WHY would a smart and popular student strangle his ex-girlfriend to death and then bury her in a shallow grave in a park?
That was the question asked by a true crime podcast that has now led to the murder conviction of 41-year-old Adnan Syed being overturned.
Adnan Syed was released from prison this week[/caption]
Adnan, from Baltimore in Maryland, has spent 23 years in prison after a jury found him responsible for the death of his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend high school classmate Hae Min Lee a year earlier.
But crucially, evidence that two other people were suspects in the case was kept from the jurors – a hole highlighted by the podcast called Serial.
One had a conviction for attacking a woman and the other was a serial rapist.
A judge in Baltimore vacated the conviction ”in the interests of justice and fairness” mainly because the prosecutors hadn’t shared that information.
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Syed will now be released from prison and placed on home detention.
The 12 part podcast, which started in 2014 and has been downloaded 340 million times, provides plenty of other signs that it was a shaky case.
Adnan always maintained his innocence, and by paying nearly £9,000 to get hold of the evidence box, his family was able to unpick it.
Hae Min’s family, though, didn’t want Adnan to go free.
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The victim’s brother Young Lee opposed the judge’s decision, saying “This is not a podcast for me. This is real life – a never-ending nightmare for 20-plus years. It’s killing me and killing my mother.”
The judge has ordered a new trial which means that Adnan’s innocence is yet to be decided. Here we examine the key unanswered questions that remain.
Who are the other suspects?
So far the other two men linked to Hae Min’s murder have not been named.
What we do know is that detectives felt that both of them had a ”motive and/or propensity to commit this crime”.
While investigating the case, prosecutors found a court document that showed an interview with one of the suspects.
A witness allegedly saw one of them threaten to ”kill” Hae Min.
One suspect was convicted of attacking a woman and the other had convictions involving serial rape and sexual assault.
It was also noted that the defence was not given the information that Lee’s car was found in a grassy area behind one of the suspects’ houses.
The suspects were ”known persons at the time of the investigation” and never ruled out by the cops. So, who are they, and could they be connected to the crime?
Is the key prosecution witness reliable?
Jay Wilds claimed that Adnan asked him to help bury Hae Min’s body[/caption]
The case against Adnan largely relied upon the testimony of his pal Jay Wilds.
Jay told the police that he had helped Adnan to bury Hae Min in Leakin Park in West Baltimore after his friend turned up with her body in the boot of a car.
The Serial podcast raises questions about the veracity of these statements.
Self-confessed drug dealer Jay was a co-defendant who was at risk of spending time in jail.
The podcast asks whether he might have been motivated by a reward which was on offer.
But it hasn’t been proven that the chief prosecution witness did receive any money from the police and Jay maintained his version of events in a 2014 interview.
Was data dodgy?
Another central plank of the prosecution case is that data from a mobile phone tower placed Adnan in the park when Jay claimed that Hae Min’s body was disposed of.
But Adnan’s appeal lawyers insist that this information cannot be relied upon.
It was one of the points the judge looked at when considering whether to quash the murder conviction.
Journalist Sarah Koenig said at the start of her first Serial podcast: “For the last year I’ve spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999.”
The timeline of events is important because Adnan did not appear to have an alibi.
Was there a payphone?
Hae Min’s body was discovered in a shallow grave in Leakin Park in 1999[/caption]
Jay told detectives that Adnan called him from a pay phone in a Best Buy shop car park in Baltimore to ask for a lift shortly after strangling Hae Min.
The problem with this is that Koenig, who hosts Serial, couldn’t find a public telephone box there.
And there is no evidence that one ever existed.
This saw fans of the podcast flock to the Best Buy to see for themselves.
Jealous lover?
Adnan had an on-off relationship with Hae Min when they were students at Woodlawn High School, which ended in December 1998.
The prosecution case was that he strangled her in a fit of rage after learning that she was seeing another man.
In an interview in 2014, Jay alleged that Adnan had talked about killing Hae Min for dating someone else.
He said: “I just thought he was just shooting off like everyone else shoots off when they’re mad at their girlfriend.”
But Adnan, 17 at the time of the murder, has been described as a highly intelligent student and part time paramedic, who was voted the “most popular” at school dances.
What does the tapping mean?
The Serial podcast examined strange tapping noises heard on the interview when the police interviewed Jay about the murder.
It intimates that whenever Jay was unsure about exact details, such as dates and times, the officers provided a signal to help him find an answer which would help incriminate Adnan.
That is a very serious allegation and one that has not been proven.
Were detectives racist?
One of the key questions is why would any police officer try to pin the blame on Adnan?
The most obvious answer is that detectives can sometimes go for the most obvious suspect, which is an ex-boyfriend.
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Digital sleuths following the case, though, have suggested Adnan’s Muslim background was a factor.
But if the cops really were racist why would they believe Jay, who was a black drug dealer, over Adnan?
