Still, it takes a lot of guesswork. Koenig drives between Woodlawn High School, Best Buy and Leakin Park, trying to match the stories of professed witnesses to the pings from Syed's phone. The Serial map shows 10 cell towers covering a six-mile stretch of Baltimore, and as Koenig drives around the area, she notes the pings don't match the story told by the state's lead witness.

It's not enough to exonerate Syed. His lawyer apparently mentioned the discrepancy, vaguely, in Syed's initial trial, but she seemed unprepared to discuss the technical details behind cell-tower location tracking. In the end, the ambiguity of a ping, which could stem from a phone miles away from the actual tower, wasn't enough evidence for the jury. They trusted the witness and convicted Syed.

Serial aired in 2014 and it covered a case from 1999. The podcast To Live and Die in LA, meanwhile, began airing on February 28th, 2019, investigating the 2018 disappearance and murder of an aspiring actress. Its tenth episode, "Blood on the Script," dropped on May 2nd, and it starts with an experiment in ping-based location tracking. The host, Neil Strauss, drives to an undisclosed location and his partner, a private investigator, contacts the service he uses to find people in real-time.

The result he gets is wildly inaccurate -- 21 miles away from Strauss' actual location, or one hour and 12 minutes in LA traffic. Strauss then reveals he has access to the suspected murderer's Google account, location history and all. Strauss spends the next two episodes retracing his suspect's steps on the likely night of the murder and over the following days, minute by minute and mile by mile.

In the dead of night, the suspected murderer wove a confusing path around a neighborhood he supposedly knew well, before driving down a small back road that led to the river where the victim's body was eventually discovered. He drove to a Chevron station, and then to a Super8, and finally at 4:04AM, he stopped at a La Quinta Inn. The next day he visited two different car washes, went to his dad's house, and hit a series of stores in a squalid town off the highway. The Google Location History data is so exact that Strauss can see whether the man got out of his truck at each stop.

Strauss follows the friendly blue line across the map, stopping where his suspect stopped and noting how long he spent in each location. He can see his suspect's every move, as long as his phone was connected to Google services.

The gap between Serial and To Live and Die in LA is jarring. Koenig had to guess where her mark might have been within a 20-mile radius at any time, making it nearly impossible to corroborate or refute witness statements, while Strauss was able to see his suspect's precise movements for days on end, complete with timestamps and cute icons.