Bob started calling around, beginning with a local LensCrafters, to get information about their time system—but they weren’t talking. They referred him to “corporate” and he found an HR manager there who was much more willing to chat. What he told Bob shocked him, and all his listeners.
The manager at corporate explained to Bob that LensCrafters was not a franchise; it was and is wholly owned by Luxottica, so all of the pay comes from a central location. The way employees in 1999 logged in was the same as today, with their unique employee ID number. That number didn’t change if an employee moved from store to store, even if an employee was moved to a store in a different state. When Bob asked him what an explanation for Don having two ID numbers could be, he responded, “If you’re looking at two timesheets for the same employee with two different associate ID numbers on them, one of them has been falsified.” Bob also asked about the missing overtime hours and the separate timesheets for the week of January 13 from the two stores. Again, the manager stated that one of the timesheets was falsified because if it was authentic, those hours would all appear on the same timesheet regardless of working at different stores. And that single timesheet would certainly contain the overtime hours.
Bob didn’t stop there. He then managed to find two LensCrafters employees, a retail manager and a lab manager, both of whom worked for the Hunt Valley store in January of 1999 and were on site on January 13. The retail manager recalled Don as being a “nice enough kid.” When Bob explained the situation, noting the timecard and employee number discrepancies, the manager responded that having worked at the store for many years and covered many different branches, he could confirm that employees never had more than one ID number. An employee could have had two ID numbers if that person had worked for the store previously, stopped working for them and then started again—but in that case the old employee ID was terminated.
Bob asked the lab manager the same question.
“Can you think of any possible reasonable, innocent explanation as to why these two timecards would have the different ID numbers?”
“No, I can’t think of any explanation for different ID numbers,” he responded.
Having put out a call for LensCrafters employees who could comment on the timesheet, about a dozen people who had worked for the chain in the late 1990s contacted Bob and confirmed what the corporate HR manager and the two Hunt Valley managers said: the Hunt Valley timesheet was falsified. Altogether, Bob had gotten confirmation with sixteen current and former employees.
It is worth noting that the only time Don ever appears to have used two different ID numbers in his employment was the week that Hae went missing. He didn’t just use the different ID number on January 13; he also used it a few days later, on Saturday, January 16, 1999. A peculiarity on the 16th that also appeared on the 13th was that Don again reported working hours that no lab technician was scheduled to work. For the 16th, according to the employee work schedule in our file, one lab tech was scheduled to work at 11:00 a.m., the next at 12:30 p.m., and a third at 2:00 p.m. There was no work in the lab at 9:00 a.m., which is when Don reported being there.
Bob also asked the retail manager about why and how timecards could be changed after the fact—was this something a general employee could do? Apparently not. But in this case, the manager said, “His mother was the general manager and yes, she could have made the changes.”
There are innocent, or relatively innocent, explanations as to why his mother made changes to his timecard, if indeed that is what happened. Maybe they were worried that he could become a suspect and created the timesheet just to cover for him.
Also, company policy, according to one former manager Bob spoke to, didn’t allow any employee to work with anyone they had a reporting relationship to, so you could not work “under” a relative, though you could work with them. Don’s mother was the manager at Hunt Valley, and it was strictly against policy for him to work there. Maybe they fudged the employee ID so no one would catch that he was working under his mother (though why would this happen only on two occasions, both in the same week?).
Yes, it could be innocent, but as Bob was airing his shows, a former manager at LensCrafters named Elizabeth went on the air with him to share something troubling.
It was true that timesheets could be retroactively changed by a manager, but only up to a point. They couldn’t, for example, be changed for time worked in weeks prior. They had to be changed within a week of the end of a pay period. In this case the pay period ended on that Saturday, January 16. The changes had to have been made by January 22. That was the date of Don’s interview at the Owings Mills store by Detective O’Shea.
Simply put, I am entirely convinced the timesheet was not just falsified. It was falsified at a time before anyone knew Hae had been killed.
Elizabeth noted something else: managers only have access to timesheets for their store, so it would have been odd for the Owings Mills manager to have known the exact hours and timings Don allegedly worked on January 13 at the Hunt Valley store. But that manager, Cathy Michel, did know the exact times, because she gave them to Detective O’Shea when he visited her on February 1, 1999.
Michel could have simply called Hunt Valley to get them. But if so, why wasn’t she bothered by the fact that Don broke store policy by working for his mother?
Thanks to an intrepid Reddit investigator, Bob realized this: at the time that Hae disappeared, Michel was living at the same address as Don’s mother, Anita Baird. Years later the two married; Michel took her wife’s last name, and together they adopted several children.
So it appears Don’s airtight alibi, as one police officer called it during the investigation, was his mother, her girlfriend, and a falsified timesheet. This, along with the fact that police were not able to contact him until 1:30 a.m. on January 14, 1999, and that Debbie Warren reported the last thing Hae told her before leaving school was going to meet Don at the mall, raises serious questions about where Don was the afternoon his girlfriend, whom he never attempted to reach after that, disappeared.
Bob wasn’t just digging up this information; he was in the business of going straight to the source. So he reached out to Don on Facebook, after having made sure it was the right Don, and asked him if he’d like to comment on the timesheet issues. Don told Bob he had the wrong person, though he clearly did not. Next Bob reached out to his mother, Anita, who threatened to file a complaint (presumably with the police) for harassment if he contacted her again. So Bob backed off, and shortly thereafter Don deleted his Facebook page.
* * *
Bob first reached out to Jay when he concluded that Jay had been coached on every detail of Adnan’s case. He thought there might be a way to create an opening to show Jay that he had also been victimized by the State, that he had been set up to admit to being an accessory in a crime that he had nothing to do with.
But Jay was not interested.
The next time Bob reached out to Jay was to confront him with more information that might have explained why Jay got caught up in the mess.
The information was a bit of a game-changer for all of us, and it came through the most unexpected channel: Reddit.
WhenTheWorldsCollide is the Reddit handle for an ex-investigative reporter and now stay-at-home-mom who had been sucked deep into the case early on. Part of a small, private subreddit, “Worlds” and others worked with Susan to assist in investigations, pulling and reviewing documents, brainstorming theories, and sleuthing online and in real life.
Worlds is extremely talented at getting people to talk. She began looking for any connections she might have with the Baltimore Metro Crime Stoppers (MCS) to see if the rumors the community had heard long ago were true. Was someone actually paid a reward for information? It didn’t seem like Sarah had checked.
She tracked down the board of the current MCS and did what investigative reporters do best, made a cold call. And she struck gold.
After a long, cordial conversation about how MCS works
, Worlds asked about the Hae Min Lee case. Did this person know anything about the reward that was offered back then? Had it been paid out? The board member said they would check with someone who had been involved in 1999 and get back to her.
Three anxious days later, Worlds got an answer and immediately posted it to the private subreddit group:
Greetings, friends.
This just in: It’s true Metro Crime Stoppers of Baltimore (MCS) paid out the cash award for Hae Min Lee’s murder case! Actually MCS paid out 2 rewards.
According to my MCS source’s records a call was received on the MCS hotline on February 1; the tipster apparently gave relevant information about [Hae’s] disappearance (days later, murder) and was assigned tip number #6456. Reward #1 was for $575, put up by MCS from its public-donation funding pool. Reward #2 was for $2500, put up by the Korean American Safety Council. The combination prize—$3075—was paid in cash, in person (ETA: guidelines call for informant to meet with BPD detective/dept. PIO + MCS board member) on November 1, 1999.
The February 12th anonymous tip, it seemed, must have been a cover for the February 1st tip, which had never been disclosed to the defense. Not only had this tip not been disclosed, it had not been disclosed that the tip informant was paid.
Colin, Susan, and I wondered what on earth the tip could have said. According to the MCS board member that Worlds was communicating with:
If a tip leads to an arrest and indictment, then the police department who made the arrest is responsible for completing the TIPSOFT program information and rating the crime for the reward potential. The MCS police representative (we call them the police council) presents the information to the board and if it meets the requirements of our by-laws we authorize a reward. We do not participate in a trial. We only provide a mechanism for getting information about the crime to the police who have the responsibility to investigate and determine the validity of the information. Defense attorneys do sometimes request information. However, all of the information that we have is provided to the police and I assume is available from them in discovery. The tip lines are not recorded. The only information we have is what the tipster provides in the call, web tip, or text tip. We give them a number. If they forget the number, then they will not get the reward.
The tip was paid because the tipster had actual, actionable information that tied Adnan to the crime.
Crime Stoppers never knew who the tipster was; only the police had that information.
We quickly sent off a flurry of MPIA requests to Baltimore County and City police, requesting the contents of the tip, and in the meantime went back to the case files to see exactly what actions the police took after the tip came in on February 1, 1999.
On that day a big flurry of activity in the investigation took place: the police questioned Inez Butler, Gerald Russell, and Hope Schab from Woodlawn High, and Cathy Michel from LensCrafters. They placed another call to Adnan, and spoke with Hae’s uncle, Tae Su Kim. The police didn’t head to Leakin Park, and they didn’t hunt down Hae’s car. But they did narrow down on two suspects: Don and Adnan.
Michel confirmed Don’s alibi, so that left Adnan.
Susan’s theory on the February 1 tip is that, having hidden it from the defense and public, the police “recreated” it as the February 12 tip, which they disclosed as having been made but not paid out. The police didn’t want anyone to know a tipster had been paid, never mind the identity of the tipster. At the same time they wanted to make it public that some incriminating tip had come in for Adnan, which gave them cover for their increased focus on him.
The February 12 tip must have evolved from the February 1 tip, though—while the earlier tip pointed toward both Adnan and Don, the later tip gave direct, specific information about Adnan, identifying him by name, saying he took Hae to Leakin Park for sex, naming a friend (“Baser” Ali, meaning Yaser Ali), and that he had broken up with Hae about a week before the murder.
Whoever this person was ended up getting paid $3,075 for their information.
This rang all kinds of bells for Susan and Colin, who immediately dug up the notes taken by police when they did the March 18, 1999, “ride-along” and interview with Jay. On the very first page of notes was scribbled something totally unrelated to the crime or the rest of the notes:
Mr. Brown
94 Suzuki 600 cc
9,000 Miles
At the very bottom of the twenty-six pages of handwritten notes is scribbled:
Private Invest
Going to discredit
REWARD
A few days later, on March 24, 1999, the police visited the school to interview a slew of teachers. Every single teacher on the list except one taught Adnan. The sole exception was a man named Carl Brown, who was Jay’s soccer coach and had no connection with either Adnan or Hae. The police interview itinerary makes a notation next to Brown’s name: “Mr. Brown—motorcycle.”
Accompanying the interview itinerary in the police files were same-day printouts of the Kelley Blue Book value of 1994 Suzuki 600 cc motorcycles.
It seemed the police were headed to the school not just to interview teachers, but to negotiate the purchase of a motorcycle from Brown for Jay, the price of which was not much different than the amount of the Crime Stoppers reward. Just a couple of weeks later, in an April 7, 1999, interview Stephanie McPherson gave to police, she mentioned Jay was planning on buying a motorcycle and financing it, and in 2014 Jay in his Intercept interview mentioned that he was busy in 1999 learning to ride a motorcycle.
We put our private investigator on the case, asking him to track down Mr. Brown. It turned out he remembered talking to police about whether he knew Adnan or Hae, and remembered the bike, but he couldn’t recall the police ever asking him about it. He also mistakenly told us it had been sold the previous year, when vehicle records showed us he sold it on April 9, 1999. It was entirely possible that the police didn’t question him about the motorcycle, or that they asked and realized he was looking to sell it quickly, whereas Jay wouldn’t get his reward until many months later.
The bike wasn’t sold to Jay. But there is no reasonable explanation for this trail of documents other than that the police were going to talk to Brown about this motorcycle that had first been mentioned by Jay in the ride-along notes.
The tie-in with the Crime Stoppers tip was becoming clear. There was only one person in the entire record of the case who had incorrectly suggested, like the February 12 tip, that Hae and Adnan broke up a week before the murder when they had actually broken up about a month prior. That person was Jay. Jay also happened to know two of Adnan’s mosque friends, Yaser and Tayyab. And the time of the pay-out on November 1, 1999, a few weeks after Jay’s plea deal, and shortly before he finally bought a car after having spent years getting rides from friends, made it abundantly obvious who collected the reward money. After gathering all the intel we could, Susan presented us with her unified grand theory of how this all went down.
A grand theory indeed, but a theory nonetheless. Bob took it a step further and decided to challenge Jay head-on.
He sent him a message about the Crime Stoppers tip.
We couldn’t have anticipated this cryptic response. The two things Bob, Susan, Colin, and I all agreed on were that Jay didn’t deny having gotten the reward money, and that he had been threatened before about what could happen to him.
My own takeaway was that Jay didn’t care about anyone but himself.
Not long after this, we had our suspicion confirmed: Jay had been threatened, and he feared for his life.
Sometime in the summer of 2015 Colin began corresponding with yet another curious character in the case—attorney Anne Benaroya. She had popped up on September 7, 1999, to enter Jay’s plea deal as his attorney of record.
The significant thing about Benaroya, which Gutierrez raised bloody hell about at trial, was that Urick had somehow procured her for Jay pro bono. In Serial, Sarah covered the events like this:
Jay testifies
that after his last interview with detectives, in April of ’99, he had no contact with the cops or the prosecutors until September 6. So a long stretch where he doesn’t know what’s going on. He says he called the office of the public defender to try to see if he could get himself a lawyer, and they told him that unless you’ve been charged, we can’t help you. Which is true. So Jay says the next thing that happens is the cops come to see him, on September 6, and tell him he’s about to be charged with accessory after the fact and that he’ll be able to get a lawyer. The next day, September 7, they come pick him up, they book him, and they take him to the State Attorney’s office. He meets Kevin Urick, the prosecutor. Jay says he’s never met Urick before and then he says Urick introduces him to Anne Benaroya, who can represent him for free. Jay and Benaroya talk privately for a while, and then they sign a plea agreement. Then, that same day, they all go across the street to the courthouse and present the signed plea to a judge. If you or a loved one is an attorney, your jaw is hanging open right now, correct? Prosecutors do not find attorneys for witnesses they are prosecuting. That is not a thing.
We never knew exactly how or why Benaroya got involved, and when Sarah had contacted her for an interview for the podcast it had not gone well. She wouldn’t tell me what went down between the two, only that it was not pretty, and she never really got any questions answered. Benaroya herself called Sarah’s interview “disastrous” in her conversation with The Intercept’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper.
But now, inexplicably, she had begun to exchange e-mails with Colin, and later Susan, in what seemed an earnest attempt to correct what people thought of her involvement with Jay and Urick. I was a bit surprised, because around the same time as the Intercept interview, in December 2014, Colin had written a series of blog posts about the plea deal. One in particular called attention to the fact that not only did Gutierrez find the attorney arrangement alarming but that Jay himself found it to be “fishy.” On the stand during the second trial, as he was being cross-examined by Gutierrez, Jay admitted he had doubts about Benaroya.
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