The podcast exploring the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, has become a global phenomenon. In an exclusive interview, Adnan’s family talk to Jon Ronson about listening to Serial, toxic Reddit threads and how his imprisonment has destroyed their lives

Serial: The Syed family on their pain and the ‘five million detectives trying to work out if Adnan is a psychopath’

An elderly man crouches on a rug in a house in west Baltimore. He’s alone, and wearing shalwar kameez, so from the back I assume he’s praying. In fact he’s eating his dinner. When he sees me come through the front door, he quickly hurries to his bedroom. He’s Syed Rahman, Adnan Syed’s father.

“He spends the whole time in his room,” his wife, Shamim, tells me a few minutes later.

“What does he do in there?” I ask her.

“He reads books,” she says. “Islamic books.”

“Has he been diagnosed with depression?”

“He doesn’t believe in depression,” Shamim says. “That’s the problem.”

“He doesn’t believe in antidepressants,” adds Yusuf, their son.

“And this is all because of Adnan?”

“Yes,” they say.

As millions of people now know – although it was barely reported at the time – a murder occurred near here, in January 1999. The crime scene was less than a mile away, in the parking lot of the local Best Buy, if you believe the prosecution’s case. Which was this: after school on 13 January 1999, Adnan, then 17, strangled his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee in her car. Then he called his friend Jay and said: “That bitch is dead. Come and get me. I’m at Best Buy.” When Jay arrived, Adnan opened the trunk, showed him Hae’s body, and said: “I can’t believe I killed her where I used to fuck her at.” The two boys buried Hae in a 6in-deep grave in woods three miles away. She was found three weeks later. A few weeks after that, Jay confessed to the police. He led them to Hae’s car. Adnan was arrested, convicted of first-degree murder, and has been in jail ever since.

And that would have been that, except that for the past 10 weeks, the radio producer Sarah Koenig has been investigating the case in her ongoing podcast Serial. Episode one arrived without much fanfare – just some promotion by its parent show, This American Life – but what happened next was dizzying. It immediately became the world’s most popular podcast – a sensation. It achieved 5m downloads on iTunes – faster than any podcast in history. (BBC Radio 4 Extra has just picked it up for broadcast too.) But Adnan’s father isn’t listening.

“We don’t want him to,” says Yusuf. “We don’t want him to know it exists. He knows it exists but – it’s a very fragile state.”

“We can’t even discuss the topic,” says Shamim. “Sometimes we see him going through the photo album and he starts crying.”

“Do you listen?” I ask Shamim.

“After everybody goes to sleep,” she says. “Eleven, twelve o’clock, I lay down here on this sofa and I listen.” She says she sometimes plays just one part over and over. “It’s the bit at the beginning where the prison operator says, ‘This is a Global-Tel link prepaid call from …’ and Adnan says, ‘Adnan Syed.’”

“So sweet,” Shamim says. “I listen to that again and again and again.”

Yusuf listens alone too, “in my room, by myself, so all the information can sink in better. After the episode’s done, I think about it all day. What does this mean? What does that mean? Everything Sarah’s saying is new to me. All I knew growing up was that my brother was arrested for a murder, but we believed Jay was responsible [for Adnan’s wrongful conviction, he means, or maybe even for the murder itself – he doesn’t know]. So when I hear the podcast it’s all new information. Sarah is so thorough and clean. She’s doing a better job investigating than the police did. It makes me so frustrated and furious that there was so little evidence. Really? That’s all you had? To take away my brother’s life? That’s all you had?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adnan Syed, 16, with Shamim during Eid at their mosque. Photograph: Jonathan Hanson/PR

Shamim takes me back to the beginning. It was an arranged marriage that brought her to Baltimore from Pakistan. Syed was already here, working as an engineer. “We wanted to raise our children in America for a better life,” she says. “Hah. We got a worse life.” They had three sons: Tanveer, then Adnan, and then, eight years later, Yusuf. Adnan was perfect, Shamim says. He was a straight-A student. The teachers would compliment her: “‘Whatever you’re practising in the house is working on him.’ He was very obedient. We never had a problem with him. He only messed up for the last year.”

By messed up she means weed and alcohol and sex and hanging out with sketchy people.

Yusuf’s relationship with Adnan was a typically antagonistic older brother/younger brother one, Yusuf says, but they were just beginning to get close when Adnan was taken away.

“What do you remember about him, pre-incarceration?” I ask.

“He’d get Chinese food from the mall and bring me back what was left over,” he says. “He brought me a Batman action figure when I was young. He’d play video games with me.”

“Homework,” prompts Shamim.

“If I had a report due the next day and it was really late, he’d help me with my homework,” Yusuf says.

I glance down at my list of questions. Usually I never have a list of questions, but this story is different. Serial fans are fevered – it’s like the Beatlemania of the nebbishy public radio longform nonfiction world – and my editors at the Guardian sent me a list of 38 questions I just had to ask the Syeds. Question 17 is: “Can they talk about the homecoming incident?”

“Can you talk about the homecoming incident?” I ask Shamim.

The homecoming incident: not long before Hae’s murder, Shamim discovered that Adnan was taking Hae to the school’s homecoming dance. So she showed up and chastised him in front of everyone. The prosecutor made a big deal of this at the trial, telling the jury: “What is it that this defendant saw on 13 January when he looked down at Hae Lee? He saw his parents standing at the window of the homecoming dance. He saw his mother raise her voice at Hae Lee in front of his classmates. ‘Look what you’re doing to our family.’”

Shamim admits she was a strict mother. She’d even listen in on the extension line when Adnan talked to Hae.

“What did you overhear?” I ask her.

“Oh, he’d say some kind of poem,” she replies. “‘Roses are blue.’ I’d say: ‘Who are you talking to?’ He’d say: ‘Mom, can you put the phone down please?’ I’d say: ‘It’s not right, Adnan. It’s not right.’”

“You don’t regret …?” I begin.

“Oh no,” she interrupts. “No way.”

“If anything we regret that our dad was too lenient,” Yusuf says.

“He was lenient,” says Shamim. “He was the opposite of me. He’d say: ‘Boys will be boys.’”

“Maybe if he’d put his foot down too …” says Yusuf.

Then Yusuf clarifies: Shamim wasn’t “a crazy strict mother”. She’d take them to baseball games. Plus they were allowed to talk to girls. “It was just the alcohol and the drugs and the sex,” he says. “It was like her intuition – that it would lead to bad stuff.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adnan Syed when he was 16 and playing varsity football. Photograph: Jonathan Hanson/PR

The police arrested Adnan at 5am on 28 February 1999. It was chaos. Yusuf was crying. He had no idea what was going on. His only clue that something was up, he says, was that Adnan had seemed sad during the previous weeks. They’d had dinner in a restaurant – just the two of them, unusually – and Adnan had barely said a word. Yusuf was blabbing on to him about Dragon Ball Z cartoons, thrilled that his older brother was spending time with him, and Adnan just sat there looking sad. (This is an important detail in Yusuf’s story because if you believe Jay’s version, Adnan was psychopathic and wouldn’t have been in the least bit sad that Hae was dead.)

Then came the conviction, and the family fell apart. Tanveer vanished to Philadelphia, becoming totally estranged from the family. “Imagine having a family one day, and the next day you wake up and it’s completely broken,” Yusuf says. “It’s all gone.”

At this, Shamim suddenly stands up and leaves the room. She comes back a few moments later holding a large board – a kind of mood board. Yusuf looks mortified.

“He doesn’t want me to show you,” Shamim says.

“I was depressed,” Yusuf says.

At the top of the mood board, Yusuf has written on a card: “Conjecture/hypothesis. My family is never going to be the same because my brother is incarcerated and my older brother left the family. My parents are now depressed. I have a broken family. This is not how it is supposed to be.”

Underneath is a second card: “Belief. This life is filled with too much hurt and the pain is never-ending. There is also no way to stop the pain. I am probably better off dead.”

And then a third: “Object. When I would see other people’s families it would remind me what I do not have. A family.”

And that’s it.

“That’s very bleak,” I say. “I thought these boards are supposed to be therapeutic, like with some kind of optimistic final card.”

They both look at the board.

“Oh,” Shamim says. “The last card has fallen off.”

She goes back out and returns with it. It reads: “Understanding. Life is not always going to be fair and that no matter what happens God is always there.”

And then came the Serial podcast. And suddenly people have started running up to the family with tears in their eyes. Many listeners suspect that Adnan is innocent – or are at least convinced he didn’t get a fair trial. There were no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence linking Adnan to the crime. Adnan even had a possible alibi – a girl who came forward to say she saw him at the school library at the time of the murder. But Adnan’s defence attorney, who died in 2004, never followed up on it. It was basically Jay’s testimony that sunk Adnan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hae Min Lee pictured in her high school year book. Adnan Syed was convicted of her murder in 2000. Photograph: PR

People listening to the podcast are trying to crack the case themselves. They’re forming online discussion groups on Reddit with threads like: “A Few Observations/Conclusions After Reading Jay’s Interviews Several Times” and “Something that has bothered me – ‘6 inch grave’” and “Are there any hints of dissociative identity disorder in Adnan?” I’ve worked with Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, two of Serial’s producers, many times on my This American Life stories and I can tell you: this kind of thing never happens.

“So your friends are listening?” I ask.

“Everybody!” says Shamim. “Everybody is waiting so anxiously. What’s going to happen next?”

“And you don’t know what’s coming up in the podcast?” I ask.

“I wish we did,” says Shamim.

“I just hope there’s a good ending, that’s all,” says Yusuf.

(What does come up next, three days later, is an episode that’s in part about the Islamophobia bubbling around the courthouse – like how bail was denied in case Baltimore’s Muslim community pooled their resources to help Adnan abscond to Pakistan. When I asked Yusuf about life at their local mosque, he told me he stopped going for years because people would just crowd around him to ask: “Do you think Adnan did it?” Which was just like at school and everywhere else.)

Yusuf saw Adnan last week. He isn’t allowed to listen to the podcast – the maximum-security prison rules don’t allow it – but they talked about it, of course.

“Does he understand what a big deal it is?” I ask.

“No,” he replies. “Sometimes he’s, ‘Oh, man, I can’t wait for it to be over.’”

“Why?”

“He thinks we might get upset by it. But he doesn’t realise the effect it’s having on the outside.”

People send Adnan transcripts, Yusuf says, but words on a page don’t do it justice. You need to hear the emotions in the voices. So Adnan is unaware of the show’s quality. I ask him if any listeners have tried to donate money to Adnan’s prison commissary account. He says if they have he’s sure Adnan wouldn’t accept it, because he wouldn’t want to be in the debt of crazy strangers.

Yusuf spends a lot of time online, lurking on Reddit, although he knows “it’s just toxic”.

“Toxic because five million detectives are all studying Adnan’s voice for clues as to whether he’s a psychopath?” I ask.

(I suspect – from this week’s cliffhanger, that next week’s episode will examine this possibility. As someone who’s written a book about psychopaths, I’ve had about a million people tweet me to ask if I think Adnan is one. I think it’s totally irresponsible to diagnose someone from afar, whether you’re a clinician or not, and I’m not. But for what it’s worth, nothing in Adnan’s conversations with Sarah rings any bells from the time I attended a course that teaches people how to identify psychopaths in part through the nuances of their language.)

“Oh I don’t mind that!” says Yusuf. “People flip-flop back and forth – that’s understandable. But there’s this group of people on Reddit who are 100% ‘Adnan did it’. And, OK, one of the moderators from Reddit told us Jay is on Reddit.”

“Do you know which name he uses?”

“No.”

“Stop shaking,” says Shamim.

We all look down at Yusuf’s leg. It’s vibrating wildly – just like my leg does in stressful situations. It’s turning the sofa into a massage chair.

“Oh, sorry,” says Yusuf.

I, by the way, have no way of corroborating whether or not Jay is posting pro-Jay sentiments under an assumed name on Reddit. It’s been confirmed that Hae’s brother posts on Reddit, though, calling Sarah “an awesome narrator/writer/investigator” but adding: “TO ME IT’S REAL LIFE. To you listeners, it’s another murder mystery, crime drama, another episode of CSI.”

Yusuf shows me something he found online that’s made him especially happy. It’s a message the judge in the second trial posted on her Facebook wall in response to a Serial fan telling her she was now famous. “I listened to the podcast,” the judge wrote, “and saw how this very intelligent young man manipulated the writer. The evidence was overwhelming. I can see how 16 years later he has regret that he wasted his life by planning and carrying out the murder of his girlfriend. Very sad indeed.”

Yusuf is delighted. He interprets this as the judge being rattled and on the back foot.

It’s obvious that Shamim and Yusuf are doing a bit of a PR number on me at times during my evening with them. But that’s totally understandable. Their lives have been unimaginably, soul-shreddingly awful these past 15 years, regardless of Adnan’s guilt or innocence. And so it’s nice to hear that they finally have some good news.

“I haven’t told Sarah this,” Yusuf says, “but we feel Serial has brought us all back together. My older brother Tanveer – who was estranged for 15 years – he came home. When he heard my brother’s voice, it brought back all the memories. He’s visited us three or four times already.”

“And, oh,” Shamim says, “if you don’t mind, I have to share something. It’s so funny.” She goes to the kitchen and takes a book out of the drawer. It’s a little book Adnan drew when he was nine. It’s very assiduously done. One psychopathic symptom is “proneness to boredom”. But the nine-year-old Adnan obviously spent ages drawing this book.

A book made by Adnan Syed when he was nine. Photograph: PR

It’s the story of Larry the Lion, who was playing in the woods with his friends when some hunters grabbed him and took him to the zoo. Adnan drew the lion in a cage, behind bars, looking sad. In the end, though, Larry escapes and returns to the woods, “home to stay for ever”.

Unlike the other pictures, this last one – of Larry back in the woods – hasn’t been coloured in.

“Adnan can colour it in when he comes home,” Shamim says.