Fair enough; I believe, based on the information presented thus far, there was insufficient cause to convict.
But it begs the question, what other evidence is there? What do you know that we do not from the 9 podcasts thus far? Are you holding out on us, counselor? 
Episode 4, “Inconsistencies”. The police notice from Adnan’s cell records that Jen was called six times on the day of the murder. They go to talk to her on January 26th. At first she tells them nothing, then the next day, the 27th, she goes back to them, armed with a lawyer. According to SK, she was afraid that she might be charged, and Jay had told her to tell the cops what she knew and send them his way.
Jen’s story to the police is that Jay told her about the murder the very day that it happened, on the 13th, when Adnan dropped off Jay that night. In this version of Jay’s story, he had refused to take part in the burial, which he would later admit to, and the murder happened at Best Buy.
Jen then says that she later gave Jay a ride to where he and Adnan dumped the shovels, so that Jay could wipe prints off them and get rid of them. She also knows, from Jay, that Hae was strangled. I don’t think that would have been common knowledge at that point.
Note that this is before the police speak to Jay. He is first questioned on the 28th.
So, yeah. Maybe, if I’m drunk enough, I can go along with a theory where some unknown third party did it, Jay is completely uninvolved, and he makes up his story wholesale with info from the police. But with Jen’s testimony taken into account, that seems like fairy tale territory. It Jay isn’t involved, I can’t see why Jen tells them what she does on the 27th and points the cops to Jay.
I also have a hard time imagining a realistic scenario where Jay is involved, but not Adnan. It’s both of them or neither, I think.
On the other hand: Jen could still be lying about something, in some way. She was clearly willing to shut up about her knowledge of the crime until the cops showed up, presumably the protect Jay. She’s not a model citizen. So, there’s still a lot of room for speculation, I guess.
On a completely unrelated note, I just realized why we’re all hooked on Serial, and what it does that makes it innovative. Audience participation. This isn’t a podcast, it’s a game.
Jay admitted to being an accessory after the fact at least, if his version of events is true. But didn’t the prosecution allow him to plead out to a much lesser offense in order to get his testimony?
I’m not convinced of Adnand’s guilt, or of Jay’s for that matter. It seems that all attempts to corroborate circumstantial with actual physical evidence have failed. A key point seems to be Anand’s having called up Jay from a pay phone
that was supposed to have been in the parking lot of a Best Buy. But nobody seems to have been able to confirm that there ever was such a pay phone. One of the interviewees on the podcast suggests the phone was inside the lobby area of the store itself. Huh? I have never seen such a thing in any Best Buy or similar store.
We have one pothead and one pothead/pot retailer, but that’s it. As far as I can tell neither one seems to be the gangster type. IIRC Jay alleged that Anand had blackmailed him into helping him after the fact, or else he would tell the police about Jay’s marijuana dealing. I can see how Jay might have been pressured into helping Anand move the body and bury it, because Jay wanted to keep his dealing on the down low, but that theory only makes sense if it’s already established through other means that Anand was the murderer. The prosecution’s argument seems to be: Anand pressured Jay into helping him with the body, and therefore Anand was the murderer. In my non-lawyerly opinion, this works only if you’ve already concluded that Anand was the murderer in the first place.
Friends and acquaintances indicate that Anand and Hae remained on good terms after they broke up. This doesn’t make it impossible that Anand murdered her, of course, but if I were on that jury the near-absence of any kind of smouldering resentment on Anand’s part would definitely concern me.
We have heard from two jury members so far.
One of them said that she believed Jay because why would he lie about being involved in such a thing when it would send him to jail too. Which it didn’t.
The other implied that she and other members of the jury held Adnan’s failure to testify during his trial against him, despite being explicitly instructed not to do so.
It would be completely mental if it wasn’t there. Just utterly incomprehensible. Best Buy is the single most important location in Jay’s story. It’s supposed to be the freaking murder scene. Surely the cops would go there and try to reconstruct Adnan’s movements. Then surely Adnan’s lawyer would do the same thing. We’re supposed to believe that no one, at any point, would go, “Um, there’s no phone here”? And would Jay tell a story at trial, even if it is full of holes, that could be shot down that easily? That cross-examination would be one quick and easy day’s work for Adnan’s lawyer. “There’s no phone at Best Buy, dude. Mind telling us what really happened?” would be enough to get Adnan off. Trial over.
If there was no phone, then… I give up, I think. Just release the guy from prison already, because clearly everyone involved in the case, from the detectives, to his lawyer, to the key witness, were all either blubbering idiots or utterly corrupt liars.
So, I’m with you. For now I’m going with the assumption that there was a phone there in 1999, even if one shoplifter remembers otherwise.
Disclaimer: Adnan may well be guilty. I don’t see anything so far that would tend to prove his innocence in any meaningful way. I wouldn’t quibble with anyone who thinks he probably did it.
However, I think that people who are saying it’s almost certain that he’s guilty may be losing sight of what is actually meaningful evidence. There’s a whole laundry list of accusations (that have mostly dominated this thread): Adnan stopped calling Hae after she went missing, Adnan can’t remember specifically what he was doing on the day of the murder, someone said later that they thought Adnan was acting weird that night, etc.
Stop and look at what this stuff is actually capable of proving: if we didn’t have Jay’s story, how many facts such as these would it take to get us past reasonable doubt? 100? 1,000? You can’t do it, because this is not real evidence. It doesn’t tell us anything about what actually happened and/or is laughably unreliable. Now, some of the stuff on the list can help us evaluate the actual evidence, and I would consider a few of the things to be slightly damning on their own (like not calling after the disappearance). Mostly, though, I give almost no weight to this stuff.
Unless I’ve forgotten something (which is entirely possible), I see two pieces of real evidence:
Adnan’s cell phone would seem to place him in the vicinity of the burial site on the night of the disappearance. It’s a reasonably big vicinity, and we’re not 100% certain that Hae was buried that day, but this is relevant, no doubt.
Jay says that Adnan showed him the body and told him he killed her. Obviously that’s the big one, and ultimately the case comes down to whether (and to what extent) we believe him.
Jay’s testimony has some things going for it:
– He doesn’t have an obvious reason to make up the story.
– Jen says that he told her the same story shortly after the murder.
– There’s good evidence he was actually involved in the crime (he knew where Hae’s car was), and during the time when we think the murder and/or disposal of the body was occurring, Adnan’s cell phone was with him (which, of course, implies that Adnan was with him).
Now, I’m not too troubled by the fact that we’d need a reason for him to lie (which probably means a reason to kill Hae), in large part since we’d need to do the same thing for Adnan: construct a plausible motive (e.g. jealous rage, or violent argument) that’s simply not in evidence. Yes, it’s a shorter leap in Adnan’s case, but I’m satisfied that he was not devastated and broken in the weeks leading up to the murder. Likewise, it helps that Jay told the story to someone else, but if he’s lying then this is the story he’s chosen to tell … so how much does it really matter whether he tells it to one person, or two? I also certainly wouldn’t discount the possibility that he could get his girlfriend to lie for him, either in whole or in part.
I’m only really impressed by the fact that he’s travelling with Adnan’s cell phone. Actually, I forget offhand what the rationale for supposedly loaning it to Jay was (little help?), but that’s just not something I (or most others) would do casually. This tendency may well be less universal for a HS kid in 1999, but it’s usually a safe assumption that Presence of Phone = Presence of Owner.
Ok, but then what are the reasons we might not find Jay credible? Well, first of all, he’s Jay. At the risk of offending all the benevolent weirdos out there, Jay is clearly a weirdo, and sometimes weirdos do or say things that are (to us) inexplicable. More tangibly, he was “the criminal element” at the school (his words), he’s been arrested for domestic violence since the murder, and he cultivated a widespread reputation as a liar. Of course, I wasn’t there at that time and can’t be certain how that came to pass, but I’m inclined to extrapolate from my own experience. I only knew one or two people in high school who my friends and I would describe as “liars,” and do you know why they got that reputation? Because they lied all the damn time, about anything, for no apparent reason. Supposedly like Jay, they didn’t lie about “big things,” but only because they normally didn’t have big things to lie about. Simply put, that multiple people would describe someone as a liar should make us much less likely to believe him.
Also, I kind of don’t understand why Anand would involve Jay in this crime instead of someone else, but I really don’t understand why Anand would involve a second person in this crime at all. Unless I’m misremembering the logistics of the thing (again, which is possible), it’s just not believable to me that Anand would recruit Jay in anything like the manner he describes. What does he benefit from having an accomplice? He can dig a hole faster, and he doesn’t have to take a cab to practice. Neither of those things really matter. Even leaving the car (with the body) unattended for a couple of hours is a much, much smaller risk than revealing evidence of your murder to an unwilling (and unnecessary) accomplice with a clumsy attempt to intimidate him. This is simply not believable to me.
Finally, of course, Jay’s story changes from one telling to the next, and in any event the details don’t seem to jibe with the available facts. The best way to square these issues to the point of plausibility is to hypothesize that he’s lying about the details of the crime to hide the actual nature of his involvement. Ok, that’s totally possible. But, then we’re stuck arguing that Jay really is credible … because he’s lying.
This is longer than I planned. Look, I don’t mean to undersell the real chance of Adnan’s guilt, but with Jay and Jay’s testimony being what they are, I’d need something more that ties him to the crime to vote to convict.
(If brickbacon or someone else decides to reply to this post, please don’t chop it up into 17 quotes. I just don’t feel like there’s anywhere to go from there.)
IMO, the safest assumption would be that there was no phone. There was only a two year period when the phone could have come down, the cops wouldn’t feel it necessary to check every detail of a story they believe, and the defense attorney seems not to have done a thorough job (and anyway I’m not sure it would even occur to me to check something like that).
Again, I don’t know, but there’s good reason not to take it for granted that the phone was there.
But wouldn’t someone back then have done what Sarah and Dana do in the “Route Talk” episode? That is, drive to the Best Buy, and trace Adnan’s alleged movements, to see if it was even logistically possible according to the timeline? Or at least see if the layout of the parking lot matches with Jay’s description?
Actually, come to think of it, I guess they didn’t. The way Adnan poses the challenge to Sarah, and his reaction to the result, seems to mean that no one has done it before, not at the time, and not in the fifteen years since.
Huh. I would have thought that would be basic investigation stuff. Goes to show what I know.
These are the puzzling things about the evidence (as it’s being presented to us via the podcast); things like cell phone location records that can be misleading, Jay’s story with it’s multiple versions, lack of concrete evidence to physically link Adnan with his phone were enough for the jury to convict. But hard evidence like the phone booth, untested DNA evidence found near the body, no search of Jay’s apartment are all dismissed as irrelevant or unworthy of investigation or consideration by the jury.
As to motive… Jay had motive to kill Hae in a fit of anger. The defense attorney raised that possibility but maybe not convincingly.
A fit of anger brought on by what? If Adnan’s motive is weak sauce, then the closest thing to a motive anyone has come up with on Jay’s part would be weak sauce in a homeopathic concentration. There have been ideas floating around about Hae planning to confront Jay about him cheating on Stephanie. That is just teenage drama, and there is no evidence that it’s even true. As far as anyone can tell, Jay and Hae barely knew each other. Maybe there was something going on between them that none of their friends knew about, but that’s fiction territory.
Also, Hae disappeared between leaving the school and the time she was supposed to pick up her cousin. Would she spend that time going to Jay’s house and pick an argument with him? Or did he flag down her car?
I mean, it’s not impossible. It just seems very far fetched.
On the other hand, there is certainly something strange about Jay. His reasons for why he agreed to help with the burial and cleanup don’t make sense either, and basically come down to “well, Adnan asked me”. And as VarlosZ said, there’s really no good reason for Adnan to recruit Jay as an accomplice in the first place. So much about this case is already very far fetched. So who knows, I suppose.
Actually, the more I think about the idea of Jay being an accomplice after the fact, recruited on short notice, the less sense it makes. What are the chances that Adnan, on the day of the murder, would reason “I’ll call Jay to help, he’s the right guy for the job”, as opposed to “if I call Jay to help, he’ll go to the police straight away”? You’d have to be an idiot to reason like that. Why risk it? And then, what are the chances that Jay actually goes along with it?
They must either have a) planned it together in advance, b) been there together when it happened, if it was a spur of the moment thing, or c) Jay did it on his own.
I just can’t believe that it happened as Jay says. It’s just too ridiculous on the face of it.
This podcasts is all about armchair sleuthing and hair brained theories. I’m rolling with the theory that there is not sufficient evidence to convict Adnan and that Jay is sketchy as hell but evidence to pin this on him is just as inconclusive. So I would love to see this brought before the court again.
Vacillate much?
Also, harebrained … :smack:
I… go back and forth. 
The Innocence Project people have multiple viable other suspects in the murder and are pursuing having DNA testing done in regards to one of these viable suspects.
By the way, here’s the Best Buy parking lot. You can’t really see the spot where the murder supposedly took place from the road, but it’s clearly a wide open public area where you wouldn’t want to be dragging a dead body into the trunk in broad daylight.
However, you can pretty much see where the cell phone is supposed to have been based on Jay’s map. It looks like it’s supposed to be all the way over on the side of the parking lot nearest to the McDonald’s (which is also still there). Problem: that just doesn’t look like a realistic spot where a pay phone might be. The border of the Best Buy side is all parking spaces, then there’s a steep grassy embankment, then there’s the parking spaces in the McDonald’s lot. There’s just no place to put a phone (even if we should expect there to be one in a parking lot at all, which in itself would strike me as weird). You could argue the phone was on the sidewalk, but (A) that’s not what Jay describes, and (B) that too is not where pay phones go. It’s not a residential area, there’s virtually no foot traffic.
For this and other reasons, I’m actually very confident that the whole thing didn’t go down the way Jay claims. The only thing that directly ties Adnan to the crime is a statement that can’t be made plausible unless we assume that it’s a lie. That makes it unreliable by definition, doesn’t it?
Until a few years ago, there was a payphone in a grocery store parking lot near my mom’s house that was similarly situated. That actually makes me think it’s more likely that a payphone was there because it’s an area where it might not be readily noticed, and that’s why people are saying there wasn’t a phone there. I have a hard time believing that none of the people involved in this trial discovered the non-existence of the phone, if in fact it didn’t exist. Which is not to say that I think the timeline is convincing. I just don’t find that a particularly implausible place to have had a payphone.
I used to keep phone books and lots of maps in my trunk before the Internet and GPS.
It is—it was—absolutely routine for cops to shut off recordings during certain points of final interviews. I’ve seen some such recordings myself.
Regardless of what has been recorded in days or weeks or months of prior interviews or notes it happened as a matter of course.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that in every single last one of these instances what is happen ending during those interview gaps is that the cops are “helping” the witness smooth out his story for the final recording.
That doesn’t mean they are always helping the witness construct a false story but they are definitely smoothing out final inconsistencies and bumps and dead ends and anything that might distract the jury from their main through-line.
And in every case there are records of old interviews that the defense will use to try to impeach the final testimony. Yeah, it happens, but most of the time, a jury will convict anyway, so the cops don’t worry too much about that.
