Episode 4: Are you scared you should be. 05/24/2015 Speaker: Bob Ruff EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Transcription

1 Episode 4: Are you scared you should be. 05/24/2015 Speaker: Bob Ruff EPISODE DESCRIPTION Bob discusses updates in the case, following Undisclosed Episode 3 Addendum. With new information, he's narrowing in on the real villain in the Adnan Syed case. Today s episode of The Serial Dynasty is brought to you in part by Audible. Audible is offering Serial Dynasty listeners a free audiobook. To receive your free audiobook, simply go to AudibleTrial.com/SerialDynasty. Hello everybody and welcome back to Episode 4 of The Serial Dynasty podcast. Thank you for downloading this episode today. To all of you listeners who have downloaded this episode and our prior three episodes, thank you one more time. You are helping this show to grow at a surprisingly fast rate. We ve got a lot of shares and interactions on Twitter, s have just been flooding in with thoughts and theories and critiques on the show and things like that. And all of that is just helping us to build the show, make it better, and create more content. I do appreciate the ratings and reviews on itunes, that s helping us to move up the charts there, so thank you for that. I have received a couple donations from listeners and I can t thank you enough for that. That s helping to cover the costs for all of the bandwidth and other expenses associated with this show. And most of all, thank you for just telling your friends about the show. Our audience is growing by the thousands every day and that just helps to add more content to the show, give us more interesting things to talk about. Now before we get into the real nitty-gritty of the show, I want to take a moment to connect with you listeners and hopefully you re feeling the same thing that I m feeling. I don t think I ve ever felt such pride in being a part of something this meaningful. For those of you that are unaware, this Monday the Court of Appeals in Maryland remanded Adnan s case back to the lower circuit court. The judge read the briefs and bypassed the oral arguments that

2 were to occur on June 9 th. And if I understand that right, felt there was such a strong argument for Adnan that they skipped that hearing and are sending it right straight back down to the court. The biggest and most important part about that is that Adnan s legal team will be able to present new evidence in that appeal in the lower court, including the testimony of Asia McClain. This is an amazing example of the power of the people. We re not just entertaining here. We re not just passing the time and listening to interesting things on the radio. Millions of Americans have gotten behind this movement when Serial was released last fall. The public outcry of support, that is what has caused this to happen. Adnan s legal team has been working for over a decade to accomplish what we just accomplished. This is something so meaningful that could let an innocent man who has been sitting in prison for over fifteen years actually walk free and be a free adult for the first time in his life. And it all started with one from Rabia Chaudry to Sarah Koenig asking her to do a story on this. Now as the audience for this show grows larger and larger I m spending, of course, more and more time, and doing more and more research, I m actually reading, people. If you can believe that. I know I told you in the first episode that I get a lot of my information through audio media because I m traveling a lot but I've been spending some late nights and early mornings on the computer and digging and digging and some of that research it lands you down the wormhole of Reddit and some of those other places that you know, I ve heard all these horrible things about Reddit and I must admit I found some interesting content and some good ideas on some Reddit articles or blogs that have come up, but there s also a lot of negativity and a lot of hating on Reddit. A lot of people just blasting on Sarah Koenig and what I want to point out to all of you and I m sure you're aware of it, were it not for Sarah Koenig creating Serial, Asia McClain would have never known what Kevin Urick said on the stand when he lied under oath and told the court that she had told him that she only wrote the affidavit because she was pressured by Adnan s family. It s the power of a podcast. But the thing is, it s not just a podcast. It s the audience. It s you. Were there no audience, were there not people that got so intrigued by this case that started actually dedicating time writing, blogging, posting about this case, the public outcry wouldn t be there. Rabia Chaudry wrote in a blog post today, which this is Thursday the 21 st [May 21, 2015] when I m recording this, that it is quite clear that the State s brief was less of a brief written to a judge but more so it was a brief that was written to the public. The way that it was written, the State knows that they ve messed up and the State knows that there are millions and millions of people that are watching their every move at this point. That pressure, that new sense of accountability for the State I believe is what is going to free Adnan. Now while we re on the topic of Reddit, if any of you follow The Serial Dynasty on Twitter you saw that I mentioned the other night that I did accidentally stumble across a Reddit post. I was actually researching some things about the case, and I saw an article come up that said it was a Reddit post about The Serial Dynasty. I've known, I learned a long time ago not to Google my name, but of course I clicked it and read it and there were some very nice, intelligent things that people had to say. But as these forums always do, it goes down the 2

3 rabbit hole where people start to get negative and they start arguing with each other and it just becomes almost an embarrassment to read. And my first thought was in the words of Farva from the cinematic classic Super Troopers, "I'm not going to dignify myself with a response to that." But the more I thought about it, there were a couple of points in there on that blog post that I thought were at least worth mentioning just to clear the air on a few things. First of all was a question of bias. The original poster had mentioned that she liked the show and she liked my unbiased approach and then of course somebody came on, says, well you know, how was he unbiased? Doesn t he know about Adnan saying that Adnan having conflicting statements about when, or if, he asked Hae for a ride that day? And by the way, I am aware of those. It made mention of the point of He s clearly not unbiased, you can see him falling all over Susan Simpson the second she got on the phone. So this is the point that I want to address. First of all, my bias. As everyone that are involved in these podcasts and bloggers and everything, all of us are clearly people that are interested in, we ll call it, true crime, but in the dynamics of an investigation like this. Intelligent people looking into an investigation and actually investigating ourselves in our own way. So ask yourself this, what bias could me, Bob Ruff, the podcaster and fire chief from Michigan, possibly have towards Adnan Syed, a Maryland 34-year-old man that was imprisoned fifteen years ago? And the answer is: none. I started Serial literally not knowing what Serial was. I had heard it mentioned several times on other podcasts and of course it was on the news. I thought, I ll give it a try. Everyone else is listening to it. When I turned it on I literally had no idea what it even was. And as I mentioned in Episode 1 of this podcast, I went through the ups and downs that I m sure most of you did. There were days after listening to episodes of Serial I thought, Nope, Adnan is guilty. The next day, I was sure he was innocent. The next day, I was sure he was guilty. The next day, I wasn t so sure. As I listened to all of those episodes, there was no bias. So I guess what I would say to my biases: don t mistake my opinion for bias. I've come to the conclusions that I have come to and I make very clear on this podcast that I don't know what happened that day and I m still digging and looking into it. But I have also presented the things that at this point, in my mind, in my opinion, I feel I know to be true. And with all of the evidence that I ve looked into since Serial was over and especially since Undisclosed podcast has dug up more and more and more information, when I factor all of that in, I m sorry, I do not believe Adnan Syed had anything to do whatsoever with the murder of Hae Min Lee based on research and evidence. Not on bias. I have no reason to be biased. I have no skin in this fight. But that s just me. More importantly, and I don t want to call it defending myself, because honestly, everyone has their opinion and there s going to be the larger this audience grows, the more negative things that are going to be out there. And I know that. That goes with anything. But I was really bothered by some things that were said about Susan Simpson. So I m going to take a minute to defend Susan. What I really like about Susan Simpson is her lack of bias. In listening to Undisclosed and watching her interviewed and reading her blog posts, what really intrigues me about her is she reminds a lot of me as far the way that I investigate. 3

4 She is very factually based. She doesn t jump to conclusions. She doesn t work off assumptions. And if you haven t listened to my Episode 3 where I interview Susan, go back and listen to that and you can hear that so clearly coming from her. When I was asking her about speculations regarding new suspects or Don s involvement, I found it really, really interesting that she pointed out that the questions that we re asking about Don based on some circumstantial evidence was so similar to the way that circumstantial evidence was used to incriminate Adnan. That honestly I caught it when I was interviewing her but as I was editing and listening to the finished product later, it just really hit me how unbiased and intelligent and factually-based Susan is. So I disagree wholeheartedly that Susan Simpson has a biased view on this. Even in the Episode 3 Addendum of Undisclosed that aired this past Monday, Rabia laid out that Susan does not agree with her about her theory that Jay took the police somewhere else before he took the police to Hae s car. And her reason for that? Because there s not enough evidence. It s taking a leap from one statement spoken. I don t disagree with Rabia necessarily for making that assumption but that s why I think that the Undisclosed team is such a great dynamic between Rabia and Susan and Colin, they have three different perspectives and they re not yes men or yes women. They all have their own minds and thoughts and angles on this case. And Rabia, who I think is spearheading this whole thing, allows and encourages Susan and Colin to do so. Now next up, of course, I want to talk about the Episode 3 Addendum of the Undisclosed podcast. The Episode 3 Addendum brought out some new information. Some of it was very moving to me and very informational and some of it I was a little bit wishy-washy on and I ve done a little research to kind of confirm or deny my wishy-washy-ness. So right up front, the thing that was very telling to me about the police investigation and the corruption that was going on there was the stet that was offered to Jay on March 5 th. For those of you that haven t listened to the Addendum from Undisclosed, which I assume you would, but if for some reason you're listening to this and you haven t heard that, you should go back and listen to it. But a stet is what is basically a pause button put onto a criminal charge. What had happened was on January 27 th, so that s after Hae was murdered, before her body was found, Jay was arrested. The charges were disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Now I tried to dig a little deeper into that and figure out the details of that and I couldn t find them. I was able to find the charges where it listed the stets on Maryland s Criminal Records Search. I couldn t get any further with that. I couldn t find any details on it. I actually contacted Susan Simpson and asked her if she had any more details about it and she was unable to get anything else either. It appears that those records have just disappeared out of the Maryland database. So we don t know what the disorderly conduct was regarding or at what level the resisting arrest was. What we do know is that Jay was officially brought in for questioning about a month after that, after they officially questioned Jennifer. Then on March 4 th Jennifer met with the prosecutor, which the Undisclosed team did a great job of parsing that together based on some scattered notes from the detectives. And then on March 5 th Jay meets with the 4

5 prosecutor and he is granted a stet. Now I believe Undisclosed team didn t find notes that he met with the prosecutor, however only the prosecutor has the authority to issue a stet. I did look that up and confirm that. So it s fair to reason that he did indeed meet with the prosecutor and was issued a stet on that disorderly conduct and resisting arrest charge. Now again, I m assuming everyone listening to this has already heard that episode of Undisclosed but just in case there s somebody that hasn t, the way a stet works is that basically they put a pause button on your charges and they have some conditions and if you meet the prosecutor s conditions, the charges are then dropped. So no doubt the conditions, and of course, we re speculating, but there s no other possible reasonable explanation to me for the stet at that time while Jay s being questioned in a murder investigation other than he was offered the stet in exchange for his testimony. So that was very, very moving and very telling of what was going on. [00:13:54] Jay Talking to Police before First Official Interview Now the other piece of the Addendum 3 that was, some are calling it a bombshell, I still don t know what to think about it, was the information the team discovered from some private investigator notes that the police were actually talking to Jay prior to their first official recorded interview on the record. Now I ve seen the notes, I ve seen the private investigator s notes from the Undisclosed website and I m very confident confirming that that did actually happen. That the police did actually speak with Jay. One of them was Neighbor Boy saw Jay in the back of a squad car near Jenn s house. Now my question wasn t did Jay actually speak to the police prior to his official interview, my question was, does that matter? So what I did is I reached out to a few law enforcement officers. I spoke actually this morning with a sergeant from the state police. First, I just asked him if it s common or is it uncommon for detectives doing an investigation to speak with witnesses and not document it prior to bringing witnesses in to give an official statement. His answer was, It depends. He said, You know, most of the time, and especially in like a murder case or anything like that, you're beating the streets and you're talking to lots of people. Anybody that you think might be involved, might know somebody who s involved, might know something. And he said and a lot of it is just useless information. So if I talk to somebody, Hey, do you know anything about this? They say, No man, I don t have any idea. They might write in their little notepad, okay, check that one off the list and they move onto the next person and they never document that or anything because it s just not useful information. There s not, I believe the term used, it s not relevant information to the case. He also said that any witness they question that sound like they have any information relevant to the case at all or that may be relevant to the case, they do document it. They at least keep handwritten notes on it and keep it in the file for later reference. So that officer gave me that it basically could go either way. And then I explained to him what went on in Adnan s case and he kind of shrugged and just kind of an uncomfortable Uh, I don't know. He said it would depend on what Jay 5

6 said to the police the first time they interviewed him and how much information they already had about him to suspect him. So if it was merely his number was on Adnan s cell phone at 10:00 in the morning on that day, and they went and talked to Jay and said, We see your number was on this phone. We re investigating this. Do you know anything about it? Did you see him that day? And he just lied to the cops and said, No I don t remember him calling me. Maybe I didn t answer, I don't know, I don't know anything about it. That would be probably the end of that conversation and they d leave unless they further suspected Jay at that point or thought he was further involved at that point. Now in an attempt to try to get more perspectives on this, a Tweeter user named Becky sent me a message asking me about the serial killer angle which I will address at some point in this episode if I don t forget between now and when we re done. But in the conversation she mentioned that she s a child victim sexual assault detective. So having a detective on the line, I posed the same questions to her and of course she has a little better frame of reference because she actually listens to Undisclosed and Serial and my podcast. So didn t have to explain as much to her. I was asking her, Could it be just normal procedure that they had a conversation and didn t document it? And this is what she said. She said: That screams shady to me. I don't know anyone that has ever done that. We may talk on the ride to the station but just on a rapport-building level in a way. We document EVERYTHING because if we don t, we could get tripped up in court later. So in Becky s case, that s absolutely out of the question in her jurisdiction in her department where she works. That was one of the other things that the sergeant I talked to this morning mentioned was that, you know, it may be different from agency to agency. Different policies and procedures about that. But he also did mention that no matter what the policy is, he said, I d find it hard to believe if there s a detective out there somewhere that has never done that. That has never just stopped to talk to somebody. A quick what he called a nothing conversation and they just move on to the next person. He said everybody has done that. A lot of it depends on what was said by Jay in that conversation when it happened. Next, and actually this was before the other two, on Tuesday morning I sent an to another detective that I know that is, you know, 25 plus years experience. He s been a detective for a long time with the state police so I posed the same question to him in and I got his response today, so I m going to read you what he said: Bob, I can only speak from my own experiences and what I ve learned from other detectives and I know things can vary from person to person, department to department, and circumstances can be very different from case to case. I know for a fact that I have interviewed homicide suspects not knowing they were the actual killer until later in the investigation. I document all my 6

7 interviews but I don t necessarily document people I am just talking to. If I m speaking to a witness or someone closely related to the investigation, I always try to record the interview. Sometimes you re unable to record an interview for one reason or another. I've had my recorder die out or malfunction during an interview and not know until later. Sometimes people will only talk to you off the record. He names a city here that I m not going to mention. This city is a good example of that. If you can even get people to talk there. He says, In your case, the first thing that stands out to me is the year. In 1999, you had cassette records which were big and bulky and not everyone carried one with them in their car. In-car video systems for patrol cars were VHS and very unreliable at the time. I know this because I was in charge of in-car video systems in 2000 and Our detective cars had no in-car video systems and still do not. Sometimes you will talk to people and they just start talking and tell you things and you don t want to stop them. So you just let them talk. Then later you bring them in for a formal interview to review their previous statements. If it was me, I would definitely document the prior conversations in the car. Especially if it was pertinent to the investigation. If it was just small talk and had nothing to do with the investigation, I m not so sure. I've also interviewed people in the beginning of an investigation just to get a statement on paper, not having all the facts yet. Later I might find out additional information that will contradict their statement. Then I would bring them back in for a more formal interview. I don't know if I answered your question or not but there might not be any real clear-cut answer. Some departments have procedures they are supposed to follow and some don t. Being that there are two prior conversations that weren t documented may lead someone to believe there is some sort of cover-up that only the participants of those conversations know what was really discussed. I hope this helps. So I guess after reading that letter and then communicating with the other two detectives, I m still kind of left wondering. And so, I don t really have any hard facts. To me, it seemed that it wouldn t be that out of the ordinary if they just spoke with Jay. Jay said he didn t do it and they just moved on to the next person. I don't know how long those conversations were or what they entailed. What we do know is that in Jay s first recorded interview with the police he, and I don't know remember the time off the top of my head, but it seems like a good hour or more was going by where he was still claiming that he knew nothing about the murder before the Okay, I come clean. 7

8 So, you know, I m certainly not writing off the police corruption, I m actually certain there was police corruption. Just in this case, I don't know if I m ready to put that in the I know or don t know pile yet. I think that s still in the maybes for me. Because I think that if the cover-up had already started, you know, prior to those conversations, you wouldn t have an hour of Jay denying everything before he finally comes clean. You know? And if he s still denying it then, then I believe he would have most certainly denied it, you know, when the police had them in his car in front of Jay s house. But then you also have the fact that Jay, I believe, claims on the record that that formal interview was the first time he spoke to the police. To me, any lie is suspect of something else. There has to be some sort of utility to the lie, to me. You know, why say this is the first time I spoke to the police if he spoke to them two weeks prior? Or a week prior? What s the gain there? There s no reason for it. So as far as my response and the research that I ve done for Addendum 3, I think the stet is very telling of what was going on. Obviously, Jay was compensated in a way and offered a deal for what I believe is not only his testimony but for him to testify in the way that the police and prosecutor wanted him to. [00:23:05] Listener s and Tweets Now moving forward, I have a lot of thoughts that I want to get out there but I also have a lot of and Twitter questions. So, what I've attempted to do is try to assemble this stack of s and Twitter questions into somewhat of an outlined order to try to keep this as linear as possible. So the subject matter may bounce around, back and forth, a little bit. I m going to read the s, discuss them, and that will be when I m getting kind of my opinions out on the case through the s. And then I ll end the show today with kind of my overall theory of where I m at now as far as what I think is going on. So first up, I got another from our friend, Mary. And we ve been opening the shows up with her short and sweet s so I thought I would do the same today. Mary says: Bob, Wonderful job interviewing Susan Simpson and the music sounds great. No theories. Short and sweet. Shout out Thanks, Mary. Oh, and that reminds me too. On that Reddit post I was mentioning earlier, someone may you know, you can pick on me, you can even pick on Susan but somebody was making comments about how they hated the music and they hated it playing in the background and I m sorry. You can kiss my ass on that one. Because I think Jonny Rose did a fantastic job of putting that music together and I didn t mention at the top of the show, but once again, all of our music is provided by Jonny Rose of Slightly Subversive Music and thank you, Jonny, for that. And the other thousands of listeners love it. 8

9 says: Next I want to read a Tweet from Victoria Nicole. Her handle She I just listened to Serial Episode 1 again and the first thing that jumped out at me was why would Adnan call Jay to pick him up? If he had Hae s car, that doesn t make sense. Even if I didn t know everything I know now, based on that, Adnan = innocent. Victoria when I read your tweet I literally smacked myself on the forehead and thought, How the hell did we miss that? Why would he call anybody for a ride when he had the car? He just brought the second car there to go drive somewhere else. That s stupid. It doesn t make any sense. But then I tried to think and remember, try to back myself up to 1999 instead of There were no cell phones then. I m not saying that the thought should be written off. Not by any means and it s a brilliant observation. Something that I didn t even think about. But the call for the car and the help, I guess, which by the way, again, I don t believe happened at Best Buy and I don t think it was Adnan calling for help at all. But just say that it was based on the State s narrative, makes more sense in 1999 than it does in 2015 because if he jumped in the car and pulled away with Hae s body in the trunk, he would have to then go get on a landline or find a payphone somewhere to make that call. And 1999 was a weird time for those of you that were around back then. You know, at the age where you were making calls as a young adult, it was a weird time because cell phones were starting to get popular but, you know, high school kids didn t have I mean, I didn t know any high school kids I m a little bit older than Adnan. But even in college, none of my college friends had cell phones. But at the same time, because of their popularity, payphones were disappearing. It was becoming harder and harder and harder to find a payphone. So it s definitely something to think about. It is something that could definitely be used against the prosecution s narrative, I think. But it makes a little more sense than what I thought it did when I first read that remembering the fact that Adnan had no cell phone because Jay had his cell phone. Next up, I have twitter user Nicole S whose handle She tweeted me and I didn t print it out in front of me but the gist of her tweet was asking why Asia recanted her statement and said that Syed s family was pressuring her and then now has flipflopped and said they weren t. And the answer, Nicole, as to why she did that is: she didn t do that. That is what the prosecutor Kevin Urick had the court believing and has had all of us believing before Sarah Koenig launched Serial. Now we know that s not true. Let me read you a statement from Asia: Urick and I discussed the affidavit that I previously provided to Chaudry. I wanted to know why I was being contacted if they already had an affidavit on file and what the ramifications of that document were. I never told Urick that I recanted my story or affidavit about January 13,

10 In addition, I did not write the March 1999 letters or the affidavit because of pressure from Syed s family. I did not write them to please Syed s family or to get them off my back. What actually happened is that I wrote the affidavit because I wanted to provide the truth about what I remembered. My only goal has always been to provide the truth about what I remembered. Honestly, in all of this, one of the things that actually makes me angry is Kevin Urick. I hope that Adnan s legal team buries him with prosecutorial misconduct. Not only did all these things happen back in 1999 but it continued and through appeals, I mean, literally, a prosecutor got on the stand under oath and lied. And said that he spoke with Asia McClain and she told him those things and Asia had no idea he had even done that until she heard Serial and she heard his recorded voice on Serial stating that she had said that. Which was of course, a lie. Now on the topic of Urick, I got an from Paul Jacobs. Paul writes: Hi, Just got done listening to your first whole episode. I know that you don t follow Reddit but for what it s worth there are many there that would sharply disagree with your notion that Adnan never lied about anything. In particular, he had differing accounts of whether or not he asked Hae for a ride. I personally am undecided but if you haven t already you might consider seeing if you can get some of the /r/serialpodcast I don t understand Reddit, so I don t quite understand what that hash r hash serialpodcast means. I assume that s a subreddit thread. You might consider seeing if you get some of those people on your podcast. A possibility to ask would be the user, xtrialatty. I have no clue if he ll interview publicly but he appears to know his stuff and will offer a spirited counterpoint to Susan and Colin. Well, thank you, Paul, for sending that to me. And like I said, I've never been on Reddit. I m not familiar enough with the medium to be able to navigate my way through it but I did go to Reddit and searched that username you gave me and I didn t see a way on there to contact them. I m sure I have to setup some sort of account or something and I just didn t have time to do that. But I did read one of his posts and it actually, and I agree with you, he made a really good point. And it s something that I hadn t really thought about before. Jay s attorney, Benaroya, I believe [her] name was remember back in Serial we found out when The Gootz [Gutierrez] went crazy over the fact that the prosecutor Urick supplied that attorney to him. Jay had sought out a court-appointed attorney and he couldn t get one because he hadn t been charged yet. So instead of just waiting the few days, or however long 10

11 it was until he was charged, Urick set him up with this lawyer. And we were all looking at it from the point of: obviously there s some misconduct there. You shouldn t be selecting a pro bono attorney for someone who you're prosecuting for a crime. It s insane. And it is insane. But the angle that xtrialatty on the Reddit thread took on it was Urick wanted Jay to have that attorney. Urick was manipulating Jay. And these aren t the exact words that he used in the thread but this is kind of my thoughts after reading his thread. That Urick wanted to manipulate Jay. He needed him to say what he wanted him to say, the way he wanted him to say it, when he wanted him to say it. If Jay lawyered up and had a, let s say, normal, decent attorney, they very well would lead him down the wrong path. Or the correct path, as it were. And not have him follow through with all these lies that Urick is having him tell. So Urick handpicks the attorney that will advise Jay to do what Urick wants him to do. So I thought that was a really, really intelligent outlook on that and well written by xtrialatty on Reddit. And as far as Reddit goes, any of you Redditers out there, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I m not biased at all. This podcast is listener-based. I have my own ideas but throw me an and I ll read it. I actually have not gotten any s saying that they believe that Adnan is guilty and I d be more than happy to read those. I d like to hear the justification for that. So any of you out there that feel that way and hear this, send me your ideas. Explain to me why I m wrong. All right, our next is from Carly Taylor from Sydney, Australia. Carly says: Hey Bob, Love the podcast. We re even Serial obsessed down here in Australia. I have a question. Do we know what Jay and Jenn are up these days? What happened with their lives since this all went down? Even Don? Sounds like he moved on pretty quickly. Thanks, Carly Thank you, Carly, for that . I ve actually been doing quite a bit of research on that. Less with Jay and more with Jenn. And I guess I ll let the cat out of the bag to you listeners out there, which may pan out to be nothing, but I have reached out to Jennifer Pusateri. I have no idea if I ll get a response back from her. I've tried in a couple of different methods to get ahold of her. The most recent being good ole fashion snail mail. Offering for her to have the opportunity to interview on this show and what I told her was everybody has these thoughts and theories that they re sending in about her and what I would like to do is give her the opportunity to give her side of the story. So I don't know if that will ever happen but if I ever do hear from Jenn and she s willing to come on the show, then maybe we can get her side of it. But looking into what she s been doing in the last fifteen years, I didn t find a whole lot of information out there. You know, Google searches, things like that. Nothing substantial that I ve found. Through the Maryland Criminal Records search I did look her up to see if she 11

12 had any criminal charges and she s been really out of trouble since 1999 until She had charges that looked like two separate cases for the same incidence with twelve or thirteen charges for each one, if I was reading them correctly. And they were, whatever the incident was, it looked like the major gist of the charges were possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Interestingly enough, the person that she committed those crimes with was an Anthony Wilds, which I wasn t able to make the link or didn t have time to research far enough but I assume that is some relation to Jay Wilds. It was really hard to piece out exactly the dates because there were different dates thrown all over those documents. Most of them read pretty clear. There was a filing date of 2012 but then when I read it further it said the actual citation date was August 16, So that s just last summer. Then a stet was entered on January 14 th of this year, just a couple of months ago on that charge. Now all of you out there with tin foil hats on right now, your wheels might be spinning a little bit and mine were too. That could be nothing. I mean, stets are not that uncommon. But it really made me wonder as she s sitting there waiting on action on these charges if I was reading those documents correctly, which, you know, I m not a lawyer and I could have read them wrong, but if she s waiting to figure out what happens with these charges and Serial comes out and all these other podcasts come out and then Jay interviews with the Intercept who I just learned today, Jay Wild s attorney who Urick set him up with in 1999 set up that interview for him and set up the interview for Kevin Urick with the Intercept. If you want some information on that, check out Rabia Chaudry s blog Split The Moon. Her blog today laid out a lot of information on that and I just don t have time on the show today to explain all of that. But it does make me wonder if with all this pressure on and the appeals and everything that s happening in the court system if Urick may not be at it again in grabbing Jenn and knowing that Jenn may end up having to go back in court and testify again and all this heat is coming and saying, Hey, we ll stet this. You make sure you keep to the story we had in You stick with it, we ll get rid of these charges. Now, understand that is 100 percent speculation. That is my tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory. But I wanted to throw that out there to see if any of you thought the same thing when you hear those dates and details. If those thoughts at least crossed your mind. Because they crossed mine. And again, it may turn out that I completely misread that document because there were dates from 2012, 2014, 2015 in there. But I did see the disposition of stet was issued on January 14, Now as far as Jay is concerned and what he s been up to for the last fifteen years. Going to the same search engine and he s got a rap sheet a mile long and that may be exaggerating but there are a lot of there s got to be at least a dozen, mostly drug related over the last fifteen years. I did notice that it seemed like there was a lot of charges that were dropped, not prosecuted, things like that. Which, you know, I don't know exactly what all those mean. I had heard mentioned, I think by Rabia, or read in one of her blog posts or somewhere in all the massive information that s out there, that Jay to this day has still never served a day in jail, even since then. I don't know if that s true or not. I tried to verify that but it s just a sea of information that it seems to be really hard to get some details on that. 12

13 All right, my next comes from Paul Vinet. Paul says: Let me just say first off, brilliant episode. Additionally, you managing to score an interview with Susan from Undisclosed, View from LL2, so cool. Thanks, Paul, and really the one that is so cool is Susan for being willing to come on the show and it s very much appreciated and it added a lot of insight to me as far as my thoughts go. He says: Anyway, enough of that. I m writing very specifically to put in my two cents on the question of why you bring up trying to figure out the detectives motivations for what they did with Jay and the other witnesses. There s something Sarah Koenig said during Serial that when I first heard it I totally interpreted it as defense/praise of the detectives. She says something along the lines of a friend telling her, Remember police detectives are the most skeptical people in the world. They pretty much assume everyone is lying to them at all times. I think that in reality, this is an ironic truth. These detectives do think that everyone is lying to them at all times. They do. Everything, and I mean, everything, which does not validate their most current theory of the case is a lie. Anyone telling them anything other than exactly what they want to hear is obviously lying. They just have to press and work on a witness who is lying to them and wear them down. And eventually, sure enough, the witness fesses up and tells them the truth. Wouldn t you know it? The truth turns out to be that Detective Ritz or MacGillivary was right the whole time. It s a cycle of confirmation bias. I do find it hard to believe that at some point, eventually, even the most hardheaded cocky bastard would have to realize that Jay was just regurgitating back to them whatever they wanted to hear. But who knows how long that took. Maybe by the time they figured it out, if indeed they ever got past their internal cognitive dissonance, telling them they are so brilliant, maybe by then it was too late in their minds to put on the brakes. They didn t want to admit they had screwed up things. Anyway, it was hearing SK talk about how the detectives pretty much assume everyone is lying to them at all times, that s what really stuck with me. Thanks so much for the podcast. You are the best Serial/Undisclosed commentary podcast by far. Signed, Laced. Thank you, Laced, for the and thank you for the compliments. You know, I don't know as far as this goes. I definitely feel very strongly, I guess I can t say know, because how could I know? But in my mind, I know these detectives knew Jay wasn t telling the truth. And from what we found on Undisclosed, these detectives not only knew it, they were creating this lie for Jay. So clearly they knew he was lying. Now, I guess if it was just 13

14 a lie, this would kind of make sense, that they had a theory and I just feel like there is still a bigger picture here. And the more and more I m researching and the more and more that I m hearing and reading, the more and more I think that this ship was driven by Kevin Urick. All right, my next is from Sherry Clark. Sherry says: Great work. Three things that I can t get passed. Not really theories, but here they are: 1) No way, no way, no way Adnan gets a phone call from the cops while he s high and goes to bury a body a few hours later. Hell, even without weed, I d be paranoid talking to the cops. I m supposed to believe he killed Hae, got high, the cops called him out of the blue and he was so calm and went and buried the body? No way. Yeah, I can definitely see your point there. It d be a weird time to go bury a body but on the other hand, you could look at it as if we re in this hypothetical world that he actually did it and the body was in the trunk of the car outside and he gets a call from the cops then maybe it s, Oh shit, we need to go quick bury this body. And we know and it s been teased by Rabia that coming in Episode 5 of Undisclosed we re going to find out more about how we know that s not when the body was buried. I do know that based on the autopsy reports and the lividity on the body, the body had to be laying somewhere else for what Susan said was between eight and twelve hours prior to being buried. Sherry s , point number two: 2) Don s reaction. In the episode where Sarah finally talks to Don she says his first reaction when the cops call looking for Hae is, They re going to think I killed her. This is before anyone knows she s dead. Everyone else assumes she ran off to California but Don goes straight for murdered. That s fishy to me. That s fishy to me too, Sherry. I still, you know, I don t want to, and Susan really made me feel guilty about this and rightly so, so I m not going to speculate on this more until I have more facts, but I do just still have that, something just doesn t seem right there. And definitely agree with Susan that Don at least should have been suspect number one. They may have been able to write him off the list, but he should have been investigated more than he was so that we d have the answer to some of these questions. 3) If Adnan went to him for help because he s the criminal element of Woodlawn, then who the hell did Jay think Adnan was threatening him with? If Adnan knew someone who could harm Jay or harm Stephanie, as Jay implied, then why didn t Adnan call that cat to help with the murder? 14

15 That is a really, really good point and this is what I love about what we re doing on this show, is getting the view points and the ideas from so many different people from so many different walks of life and so many different trains of thought all sending in their ideas. And I hadn t really thought about that but when you really pick apart these details and try to compare them all together, it s fallible. Just like that point right there. Jay saying both that Adnan picked him because he s the criminal element of Woodlawn but also saying that he helped him because he was afraid of this Westside Hitman or whoever, that Adnan knew. A real actual killer. So Sherry makes a great point here. If Adnan knew the Westside Hitman personally, then why the hell wouldn t he have that guy help if he wanted to murder somebody? That right there is one of the best points that I've heard made from my own thoughts and a lot of these s. It s simple. It s to the point. But that makes a lot of sense. Very well done, Sherry. She says: I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks, Sherry ` And those are my thoughts. Well done, well done. All right, our next comes from and I apologize if I mispronounce this because I m sure that I m going to but I m going to do by best. Now this is from Vikram Rao. I m sorry. It s V-I-K-R-A-M and the last name is R-A- O. Vikram writes: Great podcast. Just want to put forward a point I haven t seen receive a lot of attention. Jay claims he helped Adnan because he was afraid Adnan might get him for pot dealing and/or might hurt Stephanie. But does this makes sense? Here s a hypothetical conversation: Adnan says, Look, man, you better help me bury the body and keep your mouth shut. I know what you do regarding drug dealing. I m close to Stephanie and I know the Westside Hitman. Then Jay says [Bob laughs] I love the way he writes. Then he says: Then Jay says, That s peanuts, dude. I got you for murder. You make one threat, one move towards the cops or Stephanie and I can make sure you re behind bars for the rest of your life. So about that burial? Good luck with that. It s not even about Jay actually going to the cops. It s about meeting Adnan s threat with a much bigger threat that would stop Adnan in his tracks. All Jay had to do was not help with the burial. Do you really think Adnan would make good on his threat to go to the cops about Jay s dealing or to hurt Stephanie when Jay had Adnan on murder? And this just because Jay refused to help him bury a body? Or do you think Adnan would instead find another sucker or 15

16 find a way to get it done himself? Hence, Jay s explanation for his motivation to help bury the body makes no sense whatsoever. I don t see this pointed out often enough. Another good point, right along the lines of the last we read. You know, who in their right mind would think that you help me bury this body or I m going to tell the cops you deal weed, that would scare them? Obviously they re not going to go to the cops. They just killed somebody and know you know they killed somebody. So just more and more and more of Jay s testimony and the State s narrative that is debunked. Thank you for the . I m not going to insult you by trying to pronounce your name again. All right, our next is actually from the musician who created our theme music, Mr. Jonny Rose. Jonny says: Hey again, totally aside from the music, I had one question I wanted to pose for your show about the Jay/Jenn theory as it relates to the latest Undisclosed episode. The basic question is this: knowing the Baltimore PD s history of racial profiling, corruption, etc., why would Ritz and MacGillivary go to such lengths to help Jay, a known criminal element in the area, escape murder charges and frame an innocent man when it seems so obvious that the detectives must have known that Jay and Jenn were the most likely suspects? Many might say it s simply because they were tipped off about Adnan, formulated their timeline to frame him, and then doggedly stuck to it in their rush to close the case. But what if Ritz and MacGillivary were somehow on the take from Jay s family s drug operation? More information about his grandma s house can be found on Reddit. And therefore had a vested interest in protecting him and his family from charges. As a fan of The Shield where lead character Vic Mackey had a similar under-the-table operation going on with a local dealer, crazier things have happened and it really isn t that hard to believe considering all the other illegal things Ritz and MacGillivary had allegedly done. It s a far out theory but I can t help but wonder why anyone would go this far to protect a witness and admitted accomplice. Especially when Jay has ties to a much [larger] drug operation that could have been a significant drug bust for the detectives. It s not like they just coached Jay to finger Adnan. They actually constructed an unnecessarily elaborate story that protected Jay and Jenn from murder charges and then spent countless work hours and risked their careers in an effort to uphold that false narrative. To me that reeks not just of corruption but of self-protection. Cheers, Jonny 16

17 I think you have your crosshairs pointed in the right direction, Jonny. Personally, again, I m beyond the point of trying to figure out if Adnan did this or not. The major question in my mind right now, and I've said it over and over again and the listeners who have sent the s have picked up on that, is the why. We know the police corrupted this investigation. We know the prosecutor corrupted this investigation. And we don t know why. So that s definitely not a theory I can write off. I've heard rumors about, and I've read a little bit of, you know, blog posts and things about grandma s house having a much more major drug operation going on than what Jay led on to originally. So the idea that maybe the cops were on the take protecting that operation maybe that does provide a motive, I don't know. I mean, I don't know enough to say yes or no, if that s actually something that could be gone back and checked into even at this date back to that time. Because one thing we do still have access to, if a court were ever to approve a warrant or a subpoena to check these out, is it would be interesting to see Ritz and MacGillivary s bank records from that time. This is something I ve been thinking a lot about. I hadn t considered it from the angle of them being on the take to protect some drug operation but that s certainly a possibility. But I just feel like the only motivation I could think of to cause them to take this big of a risk, of course, again, we re looking at this risk based on 2015 after millions of people have listened to Serial and Undisclosed and all the other podcasts and this podcast and there s blogs and all these things about this case now. But that wasn t the case in The case came and went and it was over with. So I m sure none of the people involved in this case expected it to be slammed right back in their face fifteen years later, especially to the extent that it has been because of Serial and everything that has followed Serial. So that brings us to the conclusion of the show where I tell you my thoughts and theories. So what do I think? I don't know what I think. I don t know for sure. But I think that the questions at this point would be to start asking aren t about Jenn and they aren t about Jay and they aren t about Adnan. We need to start investigating Detective Ritz, Detective MacGillivary, and prosecutor Kevin Urick. And specifically prosecutor Kevin Urick. You see when I look at the why, the motivation for the police to do this, like I mentioned earlier, I can only think of three reasons why the detectives would have corrupted this case in the way that they did. One being they screwed up. They botched the investigation. They blew it off. They had a heavy caseload. They had who they thought was maybe a decent suspect. They had a witness that they had a little bit of leverage on. But even with that, when I say a little bit of leverage, yes, there was the stet put in place for this charge but these are not felony charges. I mean, we re talking about disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. And we think resisting arrest is big but I actually know people that have had resisting arrest charges put on them because of a domestic dispute when they argued with the cops for a minute, you know, and they didn t get anything more than probation from very similar circumstances. Is Jay willing to put someone else in jail for the rest of their life to get out of a misdemeanor charge like that? I just don t buy it. I don t feel like that is enough leverage. I still can t commit myself to believe that Jenn and Jay had no involvement at all. But as far as the detectives go, there is that first option for motivation that they just, they screwed 17

18 it up. They didn t investigate. They dropped the ball. And they just wanted to get it off their desk. They had a witness that was willing to testify so they pushed him into it and they got it done. Which by the way, I don t buy that one. I just don t. This is too big for that. I mean, in a way it makes sense, but I mean, this is a life sentence for murder. And it wasn t like they just threw a half-hearted case at the prosecutor and said, Go with it. See what happens. They went out of their way to build this case for the prosecutor under false pretenses. Which leads me to my second possibility as far as theories on the detectives motivation. It s very possibly in my mind, and this is speculation, but in my mind, that like I said earlier, Kevin Urick was driving this train. I think that we need to look at the motivation. Not necessarily at Ritz and MacGillivary but what was motivating Kevin Urick? He was involved way early. Way earlier than we thought. He was speaking to Jenn Pusateri on March 4 th. The stet was ordered for Jay Wilds on March 5 th. He was involved much earlier than a prosecutor should have been involved. At least in my experiences with the legal system, the prosecutors get involved after the police have done their investigation, they have a suspect, they want to file charges, they send the charges to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor decides what to do with them. Yet, before that s happening, the prosecutor is already involved and is already working on offering deals for Jay very, very early in the game. And that s information that was not disclosed before Undisclosed dug it up. So I think that could be one of the motivations, is that Kevin Urick was pushing them into doing this. And then the third possibility being that there was some sort of payoff. Was somebody paying them to do this? Something along the lines of what Jonny was talking about. I don't know, that seems like a bit of a stretch to me too. That seems very cliché and Hollywood but I m sure it does actually happen in some cases. But so let s say option two is the one that s correct and Urick was the one driving this home. Then we back up one more step and figure out what s motivating Kevin Urick? As I m going through this investigation, the same way I would any other investigation that I m involved in in my job, this is where it has led me. What was motivating Kevin Urick to do what he s done? Let s look at it. He got involved early. Jay was issued the stet. The police are helping to create Jay s testimony after the stet was issued. He gets Jay an attorney. He gives him representation that he has control over because he picked the attorney. We know that he s bullying Don when he s testifying. He boldface lied throughout the trial about things that he knew were not true. I ve never heard of a prosecutor making it an effort like this even let s say he didn t know that Adnan was innocent. What I can also tell you was he didn t know Adnan was guilty either. He couldn t have. There s no way. Too many alibi witnesses. Adnan s address and password were sitting in his file. I guarantee you it was checked. If you re trying to find anything you can to put this suspect away, there s no way that stone is left unturned. My guess, speculation, they opened his account, checked the , saw that he had been logged under in that time and put it away. We know that he had Hae s digital diary on the floppy disk. Never disclosed it. No one knows where it s at. There s just no way. There s no chance in hell that Kevin Urick knew that 18

19 Adnan did this. And I don t see how there s anyway in hell that he could even think Adnan was the best suspect for this. And yet he pushed and pushed and pushed and lied and cheated his way through this investigation. Years later, during the appeals process, he gets in contact with Asia McClain and he convinces her not to testify in the appeal. And then he gets on the stand, under oath, and lies though his teeth about what Asia had said. Why? What is he covering up? What is he trying to protect? Then after Serial comes out and all this light is shined on the case and the spotlight is back on him and people are starting to ask questions about him and questions about Jay and he knows that there s more information out there. Sarah and her team and Rabia and her team had dug up more information that absolutely proves that the timeline was not correct so then what most of us see is, well Jay Wilds speaks to the Intercept and he completely changes his story and he changes his narrative and says that he lied to protect his grandmother. But then we find out that the attorney that Kevin Urick secured for him pro bono back in 1999 is the one that set up the interview for him and Kevin Urick. Sit on that for a second. Urick knows what s coming and he s trying to cover his tracks, even fifteen years later. If Urick had done his job and he d done it properly or even if Urick just did his best and made a mistake, he ignores all of this. He sleeps at night knowing that he did his best, or he did the right thing. But Kevin Urick is shaking in his boots right now and I think that he should be. I think he hears Rabia Chaudry knocking and he knows that she s coming in with her big, bad team of lawyers and her mountains of facts and details and evidence. Kevin Urick, if you re listening to this, are you scared right now? You should be. [00:58:01] Next Episode and Credits Next time on The Serial Dynasty podcast, Undisclosed s Colin Miller. Thank you again, everyone for joining me today and listening to this episode. Please tell your friends. Rate us on itunes. If you want to help with the cause, there s a donate button on our website, you can help us out that way. Or, go to AudibleTrial.com/SerialDynasty and download your free audiobook. And most importantly, keeping ing in your thoughts and theories to theories@serialdynasty.com. And you can always contact me on Until next time, this has been The Serial Dynasty podcast. [00:61:21] End of Episode 19

20 *Note: s and tweets were transcribed based on the audio and may not reflect the original communication. Additionally, listener names are based on audio and may be spelled incorrectly. Transcription by 20