Adnan Syed Part 2: Alternative Suspects, DNA Evidence, and Legal Chaos

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What happens when prosecutors investigate their own successful murder case and decide they might have gotten it wrong?

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When DNA evidence excludes the convicted killer, but a paperwork error keeps him technically guilty

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Welcome to part two of the adnon-scied saga where the justice system basically threw up its hands and said we honestly don't know anymore

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*Music*

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By 2022 the legal system seemed done with adnon-scied the Maryland Supreme Court had upheld its conviction despite

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Serial's revelations the US Supreme Court wouldn't hear his case and public attention had mostly moved on to other true crime obsessions

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Sired was serving his 23rd year in prison, and it looked like he was going to die there

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Then something extraordinary happened the Baltimore City State's attorney's office the same prosecutors office that had convicted

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Sired in 2000 decided to take another look at their own case

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This wasn't prompted by new appeals from his defense team

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This was prosecutors voluntarily questioning whether they'd gotten it right

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And this by the way is about as common as unicorns in American criminal justice

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Prosecutors offices don't typically investigate their own successful convictions

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Once you've gotten a guilty verdict and exhausted the appeals process the case is considered settled

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Prosecutors move on to new cases not old ones

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But Baltimore had established a conviction review unit

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One of the growing numbers of such units around the country designed to examine potential wrongful convictions

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And adnon's case thanks to Serial's spotlight was an obvious candidate for review

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What they found would turn everything upside down

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The investigation that began in 2022 uncovered information that would have been explosive back in 1999

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Prosecutors found evidence of two alternate suspects who had been known to investigators during the original case

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But were never properly investigated

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One of these suspects had reportedly made a threat against Heyman Lee

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stating that he would make her disappear

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The kind of statement that in any reasonable investigation would warrant serious follow-up

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Yet there's no evidence that investigators pursued this lead with a thoroughness that deserved

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This revelation highlighted a fundamental problem with the original investigation

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Tunnel vision

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Once police received that anonymous tip pointing them toward adnon

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They appeared to have focused their efforts on building a case against him

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Rather than conducting a thorough investigation of all possible suspects

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The existence of viable alternate suspects doesn't prove adnon's innocence

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But it raises serious questions about whether the investigation was comprehensive enough to justify the certainty of a murder conviction

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Maybe even more significant than the alternate suspects was new DNA testing conducted on evidence from the crime scene

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That had never been tested before

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The results excluded adnon's sciat as a contributor

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This is the kind of evidence that carries weight in ways that testimonial evidence simply cannot

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DNA doesn't have motivation

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It doesn't change its story and it doesn't make deals with prosecutors

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When properly collected and tested

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It provides objective scientific evidence about who was and wasn't present at a crime scene

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The DNA results didn't positively identify another suspect

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But they scientifically excluded adnon from biological evidence connected to Hayes murder

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Combined with the alternative suspects and the longstanding questions about J. Wilde's testimony

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And cell phone evidence

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Prosecutors concluded that they no longer had confidence and adnon's conviction

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The prosecutor's 2022 review also took another hard look at the cell phone tower data that had been central to the original conviction

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What they found confirmed what defense experts had been arguing for years

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The technology wasn't reliable enough to support the conclusions drawn at trial

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The AT&T disclaimer that was never shown to the jury stated clearly that incoming calls couldn't be relied upon for location information

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In 1999, cell phone location technology was new enough that courts and juries might be forgiven for not understanding its limitations

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By 2022, those limitations were well established

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The prosecutor's office acknowledged that the cell phone evidence, as presented in trial, was not reliable enough to support a conviction

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On September 19, 2022, prosecutors filed a motion to vacate adnon's conviction

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The motion cited the unreliable cell phone evidence, the failure to disclose information about alternative suspects

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and the new DNA results that excluded him

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Judge Melissa Finn granted the motion

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And Syed walked out of the Baltimore courthouse a free man after 23 years, one month, and six days in prison

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The scene outside the courthouse was emotional, with family members embracing and crying as Syed tasted freedom for the first time

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Since he was 17 years old, a month later, in October 2022, prosecutors formally dropped all charges against adnon

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It looked like vindication, like the system had finally corrected a terrible mistake

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Syed appeared headed toward the kind of complete exoneration that would allow him to rebuild his life

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and maybe seek compensation for his decades-long, wrongful imprisonment

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But this story was far from over

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In a twist that would make legal thriller writers jealous, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals reinstated

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Adnon's murder conviction in March 2023

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Not because new evidence had emerged, proving his guilt

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Not because the DNA testing was flawed

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Not because the alternative suspects had been ruled out

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The conviction was reinstated because of a procedural error

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Hey, man Lee's brother, young Lee, had not been given adequate notice about the September 2022 hearing

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where Syed's conviction was vacated

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Under Maryland's victim notification laws, victims' families have the right to be present and heard at such proceedings

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The failure to provide proper notice violated these rights

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Let that sink in for a moment

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A murder conviction was reinstated not based on evidence of guilt or innocence

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but because of a paperwork problem

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The decision highlighted the sometimes Byzantine nature of our legal system

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where procedural requirements can override findings

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The appeals court wasn't saying Syed was guilty

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They were saying the process of declaring him not guilty was flawed

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The Maryland Supreme Court upheld this ruling in August 2024

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ordering a new hearing while allowing Syed to remain free

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The legal system had created a situation where a man could be simultaneously free

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and convicted of murder

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The final resolution came on March 14, 2025

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when Judge Jennifer Schiffer found a creative way to thread this legal needle

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rather than retry the procedural aspects of vacating the conviction

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she used Maryland's Juvenile Restoration Act to "recentence" Adnan

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This allows judges to reduce sentences for crimes committed by juveniles

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recognizing that young offenders can be rehabilitated and deserve second chances

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Syed had been 17 when Hay was murdered, making him eligible under the statute

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Judge Schiffer reduced Syed's sentence to "time served"

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and ordered five years of supervised probation

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This allowed him to remain free while technically maintaining his conviction

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It was a Solomon-like solution that satisfied no one

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but completely resolved an impossible legal situation

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So here's where we end up in 2025

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Adnan Syed is a free man with a murder conviction on his record

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He's working at Georgetown University's Prisons and Justice Initiative

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while taking classes

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He's building a new life while serving supervised probation for a murder that prosecutors

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no longer believe he committed

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This outcome satisfies absolutely no one

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Syed's supporters wanted full exoneration and acknowledgement that he was wrongfully convicted

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Hayman Lee's family wanted definitive answers about who killed their daughter and sister

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The prosecutor's office wanted to correct what they believed was a miscarriage of justice

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Instead, we got a legal compromise that keeps everyone equally unhappy

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while highlighting the fundamental limitations of our justice system

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26 years after Hayman Lee's murder, we still don't have definitive answers about who killed her

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The alternative suspects identified by prosecutors haven't been charged

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The case remains officially unsolved despite having a convicted killer

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This isn't the clean resolution we expect when we learn about true crime cases

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There's no moment where the real killer is revealed no dramatic confession that

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ties everything together no sense that justice has finally been served

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What we have instead is messy, a complicated story about the limitations of human knowledge

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and the imperfection of legal systems

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We have competing narratives that all contain elements of truth but none that provide complete answers

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Looking back at Syrials' impact, it's clear that the podcast accomplished something unprecedented

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in American criminal justice

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It took a closed case and forced the system to re-examine its conclusions

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It created public pressure that contributed to the eventual investigation

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that led to Adnan's release

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But Syrials didn't solve the case, it didn't prove Adnan's innocence or identify the real killer

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What it did was demonstrate that our justice system for all its procedural safeguards and evidentiary standards

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can get things wrong

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And when it does, correcting those mistakes are extraordinarily difficult

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Maybe the most profound lesson of the Adnan-Syed case is the importance of intellectual humility

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in matters of criminal justice

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The original prosecutors were certain enough of Syed's guilt to seek life imprisonment

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The serial podcast raised enough doubt to convince millions of listeners that he might be innocent

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The 2022 prosecutors became convinced enough of his innocence to drop all charges

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Yet none of these certainties produced the complete truth

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What we're left with is the uncomfortable but honest conclusion

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that sometimes we don't and can't know everything

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Sometimes the evidence is genuinely ambiguous

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Sometimes the investigators have gaps and sometimes our legal system produces outcomes that feel unsatisfying

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In 2025, Adnan represents something unique in American criminal justice

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A man whose freedom was secured not by proving his innocence

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but by demonstrating that his guilt couldn't be established

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with the certainty that justice requires

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The real tragedy isn't that we don't know whether Syed killed Heyman Lee

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The real tragedy is that Heyman Lee is dead

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Her killer may never be definitively identified

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and our imperfect system of justice has done the best it can with incomplete information

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Sometimes the most honest answer is admitting we don't have all the answers

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In a world that increasingly demands certainty

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The Adnan-Syed case forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality

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that absolute truth isn't always achievable

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Even with decades of investigation, millions of dollars in legal proceedings

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and the intention of the entire nation

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That might be the most important lesson of all

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder

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Bingeable True Crime Stories

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I'm Joe, I'm the host

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and I really appreciate you listening to Part 1 and Part 2

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about this case

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And I'm curious, is this the case, is this the podcast

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that got you into listening to True Crime podcasts?

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It was for me, I knew the podcasts existed back in 2014 when this happened

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But I didn't immediately listen to this

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I was up to mind said, well I can watch documentaries on TV

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Why am I going to listen to this one?

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What's all this hype about?

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So strangely, as much as I'm into True Crime

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I didn't immediately buy into the serial podcast

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And then one day I think I was cleaning up around the house

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or maybe mowing the lawn or something like that

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and I wanted something to listen to

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So I figured out how to download podcasts

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And back then it wasn't like a simple thing like it is now

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I had to find it and you know download it

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And so I thought I'll give it a chance

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I was hooked immediately

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I already loved audiobooks at that time

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And this was kind of like an audiobook

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But in real life, it's a real life case

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It's more like listening to a documentary

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And I ate it up, I loved it

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Now it would be six years after that

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Before I started doing my own podcast

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It would take a pandemic and me being bored out of my mind

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To create this podcast

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But here we are

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Talking about the podcast that got me into podcasts

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On the podcast that I later created

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Alright that's gonna do it

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That is your episode for today

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Thank you again so much for listening to 10 Minute Murder

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I'll see you next time