She moved her shovel around the hollow, showing me that it was near rock within half an inch of the surface.
“There isn’t anything to dig here,” she said, “there isn’t much topsoil, it’s mostly rock.”
As far as she was concerned, the depression was not dug, the terrain didn’t allow it, and the shape of the hollow and the route of the creek at high tide all pointed to its being a naturally created space.
If anything, this explained the discrepancies in Jay’s stories about the shovel (or shovels, as Jenn said). The police may also have realized that there were no shovels, which explains why they waited over a month to try and retrieve them from the dumpster where Jay said he had discarded them. But they wanted to appear to take his story seriously, so eventually they visited the dumpsters.
Jim Clemente’s analysis seemed credible, then. If there was no digging, he was right—someone had just dumped Hae unceremoniously, covered her up hastily, and gotten out of there.
What then, I asked Jim, did he think happened to Hae?
She probably went to meet someone she knew, and something went badly wrong. She was killed wherever she met this person shortly after leaving the school, and late that night, after being in another location all day and much of the evening, her body was left in Leakin Park. Jim would start with the men in her life at the time: Adnan and Don, though there could be people we don’t know about, people from her online life who were never discovered. From there he would look to see who had the opportunity.
There is some evidence to suggest the cops were thinking along the same lines, that she wasn’t killed in a car like Jay said (or the police got him to say), and they were looking to see where the murder actually took place.
Documents emerged from the Maryland Public Information Act file, showing that the police had been trying to find out if Hae had gone to a hotel the day she disappeared. A receipt of Hae’s credit card charge for a November 25, 1998, stay at the local Comfort Inn (a few minutes from the school) was part of the file, along with copies of a few business cards taken from local hotels, which had presumably been visited by a detective during the investigation.
It seemed as if these cards were collected not during the missing person’s investigation but during the murder investigation. For example, the police would not have contacted Phillip Buddemeyer (bottom left), the city surveyor, until after the body was found. Buddemeyer was not part of the case until February 9, 1999, when he assisted in the disinterment of the body.
The way I saw it, if contact with these hotels was made after February 1, it means the police were seriously considering the possibility that Hae went to meet someone at a hotel after school. It may also explain why Bilal Ahmed was questioned about how, when, and for whom he booked hotels during his grand jury testimony.
Even after Adnan was arrested, the issue popped up when both Ritz and MacGillivary questioned Debbie about it on March 26, 1999:
This was curious, I thought. The police already had a story from Jay, the Best Buy parking lot story, but it probably rang as untrue to them as it did to anyone who has visited the area—wide open, easily viewable from both a busy main city street and the Interstate, congested in the middle of the afternoon. Or they may have realized, based on the autopsy report, that the lividity didn’t match the way she was found, or Jay’s story.
If they believed the Best Buy version, there would be no reason for this line of questioning with Debbie.
After speaking with Jim, who promised to keep digging through the case and asked to listen to the audio of Jay’s police interviews, I couldn’t stop thinking of Jay’s question to Sarah: well then, who did it?
* * *
Summer was upon us and with it came Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so the months shift around, but in recent years Ramadan has fallen on the longest, hottest days of the year.
I had recently finished up my two-year project at New America Foundation, which took me to a dozen cities across the country, and coupled with the incessant work of the podcast and the case (and lots and lots of social media advocacy), I was looking forward to taking Ramadan to unwind. The point of the month is not to starve but to learn to detach yourself from worldly needs and wants, to learn to discipline your body and soul. Like a month-long Shabbat, the point is to be more still, to be with God.
That purpose usually gets sidelined with nightly feastings, gathering with friends and family, then night prayers at the mosque. There is a special place for prayers done at night, the later the better; prayers done while fighting sleep and exhaustion are highly valued in Islam.
This is traced back to a rather mystical and magical tradition, in which the Prophet Muhammad says, “Our Lord (glorified and exalted be He) descends each night to the earth’s sky when there remains the final third of the night, and He says ‘Who is saying a prayer to Me that I may answer it? Who is asking something of Me that I may give it to him? Who is asking forgiveness of Me that I may forgive him?’ And thus He continues until the light of dawn shines.”
It’s this time of night that the famous Sufi poet Rumi writes of when he says, “The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep!”
This Ramadan, like many in the past, I resolved to try as much as possible to pray in the hours before dawn. My prayer was simple, it was a “wird,” a continuous, repeated recitation, an exhortation, of one of the “ninety-nine names” (attributes, really) of God in Islam: “Ya Dhaahir,” The Manifest. The One who makes things clear, who reveals what is hidden. I recited this name thousands of times on a rosary, with the intention that God please reveal what happened to Hae. Bring the truth to light.
Ramadan passed without incident, and as Muslims are wont to do, a few days after it was over I broke my abstinence from the pleasures of the world and went to see a Bollywood movie with friends late one night.
Afterward, my head full of peppy songs and flashy dance sequences, I got in my car around 1:30 a.m. The windows were down, my scarf was hanging on for its dear life, and I was singing with abandon. As I pulled onto the freeway, an incredibly strange thing happened to me. I suddenly froze, the hair on my body stood up, and a chill went through me. The Bollywood songs were slammed out of my head, replaced with an intense, screaming thought that sprung from nowhere: Don. We have to look at Don.
It may seem obvious on an intellectual level that if I didn’t believe Adnan did it, I’d move on to Don. But I had no emotional impulse, in all these years, to suspect him. He was as near to a nonentity as could be to the case. I never saw him testify, I had no idea what he looked like, and there were so many other strange people like Alonzo Sellers, the streaker, involved that I dismissed Don as easily as Mandy Johnson had done in 1999.
But now I felt a strong urge to get every bit of information I could on Don. I went home and couldn’t sleep all night; early in the morning I shot off an e-mail to Susan, Colin, Dennis, and Bob explaining my weird experience.
Looking back, I’m still a bit embarrassed about the e-mail. I knew I sounded nuts, but I just had to tell them that we needed to get more information about Don, immediately.
A few hours later I had to stop by Susan’s place to drop off a birthday gift for her, during which time I marveled at the clay dinosaurs she made, the suits of bottle-cap armor, multiple gaming screens, and reams and reams of case documents and cell tower maps. As I was leaving, sounding sheepish, I apologized for my early morning e-mail.
Susan responded, “Oh, it’s okay. I mean, you do know about the psychic, right?”
I did not. She filled me in.
As Serial was ongoing, a woman reached out to Sarah Koenig. Sarah had told Krista Meyers about her, and they connected. Krista had already been communicating with Susan and Colin, answering what questions she could for their investigation. So Krista told Susan about the psychic, but Susan didn’t know her identity. The psychic had a story she felt compelled to tell, a story she was convinced was tied to th
e murder of Hae Min Lee.
* * *
It turns out she wasn’t a psychic, something she explained emphatically the first time I spoke with her (I’ll call her Pam). I was struck by how emotional she was, how raw it all still was for her.
Pam explained she was highly educated, had a successful career in finance, was not particularly religious, and had experienced a few odd moments in her life that she could only explain as slightly supernatural phenomena, but in no way did she consider herself psychic.
I heard her story out, shaken by it myself because of her clear sincerity. I didn’t think for a second she was making any of it up, and she said that she had been carrying this experience around for the past sixteen years, having told only those closest to her, who could vouch for it.
I asked her, because it had been a long time, to give more thought to what she remembered and then send me an e-mail. She was upset after our talk from having the memories rush back at her, but said she would write it all up for me. After many months she finally did.
Here is what she said.
I wanted to document for you what I saw in the Fall of 2000 when I contacted the Baltimore police.
In November, 2000, I was a sophomore in DC, and took a southwest flight from Chicago to Baltimore after thanksgiving break. As I was about to deplane, I touched a bag in an overhead compartment at the same time as a Korean woman in the plane and felt a jolt of energy. She was in her mid to late 40s, a little plump (5’2 to 5’6 and maybe 140–150) in leather black pants and a tunic type sweater. We didn’t talk but the energy was strange and left me buzzing. That night when I got back to my dorm room, I had a terrible vivid dream that disturbed me for more than a decade. I found it so disturbing I shared it with family and a few friends and actually called the Baltimore police to share my vision. I never heard back from them after I reported it. That was the one and only time I’ve ever contacted law enforcement about a dream or vision.
This is what I saw:
In a Baltimore motel parking lot off of a busy street with strip malls and big box stores and gas stations, etc., a young, Korean girl in her teens or early 20s is in the driver’s seat of a car, the car smelled like sex … not sure if it was consensual sex or not, or if the sex had been in the car or motel but I didn’t get the sense she’d been raped. The car had a cloth interior (like the fake crushed velvet kind) and was gray/silver. I think there was a tape deck? There was junk in the back seat and on the floor, a jacket, papers receipts and an empty 7up or Mountain Dew bottle maybe?
The girl was afraid. And a young white man in his early 20s or late teens with short dark blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that were bloodshot and crazed was in the passenger seat leaning over her, choking her with his bare hands. He may have stopped at some point and gotten some kind of cord like parachute core or a sweatshirt tie, but I’m not sure. It took a really long time, or felt like it did. It was awful and she made a gurgling cracking noise as she choked.
There was a minor struggle but the whole time I could hear her thoughts and she kept thinking “this is crazy, this isn’t happening.” There was a general sense of betrayal as well as shock and disbelief. She was more shocked than scared, and felt so betrayed and just shocked. She didn’t fight as hard as she could have, I think because she kept thinking he was going to stop. She didn’t believe for a second he was going to kill her.
It was cold out with no leaves on the trees, the heat was on in the car. You could see trees over the fence they faced. It was late afternoon. His thinking was disordered. It was almost nonsensical and manic. He didn’t mean to kill her and didn’t want to intellectually. I had the sense he was high on drugs or extremely mentally ill. He didn’t want to kill her and just couldn’t make himself stop. He really wanted to stop, but just couldn’t control himself. It was terrifying being in his head. And he was so out of control and self-loathing while hurting her. It was awful.…
… After she was dead, he cried. He felt horrible and disgusted with himself and didn’t know what to do. He got out of the car, which was facing a fence that was chain link with brown plastic or old brown wood, I’m not sure. Behind the car, which was gray/silver or very light blue were hotel rooms that were beige/tan with dark brown door frames and window frames like a Motel 6 or EconoLodge. They were parked by a brown dumpster that wasn’t full. He put something in the dumpster. It might have been a plastic bag with something in it? I didn’t see what it was but it made a light noise when it landed that sounded like something hard or heavy in plastic obviously on top of other trash, not an empty dumpster.
He opened the trunk that was also carpeted/cloth and had a dark blue or black duffle bag in it. It was late afternoon and the sun was already setting before he killed her, and he waited til just after dusk. There was basically no foot traffic or other cars. He moved her body to the trunk, folded her almost in half on her side to fit her around the duffel, and drove her to his mother’s house. He didn’t know what to do and drove around before taking her there but didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t scared about getting caught, he was just unable to think coherently. He may have lived there too, I’m not sure, but it was definitely his mother’s home.
He went inside and left her in the trunk. He didn’t decide to leave her there, he just did it, which chilled me. No one else was home. When he entered the house he started to sob and shake uncontrollably. There were crosses in the house and maybe a picture of Jesus with a sacred heart? He felt intense guilt and remorse. He knew he was going to hell and this scared him very much. His mother was very Christian and he was terrified of her knowing what he had done. He went up the stairs and there were family pictures on the walls and maybe the landing on the way up. The carpet was worn and either dark gray or brown, maybe. Walls were lighter. He went into his dark room, didn’t turn on the light, and fell asleep crying with terrible nightmares.
I don’t know what happened next, and I didn’t see the burial clearly. But he buried her with his bare hands (not a shovel) and he was wearing gloves. The ground was hard and there was a big mound of dirt like a mined patch or a construction site nearby. He was alone when he buried her in late afternoon. It was sunny and very cold. He said a prayer over the grave before he left her. He felt genuine sadness and remorse. He may have left a jacket or sweater on her? There was a red jacket too either in the car or grave. Then I stopped seeing and feeling him and could feel the dead girl.
She was in cold shallow ground. It was a wooded area near a creek or small area of flowing (not stagnant) water. But there wasn’t much of it. It was frozen over. It was slightly below her and she was on a bank closer to a path or road with the water on the other side of the log. There were frozen and snowy leaves on top and she was near a rotten log that had been there at least a year, possible longer that had moss on it. There was a used condom on the ground nearby and some other trash (I didn’t see any liquor bottles though). You could hear traffic muffled, and also trees rustling. It smelled like motor oil and moldy leaves. She was sad and worried about her mother who didn’t know where she was. She could hear her mother crying and it made her sad and lonely. I could hear a bell of some kind ringing and saw the letters s and d or t, I’m not sure which. I have no idea what they mean. I felt like she was crying and so sad about her family not knowing where she was. She felt worried and alone and betrayed.
When Pam woke from her dream, she did so screaming, soaked in sweat, as her roommate rushed to her side in the middle of the night. The dream had been so vivid that even after waking up she felt like she was in it. Finally she went to speak to a campus priest who advised her to call the Baltimore City Police. She made the call, and an officer listened impatiently, thanked her, and let her know they’d be in touch. Of course they never were. What she had seen, if it was about Hae, wouldn’t have mattered then anyway; almost two years had gone by since she had been murdered, and nearly ten months since Adnan had been convicted. But over the years Pam had held on to the vision and told those closest
to her about this experience she still couldn’t shake. Then she heard Serial, and it all came together for her. She had never before heard the name Hae Min Lee, and knew nothing about this 1999 murder when she had the dream, but when the podcast ran it was as if a long-scattered puzzle came together for her. She reached out to Sarah, who spoke to her and happened to mention it to Krista, but hadn’t told me about it.
The day Pam sent me the above e-mail she was also agitated. She had had another vivid and disturbing dream about the woman she saw murdered that night, and when she woke she saw online that it was Hae’s birthday. She had a connection to Hae that she couldn’t understand.
In an already complicated, difficult, obtuse case this added one more layer of pain and haze.
There was another psychic too, though, one that Hae’s mother had consulted, according to undated notes in Gutierrez’s files. The notes read: “Hae’s mother went to see a psychic. Psychic said ex boyfriend did it.”
* * *
So it seems there were two competing psychic visions, each pointing to a different man.
There was no reason, not a shred, to believe that Don had anything to do with Hae’s death, other than he matched the profile Jim gave and now generally matched a description given by a stranger with a vision from years ago. And if we tested the Physical Evidence Recovery Kit or the fingernail clippings taken from Hae (if they still existed in a police locker somewhere) and they matched Don’s DNA, then what? It wouldn’t prove anything because they were dating and he had been with her the night before.
Plus, he was at work.
Or so everyone always thought. Susan had cracked open the door to the possibility that Don’s timecard had been falsified, and Bob decided he was going to find out for sure.
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