Originally posted by Banditking:
"A) Jay killed her himself
B) Jay and Adnan did it together
C) The story happened roughly as Jay described, with Adnan the murderer and Jay an accomplice after the fact
There's no other option. None. All those hours of podcasts, and it comes down to that. Based on those scenarios, to not address that simple equation, is a major failure."
Agree. I had the same reaction. Though, I'm sure they thought of it. I bet there was some consideration of legal liability for them suggesting Jay was the murderer.
Jay knew everything about the crime, apparently. Given that, there really are only a few scenarios, as you've indicated.
The serial killer thing seems like a red herring unless Jay knew the serial killer
I did find some of the details presented regarding Jay interesting with respect to motive (that Jay did violent things for shock value).
Yep. It seems pretty apparent where the truth lies...
Adnan was the primary killer, but most likely Jay was more involved than he let on, either before or after the fact.
Jay's stories were a mess, as he tried to figure out exactly how much he could cop to and still walk away in exchange for his testimony. It's a fine line to be able to offer enough so that you're testimony is valuable enough to get a deal, yet not implicate yourself so much that a deal is impossible. The right lawyer can get down in the weeks with the prosecutor and work all that out, but I think what you see with all the inconsistencies is Jay trying to work that out on the fly the best he can.
It's also quite possible that Jay's hope had been to implicate Adnan, but to have his testimony be too convoluted to be useful on the stand. I'm sure that originally his hope was that he could turn the police on to Adnan, and further investigation would reveal physical evidence, cell phone records, other witnesses etc that the state could build the case around. He probably was not originally planning to be the state's main witness and the bedrock of their case, but hoping to serve a role more like an informant than a star witness.
Adnan can't roll on Jay, because he knows he's the actual killer, and there's no way he can frame Jay up. His only choice is to maintain total innocence. Jay can roll on Adnan, and does.
The podcast never really explores:
1) how Jay knows where the car is there if somebody else entirely murders her
2) what incentive Jay has to implicate Adnan at all if neither of them were involved
3) what motivation Jay has to kill her alone without Adnan
You have to tackle one or more of those if you are making the case for Adnan's innocence. So it's not really an unsolved mystery podcast, it's a podcast discussing thresholds of evidence in murder trials, and whether a different defendant or a different lawyer might have been able to sway a jury that there isn't enough to convict.
I find those issues, and the general picture of the legal process very interesting and worthy of a podcast. I enjoyed the concept of trying to gather up evidence and so forth from a old, cold case.
But they didn't really get at the underlying truth of what happened, and I think they were a bit deceptive by dedicating an episode or two to where a phone booth was to show how hard they were working at uncovering the truth, but not even having a discussion of key issues. Ultimately, they took the position of a defense lawyer more than an investigator.
