As I said in my theory of the case as outlined in my now-revised post, the root cause of Hae Min Lee’s murder was her obsession with Don Clinedinst. To say this is not to blame the victim, but it is to explain her. Had she only flirted with him and hinted that she’d like to go out with him but never gone any further, I firmly believe that she would not have been murdered on Jan. 13, 1999. And Adnan Syed would never have served over 20 years in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit.
Don’t believe that Hae was obsessed with Don? You can read excerpts from her diary that make the case, but the following two brief examples are very clear about her feelings for him. First, her AOL profile, undated but probably after Jan 1, 1999, since that was their first date:
Interests: Movies, Phone, Partying, TV, Music and most importantly Don*. Likes:* Looking into his blue eyes, fast cars like his Camaro*, driving to BelAir, [Don did indeed own a Camaro and lived in BelAir, Maryland.] Selling glasses and her beauty [no one’s sure what “her beauty” means—probably a typo], spending as much time as possible in the lab. [almost certainly referring to the lab at LensCrafters where Don worked, not the science lab at school.] Occupation: Part-time sales,* Full-time Girlfriend. “I love you and I miss you Donnie. [emphasis mine]
Secondly, the “Hi Cutie” note that was found in Hae’s car after her death, often referred to as the “Don note.” Here it is in its entirety:
Hi Cutie, Sorry I couldn’t stay. I have to go to a wrestling match at Randallstown High. But I promise to page you as soon as I get home, by 7. [Or a question mark—it’s not clear in the screenshot of the note.] Till then, take care, and drive safely! Always, Hae. P.S. The interview went well. I promise to tape it so you can see me as many and as often as you want.
I’ve never seen an analysis of the full implications found in this brief note. Here’s what we can learn from the note itself:
- Hae didn’t give Don this note since it was still in her car, so we can assume that she saw him in person instead.
- “Sorry I couldn’t stay” implies that she’d waited for him as long as she thought she safely could before getting on the road to the wrestling match. So there seems to have been some kind of meeting set up and Don didn’t show up on time. She was probably/possibly going to leave the note on his car.
- Paging was their usual communication method.
- Hae was nervous about Don’s driving. (Probably irrelevant, but could add to an irritation factor in their relationship, as any 22-year-old guy with a fast car would resent being told how to drive. I’ve always thought this little admonition was more motherly than romantic.)
- Hae wanted Don to see her in a taped interview, probably hoping to impress him, certainly hoping that he’d watch and re-watch it. In other words, she wanted him to have the same level of obsession with her as she had with him. Kind of an obvious point, I guess, but it shows that she doesn’t understand he’s not that into her. She has to be talking about the clip of her being interviewed as student athlete of the month (or week—there seems to be some confusion about which it was, or if indeed there were two such interviews.) We have only one available today, in which she’s being interviewed and running around the gym floor with a lacrosse stick.
How does this note fit into the overall story? I think it’s very revealing as an indication of patterns in the Hae/Don relationship. But before I get to those aspects, let me set this note into the timeline of events leading to Hae’s murder on Jan. 13.
For one thing, this undated note was not written on Jan. 13, the day of the murder, because there was no wrestling match at Randallstown High School on that date. For a long time it was just assumed that this was a note Hae was never able to give to Don because she was murdered before being able to do so and that her death was, ipso facto, also the reason why she never showed up for the meet. That version of the story can’t have happened, though, because the wrestling match took place on Jan. 5. Some enterprising people (I believe listeners to Bob Ruff’s podcast) decided to confirm the date of the wrestling match and went back through old newspaper records of high-school athletic events. The evidence was clear: there was no wrestling match at Randallstown on Jan. 13, but there was one on Jan. 5.
So when a girl named Summer, a classmate of Hae’s, came forward during Serial to report that Hae was supposed to show up for the wrestling match and never did so, she was talking about events of the week before Hae’s murder. Sarah Koenig didn’t know this, though, as the volunteer fact-checkers hadn’t yet done their work. (Maybe her own fact-checkers should have done so, but it’s clear that the call from Summer came in while the podcast was being produced and was very much shoehorned in.) Summer described a conversation with Hae while the two girls were standing in the gym and the wrestling team was getting its gear together to load onto the bus. Hae was a student scorer for the team and was training Summer. (Wrestling match scoring is very tricky, by the way—the scorer has to be down on the floor on his/her hands and knees, head sideways to the ground to peer under the wrestlers’ bodies at the floor, as a “pin” occurs when both shoulders of a wrestler touch the floor at the same time. It all happens very fast and would be totally confusing for someone inexperienced. The scorer must react very quickly, slapping the floor at each pin.) According to Summer, Hae told her that she wasn’t going to go on the bus but instead would drive directly to Randallstown in her own car. Hae mentioned that she had to pick up her cousin, but a quick look at a map shows her real reason for taking her car: the Owings Mills Mall where she and Don worked was very close to Randallstown. Hae could zip up the highway to the mall in about 15 minutes, see Don, and then get to Randallstown in less than 10 minutes from there. The bus was scheduled to leave the school at 3:45, and the meet itself was due to start at 4:30. So Hae would have had plenty of time to go pick up her cousin at the daycare center and take her home, a matter of about 20 minutes, and then get to the mall. She could have been there as early as 3:30.
But what happened? Don didn’t show up when he was supposed to, so she waited by his car for awhile. I have a vivid picture in my mind of this pretty girl, standing in the cold, waiting and hoping for a guy to show up who’s not really all that interested in her. Finally she decided that he wasn’t coming and jotted down the note, probably intending to stick it under his windshield wiper. And then, just as she was about to give up and leave, there he was! And somehow she never made it to the wrestling match. I’m assuming that Don was on break from work and couldn’t stay outside long, so Hae must have ended up going back into the mall with him and staying well past the time when she was supposed to be at the meet. Perhaps she sat nursing a Coke at a table out in the mall aisle outside the LensCrafters store just so she could catch glimpses of him. Or perhaps since she was an employee of LC she was allowed to follow Don back into the lab where he worked, to keep him company. There’s no way to know exactly how this all played out.
But because everyone, including Summer, assumed that Hae missed the match because of her murder, there was no followup on this story. Summer originally contacted Sarah Koenig when she heard about the postulated 2:36 murder time at the Best Buy parking lot. She thought this timing had to be wrong, since she had a clear memory of talking to Hae at school around that time; Hae couldn’t have been in two places at once. It would have been so helpful to know whether or not Summer confronted Hae the next day at school and demanded to know why she’d left her in the lurch. It’s also such a testament to the fallibility of human memory that Summer is absolutely certain that the wrestling match happened on Jan. 13. I went back and listened to that segment as I was writing this, and the conviction in Summer’s voice is completely genuine.
So the note isn’t germane to the day of the murder, but it tells us quite a bit about the Hae-and-Don relationship. The biggest piece of information has to do with how far Hae was willing to go in pursuing Don, even to the point of neglecting her commitment to show up at the wrestling match. Many sources say that Hae was known for her hard work and dependability. She was in the magnet program at Woodlawn High and had a 3.8 GPA. She played field hocky and lacrosse. She managed the boys’ wrestling team. And she had her part-time job at LensCrafters. When the interviewer asks her in the short clip we have, “That’s a lot to do. Do you have time to have a job?” she replies, “Yeah, I try to manage my school work and my after-school work.” And we know that she had never missed picking up her little cousin at the daycare center until the day of her death; it was because such a failure was so unprecedented that the Lee family contacted the police that same afternoon.
The other important fact about Hae and Don’s relationship is, as I mentioned in the listing above, that they used pagers to contact each other. Remember that Hae’s pager was not found with her body or in her car and indeed was never found, a fact strongly hinting that it had information on it that would identify the murderer and therefore had been taken by that person. Colin Miller of the Undisclosed podcast says that Hae was probably paged by someone on the 13th, and that person, whoever he or she was, murdered her. Her pager records were never pulled. No one at school would have had any reason to page her since they could talk to her in person.
Because Don, the intended reader of the note, was never questioned much by the police, and because there was such confusion about when the note was written, these important points were overlooked. Had they realized the significance of the note, the police could have asked Don:
Did you see Hae on the day this note was written?
How often did you and she page each other?
Did you page her or get a page from her on the day she disappeared?
Did you and she have a usual meeting place? Is that where she was when she wrote that she “couldn’t stay”?
May we see your pager? We will subpoena your records anyway if you refuse to give us access.
Etc., etc., etc.
But they didn’t ask any of those questions.
There’s so much insight to be gained from this one short scribbled note. If Hae did get a page from Don on Jan. 13th, it makes perfect sense that she’d have been in a hurry to meet him and would have been quite willing to tell Adnan that she couldn’t, after all, give him a ride. Nothing, but nothing, could be allowed to interfere with her being able to look into Don’s blue eyes once again.
And, if my theory is correct, it was indeed only once again.