Over beers and and chenin blanc in a chichi cafe-bar in downtown Baltimore called Dooby’s on Thursday night, a group of young, professional twentysomethings are talking about Serial.



The 10th episode of the podcast was released earlier in the day; but none of the after-work group have heard it yet. When they find out that I, in fact, have, they practically knock the locally brewed pale ale out of my hands. “No spoilers!”

Serial is a spin-off show from NPR’s This American Life, in which reporter Sarah Koenig delves deeply into reinvestigating the killing in 1999 of a Baltimore County high-school girl named Hae Min Lee, and the subsequent conviction of Hae’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder.

One of the group at the bar is a recent convert; she tells me she listened to episode one on Monday, and was so hooked that she listened to eight more episodes in just three days. The others nod in sympathy. It’s really, really good, is their consensus.

Serial is an international phenomenon. It has held the No 1 spot on iTunes pretty much permanently since its first episode was released in October, and in November Apple announced it had smashed the record for the fastest podcast ever to hit five million downloads, and a subreddit dedicated to the podcast – discussing it, swapping theories, making maps and investigating things – has nearly 23,000 members.

From downtown, it is just a few miles to Woodlawn, Baltimore County, just outside the city, where the events pored over in Serial take place. In traffic, it’s about a half-hour drive. But it feels like worlds away from the crowd at Dooby’s.

Woodlawn is the eye of the storm and, as befits the eye of a storm, it is eerily calm. When I arrive the day is blustery and grey, the school has not yet let out, and the streets are empty. I grab a bite of lunch with John, a member of the Serial subreddit who grew up one county over, and now lives and works nearby. A data analyst for a federal agency, he asked that I not use his real name in this piece.

“I’ve shopped at the Best Buy, and the Security Square mall [where Hae’s new boyfriend worked] when I was younger,” he tells me. “It’s all pretty intimate, and it’s amazing to know that around the world people are hearing of – y’know – Edmondson Avenue and the like.” He joined the subreddit early on, and was soon making video tours of the podcast’s locales to post to the group. “There had been a couple of pictures on the official podcast website,” he says, “but people were saying they’d like to get a closer look.”

I do a little tour, ticking off the places that have become so perfectly familiar to fans of the podcast. There is Woodlawn high school, where Hae Min Lee was last seen alive on 13 January 1999. There is the public library, just the other side of the parking lot from the school bus loop, where her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed – who is currently 15 years into a sentence of life plus 30 years for Hae’s murder – says he was at the time she was killed.

A short drive away, the other side of the interstate, is the Best Buy, where Jay – a weed dealer acquaintance of Adnan’s whose eyewitness account led to his conviction at trial – testified that Adnan showed him Hae’s body in the trunk of her car. (In earlier police interviews, Jay had said that this happened elsewhere, on Edmondson Avenue.)

A little further away, but still no more than a few minutes by car, interstate 70 abruptly comes to an end in the park-and-ride car park where, according to Jay’s testimony, he and Adnan stashed Hae’s car with her in the trunk.

Just past that is Leakin Park, a huge, bleak, forested urban wilderness, which, bizarrely, is where part of The Blair Witch Project 2 was filmed – and it is here that Hae’s body was discovered, buried in a shallow grave 127 feet back from the road.

Amateur sleuths have been digging around out here, though they aren’t thick on the ground. I chat with a Best Buy employee having a cigarette in the parking lot, and ask her about payphones. (The existence of payphones outside Best Buy is a point of serious contention in Serial – the state’s case against Adnan contends he called Jay from one immediately after strangling Hae – but no one has been able to prove they ever existed here.)

She rolls her eyes. I ask if people have come here in the last few weeks asking that question, and she nods sardonically. “A few.” She’s worked here since 1999, she tells me, but says she’ll tell me what she told the others: she doesn’t remember there ever being any payphones.

Kevin Mitchell, another subreddit member who grew up locally, tells me he’s been to that Best Buy more than 100 times to shop; but after getting into Serial he went back to have a look for those phones. Actually, he thinks he’s found a phone jack in the lobby where a payphone might once have stood. He tells me he “lurks” more than he posts on the boards. “It’s kind of hilarious to see people talk about Baltimore County.”

Later, I meet Saad Chaudry – Adnan’s best friend, and the brother of Rabia Chaudry, who first contacted Sarah Koenig with Adnan’s story. Chaudry is also an active member of the subreddit, though he tells me it’s often frustrating. “Sometimes it was like, I don’t even think we can agree on what colour the sky is,” he says. He dislikes the anonymous nature of Reddit – how he doesn’t know whether he’s engaging with a law professor, or a teenager.

Chaudry says that when he and Rabia met with Koenig the first time, they didn’t even know what a podcast was. “Rabia and I were just so excited that somebody was listening to us,” he said. “We had no idea what we signed up for. We didn’t know it was going to be a podcast, we didn’t know if it was going to be a series; we had no idea. We actually thought it was going to be more like a 60-minute radio special. Like a Dateline.”

He says they never thought about the fact that they would be sharing what they considered to be their story through someone else’s narrative.

Because it is episodic, Serial’s narrative structure shares as much DNA with fiction as it does with journalism. This is all well and good, but Chaudry feels Koenig is holding things back. He says he’s not naive – he knows that the huge attention Serial has drawn is in part down to its murder-mystery structure – but sometimes, in people’s excitement over the story, he thinks the audience forgets that there are real people at the heart of it.

According to Nicole King, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who teaches classes on storytelling, Serial’s narrative style is problematic when you come here and look at it in the context of Baltimore.

“People are so caught up with ‘whodunnit’,” she tells me. “The Hollywood ending.” For people here, she says, there will need to be some sort of a payoff – a denouement – which real life rarely, if ever, provides.

John describes this as “an epistemological faith that the truth can be known” but because this is real life, rather than fiction, this faith is problematic. “There’s the jigsaw puzzle box, but when you line up all the pieces they don’t fit,” he says. “You’ve only got maybe the corners together. You’ve got way more pieces than you need. And you’ve got pieces from another puzzle mixed in there with it.”

Two of King’s colleagues in the English department at UMBC, Steph Ceraso and Tanya Olsen, are starting to use the podcast as a teaching tool. “The podcast raises all kinds of interesting questions about storytelling, memory, ethics and the research process,” Ceraso tells me over the phone.

When she used episode one to start a discussion in class, Ceraso discovered that some of her students actually knew the families – both Adnan’s, and Hae’s, as it turned out – and the class became a heated discussion about storytelling and ethics.

The police here don’t appear to share in the joy of the puzzle, however. After two days, a spokesman for Baltimore City police tells me that “it happened a decade ago and in another county. We really have nothing to add to that.”

When pressed for his personal views, he says: “I don’t have any personal views. I work for the police department.”

As I head back to the car to leave Woodlawn, yellow buses shuffle past me out of the high school. As I drive past, crowds of kids appear, hands in pockets, trailing bags and headphone cords.

With a jolt, I realise that it is 2.15, I am at the beginning of the crucial 21 minutes Sarah Koenig and her team have spent the last year investigating – the time in which, according to the state’s timeline, Hae was murdered.

I replay the podcast on the car stereo, and as I tick off the timeline in my head I look around, trying to spot anyone else doing the same – but it’s impossible to tell.]