Previously on Serial. I think like the odds of you getting the charming sociopaths, you're just not that lucky. So, but we, we, we, they were more so kind, like, I made my mind, I was kind of like, maybe the police are putting them up to this. I said, what was your involve?
Were you involved? I think he said no. Before, he stated that you'd be willing to take us out and show us where the VF is parked. I'm sorry, so we're willing to do that again.
This is a global telling, pre-pake call from. That's not a saying. And in that, from Maryland to correctional facility, this call is a recording in my church. Okay, my name is Miss Stella Armstrong, Baltimore, Maryland.
And you were a juror on the Anansayad case, right? Yes, I was. From this American Life in WBE Chicago, it's serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Canig.
I wanted to know from Stella Armstrong why she voted to convict Anansayad. She immediately talked about Jay, that she believed him. Like I said, it's been a while, but I remember the one young man who was supposedly his friend, who had enabled him to move the body. Right.
And that struck me that why would you admit to doing something that drastic if you hadn't done it? You know what I mean? For what reason? What was he going to gain from that?
He still had to go to jail. Yeah, actually he didn't go to jail. Oh, he didn't? A friend didn't?
No. Oh, he walked. That's strange. That's strange.
I asked Stella the same thing. I asked anyone who's coming contact with Jay. What is Jay's deal? And by that, I don't mean his plea deal.
That he pled guilty to accessory after the fact and first-degree murder, testified against anun, and got no prison time as a result. I'll talk more about that in another episode. What I mean is, what did you make of Jay? Which, of course, is code four.
What am I supposed to make of Jay? How did he come across, sitting up there on the witness stand? What was his demeanor on the stand? What kind of kid did he seem like?
He seemed like he was street wise. I hope that's the best way to put it. He seemed like he got around in the neighborhoods or he was able to take care of itself. He would remind me of, he would be that friend if you got in trouble, you would call.
You know what I mean? Say if I was back in high school and somebody was bothering me, he'd remind me of somebody I would call to help me. Like if somebody was fighting me or... So it was believable to you that he would be that guy for odd-nond.
Like he would be the guy that on on would turn to. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, because we all have somebody in our life like that, you know, that you may know a cousin or a relative who if something goes wrong, you think you can call to help you.
You know, when you just said that I just did a very quick scan of all of my contacts and my family and I feel like I can't think of one, but they're also useless. We won't say they're all so useless. The day that Stella saw a trial, he was wearing a tie, sometimes a jacket. He's handsome, he's tall and thin.
You can see in the trial video how he has to bend over a little each time he speaks into the microphone in front of him. Since Jay's credibility was the state's case, a non-attorney Christina Gutierrez tried to rip it to shreds. That essentially was her defense. She uses the word truth and lie as often as possible in her cross-examination.
There were many exchanges like this one. Gutierrez asks him, quote, and now your second interview on tape, that you were not telling the truth. Were you not? Jay says.
I was not telling them everything now. You were not. And what you were telling them were what? Were they not?
So the answer to my question is yes, I was not telling the truth. Is it not? Goodyere asks Jay about Best Buy. About how Jen Pusitari told him there were security cameras in the parking lot and at the entrance.
If Jay didn't kill Hay, why would Jay care whether there were cameras there? She asks. She puts it to Jay almost casually. He would have us believe that you had nothing to do with the debt of Hayley, right?
State. Form the question. Did you kill Hayley? No, ma'am.
You want present issues, Kim? No, ma'am. The defense attorney tried to make him. Well, basically she was trying to show that Jay killed him.
And was blaming it on and on. That's what I remember. Nothing led us to believe that he had a motive to kill Ms. Lee.
That really stayed with me because she was so adamant that he was a liar. Right. You just didn't buy that he was lying about it. I didn't buy that it was a lie.
I bought the fact that he was telling the truth about what happened at that moment. Jay took the stand on five different days during the second trial. And this must have been a harrowing nerve-racking stretch in his life. But large swaths of the trial itself are really boring.
Not just the procedural stuff. That's always boring. But the cross-examination is boring. Even of the star witness.
One defense attorney I talked to said that boringness can be a strategy. She said lawyers know that people can only pay close attention for so long, 45 minutes an hour before they start to flag. So it's not the attrex that gets people to crack. It's tedium, which would explain so much of what Gutierrez was doing if in fact that's what she was doing.
She spends a lot of time on streets, for instance. The trajectories of different roads, whether they travel northeast or northwest, whether their names change as they cross from the city and to the county, on buildings, how they're situated. And that best find is a boxy structure with the best buy logo at an angle. Is it not?
Yes, ma'am. And it's plainly visible from security guidelines, isn't it? Yes, ma'am. Right at the back of the street that changes its name.
There's a light there that if you're not on security bull bars, but on that street, it works straight. You go into the parking lot of security wall, correct? Yes, ma'am. Jay doesn't crack though.
He's alert. He's polite. He stays with her. He stays with her when she's calm and soothing and boring, and he stays with her when she gets a little more shouty.
He's six to the yes ma'am, no ma'am answers, which, if I had to guess, is probably 75% of what Jay says in cross. This part where Gutierrez tries to suggest that Jay was cheating on his girlfriend Stephanie with Jen Pusitari. If you were stepping out on Stephanie, that would impact your relationship. Would it have known what?
With me. With anyone. With Stephanie? If you were stepping out on Stephanie, you understand what that term means, don't you?
If you had another girlfriend, anyone, any name, anywhere, that would have impacted Stephanie. Would it have not? That would have impacted your relationship with Stephanie. Would it have not?
Yes ma'am. And you are always here. Even when he gets irritated, Jay is civil. Excuse me, your honor.
He says when Gutierrez gets loud, could you ask her to stop yelling in my ear please? Gutierrez died a few years after this trial, so I can't ask her, but I have to think nothing she's doing here is accidental. She was a successful, sought-after defense attorney. She was aggressive.
And obviously the courtroom is no place for pulling punches. But you've got to wonder where the moments like this hurt in Non's case rather than helped it. Because Jay seems like the underdog. It's Baltimore.
Half the jury is black. Seven out of twelve actually. Jay probably comes off as a nice young man, and this white lady is yelling at him. Sometimes unwittingly or not, Jay's testimony is almost poetic.
He says he told Jen Pusitari to be honest with the detectives because, quote, The lies that we were telling to try to protect each other were clouding the truth. When he's asked why he didn't warn Hay that a nun wanted to kill her. He says it was because he didn't think a nun was serious. Quote, I took it as a grain of sand instead of concrete.
And when he's asked why the image of Hay in the trunk of the car stuck with him, he says, quote, I've never seen anyone dead before. And the first thing I thought was how fragile Stephanie was. People lie in court under oath all the time. Witnesses lie, lawyers lie, police lie.
This should come as a shocker to no one. And I'm not saying that's what happened here. I'm just saying that I'm not assuming that everyone who participated in a non's trial told the truth. But clearly the jury found Jay believable or believable enough.
After a six week trial, they convicted a nun in just two hours. We talked to six jurors and none of them had any lingering doubts about the case. None of them wondered if the investigation was shoddy. None of them were much bothered by how Jay's statements to police had shifted over time.
So am I wrong to be hung up on that? No. I should be concerned about the inconsistencies. I'm concerned about it.
Yes. As I mentioned, the detectives involved in this case didn't want to talk to me for the story. So I turned to this guy. You are Jim Trainam.
James, did you like James? Jim Trainam. And we hired you. Because I'm like me, you're a real detective.
I'm just playing one on the radio. Jim Trainam used to be a homicide detective in Washington, D.C. A jurisdiction not too different from Baltimore. He's now become something of an expert on false confessions and an advocate for better interrogation techniques.
He goes around the country doing presentations about it. We gave Trainam everything we had on this case, files, tapes, transcripts. And again, I want to be clear that we paid him for his time. It's a huge amount of material to go through.
I want to train him to weigh in on two things. First, just overall, how would he rate the investigation into Haman Lee's murder? Did the detectives do a good job or did they screw it up? And second, how should I be thinking about Jay as a witness?
What were the detectives seeing that maybe I wasn't? Trainam said, yes, he thought the inconsistencies were a problem too. But he also said, don't forget the flip side. But I'm also looking at some of the consistencies too.
He took them to where the car was. And that's a huge thing right there. Jay had a big piece of reliable information that the cops themselves did not know where Hayes' car was. Plus, Trainam said, Jay's story completes a circle for the cops.
They were suspicious of a non from the beginning. Then, from a non-sell records, they get to Jen, who leads them to Jay, who tells them it's a non. So, their suspicions have now been borne out thanks to Jay through a non's own phone. A satisfying investigative circle.
A murder case on a silver platter, says Trainam. He puts on who they consider to be the logical suspect. I mean, yeah, it's pretty much a dream case. Part of what Trainam does is review investigations.
And he says, this one is better than most of what he sees. The detectives in this case were cautious and methodical. They weren't rushing to grab suspects or to dismiss them either. The evidence collection is well documented.
Which I didn't expect to hear that even though it's basically a one witness case, the cell records mostly don't match Jay's statements. There's no physical evidence linking a non to the murder. Despite all that, to an experienced detective like Trainam, this looks like a pretty sound investigation. I would say that this is better than average.
But what I'm saying is that the mechanics, the documentation, the steps that they took and all of that, they look good. Okay? I would have probably followed the same route. However, what we're unsure of is what happened to change Jay's story from A to B.
And we do not know what happened in the interior of those three hours or whatever like that. And that will always result in a question as to what the final outcome should have been. Here's what he's talking about. In both of Jay's tape statements, there's a before, a period of time before the tape recorder is turned on.
When the cops first bring Jay in on February 28th, they talked him for about an hour before the tape went on. Then on March 15th, the second interview, Jay signs his initials to an explanation of Wright's form at 3.15 pm. Then the tape starts. The date is the 15th of March, it's approximately 20 minutes after 6th, at night.
6.20 pm. So from 3.15 to 6.20, three hours have gone by since Jay signed that form. This is what's called the pre-interview. And Trainham says that's where the mischief can happen, the contamination.
Not necessarily intentionally, but it happens. The pre-interview was when the cops in the witness kind of ironed out the statement, so it could be taped as a coherent thing. And that was standard procedure back then. Now, like a lot of jurisdictions, Baltimore homicide detectives videotape the entire interview from the moment the person steps in the interview room.
On March 15th, we know the cops had shown Jay at least some photographs from the investigation. They refer to that on the tape. And Jay says a trial that he was confronted with a cell records during that interview as well. So you have to wonder, says Trainham, whether he was massaging his story to fit with the cops wanted to hear.
The inconsistencies in Jay's statements that the cops are catching him in, Trainham says cops are used to that. Every confession has inconsistencies. You just need to understand why they're happening. Is he minimizing his role?
Is he protecting someone? In Jay's case, yes and yes. But how do you make sense of the inconsistencies that don't seem to have a purpose? Like the one about going to the cliffs at Patasco State Park that afternoon?
How it drops out of the narrative of a trial? And from where I said I'm like, yeah, it doesn't work because it doesn't fit your timeline. He can't get back to track in time if he went out and smoked a joint. You know what I mean?
I'm getting too deep in that. I'm like, no, you're not at all because I think that you hit on one of the biggest problems that we have with the way that we interview and interrogate here. And the fact that we have a excellent witness. We got somebody who's given us the whole case right here.
He's broken wide open for us. We don't want to ruin him. And so how much do you want to push? How much do you want to create quote unquote bad evidence?
But like there's no such... This is an actual term. It's called bad evidence. You don't want to do something if it's going to go against your theory of the case.
But then I don't get that. I mean, it's like my father. You always say all facts are friendly. Like shouldn't that be more true for a cop than for anyone else?
Like you can't pick and choose? Rather than trying to get to the truth, what you're trying to do is build your case and make it the strongest case possible. But how can it be a strong case and how can he be a great witness if there's stuff that's not true or unexplained? And the comeback is that there's always going to be things that are unexplainable.
But like I said, also remember verification bias is kicking in here as well. I want to believe you because you're my witness and I think this is what happened and all that. So the fact that you're giving me something that's inconsistent, that doesn't fit my theory of the case, what does verification bias cause you to do? Ignore it and push it aside.
And that's what they're doing here with these inconsistencies or kind of pushing them aside. Trainham said it was curious to him that the cops never searched Jay's house for instance, that they never subjected him to a polygraph. Again, he said maybe that's because he was on their team now helping, so you don't want to push too hard. He said the cops quote probably settled for what they thought was good enough to be the truth unquote.
He said he did have doubts about a non-claim of innocence, but that he definitely thought there was something quote unquote off about this case, that we still don't know what happened in this murder. We still don't have the true story. I don't believe Jay's version. I think that there is a lot more to it than that.
I feel that he's definitely minimizing his involvement to either protect himself. He's wondering if he's one of three reasons to protect himself, to protect somebody else or because odd non-didded and was right there with him. Right, right. But I cannot prove that he's given it to me without contamination.
Right. The real problem is that how you prove it one way or the other. Right. Trainham says the answers we want probably live in those unrecorded pre-interview hours, a black hole of crucial information.
Since this stuff wasn't all video, you know, like their holes were never, as you're saying, like we're never going to know the answer. But for what things that I could know the answer to, if you're me, what's the biggest thing I need to figure out then? Be Jay to talk. Okay.
Okay. We passed the city limit. So my producer, Julie Snyder, and I went to CJ. We did not warn Jay we were coming, which is not the generalist reporter move, I know.
But I thought we'd have the best chance of success if we met him face to face, so we could make our case for why we wanted to talk to him, and he could have a better sense of who we were, what we were about. But because it's also sort of a dick move to show up at someone's door like that, Julie and I were nervous. I am so hyped up. Listening back to the tape, I wanted to give myself a Xanax.
And I feel super excited to talk to him. I'm like so excited to talk to him. I can't tell you. Like if this works, I mean, he knows everything we want.
Every question we've had for the past eight months, seven months, he knows it. And whether or not he tells us is a different thing, but you know what I mean? Like he's like, there's a treasure chest of answers that we've been looking for this whole time, and he has it. He's it.
But whether or not he opened the door or he's even at home. We don't even know if he's home. We arrived. Jay was not home.
So we came back again many hours later, knocked. Jay answered the door. Tall and skinny and exhausted looking. A beer in his hand.
It was Friday, probably the end of a long work day for him. He nevertheless invited us in, asked us to sit down. We didn't record anything. We stayed about 20 minutes maybe.
It was a tense meeting and an emotional meeting, in fact. Afterwards, Julie and I felt like we'd walk into a stranger's house, lobbed a grenade onto his living room carpet, and then waved a bye. We debriefed back in the car. Here's the first thing he said.
I mean, you said that there are a lot of people who say that they don't think got none did it, and he very forcefully said who did. That's right. He said who did. He was like, I was there.
I saw it. Like, I know what I know. He was very forceful. Like, I can't believe he won't even man up and admit it.
He just totally scoffed at the idea that Adnan would be claiming his innocence. He was very calm. Like, how would you describe his demeanor? Tired.
Yeah. He seemed tired and a little wary, but not, but actually very polite and actually sort of very sweet and tired. But he also said, I'm feeling like so much, and he said like kind of animal rage right now, even you bringing this up right now. But she does a good job of, you know, of keeping it in because he didn't seem like he was about to.
I mean, actually you could kind of see him about to hit something, but in a more frustrated, understandable way. J was understandably skeptical of us and of our motives. When we left, J said he'd think about an interview and get back to us. He left a strong impression on Julie, maybe even more than on me.
Even just hearing him so forcefully deny, you know, and so forcefully say, I know he did it. Yeah. You know, it's your face to face. He's right there.
He's a person. He's saying it. He seems like he really means it. This is not pleasant for him to talk about.
And so, you know, it sounds believable. I totally saw the appeal of him as like a person and a friend and a witness. J and I corresponded sporadically by email in the weeks following our meeting. He said he wasn't afraid of the truth.
Finally, in so many words, J declined an interview. So what is the deal with J? I talked to dozens of people, mostly his friends and classmates. Get to know him from Woodland High School.
They have a range of opinions about whether he was a good guy or not a good guy, but they all agreed that he defied categorization. He was different. Yeah, he was like the Rodman of our, like, social world. He was like the one blacker she and, you know, I think once I'm here to get it written, another time to get it blown, but when the blog left it for a long time, I haven't been there for a long time.
I haven't been there for sure. I don't be able to BMX folk or like who the hell are the folks that I'm writing? You know, if he was at my house in my mom game home and he left, she'd be like, who's that? And why is he here?
Black people like me, black people like me, black people like me, black people like me, black people like me, black people like me, black people. And, you know, S-17, anything different from you is weird. So Jay didn't look like the other kids at school, and he also didn't act like the other kids at school. He loved animals.
He once bought a giant rat-eating frog. And he loved the outdoors, fishing, hiking, swimming. He rode BMX bikes at an old skate park. He played lacrosse for Christ's sakes.
I think Jay was actually pretty good at lacrosse. It's all a wirey dude. He could run for days. There was no training needed for that kid.
He could just run forever. Which is a good thing, because he wasn't the type to put a ton of training in. Right, because he wasn't a jock. He was more of a stoner, people said.
And he didn't seem to care whether he fit in. And he always came to me very honest with who he was. Kind of this beautifully unconventional guy. Jay didn't come from the same kind of household as a lot of the other kids he hung around with.
He lived with his grandparents and his mom. But his friends say it seemed like he was more or less taken care of himself. He always had a job. His mother depended on him.
Jay wasn't in the magnet program at Woodlawn. He was gen-pop, their term, not mine, like general population at a prison. Anyway, he hung out with some of the magnet kids, because his girlfriend Stephanie was in the program. People told me contradictory things about Jay.
Three women who knew him from Woodlawn, including one teacher, told me unflattering things about him. Nothing terrible, just that he was mean or intimidating. Some kids thought of him as quote unquote shady, that you wouldn't want to push him. You got the sense that if you cross Jay, he'd come after you.
But then I also heard descriptions of Jay that included the word goofy or stoner. Or that the thuggish vibe was just a pose, something Jay put on to seem tough. He's he's an alpha. He's definitely an alpha male.
This is Chris, who says he was one of Jay's best friends around this time. He said Jay might say slug you as you're walking down the hallway at school, but he wasn't mad or anything. He's just messing around. Boys will be boys kind of stuff.
Chris remembered this one story where it seemed to me all the different versions of Jay I'd heard. The goofy and the scary were contained in it. You know, we have weird arguments sometimes. I remember outside of one of my cousin's house.
They tried to stab me because I hadn't been stabbed before. So we got into a fight over actually I gave him a knife because I worked at a knife shop. I gave him a knife and then he tried to stab me with it. So we're literally fighting outside of my cousin's house and he's like, Oh, I'm not going to stab you deep, but you never been stabbed before.
You need to know what it's like. I'm like, Oh, I'm not going to let you stab me. I talked to three people who said they knew Jay well or hung out with him around the time of the crime. And I asked them if he ever told them about what happened.
I went to Chris first because when Jay spoke to detectives at first night during his first tape interview, Jay mentioned Chris by name. The cops had asked Jay if he told anyone else about a noncommitting this murder and Jay said he told Chris. Chris told me police never questioned him, not that he could remember anyway. And he thought he'd remember something like that.
There are no notes in their files about an interview with Chris. But Chris said it was true Jay did tell him about what had happened. But his version, the building blocks are the same, but this surrounding details are unfamiliar. Of course, giant caveat, it's 15 years later that I'm asking Chris to tell me.
But for comparison purposes, here goes. Chris says Jay told him he was at a pool hall out on Route 40 in Catonsville when he got a call from a non. The pool hall was either VIP or Blue Jays, Chris says. They were across the street from each other at the time.
He told you that Adnan came to get him when he was at a pool hall. He was shooting pool at an odd call to me. He was like, I got to talk to you. And he was like, I'm busy.
Where are you? He told him where he was. Adnan showed up. He was like, oh, I got to talk to you.
And this was a little tug of war for a while. And that thought he'd eventually convinced him to come outside with him and his car. I don't know if he was driving his car or Hallease. In this version, the trunk pop happens at the pool hall.
Chris said Jay told Anand he wanted nothing to do with it, but Anand forced him. Told him he was in it now. He was an accessory. And he knew Jay couldn't go to the cops because of his own illegal activities.
So Jay was stuck. Chris's information about the crime itself doesn't quite match the state's version. He said Jay told him that Anand confronted Hay about flirting with another guy, a car salesman. And when she called Anand crazy, he snapped and strangled her.
And Chris said he heard this happen in the parking lot of the Woodlawn Public Library. Remember, that's the one that's right there on campus where Asia said she saw Anand that day. Chris says Jay told him that Anand threatened to kill Stephanie if Jay didn't keep his mouth shut. This is not the first I'd heard about something like this.
Jay told the cops that he worried Anand would hurt Stephanie too. And he also testified at trial that Anand had made it clear he could get to Stephanie any time he wanted, since they were such good friends. Stephanie herself tells the cops, this is in their notes from their conversation with her, that Jay told her to stay away from Anand. Chris has told him Anand showed up at Jay's house with Stephanie not long after the crime, and made a gesture to indicate, I'll hurt her if you're not careful.
So Stephanie goes inside past Jay and he steps out onto the porch with Anand, and he's like, you know, you should not go and terrorize me. And Anand was like, you keep your mouth shut, or something will happen. If he had any weakness, it was Stephanie. He would move heaven and hurt if it came to protecting Stephanie.
I talked to Laura, a friend of Jay's and Stephanie's and Jen's, and of Anand's. Back then she was Laura Estrada-Sendolo. She was close with Stephanie. They played sports together.
Her parents didn't agree relationship because he was just like, they felt like he wasn't going to mountain, he wasn't going to school. You know, Stephanie, she's beautiful. I mean, she was as far as we, she got scholarship to college, like, she was like, perfect, you know, like, she ran the fastest, she was always like, in shape no matter what she could eat, anything. And like, she always felt good in people no matter what, like, no matter if her parents were telling her, he's not good influence on you.
But because she loved Jay so much, she's going to support him regardless. She was his, like, good thing in life. He was like, all the craziness, like Stephanie was like, his amazingness. Stephanie didn't want to talk to me, and no one I spoke to who knows her was surprised by that.
To a person, they said she never talked to them about what happened either. They said it was like a wall came down, and they couldn't penetrate it. Laura told me it kind of did in their friendship, because Laura really needed to talk about it, and Stephanie wouldn't or couldn't. Laura hung out with Jay all that summer before the trial, and she says they just didn't discuss it.
His murder was this enormous, sad, frightening elephant nobody wanted to go near. Jay's friend Patrick told me he couldn't get Jay to talk about it either. I think I was just going, what happened? You know what?
This Patrick, by the way, isn't the one I've already mentioned in an earlier episode from the call log, different Patrick. This Patrick went to Woodlawn. He was a year ahead of Jay, so two years ahead of a non-in-hay in Stephanie. Patrick lost touch with Jay when all this went down.
He says he tried and tried to call but Jay never responded. Years later, maybe around 2005, Jay got back and touched one day, and then they saw each other at a little party. Patrick asked him about it. He said, I was afraid he was going to hurt Stephanie.
I was like, I'm not going to threaten her. He said, he was afraid that he was going to hurt Stephanie. I was like, not only is he going to threaten her, he said he was afraid that he was going to hurt her. I guess I took it as a threat.
I remember when I pushed him for detail, and I pushed him for more, it wasn't, I didn't get it. He wasn't going to go any further with it. He just wasn't, you know, and there was a lot of this like, kind of a chummy punch to me on the shoulder. Come on, man, let's just bring beers and hang out.
Patrick says this Stephanie explanation sounded pretty thin to him, but he couldn't get anything else out of Jay. I figured it wasn't his place to force it. I asked all Jay's friends I spoke to whether they thought Jay was telling the truth about what happened that night. I got some curious answers because his friends say Jay had a reputation for lying, but not for lying about something like that, something so big.
Sort of the same way he had a reputation for being scary, but not scary scary scary. The first thing that popped in my head was like Jay lies. That's why he does that. Jay lies about everything.
That's Kathy. Again, that's not her real name or her real voice. She's the person who said that none was acting weird at her apartment that night of the murder when Jay brought him over. What was he talking about it and saying, you know, what Jay has all these inconsistencies and stuff.
The first thing that popped in my head was because Jay lies. Jay doesn't tell the truth. But look at what kind of stuff you think. I think it was kind of like, but everything, nothing.
If they can definitely remember sometimes when Jay would be telling a story, and you would clearly know it was bullshit. You know, I remember one time I was looking at Jen and I was like, here we go again. You know what I mean? Like, this is such bullshit.
Both Chris and Patrick told me that Jay would tell them stories, told tales almost, that they figured had to be made up. But then sometimes these stories turned out to be true. And Kathy said, sure, Jay might lie about what he had for breakfast, or even whether he went to Patapsco State Park on the afternoon of January 13, 1999. But she didn't think Jay was lying about the crime itself, because she's convinced anon is guilty based on anon's behavior that night.
And what he was saying when he got that phone call at her house. And then there's Jen Pusitari. Of all the people Jay told about this crime, I wondered most about Jen. If she ever thought Jay was lying about that night.
I spoke to her briefly at her work, she works at a discount store. She wasn't rude, but she was totally uninterested in talking to me. She had nothing to hide, she said she just did not want to talk about that time in her life period. She did answer my one big question though, and her answer was yes.
She believed Jay then, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years. I said, yeah, but he did lie to you somewhat back then. Remember, he tells Jen that night that he doesn't know where a don put Hayes body, but they don't know enough to go to the police. Jen told me she could understand that kind of lie, that anyone in his position forced into something he wanted no part of, anyone might have told the same kind of lie.
It didn't shake her trust in his overall story. Then she had it, there was one thing she never believed. She said she never believed the murder happened at Best Buy, because she thought there would have been security footage, and that never came out. I told her it seems like maybe there really weren't security cameras at Best Buy back then.
And she kind of shrugged and said, oh well, see, I don't know. Plenty of people I talked to said when they heard Jay was wrapped up in a murder, it didn't surprise them. At non they said, no way, shocking, but Jay, not so shocking. And people also said they couldn't swear Jay feeling threatened by a non, but dynamic of that just seemed wrong to them.
But then there's Patrick and Laura and Kathy, people who spent a lot of time with Jay, who were shocked by Jay's involvement. They couldn't see why a non would even turn to Jay for something like that, made no sense. They said that wasn't the laid back Jay they knew. The same thing, almost every single one of it non-friends says about him.
So they end up in this in-between place where they can't quite wrap their minds around the story of that night. Here's Patrick again. To him, Jay was this intelligent, inquisitive, sweet, goofy guy, beautifully unconventional. I know this, I hope in some way he was forced that he was forced, that he had no choice or that things are outside.
Things are outside of his control and that, and maybe he wasn't looking out for those safety and well-being of others, and that he wasn't such a winning participant if he was. I certainly hope that he wasn't. That grappling you can hear in his voice, that's so common among this group of friends. People like Laura who can't imagine a non-killing anyone, but also can't imagine Jay doing what he said he did, or why he would lie about something so huge.
If you're Laura and there's no scenario here you can rationalize, you're left with fog. This piece of tape I'm about to play you, it's my favorite piece of tape from all my reporting so far, because I relate to it so precisely. It could be me talking to Laura instead of the other way around. Well then, who the fuck did it?
Like why would, like why would, it doesn't make sense, why would kid, if, why would, hey, what, I just, I can't, I'm probably just as confused as you are. At Jay's sentencing for his accessory after the fact conviction, he's wearing a white shirt, his long arms hanging at his side, he's towering over his lawyer who's petite. She tells the judge all the stuff that defense attorney tends to cover at a sentencing. Jay's tough upbringing that he didn't have adults helping instead of moral compass, that he's hardworking and loves animals and is good with kids, that he's headed to college and wants to better himself.
She says he under went quote, rigorous and demeaning cross-examination on the part of Christina Guicheras, and she says he's remorseful. She says just now he was weeping in the hallway about Hayley. Prosecutor Kevin Jurek tells the judge he's thoroughly pleased with Jay's participation in the case, and impressed. As I said, very satisfactory, and I believe honestly testified, and also I would say something I usually see, I think he actually showed remorse during, I saw we were remorse on his part, so on the other predation of the iron.
The judge is impressed too, and Jay does seem genuinely torn up. You're anything you want to say before I impose this sentence? Just to, whatever you do decide, I have a real hard time even sitting here, because I feel like people look at me, they take my heart on the first minute. I'm going to sign a fool, I'll pardon you.
The judge sentences Jay to two years probation, no jail time. His lawyer mouths the words, thank you, to the judge. Jay leaves the courtroom with the only person who came with him that day, Stephanie. A non didn't testify at his trial, which isn't unusual.
Jurers aren't supposed to take that into consideration. The judge tells himself that they are not allowed to hold that against a defendant when they're deliberating. Did it bother you guys as a jury that Adun himself didn't testify didn't take the stand? Yes, it did.
That's Lisa Flynn, one of the jurors. That was huge. We all kind of like gassed, like, if we were all just like blown away by that, you know, why not? If you're a defendant, you know, why would you not get up there and defend yourself and try to prove that the state is wrong, that you weren't there, that you're not guilty.
We were trying to be the open-minded. It was just like, get up there and say something. You know, try to persuade, even though it's not your job to persuade us, but I don't know. So what was Adun thinking while all this was going down?
What do I know about Adun that the jury didn't? Next time on Serial. Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas, and me, Emily Kahn, and his art production and operations manager, Ira Glass, is our editorial advisor, editing Help This Week from Joel Level, fact-checking by Karen Frigal-Smith. Our theme music is composed by Nick Thorburn, scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips, who also mixed our show.
Special thanks today to the lovely Lisa Stern-Leib and DeGina DeVito. We're at our website where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case and sign up for our weekly emails, serialpodcast.org. Serial is a production of This American Life in WBEZ Chicago.