Adnan's Story

Home > Other > Adnan's Story > Page 35
Adnan's Story Page 35

by Rabia Chaudry


  The map they received, Susan realized, showed that the cell tower that was pinged by two calls at 4:27 p.m. and 4:58 p.m., tower L654, was in the vicinity of Kristi’s apartment and not Jay’s home, which is where he originally said he was. So Jay had to change his story. He found a reason to be in the vicinity of L654 between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. He inserted the story that he went to Kristi’s after dropping Adnan at school just to accommodate the map.

  Unfortunately for the police, the map itself was wrong. The address for cell tower L654 is 824 Dorchester Road in Catonsville, Maryland, which is close to Jay’s house. But the people who created the map put the tower at 824 Dorchester Road in Baltimore, a location three miles south of the actual site and right next to Kristi’s apartment.

  The State eventually caught this error but not until after the first trial, at which Jay still maintained he was at Kristi’s when the L654 calls came in. At the second trial the State had corrected the map and the cell tower locations and, like magic, Kristi disappeared from Jay’s afternoon rendezvous.

  All this time we were told that Jay’s narrative was corroborated by the cell phone evidence, when it was now clear that Jay’s narrative was instead created using the cell phone evidence.

  Susan didn’t just prove this by showing the evolution of Jay’s story with regard to the phone calls, but also with regard to what he knew about the crime itself. When plotted chronologically, it was really quite simple to compare the details provided by Jay with what the police already knew. At the time of Jay’s first interview, before the police had allegedly found the car, everything Jay knew about the crime scene matched the evidence that was visibly observable or known from evidence the police already had—pictures of the position of the body, Hae’s clothing, and the reddish orange fibers found by the crime lab (perhaps prompting his story about Adnan wearing red gloves). Jay said Adnan had thrown away Hae’s purse and her jacket in the first interview. By the second interview the police had found and opened up Hae’s car and, lo and behold, her purse and jacket were in the trunk. In his first interview Jay told the police that he had no idea how Adnan got in Hae’s car. In his second interview, after the police have interviewed Krista, who mentioned the ride Adnan asked for, Jay suddenly remembered that Adnan asked Hae for a ride. Susan had found the pattern. As the police gathered more information, Jay’s story changed to match.

  Sarah had said in Serial that trying to map out Jay’s movements according to his changing statements and the cell phone records was like trying to plot the coordinates of someone’s dream. The reason no one could do it, not even Jay himself, was because it wasn’t his dream. It was the police’s dream, and Jay was just giving them what they wanted.

  * * *

  In mid-January of 2015 I gave my first talk about Adnan’s case and Serial at Stanford Law School. It was quite an honor to speak at such a prestigious institution. My friend and attorney Umbreen Bhatti had organized the event and invited me. It was a great crowd, in a room packed to the gills, and afterward I spent over an hour speaking with attendees individually. One of them was a trained economist but also a naturally sharp sleuth. Something had been bothering her and she wanted to e-mail me about it. A week later I received a detailed message from her, raising questions about different parts of the State’s case and, most important, linking to a post she had made on Reddit the same day.

  The title of the post was “Livor Mortis: Why Hae Could Not Have Been Buried at 7pm.”

  I read it with fascination. What the heck is livor mortis? I hadn’t ever heard that term before. Unbeknownst to me, it was something that Susan had begun exploring a couple of weeks earlier, when an anonymous commenter on her blog alerted her to the issue. She followed up with him and he turned out to be a doctor, someone who could speak with some authority on the subject.

  Susan reached out to a forensic pathologist to confirm what she had begun suspecting, and the economist was now making it plain as day in her post.

  Livor mortis, or “the color of death,” is the process by which blood in a deceased body becomes settled in the portions closest to, or touching, the ground, pulled by gravity. The blood seeps through the tissues and red blood cells break open, causing a dark hue, often blue or purplish, where it has settled. This settling is called lividity.

  If a body is moved around after death, forensic pathologists can determine how the body was moved by following the pattern of lividity, or the blood, as it leaves a trail throughout the body, resulting in patches. For example, if a person dies on their back but after a few hours the body is turned on its left side, evidence of that movement can be found because we’ll see “mixed” or “dual” lividity—some discoloration on the person’s back, some on their left side. The blood becomes fixed in place only after eight to ten hours, longer in colder temperatures.

  Hae’s autopsy showed fixed full anterior lividity, from her face downward to her chest, stomach, and the front of her legs. But her body had been found on its right side.

  In order for full, fixed anterior lividity to occur, Hae had to have been lying facedown and stretched flat for at least eight hours before she was moved to the burial site. If Hae had been buried at 7:00 p.m. on her side, the lividity would have been on the right side of her body, not on the front.

  Over the next few weeks Colin and Susan would both post blogs about the issue of lividity, how it applied in other cases, and what it meant for this one.

  There was no way that any of Jay’s testimony, or the State’s timeline of the murder, was true anymore. And it wasn’t just about when Hae was buried. It was about where she was when she was killed, and where her body lay flat for at least eight hours before being moved to Leakin Park. There was the possibility, Colin posited, that Hae was left at the burial site facedown until lividity fixed, between eight to ten hours, then turned later onto her side.

  Is it possible that a killer would return to the place where he’s dumped a body in order to reposition it? Anything is possible, but not in this case. Because along with livor mortis there is rigor mortis.

  When Hae’s body was found, her right hand was sticking up through the soil with a large rock on top of it, presumably placed there by the killer to weigh it down. Why wouldn’t her hand naturally just fall flat? Because it’s likely that when she was buried, her body was still in rigor, and her right arm was stiffened at the elbow, forcing her hand up. The killer couldn’t force it down.

  A model created by Susan to depict the position in which Hae’s body was found.

  Rigor mortis is the stiffening of the body after death, caused by chemical changes that occur in the muscles. It begins to set in within two to six hours after death and can last for up to a day or two. It would seem that Hae’s body was already in rigor when she was placed in the grave, the reason a rock had to be placed on her hand to try and conceal it. If she had been left facedown on the ground in the same spot, then later repositioned on her side while rigor was present, both of her hands would be by her side.

  Colin wrote about what the rigor in Hae’s body could tell us, citing a 2014 Mississippi case, Beasley v. State. He notes the following:

  Anna Savrock, a crime-scene investigator with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, performed an investigation of Wilkinson’s home and Beasley’s apartment shortly after the first responders arrived. Savrock noticed that Wilkinson’s arm was hanging in the air in an unnatural position due to rigor mortis and determined that Wilkinson’s body probably had been moved between ten and twelve hours after her death.

  Hae’s body had also probably been moved after death.

  The lividity finding, even more than the rigor, was a game-changer. It went beyond challenging the State’s narrative and Adnan’s conviction, and it helped point to what had actually happened to Hae.

  For me, it raised the biggest question—where was Hae those eight to ten hours after death? Where could she lie flat for that long without being seen?

  The new burial time Jay gave in The Intercep
t interview of around midnight was probably close to the truth, and I wondered if something signaled him to change his story. Did he know, or was he told, that if the forensics were examined more closely, the 7:00 p.m. burial would be proven bogus? I wondered if Urick contacted Jay—after all, NVC had interviewed them both, and her interview with Jay (according to NVC herself) was arranged by Jay’s attorney. This was the same attorney, Anne Benaroya, whom Urick had helped retain for Jay in 1999. Would I, as an attorney, let my client talk to the media without knowing what he would say? Was Jay planning ahead, in case he had to go to court again and support another theory of the murder?

  There were many more questions about the condition of Hae’s body, questions sent by our readers and listeners. What about putrefication of the body, what about evidence of insect and animal activity (one criminal law clinic professor said unequivocally that her body would have been consumed in those weeks—too many critters in a park like that, she couldn’t have been there more than a couple of days), what about decomposition—why weren’t any of these things visible in a corpse that was exposed to the elements for four weeks?

  It didn’t get any better as Susan and Colin kept digging.

  * * *

  I definitely felt a bit weirded out after Jay’s phone rant against Sarah and her subsequent warning to me to be careful. I was publicly accusing Jay of lying and framing Adnan. Sarah and others reminded me that we didn’t know what he or others in his family could be capable of, so I should tone it down.

  My parents, on the other hand, were worried about the State. They both feared that publicly challenging and humiliating the State, the prosecutors, and the cops was inviting trouble. But my mother also thought that writing about social or foreign policy issues meant making enemies, and maybe one day some secret government agency would take me out for opposing drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I couldn’t take it entirely seriously but couldn’t completely shake it either.

  The paranoia got stronger when we, the trustees of Adnan’s legal fund, attempted to hire a private investigator. We wanted someone with a law enforcement background, maybe someone who had some contacts in the Baltimore PD, could get their foot in the door, and pick up intel in a way that non-law enforcement people couldn’t.

  Dennis Robinson knew just the guy, a retired former Maryland state trooper who was now doing contract PI work. He knew him from their time together at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, and he was also a friend of Dennis’s uncle. He was now doing some work for Baltimore City, though, but told Dennis he’d have no problem finding a PI for him, that there were lots of Maryland and Baltimore former officers doing such work.

  But then Dennis got a message that made us all wonder what was going on. He e-mailed me and said the PI “appears to have cut me off cold turkey” after sending him a text that said, “Dennis, I was not able to get anyone that I would feel comfortable referring to you. Best wishes on your case.” Given that he’d ignored numerous messages, Dennis said, “I am worried about what this means.”

  What exactly had happened here? Did the PI check with his law enforcement contacts and find out that this case would hurt their band of brothers? Or maybe he just couldn’t find the right person for the case? That was an innocuous possibility, but what bothered Dennis was that this highly reliable man, a former colleague, simply stopped responding to him.

  I started having trouble sleeping at night, hearing strange noises. I began saying copious prayers and blowing the prayers over my girls as they left for school, not wanting to let them go. I started noticing cars on the road that I thought I’d seen before—was someone following me? Was it the Baltimore City Police? One day I took it a bit far.

  A strange car was circling the parking lot; it had blacked-out windows and a slew of antennas. I e-mailed Dennis, worried that I was being surveilled by police (band of brothers, after all). He told me to take a picture of the license plate and get back to him as soon as possible. A bit later my husband came home and I told him about the car—it turned out the car belonged to a neighbor, an officer with the Prince George’s County police office, who had just gotten a new ride. Phew.

  Embarrassed, I apologized profusely to Dennis, who had been legitimately concerned. But I wasn’t completely out of my mind.

  After all, Susan had recently found something else in the defense files that hadn’t been noticed before, something that indicated serious police misconduct.

  From: Susan Simpson

  Date: Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:39 PM

  Subject: Re: Viewpoint_J-F.pdf

  To: rabiachaudryesq

  This one is another weird one, too. Not sure how reliable the manager of a porn store is, but if she is telling the truth … well, we’re getting into conspiracy theory level of wrongdoing:

  Page Two

  The 23-25 of February Jay was off. PD Davis was then advised that one of the days, either the 20, 21 or 22, Jay missed work when he responded to the Baltimore City Police Headquarters for an interview. Jay was questioned several times by the police at which time Sis asked Jay if they were questioning him in reference to the girl found in the Park. Jay advised that that was correct. PD Davis could not be given a reason why Sis suspected Jay to be involved in that incident. It was a hot news story and she knew Jay was heavily involved with the police at that time which prompted her to bring up the question to Jay. Jay advised that he “knew the person who did it.” Jay further stated “he told me (referring to Adnan) no one thinks he did it but he did kill her.”

  PD Davis was advised that Jay missed work to speak to the police again on February 26. He also missed work on Friday March 5 to speak to the police. After missing work on March 5, Jay advised his boss that he should not miss any more work until it goes to court. Sis was under the impression that Jay had recently moved in with his girlfriend.

  As a reminder, the official state version of events was that the Baltimore City Police first made contact with Jay on the night of February 27, after picking him up from the video store late that night. Adnan’s cell phone records had led them to Jenn, who led them to Jay.

  Jay gave them his first official statement on February 27, 1999, and it went into the early morning hours of the 28th, the tape being turned on after a few hours, with no “pre-interview interview” notes or record. After the interview Jay led them to Hae’s car, and within a couple of hours they arrested Adnan on the morning of February 28, 1999.

  But this document told a different story.

  Jay’s boss, a woman called Sis, told Cristina Gutierrez’s private investigator Davis that at least a week prior to Jay’s official “first” police interview he had already been meeting with the police, having missed work on either February 20, 21, or 22. She further specifically recalled he missed work to speak to the police on February 26, the day the cops first make contact with Jenn. Jay also missed work on March 5 to speak to police, and Sis says that Jay was questioned several times, though she did not know that Jay was interviewed on February 27 or on March 15. Despite not knowing about the official, documented dates Jay was interviewed, Sis was still able to state that he met with police several times, meaning dates other than the ones that were disclosed to the defense.

  Davis had uncovered something else, though, which we connected to Sis’s statements. In an interview Davis did with Ernest Carter, the same young man who apparently tried to impress a young lady on his block with a fake story of seeing a girl’s body in the trunk of a car, Carter told him that he saw Jay with the cops a week after Hae’s body was found, which would be around February 16. This is a day after Adnan is pulled over for a seatbelt violation and the same day AT&T is sent a subpoena for his records.

  Excerpt from PD Davis 9/3/99 interview with Ernest Carter.

  In his Intercept interview Jay may have been alluding to these repeated visits by the police when he said, “They had to chase me around before they could corner me to talk to me, and there came a point where I was just sick of talking to them.
And they wouldn’t stop interviewing me or questioning me.”

  The picture was getting clearer—the police had met with Jay numerous times before his first official interview, but there was no record of it. What happened in those meetings? Were those the meetings at which the police told Jay what he needed to say?

  It was depressing and devastating to contemplate this. While all of these years I kept thinking the police HAD to have known Jay’s stories didn’t make sense, I still never thought they would have gone as far as coaching him and hiding evidence of the many times they met with him.

  Now I did. And if I’m right, this was not just a conspiracy by the cops, this was straight-up corruption.

  The real question was why … why go to such lengths to nail Adnan?

  When Sarah asked Adnan’s mother why she thought the police focused on Adnan, she answered, “Discrimination.” I’ll be honest. I knew there was bigotry in the prosecution of the case, I knew the State played the religion card against Adnan, but I wasn’t so sure about whether the police felt the same way.

  It was fascinating to see, during Serial, how Muslims and South Asians immediately picked up on the bigotry that impacted the investigation and trial, but others didn’t. Sarah was openly skeptical, and when I approached Justin Brown about raising the issue in court, he likewise didn’t pay much attention to it. Was it all in our head? Were we being too sensitive?

  I wasn’t totally sure until I heard from the most powerful organization of South Asian attorneys in North America—SABA, the South Asian Bar Association of North America.

  During Serial, SABA representatives contacted me, alarmed at the blatant profiling and improper use of Adnan’s religion against him, to inquire whether they could assist by filing an amicus curiae brief in relation to the pending PCR appeal.

  An amicus brief, amicus curiae meaning “friend of the court,” is generally filed by a party or organization not directly connected to litigation but concerned with the issues at hand. In this case, as a South Asian organization with many Muslim members, SABA was concerned over the treatment of Adnan based on his ethnic and religious background. They were telling us that what happened in Adnan’s trial was not just unethical, it was unconstitutional, and the appellate court must be made aware of it.

 

‹ Prev