Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Previously on Serial…
So it's just a really tight, really window of time, I mean, for this to have taken place, right? 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. 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. This is a Global Telelink prepaid call from... Anon Sayan.
From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.
The most incriminating piece of physical evidence against Adnan Syed was a fingerprint, or rather a palm print, on a map. It was one of those big map books you buy at a gas station. Police found it in the backseat of Hay's car. On the back cover was a partial print of Adnan's left palm. One page was ripped out from the map. At trial, they pointed out that it was the page that showed Leakin Park.
The defense argued, well, you can't put a time stamp on fingerprints. They could have been six-week-old fingerprints or six-month-old fingerprints. There's no way to tell. And Adnan had ridden in and driven Hay's car many times. All their friends said so. The ripped-out page showed a whole lot more than just Leakin Park. In fact, it showed their whole neighborhood, the school, the malls, probably 90% of where they most often drove. And that page didn't have Adnan's prints on it. His palm print was only on the back cover of the book.
Plus 13 other unidentified prints turned up on and in the map book. None of them matched Adnan or Jay. So the prints weren't exactly conclusive. Over the past few weeks, I've been holding up bits of evidence here and there that look bad for Adnan. Today, I'm just going to lay out the rest. Everything else that a person could reasonably add to the Adnan is guilty side of the scale. Everything that the state had that I know about. Some of these I've mentioned before, but let's just hang them all up side by side and see what they look like.
First off, there's the question of whether Adnan asked Hay for a ride that day after school. Was he looking for an excuse to get in her car so he could kill her? Officer Adcock testified that the day she disappeared, Adnan told him he'd asked her for a ride. Adnan then later told a different cop he didn't ask for a ride. Then, you know how Adnan says he can't really remember much at all about the day Hay went missing? How it was just a normal day to him? Nothing much stands out?
I've wondered about that, the normalness of the day. Because wouldn't the call from Officer Adcock asking whether he's seen Hay just in and of itself, wouldn't that call make it a not normal day?
something pretty unusual did happen to you that day, which was... Oh, but the police... The police call you and say, do you know where Haley is? Right? Oh, no. Well, yeah, no. I do remember that phone call, and I do remember being high at the time because the craziest thing is to be high and have the police call your phone. I'll never forget that. I guess that's the only thing about the day that seems weird to me that you wouldn't then... that the day wouldn't then come into focus for you because...
you'd gotten this call from the cops, and, you know, you were high, you were young, you know, it's a scary call to get or just a jarring call to get. I mean, at the time, the only thing I really associated with that call was that, man, you know, Hayes is going to be in a lot of trouble when she gets home if the police are at her house, you know, if her mother...
Actually, you know, for whatever reason, if she didn't, you know, go home or she went somewhere else, in no way did I associate this call with being, you know, the beginning of just, you know, this whole horrible thing. It's not, in no way is this like, you know, foreshadowing, I don't know if that's the right word, what's, you know, what's to come. So to me, all this call was, was, man, Hayes is going to get in a lot of trouble. You know, her mother's going to be pissed, man, when she comes home, right? Yeah.
To be fair to Adnan, if this really was his reaction, then he wasn't the only one. The seriousness of Hay's disappearance didn't start sinking in with her friends for a while. School was canceled on January 14th and 15th because of the ice storm. Then the weekend came. Then Monday was Martin Luther King Day. So the kids didn't all reconvene at school until the following Tuesday.
All of Hay's friends I spoke to said they initially thought Hay had either run off someplace with her new boyfriend Don, or this was another rumor that a lot of people talked about at the time, that she'd run off to California. Friends said she talked about that sometimes, that her dad, or maybe it was her stepdad, was in California, and she wanted to go there. They told the cops the same thing.
Next, the night before Hay disappeared, Anand called her house three times. It seems like the only time they actually spoke was the third call at 12:35 a.m. That's when Anand says he was probably calling to give her his new cell phone number, and she does write it in her diary. Here's something that makes me pause, though. If you look at his cell records from that day forward, neither Hay's home number nor her pager shows up again, which suggests he never tried to contact her after she went missing. They were supposedly such good friends,
Hay's friend Aisha said she was paging her like crazy. Did you ever try to page her and just be like, you know, see if you could find her, raise her, see if you could get a response from her?
Well, I know that we would always... I can't remember if I did page her or not, but we would always talk about it in school. I would always, like, get my information firsthand from, like, Aisha, who would usually be in contact with... I mean, if I can remember, she was, like, in contact with Hayes' family. So it was kind of like I would always... If not Aisha or Krista or...
I mean, it wasn't like I was just sitting around, like, not even thinking about her, you know, not paging or whatever. But I used to always get my information from them firsthand. So it's not that I don't remember if I ever paged her or not. No, it just seems like I know Krista was trying to page her. I know Aisha was trying to page her during this time to just be like, where are you? Where are you? Where are you? And I was wondering if you were in that group of, like, where are you? Yeah.
Will you ask me a question? I don't know. I'm just explaining why I'm asking the question. I'm explaining why I'm asking the question. Is that it seems like from the relationship you had with her, you would have been one of those people saying, hey, hey, hey, give a holler. Are you okay? We're all worried about you. No.
Then there are some stray things that, eh, I don't know what they mean, or if they mean much of anything, but I'm going to tell you about them in case.
A note came up at trial. After Hay and Adnan broke up in early November, Hay had written Adnan a frustrated letter. I'm really getting annoyed that the situation is going the way it is, she wrote. You know, people break up all the time. Your life is not going to end. You'll move on and I'll move on. But apparently you don't respect me enough to accept my decision."
Aisha Pittman read this note at trial. Hay was her best friend. Adnan had shown Aisha the letter, apparently in health class, and they'd written notes to each other on the back. Aisha in pencil, Adnan in pen. They were joking, making fun of Hay, making fun of themselves. It's all just silliness. But then at the top of the page, it says, I'm going to kill, in pen. I talked to Aisha about it. And, I mean, did you take any of that as, as, um...
Menacing or anything? Or was it just like part of the joking of the note? So no, it just seems like you guys are just messing around. So that wasn't on the note when I was writing with it. So for, to see it later, it was one of those things where it's like, that's weird to see that, but I don't know when that would have been written or what the. Oh, that wasn't part of the conversation. No.
Because I remember, like, once you read through it, it was just, like, on it, it was our conversation on letterhead, and then at the top of it, it was kind of out of context. Okay. Did you take it to mean anything? I mean, did you take it to be meaningful, I guess? I don't know, because when I'm first seeing that part of it, it was sitting in court having to read the rest of the letter. Police had found the note when they searched Adnan's house.
But who knows about that one, right? Seems like a detail you'd find in a cheesy detective novel. The other one I'm not sure about is this kind of stray report in the police file. A guy named Dave had called the cops and said, my daughter just heard something about a dead body. Dave told the cops it was the neighbor boy who mentioned it. Dave names the neighbor boy, but I'm just going to call him the neighbor boy. Here's Dave. I just remember he had told my daughter he had seen something.
the body of a girl in the trunk of some vehicle. And it seemed to me that he said it was like an oriental girl or something, but that's all I know about it. Did he tell it to you or just to your daughter? To my daughter. He didn't tell it to me. Dave gave me his daughter's number. I went to see her right away.
Her name is Laura. Here's what she remembered about what the neighbor boy told her that day. He was with a friend, and the friend said something like, look what I have, and he popped the trunk, and that's what he saw. Did he seem upset? He seemed disturbed. More like a, wow, I can't believe what I just saw. Kind of almost like he was maybe getting something off his chest, that type of thing.
I asked Laura, did the neighbor boy tell you the name of this friend who showed him the body? I think the guy's name was maybe Adnan. Really? Mm-hmm. Hmm. So this guy said my friend Adnan showed me the body of a girl in the back of a car? Mm-hmm. Yes. Do you think he was telling the truth? Yes. Laura didn't go to Woodlawn. She didn't know Adnan. She'd known the neighbor boy since they were little. They were friendly.
Laura said she never spoke to police about this. They never questioned her. So this sounds really, really bad, right? That there was another witness besides Jay who saw Hay's body, who saw Adnan with Hay's body. That's huge.
But I called the neighbor boy that same night. He's now somebody else's neighbor, and he's a man. He was affable and patient, and he wholly denied this episode. He was pretty convincing. He said, quote,
The neighbor man said he wasn't friends with Adnan. He was friends with Jay, though. They smoked weed together. I suggested, maybe Jay told him this story, and he kind of appropriated it and told it to the neighbor girl to freak her out. And he said, no way. Quote, I wouldn't kid around about something like that. The man told me the cops came to see him in 99, and he told them the same thing. They didn't know anything. And he wrote out a statement to the same effect to a private investigator who was working for the defense in Adnan's case. I've read it.
This is what's weird. That original police report about Dave and his daughter Laura, it's dated April 28th. By that time, Adnan had already been in jail for nearly two months. But Laura was under the impression that whatever happened to her neighbor had just happened. She told her dad right away, and he called the cops right away.
And I talked to friends of Jay's who also knew the neighbor boy, and they said, "Oh, that guy?" They gave the impression the neighbor boy was a bit of a gossip, a guy untalented at keeping secrets, which could play either way, I guess, but they meant it like nobody would tell him anything they wanted to stay quiet. The neighbor boy never shows up at trial. He's never mentioned. So I let it go. But, you know, it is weird. And if Laura's story is true, then there's another witness to this murder.
It's one of the things about this case that kind of bobs above the water for me, like a disturbing buoy. Then there's Kathy. That's not her real name, and we've changed her voice, but I'm calling her Kathy. I've mentioned her before. She saw Adnan and Jay together, acting suspiciously, the word she uses is shady, at a critical time that evening of the 13th, the day Hay disappeared.
If you go by Jay's story, he brought Adnan to Kathy's apartment after he picked Adnan up from track practice. So after Hay had been killed, but before they went to bury her body. It was about six o'clock at night. And they all three, Adnan, Jay, and Kathy, acknowledge being together at the apartment. There's no dispute about that. Kathy was a close friend of Jen's. They were sorority sisters. She knew Jay a little bit, but only through Jen. She didn't know Adnan at all.
So here was an acquaintance, Jay, and a stranger who suddenly show up at her door.
Kathy remembers that night pretty clearly. Her boyfriend Jeff was there at the apartment too. And I was kind of surprised, like a little confused because he didn't come unless, you know, it was with Jen and nobody had called to say like, hey, are you guys home? Do you want to hang out? Nothing like that. So it was a little strange that he would just pop up at the door. And I remember him being like, you know, do you want to smoke? Do you want to hang out? And I remember being like, well, hang on a second and asking Jeff, you know, if he wanted to
You know, I was like, Jay's at the door. You know, Jeff was like, for what? And I think he wants to hang out. And Jeff was like, so, you know, that's cool. So Jay came in and he introduced his friend. I don't think he introduced him by name. I think he was just like, you know, this is a friend of mine. Kathy remembers Jay sat over by the table and Anand settled on the floor on some big cushions that were there and didn't speak. I remember the guy wasn't doing a whole lot of talking. Like, he was just kind of, like, slumped over,
When I first heard about Kathy's statement and her testimony, it didn't seem like a big deal to me. This is a girl who says some kid she didn't know, who was high, was acting strangely in her living room. I've been that girl, for Christ's sakes, having to deal with a stoned friend of a friend on the living room floor. And I've probably been that weird guy on the floor at least once.
But listening to Kathy tell it all these years later, the way it stuck with her, how she describes the whole night as just feeling wrong, that also made it stick with me.
Kathy thought Jay was acting odd as well. She knew him as this super laid-back stoner guy, like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. But now he was being conspicuously chatty. She says while Jay and Adnan were there, Jen called the apartment. Or maybe it was she who called Jen, she can't remember now.
But she does remember talking to Jen and saying, "Jay's here with some kid who's practically passed out on the cushions." And Jen thought that was curious. Like, what's Jay doing there? She told Kathy that Jay had been acting weird earlier in the day, too. The story Kathy's telling is pretty close to what she told the cops during the investigation. Detective McGillivary interviewed Kathy in March of '99, after Adnan had been arrested.
She told him back then she remembered Adnan saying only one thing to the group. How do I get rid of a high? And he asked, like, how do I get rid of a high? I have to meet someone or do something, and it's really important, and...
Do you have any idea where he was going to go? Who he was going to meet? Okay.
There are three incoming calls on the call log that ping towers near Kathy's house. 607, 609, and 624 p.m. That's the longest one, for a little more than four minutes. We don't know for sure who they're from, but Officer Adcock testifies that he calls around this time, and he thinks the 624 call was probably him. And Hay's brother, Young, also calls Anon around this time, looking for his sister. We don't know who the third call is from.
Kathy definitely remembers Adnan getting one phone call while he was at her apartment. She says they're sitting around talking. One of Kathy's favorite shows is on the TV, Judge Judy. The phone rings and, you know, he hadn't said anything the whole time he had been there. So when he answers the phone and he's saying, what am I going to do? What am I going to say? They're going to come talk to me. You know, what am I supposed to say? And I remember him sounding very angry.
worried, concerned, you know, like this was, whatever was happening was not good on the other line. Um, and I remember being like, wow, you know, wonder what he's, you know, eavesdropping basically, um, you know, wondering what was going on. And then, um, not too long after he hung up the phone, he left, just bust out the door,
Jay follows Adnan out, leaves his hat and smokes behind, Kathy says. They go downstairs, and then she says they get in a car and just sit there in the car for a while. And so now they're outside in the car, and I remember going to the window like, what are they doing? You know, Jeff, they're in the car. They're just sitting there. You know, what the hell is going on? You know, just finding the whole situation out.
super odd, super strange. And Jeff, he just didn't give a shit about anything. It doesn't matter. Who cares? And I just remember being like, what is going on? And was it... You'd never met the other guy before Adnan, right? So you didn't know what was normal behavior for him. But clearly it was not normal behavior for anybody. I mean, that was just...
I mean regardless of you know whether you know him or not clearly you could tell something was going on something wasn't going on it wasn't good and um yeah I mean it was just strange behavior from anybody I think that's been the one thing I've always remembered like how he said it how he looked when he said it he's definitely panicked he's definitely worried and
Many hours later, at the end of the night, Jay came back to Kathy's again. Without Adnan, but this time, Jen was with him. I remember being like, so what the fuck?
You know, and I remember kind of them both being like, oh, it's nothing, you know, kind of smoothing it over, I think, a little bit, you know, and it was kind of like, oh, it's no big deal, you know, that kind of thing. But you could definitely tell it was a big deal and whatever happened.
The next time I talked to Adnan, I told him how Kathy still remembered all this stuff, how shady the whole scene was for her.
And he said that on a bunch of levels, what Kathy had to say didn't hold much water with him. First of all, if someone had called him to warn him the police were about to call, why would he then answer the phone when the police called? I mean, if I was expecting the police to call me, I probably wouldn't have answered my phone then. You know what I mean? I could have just turned the phone off or something. That's a good point. No, I mean, a common sense, if we're going in this scenario, if I'm trying to avoid the police, you know what I mean, then I wouldn't pick up the phone and engage them in a conversation.
Well, but there's also the other thing where you're just like, just act normal. Everything's not sure. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I saw her after school. I don't know. You know, like where you try to just play it cool. But then it still leaves us as a third person, this third individual. Right. This would seem to make more sense that I have this conversation with Jay. But she clearly said, from what you just said, that I was not talking to Jay. I was talking to someone on the phone. Right. Right.
Right. Her story would imply a third man, a co-conspirator, someone Adnan would be on the phone with who clearly knew about the murder. So who would this third caller be? So at some point, her memory either benefits me or it doesn't benefit me. I mean, that's a hard one. Her testimony does not look good for you, you know, because she's not really connected to Jay. She's not connected to you. You know, she's a little bit more objective, I would say.
And she really thought you were acting very strangely, you know. So it's not good for you, what she has to say. I mean, to be honest with you, I'm listening to you, but I kind of think that it's not good for me if a person believes the narrative of what Jay is saying.
Well...
I don't know. I mean, certainly, you know, there's some things I'm going to yield, but I'm definitely not going to yield that, you know, it's something that I feel really all this in the context, this is in the context of her believing, okay, well, maybe he did this or he's charged with this. And you know what? Now all this stuff makes sense or whatever, which in and of itself may not have been that strange had I never been charged with this. Like I seriously doubt she would have gave this a second thought had I never been charged with Hayes murder. Maybe, maybe not.
There's a second person who puts Jane and Anand together that night, and that's Jen. You know how last episode we talked about those two incoming Leakin Park calls on the call log at 709 and 716 when Jay says they were burying hay, the ones where we think the cell phone really was in Leakin Park? Well, Jen has a cameo in that scene. Jen says she was one of those incoming calls. She said she called the cell phone around that time looking for Jay, but that Anand picked up.
He didn't identify himself, but she assumed it was Adnan. Here's from her police interview. When I called them, Adnan entered the phone and said, Jay will call you back when he's ready for you to come and get him or for you to come and meet him or whatever. Jay will call you when he's ready. And so that's all. He was very quick and very bye, you know.
If Jen's story is true, it does look an awful lot like Adnan was in Leakin Park that night, busy not handing the phone over to Jay. The second time Jen puts them together that night is pretty soon after that, when she picks Jay up sometime after 8 o'clock. So in Jay's timeline, after they've already buried Hay. She says she had arranged to meet him in the parking lot of Westview Mall. She says she saw them arrive in Adnan's car.
On the Adnan side, that detail has always stuck with me too. That Jen says Adnan seemed so normal. She says neither his nor Jay's clothes seem must or dirty.
Anand doesn't remember seeing Jen at Westview Mall or where he dropped off Jay that night. And Jay doesn't say he met Jen at Westview either. Matter of fact, Jay says consistently that Anand dropped him off at home and then Jen showed up at his house to get him. Jay stuck to that, even at trial, when it contradicted Jen's story.
The thing about Jen and Kathy, though, is that even if they don't look great for Adnan, they don't actually contradict Adnan's own account of that evening, which I think is why he kind of shrugs them off and why I'm sometimes tempted to shrug them off. Because Adnan has always admitted he was hanging out with Jay that night. So what if a couple of people saw them together? What does that prove? But now we come to the big one, the one nobody can shrug off.
This call, well, this is a bad metaphor for a phone call, but of all the calls on the log, this is the one I think of as the smoking gun call. It's the Nisha call. Think of it as a title, capitalized. The Nisha call. Between noon and 5 p.m. that day, there are seven outgoing calls on the log. Six of them are to people Jay knows. The seventh is to Nisha, someone only Adnan knew.
Anand's story is that he and his cell phone were separated that day, from lunchtime all the way until after track at around 5-something. But the Nisha call happens at 3.32 p.m., smack in the middle of the afternoon. The prosecution makes much of this call at closing. I can see why. In Jay's second taped statement—granted, it's the one where detectives are showing him the call records— Detective McGillivary is asking Jay about all those afternoon calls on the log between 3 and 4 o'clock.
Again, Jay says this is when they were driving all around Forest Park and Edmondson Avenue looking for weed. Did anybody else use the phone? Yeah. Adnan, I can't remember whether he received a call or placed a call, but I remember he was talking to a girl. I can't remember her name. He put me on the phone with her for like three minutes. I said hello to her. Where did she live? Silver Spring.
Do you recall her name? No, I don't. Do you have any idea why Adnan would call this individual in Silver Spring after he had just strangled his girlfriend? I don't. And I have no idea why he would call. And any conversation didn't pertain to anything that he had just done. The cops went and talked to Nisha. She was a high school student. And she told them, yeah, there was a time when I spoke to Adnan on his cell and he put his friend Jay on the phone.
Nisha testified at both trials. For a smoking gun, she's very cute. She's like a chipmunk. Good afternoon. Good afternoon to you too, sir. Thank you. Do you know the defendant? Yes, I do. This is from trial number one. It's a little hard to recall, but I remember him telling me that Jay invited him over to a video store that he worked at and...
He basically, well, Anand walked in with his cell phone and then he said, like, he told me to speak with Jay and I was like, okay, because Jay wanted to say hi. So I said hi to Jay and that's all I can really recall. At what time of day did that occur? I would think towards the evening, but I can't be exactly sure.
The prosecutor, Kevin Urich, asks her if this call, the 332 call in the log, could it be that same call where Adnan put Jay on the phone? And she says, It could be, but I'm not sure. Jay did work at a porn video store. He worked mostly nights there, so it makes sense this call would have happened towards the evening. What doesn't make sense, if Nisha's saying this call happened at the video store, is that Jay didn't have that job yet on January 13th.
As far as I can tell from Jay's own testimony and from the notes of a private investigator for the defense who interviewed the video store manager, Jay didn't start working there until the very end of January. So listen to what happens at the second trial. I don't have the tape, but I have the transcript.
Yurik asks Nisha, now, did there ever come a time when the defendant called you and put a person he identified as Jay on the line? Yes, she says. Please tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what that call consisted of. Nisha starts to answer. Basically, Jay had asked him to come to an adult video store that he worked at. But then Yurik interrupts her. He says, no, don't. Tell us the content of the call. Now, if I had to guess, I'd say the prosecutor is trying to get her to not mention the video store because it contradicts their story.
So Nisha says, okay, he just asked me how I was doing, et cetera. And then she goes on. She doesn't mention the video store to Yorick again. So I'm not at all convinced this call, the 332 call on the 13th, that this was the call when Adnan put Jay on the phone with Nisha. But still, if Adnan is supposedly at school during this time and Jay's not talking to Nisha for two minutes and 22 seconds, then who the hell is calling Nisha?
This is what Adnan can't explain. I've asked him about it many times. He says Nisha's number was entered into his phone on speed dial. You can see he calls her a lot on the cell. In fact, hers is the very first number he dials when the phone is activated on the 12th. Adnan says he thinks what must have happened is some combination of a butt dial and an answering machine. This is from one of our very first phone calls. To me, the explanation to that is that for whatever reason it was on,
But if she, but she says, she testifies that her phone does not have an answering machine or voicemail on it. So who is picking up that call and talking for two and a half minutes or whatever it was, two minutes and 22 seconds or something. You sure she testified to that? I'm sure. Because I'm almost sure I remember her phone having an answering machine or voicemail or something. Hold on. Hold on. Let me, let me look. Let me look. Let me look. Hold on.
I was right. Here's from the first trial. Yurik asked Nisha, does your home phone have an answering machine? Does your home phone have an answering machine? Not this phone number, no. But I'm sure, absolutely, thousand percent sure that video store and I have at that time the phone activating store. It was explained the billing of it, but sure, thousand percent I was not in the car with him at that time or did I have access to the phone at that time because I was in school that day.
Over the past year, I've swiveled the Rubik's Cube of this case so many different ways. I've arranged and rearranged it to come up with alternate versions of how this day might have actually gone. And I can get pretty far in certain hypothetical directions. Maybe every time Jay says Adnan's name in his story, maybe he's really talking about someone else, a person we don't know about, who Jay's afraid of or he's trying to protect. I mean, Jay's got the car, Jay's got the phone. All these calls are to his friends.
And then I remember the Nisha call and the whole thing crumbles. No way around it. The Nisha call is a big fat problem for Adnan. Adnan says his biggest fear is not being believed. When he's sure about something, he has a tendency to overexplain, to inundate you with facts and information and then corroboration for the facts and information, and then
He doesn't like this tendency in himself, but he says he can't help it. Anyone who knows me will say, man, I'll kind of go overboard to the point where people will be like, all right, man. All right, man. We believe you. It could be about anything. It could be about whether it rained yesterday. Because in my mind, it's like it just reaches something. It's like, I guess, like a personality quirk born of all this. I mean, I really I don't like to talk about things unless I can prove no matter how silly it is.
He does it with anything. He's a cook at the prison, and he said he got into a discussion with some guys recently about barbecue sauce. Adnan was saying, if you don't have molasses or brown sugar, you can substitute pancake syrup. And the guys were like, nah, no way. And so at breakfast, Adnan made a little batch of barbecue sauce using pancake syrup. Nobody needs barbecue sauce at breakfast time at the maximum security prison in Cumberland, Maryland. But he did it anyway.
All these things that look bad for Adnan, everything that's raised my suspicion, even stupid things, I've run every single one of them by him. I've got this thing in my head that I'll catch him in a lie, maybe just a tiny, meaningless lie, and that's going to be his tell, and he'll be caught. Adnan is smart and clever. He knows that's what's going on when we talk. And so every time I call, he's a little on guard. He's not sure what's coming at him. Because what if I ask him something he can't prove, and then I don't believe him?
That notion that people out there in the world, people he went to school with who knew him, don't believe him, that they could imagine he's capable of killing hay. Adnan spent 15 years thinking about that and then trying not to think about that.
And that was kind of like in my mind, I'm like, man, what was it about me? I mean, I'm fine with it now. You know what I mean? It is what it is. Like, when I was younger, I used to wonder about that a lot. Like, golly, man, what was it about me that a person could think that? It would be different if there was a videotape of me doing it.
Or if there was, like, you know, Hayden fought back and did all this stuff of me, like DNA, like scratches and stuff like that. You know what I'm saying? Or, like, someone saw me leaving with Hayden that day. Like, three people saw me leaving with her. Or, like, she said, yeah, me and Adnan are going here, like, total five people. But, I mean, it's, like, it's just on the strength of me being arrested. I used to, like, lose sleep about that. Like, what the heck was it about me? You know what I mean? That people...
not just random people. I mean, like people who knew me intimately, knew Hay intimately, saw us on a daily basis. You know what I'm saying? Just, uh, just boom. And that used to really like devastate me kind of, you know what I'm saying? It used to really, really like, you know, just really like, just strike me to my core. And, uh, just like, just like, what is it about me that would allow someone to even entertain the possibility that I could do this? Is that the thing? I,
I mean, when you really think about it, it's not, they didn't just say that, you know, that, you know, me and Hay got into a fight, boom, and it's happened. It's basically saying that I plotted and planned and kept my true intentions hidden. I mean, just some real devious, cruel, like, like, Hitler type stuff. You know what I mean? Like, this was real, like, cruel, cruel,
Mm-hmm. Like, inhuman type stuff. It's like, wow, man, you know what I mean? Like, obviously, I'm not saying that I was, you know, a great person or anything, but I don't think I ever displayed any tendencies like that. Right. Where a person would think that, you know... I mean, maybe, who knows, maybe if it happened to someone else, I would have believed it, just because I naturally would have assumed that, well, the police got the right guy, they got him for the right reason. You know, they didn't just get him because, you know, he was ex-boyfriend or something. So, I mean, maybe if she was on my foot, I would be doing the same thing, but, uh...
But you know what, Adnan? It's like the people who have told me that they think either they sort of after a long time came to the conclusion that you were guilty or that are kind of like, I don't know, maybe I've never really... Like they all at some point in the conversation, almost everybody has said, well, the Adnan I knew didn't do it. Like the guy I knew couldn't have done it. But maybe... What the hell does that even mean? I'm not like a... No, go ahead.
No, no, no, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was just thinking, but I don't even know what that means. So what they're saying is maybe there was another guy in there that I just never...
You know, like everybody has a deep dark, you know, like maybe... No, they don't. No, not everyone has the ability to do something cruel and heinous like this. This isn't like, you know, yell at the bank teller or, you know, yell at the waiter for getting the order wrong or something like that. Because it's not like they're saying it's a crime of passion. They're saying this is a plotted out...
No, I know. I know. It just, it insults me to my core, man. You know what I mean? I get used to not, I mean, it is, I don't care now, you know what I'm saying? So you don't believe, you're not someone who believes that like everyone put in a, like
Like, anyone could kill, depending on the circumstances. Like, if they were in some... No, yeah. Like, if your life was threatened, you know what I'm saying? Or, like, if it was me or him, you know what I mean? Or if, like, if my kids are in danger. Right. No, I completely don't think that anyone, or even majority of people, you know, could stoop to, you know what I'm saying, doing something like this. But based on what? What did she ever do to me that would cause me to feel so angry at her? But I gotta...
No, I'm sorry. No, no, I'm done. Sorry for interrupting you. Maybe I do care about this. I thought I didn't care about this too much, but obviously I probably do still. How could you not? How could you not care about it? Well, because, you know, it kind of doesn't really matter what people think. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't. I shouldn't care. I see many problems with the state's case. But then I see many problems with the non-story, too. And so I start to doubt him.
Then I talk to him and talk to him and talk to him, and I start to doubt my doubts. And then I worry that I'm a sucker, that I don't know. That's the cycle. Once, about six months after we'd begun our phone calls, Anand asked me a little nervously, what's your interest in this case, really? Why are you doing this?
And so I explained all the interesting stuff I'd read and the people I'd talked to, blah, blah, blah. But I also told him that really what hooked me most is him just trying to figure out who is this person who says he didn't kill this girl, but is serving a life sentence for killing this girl. My interest in it honestly has been you. Like, you're a really nice guy. Like, I like talking to you, you know? So then it's kind of like this question of, well, what does that mean, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. Oh. I mean, you don't even really know me, though, uh, Koenig. I'm... You don't. I'll... Maybe you do. Maybe... I mean, you know... I don't... We only talk on the phone. I don't understand what you mean. I'm not... I mean... It's just weird to hear you say that because I don't even really know you. It's...
But wait, are you saying you don't think that I know you at all? I mean, for you to say that I'm a great person, I mean, like a nice person, you know what I'm saying? I don't, I mean, I don't know. Like, I've only talked to you on the phone a few times. I don't, I mean, I guess you investigated me back then. We had this conversation in July. By then, we'd logged at least 30 hours on the phone. I've talked to Adnan way more than I've talked to a lot of people I think I know, people I consider friends. So I was confused by this.
This is the closest thing to hostile Adnan has ever gotten with me. The next day I came back to him about it. And so I was a little bit like taken aback. And I still, I guess, feel a little taken aback that like, what do you think I don't know about you? To be honest with you, it kind of, I feel like I want to shoot myself. If I hear someone else say, I don't think you did it because you're a nice guy or not.
So I guess kind of, you know, you wouldn't know that, but I've heard people say that to me over the years, and it just drives me crazy. I would love someone to hear, I would love to hear someone say, I don't think that you did it because I looked at the case, and it looks kind of flimsy. I would rather someone say, but no, I think you're a jerk, you're selfish, you know, you're crazy, SOB, you should just stay in there for the rest of your life, except that I looked at your case, and it looks, you know, like a little off, you know, like something's not right.
I understand this. Being a nice guy doesn't count as exculpatory evidence. And if I'm going to spend a year figuring out that he's a nice guy, I might as well piss off. Point taken. Maybe we need some experts on this job. Next time on Serial.
Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chibis and me. Emily Condon is our production and operations manager. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Editing help this week from Kana Jaffe-Walt and Joel Lovell. 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. 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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