Serial

[krissy]

who's listening to serial?

if you don't know, it's a lady radio documenting her analysis of a murder case from the late 90's

she interviews everyone she can, gets the run down from the guy behind bars, family, friends, etc.

interesting to follow along

i guess there's theory circles around the internet (http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...ubling-results)

there's only 7 episodes so far so it's easy to catch up on!

http://serialpodcast.org/

[Night Fury]

Oooooooh, that sounds really interesting I'll have to give it a listen! I love stuff like this!

[Del Murder]

My wife is obsessed with this show. I never listened to it yet I know the entire story...

[Calliope]

I'm actually listening to it right now. It's pretty interesting, although I'm kinda sick of shows about teenage girls getting murdered (El Spuuko and I are also watching Twin Peaks for the first time). I do like listening to how information spreads, evidence is thought of as important or not, etc.

[Shorty]

posting this from facebook sorry fb friends

(SPOILER)After marathoning the trout out of all twelve episodes of Serial in a single day, I am greatly disappointed with the "ending", as I feel there was no actual ending or resolution. An episode wrapping it up saying "this is what we know" isn't entirely helpful because, well, as listeners, we know what we know.

It would have been best to end after the development of the university's findings and potential pursuit so that there could be a proper "ending" or conclusion provided, but alas, I guess I will just have to follow along in the news!

It did give me a pretty sick feeling after it was all over with, though. It's weird because it just kindof came out of nowhere, after these hours and hours of me listening to it. Physically, I do not feel very well after ingesting all of this information. And I still have a lot of smurfing questions if the act was indeed committed by a serial killer. Then what happens with Jay's testimony? All that brag about seeing the body in the car and trout, that whole story. Covering up for drugs, maybe? But they tested her body and it was shown she was not sexually assaulted, even though the serial killer was mentioned to have "always" raped the women he assaulted.

I don't even know, man. I just want some goddamn closure, and I think Jay is lyyyyying and that he's very good at it. He seems way too calculating. People who are guilty don't say "I don't know" or "I can't recall that"; they have definitive alibis and explanations and plot points to shift the blame away from themselves. Either a) Jay did it or had something to do with it like bringing a third party in that's been absent from all of this who we may never find out, b) he's covering up some drug act that he doesn't want to get in trouble for (though I guess that doesn't make sense because accomplice or whatever to murder is a hell of a lot more harsh than drug convictions) or c) the serial killer dude did it. I don't think Adnan did it. I just don't know why Jay would create such elaborate lies and trout if Adnan really was innocent, or what the motivation there would be to do such a thing.

Dana is correct in that if these are truly all bad luck circumstances than he has a lot of bad luck, but if he was guilty, I think he would have atleast attempted to make a ton of trout up to cover his tracks instead of "I don't know" or "I can't explain that"

Puzzling trout, this story.

According to the wiki page, Adnan's appeal was accepted on account of his original attorney's defense considered as ineffective, so his appeal will take place this June. Interested to find out about how it goes.

edit: should be sleeping, instead obsessing over the subreddit

edit2: this thread provides some pretty goddamn good credibility to why Jay might have murdered Hae.

Specifically:

What if it went something like this:
Hae approaches Adnan's car, realizes Jay is driving.
HAE: If you don't tell Stephanie that you cheated, I will.
JAY: If you do, I'll tell your parents you've been lying to them for years and having sex.
HAE: Then I'll just go to the police and tell them you're a dealer.
See how the situation could have escalated? Especially if Jay was involved with some higher-up suppliers who could retaliate if he was ever arrested or questioned and they thought he snitched at all.

???

[Del Murder]

Hae's car is the problem with that theory. Jay was in Adnan's car but Hae's car is the one that ended up halfway across town. Jay would have needed some unnamed accomplice for both Adnan and Hae's cars to be involved. Someone had to drop Hae's car off at the pier (or where ever it was found) and then Jay would eventually return Adnan's car. Also Jay was a skinny guy and Hae was an athlete so I find it hard to believe that Jay could have choked her out on his own. Which means Jay must have had an accomplice, which means he probably premeditated it, which means that conversation where Hae confronts him and he snaps wouldn't make sense. I doubt Hae would confront Jay if he was with some other dude in Adnan's car.

I'm pretty sure Adnan did it, but the prosecution's case against him was bogus. He didn't deserve to go to jail based on that evidence. My current theory is that he is a sociopath and he's got all of America hooked line and sinker. You say a guilty person wouldn't say 'I don't know' or 'I can't explain that'. That's what a dumb guilty person would do. A brilliant guilty person (and Adnan was very smart) would act just like he would if he were innocent. It's what I would do. I'd probably act just like Adnan did if it were my case and I was guilty.

[Shorty]

I don't know, I think Jay is the sociopath here. Based on SK's interactions with Adnan, she claims to feel real emotion coming from him, even going so far to unexpectedly cry on the phone when speaking to him arat one point. Sociopaths can't fake emotions, the concept is foreign to them. I don't think a guilty person would say, "don't proclaim my innocence, let the people decide" after you've been in jail for fifteen years.

Seventeen year old kids just aren't that smart. We're talking about high school kids here involved with this at the time, not criminal masterminds. Jay's stories are riddled with holes and lies and he has been caught and called out on many of them many times. This is what we get from a teenage sociopath. Adnan's story has no holes and no lies and is incredibly circumstantial. I just don't believe that anyone is that capable of executing such a genius defense on his part and then keeping it up for fifteen years. Something always comes out, and it hasn't.

Also, since Jay was hanging around with that Jenn girl, it seems to be pretty accepted that he was cheating on Stephanie with her and desperately did not want to get caught. Jenn covers for Jay in his alibi, saying he was at her house, but somehow her landline receives a phone call from him during the time he is supposedly there? That's fishy. I that she is the third party in this and covered for him by telling an alibi that her fed to her in order to help him because she cared about him.

[Del Murder]

Could be. If that's the case, then why isn't Adnan more pissed at Jay than he seems to be? Even if it is 15 years later, I'd still be pissed at the guy who put me in jail for a crime I had nothing to do with. I would probably want to kill him.

Maybe sociopath was the wrong word for Adnan. Diabolical? I don't know. I feel like all the theories of how Jay or someone else could have done it are pretty elaborate and in these cases occam's razor usually holds true.

[Shorty]

I think Occam's Razor is exactly what was applied to Adnan's conviction, but it still doesn't add up properly. There seems to be another element here that is missing entirely, and probability rests on an unnamed third party accomplice.

If we're pointing to the simplest and most obvious explanations, though, Jay is repeatedly pointed at as a shady, weird guy who has previous arrests and trouble with the law and drugs and all sorts of weird trout like getting knifed and generally hanging around with unsavory individuals. On paper, definitely not an upstanding citizen. On paper for Adnan, he is definitely an upstanding citizen, and the worst crimes (besides being convicted for murder) he has to account for are defying his parents about his girlfriend, smoking weed, and stealing money from the mosque, which it sounds like is something that a lot of young people did. None of those are violent or out of the ordinary for teenagers. The rest of his paper would read Prom Prince or whatever the trout he was, EMT, great student and athlete, appearing to be devoted to his family and religion. Jay has none of those good characteristic qualities to back him up. He seems like a generally shady and weird character, and him saying, "You need to be stabbed in order to know what it feels like" to a friend, even just messing around tells a great deal about his character, I think.

So, Occam's Razor - the ex-boyfriend is the most obvious explanation, but is it the simplest? Other than being an ex-boyfriend - of how much time exactly? I don't remember - there isn't a motive to commit murder. I'd probably argue that when teenagers get broken up with, they are more likely to inflict harm to themselves (consider suicide, other forms of self harm) than to go after the person who did the breaking up with them.

The simplest explanation to me is that Jay has a whole weird and wired and shady past, characteristic, demeanor, and he can't even keep his story straight in any consistency whatsoever. The simplest explanation to me points that through all of these inconsistencies, Jay is guilty of something. I can't definitively say murder because there is no sustained evidence of it, but he appears to be guilty of something nonetheless. I get this feeling much more from him than I do from Adnan. After all of the lies he's told, the fact that any of Jay's testimony taken into consideration at all is incredulous to me. To quote someone from Reddit, "Jay has an answer for everything and when he forgets what the answer was, he makes a new one up. That's why his story changes, because he's a lying stoner that has forgotten his lies."

June cannot come soon enough!

[metagloria]

My wife and I binged this over Christmas. Have you guys read the post-Serial interviews with Jay? The purported rationale behind Jay's constantly shifting story is that he was holding back in order to not implicate himself or (more importantly) other people, but as he got more confident that he wouldn't be punished, his story became more truthful. It sounds weird, but that actually makes sense to me. The serial killer arc is interesting, but ultimately vacuous because if that were the case, it makes no sense why Jay would've framed Adnan when he (Jay) wasn't actually involved at all, why and how he would've made up such elaborate details, and how he would've known about stuff like where Hae's car was. When you boil it down, it has to be either Adnan or Jay, and while the podcast definitely biases the listener toward suspecting Jay, I think neither solution really makes more sense than the other.

Maybe they both did it?

[Del Murder]

The simplest explanation to me is that Jay has a whole weird and wired and shady past, characteristic, demeanor, and he can't even keep his story straight in any consistency whatsoever. The simplest explanation to me points that through all of these inconsistencies, Jay is guilty of something. I can't definitively say murder because there is no sustained evidence of it, but he appears to be guilty of something nonetheless. I get this feeling much more from him than I do from Adnan. After all of the lies he's told, the fact that any of Jay's testimony taken into consideration at all is incredulous to me. To quote someone from Reddit, "Jay has an answer for everything and when he forgets what the answer was, he makes a new one up. That's why his story changes, because he's a lying stoner that has forgotten his lies."

All this is true. It seems that a lot of people boil this case down to: either Adnan is guilty, or Jay is a liar. But clearly both can be (and probably are) true.