‘Adnan Syed’ resurrects sensational murder case
There’s never been a podcast more popular or powerful than “Serial.”
The first season of journalist Sarah Koenig’s 12-episode true-crime investigation became an instant phenomenon when it premiered in 2014: generating more than 40 million downloads in its first two months, inspiring spoton parodies from “Saturday Night Live” and “Funny or Die” and sending Reddit users into a tailspin trying to piece together information.
The central mystery was the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old high school student from Baltimore who was strangled to death and buried in a park, allegedly by her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Syed, now 38, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison, despite multiple inconsistencies in witnesses’ testimony that Koenig later tried to unpack on “Serial.”
Although the podcast was ultimately inconclusive, the media attention it received helped Syed’s attorney, Rabia Chaudry, win an appeal for a new trial in 2016, which has been repeatedly delayed.
But HBO’s four-part docuseries “The Case Against Adnan Syed” (premiering Sunday, 9 EST/PST) could be just the ammunition Syed needs to get back in front of a judge and be exonerated, with a slew of new interviews and evidence supporting his professed innocence.
Some of the most intriguing information we learned from the first three episodes:
Hae Min Lee’s troubled life, and love for Syed, come into focus
One of the chief complaints of “Serial” was that it didn’t devote enough attention to the victim, which director Amy Berg seeks to rectify by devoting the entire first episode of the new series to Lee. Through a series of fresh interviews with Syed and the teen’s close friends, Lee is described as a goofy, affable girl who loved playing field hockey and crushing on boys at school.
Excerpts from Lee’s journal paint a detailed picture of her sometimes challenging romance with Syed, as their strict immigrant families prohibited them from dating. Instead, they met secretly at motels and shopping-mall parking lots. She wrote about him in consistently glowing terms – calling him “my baby” and the “cutest, coolest, sweetest guy” – and Syed reciprocated those feelings in his latest interview, describing how beautiful Lee looked at the prom where they shared their first kiss.
But Syed also recalls darker moments, such as the time Lee told him that she was sexually abused while living in South Korea. (Her classmate Debbie Warren corroborates the story).
“I was just in shock,” Syed says. “I had a feeling I shouldn’t touch her while she was talking about this, so I just listened.”
Although the two eventually broke up, another classmate says Syed harbored no ill will when, days before her disappearance, he learned she had a new boyfriend. “He just shrugged it off and said, ‘I just want her to be happy,’ ” Asia McClain says.
Syed’s classmate and alleged accomplice, Jay Wilds, has multiple domestic abuse charges
Wilds’ knowledge of and involvement in Lee’s murder has long raised questions among “Serial” listeners. He told police Syed admitted killing her, and together they buried her body, for which Wilds received two years’ probation as an accessory to murder.
But high school friends of both men say there are multiple discrepancies in Wilds’ recounting of events, including the location where Syed first showed him Lee’s body in the trunk of her own car. (At various times, he has said it was outside a Best Buy store, a sports bar and his grandmother’s house.)
“Jay obviously picks and chooses what he wants to tell (people), and at this point, it’s created such a mess,” classmate Jennifer Pusateri says.
Equally troubling is Wilds’ lengthy criminal history since then, including more than 20 arrests on charges of disorderly conduct, possession of a loaded shotgun and second-degree assault, the series says.
Although Wilds does not appear in “Serial” or “Adnan Syed,” his ex-girlfriend Nikisha Horton claims in the docuseries that he drunkenly beat her and that she feared for their young son.
When she brought up Lee’s case to him, “he quickly brushed it off: no ‘(I was an) accessory,’ no ‘I did this,’ nothing,” Horton says. “It just makes me feel like, what else is he capable of from the situation that we’ve been through?”
Faulty cellphone records, anti-Muslim bias hurt Syed’s case
Much of the third episode is dedicated to the AT&T records used to help convict Syed; they placed his cellphone at the park where Lee’s body was buried on the day she disappeared. But prosecutors overlooked a key disclaimer on the printed records, noting that “any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location.”
Later, the episode delves into the racial tensions in Baltimore around the time of Lee’s murder, including reports of hate crimes against Koreans. The Muslim community also rallied behind Syed, which became a source of racial bias during his bail hearing when prosecutor Vicki Walsh argued that Muslims might help him flee to Pakistan if he was freed.
The prosecution “used whatever was available, and threw whatever they could at the wall to see what sticks,” Syed says.
“It just so happened that it was me being Muslim.”