SERIAL-Susan Simpson

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in Lincoln Park. At trial, the prosecutor argued that although Wilds had repeatedly given false and inconsistent statements concerning the crime, his story was corroborated by Adnan's cell phone records. Said was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Wilds pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and was released without serving a day in prison. Last year, the creators of This American Life covered Syd's story in

the popular podcast serial. In order to better visualize the events that were being described on the show, attorney Susan Simpson put together a series of maps comparing the location data from the cell records with the various witness statements concerning the location of the phone throughout the day on which Haylee was murdered. The results showed just how fragmented and incoherent the prosecution's case was, as none of Wilde's multiple stories can be reconciled with the cell phone data.

It also highlighted many of the gaps in the prosecution's evidence and showed how numerous witnesses who could potentially have confirmed or denied Jay's stories were never contacted by investigators. The focus of the program This Evening is serial the Ongoing Story with my special guest, attorney and blogger Susan Simpson, and I would say welcome to the program, Susan Simpson, but there may be some technical difficulty. I apollogize to all the critics who bring it up that I should

be editing this portion of the program. I hope to God for everyone's sake. Susan comes on right away. I gotta say, sometimes it just are even problems on this end technically on blog talk radio, trying to maintain a thousand programs at one time simultaneously, I believe, or at least hundreds of programs simultaneously. So sometimes that technology goes away.

Sometimes there are other problems. But that is a problem that occurs occasionally, and so we may be having that right now for those of you have lived on another planet, I guess, but not everyone is aware of. Here we go, Thank God. Susan Simpson. Good evening, Susan Simpson. Hello, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Did the intro and I was telling the audience that we were waiting for you to connect and sometimes they're just technical difficulties.

But welcome to the program, and thank you for greening this interview. Susan Simpson.

because it is actually quite important. I mentioned in the introduction that you were an attorney, So tell us about your legal background and your blog, The View to LL two, and explain that what the name is about briefly, and tell us a little bit about you and your blog that you run well.

international law, random topics. And for the past year or so I've been carrying on a loan and as my co bogger had to step down for professional reasons, and when sale came out, I decided to start writing about that as well. Professionally, I'm both a criminal and civil litigator. My background is primarily civil, as well as one year of criminal appeals experience, and currently I'm doing white collar crime.

a real story. And basically because of my own experiences with having a friend who did something that seemed impossible for them to have done, I started listening and there's a lot I felt the show didn't cover and I wanted to explore it further.

An Adnan sayed, first, tell us about who these people are before we get to the actual murder itself, and then we'll just do sort of a brief because we can't get into the exploration that Cereal did certainly, and even that you've done on your blog. So tell us a little bit about these two characters, starting off with Hayman Lee. Who was Hayman.

he met in the neighborhood. And then approximately three four weeks later and on January thirteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Hey went missing after leaving school one day and was later Her body was later found in a park on the west side of Baltimore called Lincoln Park, buried in a shallow grave.

There's conflicting statements there. It's unclear exactly when she left, but in general it seems that somewhere between two forty five and three o'clock when she actually left campus, where she went then or what happened next, Uh, there's very little idea. Approximately three thirty through forty five, the daycare calls one of Hay's relatives and says that the cousin

still there hasn't picked up. So then Hayes's grandmother goes and picks up the girl from daycare, and about two hours later, three hours later, around six o'clock, hayes brother calls the police reporter missing. The Baltimore County Police take a statement, makes some call to Hayes's friends, including tad non, don't learn anything, don't do much then, and let it go.

She does not reappear, and initially none of her friends are concerned because there is a big ice storm that comes in the following that night, and there's no school on the fourteenth or fifteenth, and there's a holiday the Monday the next week, so it's not until Tuesday that they're back in school. And only about Wednesday, a week following her murder, that her friends start to come alarmed and it becomes clear that something seriously wrong has occurred.

On February ninth, after a search has come up empty for her, a man driving through Lincoln Park pulls over and according to him, to take a leak at the side of the road. When he does that, he finds a body, which he reports the police.

not secluded area whatsoever. They don't find well, they find assorted potential evidence of crime scene, things like spent casings, a rope, but it's unclear if any of these are connected to the crime. Her body itself is mostly covered with dirt and a few large rocks, but she's still somewhat visible, barely, which mister s the man who found her somehow saw. They do find forensically, they find some hairs that don't belong to her, and some fibers they

can't identify. But other than that, very little forensic evidence of recovered. After they recover her body the following day, she's identified your fingerprint evidence, her family's notified and an announcement is made and at that point a search begins

or the investigation begins. Initially, they did not appear to be any suspects that are high on their radar, on the cost radar, but then on February twelfth, an anonymous call was made by, according to the police notes, a young Asian male who told him to start looking at Adnanciat and said that he had been responsible for the murder and that on Non's friend Yasser could tell them

more about it. That's when the police start their investigation into Adnan's role, and essentially when the police stop investigating anyone else.

The police were skeptical about this, with good reason, because she was Despite the shallow grave, she was very well covered and it does not seem very probable that someone just passing by would have seen her, or that under the circumstances he was in the woods, he would have found her grave site. But that's the story he sticks with.

And after a second polygraph in which the person asking the question changed the questions entirely and stopped asking questions about what he knows of the murder and only asked him if he knows about how she died, he manages to pass and they write him off as a suspect. There's a lot of different speculation about how mister S

could have found the body. One theory I've heard that I tend to favor is that perhaps mister S had seen something related to the burial while driving through at some point, or had been passing by and had seen

activity in the woods. Because again, her body was not far from the from the Lincoln Park Road, and with the leaves gone for the winner, they would have been fully visible whoever was there trying to dispose of the body, So it's possible he just saw that activity and later came by to figure out what's going on and found her. Or it's possible that his story about taking a bathroom break was true too, although I'm skeptical of that.

Later on, I believe, on February first, a different Baltimore County Police officer has a fairly routine conversation with her, like he did with a lot of her friends, and he asked, well, when'd you see her? What was going on? What have you heard? And on makes a general statement

saying he left saw her at school. The cop does not ask anything about what happened later that day, what he had done, are where he'd been, and leaves it that At that point, it seems like they may have been looking more into his current boyfriend at the time of her disappearance, Dawn, but they can quickly rule out Dawn due to his He was at work that day and he has employment records showing that he was at his place of work and had not left during the

time she disappeared, so they ruled don out and then

they started to focus more heavily on ad Non. They have a second statement planned where they want to meet with him and get a longer statement set for February ninth or tenth, but when they find Hay's body, they cancel that and they don't talk to him again until I believe February twenty sixth, And at that point they're starting to heavily focus on him because on February twentieth, nineteenth, somewhere around there, the police decide to request ad on

cell phone records, and they also request the same time a list of all cell towers in the area. The facts comes back from AT and T a couple days later, and in February twenty six twenty second they realize that on the day of Hayes's appearance, ad None had two phone calls that originated on the cell phone tower that's

located just to the north of Lincoln Park. Once they see that, and then becomes their suspect full on, and they pursue leave, leading to him only and pretty much no one else from that point onwards is ever a suspect.

where he is that point onwards. He does give a few statements about where he was prior to that time, and his story is that he last saw Hay at his last period on the thirteenth, and then afterwards he hung around school, went to the library and waits for track practice, which begun about three point thirty. At three point thirty, he went to track which was over at five thirty. Well, probably should back up here. There's a third character in the story that is pretty important, and

that's Jay. Jay was a year head of Hay and Adnn. He graduated and he was dating one of Oddnan's best friends, Stephanie. Through Stephanie, Adnan and Jay had begun, in odd Non's words, uh kicking it per se, which basically meant they had a They smoked up together. They weren't close friends, but

they would go and smoke marijuana and hang out. So on the day of Hayes's appearance, Adnan and Jay had hung out during odd nuns free period around noon, and then Oddnon had gone back to class, giving his car to j because Jay had asked to borrow the car so he could go buy a present for his girlfriend. When he did so, Odnan left his cell phone in the glove compartment because the students were not allowed to

have cell phones on campus. So according to Odnon, from about noon onwards, Jay had both his car and by extension,

his cell phone. So the rest of his day in Gulf going to class, going hanging out school, going to track practice, and then when track was over, he called Jay and actid he picked up, So according to add Noan, he Jay comes back about five point thirty ish, picks them up from track, and then the two of them decided to go visit one of Jay's friends who odd nons have ever met before, where they smoke weed and hang out.

And after according to Adnan, after that, at some point he and Jay leave Kathy's and then eventually he drops off Jay somewhere he doesn't recall where, and then he goes to mosque, gets some dinner for his father was at the mosque for Ramadan, and then after mosque goes home.

Becky and Asia. And then there is the track coach who thanks He recalls sing a not at practice on a day that could have been that day, but when asked about it a couple months later, he cannot say whether the day he recalls talking to add on a warm day in January was in exactly thirteenth or not. So he does. He does have an alibi, and there are people who think they've seen him at certain times

at places where he says he was. But given that this questioning happened most cases months later, people don't know for sure. The day they're calling is the day that haydsappeared. So the prosecution claims that he was not there at all.

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about what the prosecutions. He was right from the very beginning, and that of course comes from the police. So tell us what the police thought, and then in relation, what the prosecution thought on how this went down and why, what was the motive, and at the end of this, tell us how Hayman Lee was actually killed.

he's responsible and she look at him. The police seemed to latch onto a Muslim honor killing theory, where something to do with odd Nun's religion, motive and domestic violence combined caused him to want to kill hay because she'd broken up with him when he had lied to his family to date her, and he'd not been a good Muslim to date her, and so apparently out of revenge for her making him not be a good Muslim and then breaking up with him. He kills her in a

rage the detectives. There's one line in the reports where the detectives note how they went to go speak to a Hindu that was friends with a non in order to ask about Islam and find out more about it. So you can see the level of the investigation in terms of the religious angle. Oh, how offt key they were.

his family, that he was defying by dating. But very much like Sarah Kanig did in yourself, you've looked at the evidence and he's an American, So tell us who he really was, and tell us about this theory I gain that you refute, and she refutes too, that this theory that the prosecution has on that this was based about his religion and his shame from his family and the lifestyle of the or the culture that he lived in.

think not as guilty don't really buy that anymore. And I've never heard anyone actually in today's discussion of the case actually buy into that whole theory, because it's just it's fogus. There's nothing there. He was an American, I mean, he was out smoking weed and Ramadan, that's the kind. He was a seventeen year old American kid from a Muslim background, Muslim faith and a text any background, and whatever happened that had a little or nothing to do with it whatsoever.

then here's the proof they needed. And to top it all off, there's two later calls at six eight oh four and eight oh five pm that originated on a tower fairly close to where Hay's car was later found abandoned, So well, they don't even know that at the time, So right now at the stage investigation, all they're going on are these two phone calls that just happened to

ping the tower that's near her body. The police also noticed looking at the callogue that there were an awful lot of calls made that day to a certain phone number or two phone numbers belonging to one person, Gen Pussitary. She is called far more than anyone else that day, I think seven times in all, and she's called at all times during the day, morning, afternoon, evening. His phone is calling her a lot, So the police decide they

need to talk to her. They go to her house and say, we want to talk to you about Haley's murder? Can you tell us about it? And she initially says nothing, She balks, she gets a little bit panicked and quiet. She says, yes, she knew Haley. She was a year ahead of Hay two. She was in Jay's class, but she didn't really know Hey or on Non and the police ask her to come down to the police station

later that day to talk. She agrees kind of reluctantly, but before she goes down to the police station, she gets her friend Kathy, and she goes to talk to Jay at the adult video store where he worked, and she and him have a discussion. There's different accounts of

what they talk about. But after this discussion with Jay, she then goes back down to the police station, where she gives an official but very vague statement in which she says she knows Haley, she knows, she knows Jay, she knows that Hey was killed, by strangulation, which was not officially released yet, but she doesn't want to say anything else. At the end of the short statement the police, Jin asks the police in my suspect, and the police tell her everyone as a no one is So she

goes home. The following day is February twenty seventh. Jin apparently freaks out. We don't know what happens, but she talks to her parents, tells something and they lawyer up. So that afternoon she goes back down to the police station with her mother and a lawyer and makes an official statement, and this time she acknowledges knowing more than what she said before. Her account is it's contradictory. It's a confusing mess. It's hard to say exactly what she's

saying because she doesn't in seem to know. But she gives a story about how on the thirteenth, which the police tell her is the thirteenth, They give her the phone log and remind her of what they had occurred on. She says, well, yes, it's possible Adnan was calling the house. I don't remember that. We might have been calling Jay at my house. Jay's a friend of mine. We're good buddies.

We hung out that day and Jay was over at my house with a cell phone waiting for Adnan to call, and when Oddnon called him on the cell phone, he left. And then Jen says that about four hours later, after some confusing phone tag between her and Jay on add on cell phone, she gets a request from Jay to pick him up at a nearby mall at around eight o'clock. So, according to Gen, she goes to the mall and Adnan drives up, drops off Jay, and Jay gets in her car.

Odd None seems normal, Everything's fine. According to Gen, the only conversation they have is when a Nan says hey girl, and then drives off. When Jay gets in the car, he tells her that Adnan killed Hey and Jen. According to her and I quote, she asks him all the normal questions you would ask, who, what, where, when, why? And Jay doesn't really tell her no much. He knows some things that On then tells him about what happened, but he doesn't really know where the murder occurred, other

than it was in her car. And then as they're driving away from the mall, Jay tells her turn around, go back to the mall. I have to go wipe down the shovels, so they go back. Jen never sees the shovels are shovel She's not sure how many there are. She never sees them, but she lets Jay off at a dumpster where he says he goes to wipe down some shovels for fingerprints and then gets back in the car.

Things get confusing from there. Jin has about four different versions of the next events, but they all kind of involve at various times, a trip to see J's girlfriend Stephanie, a trip to throw away Jay's close, and then finally a trip to see Kathy again that evening. So after they talk to Gin and get this story from her, they decide the next person to talk to is Jay.

So at this point, it's about eleven thirty pm on the twenty seventh, and they drive down to the adult video store and pick up Jay to get his statement. So they get back to the police station about twelve am, and they spend about forty five minutes to an hour talking off the record. We don't know what they say. We know that at some point during discussion, Jay tells them he's going to come clean, but we don't know what he comes cleaned about, because no tape recorder is

turned on until about one am. At that point, when the tape record turned on, Jay gives a statement about how essentially how Odnon asks for his help and picking Odnon up after he committed the murder of Hey, and that Jay borrowed Adnan's car and cell phone so that after Adnan killed Hay, Adnan could call Jay and asks

for a ride after it. According to the story that Jay gives us time, Adnon calls for a ride when he's downtown is short of down in the city at this sort of strip where they sell drugs, kind of near Lincoln Park. So Jay goes pick him up, and nod On says, hey, check it out, check it out, and he pops open the trunk and Hay's body is

as Jay puts it. Pretzels up there, and Jay then recounts a very confusing story that involves them driving all around must Baltimore and making stops the very oos places, including Tasco State Park, smoking some weed there, discussing the murder, and then driving back to track practice, going to Kathy's, then baring her body in the woods. It doesn't match Jen's story in any respects except for the except for

two things. One, both Jen and j insists over and over again that he went to pick Adnin up after he has murdered at three forty pm. And both of them say that Jay pick was picked up by Jen at the mall at around eight o'clock. Other than that, the details don't really match up between their stories.

But unlike Jin, he has no attorney. There's no official deal going on other than that the Tectives promise him that if he turns on Hey, our turns on ad on on. He won't be charged with the murder.

as that. The It always depends on what kind of lawyer you have in terms of experience, and sometimes a lawyer, a better lawyer comes from being very experienced, not being a very very junior duty counsel will say, so tell us about the Yeah, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but tell us about the lawyer that comes on board and what that lawyer doing the best for his client is trying to negotiate.

public Defender's office and asking to get an attorney. At that point he's infeigned well you can't get an attorney to you're charge, so he tries calling the prosecutor and tries to figure out what's going on. On September seventh, the cops come to his door unannounced, pick them up, and drive them down to the prosecutor's office, where the prosecutor, Kevin or Errick, says, this one I want you to meet.

So Urick takes Jay to where he introduced him to his friend and Ben Roya, who is an attorney who sometimes handles criminal issues. She is a personal friend or acquaintance of Urick's and Yorick has personally reached out to her and said, Hey, I've got this person here who really deserves help. Can you come meet with him and represent him? She agrees, so they meet for the first

time on September seventh. They Ben Roya and Jay sit down for about an hour long discussion with each other, and by the end of it, Jay's agreed to accept Benroya's counsel free of charge, and he's also agreed to enter a plebial with debate, which is absurdly quick. So he meets the prosecutor, meets his new attorney. It's been handpicked. They work out a plea deal. Then they instantly go out on the courthouse where they sort of enter in this plea deal, and they don't use the official way

of doing it. It's a very unusual way of entering a plea. There's no proper facts, there's no agreement on the sentence range it's going to happen. It's it's kind of informal in some ways, and it's not very enforceable. It's more like a gentleman's agreement that Uric will not seek an overly harsh charge against Jay if Jay says what Uric wants him to say.

provide the foundation for it. You say that with the interviews that he had, each subsequent interview, he would have a there was a gap, various time periods of gap where he'd have a pre interview and who knows exactly what was said in that pre interview, and then he would have an interview and they had four interviews, but each subsequent interview would have a pre interview and then an interview and each of those, and you go through it and you break it apart very much like Cereal

does as well, but you do even more of an analysis in that the inconsistencies that are in those stories. And then you make the statement that they had plenty of time for the police to be able to give him enough information for him to be able to correct the mistakes that he did have in terms of the correct the mistakes that they did make, and so that

he could have a statement at trial. And you say that he was interested because of part of that agreement was that if he were to be caught up in lies, then he would that agreement would be And again you said it was a gentleman's agreement. So if he were to be caught up in a lie or caught to be in a lie with this, that they would negate the agreement itself. How much credit or discredit are you giving to the lawyer though in maybe this guy didn't

have this in terms of his own bright idea. How much of this is put out the lawyer's feet for doing this, negotiating, negotiating this with the help of the prosecution to be able to make this tailor made consistent statement at trial.

last one too, So there's no questions. The plea deals already no one void, which means Jay could have assumed and probably recently did assume that in order for this deal not to be totally worthless, he has to keep the prosecutor happy. At any event, The fact that Jay had given so many different and wildly different stories ought to have concerned the prosecutor when he was trying to get Jay to give a single story, because the other part of the plea deal was that Jay had to

tell the truth a trial. But given how many different statements he's made, how is the prosecutor justsed to know what the truth is or to know if Jay has broken that part of the agreement. Also to go back a bit in the four statements he'd given, actually only the first two had a pre interview and then a recorded interview. The first interview was about an hour long pre interview and then the record seession. The second interview was a three hour pre interview and then the recorded session.

The third interview has no recording whatsoever, but there are some police know about it. And the fourth and last interview, there is a one line page that says, on April thirteenth, the police pulled picked up Jay and spoke to him to resolve inconsistencies about locations. And that's it. There's no notes, we don't know what he said, will never know what he said because there's no more data about what happened

in that fourth interview. So in between from the interview one to interview four, the story changes quite a bit, and you can see more than enough room for the prosecutor or for the investigators to discuss those changes with Jay and to help them along and exact it was actually a trial. As a detective that says, well, once we show Jay, the police showed Jay the phone records,

he remembered things a lot better. So the cops themselves acknowledge that Jay's story changed directly in response to the phone lngs.

the cell phone information. And you go and dissect this, because this is very very important, because they hinge this in the end on this, and the defense attorney cannot and ads ad and ads defense attorney can't counter this at all. So talk about cell phone records, talk about the technology itself. Tell us about this. This is incredible the investigation you've done to be able to explain this, So please explain that.

innocent person in jail. It was them assuming, based on faulty evidence, they knew who their guy was, and then pursuing all routes, whether they were at good ideas or not, in order to get their case against him. So it's as you go along. It's not necessary, it's not It's definitely not a case of them trying to fabricate Evians are trying to falsely get this guy for a crime to know he didn't commit. They think he did it, and they want to make sure they have a witness

who can say how he did it. So to make sure their witness can explain how their guy is guilty, they give him the info he needs. In this case, the info that Jay needed in order to give a story that could convict god Non came in the form of the cell phone records, both in the form of a cell phone the call records, which is who was called, when, how long the call was and the location data, which is the cell site tower that the call went through

when it was made. So starting with the call logs, in the very first interview with Well, with with Jen and with Jay, the cops do tell them both, hey, look we have these calls that show you were talking to on and now on the day of Hayes's appearance, and we know that you were involved. Tell us how. But there's less coaching going on in Jay's first interview overall, because Jay only remembers three phone calls out of thirty one that occurred. So yeah, back off the bed again.

There were thirty one phone calls made from on on cell phone from ten forty five through midnight and a day of Hayes's parents. So out of those thirty one calls, Jay only remembers two, are three in the first interview, and none of them matches cell phone data. They're all way off. So going into the second interview about a month later, the cops have the goal when they said this, they have the goal of trying to reconcile Jay's story.

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that happened that day. Sort of he claims to recall them, but when the cops try and press them for details, it kind of ends up babbling and making up explanations that just sounds false. For instance, when trying to explain all the incoming calls that happened that afternoon, he talks about how Adnin calls just to say hi, or just check and see if the phone was on, or just to give him a heads up that he's going to

call again in a half hour. So Jay is trying to make up explanations for all these calls, but it's pretty clear that the cops are showing him the log and saying explain this, and Jay is doing his best to play along with it. The problem is, even after the second interview, his story still isn't matching. To give one example, in Jay's first interview, he tells the cops that after dropping ad on On off the track practice after the murder, he then goes to his house to

smoke a blunt and wait for aDNA to call. In the second interview, he changes the story suddenly. He says that, oh,

he didn't go to his house. He after dropping ad On on a track, he went to a park and then he went to Kathy's house to smoke a blunt and then went to pick up ad On, which doesn't actually make any sense because when you start looking at the location data from the cell phone records, you can see that the phone call that was made after while add On is a track, which would be the four thirty calls.

The calls around around four thirty forty eight. The cell phone site for both those calls is right next to Jay's house, so his original story about being at his own home actually kind of makes sense. The time is wrong, he says, it takes place about an hour and a half later than it really did, but the location for once and probably the only time in the stories, actually matches it cell phone records. And then in the second interview,

he mysteriously changes his story to be completely wrong. He now claims he's at Kathy's which is different part of town, different tower, nowhere near the tower that does originate for those calls. And this this part had bothered me for a while because most of the time when Jay's story change changes, it changes to match a cel phone records. This is the one time when he's changed a story

to contradict the cell phone records. But what it turns out actually happened is that the cell phone data that cops were working with was wrong. The cops erroneously believed that the calls that happened while Atam's at Track had originally on a tower that was next to Kathy's apartment. They weren't. The tower was not it was three miles north of there, but the cops thought wrongly that it was, so in a second interview they go in and say, hey, look,

we know you're lying. You're not at your house. The cell phone records clearly show you were somewhere in near cafe's when these calls happen, So tell us where you were. And then Jay says, well, the Cathy's, because that's what the records show. So you can see how the cops made them change a story, even though his story was probably more accurate and could have been more correct the first time around.

them to counteract the cell phone experts testimony. So as a backstory, The cell phone expert was retained by the prosecution in order to test thirteen separate sites around West Baltimore that were sort of relevant to this case, and they wanted the cell phone expert to find out where a call from these locations are, which tower they would originate on, so that they could figure out if their theory of the case match the cell records. So they drive the expert around and he uses test equipment to

take readings at all these sites. And then when the prosecution has to disclose the result of this testing to the defense, what they do is not provide the results, which were computer generated, have GPS location, and show in detail what the results were. They provide a brief one

page summary of the experts oral statements. What this essentially means is that as they drove around, they had the expert readout select results from his computer and then toss out all the computer records, so they didn't keep what the computer found. They didn't keep the actual location data they had required. They just use what he told them orally in the car driving around, wrote some of those

numbers down and gave it to the defense. They did keep the computer data for two of the locations, they tested that was Kathy's house and a park near Jay's house, which is significant because one both of these locations have little to no relevance to the murder whatsoever. And there's

the two locations farthest from Lincoln Park. What I suspect and can't prove they could never prove now, is that the reason they chose these two irrelevant locations to actually say the computer data was because for every other location

the Lincoln Park tower reached. So if they had disclosed those maps, it probably would have shown that the park tower EL six State nine B did have a signal somewhere outside of Lincoln Park, since the prosecution's entire case hinged upon proving that Adnan was in Lincoln Park when the EL six State nine B tower was pinged, having proof that a call made from somewhere completely not Lincoln Park ping that tower would have killed their case. So

I don't know that's what the case is. I don't know that EL sick Sat nine B definitely reached those locations, but the fact that prosecution chose to only disclose the two maps farest from Lincoln Park does just there's a reason they were scared of having naps of self reception from close to Lincoln Park and get into the hands of defense.

look like something that isn't done almost routinely. So he's seen better, he's seen worse, but it wasn't so bad in terms of you know, I think a lot of people and maybe some people are naive that lots of things don't fit, and prosecution takes a lot of cases to a jury with sort of far flung motives, or let's put it this way, very unsubstantiated motives, unprovable motives. Will say weak cases taken to a jury oftentimes, so I might, I guess you should get a question out

of that. But what I thought was that this case is obviously a case where there's reasonable doubt in regarding Adnad's guilt. But I I really like to look at a case and say, what do you think in terms of guilt and tell us what you think after this year.

average case because the prosecution's case never came together. There was always huge holes in it that couldn't be explained and shouldn't have been there if their theory was right. And the obvious explanation is that the theory was never right because their star witness, Jay was perjuring himself constantly on the stand. Jay has fully acknowledged now in a recent interview that he lied his butt off it both

had ons trials. Everything said essentially other than the fact that Oddnan killed Hay was a lie, and he was happy to acknowledge us because as he had, his reasons for lying. So it's pretty clear, whether you think Adnan's guilty or innocent, why the state's case was such an incoherent mess, And that's that it's all based on lies. It's all based on Jay's lies. It's all based on Jay's nonsense, crazy manufactured statements. The problem is that that

leaves us with basically where we started. Jay could be lying, and add none can still be guilty, or j could be lying because Adnan's innocent and Jay's just trying really hard to hide up to hide who's actually responsible. And in the end, Jay's stories just don't get us anywhere. They're too incoherent, they're too contradictory, they are too provably false to provide any basis for explaining how Hay died.

And since the investigation stopped as soon as odd non identified as the prime target, there is no other research or contemporaneous information concerning who else might have killed her, or hell she might have died, So we're less a black hole in terms of actual evidence here of what might have happened, because the state's whole case was based on investigating a lie, but they did not allegedly know is a lie at the time, so the data they have doesn't match up with anything, and the data we

have now is trying to piece together a fifteen year old story. Basically, there's really hard to give a firm answer here because we don't have the evidence. We're not ever going to have the evidence short of the confession, and trying to figure out exactly what did occur is a fool's.

was near LinkedIn Park. So we can say with some confidence that Jay was involved somehow in the cover up of the murder, but we don't actually have anything linking j to the murder itself, and I don't think we can say. We definitely cannot say that Jay was responsible for it, and I don't really have an opinion if he was or not, because the evidence is too vague and can go either way. At this point, I think God knowns innocent, but that's most years old. Of the

way the investigation was carried out. If Adnan was guilty, the prosecution should have, my dumb luck, stumbled on some kind of evidence to support that, And the fact that their investigation consistently found things that did not lead to his guilt just to me that the reason they couldn't find anything is because it wasn't there.

Later on, and like in the recent interviews he's given, he says that the reason he helped out was because he was scared of getting his family in trouble with his drug operation. He's vague on details and just kind of leaves it as this sort of this kind of a martyr complex really like he did he buried his body in order to save his grandma is what it comes down to, and there's no real coherent story behind it.

There's no way to explain it logically. Because Jay was not afraid of ad On, there was no reason to be afraid of If Anan could have threatened Jay, he would have known not to do it. So whatever reason Jay helped, he's never said it. If Ann did kill Hay we still don't know why Jay decided assistant to cover up.

On that day. There is speculation for why Jay might have had a motive. I don't really give much of it credence because everything's so vague here. It could be true, it could not be I don't think it's worth spending time worrying about it. One of the more common themes are common stories is that Jay was jealous of odd Non's close relationship with Stephanie, because Stephanie and odd Non are really good friends and used to date, and so apparently Jay was jealous of that and decided to kill Hay.

But that doesn't really make sense either. If I had a guess, I think a drug connection is going on. That's that's what a lot of the evidence seems to lead back to. But that's definitely not the only answer, and it could turn out to be a lot of different things that happened. Again, the number of possibilities here has never been narrowed down. Someone had a thought experiment once. I thought was a pretty useful way of showing how

little we know. And that's just if you could choose any location in time on January thirteenth, where you could have a camera for fifteen minutes and see what happened there, where would you choose to go, and there's nowhere to like, there's no place you could choose to look at and try and figure out this case. We don't know where she died. We don't know how she died exactly. We don't know when she died. We don't know what time she was buried. We don't know where she was kept

in between the murder and the burial. We don't know where the actors were at various times. Even with a magic camera that could show you fifteen minutes of any place in Baltimore on that day, it is very unlikely you could solve the crime.

doesn't seem to make that much sense. And these witnesses don't seem to make that much sense when they're doing stories that are supposedly going to help their friends. We talk about with Josh saying that and backing up the story from Jay, which seemed unlikely from the characterization of Adnon and who Ja it really was that he was so terrified of what Adnan might do? Is there? What do you think about the friends' connections and some of their stories.

three forty pm. That's proveably false through a bunch of different ways, so he wasn't there. She's lying about that, he's lying about that. They clearly work together to have an alibi, but we don't know why Jin agreed. Jen could have agreed because she wanted to make sure her friend, who is innocent in a murder, didn't falsely get accused of it, or she could be giving a false alibi because she knows he's yealty, he wants to help him. So even we know that people are lying, we still

don't know why. And I think it all goes back to the investigation and how the cops had one theory centered in on it and looked only there the rest of the time. As a result, the data we have is so limited that we can't rule out any hither theory. I mean, we can rule out the story at trial. We know enough to disprove what they claimed happened at trial, but we can't really disprove anything else.

That appeal was denied in January last year. It's recently the defense filed the motion to reopen it, and most recently, as you may have heard, the defense filed in affidavit from the alibi witness, Asia McLain, and which she stated that one she stood by her alibi story that she'd seen adn On in the library at two forty five when the prosecution claimed a trial that he had killed her before two thirty six pm, and two that the reason she hadn't come for sooner and that she hadn't

actually given the story at trial was because and why she hadn't given it in a previous appeal was because she'd spoken to Europe, the prosecutor, and he'd convinced her not to so based on that affidavit, they're trying to have his ineffective sense of counsel appeal upheld. The latest update there is that the prosecution has filed a motion to strike the update from the record, claiming it was filed too late. So it's not clear how that's going

to get resolved. If that appeal fails, there are other options. He could potentially file a federal appeal. There's other state level claims he can make. His best hope, although who knows how likely it is. Is his options toe the Innocence Project, who have taken on his case and are looking into possible DNA evidence that may still exist. If they can find that the DNA evidence still say somewhere and the police files, and if they can test that and have a match to someone else, that would be

his best route to freedom. But there's a lot of steps there. One finding the evidence to actually having DNA on it, and three actually from the court allowing them to test it, but then going back to the DNA evidence. That's another good example of how the prosecution failed here so horribly, because Jay told the cops from day one, when he's discussing his imaginary conversations with ad Non, that Adnan told him that he was worried that there was

forensic evidence under his fingernails. He was worried that she had scratched him somehow, and there was evidence that he'd killed her under her fingernails. And yet the prosecution never tested that DNA evidence. They put it on hold and decided not to test it, which I can't I cannot understand. Even forensic dneral is there, it's usually a long shot. But when you have a witness, saying that the defendant was worried there was DNA evidence under the victims's fingernails.

Why wouldn't you test it?

out by witness, which you can't do. I mean, that's when it comes to an EFFECTI assistance of counsel. There's a lot of leeway. Attorneys can have strategies. Just because you're wrong, don't mean you're in effective. But the one thing you always have to do is to investigate. You have to talk to an aliby witness and find out why or why not they're useful for the case. So I think she's believable. I think she's I think she's

totally honest. I have no reason to doubt her. The biggest problem with Asia in terms of solving the case is that, even though I think she very much saw Adnin in the library at two forty five PM, her testimony is only only relevant based on the prosecution's fantasy, fairy tale timeline of events because the prosecution claims Hay was dead at two thirty six, So in that case, Asia's crucial her testimony disproves it entirely. The problem is

no one actually believes prosecution. Everyone knows that the prosecution was making it up when they claimed Hay was dead at two thirty six. So in reality, in a world where the evidence shows that Hay was almost certainly killed from between three PM and three point thirty, having a solid alibi for two forty five PM isn't factual proof

that a nons inoscent. It is, however, very useful evidence for showing this attorney was ineffective and that he did not get a constitutionally fair trial because of her failure to investigate.

a couple motions to compel. She did try at some places to get the information the state was withholding, but overall, given how much they were worth holding, she was inexplicable in her failure not to pursue it further. As a result, going into both trials, she had no idea what was coming. In some respects, she didn't have the full timeline, she didn't have Jay's statements, she didn't know that Jin was

a witness. She didn't know anything in some respects. So for me, like as an attorney, strat wise, that was her biggest failure. If she had simply followed up, fouled whatever it took to force the prosecution to play fair, he would have been in much better shape going into trial in terms of actual given the lack of discovery. In terms of she did a trial, her cross examinations were meandering, to put it nicely, And what kind of killed me reading the transcripts now, is that Giddy Airs

was a smart woman. You can see there's so many times where I've seen in the transcripts that she saw a problem in the case. She clearly identified something that was hugely important, like, for instance, the fact the lividity living mortis in the body did not match its positioning in the grave. She solved that as a problem, and she tried to question the medical examiner about it. And I didn't even realize that was a problem, and I went back to bed it and I'd completely overlooked the

fact that Giddierre's was trying to get that out. She was trying like she Her questioning shows she knew that this disproved the state's case and she wanted to question the medical contaimer about it. But she keeps losing her train of thought, she keeps the question that follows it up is never there, and so even though she starts bringing these huge important issues up and saw them, she never delivers.

She was clearly unethical, and I think intentionally so. On the other hand, I think she was also actually sick and struggling, and I think that shows up in the cross examination where she was trying and she wasn't trying to get her clients in jail, but she was phoning it in on the preparation, and then when it came to trial day, she didn't have the health or the

energy or mental resources to follow through. Perhaps early in her career it wouldn't have mattered she hadn't done the backwork because she was a good trial attorney, but at this point when she was representing Adnan, she just lacked the ability to make points. And I think that's the part that came from her illness and not her unethical behaviors.

and the fact it was never tested before. So there is something to hope there, but it's far from guaranteed, and his other appeal options are slow and not necessarily going to be helpful in the end. If he goes that route and ultimately got free, it's still the years because there's appeals from the appeals. I think his current appeal likely will not succeed, which means he'll either have to start a new one or go through a federal appeal, and all that takes time.

investigation of the evidence. So there was some stuff looks damaging to add On the cameout, but none of that is outweighed by the fact that it's now gotten massive attention and popularity. And as much as the appellate system is designed to be more insulated and not sway to a popular opinion, there's no way it doesn an effect

the judges. The judges and their clerks, they're listening to this, they know about it, they're paying attention, and even though they would never acknowledge that it affected their decision anyway, it absolutely is going to.

on in the last five years. What does it hold for the future of wrongful convictions that something like this has caught the attention of the public in such a big way.

in the polls. And I think that there's definitely room for political campaigns now to try and focus on this issue. As before, you're not going to have wrongful convictions be any kind of winning cause in politics.

rest of it. But what I think is the service that Sarah and Serial podcast has brought is a big audience that weren't necessarily. They didn't think they were true crime fans, and now I guess they think that they are true crime fans by virtue of this serial. But maybe people will be a little more open minded to the idea of this trusted and judicial system is maybe not as shouldn't be as entrusted as you might have

thought all those years. And it brings up the problem too, is that you listen to Jay, you listen to some of his friends, you listen to Adnan, and you're going, I don't know, because there's so much subjective evidence as well,

that can really confuse you. That I think people are realizing the complexity of a true crime book that even after an hour of discussing it, you just barely scratch the surface of the story itself, never mind the issues and never mind the possibilities, especially when it's not clear cut, which is meant many times who's a killer.

So Cyriel was the first time where my friends without legal background, like, we've had long discussions about a legal case, And for me, it was fascinating to realize, just as an attorney, how insulated my mindset is, or just how things I know about the legal system and failings I fully expect to see didn't phase me at all. And my friends are just asking, wait, they can do that, that's allowed, this is what happened in real life, and

I'm like, yes, this is actually how system works. And for me it was eye opening to realize I'd forgotten that that it's for most people who are not involved in it. Every day. They have a more idealistic view of what's going on. And Cyril is a really good exposure to the sausage making process, I guess.

But that gives you a false impression of the precision that every trial has and the conclusions and the and the ethical morality behind all of this, and these people taking these cases home, Like you say, sometimes it's just a sausage factory and there's conclusions left to and people just sort of know, they believe they know who did it. And because it isn't very precise, and because not all the protocol is is tended to one hundred percent, it's

kind of rough. It's certainly not as slick and precise and nice as we see on television. So I think that's what people are realizing too, that you can be an amateur sleuth. For these twelve episode you can read your blog and still not have any more of an answer than you or I has, as non guilt or Jay's guilt or really really what happened.

try and solve crimes. You've got prosecutors with heavy case loads who have to be honest, mostly vast macharity of the time guilty defendants, and they're trying to make sure that some splictive instorney doesn't try and get their clients acquitted wrongfully. And then you've got judges who have heavy place with caseloads too, and they're busy, and they're sometimes going to take the prosecutor's word for it just because they assume the prosecutor's not going to state the case

wrongly to them. So at every level there's no need for wrongdoing. It's just people try and do their jobs. But the way everything's set up and the way the system is set up, these results do happen because people are trying to get their job done, and sometimes that involves cutting corners when I thinks someone's guilty and should be in jail.

And it must come from reading some of these books itself and watching these programs, and just who knows exactly how they got to that point. There are some people that are certainly naive, but there's certainly a certain camp that understand I think the principles of law that yet are still enraged, outraged, disappointed.

do the right thing most of the time. The problem comes from a system that assumes that they will always do that are assuming they have some sort of immunity from doing a lesson thorough job. So there's a balance to be had there for sure. But at the same time, I think right now more exposure to the problems in the system is needed, absolutely.

commentary on this has been incredible. I want to ask you about LLL two and a little bit more about the blog itself and your commentary, and how much attention you've had from you engaging and speaking and discussing about the serial podcast itself.

have readers too, and it's interesting to have. It's a weird tension because I feel like in some places I've gotten undue weight and well out out of theory, and I think it'll probably get I don't want to say uncritically accepted, because I think I'm right, and I'm you know, I believe I'm right. But there's less pushback than I think there should be. Because I work hard at developing

my theories and my analysis of the law. But I think what Cereal has been so great about is getting so many amateur slews, like you said, and they have some really great like everyone has really great ideas, Like there's bits and pieces coming from everywhere, and I definitely don't want to joining to stifle that.

And you know, at least for the events especially, they weren't. They weren't good choices for the defense, that's certain.