But the Leakin Park calls were different. According to Adnan, he was with Jay after school that evening. He had dropped Jay off at home at some point, and then headed to the mosque for evening prayers. Without a doubt, whether or not Jay was with him at 7:00 p.m., the phone definitely was. And if the phone was in Leakin Park when Adnan had it, we had a problem.
Susan’s next post was a few days later, where she examines Jay’s credibility and concisely articulates why he has none: because he himself admits it.
“But sometimes, it is very easy to make an assessment of a witness’s inherent credibility. And that is when a witness informs you that he has none. Jay is that witness. Jay told the police and the jury, again and again, that he was willing to lie in order to avoid criminal punishment. He was not shy about this fact. Ask Jay why he lies, and he’ll tell you: he lies because he didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Susan then challenges Sarah’s agreement with the State, that while there have been some “inconsistencies” in Jay’s story, the “spine” of his story has remained consistent.
“Wait, what?” Susan writes, “Jay tells a ‘consistent’ story? Jay has been ‘consistent’ on the main points? Koenig keeps using that word. I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.”
Susan spends a dozen pages listing the dozens of times Jay’s story has been inconsistent. As I’m reading this, I’m thinking, Who is this woman?
I had to reach out. On November 26, 2014, I e-mailed her.
“Dear Susan, I’ve been reading your blog about Adnan’s case and wanted to reach out to thank you for your tremendous work. I was going to, at the end of Serial, plot out Adnan’s timeline as per my theory and understanding that day/evening, and you did it almost exactly as I was going to. I’m in the D.C. area too, perhaps we can get together sometime. I’d love a partner in crime on this. All the best, Rabia.”
Susan wrote back the next day.
“Hi Rabia! As I’m sure you’ve noticed from the several documents/sources I stole from you, I’m a fan of your blog. (Am also a fan of Mr. Beans.) And I would be more than down for getting together sometime—I gotta admit, the narrative framework of Serial has been really frustrating sometimes, because there’s just a complete absence of any legal perspective. I’d love to hear about the case from someone with a lawyer’s view.”
I was stoked and had already decided that I’d give her access to the files. I needed her eyes on them.
* * *
Susan’s next post, on November 29, titled “Serial: Plotting the Coordinates of Jay’s Dreams,” masterfully showed the impossibility of Jay’s statements like this:
From Simpson’s blog viewfromll2.com
And this:
Shortly after I made contact with Susan, I got a message from someone else I’d never heard of before, a man named Colin Miller.
On December 3, 2014, Colin wrote to me to share a blog he had written about the cell tower evidence in the case. Not having the trial transcript, Colin had questions about how things had transpired when the judge nearly excluded Abe Waranowitz as a cell phone expert. I took a look at the blog post he sent me and then did some background research on him.
Professor Colin Miller, I discovered, taught criminal law, criminal adjudication, and evidence at the University of South Carolina School of Law. But he wasn’t just an evidence professor, he was the evidence professor, writing and editing a blog called, aptly, The EvidenceProf blog.
By the time Colin reached out to me, he had already done eight posts on the case and Serial, beginning on November 21, 2014. This was an incredibly prolific blogging rate by any standard.
I began following him and Susan and eventually realized that I needed to give them both the full case files—they both had the drive, time, experience, and brain power I lacked to analyze what had happened. What Sarah wasn’t able to find, what I wasn’t able to find, maybe they could.
It couldn’t have come at a better time because Serial was wrapping up. Sarah had told me there would be twelve episodes and by my count, in early December, that meant the end was around the corner.
Here was the real test: How would Sarah conclude on his guilt or innocence? Where would a year of getting to know Adnan leave her?
Eleven episodes of Serial had carefully kept listeners on the fence about Adnan’s guilt or innocence; maybe, we hoped, she was saving her big reveal for the last episode. Maybe she would come out and say what she hadn’t so far, that she believed in Adnan’s innocence.
A couple of weeks before the last episode Sarah and I met in my parents’ basement, not far from Adnan’s home. She recorded our conversation for about an hour, asking how I felt knowing that she had found nothing to fully exonerate him. At that point I knew there would be no big surprise at the end of the podcast.
Fine, there was no hard-and-fast proof. But what about Sarah herself, what did she think? Surely her opinion would count for so much. Unlike her listeners, she had spent time with Adnan. I didn’t want to put her in a tough spot, but dammit, after all this time I wanted to know. So I finally just summoned up the courage and point-blank asked.
“In my heart,” she said, “I think he’s innocent.”
She had no proof, of course, but for me it was enough to hear those words from her lips. I felt a rush of relief, and after she left I told Yusuf, Saad, and Adnan what she said, reassuring them that the podcast would end in Adnan’s favor.
The morning of the final episode, December 18, 2014, was tense. I couldn’t wait to hear Sarah’s conclusion but also couldn’t wait for the podcast to be over so we could focus on the actual case and bringing Asia back into it. But first there was a big surprise in the episode—out of the shadows came a person no one expected to hear from: Don Clinedinst.
When Sarah was researching the case, she had reached out to Don, and he had refused to talk to her. Then, a week before the final episode was taped, having perhaps listened to the previous eleven episodes, he contacted her and agreed to talk but not to be recorded.
I had not, in all these years, given Don a second thought. The first time he crossed my radar as a possible suspect was when I heard Deirdre Wright of the Innocence Project mention him in Episode 7. Even then, though, I figured he was part of the “big picture” excuse Deirdre thought we’d need to get a court to allow us to retrieve whatever DNA evidence may exist, nothing having been tested against Don or anyone other than Adnan and Jay all those years ago.
In the blog post I wrote after the Innocence Project episode I didn’t even mention Don, but after the last episode, in which Don speaks to Sarah but refuses to have his voice recorded, I wrote a few paragraphs about him, mostly focused on entirely the wrong thing:
“Ok, I’ll just be up-front here. I don’t know what to do about Don. The note to him really weirded me out.”
I was referring to the note found in Hae’s car, the note addressed to Don in which she tells him to drive safe and that she has to run to go to a wrestling match at Randallstown High. The question I raised in my blog was when and why Hae would have written that note, because some of the language, “sorry I couldn’t stay,” suggested she had already seen him on the day she wrote it.
And the day she wrote it, by the State’s accounts and as accepted by Sarah, was January 13, 1999, the same day Hae was killed.
Others dismissed the language as being ambiguous, that perhaps Hae was in a hurry and didn’t express herself clearly. For most, the note indicated she intended to see Don that night. But that didn’t sit right with me; it just didn’t make sense.
Hearing Don’s words about how he knew he’d be a suspect immediately and began recounting his steps raised my eyebrows. On the one hand you had Adnan, who was so clueless that even as police kept interviewing him he didn’t give it a second thought, dismissing the idea as absurd.
And here you had Don, about whom Sarah said the following:
When Hae went missing, Don was one of the first people the cops called. He says he knew immedi
ately he’d be a suspect. “I said, ‘well ok, they’re going to try to blame it on me because she was with me last night. I’m the new boyfriend, I’m obviously going to be one of the first suspects, me and Adnan.’” He said he immediately made sure he knew where he was. “When someone calls you up and tells you ‘have you seen this person? They went missing, they haven’t been seen since school,’ you automatically retrace everything you did that day.”
I found Don’s reaction deeply unsettling. In no universe, if my partner couldn’t be located, would I begin retracing my own steps. I’d be worried sick, focused on finding that person. But I had to acknowledge that this may not be true for everyone.
The police had definitely done a shoddy job during the investigation by not confirming through paperwork that Don was really working on January 13. Despite such a glaring investigatory breach, any questions about Don could be put to rest since LensCrafters had eventually turned over his timesheets to Gutierrez prior to trial. Don was definitely at work that day, and the police considered his alibi airtight.
After Don, Sarah spoke with a former co-worker of Jay’s, a man named Josh. Josh recalled Jay being terrified, paranoid about a van outside the porn shop. Josh figured Jay was scared that Hae’s killer was in the van, though Jay never mentioned that someone being Adnan.
Sarah asks Josh if Jay is scared of Adnan’s “people,” of Pakistani relatives, and Josh says, “Yeah, he definitely said it was somebody, the guy was Middle Eastern.”
Josh goes on to speak warmly about Jay, saying he feels sorry for him and that Jay wasn’t a thug, rather the opposite, and he seemed in way over his head.
Before her conclusion, Sarah asks for Dana’s take on the case. Calling her the “Mr. Spock” of the podcast, Sarah lets Dana lay out her thought process in detail, which boiled down to this: in order for everything to make sense, that Adnan just happened to lend Jay his car that day, and Jay happened to turn witness against him, and there happened to be a call to Nisha that afternoon, and Adnan happened not to have an alibi or even remember where he was—well, he’d have to be the unluckiest man ever. And no one is that unlucky.
Only after this buildup, and a brief interlude from Deirdre about a possible lead and where they were on seeking to test the forensic evidence for DNA, did Sarah get to her big ending.
To the disappointment of many, certainly all of us, Sarah wasn’t able to commit herself to Adnan’s innocence. She said she wouldn’t have convicted him because there was too much reasonable doubt, and that while most of the time she thought he was innocent, she still “nursed doubt.”
I can’t fault Sarah for reaching this conclusion, and neither does Adnan. Unlike myself, Saad, and Adnan’s family, Sarah has no reason to put her credibility and her professional reputation on the line for a cause she didn’t have full confidence in.
After Serial ended, Sarah assured Adnan that she would continue to follow the case. While it wasn’t an endorsement of his innocence, it was good enough for us.
* * *
Sometime in the middle of December 2014, right around the last episode of Serial, I was asked by a friend how to donate to Adnan’s legal fund.
“What legal fund?” I asked.
“Um, you didn’t set up a fund? Wait, you let all of Serial go by and didn’t do any fund-raising? Doesn’t he need money to help with legal fees!?”
Indeed. Yes he does. Except I hadn’t had a chance to even think about it.
There wasn’t any money, there was no fund. Adnan’s parents had paid out of their modest means for years, all throughout the appellate process, and it had taken almost five years to raise the money for the original post-conviction. After the PCR was denied in 2014, although Justin had been ready to finally step away from the case after representing Adnan for five years, he was now fully in again. Serial and the return of Asia meant he would continue to push Adnan’s appeal whether or not he got paid, he told Adnan.
But it wasn’t just about Justin’s legal fees. It would be incredibly generous if he waived them, but it would not be fair considering the tremendous amount of work he had to put in. It was also about other expenses we anticipated, such as hiring a private investigator in the hopes of uncovering new evidence.
I knew we had to raise money, I just didn’t have the mental and actual bandwidth to deal with it.
Then I received this e-mail from Dennis Robinson:
Chris and I had been discussing how to go about the fund-raising, and at some point he must have realized I needed help.
I connected with Dennis as soon as possible.
“You take care of speaking up for Adnan,” he told me. “I’ll take care of everything behind the scenes. I’ll be your assistant, set up the fund-raising, manage the communications, whatever you need.”
I cried for a couple of days, tears of happy thanks. Before I knew it, Adnan’s crowd-sourced fund-raising site was up on LaunchGood.com, which went out of its way to get the account set up and promoted within a matter of days. And the donations began pouring in.
Between Dez, Dennis, Susan, and Colin, it was as if angels had been sent to lift all the burdens I wasn’t capable of carrying. The podcast was over, but the quest continued. I had to figure out how to keep public interest in the case, had to figure out how to put pressure on the State and courts to help with the appeal, and had to figure out what actually happened to Hae.
Fighting Adnan’s case in court based on Gutierrez’s failures, coupled with Asia’s allegations, seemed possible now. But without returning to the original evidence, and getting the people at the heart of the matter to talk, getting to the truth of what happened to Hae would be much, much harder.
Some people, friends from school, tried to talk to Jay and get him to come clean. But he was angry at the attention, at his life and family being disrupted. He was married with kids now, living in California, far away from it all. He told some people that strangers had located his home and driven past it, taking pictures, posting his address on Reddit, and he was (justifiably) pissed off.
But at the end of December the universe sent us a big, fat gift. Jay talked.
I was in Canada, visiting my in-laws, relieved that Serial was over and I could take a break. Sometime in the afternoon of December 29, 2014, I got a text from Saad.
“Jay did an interview! He said he lied, it’s so effed up, read it Rabia!!!”
Within a matter of minutes the interview, written by Natasha Vargas-Cooper for The Intercept, was tweeted, texted, and e-mailed to me a dozen times. I pulled myself away from my mother-in-law and locked myself in a room so I could read it in peace—except I couldn’t, not in peace anyway.
Every paragraph made me livid. From when he first met Adnan, to his ridiculous story of being a serious drug dealer, to admitting that he and Adnan were never friends, to completely changing the narrative of the crime, I was shocked at the ease with which he lied and transformed his story.
I couldn’t get through it without tweeting my immediate reactions. I screenshot nearly every paragraph and tweeted them with exasperated comments like “#PerjuryAbounds!”
Every part of Jay’s story had changed. Now he didn’t know if Hae had been killed in the Best Buy parking lot, and he also never saw Hae’s car there; he just picked Adnan up there after the deed had been done and didn’t know where her car was. The entire ride sequence when they supposedly drove around looking for a place to leave Hae’s car, the Park-n-Ride—poof, it was now gone.
Jay says after picking Adnan up, they went to Krista Vinson’s house, referred to as “Cathy” in the interview since she was called “not-her-real-name-Cathy” in Serial, where, surprise, Jenn is present. He says it’s between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m.; they hang out, smoke weed, and Adnan drops him home at 6:00 p.m. Track practice is gone. And gone is Leakin Park in the 7:00 p.m hour.
It gets more interesting. Jay says after dropping him off at home, Adnan returned with Hae’s car to his grandmother’s house and called Jay on the landline (there is n
o such call in the call records). Adnan then popped the trunk on the side of the road, showing him Hae’s body. According to Jay, “she looked kinda purple, blue, her legs were tucked behind her, she had stockings on, none of her clothes were removed, nothing like that. She didn’t look beat up.”
This, despite the fact that when Hae was disinterred, her bra and shirt were pulled up, exposing her breasts, and her skirt was pulled above her buttocks.
Standing at the open trunk, Adnan asks Jay to just help him “dig the hole.” Jay agrees after Adnan threatens to turn him in for dealing weed, as if it is a much more serious crime than accessory after the fact to murder. Then Adnan drives off with car and body.
But the night is not over. Adnan returns a few hours later, close to midnight, in his own car. This time he’s back to make Jay keep that promise, but first he needs tools to dig the hole. Jay grabs some gardening tools and they go to the park, where Adnan presumably pulls over by the side of the two-lane road as it begins to rain (there was no rain on the night of January 13, 1999). Jays says: “We dig for about forty minutes and we dig and dig,” until Jay finally says “fuck it” and is done digging.
They have their hole, but no body. The body is apparently still in the trunk of Hae’s car, which according to Jay is up around the bend on a small hill, “parked in a strange neighborhood”—strange, despite the fact that it’s the same neighborhood where one of his grandmothers lives.
They drive around the corner, up the hill, where Adnan gets into Hae’s car and tells Jay to move his car “halfway back down the hill” so that after burying Hae, Adnan doesn’t have to walk too far to get to his car. Why he would have to walk to get to his car is unclear, since he would have Hae’s car.
Nonetheless, according to Jay, Adnan drives off with Hae’s car but then returns after thirty to forty-five minutes on foot to his own car, where Jay waits for him. He says Adnan is wearing gloves, panting, saying Hae was heavy. Gone now is the entire portion of Jay’s police statements and testimony in which he is sitting on a log while Adnan digs. In this new version, Jay never sees Hae in the grave at all, despite having described her position in some detail sixteen years earlier.
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