Adnan Syed Part 1: Cell Phone Evidence and the Conviction That Started It All

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What happens when an ex-boyfriend becomes the obvious suspect, a friend agrees to testify for plea deal,

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and cell phone technology from 1999 passes for reliable evidence.

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Well, you get a murder conviction that looks solid for 15 years,

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up until someone starts asking the uncomfortable questions that should have been asked from the very beginning.

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[Music]

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Let me start by telling you about, hey, menli,

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because in all the legal circus that followed her death,

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we sometimes forget the story that began with an 18-year-old girl who had plans that she'd never got to keep.

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January 13, 1999, hey, was a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore,

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the kind of responsible teenager who worked at Linscrafters and picked up her little cousin from school every day.

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She was also dating someone new, while navigating the complicated waters of staying friends with her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Sayed.

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That afternoon, hey, left school around 2.15 p.m. with a routine ahead of her.

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Pick up her cousin, then head to work, except she never showed up for either.

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When you're the reliable kid who always shows up, your absence goes noticed immediately.

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Her family reported her missing that same day.

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For a month, Baltimore lived with the hope that maybe she'd run away,

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maybe she was hiding somewhere, maybe this was all a misunderstanding.

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Then, on February 9, 1999, a passerby found her in Leak & Park, the autopsy revealed manual strangulation.

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Hope died along with those findings.

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What happened next would shape the next 26 years of legal proceedings, podcast episodes,

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and arguments about justice in America.

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Baltimore police had a murder on their hands, and they followed the most basic rule of homicide investigation.

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When a young woman turns up dead, you start with a people closest to her.

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In Hayes case, that meant her ex-boyfriend, Adnan.

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But here's where the story gets its first twist.

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The police didn't focus on Sayed because of brilliant detective work or compelling evidence.

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They got an anonymous phone call on February 12, 1999, three days before finding Hayes' body.

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The caller directed their attention to Adnan.

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And just like that, the investigation had its primary suspect.

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Anonymous tips can be valuable in investigations, but they can also create tunnel vision.

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When you're convinced you know who did it, you tend to interpret everything through that lens.

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This is a theme that would echo throughout the entire case.

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February 28, 1999, they arrested Adnan for Hayes' murder.

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He was only 17.

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The prosecution's case against Sayed was like a house built on a foundation of quicksand.

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But it looks solid enough from the outside.

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They had two main pillars holding everything together, and both would prove problematic years later.

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The first pillar was Jay Wilde, a friend of Adnan, who became the state's star witness.

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Wilde claimed that on January 13, 1999, Adnan had confessed to killing Hay,

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and asked for help burying her body in Lincoln Park.

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According to Wilde, Adnan showed him Hayes' body in the trunk of her car,

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and they buried her together that evening.

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This testimony came with the price tag.

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Jay Wilde was charged as an accessory to murder, but received a plea deal in exchange for his

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cooperation, a five-year suspended sentence.

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In other words, testify against your friend and walk away free.

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The incentive structure here is about a subtle as a neon sign.

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The second pillar was cell phone tower data from Adnan's mobile phone.

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This was 1999, remember?

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When cell phones were still relatively new, and the science of cellular location tracking was in its infancy.

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The prosecution used this data to argue that Adnan's phone was in the vicinity of the park

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on the evening of January 13, which would corroborate Wilde's testimony about the burial.

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Here's what made this evidence compelling to a jury in 2000.

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It was high-tech and seemingly objective.

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Unlike human testimony, which can be unreliable and motivated by self-interest,

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cell phone data looked scientific and neutral.

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The prosecution presented it as definitive proof of Adnan's location.

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And here's what made it problematic in hindsight.

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The technology wasn't nearly as reliable as it appeared,

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especially for incoming calls.

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But the jury didn't know that because nobody told them.

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Adnan's side's first trial began in December 1999 and promptly fell apart.

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The jurors overheard a sidebar dispute between the attorneys and the judge declared a mis-trial.

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The second trial started in January 2000 and lasted six weeks.

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The prosecution painted Adnan as a jealous ex-boyfriend who couldn't handle

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hay moving on.

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They had Jay Wilde's pointing the finger directly at him,

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and they had cell phone data that seemed to confirm his story.

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The defense argued that the evidence was circumstantial,

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and that Wilde's couldn't be trusted.

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On February 25, 2000, the jury found Adnan Sayed guilty on all counts.

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First to remurder, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and robbery.

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Judge Wanda Heard sentenced him to life in prison plus 30 years.

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Case closed, just as served, everyone go home.

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Except, of course, it wasn't that simple.

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Even at the time there were cracks in this foundation of Sayed's conviction.

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His defense attorney, Christina Gutierrez,

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made some decisions that would later be called into question.

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Most significantly, she never contacted Asia McLean.

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She's a classmate who had written to Adnan while he was in jail awaiting trial.

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In her letters, she said that she had been with Adnan at the Woodlawn Public Library

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on January 13 during the exact time the prosecution said the murder occurred.

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This could have been a powerful alibi witness.

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But Gutierrez never followed up.

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She also didn't aggressively challenge the cell phone evidence,

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despite the fact that there were reasons to question the reliability.

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An AT&T cover sheet that came with the phone records contained a disclaimer

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stating that incoming calls were not reliable for determining location.

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This disclaimer was never shown to the jury.

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These were more than just minor oversights.

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They were strategic decisions that would later form the basis of ineffective assistance of council claims.

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But in 2000, they were water under the bridge.

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Sayed was convicted.

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His appeals were denied and he settled into life as inmate number 187-5248.

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For a decade and a half, Adnan Sayed was just another forgotten name in America's vast prison

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population. His case occasionally surfaced with local appeals courts.

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But it never really gained traction.

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The conviction looks solid enough to withstand scrutiny and the justice system moved on to newer cases.

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During those years, Adnan maintained his innocence while working toward a college degree behind bars.

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His family continued to believe in his innocence and occasionally reached out to lawyers and

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journalists, hoping someone would take another look at the case.

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Meanwhile, the world around him changed.

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Cell phone technology evolved from a novelty to a necessity.

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DNA testing became more sophisticated and routine.

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True crime entertainment exploded in popularity,

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from shows like CSI to documentaries about wrongful convictions.

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But none of that mattered to Adnan's case.

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He remained locked away.

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His story known to only family friends and the occasional legal advocate who wondered

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if something had gone wrong in Baltimore County Circuit Court back in 2000.

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Then, Sarah Canig happened.

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In 2013, Robbie Ashajri, a family friend of the Siaeds, contacted Sarah Canig,

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a producer at this American Life.

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Shhajri had been following the case for years and believed that Adnan had been wrongfully convicted.

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She asked Sarah Canig to take a look at the evidence.

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What Canig found, it intrigued her enough to spend a year of investigating.

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She interviewed dozens of people connected to the case,

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poured over the documents, and visited key locations in Baltimore.

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What emerged wasn't a simple story of guilt or innocence,

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but a complex examination of how the justice system handles ambiguous evidence.

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An October 2014 Canig launched serial,

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a podcast that would change everything.

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Each episode was a deep dive into a different aspect of Adnan's case.

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From the reliability of J. Wilde's testimony,

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to the significance of cell phone tower data, to the effectiveness of Adnan's legal representation.

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Serial wasn't the first true crime podcast, but it was the first to achieve massive mainstream success.

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Millions of people, including myself,

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downloaded each episode, discuss theories on Reddit,

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and debated Adnan's guilt or innocence over dinner.

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The podcast won numerous awards and sparked countless imitators.

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More importantly, it created what was known as the serial effect,

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the phenomenon of a podcast or other non-traditional media source,

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driving significant change in a criminal case.

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This was different from the CSI effect,

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where fictional shows create unrealistic expectations about forensic evidence.

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Serial was presenting itself as real journalism,

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real investigation, and it was reaching conclusions that differed from the original trial.

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What made Serial so compelling wasn't that it definitely proved Adnan's innocence,

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instead it raised enough reasonable questions about his guilt to make listeners wonder if justice

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had truly been served. The podcast highlighted J. Wilde's changing story.

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His accounts of events had shifted multiple times during police interviews,

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including crucial details like where he first saw Hay's body.

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For prosecution case built largely on his testimony,

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these inconsistencies were problematic.

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Serial also questioned the reliability of the cell phone evidence.

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Cannex spoke with experts who explained that the technology in 99

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wasn't precise enough to definitively place a phone at a specific location.

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The podcast examined Asia McLean's potential alibi testimony

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and questioned why Gutierrez never contacted her.

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It looked at the timeline of events and whether the prosecution's version of

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when the murder occurred made logical sense.

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Maybe most effectively, Serial presented all of this in Cannex conversational questioning voice.

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She didn't claim to have "solved" the case, but she made it clear that

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"reasonable doubt existed." For millions of listeners, that was enough to believe that Adnan

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Syed deserved another chance at justice. The renewed media attention sparked immediate legal action.

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And February 2015, Syed's team filed for post-conviction relief,

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arguing that Christina Gutierrez had provided ineffective assistance by failing to contact

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Asia McLean and not challenging the unreliable cell phone evidence.

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Initially, the strategy worked. Judge Martin Welch granted a new trial in June 2016,

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and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals affirmed this decision in March 2018.

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But the legal system has institutional inertia, and in March 2019, the Maryland Supreme Court

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reversed everything and afforded three ruling. They acknowledged Gutierrez performance was

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deficient, but ruled it wasn't prejudicial enough to change the outcome.

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The US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in November 2019,

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effectively ending this chapter. For five years, Syed remained simultaneously the most famous,

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potentially wrongfully convicted person in America, and someone the court's refuse to actually

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declare wrongfully convicted. The story could have ended there, but what happened next would make

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everything that came before look simple by comparison.