Sarah Koenig

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.

Once the DNA results came back in mid-August, with nothing really conclusive or useful, they took stock of everything they'd learned.

The result was a disturbing bouquet of problems, whose cumulative effect gave the state, quote, overwhelming cause for concern.

Under the circumstances, they couldn't justify holding a nun in prison anymore.

So Becky Feldman wrote a motion to the court, a motion to vacate.

The motion to vacate does not tell us a new story of the crime.

It doesn't lay out an alternate theory of who killed Hayman Lee.

Instead, the motion lays out how the system malfunctioned back then and how little we know now.

The headline of the state's motion is that they've developed more evidence about two people who might have been involved in the crime, but whom they say weren't properly ruled out as suspects.

They don't name these people.

They just call them the suspect or the suspects because they say the investigation is ongoing.

They might have been involved together or separately.

They don't know.

But both were known to detectives at the time.