Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was charged with murder, and within a year, he was sentenced to life in prison. A month later, her body was found in a city park. “Next time: the final episode of Serial”.A high-school senior named Hae Min Lee disappeared one day after school in 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland. “It will be,” says Koenig, whose podcast attracts a worldwide audience of more than 1.5 million per episode. "It doesn't matter to me how your story portrays me, guilty or innocent, I just want it to be over," Adnan says. The convicted killer says he thinks it is "a trap" to try to convince people of things. And when they don't find either, they don't know what to think. He says that some people he encounters come to him expecting a monster and some come expecting a victim. In the end, Adnan says that he knows there is nothing he can do to change people's opinions of him.
So why does it matter what people think? Koenig thinks that it matters because it is a human quality to gather evidence about the world around us and then pass judgement on it. When taken as a whole, some people who knew Adnan said they thought he could have done the crime, but most, Koenig says, say they don’t believe he had it in him. You know flip flop, flip flop, like Mitt Romney." He says he has never claimed that he couldn’t have killed his ex-girlfriend because he was a perfect person, so why call his character into question at all? He tells Koenig: "You go from my saviour to my executioner on a daily. But he asks what it has to do with the case. He estimated that Adnan could have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars.Ĭross-examined by Koenig, Adnan says he did take the money. I mean are you serious? No one could even imagine it", says one former acquaintance who asked to remain anonymous. "Nobody questioned this good little Muslim kid from the mosque. “The word psychopath gets thrown in sometimes,” she says. Several say that they know things about Adnan's personality that Koenig “is not seeing”. Instead, she is left with the testimony of a number of people who tell her that they think Adnan could have been capable of the crime. But in looking into it, Koenig says she is unable to verify it. Some of the allegations are relatively inconsequential, she says, but one is “so incriminating” that it would have closed the case entirely. So what are the character questions the latest episode investigates? “It is his nightmare,” she concedes.īefore she comes to this conclusion, though, she finishes the second-last chapter of the investigation she began over a year ago, following up with several people who have contacted her from Baltimore’s “mosque community” to shed further light on Adnan’s character. "There is stuff you don't know about Adnan, stuff you need to know to understand who you are dealing with," Koenig says she was told. Not even Sarah Koenig, the programme’s producer, could have predicted the runaway success of her own show, but at the end of the episode she seems sympathetic to Adnan’s feelings about the podcast. Given that Adnan did not ask for the show to be made in the first place, can it really be justified? He says, quite plainly, he does not care what anyone thinks anymore. Has it been a legitimate experiment in narrative journalism or an unwelcome intrusion into a relatively private man’s life?Īfter an exhaustive exploration of former acquaintances’ views on whether or not Adnan Syed might be capable of killing, at the end of the episode we hear from the man himself. The penultimate episode of Serial, the wildly successful podcast exploring the case of Adnan Syed, the man convicted of murdering his ex girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in Baltimore in 1999, raises some serious questions about the podcast itself.
0 kommentar(er)
