Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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This is a Global Tell Link prepaid call from An inmate at a Maryland correctional facility.
From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. The first letter I got from Adnan Syed almost exactly one year ago included a challenge. He was writing about the prosecution's timeline of the crime, about when and where Hay Min Lee was killed. The state contended that Hay was killed between 2.15 and 2.36 p.m. at the Best Buy parking lot about a mile from Woodlawn High School.
That's a 21-minute window in which to commit the murder, which may seem like a long time, Adnan wrote, but it is virtually impossible if you consider the following facts, which he then listed. For example, when the final bell rings at 2.15, you can't just leave and jump in your car, he wrote. Quote, there are 1,500 other students filling the hallways and stairwells of a four-story building, unquote.
Then you have to get out of the school parking lot, but the parking lot is encircled by the school bus loop, so you can't get your car out until the buses fill up and leave, which Anon wrote took about 10 to 15 minutes. I'm telling you, I wish, like, maybe I'll try to draw a picture of it, but if you could just see how Woodlawn High School left out at 2.15.
That's Adnan elaborating on his letter. You can't just go to your car and then leave. It's going to take a few minutes. So it's just a really tight, really window of time, I mean, for this to have taken place, right? And I've always, like in my heart, man, I've always kind of like, I've seen it on TV before, like, you know, on 8-Line or 9-Line, where someone tries to reenact the crime. And there's a moment where, like, there's someone like...
You know what? This crime could not have been committed before it could be set up back. It's like always this moment, right? It's like I visualize the route. It's just, I don't know. Oh, hey, we're getting ready to go, right? Sorry. Hey, I got to go. All right, bye. Okay, bye. That happens sometimes. The guards come by and you're just done, mid-sentence.
Anyway, I can pick up from Adan's letter. He wrote that in addition, the route to the Best Buy, even though it's close to the school, there are major intersections along the way and that there is, quote, a ton of traffic at that time, unquote.
And then the murder itself. How would he be able to strangle Hay, a tall, strong, athletic girl, quote, remove her body from the car, carry it to the trunk and place her in there in broad daylight at 2.30 in the afternoon? And then I walk into the Best Buy lobby and call Jay and tell him to come meet me there? All in 21 minutes. I am 100% sure that if someone tried to do it, it would be impossible, unquote.
Gauntlet so thrown, producer Dana Chivas and I gave it a shot. We tried this drive. Twice we tried, in fact. Because, full disclosure, the first time we screwed it up. The second time, though, we were like a machine. So here we go. We're at Woodlawn High School, Wednesday afternoon. After school announcements. If you are a senior and you want to apply for local scholarship, you need to go to the counseling office. Okay, then last bell.
More than a thousand students fill the halls, just like Adnan describes in his letter. We figure Hay gets in her car quickly. She's in a hurry. Okay. It's now 2.17. The bell rang at exactly 2.15. Say the fastest she could have gotten to her car is two minutes. So that's giving the state the benefit of the doubt, right? If she's really hustling, maybe she can get to her car in, say, two minutes.
Remember, her friend Debbie Warren said Hay had told her right after school that she was in a rush to see her new boyfriend Don at the mall, presumably the Owings Mills mall where they both worked. I think this is the last bus. We do indeed have to wait for the bus loop to clear. It takes a few minutes. We just have to sit there. We're timing. We're in the back of the school. Now we have to drive up around to the front of the school, up around the circle near the gym. Remember, that's where Inez Butler Hendricks says she sees Hay, who'd come to grab a snack.
Once we get there, we're at 11 minutes, 38 seconds. I'm going to run in. Keep timing. I run into the gym area where the food cart was, run back out to the car. Then we have to drive back out to Woodlawn Drive, turn onto Security Boulevard, which does have some big intersections you have to get through. Again, we're trying to get to Best Buy. It's still there today. In 21 minutes. We're at 17 minutes, right about now.
We're at 17 minutes. We're just crossing under the beltway. Less than a minute later. Oh, yeah. See, there's the sign. Best Buy. Jay's story was that when he pulled into Best Buy, he saw Adnan at the phone booth there at the edge of the building wearing red gloves. Adnan motioned for Jay to follow him across the front of the building around to the other side to the farthest corner of a side parking lot where Jay saw Hay's car parked.
This particular part of the parking lot, alas, it has significance. After Adnan was arrested, the detectives interviewed another friend of his, a kid named Juwan. Juwan told them he'd gotten high with Adnan once, in Adnan's car. Here's tape of that interview. And where was this? Why did you go to Best Buy Parking Lot? Was it your choice to go there? His choice. He said that's where I am. I haven't had to go there since that time.
In case you didn't hear that, he says, I think he might have said that they had sex there before. Yeah. Juwan said this happened, this trip to get high at Best Buy, that it happened after Hay went missing.
Meaning, if Adnan did it, he was taking Juwan back to the exact spot where he killed Hay. He was returning to the scene of the crime. Juwan says that they parked, from the sounds of it, right where Jay says Hay's car was that day. Right where Dana and I are now also parked. It takes Dana and me 18 minutes to get to this spot. That leaves three minutes for the actual horror of the thing. An argument, maybe. Then strangulation. Then he's got to put her body in the trunk, somehow, without anyone seeing.
Granted, this part of the parking lot is pretty empty, but it's still, it's a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon. There are definitely cars and people near enough to make this seem like a very, very risky move. Dana and I time it out, counting down the quickest possible imagining of such a thing. Manual strangulation usually takes a few minutes. Then we get out of our car and walk over to where we think the payphone was, according to a sketch Jay made for the cops. There's no phone booth there now.
I just want to pause here and talk about this phone booth for a minute. Weirdly, we have not been able to confirm its existence. The Best Buy employees I talked to did not remember a payphone back then. We spoke to the landlord at the time and to the property manager. They had no record of a payphone. They dug up a photo of the store from 2001. No phone booth or payphone, though lots of public phones did come down between '99 and 2001.
They looked up the blueprints for the store when it was built in 1995. Nothing. The manager also said there is no record of a service agreement between Best Buy and any payphone company at that store. We checked with the Maryland Public Service Commission. We checked with Verizon. Neither could track down records from that far back. It seems crazy to me that the cops would have either not checked to make sure it existed or failed to mention it if somehow it wasn't there.
They never got the call record from this booth. There's nothing in their files about it. At trial, Adnan's lawyer brings up this phone booth when she's trying to attack Jay's credibility. She says to the judge, quote, So I don't know. We're stumped on this one.
But let's assume it did exist that day. The prosecutors said they knew Hay was dead by 2:36 because there's a call at 2:36 to Adnan's cell phone, which Jay has. And they say that must be the call Jay told the cops about, the one where Adnan calls his own phone and says, "Come and get me. I'm at Best Buy." You can see it on the call log. It just says "Incoming." There's no phone number attached to incoming calls.
This 2.36 call was five seconds long. We get out a quarter, we put it in. Dial the number. One, two, three, four, five. Stop it. 22 and a half minutes? Yeah. So wait, let's just be precise about it. 21, it's 20. 22 minutes and two seconds. Yeah. We just did it in 22 minutes and two seconds, and that was leaving about a minute and a half...
in the car for the actual killing part. Should probably be the minimum amount of time in the car. Right. I don't know. I mean, it seems like, yeah, it could be done, but it seems far-fetched. It does seem far-fetched because there's no room for any errors, any pauses even. The buses, the drive, the strangulation, the moving of the body, the call, they all have to happen as quickly as they possibly can for the 236 call to work.
But it is possible, or at least not impossible, which is what Adnan was saying in that first letter. So you guys... Huh. Yeah. So...
When I told Adnan Dana and I more or less did it in the time allowed, the 21 minutes, his overall reaction was incredulity. It seems like five minutes. From what I can remember, those buses didn't clear in five minutes because I remember sometimes we would have to wait in that parking lot for the buses to clear. I don't know. To me, that's always what stuck in my mind was the buses. You have to wait for the buses. So I don't know. I don't know. It's kind of disheartening. But I just always, you know...
I don't know how long the crime would have taken. I don't know how long. I mean, it's pretty, I don't know. I mean, if you guys said you did it, then you did it. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say to that. I don't know what to say. I've just always thought in my mind, man, that. I mean, this is what I'll say. It doesn't make me think. To me, it doesn't.
prove anything except that it's possible. It doesn't mean that I think you're lying or that I think it even happened at the Best Buy. I'm just saying, if you're going to debunk the state's timeline... No, I understand. Like, we weren't able... Yeah, we weren't able to do that. We weren't able to debunk their timeline. I understand that, yeah. I understand, right.
However, Dana and I were not done because, of course, this is just step one of the state's timeline. In the detectives notes, Dana and I found a handwritten itinerary dated March 18th, 1999. So that's three days after Jay's second taped interview with police. This is the route Jay laid out for the cops his entire driving day on January 13th. This is what we're going to try to replicate to see if it matches the call record from that day.
Because, right, the prosecution's story of the crime was mainly pinned to two things, Jay's statements and the cell records. Adnan remembers that at his trial, the prosecution had a big blow-up chart of the call record, the one listing 34 calls made and received on Adnan's cell phone that day, with blanks beside each call.
Every time a witness identified a call on the list, the prosecutor would label it with a sticker. So at 321, they would have placed a sticker, boom, Claude Genpousseter. It was a pretty powerful thing because as he was testifying, it was almost as if they were using the cell phone records as a proof for all of his testimony. OK, you said what happened at this time and such and such call was made, boom. I mean, it was very, I would say, influential testimony.
Besides the calls themselves, they also had a list of all the cell towers that pinged each time a particular call came in or went out. Sure, the prosecutor said, you might have your doubts about Jay, but the call record doesn't lie. Jay couldn't possibly have known which towers were getting pinged when. He couldn't fabricate that. It would be too crazy of a coincidence. So the cell towers and the calls and Jay's story, the way they all meshed, the prosecutors argued, was irrefutable.
Prosecutor Casey Murphy said to the jury in her closing statement, quote, the most important thing for you to remember about Jay's testimony is that it does not stand alone. It is corroborated. She added, the cell phone records support what those witnesses say and the witnesses support what those cell phone records say. There's no way around it. All right, ready? Yep. Okay. So I started it. It's 2.51 and we're making a right out of the Best Buy parking lot onto Belmont Ave.
All right, so let's see if we can recreate what Jay says happened that day. The next stop after Best Buy is the I-70 park and ride, where Jay says they leave Hay's car for a few hours. It's just a large commuter parking lot. Jay says he follows Adnan there. Adnan is driving Hay's car. Jay has Adnan's car. He's pretty careful to let the cops know. He wasn't ever in Hay's car, never touched her or her stuff. Did he get out of the car? Yes, he got out of the car and... This is from Jay's second taped statement. Proceeded to...
Go through the trunk and the backseat. This detail has always struck me, by the way. Jay says Anand is going through the trunk of Hay's car at the I-70 park and ride. Hay's body is back there, in the trunk at this point. But anyway. Several items he picked up and moved around, stuff like that. And then he came over to his car, told me to pop the trunk. I popped the trunk. He placed a whole bunch of items in the trunk.
And then he got in the driver's seat and we switched places and I got in the passenger seat. It takes Dana and me 11 minutes to get to the park and ride from Best Buy. Then we wait a couple minutes to account for Adnan's movements. In case you're wondering, there were no security cameras at this park and ride back in 99. We checked with the DOT.
So now it's a little after 3 p.m. When Jay took the cops on this ride on March 18th to map out the timeline, he told them that after they left the park and ride, they went in search of weed. He says that's when he calls his friend Patrick. And this is where things start to get off course. There is indeed a call to Patrick on the call log, but it's at 3.59 p.m. So right away, we've got a time problem.
By trial, though, Jay has sorted that out, so his story better match the call log. He testified that he'd called Jen Pusateri first at 321 to find out if Patrick was home. Jen testified that, no, Jay would not have called her to find out where Patrick was. It's just not a thing that would have happened. But in any case, there is a call to Jen at 321.
Jay says when they didn't find Patrick at home, they switched course and headed up to Forest Park to buy weed. Dana and I drive that same route. Okay, so they buy two dimes of weed here. That's a side note. All right.
Done? Done. We are making a left. Jay also mentions another call around this time. This call is incredibly important, and I will talk more about it in another episode, I swear. But for right now, what you need to know is, in his second interview, when the cops show him the list of calls, Jay says Adnan spoke to some girl in Silver Spring. Her name was Nisha. It's that girl Adnan had been flirting with. And Adnan briefly put Jay on the phone with her.
And the reason this is so important is for two reasons. One, it's the only call in this stretch of time that's to someone Anand knew rather than a friend of Jay's. And it puts Jay and Anand together in the middle of the afternoon when Anand says he was not with Jay. He was back at school. In the March 18th itinerary, there's a note about the Nisha call that Anand handed the phone to Jay at the golf course on West Forest Park Avenue. Yeah, that is the golf course. Okay.
If indeed this is the golf course he's saying where suspect hands the phone to the witness, who's Jay, that was the Nisha call. And that does happen right now. So the time works for this one. It matches Jay's story. But here's the problem. It doesn't match the cell tower in the call records.
It's pinging a tower back near the Best Buy, west of where we are. And that is true of all these calls from the middle of the afternoon. The 3:21 to Jen, 3:32 to Nisha, 3:48 to a dude named Phil, 3:59 to Patrick. None of these calls pinged a tower near where Jay tells the cops they were driving that afternoon. Not a one. At trial, though, even though all these mid-afternoon calls were identified and accounted for in Jay's testimony, prosecutors did not point out that the cell towers didn't match.
Anand's defense attorney did, sort of. But reading the trial transcript, even though she notes the discrepancy, she doesn't nail it. So it's hard to tell what that discrepancy means. So, onward. So we are headed to Patapsco State Park right now. Oh, you're kidding. Not kidding. We definitely don't have time to go to Patapsco. Well, let's see how long that takes.
This is the next stop on the itinerary to a place known as the Cliffs at Patapsco State Park, which is a good 20-minute drive from where we are right now. Anand's track practice starts at 4 p.m. If before we were sort of clinging respectably to the agreed-upon timeline, now we're about to just thumb our noses at the thing. Yeah, I mean, this just seems absurd. It's three, say it's between 345 and 350 now in their world.
And if I'm Adnan and I need to be seen for track, I'm freaking out right now that I need to get back for track to have an alibi. So what's this like? Oh, let's just drive halfway across the county to go to a state park to smoke a blunt. Like just pull up, just smoke in your car. And I don't know. It just seems like there had to be other places you could have just pulled over for a quick smoke. If indeed that's what needed to happen. There's a shrimp sale at the crab crib.
Sometimes I think Dana isn't listening to me. Anyway, we head to Patapsco State Park because Jay is very clear. Tape statement number one, tape statement number two, March 18th itinerary. Now is when they go smoke a blunt at the cliffs in Patapsco. Dana and I trek in there. Okay, down many rough-hewn steps. This is beautiful.
You can see the river below, some train tracks, hills. Jay's memories about this spot are specific. Dana reads from the handwritten notes from March 18th. So these are the detective's notes. It says, Patapsco Valley State Park, 1630 hour. And then the next note is, sun getting ready to hit mountaintops. 1630 hour means 4.30 p.m. Sunset that day was at 5.05 p.m., so that would make sense. And then it says, I can't believe I did it. I'm sad, but not really.
Here's what Jay says they talked about. And before I play this next tape, just a warning that is disturbing. We're standing overlooking a whole bunch of stuff at this cliff. And he starts telling me about how it was when he killed her. He said he wrapped his hand around her and her throat. She started kicking and he said he looked up to make sure nobody was looking in the car at him.
And he said he was worried about her scratching him, getting his skin underneath her fingernails. And that she was trying to say something. He said that she thinks that she was trying to say that she was sorry, but that's what she deserved. How long do you think you were at the cliff? 20 minutes to a half an hour. Other than that conversation, was there anything additional? He had said to me he wondered where he was going to put the body at. Did you make any suggestions? Not at all.
Did he name any locations? None at all. He didn't say, you know, what about here? You know, he didn't name off the half dozen locations and you gave him thumbs up or thumbs down? I just, no, he said something to me to the effect of the state park where we were a little bit up the river, but I told him that people walk up and down there and
So Jay says they talk about the murder at the cliffs. He says they talk about whether to dispose of the body right there in Patapsco State Park. He says they're there for 20 minutes to half an hour. Come trial, when Jay's on the stand talking about where they went that day. This whole trip to Patapsco, it never happens. It's just not there. That talk they have, instead, it happens in Adnan's car when they're tooling around looking to buy weed.
Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Plus, it's like trying to...
I don't know. Like, I'm trying to think of an analogy of like what the uselessness of what we're trying to do by recreating something that doesn't fit. It's like a, like trying to plot, you know, the coordinates of someone's dream or something where it's just like, but wait, that doesn't like, as if we're going to be surprised every single time, but it's like, but it doesn't cause it's not. I think they call that a fool's errand. Yeah.
At trial, Jay says Adnan gets another call as he's dropping Adnan off at school for track. Quote, before he left the car, he received a phone call or placed a phone call. It was in Arabic. I don't know who he was talking to. I don't know what it entailed. I believe it was his mother, unquote. Adnan and his family say he doesn't speak Arabic or Pashto or Urdu. But maybe Jay could hear a foreign sounding accent on the other end of the call.
And there is a 427 call in the log. Maybe that's the one. But again, the cell tower at Pings isn't near Woodlawn High School. The earliest Dana and I can get from the cliffs back to Woodlawn is 4.45 p.m., and that's being generous. But even so, that means if Anand still had to get changed, he is very late for 4 p.m. track now, which seems like a bad strategy for an alibi, doesn't it, to be noticeably late like that?
Jay says he goes next to a friend's house. I'm going to call this friend Kathy because she didn't want to be identified. Jay says he gets there by 5.20 or 5.30. He says he smoked some more weed there, but it's not long before Adnan calls him and says, I'm done with track. Come get me. Jay goes back to Woodlawn to get Adnan. Jay tells the cops that he gets to Woodlawn at about 6 p.m. and that he sees Adnan with a friend from track.
The notes from March 18th say, said goodbye to track buddy, Will. That day, he said, bye to Will. And then, oh, man. That is Will from track. It's hard to remember that one interaction. You mean I should have asked you 15 years ago? Oh, maybe five. Five. I would have remembered. Oh, man, that's hard to remember. Yeah.
Gee whiz, like, I didn't even know that I was a part of anything until you just told me that. Like, no one ever contacted me about anything. Really? Yeah, like, yeah. So the cop, no, no cops ever called you and said, was Adnan at track that day? No, no attorneys, no attorneys ever called and said, did you, was Adnan present at track practice that day? I don't remember any of that.
We'll confirm that, yes, track started at 4, so you had quite a bit of time from the end of school at 2.15. Yeah, go, you know, dig around, you know, play with your little girlfriend, and then go get ready for practice and be ready and on time. Like, it was never an excuse to be late for track practice. Because there was so much time. Exactly. And what would happen if you were really late or you skipped or...
Was there any consequence? Yeah, he had run extra. Like, if you didn't have a family emergency, somebody had to run extra. Okay. 400. 400. Extra running the next day. Yep. Their coach, Michael Sy, told the cops that Anand probably was there that day, that he thinks he'd have noticed if Anand wasn't there, but he couldn't be 100% sure.
The other thing Will told me was that he saw Jay pick up and also drop off Adnan for track multiple times. Right. Ah, so you can't solve this crime for us. Here's another problem with the track story. Jay says he gets Adnan at about 6 p.m.
There's an outgoing call at 5.38 p.m. to Adnan's friend Krista, someone Jay would not be calling, which would suggest Adnan had his phone at 5.38 p.m. And the call pings a tower that's out near that guy Patrick's house, sort of near where they end up ditching Hay's car. Not at all close to Woodlawn High School. I could keep going here to the bitter end of the night, but I'm hoping you'll take my word for it that the timeline has some problems. ♪
I'm going to try very hard not to bore you right now, but I do want to talk about cell records for a sec, because I want to know whether the state used the call records accurately and fairly in Adnan's trial. Do the records really corroborate Jay's story? You might have seen some recent reports about how cell phone evidence isn't as reliable as it was once cracked up to be. The Washington Post ran a story in June, for instance, with the headline, Experts Say Law Enforcement's Use of Cell Phone Records Can Be Inaccurate.
Federal courts in Oregon and Illinois have ruled cell phone evidence inadmissible. The problems arise when you're trying to say, "I can prove you were at such and such a place at such and such a time because of the cell tower that your phone pinged." You can't do that with certainty because of the way cell towers get activated and how much territory they cover. In fact, these kinds of records are mostly useful as a way to say where someone wasn't rather than where he or she was.
Like, if a call pings a tower in downtown Baltimore, I'm going to be pretty confident that you're not making that call from, say, Annapolis or D.C. or Patapsco State Park. As far as I know, Adnan's case was the first in Maryland to use cell tower technology as evidence. It was a new thing. Because I am, technologically speaking, a moron, I asked Dana to find out. Did the cell expert who testified at trial present the technology accurately in a way that still holds up?
So Dana sent this gripping testimony to two different engineering professors, one at Purdue and one at Stanford University. And they both said, yes, the way the science is explained in here is right. And the way that the state's expert, a guy named Abraham Moronowitz, tested these cell sites by just going around to different spots and dialing a number and noting the tower it pinged, that's legit. That is not junk science.
But that's a different question from, does the science he's explaining here actually support the state's case? Did the prosecution deploy that science fairly? That's a more complicated question with a more complicated answer. Woronowitz, the cell expert, and prosecutor Casey Murphy did the site tests together. She took him around to various locations connected to Jay's story. Dana explained it to me. They went to the spots that matter the most in the story of the crime. Okay. So places like...
Jen's house, the Best Buy, Leakin Park where Hay was buried. Those places that are really important. Kathy's apartment. So they do 14 of those, right? They go out this day in October. They do 14 of them. Do you know how many they brought up at trial? No. They ask the cell phone expert about four of them. You're kidding. Really? Four of them.
four of them, because the rest of the test didn't really help their argument, which is their prerogative. Their job is to put on the strongest possible case.
But of the foresight tests they do talk about, one is a test Ronowitz does in a place called Gelston Park, which I'm not even going to explain because it's basically irrelevant to our story. The other three places, these all happen in Jay's narrative after 6 p.m., after Jay had picked a nun up from track. Sort of from 12.07 until 6.07, that window of time is where kind of
Jay's story doesn't line up with the cell phone records. And the timeline he's giving is also not lining up with the times of the cell phone calls. So the towers, the times, and Jay's story are not matching anywhere in that basically six-hour period. Right. Yeah. Which this is sort of what Dana and I had experienced on our drive that day, that it wasn't plotting out.
Just a word about the cell tower testimony. It took two days, and it was sort of a mess.
Announce defense attorney Cristina Gutierrez claims she didn't have all the cell record evidence, she didn't have the cell tower maps, she tries to get Woronowitz's testimony thrown out, the judge nearly agrees with her, then prosecutor Kevin Urich ends up asking for a mistrial, which isn't granted. And all this might sound like exciting courtroom fireworks, but I just, I can't stress enough how tedious this must have been for the jury, and also possibly confusing.
Ruwanowitz is actually a young guy. On the stand, he looks kind of like George Stephanopoulos, except tired and fearful. Here's one of the more lively moments of his testimony. Prosecutor Kevin Urich talks first. What if any effect does a random cell phone tap on the functioning of the AT&T wireless network? Overruled, if you know. Depends on the quality of the phone. How might that affect it? Objection. Overruled. And again, if you know. Poor performance?
How so? Objection. At this point, I'm going to sustain. And Mr. Yorick, unless you are prepared to lay a foundation for this... Seriously, most of it is more boring than that, which is why I made Dana read it all so I didn't have to.
She explained that the cell site tests the prosecution did bring up at trial, the ones after 6 p.m., the first one was about a site near Kathy's apartment. Remember, that's the call Adnan gets at Kathy's when Officer Adcock calls asking if he's seen Hay. Moronowitz says that one worked. That 6.24 p.m. call is a winner. It matches the cell tower, it matches the call log, and it matches Jay's story, Adnan's story, and Kathy's story, too.
It puts Jay and Adnan together at a certain place at a certain time. The question is, what happens after that? Jay says after the Adcock call, they left Kathy's, and that's when they went to bury Hay in Leakin Park. Then they ditched her car out off Edmondson Avenue, and then they headed back toward Westview Mall, where they threw evidence into the dumpsters. And if you map the cell towers that ping between 6.24 p.m. and, say, 8.05, if you imagine each tower lighting up,
They do illuminate this trail. They support the locations in Jay's story. Wronowitz confirms this with riveting testimony that sounds like this. Yes. The most incriminating stop on their route that night is, of course, Leakin Park. There were two incoming calls, one at 7.09 and one at 7.16, that hit a tower at the northwest end of the park.
I asked Dana, since the range of that Leakin Park tower reaches beyond just the territory of the park, could they have been someplace else besides digging a grave in the actual park? Could you have been at someone's house or something? It's possible you could have been here. This is, I think, Patrick's house, one of his addresses, for instance. Or you could have been at, these are strips. Like maybe you could have been there. Okay. I think they were probably in Leakin Park. Okay. Okay.
Because it's just, I don't think the amount of luck you would have to have to make up a story like that and then have the cell phone records corroborate those key points. I just don't think that that's possible. Isn't that sort of tantamount to saying, I think Jay's telling the truth? I'm saying I think the cell phone was in Lincoln Park. Right. That looks pretty bad for a non-Jay.
Because even though the cell towers can't say who was with the phone or who was making the call, Adnan himself says he's pretty sure he was with his phone at that time after track. Again, his memory is vague, full of I probably would have's. But he says that from what he can remember of the evening, after he got the call from Officer Adcock, he remembers dropping Jay off at some point. And then he says he would have gone to the mosque for prayers. It was Ramadan.
He doesn't say he lent his phone out or his car to Jay or anyone else that evening. So, according to Adnan, he was with the phone. And twice that night, the phone pinged the tower near Leakin Park. So, bad for Adnan. On the other hand, the call records also undermined what Jay tells the cops about that same trip to Leakin Park. The Adcock call at Kathy's ends at about 6.29 p.m. The Leakin Park calls are 40 minutes later.
But Jay says after the Adcock call, he and Adnan left Kathy's, and then they do a bunch of different things. They drive to Jay's house for shovels, then to I-70 Park and Ride for Hay's car. Then Jay goes to McDonald's back by school to wait for Adnan, says he's there waiting for about 20 minutes. Then they drive all around for a while, back over to Patapsco, then up Dogwood to security, before they finally get to Leakin Park.
All that, what I just described, that takes an hour and 20 minutes. Twice as long, in other words, than the call log accounts for. I'm not trying to be petty here. I don't think we should hold Jay to some crystal clear timeline. How could he possibly remember each twist and turn and phone call from that day six weeks later? However, if the state is saying Adnan Syed is guilty because we have this witness and his story is backed up by cell records,
Well, what I see is, you have this witness, but his story has shifted rather significantly over time. And you have these call records, but I don't think they're as ironclad as you're making them out to be. Because for the most part, they don't exactly align with your witness's narrative. There are key moments when they do support his version of that night. But what about the rest of the day?
You know, it's like it's so unfair to me because it's like it never did the the the etched in stone of the phone records. It never goes in my way. It's just whenever it's true with the prosecutor saying it's like, you know, the Moses tablet, whenever something I'm saying, it's like the Holy Grail. Oh, we don't know where it is. We're not sure if it really exists. It kind of floats away.
But that's not cool, though, because now what you're saying is that you can use the cell phone records when it benefits me.
That was the 30-minute cutoff. Adnan called back. Yeah, I got cut off mid-rant. But, uh, yeah, no, but just to finish up real quick. The rant went on. Of all the calls, the 236 call is the most troublesome to Adnan. It's the one he probably thinks about the most, because that's the call that starts the whole chain. And he also thinks about it because he says he has an alibi for that time, the Asia letters, where she says she saw him in the library.
Here's a weird thing about the 236 call. The prosecutors are very clear at trial that this is the come and get me, I'm at Best Buy call. But they're not basing it on anyone's testimony. Jay never says the call was at that time. In fact, he says repeatedly that Adnan called him around 340 or 345. Jen also says that's about when Jay left her house that day. But there is no incoming call at or near 345 on the call log.
So the prosecution has to go with 236 because it's the only one that sort of lines Jay's story up with the log. It's their only choice. When you tease apart the state's case, you can get tripped up on details like this, which is maybe why prosecutor Kevin Urich addressed this head-on in his opening statement to the jury. He told them, "...look at the big picture. The main plot points in Jay's story have been consistent."
He tells them that consistently Jay, quote, has always given the same story about what the defendant did where. Consistently, he tells Jennifer a consistent story. He tells police a consistent story about the defendant. He tells consistently the defendant's involvement, the defendant's actions on that day. He has never wavered on that point, unquote. That is a lot of consistent lees. And while maybe it's not great oratory, it does have the advantage of being true.
In Jay's statements, while the particulars shifted, the spine of his story did not. Anand told Jay he was going to do it. Anand showed him the body. They buried her in Lincoln Park. They ditched her car. Jay has been consistent on those points.
It's funny, there's this part of the trial that keeps coming back to me. It's when Cristina Gutierrez is cross-examining Jay. She's pointing out that he lied to detectives about various things, including the location where he says Adnan showed him Hay's body in the trunk of the car. And what you told them in your act of showing them that place, those were lies, weren't they?
They were not the truth. They weren't the truth. What's the opposite of the truth? Objection. You told them something that was not the truth. No, I told them the truth. I'm sorry. And then you backed it up showing them a place that was not true. I told them the truth. I did not show them a location that was true. He says, I told them the truth. I did not show them a location that was true.
As oxymoronic as that sounds, I think I see what he's saying. Yes, I told some lies, but I told the truth. Overall, I told the truth. There are parts of Jay's story that make no sense, where it seems like there must have been more going on than he's saying. But here's what's also the truth. You can say the same thing about Adnan's story, too. 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. Our theme music is composed by Nick Thorburn. Scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips, who also mixed our show. Special thanks today to Phil Levis and Terrence O'Connor, Dan Manning, Mark Thomas, Blake Morrison and Liz Bowie. 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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