On Jan. 13, 1999, an 18-year-old girl named Hae Min Lee got into her 1998 Nissan Sentra at the end of the school day and drove off in a hurry from Woodlawn High School in Baltimore MD. She was never seen alive again. 28 agonizing days later her body was found in a densely-wooded area, Leakin Park, about 3.5 miles from the school. She had been strangled.
Within three weeks of her body’s discovery her ex-boyfriend, another Woodlawn student named Adnan Syed, was arrested for her murder. His first trial ended in a mistrial but would probably have resulted in his being declared not guilty; his second trial ended on February 25, 2000, with his conviction on charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life plus 30 years, a sentence that might have been milder had his age at the time of Hae’s killing been correctly entered into the legal record, as he was only 17.
Key pieces of evidence used against Adnan were his cell phone records, later revealed to be undependable for specifying location, and the testimony of Jay Wilds, a former Woodlawn student, small-time pot dealer, and chronic liar. Adnan tried to appeal his conviction in 2003 and to apply for post-conviction relief in 2010: both of those efforts were unsuccessful.
But Adnan had fierce defenders who staunchly believed in his innocence, the most vocal of whom was a woman named Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, she never gave up trying to get some kind of public attention paid to Adnan’s case.
Eventually she succeeded in getting a journalist named Sarah Koenig interested in doing a multi-episode audio program called a “podcast” as a spinoff of NPR’s long-running program This American Life. The new program was called, simply, Serial. The case became a worldwide phenomenon in the fall of 2014, and that pioneering podcast has now been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Renewed efforts were then made to overturn Adnan’s conviction. In 2016 he was granted a new trial, only to have a seven-judge panel reverse that decision. And that’s been just one reversal among many.
Then, suddenly, almost 23 years after Adnan’s original conviction, that verdict was vacated and he was released from prison on September 19, 2022. Marilyn Mosby, the state attorney general, had ordered a review of the files concerning cases in which a juvenile had been given a life sentence, and enough questions were raised during the review of Adnan’s file that the decision was made to set him free. A crowd gathered in front of the courthouse to cheer for him, and he went home and ate leftovers for the first time since his arrest.
There was one group, though, that was appalled at the decision: the family of Hae Min Lee. They had always been adamant about Adnan’s guilt and had spoken out previously against the various attempts to set him free. Now they turned to a Maryland law that stipulated proper notice be given a victim’s family to appear at any hearing to vacate a murder conviction and petitioned the court to reinstate his conviction. The family had moved to California after Hae’s murder and had been given only one business day’s notice of the hearing. I cannot for the life of me understand why this hearing was so rushed. What was another 2-3 days as compared to almost 23 years? Young Lee was able to appear via Zoom and spoke some of the most moving and poignant words in this whole case:
This is not a podcast for me. This is real life — a never-ending nightmare for 20-plus years. Whenever I think it’s over, and it’s ended, it always comes back. It’s killing me and killing my mother.
As of June 2023, the rollercoaster ride has continued: Adnan has indeed once again been declared guilty of this crime, with his overturned conviction’s having been reinstated, but then with the reinstatement’s being put on hold by the Maryland Supreme Court while further investigation is done. Both sides have appealed. It is a total mess.
What will happen now is anyone’s guess, but it seems more than likely that the vacating of Adnan’s conviction will stand. Hae’s family could conceivably bring a civil suit for damages against him, though, just as the Goldman family did against O. J. Simpson. The Goldmans won that case—because the preponderance of the evidence was strong enough to meet the standards of a civil suit verdict. I don’t think that the preponderance threshold would be met in a civil suit against Adnan, but who knows? He’s never going to be able to draw a breath of complete relief until the real killer is unmasked—and Hae’s family accepts that verdict.
If you’re reading or listening to this material you’re almost certainly aware of the facts in the preceding paragraphs as well as the immense wave of podcasts, blog posts, social media threads, videos, and books that have been produced about this case.
Why on earth am I writing yet more material about Hae Min Lee’s murder? For this reason: I have never seen a full, logical analysis of the ideas I present here. What I want to do in the following chapters is to follow the threads to what I think is the inevitable conclusion: that by far the most likely person to have killed Hae Min Lee was her then-current boyfriend, Donald Clinedinst III.
The idea of Don’s guilt in and of itself is nothing new. He has always been on the radar as a probable suspect, especially to those who believe in Adnan’s innocence. At first there was a real reluctance to make any kind of accusation at all about his involvement, even in the most indirect way. Bob Ruff of the then-titled Serial Dynasty (now Truth and Justice) podcast has, as far as I know, been the only prominent researcher on this case who has been willing to say openly that he thinks Don is the murderer, a statement that generated quite a bit of pearl-clutching at the time. But he hasn’t delved into the granular details as fully as I plan to do here. I do salute him for his forthrightness, though.
I’m not going to claim some kind of moral high ground in my motives for writing about this case. I’m totally fascinated with it, as are millions of others, and it’s very satisfying to lay out the facts as I see them. I am also immensely sorry for Adnan Syed, who must feel as if he’s being jerked back and forth like a puppet by the legal system. My main hope, though, outside of my own interest, is that somehow Hae’s family can recognize that the man they’ve believed, all these years and with all their hearts, murdered this bright and beautiful young woman, is innocent.
It’s doubtful that any of them will read or listen to this book, but perhaps the truth will trickle out—if indeed it is the truth. There’s always a small chance of some kind of black swan event that confounds all expectations, that Hae was somehow waylaid by a serial killer or some other figure in the story. But if I may repeat the thundering cliché, I’m treating the hoofbeats of the evidence in this case as coming from a horse, not a zebra. Who’s the most likely culprit? In a case of violent crimes against women, the vast majority are committed by an intimate partner or ex-partner. Adnan Syed was the ex-boyfriend; Don Clinedinst was the current one.
What qualifications give me standing to examine this case? I’m not a lawyer, nor someone in law enforcement, nor a private investigator. Nothing I say here is going to amount to any kind of legal case. I’m not a psychologist either, but I do think I have a little insight into how the main characters’ minds worked. What I am is a storyteller and a history lover, someone who focuses obsessively on details, and I have absorbed an enormous amount of information about this case by listening to/reading/watching all of the mainstream sources of which I’m aware.
So I’ve listened to the original Serial podcast at least twice in its entirely and some episodes multiple times. I’ve done the same with the followup podcasts Undisclosed and Truth and Justice. I’ve listened to Rabia Chaudry’s book Adnan’s Story twice. I’ve read any number of blog posts, finding the ones from Susan Simpson to be the most illuminating, and I’ve watched the HBO documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed twice. I’ve dived down a few Reddit rabbit holes.
I’ve examined quite a bit of documentation, some included with podcast episodes or a document aggregator site and some on my own, looking up legal records and doing people searches and plotting routes on Google maps. I’ve read Hae’s diary in its entirety and I’ve consulted the trial transcript. It’s surprising what you can find out when you look at source documents and don’t depend on secondhand accounts.
So here’s what I plan to do in the following: work my way through what I see as the central questions about Hae’s murder and beyond. I will try to ground everything I say in the facts available, but if I speculate about what might have happened I will make that speculation clear. My purpose is not to re-examine the case against Adnan, as that ground has been plowed into oblivion. Any ideas about him and also about Jay Wilds, the main witness against Adnan, will intrude only if they are relevant, so neither man is going to appear much. The most reputable sources for this story have all come to pretty much the same conclusion: that Adnan, and by extension Jay, had no involvement in Hae’s murder at all but were pulled into the case later on in the police investigation by a number of factors, some of which will be addressed in this material.
I include a bibliography and further commentary at the end of this material. I’ve been careful not to list any current addresses, photographs, or other information that could lead people associated with the case to be harassed. I see no bar, though, to including 25-year-old documentation, including Hae’s diary, all of which is publicly available.
