"Yeah, Serial!" I said, but what she heard was "Cereal!" I live in the south, where NPR is held with as much regard as the Winter Olympics. She left looking more concerned than before, either believing I'm crazy or hungry or just mad hungry.
Serial just threw me through a window. It's been pingponging my brain between the verdict for the death of Hae Min Lee. I have dedicated my whiteboard to solving the mystery six episodes ago and now no one is EVER going to know the truth. The listeners will split up into camps and argue for or against Adnan, rarely convincing the other party off our circumstantial evidence. If you haven't listened to the Serial podcast through the final episode, this post is going to spoil a lot. So ye be warned. And double spoiler, I'm certain I have the answer, which I'm going to outline in the first section here.
Not knowing the verdict wasn't the only cause of my turmoil. It was what the whole series says about our legal system, about journalism, and how responsible any single citizen is to them both. And I feel like I just got tossed into a stranger, blurrier world than when I started listening to the podcast in October. Which really says a lot about how well this was made. I'm going to critique it a lot here, but I only to that with media I hold in the highest regard, I think Serial is the True Detective of Podcasts.
1. The Verdict on Adnon
A. That dude totally did it
The last episode makes two great points that turned me around about how I considered the verdict for Adnan. That said, I had the verdict pegged 5 episodes in and every episode after only confirmed my theory.I want to preface my verdict by saying that Sarah Koenig's analysis of the proceedings and evidence provided by the state and the judge should not have upheld a guilty verdict. She makes a great point about that. The detectives had no physical evidence, a loose story on an inaccurate timeline, almost completely rooted on the confession of one young man whose story couldn't stop changing. Koenig is definitely right, the court should have acquitted Adnan, and if his defense attorney had done a better job, he might be free today.
The loose evidence and deep holes in the timeline are what gave Koenig trouble, even after over a year of in-depth research in reporting, it's hard to fathom that a jury could convict him in less than a week.
On the other hand Sarah is clearly sympathetic to Adnan, working to be objective, but lacking any clear evidence that he didn't do it, she spins his hand-fed narrative to the audience, and hey it works. I really like this guy and my heart's telling me that dude can't be a killer, that he might be the victim here. But on the other hand, he totally fucking did it.
I think the biggest pit for Koenig's verdict is that she talked to Adnan at all. She is a great journalist, but in this case she was not 100% objective. I think she should have coached someone to interview him as she spent time doing the research, then put those two stories together, and acted more as a hammer for the truth between the evidence and his story and less like the cushion. Meaning, I think when we heard the facts and his story she usually would shrug her shoulders and say: you could see this story going either way, like: "I really don't want to be the person who says this dude's guilty on air after all this time he let me interrogate him". I mean if she did, then who would ever let her interview them afterwards?
If she had not conducted the interviews herself I think she would have said what Dana said during the final episode. Dana's opinion was exactly what I thought by the 5th episode, and likely what judge, jury, and the detectives knew to be true as well. Simply, that there are too many coincidences for Adnan not to be the culprit.
- The phone being by Linkin Park that night
- The call to Shei
- Jay knowing where the car is and you know, going through this whole ordeal of blaming it on Adnan and going to court and risking jail time for one story. You know, Adnan, who just happened to loan him his own car and phone the same day.
- The fact that Don (Hae's new boyfriend) had made sure to remember that the instant he found out she'd gone missing while Adnan claims not to remember anything about that day.... oh except the morning, Stephanie's birthday, that he probably asked Hae for a ride, and gave Jay his phone and car on that day. But aside from that, clearly couldn't remember anything.
Dana's right. Yes there are huge holes in the detectives' timeline and sure they weighed the deck to support Jay's argument, but they had their culprit. Look I'm not a lawyer or a detective, I'm just a culture junkie who happens to love detective stories, from The Maltese Falcon to Brick. But I've been keeping rabid, fanatical details of the series from start to end, and while I can only speculate why Adnan murdered Hae, I can say for certain that dude fucking did it.
B. Never Listen to the culprit
Recently I picked up a friend from jail the day after he'd been arrested. It was later in the morning, he'd been in court and a cell all day. The first thing my buddy did was call his boss to explain why my he was not at work. He apologetically tells his boss a detailed and emotionally riveting account about how he'd fought off a boyfriend abusing his girlfriend near my buddy's apartment. His boss is satisfied, I see his bandages, I'm satisfied.When he hangs up he tells me the real story, and it has nothing to do with a relationship dispute. Now this friend is as far from an actor as a roughneck tower-climbing surfer can be, but he laid the story out with perfect ease and conviction as if it'd happen. He laid it out like Samuel L. Jackson in Resovoir Dogs had coached him. That was after one night sleeping off a hangover in a jail cell.
Adnan has had 15 years to work on every aspect of this story. 15 years.
Many of the questions Koenig had are things he'd probably figured out with his lawyer or in correspondence with friends and family long ago. He's definitely a smart guy, you put a smart guy in one place for 15 years I bet he could recite the Iliad from memory.
Now I'm not saying he's a liar or Koenig let herself get duped. What I am saying is that this fact makes him a totally unreliable source of information. My rule throughout the series has been not to listen to anything Adnon says as fact, that is to add it to the mix of other evidence.
How many times did Koenig describe Adnan's own accounts as convenient, just as Dana says.
C. Listen to Jay
I mean in the "really listen" the way some guardian wizard tells their portage to listen to the wind. The final fact presented on Serial as the only hard evidence they actually had is that Jay knew where Hae's car was. This works in two directions,1 - Jay had Adnon's car.
- If Jay had Adnon's car and then picked up and hung out with Adnan (as several people testify to), exactly at what point in the night did he have time to:
- Find Hae
- kill Hae
- Be contacted by someone who had killed Hae on a cell phone he'd just borrowed that morning
- help bury Hae
- or bury her by himself
- ditch Hae's car (b/c w/or without an accomplice, he knew where it was)
- and if you believe (I think it was Katherine's? story) sneak the dirty shovels into Adnan's car
- If Hae is en-route from one school to another, where would a stranger (like the potential murderer they discussed) or Jay have somehow stopped her to kill her? Sure you can work out ways it could happen, elaborate or simple, but it would contradict multiple testimonies outside Jay and Adnans' own versions of the story.
- and on that note, if it is this stranger, who alway assaults his victims and always robs them. If Hae was neither assaulted or robbed and the car was itself abandoned, then why pursue that path of thinking?
D. My Theory
When I first started listening to the podcast I had my finger pegged on Jay, he was shady, inconsistent, and you know, worked at a porn store. Adnan though, just seemed like a guy caught up with the wrong people and had the bad luck of being Hae's recent ex.But by that fourth episode I was certain that wasn't the case, and if you listen again to the subsequent episodes, they support my theory. My theory is simple, that Jay knew of Adnan's plan ahead of time and completely collaborated with it. The reason his story changes is to protect himself, and his own involvement so he does not go to jail. I think Adnan said: "Hey man I'm going to kill that bitch" and Jay either believed he wasn't serious or he would chicken out.
Jay and the detectives that interviewed him both knew that he would go to jail for confessing in the collaboration. The detectives helped him elude confessing his own involvement before their tapes started recording and set him up with a lawyer for his cooperation in the case. The idea that they're all conspiring against Adnon at once to reign him in as the killer is hardly believable.
This still leaves the question of why Jay did it. That's speculation and heresay, but for my two-cents I think he agreed to help Adnon, didn't believe he'd actually do it, would chicken out or think better of it when he actually confronted Hae, until he actually arrived to see her body, by which time he was too late not to be an accomplice. Adnon had basically kidnapped Jay, Jay had no car and no cell phone and was standing next to a murderer. A murderer who had class with Jay's girlfriend the very next day, and who threatened that girlfriend.
