Yahoo Lifestyle The Case That Captivated The World: Uncovering The Deadly Truth About Serial
Hae Min Lee and friends.
On the afternoon of January 13, 1999, as she did many days during the winter sports season, Hae Min Lee, 18, should have been keeping score at a wrestling match at Baltimore County’s Woodlawn High School in Maryland, USA. Instead, after telling a friend she had to pick her young relative from daycare, the tall, vibrant teen bought some hot chips and an apple juice from a food stand outside the gymnasium, jumped in her grey Nissan and drove away.
She was never seen alive again.
Four weeks later, a man who’d surreptitiously drunk a large bottle of Budweiser during his lunch break wandered into Leakin Park, a heavily wooded reserve on the City of Baltimore’s fringe, to relieve himself. There, in the scraggly bush, he made a chilling discovery: poking through the dirt near his feet was a thatch of jet-black hair. And what looked like a foot. He had stumbled upon a shallow grave. In it was the body of Hae Min Lee.
To hardened Baltimore detectives, it seemed like a straightforward case of domestic violence: the victim was a girl with an apparently jealous ex-boyfriend – and, importantly, they had an eyewitness to the burial. Based largely on the testimony of an acquaintance who told investigators he had helped dig the shallow grave, Hae’s former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, then 17, was convicted of murdering the popular student and dispatched to prison for the rest of his life. In a city with one of the highest murder rates in the US, the crime didn’t even rate a mention outside of the Baltimore-area media.
Sixteen years on, Hae’s murder has the world captivated. Serial, a gripping 12-part podcast which meticulously re-examined the case, has been downloaded 40 million times. An enthralled global audience followed along as, week by week, producers and researchers revealed the shocking new facts they had unearthed about the case. As millions listened and obsessively followed the case, they waited to find out, had an innocent boy been wrongly convicted and sent to jail?
The forest where Hae Min Lee's body was found
From family to teachers, it was apparent to everyone that the smart, industrious Hae had a bright future. The daughter of South Korean immigrants, she played hockey and lacrosse and worked part-time at LensCrafters, an optical store. Until the December before her death, she had dated a classmate called Adnan Syed, the smart and charismatic son of Pakistani immigrants. He was a runner who played high-school football, worked as a paramedic and volunteered at the local mosque.
The two began dating when Adnan asked Hae to a school dance in 1998. Their relationship blossomed over the following months, against the wishes of Adnan’s devoutly Muslim mother, Shamim Rahman. For religious reasons, she believed Adnan and her two other sons should refrain from dating, and should marry upstanding Muslim women when they were of proper age.It was a difficult edict for a teenage boy living in the US to adhere to. By December of that year, the strain had become too much and Hae and Adnan finally ended their romance. Within a month, Hae began dating a co-worker from LensCrafters.
How Adnan handled the break-up is crucial to the case against him. While prosecutors say he simmered after the split, many of his friends say he moved on like any normal teen. “He seemed like the same person even after they broke up,” says childhood and high school friend Saadi Patel, now 33, who testified as a character witness for Adnan during his trial. “He was the same person.”
But an acquaintance of Adnan’s named Jay Wilds would testify that Adnan had told him Hae was heartless, that she had said she didn’t love him, and that he was going to kill her. Wilds, then 19, said he couldn’t tell at the time if Adnan was serious.
According to Wilds, on January 13, 1999, Adnan told him that he was going to make good on his threat. He said he was going to ask Hae for a ride after school because his car had broken down. Once inside the car, he would hatch his plot to kill her. Adnan would call his friend later that afternoon so Wilds could pick him up.
At about 3:35pm, prosecutors claim Adnan did just that, telling Wilds to collect him. When Wilds arrived, Adnan popped open the boot of Hae’s car and showed him her strangled body. Later that day, Wilds told investigators, after aimlessly driving around and smoking pot together, he and Adnan would finally bury Hae’s body at the secluded spot in Leakin Park.
Three days after Hae’s body was found, police got a tip from an anonymous caller to investigate Adnan as the culprit. Baltimore Police homicide detectives subpoenaed Adnan’s mobile phone records, which led them to Wilds. He disclosed his involvement and took the police to Hae’s car. Though there was no physical evidence or an eyewitness linking Adnan to the murder, based on Wilds’s testimony and mobile phone records, jurors convicted the promising – and apparently unfailingly polite – student in about two hours. He was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years.
Woodlawn High School where Hae Min Lee and Adnan Sayed attended.
With their son in prison and support from the Muslim community that had backed the family during the trial drifting away, Adnan’s parents were bereft. His mother would steal into her son’s room to smell his clothes. Unable to work, his father Syed Rahman retired. He, too, would sit in Adnan’s room for hours, or pray at the mosque. He believed his son was innocent, but felt powerless. “It’s worse than death,” he tells marie claire.
He wasn’t the only one struggling to make sense of Adnan’s guilty verdict. Rabia Chaudry, a family friend and now an immigration lawyer, was in her first year of law school when Adnan was arrested, and was with the family after his conviction. She knew Adnan as “an extremely sweet, selfless person”, she tells marie claire.
Several aspects of Adnan’s legal representation troubled Chaudry. For a start, she couldn’t believe that it took his lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, just two and a half days to mount her defence when the prosecution had taken weeks to present their case. And when the son in whom they held so much hope was found guilty, there was no consolation for Adnan’s parents from Gutierrez, Chaudry comments – just a curt request for $60,000 to file an appeal.
Just hours after the trial ended, Chaudry visited Adnan in a holding cell at the courthouse. She told him that the case had centered on the 30 to 40 minutes after school. “Where were you?” she asked her friend. He told her he couldn’t remember, but he mentioned – by chance, it seems – that he knew for sure he was around the school at the time because one of his classmates had written him a letter to say that she’d seen him there. Chaudry was shocked. What letter? What classmate?
While Adnan was being held in jail after his arrest, a classmate named Asia McClain had written him two letters, saying she didn’t think he could have killed Hae because she had seen Adnan in the library at the time prosecutors allege the murder was taking place. Chaudry found McClain and had her write a statement. She then found a local notary who notarised the affidavit. McClain told Chaudry that no-one from the defence had ever contacted her.
Why Gutierrez never contacted McClain was one of many questions that baffled Chaudry: such as, why didn’t Gutierrez talk to a friend of Wilds’s who had told investigators that he’d seen Hae’s body, too? Why wasn’t any physical evidence tested from Hae’s fingernails or body? Why wasn’t Wilds the focus of the prosecution when his story had changed multiple times?
Less than two years after Adnan’s conviction, Gutierrez was disbarred after money from a trust fund for her clients went missing. She died in 2004.
Over the next several years, Chaudry obtained boxes of testimony and gathered evidence. She repeatedly told Adnan the case needed media attention, but Adnan demurred. He didn’t want to further embarrass or hurt his parents by having his love-life dragged into the public eye. In January of 2014, when a judge declined to consider the emergence of an alibi witness as cause for a new trial, Chaudry decided to take it upon herself to garner media interest.
As a Baltimore Sun staff writer, Sarah Koenig had written about Gutierrez’s disbarment in 2001. When Choudry emailed her in mid-2013, Koenig, then working at the nationally syndicated This American Life radio show, was curious. Describing the crime as a “Shakespearian mash-up,” for more than a year Koenig pored over court transcripts, listened to old interviews, and spoke to everyone detectives had – and should have – interviewed. She examined the spot where Hae’s body was found, and left no minute detail unchecked. She and her producers meticulously reconstructed phone records and put them into a timeline and map that showed exactly what mobile phone towers the calls pinged off of to estimate where they took place.
She learnt things that seemed to prove that Adnan was either innocent or probably shouldn’t have been convicted: McClain told her that she was sure she saw Adnan on the day in question; no-one ever reported seeing Adnan angry at Hae after their break-up, and no-one besides Wild had ever alleged he wanted to harm her; physical evidence around Hae’s body wasn’t tested.
But Koenig also learnt things that seemed to prove that Adnan probably should stay in prison: he bought a mobile phone two days before Hae disappeared; he called her three times the day before she vanished, and was overheard asking
Hae for a ride after school on the day that she disappeared; a mobile phone record and a witness corroborated Wild’s story that Adnan had been with Wild in the hours after investigators believe the murder occurred.
“It’s difficult for me to find out or uncover one single piece of information that shows whether I did do it or didn’t do it,” Adnan admits in a prison interview before Serial was released. “Absent of [Wilds’s] testimony there is no one thing that proved that I did do it.”
Not even Adnan has theory about who killed Hae. “Honestly, I have no idea,” he said. “Really, I have no idea.”
Craft objects made by Adnan in prison displayed at the home of his brother.
Serial debuted last October and soon an audience of millions of spellbound listeners was tuning in weekly. “The response has gobsmacked us,” Koenig told NYMag.com. But as it became a worldwide phenomenon, reaction poured in – not all
of it appreciative. “To me it’s real life,” a man believed to be Hae’s little brother, Young Lee, posted on Reddit. “To you listeners, it’s another murder mystery, crime drama, another episode of CSI. You weren’t there to see your mom crying every night, having a heart attack when she got the news that the body was found.”
Chaudry, on the other hand, is thrilled with the publicity Serial has finally given Adnan’s case. She has started a fund which so far has raised nearly $85,000 to help with his appeal. A Change.org petition calling for “A Fair Trial for Adnan” has collected more than 28,390 signatures. It urged Maryland courts to reopen proceedings.
In early February, this wish came true. A Maryland court approved Adnan’s application for appeal. Judges could hear oral arguments in June and new evidence could be heard, such as McClain’s affidavit about Adnan’s whereabouts on
the day of the killing.
There have been other significant developments in the case since the last episode of Serial aired on December 18. In January, The Intercept, an online news publication, posted an exclusive three-part interview with Wilds, where he did not waver from his belief that Adnan killed Hae, but provided yet another timeline that differed from the accounts prosecutors used to convict Adnan. Yet another puzzling discrepancy that adds to the case’s murkiness, which Adnan’s supporters say can only be cleared up with a new trial.
This newfound hope has lifted the mood in Adnan’s family’s small two-storey home. His younger brother Yusuf reveals Serial has made them feel less like pariahs, and has garnered some empathy for them. “It showed people ... how we truly felt,” he says of the podcast.
Ironically, one person who didn’t listen to Serial or the stir it created is Adnan. He spends his days working in the kitchen at the Western Correctional Institute in Cumberland, two hours from home – unable to listen to the series that explores why he’s there, because his prison does not allow it.
Justin George is a staff writer for the Baltimore Sun
RELATED:
Should Child Killers Be Locked Up For Life?
Rosie Batty Speaks Out About Her History Of Domestic Violence
