Here’s something that makes me pause though. That’s when Adnan says he was probably calling to give her his new cell phone number, and she does write it in her diary. Seems like the only time they actually spoke was the third call, at 12:35am. Next, the night before Hae disappeared, Adnan called her house three times. Friends said she talked about that sometimes, that her dad, or maybe it was her step dad, was in California, and she wanted to go there. All of Hae’s friends I spoke to said they initially thought Hae had either run off someplace with her new boyfriend Don or, this was another rumor that a lot of people talked about at the time, that she’d run off to California. Then Monday was Martin Luther King Day, so the kids didn’t all reconvene at school until the following Tuesday. School was cancelled on January 14th and 15th because of the ice storm, then the weekend came. The seriousness of Hae’s disappearance didn’t start sinking in with her friends for a while. Sarah Koenig To be fair to Adnan, if this really was his reaction, then he wasn’t the only one. Adnan Syed So, to me, all this call was, Hae’s going to get in a lot you trouble, you know, her mother is going to be pissed when she comes home, right. It’s not, in no way is this like you know foreshadowing, I don’t know if that’s the right word, what’s, what’s we know, what’s to come. In no way did I associate this call with being, you know, umm the beginning of you know, of this whole horrible thing. If the police are at her house, you know, if her mother, actually, you know for, for whatever reason, if she didn’t, you know she didn’t go home or she went somewhere else. Adnan Syed At, I mean, at the time, the only thing I really associated with that call was that man uh, you know Hae’s gonna be in a lot of trouble when she gets home. Sarah Koenig I guess that’s the only thing about the day that seems weird to me that you wouldn’t then, that the day wouldn’t then come into focus for you because you’d gotten this call from the cops and you know, you, you were high, you were young, you know, it’s a - it’s a scary call to get or just a just a jarring call to get. Sarah Koenig The police call! say, “ do you know where Hae Lee is?”, right? Adnan Syed Oh no, uh, I do remember that phone call and I do remember being high at the time because the craziest thing is to be high and have the police call your phone. Which was… Adnan Syed Oh like the police, the police call. The normalness of the day, because, wouldn’t the call from Officer Adcock asking, whether he’s seen Hae just in and of itself, wouldn’t that call make it a not normal day? Sarah Koenig Something pretty unusual did happen to you that day. Then, you know how Adnan says he can’t remember much at all about the day Hae went missing? How it was just a normal day to him, nothing much stands out? I’ve wondered about that. Adnan then later told a different cop he didn’t ask for a ride.
Office Adcock testified that the day she disappeared, Adnan told him he’d asked her for a ride. Was he looking for an excuse to get in her car, so he could kill her. First off, there’s a question of whether Adnan asked Hae for a ride that day after school. Some of these I have mentioned before but, let’s just hang them all up, side-by-side, and see what they look like. Everything that the state had that I know about. Everything else that a person could reasonably add to the ‘Adnan is guilty’ side of the scale. Today, I’m just going to lay out the rest. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been holding up bits of evidence here and there that look bad for Adnan. So, the prints weren’t exactly conclusive. Plus, thirteen other, unidentified prints turned up on and in the map book. His palm print was only on the back cover of the book. And that page didn’t have Adnan’s prints on it. In fact, it showed their whole neighborhood, the school, the malls, probably ninety percent of where they most often drove. The ripped out page showed a whole lot more than just Leakin Park. The defense argued, ‘well, you can’t put a timestamp on fingerprints, they could’ve been six week-old fingerprints or six month-old fingerprints, there’s no way to tell.’ And Adnan had ridden in and driven Hae’s car many times, all their friends said so.
At trial they pointed out that it was the page that showed Leakin Park.
On the back cover was a partial print of Adnan’s left palm. It was one of those big map books you buy at a gas station, police found it in the backseat of Hae’s car. The most incriminating piece of physical evidence against Adnan Syed was a fingerprint, or rather, a palm print.
Sarah Koenig From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago it’s Serial.