Here is a nearly sentence-by-sentence reconstruction of Brett and Alice's most recent episode of their podcast "The Prosecutors" - titled Adnan Syed is Guilty. I will not be utilizing the strikethrough in every sentence but will do so when I am compelled and will try to bold sections I've added. I've highlighted some of my favorite and most poignant edits.
I've tired and failed to stay away from a bit of snark. This endeavor was exhausting.
My work will illustrate how Brett Talley and Alice LaCour use narrative spin to bring you their version of events that they want to, for whatever reason, call "facts." I start just before the 4 minute mark.
Transcript
So,, Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee dated for quite some time when they were in high school, starting around March 1998. They’d
stay together for the next 9 months or so, though they broke up twice during that period. They were on-again off-again until around Halloween and broke up for good before Christmas.
Hae appears to have broken up with Adnan in late August due to feeling like many teenage girls do, emotional and confused about how to still "be yourself" while dating someone. She writes about her feelings at length in her diary but writes that she has trouble expressing things to Adnan as easily as she can on paper. These
breakups sprang from Hae’s feeling that she was losing herself in the relationship and from the
complications their differing religions created, particularly with Adnan.
Their breakups lasted just a couple of days, based on Hae's diary entries. few days after each Hae was back to writing in her diary how much she loved
Adnan. When they broke up again on December 21, 1998, Adnan and Hae both might have thought they'd eventually get back together. Or maybe they were both happy to remain friends. Either is possible. probably had every reason to
believe they’d get back together.
Everyone said they remained friends - after all, they exchanged thoughtful expensive
Christmas gifts. But it's true, something had changed - Hae had fallen for a man another boy, Don Clinedinst. Don later stated that Hae introduced him to Adnan, and that Adnan was friendly, and that he liked him. It's even reported that the prosecution would later reprimand Don for not painting Adnan as "enough of a monster" when Don testified for the state in the aftermath of Hae's disappearance and murder.
Hae and Don go
on their first date on January 1, 1999. By January 9, they appear to officially be dating in Hae's eyes, though being Electronically Official was not a thing in 1999, before the advent of social media. they are AOL Instant Messenger official,
with Hae updating her public profile to read:
Interests: Movies, Phone, Partying, TV, Music and most importantly Don.
Likes: Looking in his blue gray eyes, fast cars like his Camaro, driving to BelAir, Selling glasses
and her beauty, spending as much time as possible in the lab.
Occupation: Part-time sales, Full-time Girlfriend.
Quote: I love you and I miss you Donnie.6
Two days later, on January 11, Adnan gets a cell phone that his adult friend Bilal registers for him as Adnan's parents wouldn't let him have one. has his friend, Bilal Ahmed, buy him a cell phone.7 The
next day, he activates it as you do when you get a cell phone. He calls friends including Hae and Jay Wilds, to give them his new number, as you do when you get a new cell phone. He makes a call to Jay Wilds,9 and three calls to Hae.10
The next day, January 13, someone will murder Hae, which maybe we should have led with.
The next morning, Adnan tells his friend, in 1st period Photography, Krista Meyers hears Adnan ask Hae Min
Lee for a ride after school, according to Krista's statement to police on 2/29/99 (a month and a half after Hae went missing.) She later overhears this conversation and hears Hae say she will
give Adnan a ride. She recalls assumes Adnan either said his car was in the shop or his brother, who
worked at a tire store, had it.
That evening, after Hae disappears, we believe Adnan told will tell Officer Adcock
that Hae was supposed to give him a ride, but she’d already left by the time he got to their
designated meeting place. He may have told Krista the same thing.
From that point forward, Adnan will
deny ever asking Hae for a ride. Adnan does not remember if he asked Hae for a ride. For him, it appears to have been a normal and mundane school day. "Ride" could have been from one side of the school to the other, and not just to a completely different location. Others claim that Hae later told Adnan she couldn’t take
him, but if she did, Adnan has never said that, even to Officer Adcock, and we don't know or care to tell you who these "others" are.
At Around 11:00 AM that day on 1/13/99, Adnan and Jay Wilds get together. They go to the mall to pick up a
birthday present for Jay’s girlfriend and Adnan’s good friend, Stephanie. During this trip, Jay
will say in some recorded interviews that Adnan discussed killing Hae because she broke his heart. Jay claims he thought he was
blowing off steam.
Sometime around 1, Jay drops Adnan back off at school. Adnan leaves his phone and his car with
Jay. Adnan claims that the phone was in the glove compartment and that Jay did not ask to borrow it. The cell phone will make and receive phone calls from that point forward. Our opinion is, those calls, both
who they are to/from and the location of the phone when they are made, will be crucial to the
prosecution’s case. WE think that everyone agrees that the location data for outgoing phone calls is accurate.
Some dispute the location data for incoming calls, and Adnan’s attorneys were even able to
convince a judge to discount their accuracy including a judge during PCR proceedings who found in favor of Adnan on the issues.
This is a fallacy. As our interview with FBI CAST
Agent Jay Berni confirmed, there is no scientific or technical reason why incoming calls were
less reliable than outgoing calls for determining the location of the cell phone. We don't believe this and want you to feel like idiots if you do, because our paid expert who was not involved with the case said we were totally right, 24 years after the trial.
After arriving back at school, Adnan goes went to the guidance counselor’s office, possibly to pick up a letter he
needed for his college education. At least one student will later say she saw Adnan at the
guidance counselor’s office after, rather than during, school, providing a potential alibi. But the
student, Debbie Warren, acknowledged at the time that she couldn’t be certain about when
exactly she saw Adnan or what day she was remembering. Which makes sense - surely, they both went to the guidance counselor multiple times throughout their high school careers, and hey - Adnan could have EVEN gone there both during AND after school on the 13th, to request that letter and then later to pick it up.
The One person who has never said to us personally that he went to the guidance counselor’s office after school is Adnan himself. Yet, it's understandable that he doesn't remember the course of events during a typical school day. In fact, in two different
timelines he created for his defense team, he places himself It seems he recalled at least one trip as he says he went to the guidance counselor’s office
after Jay dropped him off and before he went to his final class of the day. And, in fact, he was
late for that class, arriving around 1:30. At 2:15, school lets out. Hae is supposed to pick up her cousins at her from school sometime after 3, and the school will alerts her the family around 3:30 that Hae had not yet arrived. Adnan will tell told Serial that there’s no way he would have asked Hae for a ride because she never did anything
after school. “I would-- wouldn’t have asked for a ride after school. I’m--I’m sure that I didn’t
ask her because, well immediately after school because I know she always-- anyone who knows
her knows she always goes to pick up her little cousin, so she’s not doing anything for anyone
right after school. No-- no matter what. No trip to McDonalds. Not a trip to 7-Eleven. She took
that very seriously.” Adnan, of course, made this statement when speaking to a reporter, and probably did not want to disclose what we're about to tell you: SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX!!
But in his statements to his defense team which were confidential until well after Serial aired, Adnan confirmed that he and Hae would indeed go to the Best Buy after school, but before she picked up her cousin, to have sex in the secluded side parking lot. The file reads, “Since Hae was responsible for picking up her niece after school, they would have sex in the Best Buy parking lot close to the school after school. Hae would leave to get her niece, and they would see one another that night, when they would have sex again.”
Sometime between 2:15 and 3:30, Hae was abducted and murdered. It's important to point out that other than the inconsistent stories of Jay Wilds as an "eyewitness," we don't precisely know what time Hae was murdered.
At 2:30, Asia McClain stated in an affidavit that she saw sees Adnan at the library right next to school. At 2:40, Asia leaves and
Adnan is still there. By 3:15, Adnan’s cell phone, which Jay Wilds has, is pinging a certain tower and sector covering an area. Prosecutors alleged at trial that sector does include the
Best Buy just west of school. As it happens, this is the same Best Buy where Adnan and Hae often went to have sex, because there obviously aren't that many Best Buy's right by school.
Jay Wilds would later say tell multiple, conflicting versions of his day, one being that he met Adnan there and Adnan showed him Hae’s dead body in
the trunk of her car. Our opinion is, Best Buy was first mentioned to police by Jenn Pusateri, who said Jay
told her Adnan had murdered Hae in the Best Buy parking lot. Jenn Pusateri’s statements are
important because they were made to police before they brought Jay in to question him about the
murder interviewed Jay on the record. Jenn relays that Jay told her the story of what happened to Hae on the day Hae went
missing and immediately after, well before Jay could have possibly been influenced by the
police. We haven't cited a source for this, though... Furthermore, Some of Jenn’s early statements were made in the presence of her mother and lawyer, but these were not recorded.
At 3:32, the cell phone calls Nisha Tanna’s phone. Nisha was a girl Adnan had met on New
Years and to whom he was talking on the phone as part of a bourgeoning relationship. Nisha will
tell police Police notes dated over 2 months after the murder claim that she remembered Adnan calling her a day or two after he got his cell phone. He
put Jay Wilds on the phone with her. It was a short call. Jay would tell police in one of his ever-changing stories he remembered
Adnan putting him on the phone with some girl from Silver Spring, which is, indeed, where
Nisha lived. Nisha would say that she thought they were on the way to Jay’s job at a video store
at the time and that she talked to Jay in the evening. It is possible that this call was Jay making a butt dial. If you need an explanation of butt dials, look no further than Canton, Massachusetts. Butt dials happen. To believe this couldn't have been a butt dial, you'd have to believe that Karen Reed is innocent.
But I digress.
This wouldn’t fit, as Jay didn’t start the job until later. But given the other facts, it is
more likely that she confused this one detail than that she confused all the other corroborating
facts. Moreover, to discount the call you’d have to believe that Nisha just so happened to
remember the call happening when Adnan’s phone just so happened to have called her.
And Jay and Nisha are not the only ones who say that Adnan called Nisha that day. Adnan’s
brother Ali—whose full name is Tanveer Ali Syed — would tell Adnan’s defense team in a
document entitled “Interview with Adnan’s Brother, Ali,” that around 3:30 pm on the day of the
murder, Adnan had called Nisha.34 It’s unclear exactly where he got this information, but the
most plausible answer is that Adnan told him this at the time he still believed he could rely on
Jay to be his alibi.
We wanted to use the memo concerning "Adnan's brother Ali" as a smoking gun, but we realized that it's nonsensical. We cannot in good conscience say that he "would tell Adnan's defense team in a document titled xx..." because the memo does not make sense. Please see footnote 22. There are a few possibilities as to the questions and answers listed: they are a master list with information being added as multiple people are interviewed, and there was a sloppy copy and paste job on this one. We also have not been able to verify the varacity of the document itself.
As long as Jay does not turn on Adnan, the Nisha call provides an alibi for
Adnan at around the time of the murders. It only becomes problematic once Jay tells police that
Adnan killed Hae. The Nisha call took place after the disappearance (and presumed time of death) of Hae Min Lee, so it would not provide an alibi for Adnan even if he had been in possession of his phone and called her at 3:32pm.
At 3:59, Jay calls a friend of his. the cell phone calls a friend of Jay’s. It is pinging the Woodlawn High School tower and
sector. This is consistent with Jay still having Adnan's car and phone and driving around the city Jay lives in. calling someone after dropping Adnan off at track practice
According to the testimony of the track coach, Coach Sye, track practice started at 4 pm. And
not just that day, every day. This has been disputed by Coach Sye's own contradictions as well as those who have stated that there was a practice time change by the time of Adnan's 2nd trial. was confirmed by another member of the track team who told
Serial that track practice started at 4 pm. Adnan’s team has attempted to push the start of track
practice back to 3:30 based on a statement by Sye that he would arrive at the track at around
3:30.39 But when the coach arrived to get ready for practice is not the same thing as when track
practice began. The former doesn’t matter unless you’re trying to establish Sye’s alibi. But if you
want to know when track practice generally started, that’s easy—4 pm.
At practice, Adnan had a conversation with Coach Sye. It would be the most in-depth
conversation they would ever have.40 If Adnan wanted to make sure that he was noticed at
practice that day, he’d succeeded.
The fact that Adnan had track practice and attended it is consistent with the statement does not impeach Jenn Pusateri on its face. that “Jay
took him to maybe some kind of practice.”
Jay Wilds know would also tell police Adnan wanted to be at track practice to create an alibi, because Jay Wilds knew if he didn't turn on Adnan he was going down.
In fact, it was Adnan who told police about the conversation and that it occurred on the 13th. Jay picked Adnan up again after track practice. Adnan later received a call and found out Hae was missing. rom both Young Lee and Officer
Adcock revealing that Hae was missing and people were looking for her. Jay would tell police
that at this point, Adnan said they needed to bury Hae, though Jay could not recall where they were when he received the call from Officer Adcock. Could have been McDonalds, could have been their friend's house... it just depends on which cell records you're reading wrong.
At 7:09, Jenn called Jay on Adnan's the cell phone. She claims Adnan answered and told her that Jay was busy and he’d
call her back. This call pinged the tower and sector covering the burial site in Leakin Park along with many other paths, trees, roadways and houses. To boot, the call was incoming, so who's to say? We know what our FBI guy would tell us, but as of late, how much can you trust them, am I right?!
Seven minutes later, another call came in. This call also pinged the tower covering the burial site according to the cell data. In the time between that night and when Adnan was arrested, the cell phone will ping off this tower and, in this sector, L689B, only one other time—at 4:44 PM, January 27, the day after Jay was arrested for an unrelated incident the night before. We aren't giving you any other context for this "fact" or even suggesting it's circumstantial at best and wholly irrelevant. It's not our style.
At 8:04, the cell phone Jay makes an outgoing call to Jenn’s pager. It is pinging the tower over the
location where Hae’s car was dumped. At 8:05, the cell phone Jay makes a call to Jenn’s pager again,
now pinging the tower just west of the dump site location where Hae's car was eventually found, indicating that they are driving phone is moving away from
the dump location.
Jenn will later tell police, with her lawyer and mother in the room, that after these pages she met Jay and Adnan in a mall parking lot. We can't verify this, and the statement Jenn made at her lawyer's home with her mother present was not recorded. After Adnan leaves, Jenn claims Jay tells her what happened, and she helps him dispose of evidence, both that night and the next day when he needed to be driven to a dumpster in a damn blizzard.
The "basic story" Jay tells Jenn and that she relays to the police—before the police interrogate Jay on the record and before there is any evidence they are aware of Jay and his involvement with the case (other than the fact that the police knew somehow that they were looking for Jenn and not her father whose name was on the cell records)—is
largely kinda consistent with the same story Jay will tell the police later if you try hard to ignore the glaring inconsistencies.
The key points that we need you to believe are —that Adnan left the car and cell phone with Jay, that he killed Hae because she broke his heart, Jay seeing the body, that Adnan strangled Hae, that Jay dropped Adnan off at school so he could be seen at practice, that Adnan buried Hae (though Jay lied to Jenn and said he wasn’t with Adnan at the time because as we know Jay lies and it's FINE), that Jenn called the cell phone and Adnan answered, that Jenn picked up Jay after the burial, are all contained in Jenn’s statement which was given after she had time to get her story lined up to save Jay from being railroaded.
In fact, it was Jenn, and not Jay, who first
mentioned (on the record) the murder happened at the Best Buy—the same Best Buy where Adnan’s phone
pinged around the time of the murder (assuming she was murdered instantly) and the same Best Buy where Adnan and Hae would go to
have sex in a secluded parking lot where people would not see them, facts that could not have
been known to Jenn at the time. I don't know HOW we know Jenn couldn't have known that Jay's friend Adnan banged it out in the Best Buy parking lot on the regular, but we swear, she couldn't have known.
A good place to have sex, and a good place to commit a murder. I mean, we were giving you facts, we promised. And maybe opinions. But I have to pause here to say, Brett: I'm not buying my own bullshit. NEITHER of those things are true.
And Jenn didn’t remember the date all this happened nor that there was a damn blizzard the day after. but she remembered it was the
only day Adnan’s cell phone ever called her—January 13th. If the story was created by the police, then it was created for Jenn first and fed to her with her
lawyer and mother present they talked to Jay first, but the interview was not recorded.
It was manufactured with details that would eventually matched the cell
phone records they already had, ping evidence, evidence it’s unlikely the police even understood fully yet, because they kept having to re-do Jay's timeline with him later on. if at all, at the time
of this interview. But it was also manufactured with inconsistent details as well, even though the
police would have told both Jenn and Jay the story—that Hae was killed at the Best Buy, which
Jenn told police, but Jay omitted, and that Jay helped bury Hae, a fact Jay apparently lied to Jenn
about but was forthright with police about. If the police manufactured this story, why these key
inconsistencies? Could it be that it's hard to keep a story straight when it didn't happen? And finally, you’d have to believe Jenn’s lawyer and her mother allowed Jenn to
repeat this police-fabricated and fed story, even though it implicated her in covering up a murder.
To this day, Jenn has never said the police fed her the story of what happened that night. She
maintains that Jay told her the story, whether he made it up or not. This is not indicative of Adnan's guilt, but we're just saying. Jay certainly did "tell Jen the story." Then told her to talk to the cops, and send them back to Jay.
And this is the key. While much effort has been put into debunking Jay, Jenn was the first to be recorded during an interview. told the basic story
first. If this story was fabricated, if it was made up, we can't prove it wasn’t the police who did it. They didn’t
feed Jay the key pieces on tape. He’d already given them to Jenn by the time the police sat him down for a recorded interview.
Yes, Jay lies, and yes there are things he says that are inconsistent with what Jenn says. But the
major beats are all there, and most importantly of all, Jay took said he could take the police to the one piece of evidence
they desperately needed—Hae’s car. So, he told them he knew where it was, but the police never asked exactly where that location might be, at least not on tape.
Jay could only have known where Hae’s care was located in
one of four scenarios for multiple reasons. Here are a few:
He killed Hae and dumped it himself, which would seem to implicate
Adnan since they were together most of the day. He stumbled upon it innocently—which is
unlikely in of itself and even more unlikely that he would recognize this random sedan as Hae’s
vehicle. The police led him to it, which requires a multi-officer conspiracy and an apparent
willingness on law enforcement’s part to leave the most valuable piece of evidence they could
possibly have—Hae’s car—out in the elements and the middle of the city where it could be
stolen, vandalized, or just through the process of time and weather lose potential evidence. and
the police did so after they’d already fabricated the story because in that instance, they would have already seen the car and been able to tell there wasn't any evidence of value in it. apparently crossing their fingers that no
evidence in the car would make it abundantly clear to everyone that Adnan was not guilty and
someone else was responsible. But despite this thoroughgoing conspiracy, the police forgot to do
something as simple as plant damning evidence of Adnan’s involvement in the murder in the car.
Or the There's not a way to know the answer for certain—Jay knew where the car was because he had been told by the police or someone else/ or he drove or walked by it and did recognize it as Hae's. was with Adnan when they
dumped it.
When the police processed the car, they found a map book that Hae kept in the driver’s side door.
But it wasn’t in the door; it was in the back seat, open with the map page for Leakin Park torn
out. When it was moved to the backseat is unknown. When the page was ripped out is unknown. Adnan’s fingerprints were on that map book because he and Hae dated for the better part of a year and they rode around together.
But that’s not the only place his fingerprints
appeared. *Cue scary music: dun dun dun* On top of the map book, the one that ordinarily stayed in the front driver’s side and
shouldn’t have even been in the back seat, was what a property list described as a “rose and
baby’s breath wrapped.” We have a source here (#67) with a photo of the backseat, and a short list of the flowery thingy and a "mango drink."None of the other contents of the back seat are listed. Maybe there's a page 2. But, I checked, and we don't have a citation stating where we obtained this. And, actually Alice, the more I look at it the mapbook seems kinda, uh, big and cumbersome to have in the front driver's side pocket, and it's not bent... maybe she kept it in the backseat sometimes... I dunno.. huh huh... I'm Brett. (Read southernly.)
In the book, Adnan’s Story by Rabia Chaudrey Chaudry what the police found
is described as a “dried rose and baby’s breathe in a wrapper.” (Note: Rabia did not misspell "breath" as "breathe" in her book. Footnote 68. That was a Pros Pod typo. And I'll point out that though they've finally just barely learned to pronounce Rabia's last name, B&A misspelled "Chaudry" here.)
In addition to the rose, baby’s
breath, and floral paper, flower food, the kind sold with roses, was also in the back seat. At trial, a fingerprint analyst, Sharon Talmedge, testified about the floral paper. The trial
testimony reads, “Okay. Now, from its size and shape, does it not appear to be paper and tissue
that may have once surrounded flowers? A Yes. Q You can't tell from your examination if, in
fact, it did; could you? A There were a little bit of stems, flower stems, and things that were
inside there laying around it. Q That corroborated your impression that there were once flowers
in there, correct? A That's correct. Q But you couldn't tell from your examination what those
flowers were; could you? A No, they were dead.”70
And on this floral paper that once surrounded a single rose, found sitting on top of the misplaced map book? Adnan Syed’s fingerprints. We should add that while #71 is our footnote, the words "single rose" do not appear in this testimony transcript. But, anyway, Adnan once bought Hae a flower, and it's packaging was still in the backseat of her car. Boom!
Alice: That's a really great point, Brett.
The only way Jay could know where the car was located was if he was with Adnan when he
dropped it off, Jay killed Hae alone, or the police told him where the car was. If Jay killed Hae,
it’s hard to imagine how Adnan wasn’t involved somehow given how much they were together.
And Jay kinda sorta maybe knew where the car was, and to believe the police told him where it was, you’d have to believe that the police, for reasons
that are entirely unclear because in Balitmore they made a habit of it, decided to frame a brown boy named Adnan and use a black man from Baltimore with a
criminal record as their star witness, hoping against hope when they made this decision that
Adnan didn’t have a rock solid alibi, or that when they processed the car, definitive evidence of
the killer wouldn’t be present. They also had to hope and ensured that Jay would never break, not at the time
and not even after the case became famous and he had every incentive in the world to be the hero
who freed Adnan and pointed the finger at the corrupt police as the bad guys. because the cops told him their threats were far reaching and everlasting.
And you’d have to believe not only that. You’d have to believe an incredible number of
coincidences. Adnan Syed just so happened to activate his phone, the same phone he left with
Jay, the day before Hae disappeared. He just happened to forget the details of what was, to him, just a normal day. tell a friend that his car was in the
shop—a lie—and that he was going to ask Hae for a ride, on the day she and her car disappeared.
He just happened to tell a police officer that he’d asked Hae for a ride that morning but had
missed her after school, and then just so happened to deny that statement for the rest of time.
After Jay told her the story that the police had helped him come up with, Jenn didn't just so happen to say that the murder was committed at Best Buy, the same Best Buy
where Adnan and Hae had sex after school before she’d go pick up her cousins. Jenn didn't just so
happen to mention Jay dropping Adnan at practice, the same practice that started at around or before 4 oclock,
the same time Adnan’s phone (which Jay had) pinged off the Woodlawn tower when Jay called one of his friends who did, it just so happens, live nearby.
The Nisha call was a butt dial. just so happened to occur at the exact time in the exact place where it would need
to have occurred if Jay’s story was true.
Adnan’s cell phone just so happened to ping all over town, during the day when Jay had his car and phone and in the evening when the two were together. over the
murder site, the original car dump site, the burial site, and the final car dump site, at exactly the
times you would expect it to if Jay’s story were true. Jay just so happened to know where Hae’s
car was, presumably because the police told him where it was, and that location just so happened
to lined up with the cell phone pings because we're not talking about a ton of square miles, here. and the rest of the story we’ve described above.
And when
the car was opened, in the back seat was a mapbook that shouldn’t be there with a rose and on top of it, some old stems from an old flower, wrapped
in settled deep inside a cone shaped floral paper thingy - on top of it, the mapbook that is, and Both of these items that Adnan Syed had touched before - WAIT FOR IT - had Adnan's fingerprints on them! just so happened to have Adnan’s fingerprints on them.
What a coincidence.
But no one ever ran the prints on her rearview mirror. What a coincidence.