Sarah Koenig

She's having a hard time answering what should be a simple question.

What's Adnan Syed's level of culpability in this crime?

Becky Feldman is pretty new to the prosecutor's office, pretty new to being a prosecutor.

She'd been high up at the public defender's office for years.

Her sense of alarm was cultivated on the defense side.

A sentence review isn't supposed to be a reinvestigation of a case, but that's what starts rolling.

By March, Becky's office, joined by Adnan's lawyer, asks a judge to order new high-tech DNA testing.

That takes a while to work through the system.

So while they wait, Becky and Erica Suter work together, pulling threads.

Becky's office consults cell phone experts, a polygraph expert.

She's all up inside Google Maps and land records.

The state's massive case file is over at the attorney general's office a few blocks away.

Becky starts hoofing it over there in June.

The AG's office is like, 17 boxes of case materials, here's a copy machine, knock yourself out.

She copies a bunch of stuff from the first seven boxes, takes the papers back to her office to read.

And that's when she discovers some handwritten notes.

They're messy, hard to make out.

But once she deciphers the writing, she realizes these notes are about a potential alternate suspect in the case.

She calls up Erica Suter, who tells her, yeah, we've never seen these notes before.

They're both shocked.