The Burgess case is even worse. In 1995 Sabien Burgess was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Michelle Dyson, whom he found shot in the home they shared. A child who had been in the house when the murder took place told detectives that he had seen another man, and not Burgess, commit the crime. But Ritz and Lehman did not report this. According to the federal lawsuit brought by Burgess after his release, he was convicted based on the false testimony of another person involved in Adnan’s case—Daniel Van Gelder of the Baltimore Police Trace Analysis Unit. Van Gelder testified that he had swabbed the webbing of Burgess’s hands and found gunshot residue, which could only be present if Burgess had fired the murder weapon. But Burgess maintains that Van Gelder lied; he had swabbed Burgess’s palms, where such residue would naturally be found because he had touched his girlfriend’s body after finding her. Burgess was convicted after a two-day trial. Two years later, a man by the name of Charles Dorsey wrote repeated letters to Burgess’s attorney confessing to the murder. Ritz went to interview Dorsey a year later and dismissed him, reporting that he didn’t have the kind of details the real killer would have.
In 2013 the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project filed a petition for writ of actual innocence on Burgess’s behalf; after spending nineteen years in prison, he was finally released in 2014.
In Addison’s case, the testimony of a witness was used to charge and convict him of a 1996 murder, though other witnesses gave conflicting testimony that would have exculpated him. The conflicting witness statements were withheld by the State’s Attorney from the defendant and he was convicted, serving nine years before those statements were discovered. In 2005 a court ordered a new trial, at which point the State dismissed charges. The investigating officer in the case was Detective MacGillivary.
In all three cases exculpatory information was withheld and wrongful convictions obtained. Sarah never mentioned any of this in the podcast. Her treatment of Gutierrez was likewise lukewarm, even sympathetic. She mentioned another important case Gutierrez was working on around the same time as Adnan’s, that of Zach Whitman, an adolescent who had been convicted of the brutal murder of his brother. Gutierrez had failed to file his appeal and lied to the parents about it. They felt Gutierrez had lied to get their money. But Sarah had a generous assessment: it could be that Gutierrez didn’t know how sick she was, that she was taking cases she thought she could handle, and that she didn’t understand the “business side of things.” Sarah point-blank disagreed with me on the podcast that Gutierrez may have thrown the case on purpose, something that not only I but Adnan and his family suspected, given her desperation for money.
In both cases, with Gutierrez and the police, I told Sarah how I felt (and blogged about it too)—that if Adnan was her son, brother, loved one, she wouldn’t have gone so easy on either of them. We texted back and forth. She agreed, and I calmed down.
But I wasn’t so calm when I confronted her about the clip she played in Episode 10 of Adnan discussing his relationship with Gutierrez. In it Adnan says he had a great deal of affection for her, that she only showed him compassion, and that he felt like she “had his back.” He says: “The closest thing I can think of is if you combine a doctor, a nurse, a school teacher, a coach, and your parents. If you combine all of that then you may have an idea of how much I trusted Miss Gutierrez in that situation.”
This episode, ironically called “The Best Defense is a Good Defense,” didn’t air a negative word from Adnan about Gutierrez. If all you heard was the podcast and didn’t follow my blog (which was most people), you’d think Adnan was really happy with Gutierrez. I was baffled. I asked Adnan why he had only waxed eloquent about Gutierrez.
He said that he had explained to Sarah that this was how he felt about Gutierrez when she represented him, but not after he learned what she’d done and how badly she had failed him. He didn’t realize Sarah had cut the rest out.
I was livid, and so was he. It wasn’t so much about the public perception on this issue—it was about his having an ongoing ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) claim. I worried that his apparent positivity about Gutierrez on the podcast could be used by the State against his claim that she was ineffective.
I didn’t immediately say anything to Sarah, but a few weeks later she sent me a message; she was upset about something I had posted on my blog. I had e-mailed her to ask if her team had identified Hae’s pager number, because I certainly couldn’t find it in any of the files, and she responded with no, they didn’t know it. I thought that was odd, considering she mentioned in the podcast that Adnan never reached out to Hae after the day she disappeared. His response to her questions about this was initially that he didn’t remember. When Sarah told him his records show that he didn’t page her after January 13, he tried to explain it, saying he may not have reached out because every day at school the kids were discussing it and he was getting updates from her other friends. But if Sarah was now telling me they didn’t know Hae’s pager number, how could they say whether or not Adnan had paged her? Did she challenge him, effectively cornering him without actually knowing whether or not he had paged her? So I took to my blog and posted about our exchange, which really pissed her off.
She called me immediately to correct her e-mail, saying that she was mistaken and they did in fact have Hae’s pager number, that she was upset I shared a private e-mail, and lastly, because my blog made them seem incompetent.
But I was already angry about the Gutierrez episode and not exactly in the mood to entertain her hurt feelings at being made to look bad.
“You know who looks bad? Adnan, who looks like an idiot for saying wonderful things about Gutierrez when he’s got a claim in court against her. He told me that he made it very clear to you that he had no idea how badly she was screwing up his case, and that after he found out he was upset. But all you aired was him saying lovely things about her, and that could hurt his IAC claim!”
Sarah told me that it was their editorial discretion to use his clips however they wanted, meaning yes, they had cut out the other parts of his statements, and that the IAC claim wasn’t their problem, it was Adnan’s lawyer’s problem. I wasn’t about to stand for that.
A full-on shouting match ensued. It is embarrassing, looking back on it now, but it was also a necessary purge. Having gotten our agitation with each other out of our system, we both somewhat lukewarmly apologized. I apologized for putting her private e-mail message on my blog, and she apologized for not representing Adnan’s sentiments about Gutierrez fully. We called it a draw and moved on, knowing that neither of us could afford to undermine the relationship.
Negotiating this relationship was always a challenge for me and Adnan’s family. We felt constantly torn between undying gratitude to Sarah and bitterness that she didn’t go completely to bat for Adnan. Having such a prolonged and personal interaction with a journalist will blur lines. It makes you forget why that journalist is there and what their mission is. But it was hardest for Adnan.
My heart broke a little the first time Adnan told me how conflicted he was.
He was upset about Episode 11, “Rumors,” in which Sarah gave airtime to two anonymous men who had been bugging her for weeks. They wanted to challenge the good-guy image that the rest of the community had so far painted of him. Try as Sarah would, person after person said the same thing about Adnan: he was cordial, kind, easy-going, affectionate, and just nice to everyone. But the anonymous men, who alleged that they were childhood friends of Adnan, claimed that he had a side that no one knew about. Finally Sarah capitulated, perhaps not wanting to be called biased.
* * *
Listening to “Rumors,” I realized what Adnan had recognized years earlier: that many of the people he grew up with believed in the process, the system that convicted him, over their own experience of knowing him. “Ali” in the podcast was in fact Imran Hasnuddin, a friend of Adnan’s growing up, who had nothing bad to say about him but was basically not allowed by his parents to publicly get involve
d in the case at all. Even as a thirty-three-year-old man, Imran was afraid to be interviewed with his real name and voice.
A different voice sheepishly offered as evidence of Adnan’s dark side that he stole from the mosque collection box in middle school. He alleged a ridiculous figure, thousands of dollars every week, and then threw in that he himself also stole from the same collection boxes. He ended by agreeing that Adnan was a good person.
Sarah spoke to the mosque president, who said it was impossible that thousands were ever stolen. They don’t even collect that much. It was an embarrassing and irrelevant sideshow. Adnan readily admitted to Sarah that he stole twenty, forty bucks here and there from the Friday collection box when he was a kid. He then got caught by his mother and stopped doing it.
If there was ever a straw that broke Adnan’s back in this process, it was this episode. He didn’t hide his irritation when Sarah asked him about the petty theft, and you could hear it in the podcast. The way Sarah framed it, there were only two possibilities ultimately: that either Adnan was a liar or Jay was. And if that was the case, then exploring them both in depth was only fair. Yet she gave airtime to Adnan’s middle school collection-plate petty thefts while never mentioning Jay’s criminal record.
Since 1999, Jay’s Maryland criminal record has included assault, theft, trespassing, and domestic violence charges. This is public information easily available online, as are all Maryland criminal records. We thought Sarah would at least mention this in her commentary on Jay, especially since any of these charges should have violated the conditions of his probation, which he was on after pleading guilty to being an accessory to Hae’s murder, and it was highly suspicious that they didn’t. But Sarah never mentioned them. If anything, her portrayal of Jay was sympathetic and kind. She said she saw his appeal, as a person, a friend, and a witness. Which was all fine and good; after all, she said the same thing about Adnan repeatedly, that he was likeable, charming, kind, just a nice guy. But the difference between Adnan and Jay was this: Adnan’s personality was and is consistent, whereas the Jay she met was not the Jay who called her late one night.
She had interviewed Jay before the podcast began, and what we heard on Serial was from that meeting. She had given him her contact information in case he wanted to talk further (or rather she hoped he wanted to talk more, and on tape). One night, as the podcast was well under way, she finally heard from Jay in the most unexpected way. She then called me, a little freaked out.
It was late in the evening on the East Coast when her cell phone rang. An agitated, angry man railed on for a few minutes, threatening Sarah to back off, to stop reporting on the case, cursing profanities and screaming. Then he hung up. Sarah was stunned. She knew the voice, and the man had failed to block the number he called from. So she called him back, immediately.
A calm voice answered the phone, saying “hello?”
Sarah asked, “Jay?”
He responded in the affirmative, yes, it’s Jay.
Sarah asked him if he had just called her and hung up. He said no. She said that she got the call from his number, literally minutes ago. He still insisted, no, it wasn’t him. His tone was even.
Sarah wasn’t about to let it go so easily, of course, and then the calm, collected Jay who insisted that he hadn’t called began to raise his voice. After a few minutes he was essentially using the same exact language as in the previous call, including threatening her, while at the same time maintaining that he was not the one who called.
I can’t recall how the second call ended, but Sarah immediately contacted me to let me know about this exchange. Not in a gossipy way, but to give me a heads-up to be careful and be safe, because I was unequivocal in my disgust for Jay online, holding him responsible for ruining Adnan’s life while protecting his own rear end. The hashtag #JayDidIt was already circulating on Twitter and the public momentum for him to come clean was building. Sarah was worried he might lash out at me.
But she was no less amazed at how easily he lied to her. It made us both wonder if he suffered from some delusional disorder—maybe he really believed his lie? Maybe he didn’t remember making the call?
Either way, his ability to lie so easily and then indignantly and unflinchingly stand by his lies impressed us both.
Of course, Sarah had to keep the lines of communication open with Jay in the hopes that he would be willing to talk more. At a minimum I hoped that his behavior would impact her reporting on the case.
But she didn’t say anything publicly, and neither did we. I just mildly seethed as she explored Adnan’s middle school misdeeds.
Adnan didn’t seethe, though; he wrestled with the relationship. Sarah and he had developed a friendship, or at least to him it was a friendship. She didn’t just interview him about the case—she asked him about his life, she shared her personal stories, he learned about her family, spoke to her kids over the phone. Isn’t that what friends do? But then there were these weekly shows, her public doubts, not just about his innocence, but even about his character.
Was Adnan a psychopath? Was he manipulative? These were serious considerations Sarah undertook as she tried to unravel the truth. So what was Adnan to do, cut her off? Continue to be friendly, though in reality no reasonable person could sincerely be friends with someone who publicly wondered if they were a psychopathic killer?
Serial shattered Adnan’s self-contained world. He had built a life full of people who trusted him, loved him, believed him, in which he would never be accused of being manipulative again.
I always raged a bit on the inside at Judge Heard’s pronouncement at sentencing that Adnan was manipulative, and I had not carefully considered the profound emotional and psychological impact it must have had on him. Here he stood, barely out of childhood, in a room packed with his community, loved ones, Hae’s family, and media, with no way to fight back against the woman sitting high above us in black robes. It was official, recorded for posterity, that he was a manipulator. It broke him nearly as much as did the verdict itself.
Having been through all that, letting Sarah into his controlled emotional environment was a significant emotional risk for him.
But like any risk, this one had a shot of paying off big.
* * *
As Serial exploded, Adnan’s mailbox filled up. I had posted his address on my blog, where some folks got it while others were enterprising enough to dig it up on their own. Adnan was deluged with letters, notes, pictures, and prayers. Some were short messages of support, others were pages and pages of personal divulgences. Adnan was stunned at the sometimes very intimate nature of the letters, people pouring out their pain and tribulations to a stranger. He realized it was sometimes easier for people to share their deepest sorrows with a stranger than with people they knew. I told him that’s how the Internet mostly works.
Students who had been assigned to listen to Serial wrote to him. People doing their master’s or PhD thesis on some aspect of the case wrote. Supporters tried to send money, music CDs, and books, all of which the prison sent back. Women infatuated with him wrote letters, sometimes proposing marriage or love, and some sent pictures of themselves, half-dressed or not dressed at all; these pictures he mailed back, feeling a bit embarrassed.
Initially he tried to respond to every letter, that was his intention. He made a stack of letters to respond to, attempting to write a couple of responses daily. The stack grew and grew, his hand began to wear down after a couple of months of painstaking writing, and eventually he gave up. He owns an ancient word processor, a machine he’s had for years, which he affectionately calls his wife. The word processor, however, required reams of inked tape, and he couldn’t afford to type out responses to all these letters. So he decided he would only respond to letters from kids, not wanting to disappoint them, and hope the grown-ups would understand.
There was no way the prison staff and other inmates could miss all the attention he was getting. His mail was in bundles, newspapers and magazines coming into
the prison covered stories about Serial and his case, and local and national stations gave regular updates. More than once friends and fellow prisoners came to show him an article with his picture, and more than once he would catch updates from television. They joked and nicknamed him “Hollywood.” Numerous times guards told him they were listening to the podcast; a few told him that they always knew he didn’t belong in prison and now they knew why.
While Adnan could definitely tell that his case had global attention, he still had no idea of the extent of the madness. One day he said to me, “I mean, I know it’s big, but it’s not like as big as the West Memphis Three case, right?”
Wrong.
After Adnan was convicted he mostly lost his community, but now they were back. As word got out about the podcast, and news outlets across the globe reported on his case every week, people at the mosque began saying his name again. Women who hadn’t mentioned her son in over a decade came to Aunty Shamim, telling her they supported Adnan; random people at the mosque would hug Yusuf and tell him they always knew his brother was innocent. Dozens and dozens reached out to the family to ask how they could help. Though relations were still strained, Tanveer began communicating with the family, speaking up online in support of Adnan. After all these years, they finally felt free to talk about him.
But there were also those who still kept a distance. I heard second- and third-hand whispers that so-and-so, who knew Adnan as a kid, thought he could do it. This was new.
I realized I needed to prove that Adnan had been framed. I had to figure out how the State did it. Sarah had copied all the case files onto a thumb drive and sent them to me a few weeks after the podcast started. I began not very efficiently to review the files, documents I hadn’t seen in fourteen years. There were thousands and thousands of them. Every day I reviewed a few hundred superficially, just to remind myself of what was there. Other than that, I barely had time to breathe. The three months or so that Serial ran, which in hindsight felt like three years, brought with it hundreds and hundreds of interview requests, article submission requests, and speaking requests. I was still blogging, working, and trying to manage the family.
Adnan's Story Page 31