Don’t you think though that if that were their aim here, they would have reconciled Jay’s story off the record?
What are you basing this on?
Because those loose ends often invite more baseless speculation that can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. Just like we have in this case. There are people speculating any tangentially related person is responsible based on no evidence.
Just think about almost any exhaustively investigated case, and you have conspiracy theories abound. Whether it’s Obama’s birth certificate, The JFK assassination, 9/11, the moon landing, etc. The 9/11 truthers often insist the buildings were blown up despite us having video evidence of planes hitting the buildings. More evidence often doesn’t give more clarity. Chasing down every lead almost always leads to dead ends which some will claim are not really dead ends. Yes, there needs to be some due diligence, but more evidence is not always better.
Yes, but the police are “fact checked” by the DA, and ultimately by a jury. The innocence project doesn’t have to answer for their mistakes.
We don’t KNOW that. There is no evidence that Jay cheated on Stephanie or that Hae knew and threatened to expose him. That is baseless speculation. Even if that were true, Hae would probably tell Stephanie directly rather than confronting Jay. Additionally, Hae would have no reason to meet Jay after school.
So you think Adnan helped move the car, but wouldn’t rat Jay out? What sense does that make? Or you presume, WITH ZERO EVIDENCE, that Jenn is lying about a murder now too?
the wording of your question is confusing, but if you are asking what I think you’re asking, then, yes, I believe that one of the specific purposes of an unrecorded “pre-interview” is to make sure that the interviewee says what the cops want him to say, including any memories they want to plant or manipulate, or help him construct an entirely false story.
However, the early recorded Jay interviews when his story was changing were at a time when Adnan was not a target of their investigation, and, indeed, Jay had made himself a suspect.
They just hadn’t gotten to the point of “setting up” their best interview yet.
He may well be guilty of the murder and still have been genuinely surprised by this. At this point, if anything has been made clear to us, it is that the timeline has some problems. I still think Adnan most likely did it, but I also don’t believe that he actually did it at Best Buy in those 21 minutes. So, yeah, he may actually have believed it to have been impossible to pull off in the way Jay and the prosecution were saying, because he knows how the murder actually went down. I don’t think we’ve heard anything close to the real story of the details of the day.
Interestingly, the latest episode gave us yet another early version of Jay’s narrative, where the murder was supposed to have happened in the library parking lot, not at Best Buy. I’m not sure if that’s a realistic scenario, as I imagine that there would have been a lot of people around the library and the school during that time. In some ways it would make more sense, though. For one thing, the meeting with Asia would no longer be an alibi.
Indeed. Though then one wonders why the pushing of the “Best Buy” murder narrative? Obviously they were around the Best Buy, as that is what Adnan’s cell phone was pinging off of (and of course, when Jay talks about their long and winding drive to the State Park, Adnan’s cell phone was still pinging off the cell phone tower close to Best Buy… part of the big inconsistency in Jay’s story). If the murder is done at the library, even with everyone there, or even if not there, Jay sees it at the place he was at… why go to Best Buy? I mean it isn’t like they sell shovels there.
I think many people are overlooking how close Adnan was to Stephanie - Jay’s girlfriend. To me this is motive, there is also motive with the fact that Hae might have been going to tell Stephanie about Jay’s cheating.
What really seems nuts to me is that on the testimony of one person who changed his story and NO physical evidence, a person is convicted. That is scary.
I don’t know. Maybe they don’t need a particular reason to go there. It could be that they were just were driving around, probably panicked since one or both of them just killed a girl, and happened to end up at Best Buy. Or they went there to move the body.
Possible scenario: Adnan and Jay both kill Hae together, at the library. It’s easier for two guys to hold down and strangle someone, quickly and quietly, than for one guy alone. Somehow they’re not noticed. Adnan, panicked but hiding it, walks around, bumps into Asia. Jay waits in the car. They decide that they need to move the body, which is in the back seat and probably covered by a jacket or similar, to the trunk. They’re worried about being seen, so they drive to Best Buy, which is more secluded. Jay is in Adnan’s car, Adnad is in Hae’s car with her body in it. They move the body in the secluded part of the parking lot. Now there’s no need to fit in the “come get me” call on the timeline, and the Asia alibi is no longer an alibi. It also explains why Jay is concerned about cameras at Best Buy at first, since he was there with Adnan moving the body. He still doesn’t want to mention the library parking lot, obviously, since it’s the actual murder scene and he doesn’t want anyone who might have seen him there to have a light bulb moment. So he sticks with Best Buy in his story, to keep himself out of it as much as possible.
I guess you could come up with a slightly modified version that doesn’t include Jay at the scene of the murder, if you want. I’m still fine with Adnan doing it by himself.
Someone on Reddit speculated that the reason why Adnan’s lawyer didn’t want him to testify, and why she didn’t bring up the Asia letters, is that Adnan had actually confessed to her that the he was guilty, and that it happened at the library. She didn’t put him on the stand because she didn’t want to ask him to lie, and she didn’t bring up Asia, because her letters place him at the actual murder scene. I don’t know how much sense that makes, though.
Problem with the murder happening at the library: I’ve seen those Woodlawn guided tour videos on YouTube. That library parking lot so totally does not look like a place where you could just commit a murder and not being seen by about a thousand witnesses, especially right after school lets out. So this scenario is probably just complete bollocks.
If this is true, the one possible scenario is that Adnan did it, at the library, and he told his lawyer the truth about it.
That would explain both why the lawyer didn’t contact Asia (because her “alibi” actually put him at the scene of the crime) and why Adnan didn’t take the stand in his defense (because an ethical lawyer would not put her client on the stand if she believed he was going to lie).
A perfect lawyer would probably have gone back to Asia after the police constructed a narrative where the murder took place at Best Buy, but it’s a totally human mistake to mentally file her testimony as “not helpful” because it puts her client at the site of the murder and then not revisit that conclusion even when it becomes helpful to disprove the incorrect narrative from the police.
I remember Sarah Koenig’s comment from the very first episode, when she’s talking about the Asia alibi: “Library equals innocent. It’s so maddeningly simple.” Um, yeah, maybe not so much.
Sometimes when listening to the podcast, I’ve though that Koenig has come across as weirdly naive and trusting of Adnan. However, now I’m thinking that it could all be an act, a persona she puts on. Because, of course, there are two Sarah Koenigs in that clip: There’s the reporter with a crush on Adnan who thinks it’s all “maddeningly simple”, and then there’s the creator of the podcast who edits all this together, who has been working on the story for months, and who knows damned well that it’s anything but.
Best Buy may be MORE secluded that the library, but it definitely isn’t a very secluded place in general, even in the corner parking lot area. There are probably a million more places that are more secluded. Heck, the state park drive makes more sense if they wanted to transfer the body to the trunk.
Of course, the library as murder scene version could just be a red herring. By my count, there are more red herrings on this podcast so far than at a herring sale at the Crab Crib.
My question was, if the cops intended to massage Jay’s story, why would they get him on the record telling conflicting stories? Even if they slowly reached that point, why would they document his earlier different stories?
This is incorrect. Adnan was always the target as far as the police questioning Jay. The only reason they contacted him and Jenn was because they were called from Adnan’s phone.
But why keep all the “rough drafts” if they knowingly are setting up a better interview.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE JAY WAS CHEATING ON STEPHANIE. And even if he was there is not evidence Hae knew, that she was gonna tell Stephanie, or that Jay knew she was gonna tell on him.
How so? How many rape, assault, and robbery cases are based on the victim’s word? If I walked up to you on the street and punched you in the face, would you think your own testimony was insufficient to convict me?
There’s another thing I’ve been thinking about: I may have been listening to the podcast so many times that I’m starting to see patterns in clouds, but there’s something about the things Adnan says. The specificity of what he’s denying. I don’t think I’ve heard him say, plain and simple, “I didn’t kill her”. He says “I had no reason to kill her.” He says Jay’s story isn’t true. He says that it would be impossible to commit the crime in the way the prosecution claims. “Look at what they’re saying. They’re saying it’s not a crime of passion. Not that me and Hae got in a fight, and boom, this happened. They’re saying I plotted and planned.” “You don’t know me, Koenig. I want to shoot myself when I hear someone say that ‘you’re a nice guy’. I’d rather have someone say, Adnan, you’re a crazy bastard, and you should stay in there for the rest of your life, but I looked at your case, and something’s not right. Something’s a bit off.”
It’s almost like someone trying to get off on a technicality. Like he’s saying: “I’m not guilty of the murder I was convicted of”, rather than “I’m not guilty of murder”. More like “it didn’t happen like that”, instead of “it didn’t happen at all”.
It’s almost like truth is leaking out in places. I don’t know, though. I’m probably just imagining things.
I agree, but the thing about this point is that it is small excerpts from a very extended conversation, where the journalist is picking what she plays. It’s highly plausible that he has said it many times, but she hasn’t included those parts.
Also there was one time where he talked about that he wished that people could look inside his head somehow to see that he was innocent.
Have you tried playing werewolf or The Resistance, or a game like that? I think those games are were similar in nature to what’s going on here. And one thing that in my experience is that in those games you can’t judge people’s werewolf-ness by their repeatedly stating that they are villagers. In my experience, sometimes werewolves do this, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes villagers do that, sometimes they don’t. It’s just not a good tell in that game. (Of course the stakes in the serial podcast are slightly higher. )
Early witness interviews aren’t necessarily the same sort of animal as the later interviews that are used to construct final evidence. They’re not necessarily treated like “rough drafts.”
And just because misbehavior isn’t accomplished with perfect precision doesn’t mean that it isn’t misbehavior.
There are things such as chains of evidence. It’s not always possible to make evidence disappear easily after it has been created, especially if someone else already knows about it.
And it is always possible that the cops have enough experience to know that a few faltering recordings aren’t necessarily enough to sink the final set-up.
None of this has anything to do with whether that’s actually what happened in this case. It’s just clear to me that the unrecorded interviews were unrecorded because the cops were helping Jay get his final story straight. Whether that final story was falsely constructed is a different issue, but the suspicion that this missing time creates is a reason that we shouldn’t allow it.
One tiny detail question I would really like to know the answer to is about Nisha’s phone. We’ve heard that her phone (land line) didn’t have an answering machine or voice mail, but did it have call waiting? If someone in her house picked up call waiting, and it was a butt dial, they would have flipped back to the other call and the open call could have gone on for … I don’t know, a while? I remember it was possible to get stuck on call waiting for a considerable time.
This whole story has been an exercise in remembering back to the early cell phone era, too. NOW my cell phone has a smart feature that will disconnect after some amount of time of not detecting any voices on the call, but I’m pretty sure my cell phone in 1999 wouldn’t have done that.
I was talking about this yesterday with a coworker (who I hooked on Serial), and he brought up again the fact that Adnan didn’t take the stand. While we were discussing that, I thought, “Wouldn’t Adnan have been interviewed by the police at some point, the same way Jay was? Where are those tapes?”
It’s possible that he was arrested, and exercised his right to remain silent, but I feel like there should be something from him from 15 years ago.
I think you are imagining those things, or (more likely) being subtly misled by the producers of Serial, who of course want to emphasize mystery and doubt because that makes their story compelling. The quotes you’ve mentioned are all in response to specific lines of inquiry in the episode. He says “I had no reason to kill her” when the podcast is talking about motive. He says “it couldn’t be done in the time provided” in the episode about the timeline, and so on.
Here’s Sarah Koenig in episode 1
Now, that’s not a direct quote from Adnan, but it’s not at all equivocal.
What would it even mean if Adnan were somehow choosing his words so carefully that he never actually makes a specific claim against being the murderer? He’s somehow a vicious cold-blooded killer and sociopath, but he has such an aversion to making direct misstatements that all he’ll do is mislead you rather than tell an outright direct lie? That doesn’t really make any kind of sense.
So the latest update on the Asia alibi is that she might have the wrong day. Or at least she’s not remembering the weather correctly.
[QUOTE=The Serial website]
We looked up the weather for Wednesday, Jan. 13 and Thursday, Jan. 14, 1999. The Baltimore area certainly got hit by a big ice storm beginning in the early morning of Jan. 14. The storm left the area without power for a few days and closed Baltimore County schools on both Jan. 14 and Jan. 15.
[…]
But no snow.
So it seems unlikely Asia would have been stuck at her boyfriend’s house on the evening of Jan. 13, because the ice storm didn’t start until 4:30 on the morning of Jan. 14.
[…]
Considering that in just one week there were three school days cancelled due to weather, it seems possible Asia conflated these two weather events. But if her memory of talking to Adnan in the library is specifically tied to snow, then it’s unlikely that the day she is remembering is Jan. 13.
[/QUOTE]
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