Yeah, it would make Jay just about the luckiest murderer ever, to pull it off. But it’s not impossible.
As for framing Adnan, maybe the detectives mentioned something about looking into Adnan when first talking to Jen, and that’s where the idea came from. She could have realized that Adnan was the prime suspect.
Although, again, we have the other obvious problems:
Jay’s motive? No idea. I still don’t buy the “stepping out” stuff, it just seems far fetched and completely unsupported. Besides, this is high school. If Hae knew about Jay cheating on Stephanie, a lot of people would know. Jay would have to shoot up the entire school, not just strangle one person.
How would Jay get to Hae between her leaving school and the time she was supposed to pick up her cousin? No idea. Would she have stopped if Jay flagged her car down? Doesn’t seem likely. Maybe, though.
I’m a latecomer to Serial, but am now mostly caught up with the podcast and this thread. (I haven’t listened to Episode 10 yet, and so skipped the recent posts about it.)
Listening to Episodes 8 and 9 today, it occurred to me that if this were a fictional mystery then my guess as to whodunnit would be…Stephanie!
Since this is a real life mystery and not fiction I’m not seriously suggesting Stephanie as an alternate suspect. Nothing in the podcast so far indicates that she would have any reason to want to harm Hae. I don’t know if she even had any opportunity to kill Hae on January 13. Since it was her birthday, her friends were presumably paying extra attention to her and probably would have noticed if she’d disappeared for a few hours or even just seemed upset. But in a work of fiction I think it would be significant that Stephanie is such a central figure in this story.
Stephanie was dating Jay, a close friend of Adnan’s, and it seems like their relationships with her was the main reason why Jay and Adnan became casual friends in the first place. (Stephanie also presumably knew Hae pretty well since they were both in the magnet program, although I don’t think they were described as being friends.) The stated reason for Adnan calling Jay the day of Hae’s disappearance and then lending him his phone and car was because Adnan wanted to make sure Jay had bought Stephanie a birthday present. It seems far more plausible to me that Jay would be willing to help his girlfriend dispose of a body than his girlfriend’s friend, and Jay’s shifting story and concern about security cameras at Best Buy makes more sense if he’s trying to protect someone. Jay actually said that protecting Stephanie was important to him, although he said he was afraid for her safety because Adnan had threatened her.
Stephanie also seems like one of the few people who both Jay and Adnan would want to protect from the police, so if Adnan had any suspicions about Stephanie being the killer he might have kept them to himself. Heck, since I’m just speculating then perhaps Adnan was even an accessory after the fact like Jay but is still unwilling to point the finger at Stephanie.
It also seems odd to me that Jay didn’t try to call Stephanie from Adnan’s cellphone on January 13. Not that odd, since Jay was a stoner who hadn’t even bought Stephanie a birthday present until prompted by Adnan, but at least slightly odd considering that Jay made a number of calls to friends on Adnan’s phone. According to the call log Stephanie did have a cellphone (Adnan had called her twice on it the day before), so Jay could have reached her or at least left a “Happy Birthday!” voicemail at any time. But if Jay and Stephanie were together after school or if any of the unidentified incoming calls were from her, that would explain why he didn’t call her.
That was a truly crazy episode. After hearing that, I think if Adnan can’t get some sort of retrial based on crappy representation, then I don’t think anything will get him out of jail.
Just an aside, I remember thinking how odd it was that Guttierez would think Jay would be familiar with the expression “stepping out.” Even when I was in high school, that would have been very outdated, and while I could have figured it out from context, it would hardly have been something I heard often and it might have thrown me if someone said it to me in a stressful situation, like being cross-examined during a murder trial.
That was one of the first things that made me think she was incredibly off-kilter …and today’s episode really made me believe that she wasn’t competently defending her clients – and I feel for her, because I bet it was in large part related to her illness and she might not have been aware. (Still extremely annoying to listen to, though.)
Yeah, sure, why not? At this stage, pretty much nothing seems too crazy to consider.
It feels a bit sometimes like this case is reality trespassing on fiction. However, it’s not your traditional whodunnit, it’s a postmodern mystery. The more you investigate, the less anything adds up. Everybody is lying, nobody can remember a damned thing, and every theory you come up with gets blown out the window in the next chapter. After a while, you don’t even know who you are or where you live anymore.
A while back, I was getting enamored with the idea that Adnan had confessed to Gutierrez, the murder scene was near the library, and this was the reason for not putting Adnan on the stand or following up on the Asia letters.
That just sounds like so much garbage now, especially after this episode. It seems that Gutierrez didn’t follow up on the Asia alibi because at this point in her career, there was a lot of things she didn’t do for a lot of her clients. She also didn’t throw the case on purpose, and there weren’t any hidden agendas. It’s just that because of her illness, she wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders anymore. She was screwing things up. Many things, in many of her cases. It is sad, and very bad luck for Adnan.
It’s funny how Adnan still only has good things to say about her. But then again, he never has a bad word to say about anyone. Not Hae, not Jay, not anyone. It’s almost getting a bit unnerving. The guy is almost too nice. I’m not sure if I want to take him home to watch movies and eat ice cream, or take two careful steps back from him, because he’s so likeable that’s it’s just a little bit creepy.
Then again, maybe he just is that nice, and always sees the good in people. I guess if he wasn’t convicted of murder, I’d simply want to hug him and squeeze him and name him George.
After Ep 10, I’m starting to believe that Jay is the ‘sociopath’ and Anand is innocent. I’m looking back to things that sounded damning when I heard them earlier, but now seem consistent with what an honestly innocent man would do and say. AND THAT IS WHAT KOENIG TOLD ME WOULD HAPPEN AND I NEVER SAW IT COMING!
Man, it really is grating. Her “sing-songy” speech pattern and the overall timbre of her voice would drive me nuts if I had to listen to it for extended periods.
I thought it was interesting that Sarah Koenig said she had reported on the lawyer’s troubles many years prior. She just kind of slipped that in there without comment.
It has been mentioned before, all the way back in the beginning of episode 1. It’s the reason why Koenig is doing this story in the first place. Rabia contacted her because of her earlier reporting on Gutierrez.
I’m caught up on Episode 10 now, and I was really surprised (and then surprised by my own surprise) when it was mentioned that Hae wasn’t necessarily killed on the same day that she disappeared. I’d accepted January 13 as the date of her death because that was the date that people kept talking about, and had kind of assumed without thinking about it carefully that this must have been confirmed by the medical examiner. I wonder how many people on the jury thought the same thing?
Had I given this any consideration I would have realized that it’s unlikely an examination of the body could have confirmed this. I don’t know much about such things except what I’ve read in mystery novels, but while there are a number of ways to estimate time and date of death based on forensic evidence I don’t think there’s anything that would be accurate to the day after a person has already been dead for several weeks.
If Hae wasn’t killed on January 13 – and while we have no evidence that she wasn’t, we really only have Jay’s word for it that she was – then that doesn’t necessarily mean Adnan is innocent. Unless Adnan has a solid alibi for those days then maybe he abducted Hae after school, hid her away somewhere, and killed her later. That would be a lot more complicated that the prosecution’s version of events, but it might have been possible.
But IIRC, the reason the police never considered Hae’s boyfriend Don a serious suspect was because (unlike Adnan) he did have a solid alibi for January 13. He was at work. I’m guessing he wasn’t at work for the next day or two because of the January 14 ice storm, though. Could Hae have been with Don at that time, either because she voluntarily snuck off to his place on January 13 or because he abducted her? That seems like the sort of thing the police should have checked up on. Perhaps they did, but if so I don’t think it’s been mentioned on the podcast.
I know we’re getting close to the end of the series, and time is getting tight, but I still feel like we might get at least a segment of one of the remaining episodes called “Okay, so who is this Don guy?” because it feels like there has been SO little information about him.
That would be nice, although I’m assuming he refused to talk to Serial since we haven’t heard from him. There’s presumably not much about him in the police record or court documents since he wasn’t a suspect or a witness.
Even ignoring the possibility of Don as an alternate killer, it would be nice to hear about Hae from her boyfriend at the time. I understand why her family wouldn’t want to get involved with this podcast, but we haven’t heard a whole lot about Hae as an individual rather than a murder victim.
Hi, I started this thread back in September, it didn’t go anywhere, and I assumed there was no interest. How wrong I was.
I have been following the series, but admittedly not always paying the closest attention, and so feel a bit swamped by all the contradictory accounts, timelines and circumstantial evidence that the series has presented. But that’s not surprising, and I’m also not shocked that there’s a lot of disagreement among the commenters (no, I didn’t read every post) as well as shifting opinions as the story unspools.
Question: Do you think the series has been fair in the way it presents information? Is focusing on one particular aspect each week (Jay’s story, the defense at Adnan’s trial, piecing together the timeline, etc.) is a good way to proceed or an artificial construct that may make for more interesting listening but doesn’t necessarily serve our greater understanding of a case where all facts are not equal and all points of view don’t deserve equal time? How would you have done it differently?
I wish there were more jokes. The guys on Reddit have been riding the Mail Chimp ad and the Crab Crib line to death and back. I think it would be healthy for them to have some more variation in their meme diet.
You SAY you started the thread in September, but I have evidence that you actually started it in October!
Sorry, I don’t mean that to be snarky, I just thought it was funny given the nature of Serial that you’d make a mistake about the date.
Well, any way of presenting the information is going to involve some artificial construct. Chronological order would be difficult since we don’t know exactly what happened when – and there’d be no mystery if we did. Serial could have been modeled more on the way information is presented in court, with the case against Adnan presented in the first half of the series (or first half of each episode, I guess) and the case for him presented in the second half…but that’s a totally artificial construct too and would have required or at least encouraged Koenig to ignore evidence that didn’t strongly point to Adnan’s guilt or innocence.
A more trial-like format wouldn’t have left much room to address the problems with Adnan’s actual trial, either. I think Serial had been fair about acknowledging that there are two big questions here, and that they might have different answers: whether Adnan is actually guilty of Hae’s murder and whether he should have been convicted of this murder. At this point it seems clear that there were some major problems with Gutierrez’s defense of Adnan, but that’s not proof that he’s innocent. It’s just evidence that he might have been found “not guilty” if he’d had a better lawyer.
