To be honest with you, I feel like I want to shoot myself.
If I hear someone else say, I don't think you did it because you're a nice guy.
Previously on Cereal. Did anybody else use the phone?
Yeah, and I remember he was talking to a girl.
He put me on a phone with her for like three minutes.
That's that hello to her.
I just remember he had told my daughter he had seen the body of a girl in the back of the trunk of some vehicle.
I think the guy seen was maybe Adnan?
Look at that. Global talent.
Playpeg calls from... Adnan, say it.
And in May, then, from Maryland, the collection of the movie, it's gonna be the movie.
From this American life in WB Easy Chicago, it's Cereal.
One story told week by week.
I'm Sarah Canig. I heard about this other case of a kid named Justin Wolf.
Actually, Adnan mentioned the case to me kind of in passing.
I can't remember how he heard about it.
He reads a lot of different stuff in prison.
Anyway, we've been talking about the cell records and how they were used in a non-case.
And a non-said that in this other case of Justin Wolf, cell records had also been used against him.
But then, Justin Wolf's conviction was overturned, in part because of the cell records.
So, I looked up this case of Justin Wolf just to see.
And on paper, I have to say it's sort of uncanny how many similarities there are with Adnan's case.
All young people, first of all.
Justin Wolf was a suburban kid, 18 football player.
People thought of him as a good kid, though he was selling pot and hanging around with some tougher types.
This next part is different, obviously.
He was convicted in the 2001 murder of a drug dealer who was shot nine times.
Justin Wolf was not the shooter.
The shooter was a slightly older friend of Wolf's named Owen Barber, who got a deal in exchange for testifying against Justin Wolf.
Owen Barber told the cops that Justin Wolf had hired him to kill the drug dealer.
Wolf was sentenced to death in Virginia.
Wolf's trial attorney later gave up his law license after the bar had initiated disciplinary charges against him for, this is the technical term, being a crappy lawyer.
Oh, and there was a witness who was never heard from.
Other than that, totally different case.
Anyhow, eventually Owen Barber recanted.
He said Justin Wolf had nothing to do with the murder.
He'd only implicated Wolf to avoid a death sentence for himself.
So, I read all about this and thought, let me talk to the lawyer who helped figure out the flaws in the state's case against Justin Wolf.
Maybe she has some tips about how we should be looking at the cell records differently in a non-s case.
I looked her up. Her name is Deirdre N.
Wright, and she works at the University of Virginia School of Law.
She runs their Innocence Project clinic there.
They do what Innocence Projects do.
They reinvestigate old cases to see if someone's been wrongfully convicted.
I called her and asked how she dealt with the cell records in the Justin Wolf case, and she was kind of so-so on that topic.
She gave me a couple of names to try.
No great insights though.
But, man, on every other topic, I found her so helpful.
She started asking me about a non-s case, and I ended up sending her a summary I'd made of the detective's reports.
And then the next time we talked, I asked if she'd mind going to a studio.
Hey, you know, I read your synopsis of your- just to jump right into your case.
Okay. I have a million questions for you, but it's very, very thin.
Oh, the state's case. Yeah.
After I started reading all the- all the- all the- what you had, I started thinking, so- so everybody here is in high school, right?
And why is Don- doesn't appear to be of interest to anyone?
Don was Hayes new boyfriend.
The police considered his alibi iron clad.
He was working at Lens Crafters all day.
But see, this is how it is with Deirdre.
A conversation with her never seems to begin exactly.
It's already there, ongoing, her thoughts churning, and you just kind of join in when you're ready and hope you can keep up.
She is not a small talker or a beat around a bushes.
You discuss whatever it is you came to discuss, full on, looking at squarely in the face.
She has no time for bullshit.
And not because she's above it or anything, but because she actually has no time.
She's one of the busiest and most curious people I've ever met.
You know, when you first talk to me about this case, the first thing I thought is, okay, do we have a jailhouse informant?
Do we have a person who got way too sweet of a deal?
Or what- when I read through your police notes, your summary of your police notes, I just kept going back to motive and thinking, that's a big black hole for me.
I still don't understand why you want this girl dead.
Because she broke up with you.
People break up with people all the time.
And I'm a little concerned about racial profiling here.
On the part of Anun. In other words, he's a Pakistani Muslim.
Right. And people are saying, you know, his dark side.
And there was some notation about he was very controlling.
And I thought, I wonder if he was really very controlling.
And so there's that. Then a little bit I had the cell phone thing for us in Justin Wolf is that they used the cell phone records to say they cab and out the period of time when the shooter is driving to the place where the victim is and shooting him and then coming back.
And so they put those up on a board in the courtroom and say, look at this.
He calls him right before he commits the murder and he calls him right after he commits the murder.
And then you get everybody's phone records, right?
All these kids that are buying pot and smoking pot and selling pot.
And everybody's calling each other all the time.
So then you stop and stand back and say, well, so what are they trying to say that Justin Wolf and these kids, these upper middle class kids are so stupid that they get in the car and call and say, OK, I'm on my way to murder him.
OK, I just murdered him.
I'm coming back now. I just murder.
You know what I mean? Like, who does that?
And so, you know, now all these witnesses are saying, Oh, no, we were just calling each other to buy pot.
Like those calls are that are infused with meaning by the prosecution's theory have no meaning in space.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny.
Like, do you get cases like because in on NONS case, I feel like from what I can tell, you know, there's not sort of gross negligence or or or malfeasance or something on the part of the detectives or the state's attorney's office.
Everyone seems to be doing their job, you know, responsibly, just doesn't seem like there's an obvious like, oh, they never looked at the new boyfriend or oh, they never questioned the guy who found the bot.
Like, it seems like an on on himself is not supplying anything super useful to say like, here's why I can prove I didn't do this.
Like he has set out front like I can't give you like some clenching piece of information or evidence that's going to solve this.
Like, I wish I could, but I can't just don't have it.
Like, I don't know. I don't know how to prove this.
So that's that's love hearing that because somewhere along the line I started realizing that when you have an innocent client, they are the least helpful people in the whole world.
Because they don't know they don't they have no idea like as soon as I realized I have an innocent client in that situation, I think like, okay, well, I'll talk to you again when I've solved it because I'm not going to need you here.
Because what's happening with a nun is where I'll find something out that looks kind of bad for him and I'll come to him with it and be like, why it does seem like you maybe made this phone call in the middle of the afternoon at a time when you're saying you were a track.
But the phone number is to someone who only you know and Jay didn't know.
And so like, there's this phone call with this girl, Nisha.
And it's like this glaring thing to me in the middle of the phone record where I'm like, that's the one that kind of looks bad for you.
Like explain that to me.
How do you explain that call to me?
And then his answer is so kind of mealy or not so satisfying where he's just like, I don't, I can't explain it.
Like, maybe it was a butt dial and like a machine picked up and I'm like, but she's testifying that there's no machine on it.
And he's just like, I don't know, I don't know what to tell you, but like, I didn't, I didn't have the fault.
Like, I was a track. And I'm just like, I want to be like, no, explain it.
Like, you should have an answer.
I can't. That's not surprising to you.
Not at all. So there was a case that I had the federal capital murder case, right, where my client, Darryl Rice, right, a charged with killing two women hikers and then to Shanido National Park and blah blah blah.
They filed a motion saying the motive in this case was hatred.
It was a he hated lesbians.
That's why he murdered these two women.
So Darryl Rice was easy for me, not in the beginning, because his answers weren't self-serving and helpful.
The way you think he's had time to think about this.
Why? Why doesn't he have a better answer than that?
And then I started to realize because he hasn't been thinking about this because he didn't murder anybody.
And so like, I remember one day I had in their maps, right, to show him, like, where the crime scene was versus where the lodge was versus where mile marker 42 point, you know.
And so I put this all out on a table and get my reading glasses and then I said, so when you would camp there, can you show me where you were?
And then he was like, okay, well, I didn't I didn't camp there.
I would ride bikes there.
And of course, I'm like, okay, well, whatever that, you know, who cares, whatever.
You're in you've been in the park before and then finally I said, but in relation to the crime scene and then he looked at me and it was so simple and but he said, well, I don't I don't know where the crime scene was.
So can you show me that? And I remembered thinking, of course, I'm like everybody else.
I think he knows where the crime scene is, right?
How many like do you only take on cases where it's super clear to everyone involved like on your side of the your side of the bar or the bed rather, I guess, that this person is in a center wrong click convicted.
Or do you take cases where like you really don't know and you start down a road and like three quarters of your cases turns out like, yeah, we probably did it.
So let's not take on that one.
Or do you are you only working with cases where you're pretty sure from the get go that the person.
Well, we don't know if the get go because we're the people that decide whether it's going to be it's going to go or not.
So so it goes every different way, right?
Sometimes we start down the road and very quickly we talked to four witnesses, all of whom say, no, it was absolutely him.
They have no reason to lie.
You know, we there's not we quickly realize, okay, we're being had here.
So we are in the weeds about a lot of things for a long time until we figured it out.
So like today we had team meetings for our four clinic cases.
And those are four cases, you know, two of whom we are sure already, two of whom we're just trying to figure it out.
Yeah. But your guy went to a jury, which you know, that's relatively unusual.
And I'm assuming he went to a jury because he was saying I didn't do this.
Right. Right. And so sometimes people say, I did some of this, but I didn't do all of this.
So I'm going to trial. But he wasn't saying that.
Yeah, he's always said the same thing, which is like, I have nothing to do with this.
Right. Which I don't know people, you know, a lot of learners say, oh, they're all guilty.
They're all guilty. I generally feel like, especially for most of my career, I was dealing with people.
I wasn't a director at an innocence project.
And I had a very clear sense of which of my clients did what and that's because they told me like, you know, so I put some stock in people saying, I didn't do it and staying with that.
You do. Yeah. Now, you know, I know some people would say I'm naive, but I also think like, I've been doing this work for a really long time.
I don't think naive is a good word for me.
You know what I mean? So, I mean, I feel like, because I feel like I'm having this experience where I'll read something or I'll do an interview and I'm like, okay, yeah, there's no way he did it.
It just doesn't add up. It doesn't add up.
And then I'll then then the very next day, I'm like, oh my God.
Oh my God. Look at the phone call to Nisha.
Well, yes, yes, or like, you know, oh, this friend said that he, you know, behaved this way during the relationship.
But this other girl I just talked to last night was like, no, he was really overbearing and possessive.
And I'm like, wait, oh my God, maybe you know, right?
Do you have that? Like, does that still happen to you?
Or do you just, oh, I now, I now actually teach that I tell people all the time you are you are you are juggling and everything's in the air and you're frozen.
And you have to stay there until you're just you've eliminated all questions.
Because if you if you come down or catch one and get attached to it, you're going to make the same mistakes that law enforcement do.
And I think too, when you keep going like, what happens to me is that I reach a tipping point where I have answered questions to my satisfaction.
And I have answers for everything and and my answers are better than law enforcement's answers.
So when I read what you've given me, I just think you guys just don't have it.
You just didn't nobody's really doing anything bad.
Every people are trying to run down their leads and talk to people, but they don't have enough to go forward, but they do anyhow.
Right. So people so you know, you've got bad feelings and you've got J changing a story.
You know, like I look at this is this is just a case that wasn't ready to be brought.
You don't have enough to put ad non away like not to not to me.
You don't. Yeah, but doesn't the fact that they did put him away mean that they had enough to put him away.
Well, and yeah, they would say yes, and I would say no.
And the reason I say that is because I look at this and think law enforcement and prosecutors and defense attorneys.
We all we act like if a jury will convict, then that's fine.
And I think those of us who know a good case from a bad case should know that even if we can get a jury to convict, it doesn't mean we necessarily should ask them to do that.
So, so are you not does it not happen to you anymore where you're just like one day you think like oh he did it in the next day you think oh no he.
Oh yeah, no for the first however many months thinking oh yeah, of course it's him.
Oh no, it's not him. But in order to revisit it in any kind of careful way, you have to revisit everything right and the good and the bad and whatever and look at it with you know and I brow up.
Yeah, and sometimes it's it's going to stay exactly the way it is and it's unsatisfying.
And that's my fear is I'm going to get through all this and just be like yeah and and you might and I can't pretend that that that I just thought of something that I think we should do unless you don't want to do it and you can just think about this.
Just today one of my teams and it's one of my better teams because it's a kid who had a law student who has summered at the FBI and is going to work for the US attorney so he doesn't have my tree hugger you know everyone's innocent instincts but he's a really hard worker and he has a team and we just closed their case and he came to me tonight and said are you going to find me
another good case and I said yeah let me flip through tonight and see what we got.
And I'm sitting here thinking wait I should assign them oh my god right that's really well I just I literally just thought of it.
Okay, okay, thinking you know it's a lot of legwork.
Huh if we had a team of five students we could get those things done you know with people that are being supervised so think about that I'm totally hooked.
I did think about it I said yes go ahead not that I would work with her my job unlike theirs is not to figure out if or how I can exonerate it not but sure if they wanted to take a look at the case on their own of course I'd welcome that many more sets of eyes some fresh some jaded could only be helpful it seemed to me.
I went down to Charlottesville to see how they were getting along here is the sound of a law clinic getting ready to consider a new case.
That's a scanner scanning its little scanner hard out it's man by anyone dear to can grab her students mostly couple of her kids come by the office she gets one of her daughter scanning.
You said the scanner smells good yeah smells like laundry and ink and I don't actually know what laundry smells like.
That's dear draw so now what we do usually in when we get our cases is we collect what mom has what the inmate has what is in the court file what paper everywhere that's what we do is collect all the paper and then do exactly what they're doing and then put the team and we say take a weekend and read it all.
Post conviction work often involves going back and looking at physical evidence in a case some innocent projects only work with cases that have DNA evidence for instance.
Deerter's group isn't one of those but still she'll definitely take it if she can get it.
At one point dear to reads a printout of an email regarding evidence in a non case.
So this is an email in 2008 from the Baltimore police saying that he believes items from this case have been destroyed but he doesn't have a document saying that that is true so he can't be 100% sure and he's the evidence control unit person.
So yeah that's not good I think there's two things to think about there's a statute usually in every state about evidence retention and that you can't destroy evidence until a case is over and done with doesn't mean they always honor it the other thing I'm thinking about is I can tell you the number of cases where somebody says I think it's gone and then you go and you
be annoying and you poke around and say can I come back there and look at that.
And they say okay we'll look and then somebody goes oh here it is like so it's not fatal so do you see how I refuse to accept anything.
It's true I can't think of anyone more optimistic than Deer Dre which I don't know I would have guessed that after doing this kind of work for decades and knowing how rare it is to reverse a conviction you naturally settle in as a pessimist.
But maybe the opposite is true that because your chances are so low you have to look on the bright side in order to do this work at all otherwise you can function.
Once Deer Dre and her students digest this massive amount of paper the next step is to decide what they've got on their hands.
The first thing they do says Deer Dre is to give it non back the presumption of innocence.
It's kind of a profound thing when you think about it it's supposed to happen the first time around a trial but it seems like no one in the profession really believes that it does because you can't help it as a juror you figure the guy sitting behind the defense table must have done something wrong.
So Deer Dre's team starts with the premise that he didn't do it and then they see where that road takes them.
If where they end up is that they think maybe a non really is innocent then they have to figure out if there's any way they can prove that in court the answer to that could definitely be no because the evidence is gone the people won't change their minds there's no legal remedy.
It's just those things are just after time those things are usually harder to get to.
As a legal question Deer Dre says they should only have to prove a non isn't their guy he's not the killer but as a practical matter she said their chances are much better if they can go a step further and say to the state not only is this not your guy we can tell you who is your guy.
The truth is when you can give the answer of who it is it makes it a whole lot easier on everybody else to walk away and do this thing that no one ever wants to do.
And usually there's some logical explanation right there's there is a guy there is a serial killer there's somebody who's motivated there's somebody who hated hey like usually there's something so you don't have to but I always tell people you have to.
Of course after looking everything over Deer Dre and her team might well decide that maybe a none is guilty in which case they would quietly pack up the files and just keep their mouth shut.
But what I'm saying is like that could happen here and on non-case like you could look at it and be like me looks like you did it.
To me I mean not to the world right I would say it to you I would say it to odd on but I wouldn't say it to anyone else I'll let you do that.
4 weeks later I checked back in with Deer Dre and two of her students Katie Clifford and Mario Pea they'd read through all the files.
Do you guys do any of you guys think Adnan's guilty?
No. No. I wouldn't be I wouldn't have been able to find him guilty with this.
No this is one of the things that was very odd when I first started reading this case was how precisely he was convicted under this amount of material.
But no I do not see him as being guilty at this point.
I would just at this point knowing what I know I would say I guess I'd have to put him in the person of interest category because he was an old boyfriend.
But even that I would think like but I see no evidence that he was mad mountains of reasonable doubt.
Yeah. This surprised me somehow I thought at least one or two of them would end up on the fence but they all sounded so forthright.
They said the big things that troubled them were the same things that troubled me namely J's shifting statements to police and how the Celtaura information didn't fully match J's narrative.
But the other stuff they seized on was stuff I hadn't paid much attention to at all the forensic reports or rather the relative lack of forensic reports.
This is Katie. Because in our files we have a lot of things evidence they collected that sent off and we don't have reports for everything and we are curious about the results that we don't have and whether or not those exist and just why they're not in the files that we have.
The liquor bottle for one.
That bottle of cornette VSQ Brandy that was found right in your Hay's body.
A lab report says they recovered nucleated epithelial cells from the mouth of the bottle and from the cap.
But that's all it just says quote retained for future possible analysis.
But the future never came they never tested those cells for DNA.
Then Mario didn't like the report on the fibers two fibers one reddish that was found in your Hay's head and one that I think was fluorescent blue it's a little hard to tell from the report that was found underneath her in the soil.
Mario didn't think they were tested against enough samples for instance they weren't tested against a rope that was also found right near the body.
I would think that you would be able to compare the fibers to the rope or compare the fibers to whatever you can get your hands on and I didn't actually see that ever get tested the fibers were tested against some things but nothing nothing came back of significance and then the fibers just the fact of the fibers just kind of went away.
As for the rope which from a photo looks sort of like a laundry line it wasn't tested at all for anything.
Deirdre says that kind of thing happens a lot where investigators will say oh that item we collected it's not relevant it's not connected to what happened so there's no point in testing.
So another case that I had anything that didn't match the the purpose that or the suspect that they had they just ignored it right and they would say well that's that's outside the crime scene that's really not inside the crime scene.
So those beer cans over there we're not going to test there because that's too far away we're going to call that outside the crime scene and when I talked to DNA experts about that they were saying yeah I mean if you swab that and you get some skin cells or saliva and it's just random you get no hit on anybody well then it's then it's neither here nor there but they were saying but if you
if you put it in and you get a hit on a cereal killer right or one of two other people who killed Asian women.
Within a year in Baltimore well now we've got enough to charge and convict somebody so what you call relevant and irrelevant you can only do once you have a test result.
Finally dearja and Katie and Mario were all confused by the swabs that were taken from Hay's body.
The medical examiner had done what's known as a perk kit it stands for physical evidence recovery kit it's a standard procedure in a rape case but it's also done in some murder cases.
There was no evidence Hay was sexually assaulted but they did the swabs just the same the medical examiner's report says they came back quote negative for sperm and a zoa unquote but that's about it which seemed very thin to dearja that these swabs weren't examined more thoroughly that they were never tested for DNA which is just weird that's just that seems very
strange to me in a case like that seems very strange to you.
You almost always submit that for DNA testing and that's what we're not seeing is a lab report that says you know if it came back and that's the other being Lucy goosey about whether it's not Jay not odd non you know that's strange right so okay so so is that something that you guys would want to get tested absolutely.
Yes it did you can correct me from wrong but this certainly seems to be quite a bit to get started.
Do you have any metric of how hopeful slash hopeless this one looks at this point in terms of finding out something useful and usable.
Mario is shaking his head that's because he's a pro government right wing republican operative easy here I checked with Mario he said it was fine.
You know it's always an outside shot always but there's enough here is what I guess what I'm saying is there's enough here that you.
Think it's worth asking these questions you're you don't mean like do you guys independently feel like no something went wrong here or is this just like well we're sort of humoring you the reporter no I would I would I would look at this as this I would have a team on this case saying keep going.
I see they all seem so hopeful so sure that with enough digging they were going to shake something loose but I was more skeptical I mean I felt like I've been in that same mindset for so many months and I hadn't found anything that absolutely tip the scale and a non's favor anyhow dear noticed sir you sound really down on add on today I don't know yeah you're I do I go up and down
I go up and down sometimes I'm totally with them and then other times I'm like I don't know do this doesn't why why can't you remember anything why is this nothing I don't know and then I just go back to like why can't you account for this day of all days you knew it was an important day you got a call from a cop that day asking where your ex girlfriend was surely you must have gone
over it before six weeks had passed surely you know I don't have that reaction but I see what you're saying yeah and then I just am aware of like what if he is this amazing sociopath and that's just like I'm being played you know I mean I don't get that sense but he I mean he's really charming he's really smart he's really he's funny and you're like yeah and he totally be
so see you back see years where I go with that like in my 20 how I'm six years of doing this I pray for a sociopath because I never get those guys I get the innocent once and I get these dumb so me and my friends smoke crack for three days and we drank five bottles of whatever and then we got a plan that's who I get all the time so I think like the odds of you getting the charming
sociopath you're just not that lucky very few times if I had a client and the ones who really did it and they they have serious mental issues and they're and they're not sociopathy there you know or a friend or a florid psychosis because of a whatever I just think the odds of him being that and no one having detected any signs of it until he kills his girlfriend who he's
moved on from so dear during her gang they've got to stick with stuff they can bring to a court friends it's mostly and they're on the lookout for another donation entirely maybe a none had nothing to do with this at all maybe it was a serial killer maybe there's a clue from another Baltimore cold case they're like explorers headed for a bold new world me I'm going to
stay right here at home with my little garden spade and keep scraping at the thing that confuses me most J next time on cereal cereal is produced by Julie Snyder Dana Chivas and me Emily Connan is our production and operations manager Ira Glass is our editorial advisor fact checking by Karen for Gala Smith administrative help from Elise Bergerson our theme music
is composed by Nick Thorburn scoring music by Nick and by Mark Phillips who also mixed our show 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 cereal podcast dot org cereal is a production of this American life and WB easy Chicago
