of the car stuck with him, he says, "I've never seen anyone dead before, and the first thing I thought was how fragile Stephanie was." People lie in court under oath all the time. Witnesses lie, lawyers lie, police lie. This should come as a shocker to no one. And I'm not saying that's what happened here. I'm just saying that I'm not assuming that everyone who participated in Adnan's trial told the truth.
But clearly the jury found Jay believable, or believable enough. After a six-week trial, they convicted Anand in just two hours. We talked to six jurors, and none of them had any lingering doubts about the case. None of them wondered if the investigation was shoddy. None of them were much bothered by how Jay's statements to police had shifted over time. So, am I wrong to be hung up on that? No.
I should be concerned about the inconsistencies? I am concerned about it. You are? Yes. As I've mentioned, the detectives involved in this case didn't want to talk to me for this story. So I turned to this guy. You are Jim Tranum. James, do you like James? Jim is fine. Jim Tranum. And we hired you. Yes. Because unlike me, you're a real detective. I'm just playing one on the radio.
Jim Tranum used to be a homicide detective in Washington, D.C., a jurisdiction not too different from Baltimore. He's now become something of an expert on false confessions and an advocate for better interrogation techniques. He goes around the country doing presentations about it. We gave Tranum everything we had on this case, files, tapes, transcripts. And again, I want to be clear that we paid him for his time. It's a huge amount of material to go through.
I wanted Trenum to weigh in on two things. First, just overall, how would he rate the investigation into Heyman Lee's murder? Did the detectives do a good job or did they screw it up? And second, how should I be thinking about Jay as a witness? What were the detectives seeing that maybe I wasn't? Trenum said, yes, he thought the inconsistencies were a problem too. But he also said, don't forget the flip side.
But I'm also looking at some of the consistencies, too. Right. That's true. He took them to where the car was. Right. And that's a huge thing right there. Jay had a big piece of reliable information that the cops themselves did not know, where Hay's car was.
Plus, Tranum said, Jay's story completes a circle for the cops. They were suspicious of Adnan from the beginning. Then, from Adnan's cell records, they get to Jen, who leads them to Jay, who tells them it's Adnan. So their suspicions have now been borne out, thanks to Jay, through Adnan's own phone. A satisfying investigative circle. A murder case on a silver platter, says Tranum. He puts it on who they consider to be the logical suspect.
I mean, yeah, it's pretty much a dream case. Part of what Tranum does is review investigations. And he says this one is better than most of what he sees. The detectives in this case were cautious and methodical. They weren't rushing to grab suspects or to dismiss them either. The evidence collection is well documented.
Which I didn't expect to hear that even though it's basically a one witness case, the cell records mostly don't match Jay's statements. There's no physical evidence linking Adnan to the murder. Despite all that, to an experienced detective like Traynham, this looks like a pretty sound investigation. I would say that this is better than average. Wow.
But what I'm saying is this, the mechanics, the documentation, the steps that they took and all of that, they look good. Okay. I would have probably followed the same route. However, what we're unsure of is,
is what happened to change Jay's story from A to B. And we do not know what happened in those three hours or whatever like that. And that will always result in a question as to what the final outcome should have been. Here's what he's talking about. In both of Jay's taped statements, there's a before, a period of time before the tape recorder is turned on.
When the cops first bring Jay in on February 28th, they talked to him for about an hour before the tape went on. Then, on March 15th, the second interview, Jay signs his initials to an explanation of rights form at 3.15 p.m.
Then the tape starts. Today's date is the 15th of March. It's approximately 20 minutes after 6 midnight. 6.20 p.m. So from 3.15 to 6.20, three hours have gone by since Jay signed that form. This is what's called the pre-interview. And Tranum says that's where the mischief can happen, the contamination. Not necessarily intentionally, but it happens.
The pre-interview was when the cops and the witness kind of ironed out the statement so it could be taped as a coherent thing. And that was standard procedure back then. Now, like a lot of jurisdictions, Baltimore homicide detectives videotape the entire interview from the moment the person steps in the interview room. On March 15th, we know the cops had shown Jay at least some photographs from the investigation. They refer to that on the tape.
And Jay says at trial that he was confronted with the cell records during that interview as well. So you have to wonder, says Traynham, whether he was massaging his story to fit what the cops wanted to hear.
The inconsistencies in Jay's statements that the cops are catching him in, Trenum says cops are used to that. Every confession has inconsistencies. You just need to understand why they're happening. Is he minimizing his role? Is he protecting someone? In Jay's case, yes and yes. But how do you make sense of the inconsistencies that don't seem to have a purpose? Like the one about going to the cliffs at Patapsco State Park that afternoon, how it drops out of the narrative at trial. And
And from like where I sit, I'm like, yeah, it doesn't work because it doesn't fit your timeline. He can't get back to track in time if you went out and smoked a joint. You know what I mean? Anyway, I'm getting too deep in, but I'm like. No, you're not at all, because I think that you hit on one of the biggest problems that we have with the way that we interview and interrogate here and the fact that.
We have an excellent witness. And we got somebody who's given us the whole case right here. He's broke it wide open for us. Right. We don't want to ruin him. You know, we don't. And so, you know, how much do you want to push? How much do you want to create, quote, unquote, bad evidence? But like there's no such thing. That's an actual term. It's called bad evidence. Right. You don't want to do something if it's going to go against your theory of the case. Right.
But then, see, I don't get that. I mean, it's like my father used to always say, all facts are friendly. Like, shouldn't that be more true for a cop than for anyone else? Like, you can't pick and choose? Rather than trying to get to the truth, what you're trying to do is build your case and make it the strongest case possible. But how can it be a strong case and how can he be a great witness if...
there's stuff that's not true or unexplained. And the comeback is that there's always going to be things that are unexplainable. But like I said, also remember verification bias is kicking in here as well. I want to believe you because you're my witness and I think this is what happened and all that. So the fact that you're giving me something that's inconsistent, that doesn't fit my theory of the case, what does verification bias cause you to do?
ignore it and push it aside. And that's what they're doing here with these inconsistencies. They're kind of pushing them aside. Tranum said it was curious to him that the cops never searched Jay's house, for instance, that they never subjected him to a polygraph. Again, he said maybe that's because he was on their team now, helping, so you don't want to push too hard. He said the cops, quote, probably settled for what they thought was good enough to be the truth, unquote.
He said he did have doubts about Adnan's claim of innocence, but that he definitely thought there was something, quote-unquote, off about this case. That we still don't know what happened in this murder. We still don't have the true story. I don't believe Jay's version. I think that there is a lot more to it than that. I feel that he's definitely minimizing his involvement.
To either protect himself. He's doing it for one of three reasons. To protect himself, to protect somebody else, or because Adnan did it and was right there with him. Right, right. But I cannot prove that he's given it to me without contamination. Right. The real problem is, is that how do you prove it one way or the other? Right, right.
Trenum says the answers we want probably live in those unrecorded pre-interview hours, a black hole of crucial information. Since this stuff wasn't all videotaped, you know, there were holes that were never, as you're saying, like we're never going to know the answer. But for things that I could know the answer to, if you're me, what's the biggest thing I need to figure out then? Get Jay to talk. Okay. Okay. We passed the city limit. So my producer, Julie Snyder, and I went to see Jay.
But because it's also sort of a dick move to show up at someone's door like that, Julie and I were nervous.
I am so hyped up. Listening back to the tape, I wanted to give myself a Xanax. But I feel super excited to talk to him, like so excited to talk to him, I can't tell you. Like if this works, and he, I mean, he knows everything we want to know. Every question we've had for the past eight months, seven months, he knows it. And whether or not he tells us is a different thing, but you know what I mean? Like he's, like there's a treasure chest of information
answers that we've been looking for this whole time and he has it he's it but whether or not he opens the door or if he's even home we don't even know if he's home we arrived jay was not home so we came back again many hours later knocked jay answered the door tall and skinny and exhausted looking a beer in his hand it was friday probably the end of a long work day for him
He nevertheless invited us in, asked us to sit down. We didn't record anything. We stayed about 20 minutes, maybe. It was a tense meeting, and an emotional meeting, in fact. Afterwards, Julie and I felt like we'd walked into a stranger's house, lobbed a grenade onto his living room carpet, and then waved goodbye. We debriefed back in the car. Here's the first thing he said. I mean, he said that there are a lot of people who say that they don't think Adnan did it, and he very forcefully said, well, then who did?
That's right. He said, who did? He was like, I was there. I saw it. Like, I know what I know. He was very forceful. Like, I can't believe he won't even man up and admit it. He just totally scoffed at the idea that Adnan would be claiming his innocence. He was very calm. Like, how would you describe his demeanor? Tired.
Yeah. Yeah. He seemed tired and a little and wary, but not but actually very polite and actually sort of very sweet and tired. And but he also said, I'm feeling like so much. He said, like kind of animal rage right now, even you bringing this up right now. But she does a good job of, you know.
of keeping it in because he didn't seem like he was about to. I mean, actually, you could kind of see him about to hit something, but in a more frustrated, understandable way. Jay was, understandably, skeptical of us and of our motives. When we left, Jay said he'd think about an interview and get back to us. He left a strong impression, on Julie maybe even more than on me. Even just hearing him so forcefully deny, you know, and so forcefully say, I know he did it. Yeah. Um,
You know, it's your face to face. He's right there. He's a person. He's saying it. He seems like he really means it. This is not pleasant for him to talk about. And so, you know, it sounds believable. I totally saw the appeal of him as like a person and a friend and a witness. Jay and I corresponded sporadically by email in the weeks following our meeting. He said he wasn't afraid of the truth.
Finally, in so many words, Jay declined an interview. So what is the deal with Jay? I talked to dozens of people, mostly his friends and classmates. Kids who knew him from Woodlawn High School, they have a range of opinions about whether he was a good guy or not a good guy, but they all agreed that he defied categorization. He was different. Yeah, he was like the Rodman of our, like, social world. He was like the one black kid who had, like, a lip ring and...
Listen to like Rage Against the Machine and you know. He would dye his hair different colors. Like I think one time he had it red and another time he had a blonde. But the blonde lasted for a long time. Like I remember the blonde for sure. I remember he had a BMX belt buckle. And he had a belt buckle. Like who the hell had a belt buckle? Basically Dennis Rodman is the best way I can describe it. You know if he was at my house and my mom came home when he left she'd be like who's that? And why is he here?
Mm-hmm.
So Jay didn't look like the other kids at school, and he also didn't act like the other kids at school. He loved animals. He once bought a giant rat-eating frog. And he loved the outdoors, fishing, hiking, swimming. He rode BMX bikes at an old skate park. He played lacrosse, for Christ's sakes. I think Jay was actually pretty good at lacrosse. Tall, wiry dude. He could run for days. There was no training needed for that kid. He could just run forever.
Which is a good thing, because he wasn't the type to put a ton of training in. Right, because he wasn't a jock. He was more of a stoner, people said. And he didn't seem to care whether he fit in. He always seemed very honest with who he was. Kind of this beautifully unconventional guy. Jay didn't come from the same kind of household as a lot of the other kids he hung around with. He lived with his grandparents and his mom. But his friends say it seemed like he was more or less taking care of himself. He always had a job. His mother depended on him.
Jay wasn't in the magnet program at Woodlawn. He was gen pop, their term, not mine, like general population at a prison. Anyway, he hung out with some of the magnet kids because his girlfriend Stephanie was in the program. People told me contradictory things about Jay. Three women who knew him from Woodlawn, including one teacher, told me unflattering things about him. Nothing terrible, just that he was mean or intimidating.
Some kids thought of him as quote-unquote shady, that you wouldn't want to push him. You got the sense that if you crossed Jay, he'd come after you. But then I also heard descriptions of Jay that included the word goofy or stoner, or that the thuggish vibe was just a pose, something Jay put on to seem tough. He's an alpha. He's definitely an alpha male. This is Chris, who says he was one of Jay's best friends around this time.
He said Jay might, say, slug you as you're walking down the hallway at school. But he wasn't mad or anything. He's just messing around. Boys will be boys kind of stuff. Chris remembered this one story where it seemed to me all the different versions of Jay I'd heard, the goofy and the scary, were contained in it.
You know, we have weird arguments sometimes. I remember outside of one of my cousin's houses, he tried to stab me because I hadn't been stabbed before. So we got into a fight over... Actually, I gave him a knife because I worked at a knife shop. I gave him a knife and then he tried to stab me with it. So we were literally fighting outside of my cousin's house. And he's like, yo, I'm not going to stab you deep, but you've never been stabbed before. You need to know what it's like. And I'm like, yo, I'm not going to let you stab me. So...
I talked to three people who said they knew Jay well or hung out with him around the time of the crime. And I asked them if he ever told them about what happened. I went to Chris first because when Jay spoke to detectives that first night during his first taped interview, Jay mentioned Chris by name. The cops had asked Jay if he'd told anyone else about Adnan committing this murder, and Jay said he'd told Chris. Chris told me police never questioned him, not that he could remember anyway, and he thought he'd remember something like that. There are no notes in their files about an interview with Chris.
But Chris said it was true. Jay did tell him about what had happened. But his version, the building blocks are the same, but the surrounding details are unfamiliar. Of course, giant caveat, it's 15 years later that I'm asking Chris to tell me. But for comparison purposes, here goes. Chris says Jay told him he was at a pool hall out on Route 40 in Catonsville when he got a call from Adnan.
The pool hall was either VIP or Blue Jays, Chris says. They were across the street from each other at the time. He told you that Adnan came to get him when he was at a pool hall. He was shooting pool. Adnan called him. He was like, yo, you know, I got to talk to you. And he's like, yo, I'm busy.
In this version, the trunk pop happens at the pool hall.
Chris said Jay told Adnan he wanted nothing to do with it, but Adnan forced him, told him he was in it now, he was an accessory, and he knew Jay couldn't go to the cops because of his own illegal activities, so Jay was stuck. He helped bury the body. Chris figured Leakin Park was likely Jay's idea, rather than Adnan's.
Chris's information about the crime itself doesn't quite match the state's version. He said Jay told him that Adnan confronted Hay about flirting with another guy, a car salesman, and when she called Adnan crazy, he snapped and strangled her. And Chris said he heard this happened in the parking lot of the Woodlawn Public Library. Remember, that's the one that's right there on campus where Asia said she saw Adnan that day.
Chris says Jay told him that Adnan threatened to kill Stephanie if Jay didn't keep his mouth shut. This is not the first I'd heard about something like this. Jay told the cops that he worried Adnan would hurt Stephanie too. And he also testified at trial that Adnan had made it clear he could get to Stephanie anytime he wanted since they were such good friends. Stephanie herself tells the cops, this is in their notes from their conversation with her, that Jay told her to stay away from Adnan.
Chris says Jay told him Adnan showed up at Jay's house with Stephanie not long after the crime and made a gesture to indicate, I'll hurt her if you're not careful. So Stephanie goes inside past Jay and he steps out onto the porch with Adnan. He's like, you're not going to terrorize me. And Adnan's like, you keep your mouth shut or something's going to happen. If he had any weakness, it was Stephanie.
Jay would move heaven and earth if it came to protecting Stephanie. I talked to Laura, a friend of Jay's and Stephanie's and Jen's and of Adnan's. Back then, she was Laura Estrada Sandoval. She was close with Stephanie. They played sports together. Her parents didn't agree with their relationship because he was just like...
They felt like he wasn't going to amount to anything. He wasn't going to school. You know, Stephanie, she's beautiful. I mean, she was a star athlete. She got a scholarship to college. She was like...
Perfect, you know? Like, she ran the fastest. She was always, like, in shape no matter what. She could eat anything. And, like, she always saw the good in people no matter what. Like, no matter if her parents were telling her, he's not going to influence on you. But...
Stephanie didn't want to talk to me, and no one I spoke to who knows her was surprised by that. To a person, they said she never talked to them about what happened either. They said it was like a wall came down, and they couldn't penetrate it.
Laura told me it kind of did in their friendship, because Laura really needed to talk about it. And Stephanie wouldn't or couldn't. Laura hung out with Jay all that summer before the trial, and she says they just didn't discuss it. Hay's murder was this enormous, sad, frightening elephant nobody wanted to go near. Jay's friend Patrick told me he couldn't get Jay to talk about it either. I think I just kept saying, like, what happened? You know, like, what God's name happened, you know, in all of this? Like, you know, I don't know.
This Patrick, by the way, isn't the one I've already mentioned in an earlier episode from the call log. Different Patrick. This Patrick went to Woodlawn. He was a year ahead of Jay, so two years ahead of Adnan and Hay and Stephanie.
Patrick lost touch with Jay when all this went down. He says he tried and tried to call, but Jay never responded. Years later, maybe around 2005, Jay got back in touch one day, and then they saw each other at a little party. Patrick asked him about it. I've heard all of these, like, renditions and versions of stories from so many people. Like, I figured, like, I have them in front of me now. Like, I can get to the truth. And, um...
He said, yeah, like, you know, I was afraid he was going to hurt Stephanie. And I was like, like, Adnan, he's going to threaten her? And he just said he was afraid that he was going to hurt her. And so I guess I took it as a threat, you know. I took what he was saying as a threat. But I remember when I pushed him for detail, when I pushed him for more, it wasn't, I didn't get it.
Like he wasn't going to go any further with it. Patrick says the Stephanie explanation sounded pretty thin to him, but he couldn't get anything else out of Jay and figured it wasn't his place to force it.
I asked all Jay's friends I spoke to whether they thought Jay was telling the truth about what happened that night. I got some curious answers because his friends say Jay had a reputation for lying, but not for lying about something like that, something so big.
Sort of the same way he had a reputation for being scary, but not scary, scary. The first thing that popped in my head was like, Jay lies. That's why he does that. Jay lies about everything. That's Kathy. Again, that's not her real name or her real voice. She's the person who said Adnan was acting weird at her apartment that night of the murder when Jay brought him over. That's right. When you were talking about it and saying, you know, well, Jay has all these inconsistencies and stuff. The first thing that
Popped in my head, well, because Jay lies. Jay doesn't tell the truth. But like about what? What kinds of stuff are you thinking? I think it was kind of like about everything, nothing. Because I can definitely remember sometimes when Jay would be telling a story and you would clearly know it was bullshit. You know, I remember one time I'm looking at Jen and Jen will look in her eyes like, here we go again. You know what I mean? Like, this is such bullshit. Both Chris and Patrick told me that Jay would tell them stories, tall tales almost, that they figured had to be made up.
But then sometimes these stories turned out to be true. And Kathy said, sure, Jay might lie about what he had for breakfast, or even whether he went to Patapsco State Park on the afternoon of January 13th, 1999. But she didn't think Jay was lying about the crime itself, because she's convinced a nun is guilty, based on a nun's behavior that night, and what he was saying when he got that phone call at her house. And then there's Jen Pusateri. Of all the people Jay told about this crime, I wondered most about Jen.
If she ever thought Jay was lying about that night. I spoke to her briefly at her work. She works at a discount store. She wasn't rude, but she was totally uninterested in talking to me. She had nothing to hide. She said she just did not want to talk about that time in her life, period. She did answer my one big question, though. And her answer was yes. She believed Jay then, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.
I said, yeah, but he did lie to you somewhat back then. Remember, he tells Jen that night that he doesn't know where Adnan put Hay's body, that they don't know enough to go to the police. Jen told me she could understand that kind of lie, that anyone in his position forced into something he wanted no part of, anyone might have told the same kind of lie. It didn't shake her trust in his overall story.
Then she added, there was one thing she never believed. She said she never believed the murder happened at Best Buy because she thought there would have been security footage and that never came out. I told her, it seems like maybe there really weren't security cameras at Best Buy back then. And she kind of shrugged and said, oh, well, see, I don't know. Plenty of people I talked to said when they heard Jay was wrapped up in a murder, it didn't surprise them.
Adnan, they said, no way. Shocking. But Jay, not so shocking. And people also said they couldn't square Jay feeling threatened by Adnan. The dynamic of that just seemed wrong to them. But then there's Patrick and Laura and Kathy, people who'd spent a lot of time with Jay, who were shocked by Jay's involvement. They couldn't see why Adnan would even turn to Jay for something like that. Made no sense. They said that wasn't the laid-back Jay they knew.
The same thing almost every single one of Adnan's friends says about him. So they end up in this in-between place where they can't quite wrap their minds around the story of that night. Here's Patrick again. To him, Jay was this intelligent, inquisitive, sweet, goofy guy. Beautifully unconventional. I think part of me hopes and then...
I know this is so terrible to say. I hope in some way his hand was forced, that he had no choice or that things were outside of his control and maybe that he was looking out for the safety and well-being of others and that he wasn't such a willing participant if he was. I certainly hope that he wasn't.
That grappling you can hear in his voice, that's so common among this group of friends. People like Laura who can't imagine Anon killing anyone, but also can't imagine Jay doing what he said he did, or why he would lie about something so huge.
If you're Laura and there's no scenario here you can rationalize, you're left with fog. This piece of tape I'm about to play you, it's my favorite piece of tape from all my reporting so far, because I relate to it so precisely. It could be me talking to Laura instead of the other way around. Well, then who the fuck did it? Like, why would... Like, why would... It doesn't make sense. Why would... If... Why would... Hey, wasn't... Like, I just... I can't...
I'm probably just as confused as you are. At Jay's sentencing for his accessory after the fact conviction, he's wearing a white shirt, his long arms hanging at his side. He's towering over his lawyer, who's petite. She tells the judge all the stuff a defense attorney tends to cover at a sentencing. Jay's tough upbringing, that he didn't have adults helping him set a moral compass, that he's hardworking and loves animals and is good with kids, that he's headed to college and wants to better himself.
She says he underwent, quote, rigorous and demeaning cross-examination on the part of Christina Gutierrez. And she says he's remorseful. She says just now he was weeping in the hallway about Haley. Prosecutor Kevin Urich tells the judge he's thoroughly pleased with Jay's participation in the case and impressed. As I said, very satisfactory. And I believe honestly testified. And also I would say something you don't usually see. I think he actually showed remorse during the trial.
I saw real remorse on his part, so I'll be happy to take that recommendation. The judge is impressed, too, and Jay does seem genuinely torn up. Is there anything you want to say before I impose the sentence? Just that whatever you do decide, I'm like, you know, I had a real hard time even sitting here because I feel like people look at me, they think I'm a horrible person, and they're really sorry for my part in what happened.
The judge sentences Jay to two years probation, no jail time. His lawyer mouths the words "thank you" to the judge. Jay leaves the courtroom with the only person who came with him that day: Stephanie. Adnan didn't testify at his trial, which isn't unusual. Jurors aren't supposed to take that into consideration. The judge tells them so, that they are not allowed to hold that against a defendant when they're deliberating. Did it bother you guys as a jury that Adnan himself didn't testify, didn't take the stand?
Yes, it did. That's Lisa Flynn, one of the jurors. That was huge. We just... I think...
Yeah, that was huge. We all kind of, like, gasped. Right. Like, we were all just, like, blown away by that. You know, why not if you're a defendant? You know, why would you not get up there and defend yourself and try to prove that the state is wrong, that you weren't there, that you're not guilty? We were trying to be so open-minded. It was just like...
So what was Adnan thinking while all this was going down? What do I know about Adnan that the jury didn't? Next time on Serial.
Thank you.
Special thanks today to the lovely Lisa Sternlieb and to Gina DeVito. 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. Serial's 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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