Previously, I'm Serial. What did he tell you? Um, you don't mean that she had broke his heart. It was extremely wrong.
There ain't no way to treat him that way. He was like the community's golden child. I think, like, the odds of you getting the charming sociopath, you're just not that lucky. You don't think that I know you at all?
I mean, if you say that I'm a great person, I mean, I'm a nice person. I don't want to talk to you on the phone, you're done. This is a global tell-in. Where's a call from?
I'm not saying it. An inmate at a Maryland Correctional Facility. It's called by a local monitor. From This American Life in WPEC Chicago, it's Serial.
One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. For two months now, I've been grappling with rumors about Adnan. People telling me, there's stuff you don't know about Adnan.
Stuff you need to know to understand who you're dealing with. These communications came in the form of phone calls. Many phone calls. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes conference calls.
Also texts and nervous emails. I can't tell this one, I've spoken to that one, and then that one gets worried that I've broken my word, which I promise I haven't. When person two doesn't confirm the thing person one told me, and I report that back to person one, person one often tells me, person two is lying to me. All these rumors are coming from people in Anu growing up in the mosque community.
The South Asian families who attend the Islamic Society of Baltimore. Some of these people I'd already talked to during my first round of reporting for this story, but then once the series started and they heard how Adnan was being portrayed, a new round of phone calls began. The rumors themselves are nothing too dastardly. Nobody is saying, I saw him do it, or I have proof.
None of it is directly connected to the crime. But likely there are a great many things I don't know about Adnan, and some of the things I was hearing were giving me pause. So I checked them out as best I could. Not every single one.
Some of them were so small that I initially was confused by the telling, waiting for the punchline that had already slid by. Such as, he took a piece of my clothing, a piece of designer sportswear, and then over-explained, claiming it wasn't mine, or that he didn't know it was mine, and then apologized profusely. I, Sarah Koenig, am going to confess something right now. I have done exactly the same thing.
More than one sight wager. On the other end of the scale was a story so incriminating that we thought, well, if this one is true, then we're done. Our story is over. We can all go home.
This was a biggie, and I worked every angle I could to suss it out. I heard it secondhand, that someone said something about Adnan at a party 15 years back. I spent weeks trying to learn first the name, then the location of that someone, then trying to contact that someone, and then finally driving several hours to question that someone in person. I nervously knock at the door, nice guy comes out, we chat, he tells me what I've spent all these weeks and hours waiting for.
Oh yeah, he says, I remember Adnan, nice kid. I remember he seemed sad when he and his girlfriend broke up. And so, I prompt him, I heard this thing, is that true, anything else you want to tell me? The guy looks blank.
That's all he had for me. Imagine I have a file on my desk about this rumor, and I just stamped it with my big cartoon stamp, unsubstantiated. I crossed it off the list. There's one more rumor I'll tell you about in a minute, but first, I want to talk about why relatively few people from the mosque community are willing to talk on tape, or on a record about Adnan.
To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, here's Ali, not his real name, and this is also not his real voice. Why the secrecy? So now let's say you use my voice, and you use my first name and last name, and then you play it on NPR radio or whatever, and it's something from the community that within seconds that will travel throughout the whole community. And this is what he said, he probably knows something, how do we know he's not involved, or he did something, or why is he doing that?
And that's how they're irrational, they're thinking his. I don't know. It's very irrational thinking. And it's sad because it's educated kids talking like that.
That's you, but you're one of them. I mean, you're basically saying I'm succumbing to this irrational... Oh yes, I'm 100% guilty. I'm 100% guilty.
Ali and others told me that their community is judgmental. Right and wrong is drummed into you early and often. Adults judge kids' behavior, which then gets reflected back onto their parents. This is certainly not unique to their community, and the other thing that isn't unique is how close-knit it is.
Information in Gasset travels swiftly, and you don't want to be the one who goes against the grain, or says something that could hurt Anand or his parents. No one wants to end up in hot water. I live in a small town, I understand that. But what I hadn't totally understood, I think, is how scared people were when Anand got arrested.
I got an anonymous text recently that said, quote, I'm a Muslim male who attends the Baltimore mosque. My father and Anand's father are good friends and have known each other for years. Anand's story has always been an urban legend to us kids growing up in the Muslim community, clouded in mystery and used as a cautionary tale. Some people did speak out on tape.
I mean, Rabi and Saad Chaudry obviously did, and there are others too. But there's also a significant faction of people, including Ali, who were scared. Ali said his parents were specially protective, like a 10 on the protective scale, so that after Anand was arrested, they were frantic about his safety. His own life changed because of it.
Drastically. I would even go to the mailbox and my dad's like, where are you going? Are you serious? That really happened?
It really happened. I'm not even making that up. Because your mailbox was like at the end of a driveway or the end? No, my mailbox is attached to the wall of my house next to the front door.
If I open the front door, he's like, where are you going? Who are you going to go meet? There's a girl. Are you going to give her a ride?
Because they think Adnan gave her a ride, and so they think that that's the reason that they picked him up because he arrived. And there was a girl that I used to give her rides to in the morning, lived in the street from me, and after Anand got picked up, she came and was knocked on the floor, like, you didn't come pick me up? What's going on? And my dad went crazy.
My dad dropped her off to school and in the car told her, don't ever ask my son for a rocket pick. Oh my god, really? Yeah. And I think that's just the general...
A bunch of people I talked to told me they feel guilty towards Adnan, but they let him down, because they let him stray, or didn't protect him, or didn't mentor him, or didn't show up in a trial, or didn't visit him in jail. Even ones who were on the fence about his innocence said, please tell Adnan I love him, or please tell him I'm sorry. And I often say back, you should tell him yourself, you can write to him, you know. And then sometimes comes a pause.
The reason Ali agreed to go on tape was that he wanted me to know this about Adnan. I remember, especially in middle school and elementary, more into middle school, that when we would get picked for sports, Adnan was very athletic, tall, good-looking, kind of like the jock role, and I was more chubby, short, kind of the nerdy, you know, kind of role, so he never made me feel that. He always made sure I got picked for the team. If other kids made fun of me on my athletic performance, or couldn't shoot, or couldn't kick the ball, and they would start poking fun, he would always have my back and kind of tell them, stop it, or kind of watch out for me, kind of like an older brother.
And I'll never forget that. Adnan was the kind of kid who'd stand up when her parents came into the room, what he said. At parties or events, he'd be the first one to ask, how can I help you, do you need help setting up those tables, uncle? This was what Ali, disguised and anonymous, had to say.
Normally I probably wouldn't pursue rumors that on their face aren't connected to the crime at hand. But in this case, I decided it was worthwhile because of where these rumors come from. I think these rumors are coming from a feeling that a handful of people have, I've heard this from about four people, people who knew Adnan growing up, that Adnan was capable of committing this crime. I think they believe they saw things in his personality that they think I am not seeing, namely that he's duplicitous.
The term psychopath gets thrown in sometimes. People told me he used his charm and his smarts to deflect suspicion or weasel out of things when he got caught, pretty much what the judge said to him at the sentencing. Which brings me to the only rumor I heard that at least partly checked out. Adnan stole money from the mosque.
Donation money. I've heard various versions of how this happened or could have happened. But from what I can tell, the basic story is, people who come to pray on Fridays, and it's a lot of people, many hundreds, some of them put donation money into boxes. And that's what Adnan's skinned.
Two people told me they saw him do it. One person told me he'd seen it several times. He wouldn't go on tape. But the other guy did.
He was stealing from the mosque every Friday. This is a guy I can't name whose voice we've also changed. See explanation above. Because he was looked upon like a golden child.
And his dad was very religious. And he would go out on missionary work and so on. So his family was looked at a very good religious family. And he was collecting money.
Or the donation boxes that would go around on Friday after prayer. He was in charge, basically, of getting all the boxes together and jumping money and trolling it all up. And he was pocketing thousands of dollars every week. And nobody questioned a good little Muslim kid, you know, stealing from the mosque.
I mean, are you serious? I couldn't even imagine. You saw him actually take money? No, I absolutely saw him taking it.
And I also have done it. This guy estimated that Adnan had stolen many thousands of dollars over time. Tens of thousands. Maybe $100,000.
This sounded fantastical to me. So I checked with Makbul Patel. He was president of the Islamic Society of Baltimore at the time. He said he'd never heard of Adnan taking donation money, but that it does happen from time to time.
Someone's stealing or trying to. There are people who take shoes, he added. My own brand new shoes were stolen. Twice he said that happened.
Once in New York and once in Baltimore. But if Adnan did take money, he said, there's no way it was a big amount. He said on average, people donated about $2,500 at Friday prayers. Maybe up to $3,000 if it was a special occasion.
That money was used to pay the bills, he said. Keep the electricity and heat on. If they were even $100 short on any given week, they'd have noticed. So sure, maybe $20 or $40 here or there, but not hundreds.
And thousands out of the question. Adnan says it's true. He did take donation money. When I first asked him about it, he was unhappy.
I asked him so many, frankly, insulting things, so many nosy and inappropriate questions, and he's never given me pushback. But this was the last straw. What does it have to do with the case he wanted to know? He's never claimed that he's innocent of killing hay because he's a perfect or even a good person, he said.
So why talk about this? And why the double standard? Why wasn't I going to everyone else's closet and pulling out skeletons that made them look bad? Why do I protect other people and call him out on everything?
He's endured other stuff in my reporting that he didn't think was fair to him. But now he was sticking up for himself, he said. He seemed pissed and hurt, and I understood it. If you don't want to talk about this, that's your prerogative.
I'm not going to force you to talk about it. If you don't want to talk about it... Yeah, but I'm also not going to sit here and you mention it, and this is the only thing I don't talk about. Do you understand what I'm saying?
So it's for me in a predicament. It's like you're basically publicly shaming me for something that I've never denied that I did anyway. And it has nothing to do with the case. But you won't do it to other people, though.
I mean, it's like, why do I actually get called out on my stuff? It has nothing to do with the case, but you won't do it to nobody else. Well, I mean... A couple of days and phone calls later, all was calm, and he told me his stealing story.
It was during the summer, maybe the summer before 8th grade, he said. During, like, the Friday prayers, a lot of times there would be one adult, and he would get, like, four or five kids together. And he would say, hey, look, I want you guys to go around and collect, you know, money from people. We're staying there.
You know, however different days, it was different ways. So it was usually anywhere from, like, four to five of us. We all have little boxes or something. And people would come, and they would put money in them.
Usually, like, it would be... I mean, I'm not trying to sound like Ocean's Eleven or whatever, but it was, like, thousands of dollars in cash. Like, one, five, tens, twenties, and maybe, like, $2,000 or $3,000 in cash. And I don't really remember who.
I'm not saying it wasn't me. I'm not saying it wasn't me. You know, just the idea came up. Like, hey, man, we can take, like, $60 or $80.
We can go to the movies, go to the mall, you know, play an arcade, you know, and stuff like that. So eventually, it would be a thing where, like, one or two of us would, like, pocket a $20 bill, and then pocket another $20 bill, and the other three... Or, you know, two or three of us would do it, and the other two would kind of, like, keep watching. And I mean, it was, you know, it was wrong.
It was very wrong. You know what I mean? It's nothing that I'm proud of. It's nothing, you know, I'm very ashamed of.
You know, I don't say that we were kids to try to put it in context or try to make an excuse. I mean, well, maybe I am, right? But it's just, you know, I mean... What made you stop and what made you realize it was wrong?
I mean, I wish I could say that it was, like, you know, some feeling of religion or something or feeling of wrong, but it wasn't. I mean, you know, it was just kind of caught red-handed, so to speak. Anand says he was caught red-handed by Shanim, his mother. He says she found some money in his pants pocket and asked him where it came from, and the truth came out.
He says she was horrified. It was a classic, I'm not angry, I'm disappointed. More disappointed than she'd ever been in him, he says. Anand says back then he didn't think he was hurting anyone.
They spent so much time at the mosque, and they shoveled snow, and they helped set up events and clean up, and so to him it was akin to taking 20 bucks from the till of the family store at the end of the night. He says, of course, as an adult, he knows how wrong that is, but back then, in 8th grade, he didn't fully get it. Anand's telling of this stealing episode is a much more boys-will-be-boys version than what I'd heard from other people, who told me they saw in his actions something more malignant. A couple people I talked to from the mosque community said, this was so low, to take the hard-earned cash of hard-working people, and at the mosque of all places.
This was a terrible thing. Other people said, eh. Mr. Patel, then president of the mosque, was thoroughly unruffled by the whole thing.
He obviously didn't condone it, but he more or less said, so what? It certainly does not a murderer make. To him, he said, if a young person does something like this, it's not even necessarily a sign of bad character. Other mosque friends agreed.
They didn't see how it was connected to the crime, and also, some people told me they'd shoplifted before, they'd broken the rules, so people in glass houses, man. And in the end, these guys all said what most of Anand's old friends say. He didn't have it in him to kill someone. It wasn't in his DNA.
To me, this question is the hard center of Anand's case. Can you tell, really? Can you tell if someone has a crime like this in him? I think most of us think if we know someone well, we can tell.
We act as detectives all the time, gathering evidence. Certain scenes we remember, or the look on someone's face, or that thing he said when he got mad, and then we act as judge of character. This is just a human thing. But of course, it's slippery, because it's so subjective.
One person's evidence of good character is another person's evidence of questionable character. Case in point, I heard from many people that Anand was the opposite of violent, that he was someone who would take the heat out of tense situations. I've never even seen him in a fight. Like, I've never even seen him mad at anybody.
This is Atif Iqbal, who knew Anand from the mosque. That's his real name and his real voice. It's actually pretty funny. Like, it was me and him.
Somebody told me that he said something about me and some other person, or something, and I went up there to confront him, and he was like, hey, man, I don't know what you heard. I didn't say anything like that. And I was like, man, if you ever said something like that, I was, you know, getting all rowdy up, and he just came and kissed me on my cheeks. And the dad just, like, diffused me, like, completely.
I missed that. He kissed you on your cheeks? He kissed me on my cheeks. Like, it just, like, completely, like, diffused me.
Like, I couldn't even be angry anymore. So, I mean, that's why, like, I just couldn't even fathom the thought of him going out and then killing, I mean, killing somebody, I mean, that's just so, like, I don't even know how to say it. It's just so out of, like, you know, like, his personality, I would say. So for Atif, that kiss on the cheek is a tell.
It's the real Anand. But for that other guy, who said Anand's stolen, who thinks Anand might be guilty of the crime he's in prison for, that same peacemaker quality was something he brought up to me as evidence that Anand was full of shit. You know, taking out detention out of a situation. He was an icebreaker.
And I knew that whatever was coming out of half of the time, it was just a sweet talker to take the heat away. And then half of it, the majority of it, it was a lie. Here's the curious thing, though. The same people who tell me they think Anand was capable of killing Hay, or that stealing from the mosque was a great evil, or that Anand was a pathological liar, they also tell me, to a man, that Anand was a great guy.
This is the same anonymous person who thought Adon had taken many thousands from the donation boxes. He was so smart and he was so friendly and so many positive things. And it don't feel fake to you? Like that part feels real too?
Genuinely, he was good and he had that good side and he was helpful and he was caring and all that. You think a person can sort of contain both those things inside their personality? I think it's very easy. I think if you corner anybody into a corner, they'll explode.
And different people explode for different reasons. Well, most of the hundreds of killers I've evaluated have been pretty ordinary people. This is Charles Ewing. He's a forensic psychologist and a lawyer.
He teaches at the SUNY Buffalo Law School. He told me he's evaluated several thousand criminal defendants and testified in more than 700 trials as an expert witness. Mostly, lately, homicides committed by people in intimate relationships and homicides committed by young people. Ewing had listened to about half the episodes of the show.
And obviously, he can't weigh in on a non-psychological health. That'd be ridiculous. But I went to him to find out what's a valid way to try to understand what's going on when someone kills someone else. What's the range of options here?
Ewing said most of the time he's doing insanity evaluations or evaluations for extreme emotional disturbance. And usually in cases where there's not a question of whether the defendant did it, more a question of why. And again, most of the people he's evaluating are pretty ordinary. Some are extraordinary.
There's some serial killers, some spree killers, some really awful psychopathic individuals. But for the most part, people kill not in a premeditated way. They're not evil. They're not sociopathic.
They're not psychopathic. They kill because something happens that pushes them over the edge. In other words, murder isn't usually, strictly speaking, a planned event. A lot of people who know Adnan, they can't get their heads around the idea that Adnan planned to kill Hay.
I hear it all the time. Here's his old Woodlawn classmate, Peter Billingsley. I still have the whole idea of premeditation just doesn't fit for Adnan. No, it doesn't fit at all.
But I don't. Yeah, Adnan doesn't fit with the person I knew. Of course, there are some planned murders, but I'm sure this was not a planned murder. That's Jane Efron, who taught Hayman on English at Woodlawn.
Her father was a cop. I can't buy that because that destroys everything that I feel about these kids. So I absolutely, I think it was passion, an overdose of emotion, of love, of jealousy, resentment, all of those things. It sneaks in on you and it dominates your thinking and you can't get away from it.
But that's what I'm comfortable thinking. Planned premeditated murder? Oh my lord, no. I asked you, can an otherwise seemingly normal kid up and do something like this?
Plan something like this? Or even do it impulsively? Is snapping a thing? Because people say that all the time also.
Like, maybe he snapped or maybe, you know, he snapped. People sometimes lose it. And when they lose it, it's not always. All at once.
I've seen a lot of cases in which people have, over a relatively short period of time, nursed feelings of rejection or anger or hostility. And they've slowly risen to the point at which the individual decides to kill somebody. Those feelings simmer for a while. And one of the thoughts is, maybe I should kill this person.
I'm not going to kill this person. I don't want to kill this person. But what if I did? And the person thinks about it and then maybe confronts the other person, the person who's the object of the frustration, the anger.
And then at that point, the victim or would-be victim says or does something that triggers it, that provokes the ultimate killing. Now, the law looks at that as premeditated. I'm not sure that it really is premeditated in the sense that we normally think of it. It doesn't have to be like a sudden impulse to violence.
So that was news to me, that there's this sort of liminal phase, a simmering contemplation. What if I kill this person? And that can take the place of actual cognizant planning, but end up in the same result. The other thing I've considered in my more reachy moments is whether Adnan did it, but doesn't know he did it.
I'm not the only person who's entertained that one. Here's Adnan's friend, Laura. I mean, I remember the cops telling me sometimes they have murderers standing with a knife in their hand next to the body saying to them that they didn't do it because your brain goes into the shock and it shuts down. And I was like, well, maybe that happened.
Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he got mad. I mean, we get mad. Maybe he lost it for a moment, you know, and it was an accident.
Apparently, this is not as outlandish as it might sound. People can go into what's called a dissociative state where they're really psychologically not where they are physically. Probably half of the people I've evaluated who've killed other human beings have some degree of amnesia for what they've done. Did you say half?
Half the people? Yeah, about half. Yeah, and it's not total amnesia usually, although I've seen some people who have a complete amnesia for killing. But it can be partly, I don't really recall the details.
I don't recall doing this. Because literally, like, the memory isn't in their brain anymore? Or it never was in their brain? Yeah, I don't think we know the mechanism by which this kind of denial or amnesia or combination works.
But in the cases that I've been involved in where people have had some kind of amnesia or partial amnesia or denial, it doesn't last forever. It's very difficult to maintain that kind of facade. What I find is that over time, people do recover traces of what happened, and they know what happened. But I've also seen people who have genuinely snapped and who've committed a homicide, and then they realize what they've done.
And the immediate reaction for most people is, oh, my God, look what I've done, and what am I going to do about it? I've got to figure out some way to cover this up. Do you think it's, is there another scenario where you, it starts out as a lie, as a sort of cognizant lie, like, I didn't do this, I had nothing to do with this. And then over time, you truly believe that lie?
Like, you kind of erase the fact that you're lying, and it just becomes the truth of it for you? I think that happens. I haven't seen that happen in homicide cases, but I've certainly seen it happen in ordinary life. Less often in homicides?
Yeah, I haven't seen that, and it's probably just because of, in most homicide cases, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that you did it. Off the top of my head, I can think of five different people in this story whom other people have told me they think are either pathological liars or psychopaths, but I shouldn't trust anything they say. This term, psychopath, gets thrown around so easily as a kind of catch-all term for a cold-hearted and calculating killer. If Adnan did this, and if he did it the way Jay tells it, he is so cold-hearted.
I mean, Jay tells the cops that Adnan says to him, quote, all the other motherfuckers referring to, like, hoods and thugs and stuff think they're hardcore, but he just killed a person with his bare hands, unquote. If Adnan said that, does that mean the 15-year since has been this very, very long con, that he's calculating enough to only pretend to be the normal-sounding person he is with me on the phone? Ewan told me, a psychopath usually means a person who has little or no conscience, is glib, who can't empathize or relate to other people's feelings. They can read other people very well, but they don't have genuine empathy.
Another factor, to be sure, is what's known in the profession as superficial charm. These are people who come across very smoothly and effectively manipulate other people and manipulate them without them knowing it very often. Now I'm running through my head, everything you're just saying, if it applies, of course. And some of it I can see, like, yeah, maybe another stuff.
I'm like, no, I don't think so. I mean, so it really does seem like Adnan is, like, really functioning really well and is just fine in prison. Like, he seems very adaptable and he's always had, like, a job with responsibilities and he's not gotten into, he's not been disciplined really ever except for having a cell phone. And, like, doesn't appear to have any kind of antisocial behavior.
He's got lots of friends. He's maintained his relationships outside the prison with his family and with friends, certain friends. I mean, is that something that I should be taking into account? I think so, yeah.
It certainly cuts against a theory that he's a psychopath or that he's some kind of pathological person. But it doesn't rule it out. And the fact is most psychopaths aren't killers and most killers aren't psychopaths. There's a very limited overlap between those two spheres.
Finally, I asked Ewing, should I be influenced by the fact that Adnan has so consistently maintained his innocence all these years? And Ewing said in his experience, people who are wrongfully convicted always maintain their innocence, even when it hurts them, like in sentencing or parole. But on the other hand, he said, just because you say you didn't do it, even for decades, doesn't mean you didn't do it. There just aren't any rules for this stuff.
Here's what I take away from this conversation with Charles Ewing. I don't think Adnan is a psychopath. I just don't. I think he has empathy.
I think he has real feelings. Because I've heard and seen him demonstrate empathy and emotion towards me and towards other people, he is able to imagine how someone else feels. But on all the other options, it's a toss-up. Could he not initially have been in some state of amnesia and denial and then supplanted that with actual lying?
It's possible. Could he have had simmering feelings of anger and resentment that then boiled over in a not-quite-by-accident way? It's possible. Could he be truly innocent?
It's possible. Ewing said he's often asked on the stand, how do you know this person isn't lying to you? And his answer, he said, is always the same. I don't know.
In the course of his career, he's been fooled. A handful of people who are listening to this story have told me one thing they think makes Adnan look guilty is the way he talks about, or rather doesn't talk about, other people involved in the case, especially Jay. That if he were really innocent, we would hear him being madder. I know we've already talked about this.
Why doesn't he sound more mad? But there's another factor I haven't mentioned. And that is, as a defense attorney has explained to me, no good can come, and in fact only harm can come, from Adnan attempting to contact or influence people on the outside or connected to his case. That's kind of inmate behavior 101.
Because let's say Kathy changed her story, suddenly remembered something exculpatory for Adnan. And then the state found out that Adnan had been writing to Kathy, or threatening Kathy somehow, or talking smack about Kathy on a podcast. Then that could be used by the state to challenge the validity of Kathy's new information. Adnan is a smart guy.
He's been an inmate for 15 years. He knows the deal. And he also knows there's nothing he can do to change other people's minds about him. If a person genuinely doesn't think that I feel something towards the people who put me in prison, then me saying it, it really has no validity, in my eyes anyway.
Because come on, either you think I did it or you don't. And if you think that I did it, then you can assume that I'm a normal, you know, I'm just a racist. I think what happens is people come expecting a monster, and they don't find that. Well, next day they come expecting a victim.
I know, but I think actually, I think that's right. But I think also what people do is they put themselves immediately in your position and think, what would I do? How would I be feeling? How would I act if I thought, you know, someone had done me wrong and put me here, and I would be screaming to the rooftops, and they're not hearing you do that?
If someone, I mean, it's really nothing to say. If someone can't imagine how I feel, there's no need for me to say anything to try to convince them otherwise. I mean, it is what it is. If a person can't figure it out, then it's not for me to say.
I think what Adnan's saying is, it's a trap to try to convince people. A few weeks ago, after these rumors started surfacing, I got a letter in the mail from Adnan. It was 18 typed, single-space pages. He gave me his reluctant permission to talk about it.
He wrote about lots of things. His religion, his case, how he's managed over the past 15 years. It's a good letter. He's a good writer.
But it swung from pole to pole, from distrust to gratitude to confusion. Adnan is obviously aware of this podcast, that it's out in the world, and I could tell that my story had messed with his equilibrium. When he was convicted of murder, he said the biggest shock for him was that people thought he was capable of this hideous thing, that people didn't believe him. As I look back now, he wrote, I realized there were only three things I wanted after I was convicted.
To stay close to my family, prove my innocence, and to be seen as a person again, not a monster. The third one, he says he's managed, inside prison. Quote, people in here know me as a stand-up guy. Guards, inmates, staff, people I've been around for 15 years, have seen me every day, recognize me as someone whose word can be trusted.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I was able to find the peace of mind in prison that I lost at my trial. Unquote. And now I come along, at Ravi's behest, not his, and yank this door open again, to the outside world, and to all its doubts about Adnan's integrity. Stirring up the most painful possible questions about whether he's a monster.
It's his nightmare, basically, to be accused of manipulating everyone around him. Of course, I've had a sense of this feeling from him now and then, over the year that we've been talking. But his letter made plain that in 40 hours of taped conversations, he was weighing every word. His goal was to keep it all business.
And having to do that made him feel bad, he said. I had a rough year. My stepfather died in April, then my father died two months later. Adnan knew that.
Quote, but I couldn't say anything to you because I had to stick to what I know. Can you imagine what it's like to be afraid to show compassion to someone out of fear they won't believe you? I was so ashamed of that. Unquote.
And this second guessing, this monitoring, of everything he says to me, and therefore to the outside world, about anything, really, but especially about his case, he writes in his letter that it's crazy-making. Quote, I'm always overthinking, analyzing what I say, how it sounds, and the fact that people always think I'm lying. All this thinking is to protect myself from being hurt, not from being accused of Hayes murder, but for being accused of being manipulative or lying. And I know it's crazy, I know I'm paranoid, but I can never shake it, because no matter what I do or how careful I am, it always comes back.
I guess the only thing I could ask you to do is, if none of this makes any sense to you, just read it again. Except this time, please imagine that I really am innocent, and then maybe it'll make sense to you. At this point, he wrote, it doesn't matter to me how your story portrays me, guilty or innocent. I just want it to be over.
It will be. Next time, final episode of Serial. Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chittis, and me. Emily Condon is our production and operations manager.
Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Editing helped today by Joel Lovell. Research and fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Administrative support from Elise Bergerson.
Our score is by Mark Phillips, who also mixed the episode. Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn, who provided additional scoring. Special thanks to the Studio Rodrigo and company that designed our website, and to Rich Orris, who codes everything. And to Julie Farris, Marianne Hamill, Thomas Moriello, Shivani Lamba of Forensic Outreach, Libby Myers of Pick'em Up Productions, Detective Robert Cherry, Tom Snyder, Lisa Scalpone, Aaron Henkin, Jake Halpern, Jake Polini, and Shannon Son Higginson from The Whitman Project.
Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.