her drive to exonerate the serial subject reopened a seemingly shut case. now, with a new book, a hit podcast, and a legion of armchair acolytes, RABIA CHAUDRY just might change the course of justice.

Her drive to exonerate the serial subject reopened a seemingly shut case. now, with a new book, a hit podcast, and a legion of armchair acolytes, Rabia Chaudry just might change the course of justice.

Rabia chaudry picks her way through baltimore’s densely wooded leakin park, stepping over fallen branches and ducking under tree limbs as she heads toward the spot where 18-year-old Hae Min Lee’s body was found in February 1999. Bits of debris—soda bottles, food wrappers, an empty pill canister—litter the area, but other­wise it’s tranquil. The trees muffle the sounds of the nearby road, and the area is awash with birdsong.

But as Chaudry surveys the area, something feels off. “That was one of the easiest treks I’ve made here,” she says, furrowing her brow as she approaches the giant, mossy overturned tree marking the leaf-covered hollow where Lee’s corpse was stashed. “It looks like there’s a path now.” She’s disturbed, but not necessarily surprised: “As Serial was happening, people came here all the time…driving up and looking for the log, taking pictures. They were obsessed with [the case] in a way that was kind of crazy.”



She’s not exaggerating. When NPR’s This American Life launched the podcast Serial in October 2014, few could have predicted it would grow into a global phenomenon, with 142 million downloads and too many spin-off podcasts, Reddit threads, and blog posts to count. Its first 12 episodes focused on the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 2000, at 17, of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee—a conviction based largely on cell-phone data and the shifting testimony of Syed’s acquaintance Jay Wilds, who claimed Syed strangled Lee and that he helped bury her.



But as Serial’s host and executive producer Sarah Koenig illustrated over the course of the season, the case wasn’t nearly as straight­forward as it seemed. The state spun a Romeo and Juliet tale about Syed, a Pakistani-­American Muslim, and Lee, a Korean-American, whose forbidden love ended in murder. The defense floundered. Syed’s lawyer, M. Cristina Gutierrez, failed to contact crucial alibi witnesses like Serial’s breakout star Asia McClain, who claims she saw Syed in the library at the time the state alleges Lee was killed. Nor did Gutierrez ever lay out the inconsistencies in Wilds’ story or put Syed on the stand to discuss his relationship with Lee, which had ended on good terms. Chaudry—who’d known Syed and his family for years—had trusted Gutierrez, a well-known Baltimore defense attorney, to exonerate the sweet 17-year-old kid she’d watched grow up. But that trust quickly dissolved. In the end, Syed was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years, for the kidnapping and murder of Lee. “I was like, ‘What the hell just happened here?’ ” Chaudry remembers. “That’s when I got involved on a deeper level.”



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THE SCHOOL AND THE LIBRARY McClain testified she saw Syed at the Woodlawn branch of the Baltimore County Public Library after school on Jan. 13, 1999, which is when prosecutors allege Lee was murdered. Although the library had a working video-surveillance system, there’s no evidence that Syed’s original lawyer ever asked to see the footage.





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Inside the Woodlawn branch of the Baltimore County Public Library





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Inside the Woodlawn branch of the Baltimore County Public Library





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She details her 16-year fight to prove his innocence in her new book, Adnan’s Story, out Aug. 9. In crisp, powerful prose, Chaudry, 42—a former civil rights and immigration attorney who now works in policy—walks readers through the case and initial trial, Serial and its impact, and her own podcast, Undisclosed, which details the mind-boggling new evidence that came to light after Syed’s conviction. Serial may have brought the case and its flaws to the world’s attention, but it was Undisclosed that eventually helped Syed come out of a February 2016 post-conviction relief hearing with an order for a new trial.



Soon after Syed’s arrest, Chaudry began visiting and exchanging

letters with him. “I helped him through the appellate process the best I could,” she says of the years between 2000 and 2013. “I wasn’t a criminal defense attorney. I’m not an investigator. There wasn’t a lot I could do.” Syed lost appeal after appeal, and finally Chaudry, fed up, made an executive decision. “The courts had failed us, and the systems failed us. We had to go to the media,” she says. “I had initially thought I would try to find somebody from the Baltimore area who knows the judges and the prosecutors, maybe had some sources,” Chaudry explains. “I just wanted somebody who could find evidence in a way that we couldn’t.” Sarah Koenig was the first name she came across, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who had written about Gutierrez when she was disbarred years before.



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The courts had failed us, and the systems failed us. We had to go to the media.

