We both immediately responded by saying we were in, we were willing to do this, though I was secretly thinking, Oh God no, I can’t do it. I know nothing about podcasting. This will be a spectacular disaster.
But I knew Dennis was right. It would be ridiculous not to take all the information Susan and Colin had found and find a way to deliver it to a broader audience. And also true was that we definitely needed more money for Adnan’s legal fees.
Within two days Susan had gotten her husband on board to create the Web site; gotten a volunteer logo designer; found musician and photographer Ramiro Marquez, who was willing to create our theme music and take pictures for our Web site; tracked down a volunteer sound editor, Amar Nagi, all the way in the United Kingdom; figured out how to record via Skype together; confirmed Colin would participate; and decided on what the first few episodes would be.
Clearly, there was no backing out now.
After some initial duds on coming up with a name, Susan suggested “Undisclosed: The State vs. Adnan Syed.” It sounded right, we all liked it.
We spent the next two weeks frantically picking music and a logo, drafting scripts and episode schedules, contacting potential sponsors, setting up social media accounts, trying to figure out exactly how to record everything with the three of us in different places, buying microphones and audio equipment, getting the media alerted, and building public interest.
Roughly two weeks after first agreeing to do the podcast, we issued a press release on April 3, 2015, announcing the new show and that our first episode would air on April 13. In retrospect, we were nuts. I have no idea why or how we thought we could pull this off in a matter of weeks, something professional radio people like those who work on This American Life took almost ten months to do.
We hadn’t even recorded our first episode when the story of the new podcast made every major media outlet, from Rolling Stone to Huffington Post to the BBC. The media was framing Undisclosed as a Serial sequel, but it wasn’t going to be anything like it. To be honest, we didn’t exactly know what it would be like; Susan, Colin, and I didn’t really even know each other, we didn’t know if we could or would work well together, we didn’t know if we should read from predetermined portions of a script or make it conversational, or who would do what research work to prepare. We just kind of started blind.
After the media started reporting it, Adnan gave me a call.
“You’re going to do a podcast, Rabia?”
“Uh, yes. Not just me, but Susan and Colin,” I responded, hoping that made me sound more responsible.
“That’s kind of crazy. But also amazing. You have the time to do it?”
Well not exactly, as I was in the middle of my New America Foundation project. But both Susan and Colin had full-time jobs, so if they could handle it, so could I.
Adnan laughed and told me if anyone could do it, I could. I figured that with him on our side, being able to interview him and include the audio, we would be ahead of the game already. A wrench got thrown in that pretty quickly.
After Serial blew up, someone from the State’s Attorney’s office had contacted the prison, complaining that an inmate named Syed who was housed there was having recorded conversations with a journalist against Department of Corrections policy. His phone privileges had to be revoked or some measure taken to ensure this didn’t happen again.
Adnan was summoned by the prison staffer who oversaw the inmates’ phone usage and given a stern talking to, but since Adnan had good relationships with the prison staff and guards, he didn’t come down too hard on him: one month of no phone calls except to his mother, and after that it was back to his regular calling list, with the understanding that there would never be another recorded conversation.
I tried hard to convince Adnan to just give us one interview, but after trying nicely to explain to me that he’d rather not, he finally broke it down: I didn’t know what prison life was like. It took years to build trust and friendship in prison. One breach of that trust would not only put his phone privileges in jeopardy permanently, which he was less concerned about, but could also negatively impact that staffer and dishonor his promise to him. He couldn’t do that. People respected him at NBCI, and it was important for him to maintain that trust and respect.
I finally got it, and I realized that in all these years of talking to Adnan, I really had no idea what his life in prison was like. None of us did—not his family, not Saad. Adnan had always spent his time talking to us about our lives, what was happening in the world, God and faith, sharing funny stories.
After it was settled that Adnan wouldn’t appear on the podcast, and I had broken the news to Susan and Colin, I still went into recording the first episode feeling pretty good.
The way we envisioned it, Colin wasn’t even initially going to be recording the substantive portion of the podcast with Susan and me; he was going to do short “Evidence Professor Corner”–type clips. But after the first recording we realized he needed to be in the mix. The three of us were bringing very distinctive things to the show—Colin brought his keen legal sense, Susan brought her Sherlock investigatory skills, and I was essentially the voice of the audience, the narrator moving us along and weaving the bits together, setting the stage and then closing out at the end.
I thought it worked great the first go, despite being new to recording. Susan and I (then and now) tended to do numerous takes, starting over, talking too fast, messing up, re-recording, while Colin was (and is still) a machine, barely stumbling, even when called on to improvise. Our first episode was set to flip the script on the way Serial framed Adnan; he wasn’t someone who remembered nothing, he actually remembered most of January 13, 1999, and we were going to prove it.
I was excited to show the world the rest of the story, and also excited after the first recording session to see how it would be edited with our new music. But two days before the podcast launched we got a message. Amar Nagi, our volunteer sound editor, was suddenly sick and unavailable to do it.
I panicked. What do we do now? Susan suggested we push the launch date, but I couldn’t bear the thought; we had gotten so much press coverage that postponing it would look terrible. Some of the editing had been done, and Amar and Susan had the audio files. I told Susan to send them to me and I’d see what I could do.
I know nothing about sound editing and had never even heard of Garageband in my life. But I knew my Macbook had some editing capability, and overnight I read up on and figured out how to lay tracks on Garageband. I don’t think I slept that entire weekend, but by Monday, April 13, 2015, I had cobbled together a terribly edited first episode of Undisclosed.
I was relieved that we launched when we said we would, but I was so focused on getting it out that I didn’t brace myself for what we would hear back. And what we got back was awful. This was no Serial, this was a low-quality, confused, poor substitute.
David Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun media critic, put it this way: “Unfortunately, a lot of people who followed the Serial podcast are going to be disappointed.” His main critique was that we didn’t synthesize our findings into an easily digestible narrative for the audience. Instead, we just threw everything at them (little did he know that we actually left a lot out), too many details with little storytelling. Zurawik had some great advice, though. He said Undisclosed needed a producer with a public radio sensibility. He was right.
Within a couple of weeks we brought Rebecca Lavoie on board; she was a crime writer and podcaster with a background in public radio. Rebecca became our production consultant and editor for every episode while Amar, once recovered, bounced back to sound edit every other week for what we called our “Addendum”—shorter episodes with additional or supplemental information.
The feedback from the public was as immediate as the feedback from the media—we got hundreds of e-mails, messages, and tweets telling us exactly what we were doing wrong: Susan talked too fast, I was biased, Colin’s legal analyses were hard to understand. We did our b
est to take the feedback as advice and do better with every episode.
It wasn’t so much the substance but the form that needed tweaking. The substance was fairly strong, especially our third episode, “Jay’s Day,” in which Susan showed exactly how the police could have gotten Jay to say what they needed.
* * *
When I first got the text on my phone from Susan I had to read it a few times to understand what she was saying. She had figured out how the police coached Jay? “Tap, tap, tap,” was her reply. I ran to pull the audio recordings of Jay’s police interviews and strained my ears. I heard it. She was right.
How on earth did you figure this out, Susan? That was my question. This was her response:
I first noticed it while I was putting Ep 1 together, so shortly before April 13th. One of the tapping sections was used in it—I think it was the one about Adnan going to track practice—and as I was (clumsily…) trying to put the episode together and listening to the section again and again, it just sounded off to me. Something else was going on in the room, and it, well, kinda sounded like someone was leading Jay along. But that is an insane idea and I was clearly hearing something that wasn’t there, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. I did make a vague reference to it in that first episode, mentioning how Jay sounds like an actor who forgot his lines, but I left out the second part of what I was starting to think: that it sounds like someone might’ve also been feeding Jay his lines whenever he forgot them.
Then over the next few weeks as I was going through the interviews to pull more clips to use for later episodes, I kept hearing it again and again, and as I found more examples, I became more and more convinced that it really was happening. I think the one that sealed the deal for me was the one where Jay reads out “pops” then says “Oh yeah Adnan popped the trunk.”
I finally asked Amar if he could listen to the clips, and see if the taps really were there, or if they were some artifact of the recording process, or if I was going insane and hallucinating it all, or what. (He was nice about it, but I think his initial response was to go with the “Susan is insane; option.) Then he listened to the clips, and was like “yup, that’s actually happening.”
Episode 3 of Undisclosed, in which we played the police interviews with the taps in the background, clearly directing Jay, lit the Internet on fire. #Taptaptap began trending on Twitter, and the number of our listeners skyrocketed. After a rocky start we had redeemed ourselves, not only because our quality was better but because we proved that there was a lot more to this case than Serial had told the world.
As elated as I was about the public recognition this episode brought us, I was privately full of grief and rage. I felt a strange sense of mourning when I realized what Susan had really uncovered, the possibility that Jay actually knew nothing about the murder whatsoever.
For sixteen years I had made the argument that the reason Jay knew all these details about the crime, that it had to be because he was directly involved, and probably because he had killed her himself. Jay had been cheating on Stephanie and Hae knew about it. Maybe she had confronted him and he killed her because he couldn’t stand to lose the love of his life. Maybe Hae went to buy weed from Jay and they ended up in an altercation and he accidentally killed her. Maybe someone he knew and was frightened of killed her, maybe even a family member.
Over the years I had never, ever entertained the idea that he knew nothing about the crime, that he had nothing to do with any of it. I think that even considering the possibility was too painful—it meant the police set Adnan up completely and fed Jay all the details themselves. It meant the cops knew for certain that Adnan couldn’t have killed Hae in the way they purported he did. I wondered if they knew he didn’t do it at all, but just wanted a conviction. Knowing that in other cases they had ignored clear evidence of a defendant’s guilt, I realized that there was no reason they couldn’t have done the same here.
How would I tell Adnan, how would he feel? Unlike me, he had never come out and accused Jay of anything other than lying. I always thought it must be because he has a generous spirit, but when I told him about the tapping, I realized he had probably guessed what happened already.
He became quiet when I told him.
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah.”
Jay wasn’t the only one whose statements changed, Susan pointed out.
In Debbie Warren’s police interview she tells the police she is certain she saw Adnan at the guidance counselor’s office around 2:45 p.m. on January 13. The detectives press her, asking her if she’s positive it was that day. She responds in the affirmative.
Then, as it happens in Jay’s interviews, Ritz announces the audio tape is going to run out and they need to flip it over. They stop the interview at 11:25 a.m. and start the tape again at 11:36, over ten minutes later. All of a sudden Debbie isn’t so sure anymore when she saw Adnan.
Something similar happened with Coach Sye, about which both Susan and Colin realized and blogged. Susan had already determined, using Sye’s statements about the weather and the track practice schedule, that he had indeed seen Adnan on the 13th at practice and that he came on time and left on time. The fact that Adnan was at practice that day was never in dispute, though; even Jay stated that he dropped Adnan off at track after ditching Hae’s car. The question, then, was what time track began. When interviewed on March 3, 1999, Sye told police that track practice began at 3:30 p.m. But by the time he testified the following year, track practice had moved to 4:00 p.m.
This move was rather fortuitous for the prosecution—if Adnan was on time for track practice and arrived there by 3:30, he could not have made the “Nisha call.” If he arrived at four o’clock, suddenly it became possible.
In her first police statement in March of 1999, Inez Butler remembered Hae saying, as she grabbed some hot fries and apple juice, that she had to pick up her cousin before going to work. By the time Butler testified at trial, Hae was no longer headed to work, she was going to be returning to the school for a wrestling match—a detail that the State was pushing as part of the narrative because of the note they found in Hae’s car.
Repeatedly Susan and Colin pointed out how witness stories had been massaged in favor of the prosecution, a pattern of deliberate manipulation. If I felt devastated at the betrayal of justice, I could only imagine how Adnan felt. They took away his life, his future, and ruined his family. Grown men, bound to protect and serve, responsible for the safety and security of the public, had framed a child by manipulating witnesses, including their eyewitness, and this was the only “evidence” they had because they could find nothing with which to tie Adnan to the murder.
What we were looking at wasn’t just potential witness-tampering. The police may have taken it a step further and messed with physical evidence as well, all just to get their man.
* * *
Hae’s body and car are really the only two pieces of physical evidence that can help us understand what might have happened to her on January 13, 1999. Having dissected how the autopsy contradicted the State’s theory of the murder, Susan pointed out that something was also very wrong about the condition in which Hae’s car was found.
The 300 block of Edgewood Drive in Baltimore is an urban area with both high crime and heavy policing. It is a sprawling neighborhood of brick row homes, and in some places the homes line up around all four sides of a vacant grassy patch, which is used as a parking lot by residents. Hae’s car was found in such a lot, parked right next to rows of other vehicles.
Susan had taken a very close look at the color photograph of the car taken before it was towed and, eagle-eyed as ever, noticed things that didn’t add up.
At the time the car was found, it had ostensibly sat through winter weather and storms from January 13, 1999, to February 28, 1999—six weeks. And yet, the car was remarkably clean, showing no signs of snow and ice sediment or deposit. The grass on the tires and inside the wheel wells was greenish, Susan noticed, as if it had been recently kicked up and
stuck on the car. It did not look like grass from six weeks ago, which by then should have been withered, tan, and very dead looking. The grass under the car was likewise remarkably green, given that the car had apparently been standing above it for that long. In fact, the picture shows an empty space next to Hae’s car with a large, brown, car-shaped patch of dead grass, a clear indication that another car had been standing in the adjacent spot, and there were dead, car-shaped patches of earth on both sides of the strip of green grass where Hae’s car stood. It had actually been parked between two regular parking spots.
Then there was this: while every other car in the picture had a lock on the steering wheel, an expected measure in such a neighborhood, Hae’s car had sat week after week untouched. All the items in the car, in the backseat and the trunk, were untouched. No one had broken into it; her personal items, including her purse and book bag, were in the trunk; a gold charm worth over a hundred dollars was in the glove compartment. Nothing had been stolen or stripped. This, in one of the highest-crime neighborhoods in Baltimore, with a continuous and heavy police patrol. But none of what you’d expect in this situation happened: the car wasn’t damaged, stolen, or broken into; no neighbor reported the abandoned, untouched vehicle; and no cop spotted it. For six weeks.
All these things added up to one conclusion for Susan—the car most likely had not been there the entire time. It had been moved there so recently that the grass stuck to the tires was still green.
As if this wasn’t enough, Colin pointed out something else.
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