In Jay’s “first” interview, he stated that Adnan had told him that Hae had kicked the windshield wiper lever as she was being strangled, breaking it. After the police recovered the car, they took both pictures and a video of a lever that was hanging limp on the right side of the steering column. The lever itself was removed and sent to a crime lab to see if any of its edges were fractured, as they should have been if it was kicked so violently that the entire lever collapsed.
The prosecution used the video of the dangling lever to corroborate Jay’s testimony that Hae was strangled in the passenger seat of her car. Except that the lever wasn’t broken at all. The lab returned a result that there was no fracture anywhere along the edge of the lever. It was simply dangling down, and the video shows that the assembly behind the lever, inside the steering column itself, was loose.
In other words, the lever had not been kicked. It had been loosened at the base, where the stalk should attach to the steering column. To boot, the ignition collar was missing.
All of this could mean nothing. Or it could mean something very big if the ignition collar was missing and the lever became loose because someone was trying to move the car without any keys.
In a blog posted on March 27, 2015, Colin wrote, “If Hae’s Sentra were a 1994 Sentra, removing the ignition collar would have been a good first step toward hotwiring her car, which is why the 1994 Sentra was among the 10 most stolen cars in 2011, 2007, 2006, and 2005. In the mid-1990s, however, many car companies, including Nissan, introduced new locking mechanisms. Now, removing the ignition collar would not be a good first step toward hotwiring a ‘modern’ car, which generally can only be done by drilling the lockpins, using a screwdriver in the ignition, or somehow powering the dash through the hood (depending on the type of car).”
Hae’s car was a 1998 Nissan Sentra. The missing ignition collar may have been from a hot-wire attempt that either failed or succeeded. Colin theorized that maybe Hae was killed when interrupting an attempt to steal her car, and we all wondered if her car was hot-wired and moved recently to the location where it was eventually found.
If the car had been moved recently, and Jay didn’t really know where it was the entire time, two questions now remained: why would Jay cooperate and implicate himself and, as Jay asked Sarah on Serial, who did it—who killed Hae?
CHAPTER 13
TRUTH AND JUSTICE
Believers, be the supporters of justice
and testify to what you may have witnessed, for the sake of God,
even against yourselves, parents, and relatives;
whether it be against the rich or the poor.
Holy Quran 4:135
“Who is this guy?”
I sent Saad a text message after he sent me a link to a podcast I had never heard of before—a new one to add to the host of many that cropped up to talk about Serial.
Serial Dynasty was about as obvious a name as you could come up with to get the attention of Serial fans, and it looked like the host was going to basically recap and cover all Serial and related shows out there: Undisclosed, Serially Obsessed, Crime Writers On Serial, and the Serial Serial Podcast (yes, I know).
The host was a fire chief named Bob Ruff. Born and raised in a small town in Michigan, Bob had a deep, authoritative voice to match his towering, broad frame. While true crime and criminal justice were never necessarily his interest, he loved a good mystery, had an inquisitive mind, and showed a tenacity for figuring things out. He was a die-hard follower of Serial and the case, but not just as a “fan.” He became obsessed with the case, taking copious notes and listening to every bit of Serial and case-related information in the public domain. As a career arson investigator, he was committed to figuring out what really happened on January 13, 1999.
That’s why, when he heard Undisclosed, he decided he had to get on the air and talk about it. He already hosted and produced a podcast called Off Duty Podcast with a group of his firefighters. But after hearing our podcast, he decided he had to launch a second one focused on the case; he was already called crazy by friends and family for his obsession, for the hundreds of pages of notes, and for listening to Serial almost a dozen times. Undisclosed was exactly what he was looking for, a show that would dig deep and truly investigate the case.
Calling Undisclosed “groundbreaking,” “mind-blowing,” and more interesting than Serial, he urged everyone to listen to it immediately and then asked them to send him all theories, thoughts, suggestions, and research related to figuring out who killed Hae Min Lee.
I listened to the first episode cautiously, though I did share his show on social media since he was so positive about Undisclosed. But at that point, I had no idea who he was. As a fire chief he already had some credibility. He was also the director of the Fire Science Academy, owned his own training firm, and as an arson investigator he had been involved in cases as an expert witness. He had his own investigatory method and felt that Adnan’s case was flawed from the beginning because of investigatory failures. I liked what I was hearing; he announced he would follow Undisclosed, and I decided I’d follow Serial Dynasty.
His second episode had a singular focus: Don. Bob found it incredibly odd and suspicious that Don hadn’t reached out to Hae the night she disappeared, especially since the note found in her car seemed to indicate she had seen him or had planned to see him. But after hearing Undisclosed reveal that the note, and the wrestling match referred to in it, was almost certainly not written on the 13th, he backed off on Don a bit. Regardless, he was sure that the legal system had let down Adnan. The frequency of changing statements of witnesses was evidence that the detectives or prosecutor had something to do with those changes. He closed out his second episode with a clever memory experiment, showing how easy it was to manipulate someone’s memories, and then showed how easily it could have been done in Adnan’s case.
It was brilliant, and I was sold. Unlike other podcasts that just did recaps, with hosts giving their not-well-informed opinions on the case, Bob was taking it to an investigative level. He clearly wasn’t a sensationalist, and he had a very smart head on his shoulders. A head we could use. I reached out to Bob and asked him if he wanted to delve into the case files. He said yes, and I obliged.
As our listener base grew, so did Bob’s. With every episode and every revelation we disclosed, Bob developed his theories, synthesized and contextualized our findings, and interviewed Colin, Susan, and myself. But then Bob went further, doing things we were hesitant to do—like reaching out to players in the case, including the enigmatic Ernest Carter, Jay’s friend who was knighted “Neighbor Boy” in Serial.
In my first meeting with Sarah, the two big issues I had presented to convince her to look into the case were Asia’s alibi and a document that had left me confused for years—a police report about a man named Dave Hogston who called the police after his daughter came to him with some troubling information: Carter had told her he had seen the body of a young Asian woman in the trunk of a car.
This police report, which I had found in Gutierrez’s files years earlier, had always haunted me. It was one of the documents I copied and kept in my private case stash as the rest of the records were passed around between attorneys and the family.
Sarah saw the importance of tracking Carter down, and did eventually speak to him, but his story left us nowhere.
Hogston’s daughter, Laura, was lying, Carter essentially said. She made it all up; Carter had never said those things to her. The police had even taken him in for questioning and he had told them the same thing back in 1999. He had known Jay since childhood but he didn’t know Adnan. And he told Sarah that he knew nothing about the crime or a body in a trunk, and that he wouldn’t “kid around about something like that.”
I didn’t buy for a second that he hadn’t said anything to Laura. Something prompted her father to contact the police, and a story so specific about an Asian girl’s body in the trunk of a car, coming from someone with a lifetime of friendship with
Jay—Laura and her father couldn’t have made it up.
When Bob got a hold of Carter, a slightly different picture emerged. Carter admitted to Bob that Jay had told him a story about the crime in which Adnan had driven up to Jay’s house and popped the trunk, asking him, “Yo, are you ready for this?” Adnan showed him a body, and then they drove off together to bury it somewhere. Carter recalled telling Laura something after getting drunk at a party and the next thing he knew, the cops were at his door.
At this point it became clear—“neighbor boy” wasn’t such a big mystery after all. He had taken a story his friend had told him and told it to a girl, maybe in the hope of impressing her, and got caught up in something he knew nothing about. Nothing to see here, no smoking gun.
In the meantime, though, as Bob dispensed with Carter, he was already working behind the scenes on a bigger target: Jay himself.
* * *
Miracles were happening. On May 18, 2015, the Court of Special Appeals did something extraordinary. It cancelled the upcoming oral arguments that had been scheduled for the following month.
Without our even stepping into court, COSA rendered a decision to remand the case back down to the circuit court, the same court that had denied the PCR, and directed Adnan’s attorney to file a motion to reopen the PCR proceedings with the lower court in order to hear Asia’s testimony.
I was stunned. We were all stunned. Justin called me, full of wonderment. “Is this normal?” I asked him.
“Nothing about this case is normal, Rabia.”
Adnan called, having heard it on the news.
“This is good, right?”
“Yes,” I said cautiously, still in disbelief. “It’s good. It’s very, very good.”
COSA’s decision seemed a clear indication that the issues raised, the gamble that Justin took, had serious merit. It’s not often that a superior court will remand a case, and when it does, it’s telling the lower court that something went wrong here.
We couldn’t imagine that the circuit court would refuse to reopen the case. And it didn’t.
On August 25, 2015, the State foolishly referred to the cell phone records in their opposition to our motion to reopen, and Justin went full lawyer on them. Since the State raised the issue, they opened the door to the cell tower evidence, and Justin pounced, filing a supplement to our motion and raising a new issue before the court: the AT&T fax cover sheet, discovered by Susan eight months prior, that clearly indicated incoming calls were not reliable for determining the location of a cell phone.
Months earlier Susan and Justin had run the fax cover sheet past Abe Waranowitz, the State’s cell expert from the trial. He said he had never seen it before, and if he had, it would have impacted his testimony.
In his filing, Justin made the only two arguments that could possibly explain how the fax cover sheet had escaped attention in 1999—either the prosecutor had hidden it from the defense and Waranowitz, which would be a a Brady violation, or Gutierrez had completely missed it, fortifying our ineffective assistance of counsel claim. It was one or the other because at the end of the day, no one had provided it to the expert who had to testify about this evidence. We were on pins and needles awaiting the State’s response to this supplement. Their earlier opposition brief had been rather stomach-turning, full of dramatic, overwrought language, making rather disgusting insinuations and even reciting outright lies.
From alleging that Asia’s statement had changed to become time-specific only after I’d met her (implying I fed her the time to note in her affidavit), to repeating the lie that Adnan conveniently recalled nothing of his day, to reiterating a 7:00 p.m. burial time even though Jay had drastically altered it in his Intercept interview, to suggesting Adnan “elected” to skip Hae’s memorial service when he had actually already been arrested by that time—the brief was a disgrace by any measure.
It must have been the public reaction to the terrible brief that gave the State some difficulty in coming up with a reponse to our supplement. They missed the deadline of fifteen days after our filing, then thirty days, and finally on September 28, 2015, filed an objection to the inclusion of the fax cover issue.
The circuit court wasn’t having it, though, and in record time, on November 6, 2015, Judge Martin Welch, who had denied the PCR nearly two years earlier, and now having been brought out of retirement to adjudicate the case, granted our motion to reopen. All of the State’s arguments had failed.
We would get another day in court. And this time, Asia McClain would be with us.
* * *
While the wheels of the law were grinding away, Susan, Colin, and Bob were still going full steam ahead on their investigation.
As Susan and Colin broke the State’s case to bits, Bob was more interested in figuring out what happened to Hae after she last left school, and who killed her.
Full disclosure: I had many times thought about Hae, shed tears of horror and grief at what the family must have gone through when she was missing, pain at thinking about her last moments, and rage at how she was discarded by some monster, but I had not given any real consideration to actually solving the crime. Not because it wasn’t important, but because I seriously doubted I had the skills to do so. How are cold cases solved without the cooperation of police, without the State reopening the case? I had no idea.
But I now realized that while we might be on the road to a new trial, or a plea deal for Adnan, as long as the real killer wasn’t caught a cloud would hang over him. Unless we could prove someone else killed Hae, there would still be many who’d consider Adnan a killer who got out on legal maneuverings. It made me angry but also forced me to think about the crime itself, to try and piece together what I could.
We knew that Hae’s pager was never found, even though her purse and other belongings were still in her car, and Colin believed it was probably because whoever killed her had paged her, and his number appeared on that pager.
If she was paged, it had to be by someone who knew her, presumably someone not at the school.
Hae’s shoes were found in the backseat of the car, which makes no sense at all if she was actually killed in either the driver-side or passenger-side seat in the front. If she had been killed in the car and her shoes had come off as the body was being moved to the trunk or the burial site, why would the killer pick them up and put them in the backseat? Why wouldn’t he leave them wherever they came off? The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that either they came off as she was killed in the backseat, or they came off at another location that was tied to the killer, so he had to grab them and toss them in the backseat, like he had thrown her purse in the trunk. Women don’t drive around with their purse in the trunk. Hae had to have gotten out of her car somewhere with that purse, and after she was murdered, the killer took the purse and threw it in the trunk as he was cleaning up the crime scene.
A number of listeners with backgrounds in law enforcement also contacted me about the method of the crime and suggested that bodies are moved, as was done in this case, only when the location the victim was killed in could be tied to the killer. I thought it was an interesting theory and then had a long, detailed conversation with someone who was internationally renowned for profiling criminals based on a crime scene—Jim Clemente.
Both a retired prosecutor and FBI profiler, Clemente’s name is well known to crime aficionados for his work on the extremely popular television show Criminal Minds and many others. I kept getting suggestions from folks to try and speak to him. So I sent him a message on Twitter and, lo and behold, he responded.
Jim was incredibly gracious, explaining that despite his overwhelming work schedule he wanted very much to help us. He asked that I send him the files about the crime scene—he hadn’t heard Serial or Undisclosed and wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t want to know anything about any of the suspects or the investigation. He only wanted to know how and where Hae was found.
After he reviewed those documents, we set up a pho
ne call, which basically blew my mind.
Jim explained that one thing we could almost completely rule out was that this was a third-party killer—not impossible but highly unlikely. A few things pointed to this conclusion: she was found with all her jewelry on and her purse and belongings weren’t taken, so clearly this wasn’t a robbery. There didn’t seem to be any signs of struggle or rape either, and third-party killers generally murdered female victims in conjunction with a sexual assault or robbery. But killers who know their victim are different; they may kill in the heat of passion or for some premeditated reason like revenge.
Random killers, he also explained, had no incentive to move a body. They generally encountered their victims in an outside space not connected to either killer or victim, or in a space connected only to the victim, as in a home invasion. But generally, killers only took the immense risk of moving a body to a new location when the location of the murder itself could be tied to them.
He went on to note that he didn’t think this was premeditated, that it had the hallmarks of an amateur, a young, first-time perp, of someone who panicked, leaving the body in an almost haphazard fashion with loose dirt and leaves piled on top of it, not even having the time to dig a grave.
I told him about having visited the grave site recently with a soil specialist, a woman who had done the soil survey for the entire city of Baltimore and knew the area inside and out. When we got to the site where the body was found, I showed her the depression described by MacGillivary in his testimony. She spent over an hour inspecting the area, noting that the log itself actually was lying over the depression, with half of the hollow on either side of the log.
“Unlikely someone would have dug a space out like that, doesn’t make sense to dig under the log and over to the other side,” she noted.
If the police had wanted to, she said, they could have easily determined if the area had actually been dug by pulling core samples of the soil from the depression and matching it to that of the slightly higher ground. It could still be done, though with less accuracy. But surveying the area and noting that the stream often rose up and flooded this part, she said the hollow was probably from the water erosion coupled with a natural dip in the earth.
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