‘IT WASN’T ADNAN’
‘Other lover’ is eyed in ‘Serial’ slay
When Baltimore high-school senior Hae Min Lee went missing on Jan. 13, 1999, one of the first calls the cops made was to her boyfriend, 21-year-old Don Clinedinst.
“I said, ‘Well, OK, they’re going to try to blame it on me because she was with me last night. I’m the new boyfriend. I’m obviously going to be one of the first suspects, me and Adnan,” he told “Serial” podcast host Sarah Koenig in 2014. “When someone calls you up and tells you, ‘Have you seen this person? They went missing,’ you automatically retrace everything you did that day.”
That was a red flag for attorney Rabia Chaudry, a family friend of Adnan Syed, the man currently serving time for Lee’s murder.
“In no universe, if my partner couldn’t be located, would I begin tracing my own steps. I’d be focused on finding that person,” writes Chaudry in her new book, “Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After ‘Serial.’ ”
Syed landed in the spotlight when he was featured in the NPR podcast, which became a recordbreaking hit. His case, in brief: Almost a month after her disappearance, on Feb. 9, 1999, Lee’s strangled corpse was found in a wooded area of a Baltimore park. Syed, her ex-boyfriend, was arrested that month and found guilty of first-degree murder a year later.
The research done for “Serial” unearthed enough new evidence to merit a new trial for Syed. A judge granted him one this June.
Chaudry, who initially brought Syed’s story to Koenig’s attention, contends “Serial” missed key details — and failed to properly investigate Clinedinst.
Why, Chaudry asks, did nobody investigate Clinedinst’s alibi that he had been working at his LensCrafters job when Lee disappeared? A police call at the time found Clinedinst — Lee’s new love with “baby-blue eyes,y dirty blond hair and a red Camaro” — had worked that day, but at a different branch than usual.
What that call missed was that the manager of the other branch was Clinedinst’s mother — a di- rect violation of company policy. Later, his manager at the main branch was found to be his mom’s girlfriend, also a violation.
Furthermore, says Chaudry, Clinedinst’s time sheets show strange time discrepancies, and two different employee ID numbers used, for that week.
A LensCrafters HR manager confirmed that his mother, as a manager, would have been able to alter the time sheets. But they would have had to be changed within a week of the time period — or before Lee’s body was found.
“I am entirely convinced the time sheet was not just falsified. It was falsified at a time before anyone knew Hae had been killed . . . It appears Don’s airtight alibi was his mother, her girlfriend, and a falsified time sheet,” Chaudry writes.
“This, along with the fact that police were not able to contact him until 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 14 and that [Hae’s friend] Debbie Warren reported the last thing Hae told her before leaving school was [she was] going to meet Don at the mall, raises serious questions about where Don was the afternoon his girlfriend, whom he never attempted to reach after that, disappeared.”
Chaudry’s book also includes a creepy, if insubstantial, anecdote about a woman named Pam, who called Baltimore police in 2000 after a disturbing vision.
“In a Baltimore hotel parking lot . . . a young Korean girl in her teens or early 20s is in the driver’s seat of a car . . . The girl was afraid,” Pam had said. “And a young man in his early 20s or late teens with short dark blond hair and piercing blue eyes was in the passenger seat leaning over her, choking her with his bare hands . . . I could hear her thoughts and she kept thinking ‘This is crazy, this isn’t happening.’ ”
Pam, who doesn’t consider herself psychic, goes on to describe his burying the girl “in a wooded area near a creek.”
Although Chaudry’s writing is sometimes clunky, any “Serial” fan should eat up this heavily researched book. And, who knows, it may spawn yet more amateur sleuthing — which is how Syed got his new trial in the first place.
It appears Don’s airtight alibi was his mother, her girlfriend, and a falsified time sheet. —Rabi a Ch au dry, on Don Clined inst, the victim’ s boyfriend, in the book “Adnan’s Story ”( left)