My Modest Attempt to Present a Possible Solution to the Murder of Hae Min Lee–Revised and Updated

Adnan Syed was released from prison in September 2022 after serving 23 years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee; the release came about because there were two “alternative suspects” in the prosecution files. The specific statements about their potential guilt had not been turned over to Adnan’s defense, thus constituting a Brady violation. Because of this violation, the Baltimore prosecutor’s office felt that there was enough doubt about the verdict that Adnan should be freed. At first the suspects’ names were withheld from the public, and those who knew their identities were asked not to divulge them or even offer speculation. But now the names are known to the general public, as was, of course, inevitable. One, Alonzo Sellers, is discussed in the material below; the other, Bilal Ahmed, has not been on my radar at all. Bilal is the man who co-signed Adnan’s contract for his infamous cell phone and who met with Adnan on the evening of 1/13/99 to go over the Ramadan prayers that would be led at the mosque on the night of Jan 14, the day after Hae disappeared. Bilal is now in prison for sexual assault and is probably the one who said he was going to “make Hae disappear.” I’m highly dubious, though, that he actually was involved in her murder, as I don’t see how he could have waylaid and killed her between the time she left school on 1/13/99 and the time she was supposed to pick up her little cousin. As is outlined below and has been said in many other theories, someone almost certainly contacted Hae via her pager on that afternoon and lured her to her death. Could/would Bilal have known Hae’s pager number? Seems doubtful to me. Was he following her around on the off chance that he’d have a chance to kill her? Again, doubtful.

So with that said, here’s my theory of the murder of Hae Min Lee in January 1999: That there are two completely separate narratives, one of her actual murder and one totally unrelated to that murder and having to do with Hae Min Lee’s ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed and his friend Jay Wilds. Since the first lead in the case pointed to that second narrative, the real murder story was never investigated much at all. In this completely self-indulgent material (who asked me, after all?), I’m presenting the narrative of what seems to be the actual sequence of events. All of these ideas are based on known facts, but they’re my ideas, my theories. Take them for what they’re worth! I assume, by the way, that anyone bothering to read this long post is well acquainted with the case, so I don’t include a lot of backstory here.

I’ve been obsessed with the case of Hae Min Lee’s murder for years, have listened to the original Serial podcast multiple times, gone on to the Undisclosed podcast and the Serial Dynasty (now Truth and Justice) podcast and the Crime Writers on Serial podcast and who knows what else, and I’ve done Google maps searches and the whole nine yards. Oh, and I’ve also listened to Rabia Chaudry’s book, Adnan’s Story, twice. I’ve also watched the HBO 4-part documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed, which is quite well made. There’s a bombshell in the documentary that I’ll get to in a bit.

All of the above has led me to my own theory based on information contained in those sources. I have felt for a long time that there were some ideas that had never been given much weight and that were important to the case, but I felt no particular need to publicize my views. Surely everyone had already thought of every possible angle, right? But now I’m not so sure. I’ve never seen the theory I present below of why Hae’s then-current boyfriend, Don, could have/might have wanted to kill her and who was involved in helping him cover it up.

So let me lay out my theory of what could have happened, with an emphasis on the word “could.”  I start with Hae’s relationship to Don Clinedinst, who was 22 years old in the fall of 1998 and working at a LensCrafters out of the Owings Mills Mall (now closed). Hae got a job there too and immediately fell for him. Her diary is explicit about this, but more to my point is that she was clearly the aggressor/initiator. Co-workers at LensCrafters report that she would repeatedly say to Don “You should date me.” She would follow him into the break room to talk to him. Finally they had their first date, on Jan. 1, 1999, at an Italian restaurant about 40 miles away from the mall. Why did they go to such a faraway place? No clue. Somewhere in the recent spate of information I’ve taken or re-taken in there’s a mention of Hae’s going by the store on a day when she wasn’t scheduled to work (perhaps she was picking up her paycheck), and she talked to Don then. As a result of that conversation the two of them made plans for that Italian dinner. It seems pretty clear that the date was her idea. And there’s only one other mention of their going out together, to a movie, a double date with Hae’s best friend Aisha Pittman and her boyfriend. Other than that, their “dates” consisted of Hae’s going over to Don’s house, in particular after her evening shifts at LensCrafters. Don’s parents were divorced and he lived with his father, so there weren’t a lot of prying eyes. Then Hae would go home and fight with her mother over breaking curfew. But she was 18 by then and her mom couldn’t do much.

Here’s where a vital piece of information comes in: Hae apparently told one of her teachers that she wanted to move in with Don. I refuse to go back and try to find that teacher’s name, as it was very much a passing comment that was never followed up. I do know that it wasn’t Hope Schaub, the French teacher who was very close to Hae, and it wasn’t Inez Butler, the PE teacher who said she saw Hae drive off from school on the day of the murder. It’s a teacher who doesn’t figure prominently in the story at all. I think the teacher said this when the police came to Woodlawn High School to interview people who knew Hae—and by that time Adnan.

On the day of the murder, January 13^th, we have the infamous “Adnan asked Hae for a ride/first she said yes and then she said no” hoop-de-do. If you’re like me and have been trying to parse out every single detail in this case, you’ve probably wondered about the purpose of this ride request. Was Hae going to take Adnan home to change clothes or something, and then drive him back? That seems like a big ask, and there’s a locker room right there at the school for changing and even showering. The true purpose of the ride request can be found in a discussion with Colin Miller, I believe in one of those bonus Undisclosed episodes. It seemed to be a usual thing for Adnan to get a ride after school from friends, including Hae, down to the track field, since it was a ways from the school and there was no parking there. Rather than having to hoick all the way down there and back, before and after an arduous track practice, he’d get someone to drop him off so he was at least spared one hoick. It’s telling, by the way, that Hae was in such a hurry that she didn’t even want to take the small amount of time for that small detour to drop Adnan off. She was on a mission.

But of course, even if there had been parking at the field, Adnan wouldn’t have been able to use his own car because, as all the world now knows, he’d lent it to Jay Wilds, a somewhat-shady guy who’d graduated from Woodlawn the year before. Jay is . . . a problem. He’s seen as the key to the whole story, the guy whose testimony, along with the cell phone data from Adnan’s phone, put Adnan away for life plus 30 years. Adnan had apparently loaned his car to Jay so that Jay could buy his (that is, Jay’s) girlfriend Stephanie a birthday present. And if you find that statement to be puzzling, well, I don’t. I’m 70 years old as I write this and I still have vivid memories of what it’s like to be a teenager. Plus, I taught high school for a number of years. It makes perfect sense to me that Adnan had had this somewhat-flirty relationship with Stephanie for years, even as he’d dated Hae and had now moved on to other girls. I think he felt sorry for Stephanie, to be honest, and protective of her. She was this beautiful, beautiful girl, smart, athletic, and on her way to a successful post-high-school life, and yet she’d fallen in love with Jay Wilds in junior high and couldn’t seem to get over him. We know that Adnan had bought Stephanie a birthday present himself, a stuffed reindeer, and that he’d left it on her desk for her first class. But he was worried that Jay hadn’t bought her anything. And Jay didn’t have a car. Would he like to borrow Adnan’s, and go shopping during the day to get Stephanie something? Nudge, nudge. It’s not at all clear, by the way, that Jay ever did actually get Stephanie a present. (Susan Simpson of the Undisclosed podcast speculates that Adnan’s motives for lending the car to Jay may not have been completely unselfish, as Jay was his small-time pot supplier. This car loan may have happened before in connection with Jay’s dealing and the Stephanie shopping may have been a secondary reason on this particular day.)

Here’s what seems to have happened on the 13^th: Since he was part of an observant Muslim family, Adnan was fasting for the month of Ramadan, which meant no food or (sometimes, depending on how strict you are) drink, including water. He was still required to go to track practice, but the coach made allowances for Ramadan observances and didn’t require lap running for those involved. Instead he had them do some light stuff such as stretching and slow jogging. For the first part of the month track practice had been indoors because it was cold, but it was moved back to the outside track on the 13th because the weather was going to be up in the 50’s. (There’s been a whole chain of reasoning about that outside practice, with people going back and looking at weather reports for the relevant days, and Jan. 13 is the only day during Ramadan that fits this scenario.) Adnan found out that morning that track practice was going to be outdoors and that therefore he’d have to get all the way back there instead of just going to the gym for indoor practice. Bummer! He saw Hae sometime in the morning and asked, “Can you give me a ride after school to the track?” and she said yes. But then, later on, sometime after lunch, she told him that something had come up and she couldn’t give him a ride after all. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll just get a ride with somebody else.” Did he ever get that ride? No clue. No one’s ever come forward and said, “Oh, by the way, I gave Adnan a ride to the track that day.” It sure would be helpful if we could find that person! In any event, the track coach Michael Sye couldn’t say under oath that Adnan was at track on the 13^th, and Adnan’s incompetent lawyer never did the necessary research to nail him down. Sye did have a clear memory, though, of talking to Adnan during Ramadan on a day when track practice took place outdoors, and for the reasons listed above that day has to be the 13^th. It’s a huge missed opportunity to give Adnan an alibi. (Another big missed opportunity, of course, is Adnan’s conversation with Asia McClain at the library right after school, yet another incompetent-lawyer incident.)

So what had come up for Hae that made her say that she couldn’t give Adnan a ride? Colin Miller of the Undisclosed podcast says the most likely answer is that she got a page from someone, and it would almost have to be someone who wasn’t at school. Since her pager was never found and the police never checked her pager account, we’ll never know for sure who that was. But the most likely person who would have paged her was, of course, Don. (Be sure to read the post I wrote about the “Don note” and its implications, including the very relevant fact that they communicated with each other via pager.)

Here’s where we circle back to this whole Hae-as-aggressor idea. By the way, before I go on, let me be clear that I’m not doing victim-blaming here. It’s not Hae’s fault that someone murdered her! (I shouldn’t have to say that.) But it’s a principle of law enforcement and crime analysis that you have to understand the victim if you’re going to understand the crime. So it has to be said that Hae had already prodded Don into going out with her. She’d been going over to his house, perhaps without his enthusiastic consent. We have no idea what did or did not happen between them on those occasions. But we do know, and this is from Don himself, that she had come over to his house after her shift ended at LensCrafters on the night of the 12^th, left about 10:00, and then called him when she got home at around 10:30 and talked to him until around 3:00 AM. (When did these people ever sleep?) And what were they talking about? Don’t you think it was mostly Hae making the case for the her moving in? I think that’s entirely possible. And she was planning to come over again that evening, after her 6:00-10:00 shift, another piece of info from Don. Did she push and push and push? Did she say that she’d start bringing over her things that night? We’ll never know, but something along that line seems possible. And Don absolutely did not want this. He’d been willing to go out with her a couple of times, and maybe make out on the couch in front of the TV when she came over, but he was not in the market for a live-in girlfriend. ‘Good grief!’ he may have thought. ‘Who does she think she is?’

Now we get to January 13, the day of the murder. Keep in mind that there are two absolutely immovable time limits that must be adhered to on this day. The first one is that the murder, or at least the restraint/kidnapping/rendering helpless action, must occur between Hae’s departure from school, 2:20-2:25 PM, and 3:15 PM, which is when she needed to be at the Camptown Early Learning Center to pick up her little cousin. (Side note: the daycare center actually closed at 3:00; 3:15 was the end of the grace period after which the parents who failed to meet the deadline would be charged extra.) So we have less than an hour in which the murder must have occurred.

Back to Don. It makes sense that he would decide to pre-empt her visit to his house that night and get her to meet him somewhere before she picked up her cousin at the daycare center. Hae told her friend Debbie that she was in a hurry because she had to “meet Don at the mall.” Debbie’s testimony changed before the trial, by the way, but the first witness testimony is usually the most accurate. It makes sense that Don would do what’s recommended if you’re going to have a difficult conversation with someone, especially if you’re breaking off a romantic relationship: control the location and the timing. Give yourself an out. So he paged her, saying something like “meet me at our special space after school,” or whatever message he could convey with a pager. There’s a reference somewhere from fellow employees that Hae and Don would go sit out in his car during breaks once they’d started dating, so maybe there was a little secluded spot in the parking lot. She was only going to have 10-15 minutes since she had to get to the daycare center no later than 3:15, so he knew he could keep it short and sweet. He also knew that she’d assume he was so eager to see her that he just couldn’t wait until after she got off work, and she’d therefore make every effort to get there. So she showed up, all glowing with anticipation, perhaps thinking that he was going to say something like, “Hey, I wanted to see you before you went home because I want you to move in tonight. Pack your suitcase.” The capacity of someone under the spell of an intense crush to believe the most unlikely things is boundless; I speak from experience here. He got into her car. He said his piece: “I’m sorry, but this just isn’t going to work. You’re a nice girl, and I like you, but I just don’t have the same feelings for you that you have for me. So no, you can’t move into my house. And I think we’d better just break things off.”

And now this hypothetical scene becomes very ugly. I can imagine that she got really mad, maybe started screaming at him and/or slapped him. And he lashed out, hitting her on the head with his fist. (This is borne out by the medical evidence—she had blunt force trauma to the right side of her head.) Maybe she then smashed back against the door–she had several blunt force injuries. Did she stare at him uncomprehendingly and then open her mouth to scream again? Very likely. And he lost it even more than he already had, panicking that she’d report his assault or that someone would hear her, and strangled her. Suddenly he there he was, sitting in his girlfriend’s car with her dead body in the driver’s seat. What had he done? And what was he going to do now? (Note: there’s an absolutely chilling scene in Rabia’s book where she quotes from an e-mail she received from a psychic that matches the strangling part of the scenario above almost exactly. I don’t believe in psychics, and I didn’t come up with my theory because of the scene in the book. But man! Is it ever weird!)

At this point we bump up against the second immovable time limit: the formation of livor mortis, or post-mortem lividity, caused by the settling of the blood in the body once the heart is no longer pumping. This post-mortem change in the body can begin as soon as 20-30 minutes after death but can shift somewhat if the body is moved around during the 2 hours or so after that. Within 8-12 hours, though, the lividity becomes “fixed,” since the blood has coagulated in place. Hae’s body showed “fixed frontal lividity” when it was found, but that lividity didn’t match its position: her body was on its side. So she was somewhere flat and facedown during the hours immediately after her death. Where on earth was she? Here’s where the casually-dropped bombshell from the HBO documentary comes in. One of the big puzzles about Hae’s body in connection with the post-mortem lividity has always been that there are some very clear markings on her shoulders of a strange double-diamond shape. They’re quite distinct. People have come up with all kinds of weird theories about these markings, but none of them really makes sense. One that I remember speculated that she’d been face down on a mattress with diamond-shaped quilting. But that won’t work at all. The pattern wouldn’t be that distinct, and it wouldn’t be isolated to a couple of places.  It has to be something hard, with sharp edges, and it has to have individual pieces. So what on earth was it?

In the finale of the documentary there’s a scene with two private investigators discussing these markings, and they say, quite matter of factly, that these are the marks of something called a “concrete shoe.” They’re little gadgets or tools or widgets or whatever you want to call them that are used in concrete work, specifically in grinding, and they’re made of metal. The diamond shapes stick up distinctly. And then the men say, “Alonzo Sellers had worked in concrete for many years.” Say what? This has been known all this time and no one’s been publicizing it? I was completely flummoxed here. Alonzo Sellers, the man who reported his discovery of Hae’s body, whose story about said discovery is very, very strange, and who failed a polygraph test about her murder, was connected to the very items that probably caused the markings on the body?

Okay, deep breath. When I first heard this startling bit of news I assumed that somehow Hae’s body had ended up facedown in the bed of Sellers’ pickup truck (yes, he owned one), that there had been a couple of unnoticed concrete shoes lying there, perhaps under a tarp, and that Hae’s body had come to rest with her shoulder on top of them. But then I realized that I was overcomplicating matters quite a bit.The simplest explanation for how Hae’s body ended up the way it did is that Don’s father helped Don hide and dispose of it. As we’ll see below, Don’s mother almost certainly helped fabricate an alibi for him by constructing fake time cards. Why wouldn’t the dad pitch in, too? I’d postulate that Don simply drove Hae’s car to his own and his father’s house, parked it in the garage, and said, “Dad, you have to help me.” And so the first steps took place in the elaborate body disposal scheme they cooked up. They couldn’t leave Hae’s body in her car and drive it somewhere, as they had to know that there would be alerts out once Hae hadn’t shown up at the daycare center. So they moved Hae’s body to Don’s father’s pickup truck, placing her flat on her face and covering her up with a tarp. If Don’s father knew Alonzo Sellers, maybe that acquaintanceship came from shared employment. In that case, the concrete shoes were in the bed of Mr. Clinedinst’s truck.

When the police initially tried to contact Don by phone on the 13th at around 7:30 PM they were unable to do so. My memory of this failed attempt is that they initially called LensCrafters and that LC called Don’s home and left a message that the police wanted to talk to him about Hae. The conversation finally took place at 1:30 AM on the morning of Jan. 14, and there’s no indication as far as I can tell that the police asked Don if he was worried about Hae and wondered why she hadn’t shown up at his house after her shift ended at 10:00. He says some very strange things in this phone interview, notably that Hae had been talking about moving back to California to live with her stepfather (about whom nothing is known) and that she might have flown from the Baltimore airport and left her car there in long-term parking. Say, like, what? These ideas are totally nonsensical. Why would Hae move to California when she’s well into her last semester of high school? Why would she leave her car at the airport if she wasn’t coming back? Etc., etc., etc. These ideas from Don have a strong whiff of someone in a panic making it up as he goes along.

Now we come to Don’s almost-certainly-falsified time sheets for Jan. 13 and Jan. 16. As everyone reading this material almost certainly knows, the great and awesome Susan Simpson of the Undisclosed podcast discovered that there was something very fishy about Don’s alibi for the 13^th. These ideas were more fully developed by Bob Ruff on the Serial Dynasty podcast and website. Don had said he was working that day and so couldn’t have met up with Hae; he had been “loaned out” to work a shift at another LensCrafters store located in the Hunt Valley mall. The police checked on this story and were told by the manager at Owings Mills that yes, indeed, that was true. They also requested copies of his time sheets and received those; they’re in the police files. But the sheets for the 13^th, the day Hae disappeared, and for the 16^th, the Saturday after the murder, show Don under a slightly different name and with a different employee number from his usual one. And the manager at the Hunt Valley store was Don’s mother. Furthermore, the manager at the Owings Mills mall, the one who confirmed Don’s shift at the other store, was actually living with Don’s mother at the time; the two women later married once same-sex marriage was legalized in Maryland. So . . . the implications are pretty clear. Don’s time needed to be accounted for, and his mother and mother’s girlfriend obliged. Once he seemed to have an alibi, the police dropped him from the list of suspects. He did testify at trial but said nothing much of note, and his alibi was not questioned.

On Saturday, then, when Don’s timesheet gives him another alibi, I postulate that Hae’s body was dumped in Leakin Park; she was not “buried” in any true sense of the word. Her body was shoved into a shallow natural depression underneath a huge fallen tree that’s located about 40 yards from the main road that runs through the park. Given the description of how densely wooded the place is and also of Hae’s height and weight (130-140 pounds, 5’6’ to 5’8”), it seems fair to say that two people would have been needed to maneuver her there. There’s no path to that point. (Later, after dozens of people had visited the spot, there was indeed a path.) They—Don and his father, I’m assuming—kept pushing into the trees and underbrush looking for a reasonable spot and came upon this natural hiding place. ‘Good enough,’ they thought, and that was that. Some leaves and dirt were scattered over her, along with some rocks to weigh the body down and keep it from being dragged off by animals. Maybe she’d never be discovered.

And it’s very possible that she wouldn’t have been, except that someone, almost certainly Don, found it impossible to keep quiet. He kept seeing news reports and hearing the pleas from Hae’s family for anyone who knew anything to come forward. Maybe he thought that it wouldn’t hurt to report where the body was and at least let her family know for sure that she was dead. But he of course couldn’t “discover” the body himself.  So . . . and here we’re veering into rank speculation . . . maybe Sellers owed Don’s dad a favor and he called it in, framing it as no big deal. All (all) Sellers would have to do is to come up with a plausible reason for being back in the woods and stumbling across Hae’s body. Then Sellers could call the police and report it. Let’s see: what could that “plausible reason” be? How about if Sellers had been answering a sudden call of nature? His story was given some thin veneer of credibility in that he worked as a maintenance man at a college on the north edge of Leakin Park and lived on the south edge, so cutting through the park that way made sense. But what reason did he have for going home during the day? Um, he needed . . . a tool of some sort, one that they didn’t have at the college? Sure, why not? The dad must have taken Sellers to the site so that he could report the body’s location accurately.

Here’s what Sellers might have done: He left the college around lunchtime on February 9 and went home via Franklintown Road. He either did or did not get the tool he’d said he needed. He also grabbed a 22-ounce can of beer and took it with him, to add, as Pooh-Bah says in The Mikado, “verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” He probably thought that if he could say he’d gulped down lots of beer it would seem natural that he suddenly needed to urinate, even though he was only five minutes away from his job at a college campus that had lots of bathrooms.  After he (probably) checked that the body was still there, he went back to the campus, told his supervisor about his gruesome discovery, and called the police. They came out and he went with them to the body. And that was it, he and the Clinedinsts must have thought. Whew! Now they could quit worrying about the whole thing.

But Sellers wasn’t out of the woods, not by a long shot. The police seemed to think that his story was very odd, as well they might since it was totally nonsensical. He ended up being given two polygraph tests, the first of which he understandably failed since he was lying through his teeth, the second of which he passed but which asked very different questions, and he had to testify at Adnan’s trial. For quite a while afterward he was identified only as “Mr. S.” It wasn’t until Rabia Chaudry’s book that both he and Don were identified with their first and last names.

So that’s the first narrative that I mentioned at the beginning of this article: the actual murder and placing of the body in Leakin Park. Where did that second narrative, the one about Adnan Syed as the murderer, come from? For the answer to that question we have to look no further than the anonymous phone call placed on February 12 to the police tip line, saying that they should “take a look at the ex-boyfriend.” (Details about this phone call are extremely murky; I’m going with the simplest narration I’m aware of.) The description of the call in police records says that it was from “a young Asian male, aged 18-21 years.” Huh. I never knew that you could pinpoint someone’s age that closely just by the sound of his voice on a very brief phone call. And there’s no explanation of what “Asian” means. We assume the term refers to the caller’s accent, but what accent specifically? Does it mean Far East Asian, such as Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean? Or does it mean more Middle Eastern, including Pakistan or India? Or Near East, including Israel? We just don’t know.

What we do know is that Hae’s family hadn’t moved to the US from Korea until 1992, and that her mother had never learned English very well. Hae was 12 at the time of the move; how old was her mother? More importantly, how old was her uncle, the other adult male in the household, who must have been her mother’s brother and who, we assume, had immigrated with his sister and her kids? All we know is that he was old enough to have a 6-year-old child, the one whom Hae picked up every day after school. His last name is “Kim.” He and Hae’s mother were very much opposed to her dating Adnan. They were Korean Roman Catholics; Adnan was a Pakistani Muslim. (That’s how they saw him anyway. Adnan had actually been born in the US; his parents were naturalized US citizens from Pakistan.)

Hae’s brother, Young Lee, was several years younger than Hae and so probably wouldn’t have been identified as being 18 or older. He therefore almost certainly didn’t make the anonymous call. We know that the uncle later commissioned the now-infamous report titled “Islamic Thought and Culture” from the Inehey Group, a “research” organization, which laid out the theory that Hae’s murder was an “honor killing,” carried out by Adnan because of Hae’s breaking off of their relationship and pursuing other guys. The damage that this report caused can absolutely not be overstated. It formed the whole basis for the murder’s motive, and it was, as Rabia Chaudry says, “hot garbage.”

Back to the call, which almost certainly came about because of the caller’s frustration with the slow pace of the investigation and which I postulate was from the uncle, who may have sounded young for his age and probably had an “Asian” accent. By Feb. 9 when Hae’s body was found the Baltimore police had indeed tried to discover what had happened to her. They’d called around to the friends whom Young Lee had listed as perhaps knowing where she was, including Adnan. They’d come to the school and interviewed students and faculty members. They’d had cadaver dogs searching around the school since that was the last place Hae had been seen. Nothing had turned up. Then they got the call from Alonzo Sellers on Feb. 9, 28 days after Hae’s disappearance.

Hae’s family had been undergoing an agony of suspense and fear for those 28 days. The fact is that her family tends to drop out of the narrative of the crime. There’s been a real effort in the media to keep Hae’s name in front of the public and to remind people that she’s important too. But the family? Not so much. The only one who’s ever appeared in the media is her brother Young, and he honestly seems like a good guy. One of the most poignant things said in this whole case is from him as he listened in via Zoom to the Sept. 19 2022 hearing that resulted in Adnan’s release: “For me, it’s not a podcast. It’s been an endless nightmare for twenty years. When I think it’s over, it always ends up coming back. It’s killing me and it’s killing my mother.”

When that call came to Hae’s mother on Feb. 9 that a body had been found the Lee family must have thought that at last there were going to be some answers. They’d probably had to accept at least provisionally by this time that Hae must be dead. But now, surely, they’d find out what had happened. There’d be an arrest. Three days passed, and there was no such thing. They were still in limbo. And so it seems likely that Mr. Kim decided to prod the police a little. He placed the anonymous call, thus setting in motion the chain of events that landed Adnan in jail.

It’s important to point out here that the police were under immense pressure to come up with a suspect. This was a classic viral news story before the word “viral” was even in common use. A young, beautiful, “exotic” woman had been mysteriously killed, her body unceremoniously dumped. There were no leads. Other, similar cases in the area had also gone unsolved. (Some were later solved by DNA testing.) So that anonymous call must have seemed like a godsend. “Right! The ex-boyfriend! We didn’t consider him, but that makes sense! Let’s see what we can dig up!” And dig they did.

Here’s where things get a little murky. We know that the police pulled the cell data for Adnan’s phone but we’re not quite sure how they did this without some kind of warrant. Cell phones were still very new; Adnan had just gotten his phone the day before Hae went missing. I’ve always wondered how the police even knew that he had one. But those questions are kind of irrelevant to my purpose here, so I’m going to plow ahead. Regardless of how they got the records, the police started looking at them and quickly realized that they didn’t make sense. There were calls made during the times that Adnan was supposedly in school, to numbers that didn’t match up with any of his friends. They did some followup and soon discovered that Adnan hadn’t had his phone during the day; he’d left it in the glove compartment of his car, the car he’d lent to Jay Wilds. These were calls that Jay had made or received, not Adnan.

And so the second narrative took shape, with the police pursuing all sorts of blind alleys and dead ends, trying to make sense of a mythical case against Adnan and perhaps Jay.  Susan Simpson believes, and I agree with her (always a safe thing to do), that neither Jay nor Adnan had anything to do with Hae’s murder. Adnan is very clear on this: he had no idea why he was being arrested when the police came for him on Feb. 28. Jay is never clear, about anything, but he doesn’t really seem to know much about the murder either. If you’re familiar with the case you already know this. He was a small-time drug dealer, he supplied Adnan with pot, he’d gotten into other trouble with the law, and he seemingly was put in a position where the police were saying that he either needed to finger Adnan for Hae’s murder or it was going to be pinned on him. So he capitulated. And things took on a momentum of their own.

I’m absolutely not going to pursue untangling the storyline of Jay’s very real and complicated life and how it got all mixed up with the totally mythical timeline of how he and Adnan participated in Hae’s murder and burial. There’s nothing to pursue. Adnan told the truth, in particular about Hae, and Jay lied, about all sorts of things. That field of disentanglement theory has been plowed repeatedly. There’s honestly nothing more to say.

And with that I’ll close. I haven’t dealt with everything, of course, especially the question of Hae’s car. I think when the case is finally solved that mystery will also be cleared up. (One reason why Alonzo Sellers is now considered a suspect is that he had a family member living in the apartment complex overlooking the lot where the car was found. Did he suggest it as a dumping site? But where had the car been in the meantime? It was too clean to have sat out for six weeks. Etc.)

There were hopes at the time of Adnan’s release that new suspects would be arrested soon, perhaps by the end of 2022. That hasn’t happened yet; I’m revising this article in mid-January 2023. In the meantime, perhaps I’ve added a brick or two to the building of truth about this decades-old murder.