And while I'm in the head space of the late 90's, there were recent developments in a couple of true crime stories that were reinvigorated by podcasts. Admittedly I feel a bit guilty following these stories for entertainment.
Prosecutors said Smart was killed during an attempted rape by Cal Poly classmate Paul Flores. His father had been accused of helping dispose of the body, which was never found.
www.nbcnews.com
The Kristin Smart case was covered by a podcast called "In Your Own Backyard." Cliff's Notes summary:
Smart was a college freshman in 1996. On Memorial Day weekend, she attended an off campus party. Her roommate was away for the weekend and didn't suspect anything nefarious when she didn't see her upon returning. Eventually she does notify campus police who are a bit slow to investigate as they assumed she had gone somewhere for the holiday weekend.
Eventually the police start investigating and determine she was last seen walking back to campus from the party with a small group. Unfortunately by the time they identify the prime suspect (Paul Flores), the school year had ended and the dorms had been cleaned. Despite that, K9 unit seemed to alert the police to Flores' room but they weren't able to find sufficient evidence.
Body was never recovered. The creepy layer to the story was the possibility that the body was buried in the backyard of Flores' nearby home. They had rented out a guest house and the tenants noted that they'd hear a faint alarm go off around 4:20am every morning. They didn't know what to make of it and eventually it went away. Later it was theorized that it could have been Smart's watch as she had a 5am shift as a lifeguard on campus.
Fast forward to the recent podcast and Flores' predatory behavior after the incident was uncovered. The police reopened the investigation and eventually charged him last year and he got convicted this week.
I might have to check out recent coverage of the trial to see if there was any additional evidence introduced. Unfortunately most of the story is Flores following Smart around at the party and then being adamant that he'd be the one to walk her back to her dorm.
Mr. Syed, who was the subject of the 2014 podcast “Serial,” had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his high school classmate Hae Min Lee.
www.nytimes.com
The Hae Min Lee murder / Adnan Syed conviction was popularized by the Serial podcast and later an HBO four part documentary. Recently Adnan was released and the state is following leads on a couple (new?) suspects.
This one hit home for me since I'm the same age as the principles of this case. So when I listened to Serial, I was almost picturing myself (I coincidentally was dating a Korean classmate at the time).
TL;DR version: Ex-boyfriend found guilty of murder. But star witness keeps changing his story and there's no physical evidence tying him to the crime.
Cliff's Notes:
~ early 1998 - Adnan and Hae begin dating as high school juniors, but due to their cultural backgrounds they have to keep it from their families. They break up and reconcile a few times, but eventually call it quits by December 1998.
Hae begins to date an older coworker in January 1999 then goes missing a couple weeks later. A random* passerby finds her body in a shallow grave in a heavily wooded area. Some are theorizing the passerby might be being reevaluated as a suspect. His story was that he had stopped off to take a leak.
Adnan was probably a prime suspect anyways, but police received an anonymous tip to focus on him. Eventually they get his cell phone records and they narrow it down to Adnan and his friend/acquaintance Jay. Adnan's story was that he was at a nearby library waiting for his afternoon track practice (basically a normal day). He had lent Jay his car so he could get a birthday gift for Stephanie (Jay's girlfriend / one of Adnan's best friends). Adnan's newly activated cell phone had been left in the car.
Jay becomes the prosecution's star witness and he tells the police that Adnan murdered Hae then contacted him to help dispose of the body. Jay also informs the police where Hae's car was abandoned. Other testimony from Jay's friend's roommate (insert Spaceballs joke here) is used to place Adnan with Jay the night that Hae disappeared. Adnan is convicted in 2000 and had imprisoned until recently.
The Serial podcast brought light to how Jay's story had progressively changed throughout the process. The thought was that he was coerced/coached by the detectives in order to fit a particular timeline based on the cell phone records. Apparently Jay had a reputation for either being a compulsive liar or throwing people under a bus to keep himself out of trouble. The thought is that Jay was a low level drug dealer, so he might have been motivated to cooperate in this case to avoid getting a harsher sentence for his own crimes.
The HBO documentary also found the class schedule for the friend's roommate and she should have been in class the night that Hae disappeared. So the thought being that her memory was off by a day. Subsequent analysis also found a possible typo in the cell phone tower report which threw further doubt into the police's theory plus the overall reliability of the data itself. The cell phone engineer in the original trial has since recanted the accuracy of his testimony.
Adnan's attorney from the original trial also disregarded a possible alibi witness who potentially talked with Adnan that afternoon in the library when the police asserted was during a brief window when the murder occurred and Jay claimed he had dropped Adnan back off at school.
Also may have been a bit of an inherent racial bias as Jay is African American as were 11 of the 12 jurors. Adnan's defense attorney (now deceased) was particularly abrasive. Serial contacted (at least) one of the jurors who noted that perhaps there was a sense of empathy for Jay as he was getting grilled on the stand. So instead of focusing on his inconsistent testimony, they just felt bad for him.
A few weeks back, Adnan was released from prison at the request of the prosecutor's office. Apparently there had been a Brady violation in the original case where the prosecutor didn't disclose alternative suspects to the defense. And then also recently there was a DNA analysis done on Hae's shoes which didn't come back with Adnan's DNA, so they've at least publicly cleared him as a suspect for the moment.
