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Previously on serial. I think like the odds of you getting the charming sociopath you're just not that lucky.
So but with today it was more so kind of like, I don't know in my mind I was kind of like maybe the police are putting them up to this.
I said, what was your involvement?
Were you involved? And he said no.
Before you stated that you'd be willing to take a sound and show us where the bid was parked.
No problem. Are you still willing to do that?
Yes. This is a global tailed link.
Prepaid call from. I'd not say it.
An inmate act from Maryland Correctional Facility.
This call will be recorded in monetary.
If you wish to block any car, you're not going to be able to.
OK. My name is Miss Stella Armstrong, Baltimore, Maryland.
And you were a juror on the Anan Sayed case, right?
Yes, I was. From this American life in W.B.E.Z.
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 Anan Sayed.
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.
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? The friend didn't?
No. He walked. That's strange.
That's strange. I asked Stella the same thing.
I asked anyone who's come in 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 in a first degree murder, testified against it 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 for 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?
Like, what kind of kid did he seem like?
He seemed like he was streetwise.
Can 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 himself.
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 would remind me of somebody I would call to help me.
Like if somebody was fighting me.
So it was believable to you that he would be that guy for Adnan.
Like, he would be the guy that Adnan would turn to.
Yeah, yeah, that was my impression.
Because we all have somebody in our life like that, that you may know a cousin or a relative who, if something go wrong, you think you can call to help you.
When you just said that, I just did a very quick scan of all of my contacts with my family.
And I feel like I can't think of one, but they're also useless.
We won't say they're also useless.
The J that Stella saw at 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 J's credibility was the state's case, Adnan's 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 are 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?
J 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? Yes. 16. Gutierrez asks Jay about best bye, about how Jen Pucetari told him there were security cameras in the parking lot and at the entrance.
If Jay didn't kill, hey, why would Jay care whether there were cameras there, she asks.
She puts it to Jay almost casually.
We have a lead. Objection.
You had nothing to do with the death of Hayley White.
It's a strange formal question.
Did you kill Hayley? No, man.
And you weren't present in this case.
No, man. The defense attorney tried to make him, well, basically, she was trying to show that Jay killed her and was blaming it on Adnan.
But that's what I remember.
Nothing led us to believe that he had a motive to kill Miss Lee.
Yeah. That really stayed with me because she was so adamant that he was a liar.
Right. Did 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.
J.J. took the stand on five different days during the second trial.
And this must have been a harrowing, nerve-wracking 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 theatrics that gets people to crack.
It's tedium, which would explain so much of what Coutera's 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 into the county, on buildings, how they're situated.
And that best find is a boxy structure with the best by logo and an angle.
Is it not? Yes, ma'am. And it's extremely visible from security buildings.
Yes, ma'am. Right at it, that's also the changes.
There's a light there that if you're not on security buildings, but on that street, in which straight you go into the parking lot of security more, correct?
Yes, ma'am. Jay doesn't crack, though.
He is alert, he is 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 shouting.
He sticks to the yes, ma'am, no ma'am, answers, which, if I had to guess, is probably 75% of what Jay says and cross.
There's a part where Coutera's tries to suggest that Jay was cheating on his girlfriend Stephanie with Jen Pucetari.
If you were stepping out on Stephanie, that would have been an impact on your relationship.
What did you have to know?
With me. With anyone. With Stephanie?
If you were stepping out on Stephanie, you understand what that term means, don't you?
Yes, ma'am. OK. If you had another girlfriend, anyone, anything, anywhere, that would have been an impact on Stephanie.
What did it not? I didn't know you last night.
If you were stepping out with any girl of any name from any location, that would have been impacted your relationship.
What's your girlfriend, Stephanie?
What did it not? Yes, ma'am.
And you were always weird, OK?
Yes, ma'am. Even when he gets irritated, Jay is civil.
Excuse me, Your Honor. He says when Coutera's gets loud, could you ask her to stop yelling in my ear, please?
Coutera's 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 whether moments like this hurt a non-case rather than helped it.
Because Jay seems like the underdog.
It's Baltimore. Half the jury is black, 7 out of 12, 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 Puceteri 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 non wanted to kill her, he says it was because he didn't think a non was serious.
Quote, I took it as a grain of sand instead of concrete.
And when he's asked why the image of Hay and 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 non 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 am concerned about it.
You are. Yes. As I've 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 Trainham.
James, should you like James?
Jim Trainham. Jim Trainham.
And we hired you. Yes. Because unlike me, you're a real detective.
I'm just playing one on the radio.
Jim Trainham used to be a homicide detective in Washington, DC, 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 Trainham 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 Heyman 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?
Trainham 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.
Right. You know, he took them to where the car was.
Right. And that's a huge thing right there.
Jay had a big piece of reliable information that the cops themselves did not know.
Where his car was. Plus, Trainham said, Jay's story completes a circle for the cops.
There was suspicious of a non from the beginning.
Then from a non-cell records, they get to Jen, who leads them to Jay, who tells them it's a non.
So there's suspicions have now been born out, thanks to Jay, through a non's own phone, a satisfying investigative circle, a murder case on a silver platter, says Trainham.
He puts it on who they consider to be the logical suspect.
I mean, yeah, it gets pretty much a dream case.
Part of what Trainham 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 Trainham, this looks like a pretty sound investigation.
I always say that this is better than average.
But what I'm saying is this, the mechanics, the documentation, the steps that they took, and all of that, they look good.
OK? 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 those three hours or whatever like that.
And that will always result in a question as to what the final outcome I mean should have been.
Here's what he's talking about.
In both of Jay's taped 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 28, they talked to him for about an hour before the tape went on.
Then on March 15, the second interview, Jay signs his initials to an explanation of Wright's form at 3.15 pm.
Then the tape starts. Today's date is the 15th of March.
It's approximately 20 minutes after 6.
In 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 video tape the entire interview from the moment the person steps in the interview room.
On March 15, 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 the 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 that Patapsco State Park that afternoon?
How it drops out of the narrative at trial?
And from like where I said, I'm like, yeah, it doesn't work because it doesn't fit your timeline.
And he can't get back to track in time if you went out and smoked a joint.
You know what I mean? Anyway, I'm getting too deep in bed.
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.
And we got somebody who's given us the whole case right here.
He's broke it wide open for us.
We don't want to ruin him.
You know, we don't. And so how much do you want to push?
How much do you want to create quote, no quote, bad evidence?
But like there's no such, like this is an actual term.
It's called bad evidence.
Right. You don't want to do something if it's going to go against your theory of the case.
But I don't get that. I mean, it was like, my father used to always say, all facts are friendly.
Like shouldn't that be more true for a cop than for anyone else?
Like you can't, 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, 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 is verification bias caused you to do?
Ignore it and push it aside.
And that's what they're doing here with these inconsistencies are kind of pushing them aside.
Trainings that 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 doing it for one or three reasons, to protect himself, to protect somebody else, or because odd non-dentity, and was right there with him.
Right, right. But I cannot prove that he's given to me without contamination.
Right. The real problem is is that how do you prove it one way or the other?
Right. Trinum 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, to you know, like there are holes that were never, as you're saying, like we're never gonna know the answer, but for things that I could know the answer to, if you're me, what's the biggest thing I need to figure out then?
Good day 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 journalist reporter move I know.
But I thought we'd have the best chance of success if we met him face to face.
So we can 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.
But I feel super excited to talk to him, like so excited to talk to him.
I can't tell you. Like if this works and he, I mean, he knows, he knows everything we wanna know.
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 hasn't.
He's it. But whether or not he opens the door, or if he's even 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, Julian and I felt like we'd walked into a stranger's house, lobbed a grenade onto his living room carpet and then waved goodbye.
We debriefed back in the car.
Here's the first thing he said.
I mean, he said that there are a lot of people who say that they don't think God not did it.
And he very forcefully said, well, then 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. I can't believe he won't even man up and admit it.
He just totally scoffed at the idea that a non would be claiming his innocence.
He was very calm. Like how would you describe his demeanor?
Tired. Yeah. Yeah. He seemed tired and a little and wary, but not, but actually very polite and actually sort of very sweet and tired.
And but he also said, I'm feeling like so much, he said like kind of animal rage right now, even you bringing the sub right now.
But he 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.
Jay was understandably skeptical of us and of our motives.
When we left, Jay 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. Um, 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.
Jay and I corresponded sporadically by email in the week's following our meeting.
He said he wasn't afraid of the truth.
Finally, in so many words, Jay declined an interview.
So what is the deal with Jay?
I talked to dozens of people, mostly his friends and classmates.
Kids who knew 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 social world.
He was like the one blackhead who had like a lip ring and listened to like raging in sort of she and, you know, he would die.
He's had different colors like I think one time he had a red and another time he had a blonde, but when the blonde lasted for a long time, like I remember the blonde for sure.
We're going to be at a BMX belt buckle and he had a belt buckle.
Who the hell is a belt buckle?
Basically Dennis Rodman is the best wrecking describe it.
You know, if he was at my house and my mom came home and he left, she'd be like, who's that?
And why is he here? Like, whoa, he's weirdo.
At the time, I didn't know too many black guys that were into all of those piercings and shit in the big, gossy jeans like that.
Again, woodlands fairly black, maybe very black, for me, black predominantly black high school.
And, you know, at 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 went spotted 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.
Tall wire, he dude, he could run for days.
There was no training needed for that kid.
He could just run forever, which was 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 seemed very honest with who he was.
Kind of this might 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 taking care of himself.
He always had a job. His mother depended on him.
Jay wasn't in the magnet program at Woodlawn.
He was Jen 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 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.
Just remember 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.
We had weird arguments sometimes.
I remember outside of one of my cousin's houses, he 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 were literally fighting outside of my cousin's house.
And he's like, oh, I'm not going to stab you deep, but you've never been stabbed before you need to know what it's like.
And I'm like, yo, I'm not going to let you stab me.
So 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 that first night during his first taped interview, Jay mentioned Chris by name.
The cops had asked Jay if he'd told anyone else about a non-committing this murder and Jay said he'd 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 the surrounding details are unfamiliar.
Of course, giant caveat, it's 15 years later than 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 Cattonsville 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 Adnan called on me.
He was like, yo, you know, I got to talk to you and he was like, yo, I'm busy.
You know, where are you?
He told him where he was.
Adnan showed up. He was like, yo, I got to talk to you.
And this was a little tug of war for a while.
And Adnan eventually convinced him to come outside with him and his car.
Or I don't know if he was driving his car, Hey, Lee's.
In this version, the trunk pop happens at the pool hall.
Chris said Jay told Adnan he wanted nothing to do with it, but Adnan 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. He helped bury the body.
Chris figured Leacon Park was likely Jay's idea rather than Adnan's.
Chris's information about the crime itself doesn't quite match the state's version.
He said Jay told him that Adnan confronted Hay about flirting with another guy, a car salesman.
And when she called Adnan crazy, he snapped and strangled her.
And Chris said he heard this happen in the parking lot of the Woodland Public Library.
Remember, that's the one that's right there on campus where Asia said she saw Adnan that day.
Chris says Jay told him that Adnan 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 Adnan would hurt Stephanie too.
And he also testified a trial that Adnan had made it clear he could get to Stephanie anytime 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 Adnan.
Chris says Jay told him Adnan showed up at Jay's house with Stephanie not long after the crime.
They 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 Adnan.
He's like, you're not going to terrorize me.
Adnan's like, you keep your mouth shut or something's going to happen.
If he had any weakness, it was Stephanie.
They would move heaven and earth if it came to protecting Stephanie.
I talked to Laura, a friend of Jay's and Stephanie's and Jens and Adnan's.
Back then, she was Laura, a strata sendoval.
She was close with Stephanie.
They played sports together.
Her parents didn't agree with their relationship because they felt like he wasn't going to mount anything.
He wasn't going to school.
Stephanie, she's beautiful.
I mean, she was as far as we...
She got scholarship to college.
She was like, perfect. She ran the fastest.
She was only in shape no matter what.
She could eat anything and she always saw the good in people no matter what.
Like no matter if her parents were telling her, he's not going to influence on you.
But because she loved Jay so much, she was going to support him regardless.
She was his, like, good thing in life.
He was like, out of 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.
Hayes 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 kept saying like, what happened?
You know, like what? God didn't even happen, you know, at all good.
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 Woodland.
He was a year ahead of Jay so two years ahead of it, none and Hay and 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 in touch one day and then they saw each other a little party.
Patrick asked him about it.
I've heard all of these like renditions and versions of stories from so many people like, I figured like, I haven't in front of me now.
Like I can get to the truth.
And he said, yeah, like, you know, I was afraid he was going to hurt Stephanie.
And I was like, like, adding on, he was going to like, to threaten her and he just said he was afraid that he was going to hurt her.
And so I guess I took it as a through it.
You know, took what he was saying as a threat.
But I remember when I pushed him for detail, when I pushed him for more, it wasn't, I didn't get it.
Like he wasn't, he wasn't going to go any further with it.
He just wasn't, you know, and there was a lot of it like just kind of like, show me, punch me on the shoulder kind of like, come on man, like let's just drink beers and like, hang out.
Patrick says this Stephanie explanation sounded pretty thin to him.
But he couldn't get anything else out of Jay and 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.
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 it was acting weird at her apartment that night of the murder when Jay brought him over.
That's right, what look when you were talking about it and saying, you know, what Jay has all these inconsistencies and stuff.
The first thing that popped in my head was that because Jay lies, Jay doesn't tell the truth.
But like about what, what kinds of stuff are you thinking?
I think it was kind of like, but everything, nothing.
It's like I 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 Jen and Laura, 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, tall 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 Batapskow 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 a non-is guilty based on a non-sbehavior that night and what he was saying when he got that phone call at her house.
And then there's Jen Pucetari.
Of all the people Jay told about this crime, I wondered most about Jen.
But 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 non-putt haze body, that 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 added, 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.
A non they said, no way, shocking.
But Jay, not so shocking.
And people also said they couldn't square Jay feeling threatened by a non.
The dynamic of that just seemed wrong to them.
But then there's Patrick and Laura and Kathy, people who'd 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 a non's 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 think part of me hopes and then I know this is so terrible to say.
I hope in some way he, his hand was forced that he was, he had no choice or that things were outside of his control and that.
And maybe he was looking out for the safety and well-being of others.
And he wasn't such a willing participant if he was and 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?
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