Getting a jump on Serial,

The next episode of Serial downloads tomorrow and I’m getting an idea of what is really going on with this mystery.  If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip this post. You can also check out the Serial page on Slate in order to catch up with other listeners. I want to talk about who might have killed Hae Min Lee.

First, let me say that I really like the way Sarah Koenig has presented this story. She has had different professional experts look at the evidence, investigation and trial and that is a good thing. It’s important that the analysis converge at some point in order to ferret out the truth.

So far, the cell phone experts say that the call records presented at trial were inconclusive, the innocence project lawyers say the evidence presented at trial does not incriminate Adnan Syed, and the homocide detective consultant who specializes in interrogations says that the police may have made a deal with Jay in order to tie up the loose ends of their theory that Adnan did it. In short, it looks like Adnan Syed was a convenient suspect and the case was built to send him to jail using his “friend” Jay as the primary witness against him.

The one person who we know for certain is involved in the murder of Hae Min Lee is Jay. We know this because he was the person who lead police to the location of Hae’s car. There is no physical evidence linking Adnan with Hae’s body or the crime scene and nothing but circumstantial evidence linking him with the crime at all. The motive, that Adnan killed Hae because she caused him to violate his religious principles and then broke up with him, is silly. The evidence for that is dubious at best and in all other respects, his friends report that he got on with his life and other girlfriends while still remaining friends with Hae.

Let’s do what the innocence project lawyers suggest for a moment and take Adnan out of the picture. That leaves us with a couple of alternative explanations for who killed Hae.  The first is a yet unknown serial killer. There has been a suggestion that another murderer who killed a young woman Hae’s age less than a year before might have been the murderer. The problem with the serial killer theory is that it doesn’t explain Jay’s involvement in the Hae’s murder. The murderer of the previous victim was caught in 2002(?), so while this person might have killed Hae, there has yet to be a link back to Jay.

Jay might have been the killer. So far, he’s the only person directly implicated and he got off with two years of probation for hiding the body. Maybe Jay was forced to cooperate with hiding the body because the real killer threatened to expose Jay’s connection to illegal drug dealing. In other words, the murderer and Jay each had something on the other. Maybe the murderer threatened someone Jay cared about.

There have been other suggestions by both the innocence project team and the homocide investigator that seem to be converging.  That is, the person who killed Hae really hated her and/or Jay is trying to protect someone, i.e. the person who really killed Hae.  We have heard over and over again that Jay would have done anything to protect his girlfriend, Stephanie. We need to take a look at her.

Stephanie has been in the picture from the very beginning. She appeared in the first episode as a bit player. If Koenig were writing a mystery story, it would be best practice to introduce all of the suspects in the first fifty pages. That’s so that the readers are not lead on a merry chase throughout the story only to have the murderer appear in the last chapter without any relationship to the rest of the story. So let’s assume that the murderer has been introduced and let’s look at all of the other suspects. Let’s look at Stephanie. What do we know about her?

Stephanie is in the magnet program of a urban/suburban high school. She is bright, blonde, beautiful. She’s athletic. She runs, so presumably, she’s on the track team with Adnan. Hae is not on the track team that I can tell but she does play LaCrosse with Jay. Jay is not in the magnet program with Adnan, Stephanie and Hae. He is “gen pop”. Stephanie is out of his league in many respects. Jay is from a broken family. He lives with his grandmother. He’s poor. He deals drugs. His prospects are poor. Stephanie is going places. She has a scholarship.

On the morning of January 13, the day of Hae’s disappearance, Adnan goes to Jay’s house and tells him that he should get a gift for Stephanie’s birthday. Adnan has already given Stephanie a gift of a stuffed reindeer. He gives Jay his car and his cell phone. I don’t know but something about this part of the story just seemed weird to me. Koenig picks up on it in the first episode. It sounds like a convenient excuse. Why was Adnan so interested in whether Jay got Stephanie a present? Is it possible that Adnan had moved on from Hae to Stephanie? They were junior prom prince and princess after all.  They had a lot in common academically and extracurricularly. They were in AP Psychology together.

The biggest predictor in who you will fall in love with is proximity. Adnan and Stephanie are spending a LOT of time together. Jay is graduated, not in school and is more of an outsider looking in.

My next questions have to do with Stephanie’s relationship with Hae.  How well did Stephanie know Hae? Were they friendly? Was there any reason for Stephanie to fear Hae or something Hae knew about Stephanie? Where was Stephanie on the afternoon of Hae’s murder? I’d just like to know in order to eliminate her as a suspect. Also, was Jay seeing someone other than Stephanie? What kind of relationship did Jen Pusateri or “Cathy” have with Jay?

I suspect that there is a love triangle, quadrangle, quintangle going on here. Well, this is high school, after all. Hae was the unlucky victim, Adnan took the fall, but it’s the circle around Jay that knows who really killed Hae Min Lee. The circumstances leading up to or involving the murder threatened Stephanie in some way. Who were Jay’s connections and what did they have on him?