Are you a Serial addict too?
On February 9th, 1999, a man walked deep into a wooded Baltimore park to relieve himself. Once there, he discovered a clump of human hair sticking out of a shallow grave. That discovery ended the three week search for missing high school student Hae Min Lee. Lee’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the murder and given a life sentence yet has always proclaimed his innocence.
Fifteen years later, Sarah Koenig of This American Life received a call from a friend of Adnan’s family, begging her to investigate the case. And so begins the first episode of Serial, an instantly-addictive new non-fiction podcast presented in weekly installments. Koenig has logged over 30 hours of phone time with Adnan, and she’s meticulously poured over transcripts, phone records, and old photos. She reports what she finds back to Adnan and we hear him digesting the sometimes surprising, always intriguing information. And the kicker is, Koenig is still working on the case and has no idea how the series will end (the series will offer its eighth installment, "The Deal with Jay"(!), this Thursday).
Serial has every ingredient necessary to create an engaging experience: There’s romance. There are high schoolers doing dumb high school things. There’s murder. And we can all get on Reddit and become detectives discussing our theories about who did it. It’s a living narrative and Koenig’s exposition is flawless. You want so badly to solve this mystery in your head, but you can’t. Unless you keep listening.
That hasn’t stopped Redditors from trying to crack the case. The subthread dedicated to the show is called r/serialpodcast/, and its following is intense. Conspiracy theories abound, some of which I’ll mention below. If you haven’t listened to Serial yet, then be warned: there are some spoilers here.
The Conspiracy Theories
Adnan’s friend Jay did it. He was a police informant and got off scott free by blaming Adnan. He had a history of criminal activity and drug abuse, so he took a sweet plea deal in order to save himself.
Roy Davis did it. In 2003, Davis was convicted of raping and strangling a woman named Jada Danita Lambert in Baltimore back in 1998, about six months before Hae’s body was found.
Adnan did it. He is actually a psychopath/sociopath who is fooling us all. The Adnan we hear weekly on the phone seems intelligent, nice, and as far as Koenig can tell (since she has spent the most time developing a relationship with him), honest. But there’s another side none of us know yet.
Jay, Adnan, and their friend Jenn did it. Adnan and Jay were sitting around high one day, and after Adnan said something like, "God I could kill Hae,” the three of them took action on that sentiment.
Jay and Jenn did it. A variation of the above theory is that Jay and Jenn killed and buried Hae because she knew the two were secretly seeing each other, and they didn’t want Hae telling Jay’s girlfriend Stephanie.
Feel free to add your theories into the comments section below. (Personally, I think it was Jenn who killed Hae. Well — and maybe Jay. I think they met Hae in the Best Buy parking lot, asked her not to tell Stephanie about their little affair, and things escalated so they killed her.)
So an interesting question here is can this type of long-form, single-narrative storytelling work? Obviously the podcast has gained such a huge following that the producers are definitely on to something. Serial is so carefully paced it’s hard to tell what you’re going learn from week to week. The Atlantic has questioned if Koenig is feeding us information and holding facts back in order to “ratchet up narrative tension.” And Slate, which has its own podcast dedicated to Serial — “The Serial Spoiler Special” — accused the reporter of having tricks up her sleeves, claiming she’s “manipulating the audience in some way.” In response, Koenig told Vulture, “That really couldn’t [be] farther from the truth. I am not playing all of you.”
Serial is so riveting I forget that it's true crime when I'm listening. Unlike the television shows we all binge watch to find out the answers we need to know right now, though, Serial can’t reveal anything to us early. It’s a story whose ending won’t be exposed until the investigation by Koenig and her colleagues has been exhausted. And I can barely wait to hear what’s next now that Koenig has brought on Deirdre Enright from the Innocence Project to look over Adnan's case.
Unlike fictional narratives, there’s no guarantee of a nicely packaged, balanced finale here. For me, the most horrible part of each podcast is the moment when the theme music starts up, and Koenig signs off, ”Next time, on Serial,” reminding us that the answers are still out of reach for another week.
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