Previously on Serial from the American Life & WB Easy Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week, I'm Sarah Canig. The cops who investigated the murder of Hamin Lee were both experienced Baltimore city detectives. Their names were Ritz and McGillivary, Bill Ritz and Greg McGillivary, and how I wish right now that I could play you tape of their perspective on this case, but they didn't want to be interviewed. When Bill Ritz finally turned me down after
six weeks of back and forth, he said he didn't see the point. The case has been adjudicated, he said. What good would it do? I also spoke on the phone briefly to McGillivary, and he said just a few sentences to me, and one of them was, beyond question, he did it. Meaning a non-diddit. He didn't ham or ha or hesitate. You remember the case right away. Beyond question, he did it. How did they arrive at that level of certainty?
Before his body was found, this was a missing person case. She disappeared January 13th, and the investigation starts out a little slowly, which makes sense to me. She's not a small child. She's 18. She's got a car, which is also missing. That first day, the police call around to her friends. They talked to Aisha to a nun. I remember that's when he tells them he's supposed to get a ride from her, but didn't. The next day, they call around to hospitals, hotels,
motels. They check the area around the high school parking lot where she was last seen. You can see from their reports that they immediately hone in on the most time-worn explanation for such disappearances. The boyfriends, current and former. That first day, they call Don, her new guy. They check the area around his house, which is in another county northeast of Baltimore. Over the next two weeks, they keep going back to Don, and to Adnan, asking more questions.
They checked Don's alibi. He was indeed at work at the Lens Crafters store the day he went missing. His manager tells them. And they talked to Adnan's track coach to check Adnan's alibi. And it's inconclusive. The coach tells them he can't be sure at non-practice that day. They don't take attendance. On February 6th, they do that awful foreboding thing you see on TV sometimes. They take a team of dogs to check the wooded areas and fields around Woodland High School. They use
Hayes Curling Iron for a cent. On February 8th, they make a report saying they're going to check Hayes Computer, her AOL account for clues. And then, on February 9th, their search stops. And a new suspect emerges. Testing 1, 2, 3. Testing 1, 2, 3. This is tape from a police interview of the man who finds Hay. He's a little hard to hear on the tape. He's soft-spoken. I'm going to call this man Mr. S. I don't want to use his full name.
For reasons, I promise we'll become clear. Mr. S works in the maintenance department at a local school. I think I may discover that in Lincoln Park. I think I may have discovered a body in Lincoln Park, he says. Before I get to the slightly off-kilter story about how Mr. S discovered this body, just a word here about Lincoln Park. It's actually spelled Lincoln Park, L-E-A-K-I-N, but almost everyone in Baltimore pronounces it Lincoln Park. It's huge over a thousand acres on the western
edge of Baltimore City. It's got a reputation and not for the beauty of its woods or its trails or its nature center. What it's known for, sadly, is dead bodies. Mentioned Lincoln Park to people from Baltimore, as I often did, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get a comment like this. Well, you're digging in Lincoln Park to bury your body, you're going to find somebody else's. That's Lincoln Park. When I told the rental car guy in West Baltimore, I was working on a story
about a girl who was found in Lincoln Park. He said, oh yeah, my uncle was found dead in Lincoln Park. A macabre website dedicated to Baltimore murders lists 68 bodies found there since 1946, though the list is missing at least seven years of stat, so that number is probably low. A lot of law-abiding Baltimoreians, they don't even really know where Lincoln Park is. Robbie a childry, that family friend of a non-s who first contacted me about this case.
When she was explaining it to me, she said, yeah, and how is a non-s supposed to get to Lincoln Park so fast? It's like an hour into the city. Lincoln Park is nowhere near the school. Her brother, Sad, a non-s best friend, he didn't know anything about Lincoln Park either. After a non-head initially got arrested when I was on the phone with him talking like when he was locked up, I was like, Lincoln Park, I'm like, where is that? Do you even know where it is? Have
you ever been there? And he's like, I have never been there. I don't even know where it is. So I mean, living around here, we don't know, but it's somewhere in the inner city. Where Hay was found is in fact less than three miles from where Sad and Robbie are sitting right now in an office across the street from Woodland High School. It's about a seven-minute drive. They have no idea. We wouldn't go there. We'd go to the harbor somewhere nice, but yeah,
there's no reason for us to go there. I'm explaining all this just to say that the simple fact that Hay was found in Lincoln Park, for a lot of people that alone made it non-look innocent. Like, what's a nice boy like you doing in a park like this? And now walk around, do the bushes and everything. So now, Mr. S, he also told the cops he'd never been to that part of Lincoln Park before, though he did seem to know that people go fishing back there.
Here's what he told the cops. At his job, he'd gotten a work order to shave down a door, but the school didn't have the tool he needed, a plane. He had one at home, though. So during his lunch hour, he said he drove his truck home, got the plane from his basement, and before he left, grabs some sustenance out of the fridge. So he's drinking this 22-ounce bud wiser, and he's heading back to work, and his route to the college is through Lincoln Park, and suddenly he has to pee badly, he says.
He stops on Franklin Town Road. He's about three miles from work. There's a small pull-off and some concrete barriers, and he walks back in there. Quite a ways it seems like for a guy who just has to pee. Later, they'd measure 127 feet back into the woods as where he goes. This next tape is a little upsetting.
I got back that way. I was, you were in the evening, I looked down, I seen something look like hair, something that's covered in kind of dirt, and I looked good again, and it's not a thing you know, but it looked like a foot. What drew your attention to the area that you went to? There was something there. It was an open area, but there was also a fallen tree. Is that correct? Yes it was. Did you go to that area for a certain reason? No. No? Yeah. All right.
They're suspicious of Mr. S, who by this time has become a suspect in the case. This tape was made on February 18, nine days after Mr. S reported finding the body. They're going over the details carefully, because there are parts of his story that are a little weird. One of them is this thing about the fallen tree. 127 feet back into the woods, there was a fallen tree, essentially a 40 foot log, lying more or less parallel to the road.
On the other side of the log, if you'd kept going, you'd have gotten to a stream with the unfortunate name of Dead Run. Hay's body was buried right behind this log on the stream side. If you were standing on the street side of the log, so on the other side, it's not at all obvious that you'd notice her. So his story about why he stopped where he stopped. It doesn't quite seem right. Here's Bill Ritz.
When you're walking back to this area where you finally stop, why did you pick that particular area? Well, I just asked that thing to pick it out. I was going to go back further, I said, well, that's when I seen the hair, that's going to go up. I left that one. You said you were going to actually go back further? Yes. In this part of the tape, you get a sense of how Ritz and McGillivary operate together, or at least what I've gathered for listening to a bunch of these interviews.
McGillivary starts out, all non-judgmental. Just tell me your story. Then Ritz comes in and says something like, just help me understand here and asks some harder questions, exposing weaknesses in the narrative. Then McGillivary will come back in, but now it's a tough one for McGillivary. And he's asking direct, sometimes harsh questions that seem like they'd be good at pushing someone off balance. Like this one, sort of out of the blue.
Back to the fallen tree. Here Ritz is saying, wait, I thought you told McGillivary you stopped at the log to pee. But now you're saying you were on your way farther back? Stop there, say before that you're getting ready to urinate. And then that's when you look in and discovered the hair. Now you're saying you're running actually go back further? Oh, I'm glad it's not there. Before you discovered. Maybe I'm a little bit confused. As you're standing on the south side of
the tree between a tree and the right... This doesn't ever get cleared up really. And they sort of let it go. But a bunch of things are fishy. The path he takes back into the woods, it doesn't really lead to the log. So what does he end up there? He didn't need to head toward the log to find a hidden spot to pee. There are so many other choices. And if you're walking through brush and brambles, when you sort of naturally avoid a big log, you need to step over. What they're trying to
get at is, did you really just stumble on this body? Or were you looking for this body? Because you already knew where it was. That is a reasonable question. Because Hayes' body wasn't just hard to spot. It was nearly impossible to spot. All right, we're in the state's attorney's office. We just got delivered the first box of what they're saying is disclosable under whatever public information act that I did. I didn't understand how camouflage the body was until I saw photos of the crime scene,
the way Mr. S found it, before they removed the body. I was in the state's attorney's office in Baltimore. I went there with a crime reporter from the Baltimore Sun. His name is Justin George. I've been talking to Justin about the story, and he's interested in maybe writing about it too. We opened a packet of photos together. Some of them were awful to see, as you'd imagine. There was one where you could make out a bit of black hair amid dirt and leaves. How did he notice that?
I don't know if you notice the body. I don't understand that either. I mean, it's pretty well covered. Yeah, there's barely anything showing. Wait, are we supposed to be looking at something there? What is that? Yeah. Is that her? That's her. That's all he saw? Yeah, that looks to be part of the body. Yeah, I expected it to be more visible than it is.
Justin and I weren't the only ones who had this reaction. The city's surveyor, a guy named Philip Buttermeyer, went out to the burial site to measure the distance from the road. This is before they disinterred her. Here's Buttermeyer testifying a trial. When I arrived at the site where the body was, there was a log on the ground, approximately 40 feet long. Okay, I stepped over the log, I walked along the edge of the log,
expecting to find a body real soon. I never saw one. At which time, had I taken one more step, I would have walked on the grave site where the body was. At that point, there were others on the scene. Yes, man, there was a lot of people there. At someone who pointed out to you the exact location. Yes, man, Detective pointed to the site. I looked down at the ground and I said, well, I don't see any body. It wasn't a freshly destroyed. It was not freshly destroyed.
Yeah, it just blended in with the natural surroundings of the ground. So here's a guy who's looking for the body, who knows where it's supposed to be, who can see that there are a bunch of people standing around it, and still he can't find it. So does it seem reasonable that Mr. S, who apparently wasn't looking for anything except a secluded place to pee, would have discovered it just like that? The other thing that's a little odd is this business of having to pee.
The spot where Mr. S stops is only a few miles from his house, and only a few more miles from his work. Yet he can't wait. Here's Detective Ritz questioning Mr. S again. While you were at home, you'd have to urinate or use bathroom at all. You know, I didn't feel like I had to go at the time. So within seven or eight minutes, how much of the 22-hours beer had you consumed? I think it was almost empty. It was almost empty. In that seven, eight-minute period you had to go to the bathroom.
It was an urgent need. Yes, yes, he was. Yet Mr. S says he never actually does pee in the woods. He says he ends up waiting until he gets to work. Which, okay, maybe that makes sense. You've had a shock. But why would you walk so far in in the first place? These just try and have a quick pee. And why was he studying the ground? Ritz asks him about this. You got out of your vehicle and bent your back into the woods. When we were at the remeasured, it was actually 127 feet off the roadway.
As you're walking along, why are you looking down the ground? Are you looking every step that you take? Yes, it's not a step. So you went solo? Oh, okay. 10, 11, 12. On a freezing day back in February of this year, we went out to Leakin Park. We wanted to know whether it was strange that he'd gone so far back into the woods. Like, what did 127 feet from the road look like?
My producer Dana was with me, and so was Justin George from Baltimore Sun. Right at the place where Mr. S had entered the woods, right at the road, just to notice a sign. What's that? You should look at it. I mean, the sign says a lot. It's at this area patrolled. Dumpers will be prosecuted. But you could barely read it. It's hard to read a sign that's covered in graffiti and pierced with seven bullet holes.
And in fact, the cops found 20 cartridge casings in right about this spot when they collected evidence in 1999. Still, I thought the park itself was quite lovely. Brambles and trees, it's rocky near the stream. It's uneven terrain. It's not hilly, but it's not flat either. It's not nearly as creepy as I imagined it. I think it is a night. At night? Yeah, I think it does get... I think it is. Very bleak. 21, 22, 23. We walked in what we figured is about 127 feet. Justin paced it out by the yard.
1, 42. We're right about there. We actually wander around for a while trying to find the right spot. Finally, I remember that we have a hand drawn map of the site from that survey or bettermire who testified. 40-foot long, 15-inch log on the ground. Once we get to the right location, it dawns on all of us. 127 feet back doesn't feel all that far if you're looking for privacy. You can still see the cars on the road from where we're standing. So if he's peeing... If he's peeing...
Yeah, I mean, at least you'd want to come this far. Huh? There's not a lot of foliage, say, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's some dead leaves or whatever. But yeah, you can totally see the cars. So actually that doesn't seem that weird to me. Suddenly, Mr. S's story seems eminently more believable. While we're in the woods, I feel Justin in on the evidence they collected here. Right near the body was a liquor bottle from which they got cellular material and never tested.
And a rope that was never tested, as far as I know. As far as I know. And then up at the road, they found a condom and a condom wrapper, but I think the condom was still rolled. Like, I don't think it was a used condom necessarily. And they found a bunch of shell casings. They found bullets and shell casings and stuff from two different guns. And they found a blockbuster video, two blockbuster video, like cases.
But by the body was, I think the only thing that it got right from the area of the body was the liquor bottle and the rope. I know, it sounds like a game of clue, except for the condom part. As for the liquor bottle, back at the taped interview with Mr. S, detectives Ritz and McGillivary want to find out if this guy could be the source of that liquor bottle. Do you drink anything else besides beer, they ask? Yeah, he says, what? Whiskey. What kind?
Windsor, Canadian, Whiskey. What denomination? Maybe half a pint. Did you ever take a bottle into the car with you also? Half a pint. Would you ever take that into car? Keep you warm. Sometimes. Keep you warm. Taking it beer in there. Yes, yes. Okay. Now Ritz comes in. We've collected evidence, he says. Kans and bottles from the crime scene. We're going to test them. He's bluffing here and they never do test. Are we going to find your DNA on one of those bottles, he asks?
Maybe through a bottle out the window when you were driving past, coming home from work? If so, you better tell us now. And it's important we know about it because what we're going to do is analyze that and come back six months or a month from now with release, you're going to say, we have evidence that you were deceptive with us, that we have DNA proof that you were there and then you say, oh, Detective Ritz, I forgot.
Because I go on fishing out there, that weekend, I told you that people go fishing out there. And yeah, you know, I told you I drank half a point and I threw a bottle with them. So it likes to take a minute and think, are any of the items not just on whiskey bottles, beer bottles, soda cans or anything like that where you may have discarded in that general area? I'm not sure. I could have, but I'm not sure. I know I do a lot about stuff.
Okay. He says, I'm not sure, could have, but I'm not positive because I know I throw a lot of bottles out the window. Ah, Ritz asks, what bottles, beer bottles, whiskey maybe? It's possible, he says. Anything else? Well, for a while, he switched to rum, what rum, dark rum, bicardy. Finally, McGillery can't stand it. He just starts listing different kinds of booze. Look, Jen. That's a very long time ago. It's five years ago. Brandy? No, no, Brandy. Cognac? Yeah. Just the western sea stuff, yeah.
Okay. Just cheap stuff, yeah. Brandy. Brandy was the answer they were looking for. The bottle they found in your hay's body was Coronet VSQ Brandy, 200 milliliters. And Mr. S, you blew right past it. Consider for a moment. If Mr. S was just trying to relieve his bladder and peace that February day, minding his own business, and then he sees this terrible sad site, and he does the right thing, tells the cops, shows them where she's buried.
Well, how horrible now that they're so suspicious of him, that they're considering that maybe he either did it or he knows who did. How terrifying for Mr. S. After all, he seems like a nice quiet guy, cooperative, doesn't appear to be a Brandy drinker. Again, I can only go by the reports and files, but my guess is, the reason the cops are holding on to Mr. S's suspect is because Mr. S has a little bit of a record, which isn't necessarily a big deal.
But, and here's a part of the story where I'm hoping you'll understand why I'm not using his name. Mr. S is a striker, and not the frat party kind, the freaky kind. He's got indecent exposure charges, cabaro phrase from a non-stiffence attorney, under circumstances that bizarre does not even begin to define. Mr. S's arrested May of 94 for running about naked in a residential neighborhood. Two years later, March of 96, he spotted wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, white sneakers, and nothing else.
The officer writes, The Southwestern District has received numerous calls for service in the past three years to this area, for the same incident, same description. The officer chases down Mr. S onto I-95. Mr. S jumps from chain link fences, the kind with razor wire at the top, ends up in the hospital. It gets worse, or better, depending on whether you enjoy police reports as much as I do. December 7th of 1998, so barely two months before Mr. S finds Hayes' body, there's this.
And around noon, during what I have to imagine is Mr. S's lunch break. A lady named Margaret is driving along, and here's the report, quote, a black male dashed out in front of my car and began shaking his body in an up and down motion. The male had on no clothes. His penis was exposed as he faced my vehicle, shaking. And this lady, Margaret, is a police officer. In uniform, she chases him, but he runs down into the
metro stop. Margaret finds his work clothes in a pile and takes them, which means, unless Mr. S has a second outfit stashed someplace, he is riding back to work in the altogether. And there's another twist to this incident. The same day he flashes Margaret, so December 7th, 98, Mr. S files his own police report. There's been a theft, he says, from his car. Someone's taken his cell phone, his money, his keys, his work clothes. But you and I, we know who has all of it. Officer Margaret.
Strieking is an avialant crime, or necessarily a sexual one. And there's no evidence that hay was sexually assaulted anyway. But you can imagine both sets of eyebrows rising on Ritz and McGillivari's faces when they see these reports. It's strange behavior. They never ask Mr. S about it on tape, but I figure he knew they knew, and they knew he knew they knew. The same day they interview him on tape, February 18th, they also give him a polygraph test,
which he fails, deception indicated as a conclusion. But the tester also said Mr. S seemed to be nervous, because apparently had an important meeting with a realtor that day, his wife is expecting him to pick her up. So the tester recommends a do-over. About a week later, they give him another polygraph, this time with different questions. For instance, do you know if that girl you found died because she
was hit with a tire iron? I guess that's a thing. This time the result is no deception indicated. He passes. And very quickly, Mr. S fades from their view. Here's what my own thoughts were when I learned about Mr. S. I didn't really think, oh maybe he did it, maybe he killed hay. But I did wonder if maybe he'd heard something about the crime, and about where she was buried. Because it did seem a tad unbelievable to me that he spotted her the
way he said he did. One thing I had was maybe one of his stepkids or a neighbor had told him about the body, because maybe they'd heard about it through other kids of school. And maybe Mr. S, just as a good Samaritan thought, someone needs to go find this girl and tell the cops. But he doesn't want to say he's heard about it beforehand, because he didn't want to get anyone else in trouble. Mr. S didn't want to talk to me. After I made several requests, he asked if I'd
please leave him alone. Fair enough. I tried every which way to figure out if he knew or anyone in his family knew a nun or Jay or any of the people Jay had told about the murder. And vice versa, whether any of them had ever heard of Mr. S. I found no connections. The closest I got was, bear with me. I found out that Mr. S's sister-in-law was a math teacher at Woodlawn back in 1999 when all this happened. So I called her. He was her student, she said, an excellent student, top of the line.
But she didn't think Mr. S knew anything about the crime before he found the body. She put her husband on the phone, Mr. S's younger half-brother. And he said, you know what's crazy? I used to live next door to the kid that did it. I was back when a nun was nine or ten. He said he used to throw the football around with him, and he always seemed like a nice kid. But again, he said he thought his brother stumbled on the body by accident. Then he paused and chuckled and said, I think he was running
through the woods, streaking. And that's how he found it. When I told him that apparently he had stopped to take a pee, he said, that's possible too. So maybe Mr. S is telling the truth. After all, why would a guy who's been in trouble, repeatedly, for indecent exposure, seek out a dead girl, thus inevitably inviting more police contact to rain down upon him. Mr. S wasn't that detectives
only lead in this case. We know they're also looking at the boyfriends. And while I don't exactly know why their suspicions about a non-start to percolate, I have an educated guess. Next week on cereal. Cereal is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas and me. Emily Connan is our production and operations manager. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor, editing help from Nancy Updike,
fact checking by Karen Fregalla Smith. Special thanks today to Natasha Lesser, Lou Teddy, Scott Calvert, and Dave Rosenthal and Andy Rosen from the Baltimore Sun. Our theme music is composed by Nick Thorburn, scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips, who also mixed our show. Our website where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case, cerealpodcast.org. Cereal is a production of this American life and WBEZ Chicago.