Not listened to the Serial podcasts? The following will mean very little to you. Have listened to some of them? The following will contain spoilers. Listened to all the episodes? The following will make you very, very tense.
Jay Wilds, the main witness in a case that put then-18-year-old Adnan Syed into jail for the murder of his ex girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, has done an interview with The Intercept and changed his story. As any listener will know, Jay was a problematic witness for Serial narrator Sarah Koenig, because of the way he kept changing his story as the case continued to unfold - from the first time he was interviewed by police, to the trial.
Well, now he's done it again: instead of first seeing the body of tragically murdered Hae in the car park of a Best Buy (an American store that will is forever imprinted on our brains thanks to an errant phone booth), he now says he saw it outside his grandmother's house - but didn't want to implicate his grandmother, so lied about it. *
'I didn’t tell the cops it was in front of my house because I didn’t want to involve my grandmother,” he said. 'I believe I told them it was in front of Cathy’s [a psuedonym] house, but it was in front of my grandmother’s house. I know it didn’t happen anywhere other than my grandmother’s house. I remember the highway traffic to my right, and I remember standing there on the curb. I remember Adnan standing next to me.'
One of the main problems with the case against Adnan - which Serial plots out - is the changing story of Jay, and the issue with him as a witness. It casts huge doubt on whether or not Adnan actually did the crime he's still imprisoned for. Adnan maintains that everything Jay said in court is a lie, and that he was at track practise during the time the murder occurred.
Jay, who knew Adnan because they smoked weed together, still maintains he was not.
'At the time I was convinced that I would be going to jail for a long time if he [Adnan] turned me in for drug dealing, especially to high school kids,' he said. 'I was also running [drug] operations from my grandmother’s house. So that would ruin her life too. I was also around a bunch of people earlier the day [at Cathy’s], and I didn’t want them to get fucked up with homicide.'
He goes onto explain how he stonewalled the police, because of the fear he was going to be put away for drug dealing. 'People had lives and were trying to get into college and stuff like that. Getting them in trouble for anything that they knew or that I had told them — I couldn’t have that.'
Now we don't know what to think...
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.