Chapter 1: What new evidence did detectives uncover after Hae's body was found?
We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times Games. And here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people.
I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers.
I have a J for 10 points.
I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh.
As an English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words. Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. Hello, Serial listeners. This is Sarah Koenig. If you're listening to this show, I'm hoping that means that you're into it, and maybe you want to hear more stories like it.
Well, you're in luck, because we've got a brand new show called The Idiot coming at the end of March, 2026. Just like or follow this podcast, The Serial Podcast, on your podcast app, and you'll automatically be notified when The Idiot comes out. And I am predicting you're going to love it. Okay, on to Serial Season 1.
Previously on Serial. While you're digging in Lincoln Park to bury your body, you're going to find somebody else's. That's Lincoln Park. I walked along the edge of the log expecting to find a body real soon. I never saw one. Lincoln Park, I'm like, where is that? Do you even know where it is? Have you ever been there?
Went shopping with a friend of mine, an ex-friend of mine. I had no idea.
You know, it was not abnormal for me to leave school to go do something and then come back.
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Chapter 2: How did Jay's story change during police interviews?
He's talking about how they got this anonymous call three days after Hay's body was found. The call came in to Detective Massey, a Baltimore County cop. The caller must have had an accent of some kind because Massey's report describes him as an Asian male, 18 to 21 years old. though it's unclear whether Asian in this case means East Asian like Korean or South Asian like Pakistani.
But anyway, a mystery caller says, look at the ex-boyfriend.
The caller further advised that the boyfriend has taken the victim to Lincoln Park on past occasions for sexual encounter. Prior to concluding the phone interview, the caller further stated that the victim broke off their relationship with her boyfriend about a week before she was reported missing.
The caller hangs up. Then, a few minutes later, the same guy calls back and says, oh yeah, by the way.
This time, the caller remembered about a year ago, the suspect informed a friend of his, parentheses, Basir Ali, Asian male, 17, end of parentheses. If he ever hurt his girlfriend, he would drive her car into a lake.
This time, the caller mentions a friend of Adnan's, Basr Ali. Actually, the name of this friend is Yasir Ali. The caller says, Yasir might know something. Hangs up again. The cops can't trace the call. It's out of range. Three days after the anonymous call, the detectives go meet with Yasir Ali at a pizza hut. Yasir says, I didn't make that call. I don't know anything.
Their notes from that conversation say, quote, If Adnan wanted to get rid of the car, where would he do so? Ali indicated somewhere in the woods, possibly in Centennial Lake or the Inner Harbor, unquote. No one has ever gotten to the bottom of who made this anonymous call. The cops didn't figure it out. Anand's attorney didn't figure it out. I've tried to figure it out, too.
For a while, I couldn't let it go. Because it seemed to me that whoever made this call, he must be the key to the whole thing. But so far, I only have guesses that I can't responsibly say out loud. Anyway, the day after the Pizza Hut talk on February 16th, the detectives do some paperwork that will ultimately crack the whole case open for them. They get a subpoena for Adnan's cell phone records.
The results of that subpoena include a list of all the calls dialed and received on Adnan's phone on January 13th, the day he disappeared. That list will become arguably the most important piece of paper among all the thousands in this case. It'll become their map. And they'll follow it, call by call by call, like footprints that end up at Adnan's front door.
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Chapter 3: What did the anonymous caller reveal about Adnan and Hae's relationship?
And that's when I was just like, whoa, what do you mean Adnan killed Hay? Why, what, how, when, where, you know?
If you want to figure out this case with me, now is the time to start paying close attention, because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing. This interview with Jen happens on February 27th, 1999. The day before, on the 26th, the cops had gone to find Jen at her house. They explained they'd like her to come downtown to talk. Jen is thoroughly wigged out.
She says she can't right now. She's busy maybe later. Then Jen and a friend go see Jay. He's at work at a video store. She tells Jay, the police want to talk to me. What do I do? At trial, Jen says, quote, he told me to go down there and tell them what I knew. Tell them enough to keep me out of trouble and tell them to go see Jay. Send them his way.
So Jen goes downtown to see the cops later that night, and she lies to them, says she doesn't know anything. I've seen the detective's notes from that interview, and they're remarkably uninteresting. But by the time she left that night, Jen thought it was possible she was about to get charged.
At trial, she said the last thing Detective McGillivary said to her that night was, quote, everyone's a suspect and no one's a suspect. So the next day, she goes back to the detectives. This time, she's got reinforcements. She's got an attorney with her, plus her mom. They turn on a tape recorder. Who, what, where, when, why?
When you asked why, what did he say?
He said that Adnan said that he broke his heart.
Did he say anything else?
No.
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Chapter 4: How did the detectives connect Jay to the case?
She was in a sorority. When Hay disappeared, Jen was on winter break. She was working part-time as a lifeguard. And Jay was also working. One of his jobs was at F&M, a discount store. Jen said on January 13th, she and Jay had been hanging out earlier in the afternoon at her house after she got home from work. Then Jen says Jay left her house sometime between 345 and 415.
They planned to meet later that evening. But then Jen had gotten a message Jay was running late. He wanted her to pick him up in the parking lot of Westview Mall around 8 p.m. She goes there, and she sees them together. She sees Jay get out of Anand's car. Anand says hi to her. She says he seems to be acting normal. Jay gets in her car, and that's when he tells her about the murder.
After they'd driven a little ways, Jay mentions shovels, the shovels Anand had used to dig in the park to bury Hay, that they were Jay's shovels from his house.
Jay mentioned to me that he knew where Anand dumped the shovel, their shovels. I don't know how many there were, but He mentioned to me that he knew where Adnan put the shovels.
Jen tells them she drives Jay back to Westview Mall, to the dumpsters back there, so that Jay can retrieve the shovels and wipe the handles clean in case of fingerprints.
After that, Jay came back out of my car, and he was really shooken up. He was completely shooken up. He was like, you have to take me to go see my girlfriend now.
The next day, Jen says she drove Jay to the F&M store, the same one where he worked, so that he could throw out the clothes and boots he was wearing the previous night. He pitched them into a dumpster behind the store. One of the cops points out, for a guy who's telling you he didn't kill anyone and didn't help dispose of a body, he sure is taking a lot of precautions.
He clarifies, Jay wasn't along when the body was buried.
Jay wasn't along when the body was buried. In my opinion... No.
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Chapter 5: What inconsistencies exist in Jay's account of the events?
So that's huge for them. Jay will take them to the car. And he does. Once they're finished at headquarters, they all drive out in the middle of the night to where the car is parked, on a grassy hill behind some row houses off Edmondson Avenue. Within a few hours, they'll have a warrant for Adnan's arrest.
They said, something like, we know what you and Jay did, and we talked today. And I'm like, Jay, Jay, like, I had a look of puzzlement on my face, like, what do you mean? Like, what do you mean, Jay?
Anand, of course, says Jay's story isn't true. But he says he doesn't know why Jay would lie, either. He says when he first heard Ritson McGillivary mention Jay's name in connection with his own arrest, he was just confused.
And the same guy, McGillivary, he kind of, like, snorted, like, huh, you know what we're talking about. No, I mean, I had no idea. And the reaction that he gave me was like, stop playing dumb.
It's not like there was some secret feud between Jay and Adnan, at least not that I know of. There was no drug deal gone wrong, neither had bad-mouthed the other or stolen the other's girlfriend. To hear Adnan tell it, it sounds like they didn't even know each other very well. When I first asked him what their friendship was like, what Jay was like as a person, Adnan really had to reach.
He was like, um, Jay worked? He wasn't that into sports.
Okay, I knew he generally kind of listened to like, I don't want to say white people music. But he, like, listened to, like, rock and roll, things like that, like heavy metal. I guess, you know, I can't really, I mean, just, you know, just, like, I can't, to be honest with you, I couldn't even really recall, like, a huge long conversation that we ever had other than, like, a specific subject.
If he was asking me something about Staffanini or something like where we were going to go or, like, we're hanging out or something. we wouldn't necessarily, like, you know, be kicking it per se, right?
We wouldn't necessarily be kicking it per se, as Adnan speak for, yes, we smoked weed together, but we weren't close. However, Adnan was close with Stephanie, Jay's girlfriend, very close. And Adnan says that's the only thing he can think of now that might have turned Jay against him. Stephanie was smart. She was a top athlete at the school. She was beautiful by any standard.
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Chapter 6: What role did Adnan's cell phone records play in the investigation?
In the first taped interview, the detectives asked Jay, why would Adnan turn to someone he didn't even know all that well to help him with this murder?
Jay, why would that man call you the criminal element of Woodlawn?
I'm the criminal element of Woodlawn, he says.
Is that a real or a perceived reputation? I quote, perceived is like how a student body sees, you know, I mean. Teachers who really know me know that I'm not like that, but, you know, you get a certain reputation, it kind of sticks with you.
Because of the contacts you have with helping him get his marijuana, he thinks that you're in that element that you'd be willing to assist him in disposing of the body? I would guess so. That I would know someone or know where or something, but...
In her closing argument at trial, prosecutor Casey Murphy posed this why him question to the jury about Jay. Think about it, she said. Do you really believe that the defendant, meaning Adan, could go to one of his upstanding magnet school honor student friends or a friend from the mosque to assist him with this act? Of course not.
He needed someone who behaved a little more dangerously than those people. He needed someone who took risks. The defendant hopes that you will look at Jay and say, I don't believe him. That is why the defendant chose Jay, because if something went wrong, the defendant could point the finger at Jay. This idea, this is what Jay is more or less trying to communicate to the cops.
But they ask him, if you're actually not the type of guy who knows where to bury a body, then why did you help? Why didn't you go to the police instead?
He gives you his car keys. He gives you his cell phone. tells you a time that he's going to call you, that he's going to kill her, and you do absolutely nothing. Help me understand your train of thought of why you do absolutely nothing at that point. Um, Adnan knows a lot of things about me, like the effect of criminal activities. So, I mean, it wasn't... You're selling marijuana.
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Chapter 7: How did Jay's testimony evolve during the trial?
At first, it was just like shock. And then after that, I was part of it. So, I mean, I couldn't just... But I'm trying to understand, Jay, what he has over you or your involvement in this is beyond belief other than you being afraid of the police. Either he has paid you something or... Like I said, he knows that I sold drugs.
I mean, that was... I mean, that's... He could get me locked up for that.
I mean, I'm sure if I ratted him out for killing Hayden, he wouldn't hesitate to turn me over for selling drugs.
Is there anything else that you'd like to add to this?
He says, I just feel bad about it. That's all I got to say. The cops have a struggle with Jay. I have a struggle with Jay. He's the biggest mystery of this whole case for me. The cops interview him at least four times that I know about. Two of those are on tape. And Jay also tells this story at trial, not once but twice, because the first proceeding ended in a mistrial.
So at least, say, six times he's told what happened, and each time some details shift. Some of these discrepancies seem small to me and understandable, but some are significant and confounding.
And that distance between where a certain detail starts and where it ends up, how far it slides, and why it slides, I've spent untold hours trying to measure that distance, trying to weigh it, for clues as to what might actually be true." For example, this is from taped interview number one. The cops are asking about what he and Anand did that morning of the 13th.
Now, here's taped interview number two from March 15th, two weeks later.
We went to Security Square Mall.
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Chapter 8: What implications do Jay's inconsistencies have for the case against Adnan?
He pops the trunk open and... I don't know him by name, but I can tell him to you by sight.
A strip is a small outdoor drug market, just like a block where you can buy drugs. Jay tells the cops that it takes him about 15 or 20 minutes to get to the location on Edmondson. And later, when the cops drive out with Jay to get Hay's car, Jay shows them this spot on Edmondson Avenue. It's just a few blocks from where they ditched Hay's car, he said. Now, listen to what he says on March 15th.
And while en route to your house, you received a phone call from Adnan. Yes. On his cell phone. Yes. Which is in your possession. Yes. And the conversation was what? That bitch is dead.
Come and get me.
I'm at that spot.
Best Buy, just like Jen had originally told them. This is a problem for the cops, this change. Because it's not something you forget, where you were when you saw a dead body in the trunk of a car. It's not a slip of the tongue. And it's not clear what the calculation is, Edmondson Avenue versus the Best Buy parking lot. What's the advantage of one place over the other? Why tell this lie?
Maybe he's just saying it because it matches Jen's story. Or did he lie to Jen in the first place and then forget? I have a friend who's worked for a long time in the Baltimore judicial system. She knows a lot of cops. And she reminded me when I was telling her about this case, cops are the most skeptical people in the world. They pretty much assume everyone is lying to them all the time.
Ritz and McGillivray aren't newbies. McGillivray came from a law enforcement family. His father had been captain of the homicide unit, in fact. And Ritz was known in the department and in the state's attorney's office as a skilled and meticulous investigator. So they're not suckers. They're taking careful note of the changes in Jay's stories.
It's why they keep going back to him, to clear up the inconsistencies. In the second taped interview, McGillivary confronts Jay, ticking off a list of the main things he's lied to them about. And Jay admits to all the lies. But even so, what struck me is that they don't really press him on any of it. The most forceful McGillivary gets is in this exchange about the location of the trunk pop.
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