Did he do it? That’s the question posed in “Serial,” the wildly popular podcast spun off from “This American Life.” “Serial” does to its listeners what crime shows do to viewers, only it delves even deeper into our psyche because well, it’s true. In the podcast, journalist Sarah Koenig leads listeners through the incontestable facts and contradicting accounts concerning a gruesome 1999 murder. The story surrounds the death of beloved high school student Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed.
Syed, now 34, has served 15 years of his life sentence in prison. Lee’s body was discovered buried in a shallow grave in a Baltimore park 27 days after her disappearance on Feb. 9, 1999; someone had strangled her with his or her bare hands.
It all seems pretty straight-forward, right? It was the ex-boyfriend! It’s always the ex! He seemed to have a motive: Lee had ended things with him just a month prior and was already getting fairly serious with another man. In other words, Syed was jealous and jilted, and if he couldn’t have her, nobody could.
There’s even a key witness, Jay, an acquaintance of the victim and drug dealer to the accused, who testified that Syed killed Lee in a rage over the demise of their relationship. Jay told police that he helped Syed dispose of Lee’s body and was even able to tell police where Lee’s missing car was located.
But not so fast—Jay’s story to police was littered with inconsistencies and several revisions. Furthermore, the motive he attributed to Syed—the jealous ex—is both obvious and hollow. And it gets better. There’s another witness who remembers seeing and talking to Syed at the public library at the exact time the prosecution placed him in the parking lot of a Best Buy strangling his ex-girlfriend. The prosecution didn’t have any substantial physical evidence against Syed, aside from some fingerprints found in Lee’s car, which he rode in frequently even well after their breakup.
Perhaps the most convincing consideration of Syed’s innocence are the phone conversations included in the podcast between Syed and Koenig from a Western Maryland State prison. After all this time, Syed maintains his innocence, even as it would be more beneficial for him not to.
Their conversations reveal Syed to be a compassionate, sincere, well-adjusted man, certainly not a monster capable of such a gruesome act as strangling someone with his bare hands. Like all his friends and family testified, the “man [they] knew could never have done this.”
The case against Syed is unsubstantiated at best, and what’s more, as in all great crime dramas, there are plenty of curveballs. For one, the man who found Lee’s body is a convicted sex offender who told police he just happened to find her well-hidden corpse in Leakin Park on a pit stop on his way to work. And what about Lee’s boyfriend, Don? Records show he was clocked in at work, at the Lens Crafters owned by his mother. What about Jay? Could Jay have been jealous of Syed’s popularity and success? So jealous that he wanted to destroy Syed’s “golden boy” reputation and ruin his life forever? Or, is it possible Syed was actually a sociopath, capable of manipulating everyone around him into believing the cold, calculating killer in front of them was nothing but innocent?
“Serial” is, above all, an excellent piece of journalism that engages listeners and inspires them to solve the crime right alongside Koenig, letting them dissect the facts and varying narratives and decide for themselves: Is Adnan innocent? And if he is, who did it?
Pios who want to join the investigation can listen to all twelve episodes of “Serial” free on iTunes.
