Adnan Syed
The following story contains spoilers for the incredible Serial Podcast. If you’re waiting to listen to it and you’d rather not read spoilers, please turn back now.

We received a request to cover this story and since I’ve been binge listening to Serial, I was glad to oblige. Serial is a spinoff from the exceptional NPR show, This American Life. I’ve been listening to TAL almost since it started airing in 1995. I used to kill time at work in the late 90s by streaming all the back episodes, which were free online at the time.

Unlike TAL, which has shorter stories centering around a theme, Serial is a 12 episode in-depth look into a single murder case from 1999. Hosted by TAL producer Sarah Koenig, the show is the most popular podcast ever. It’s the number one podcast on iTunes and outlets are talking about how it’s opened up a whole new audience to podcasts. Time Magazine even has a list of podcasts to try now that Serial has ended. (My favorites are The Ted Radio Hour, Science Friday and Radiolab.)

Now that the show has wrapped, there are still so many questions about the murder of Hae-Min Lee, an 18 year-old student in Baltimore whose body was found in early 1999. Then 17 year-old Adnan Syed, Hae’s ex boyfriend at the time, was convicted of the murder and has served 15 years of a lifetime sentence. The conviction was largely based on the testimony of Adnan’s friend, Jay, who claims to have helped Adnan bury the body. There was no DNA testing performed and only that one alleged witness and tenuous circumstantial evidence links Adnan to the crime.

There are so many loose ends and details in this case it’s hard to sum them up. Prosecutors overstepped their boundaries on many occasions, paying for their chief witness Jay’s attorney and coaching other character witnesses. Adnan’s attorney, now deceased, was disbarred after multiple clients complained that she bilked them of money and missed key details in their cases. She may have deliberately thrown cases in order to increase her billable hours. Adnan’s first trial ended in a mistrial and it’s believed that he would not have been convicted had that trial concluded.

For those of you who have listened to this first season, here’s a very good list of questions about the case, compiled by The Huffington Post. (There are more at the source.)

1. What was up with the Nisha call?
As host Sarah Koenig reiterates during the “Serial” finale, the Nisha call looks terrible for Adnan. According to records from Adnan’s phone, Nisha was called for two minutes and 22 seconds at 3:32 p.m. on Jan. 13, a time when Adnan swears he wasn’t with his phone (he says Jay had it). Koenig and her team determine through AT&T’s customer service contract from 1999 that there’s a possibility the call could be a butt dial, as AT&T charged for calls that went unanswered for a long period of time (Nisha’s number did not have an answering machine). But, as Dana says, “Even if the Nisha call could potentially be a butt dial, in the realm of possibility, maybe it was a butt dial. What are the chances?”

2. Is Ronald Lee Moore, a now-deceased criminal who was released from prison on Jan. 1, 1999, involved?
Koenig catches up with Deirdre Enright from the Innocence Project, who has a motion in the works to test DNA from Adnan’s case that wasn’t tested before. This includes DNA from under Hae Min Lee’s fingers as well as hairs found on her body. Enright’s reasoning for doing so is because she thinks they may match another potential suspect, Ronald Lee Moore, a man who had been in prison for a while, but was released for 14 months on Jan. 1, 1999. He was linked by DNA to the murder of another Korean woman in Owings Mills, Maryland, who was killed 11 months after Hae. Koenig admits that a DNA match between Hae’s body and Moore is a long shot.

3. Was Jay covering for something else that he did?
There are repetitive references during “Serial” to vague, separately shady crimes that Jay allegedly committed. With the character witnesses generally saying he was a good guy, maybe he got caught up in something and this whole story became a convenient alibi hammered through by the cops that kept him out of something else. The fear he apparently felt while working at the video store seemed over the top for the descriptions of the 17-year-old Adnan and how even Jay described their relationship.

4. What did Hae’s note to Don mean when she said, “Sorry I couldn’t stay”?
In the first few minutes of the “Serial” finale, Koenig discusses an interview she conducted with Don, Hae’s boyfriend. Don said that he had plans to meet up with Hae on the night of Jan. 13, 1999. When Hae’s car was found, police discovered a note addressed to Don that read “Hey cutie. Sorry I couldn’t stay. I had to go to a wrestling match at Randallstown High. But I promise to page you as soon as I get done, okay?” Koenig contemplates the sentence, “Sorry I couldn’t stay.” Where was she coming from? How was she going to get the note to Don, since his car was far away in Hunt Valley? Don had never seen or heard about the note until Koenig told him about it.

5. Where was Adnan Syed on the night of Jan. 13, 1999?
We will never know where exactly Adnan Syed was on the night of Jan. 13, 1999, because he doesn’t remember. Twenty-one minutes of his life are not accounted for, and because prosecutors concluded Hae was murdered during that time, Adnan was, basically, screwed.

6. What was the big rumor that Sarah Koenig said she pursued, but couldn’t verify?
What was rumor Koenig called “so incriminating that we thought, well if this one is true then we’re done, our story is over and we can all go home”? Koenig, being a responsible journalist, never said, so it looks like we’ll never know. (Vulture speculated about that rumor as well; read their take here.)

7. What about Don?
Koenig never focuses too much on Don throughout the season and therefore we’re left to assume Hae’s boyfriend at the time was pretty clearly removed from the crime. From what Koenig presents, however, the details are still hazy and it would have been nice to get a LensCrafters employee who could talk about their relationship at the store and Don’s behavior on the day Hae went missing.

8. Why would Adnan ask Jay to help bury the body, especially if Adnan apparently knew a “Westside Hitman?”
In his Feb. 28, 1999 interview with detectives, Jay claimed that Adnan knew a “West Side hitman” and took that as a thinly veiled warning. But if Adnan had connections to professional criminals, why bother asking Jay, of all people, to help him bury Hae’s body?

9. What was said between the cops and Jay when the tape wasn’t rolling?
Could be the explanation for why Jay’s story is so convoluted.

10. What is the deal with State Attorney Kevin Urick?
State Attorney Kevin Urick factors into a number of key moments during “Serial” — he helped Jay find a pro bono lawyer and chastised Don, according to Don, for not making Adnan sound creepy enough. Koenig says in the finale that she ran the Don claims by Urick, but he responded that he wasn’t authorized to talk about the case.

11. Why wasn’t it a bigger deal that Hae was on television the same day she went missing?
In the note police recovered from Hae’s car, she tells Don about participating in a television interview about student athletes, which was taped earlier that day. This isn’t a regular occurrence in a high student’s life and seems like it might have been mentioned earlier.

[From Huffington Post]

I think question number 3 is the most meaningful to me, in terms of Jay’s motivation. If Adnan didn’t do it, Jay may have been coached and/or threatened by the cops to finger Adnan. Remember how Don said that the state attorney told him he didn’t make Adnan sound creepy enough? It’s also possible of course that Jay did it. Remember how his friend Jenn said that she helped Jay carefully clean the shovel and dispose of his work clothes after the crime? It’s possible Jenn was lying, but Jay was very thorough for just an accessory to the crime.

Also, I was frustrated at how much time was spent on the Nisha call in this episode. I didn’t really understood why that mattered until I read another synopsis of possible scenarios for the crime. The timeline initially didn’t make sense to me but there were many details in this case that confused me. Imagine how the jury must have felt, especially after hearing just a small segment of the incredibly boring courtroom testimony. The whole thing hinged on Jay’s testimony, and a juror said as much to Koenig.

Serial is coming back at some point for a second season. I hope that the DNA evidence somehow solves this case either way, but I have the impression that there’s no easy answer to what happened, and that we’ll still be digging through the weeds trying to figure out what happened.

Also, The Huffington Post points us to this video interview of Hae Min Lee, taken in the early morning the day she died. If this segment aired at noon on the day she died, it may have made her a target.

photos are of Adnan and Hae and are courtesy of Serial and via Reddit