Did Adnan Syed kidnap and murder his ex-girlfriend and high school classmate Hae Min Lee in 1999? A Baltimore County jury in 2000 decided he did. Millions of listeners to the podcast “Serial” haven’t been so sure.
Viewers of Sunday night’s finale of the four-part HBO documentary “The Case Against Adnan Syed” will continue to wonder. But they will do so armed with new facts. Chief among them: A series of new forensic tests found no traces of Syed’s DNA on the many samples taken from Lee’s body and car during the original investigation.
The series’ director, Amy Berg, made good on HBO’s promise to deliver big revelations on a 20-year-old murder case that “Serial” made famous starting in 2014. Like the podcast, the HBO series offered no definitive statements about Syed’s guilt, but it did raise numerous questions about the methods and conclusions of the state.
What’s next? Whatever happens will arrive in a context very different from the one Syed faced less than a month ago, when the highest court in Maryland denied him a retrial, overturning the decisions of two lower courts. Here’s a quick look at the finale’s major revelations.
— Tests Did Not Find Syed’s DNA
Many samples were taken from Lee during the original investigation, including fingernail clippings and material from necklaces and clothing. New tests performed at the defense’s request revealed that none of the samples tested positive for Syed’s DNA. His DNA also was not found among samples taken from Lee’s car, where prosecutors have said they believe she was strangled.
No physical evidence against Syed was presented at his trial in 2000, so these findings could add heft to his innocence claim. Still, there is a major caveat: No one else’s DNA was found on Lee’s body or in her car, either. That means only that the killer, whether it was someone else or Syed, left no detectable trace among the areas sampled.
News about the DNA testing was first revealed Thursday by The Baltimore Sun, based on documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. “These results in no way exonerate him,” a spokeswoman for the Maryland Attorney General’s Office told The Sun.
According to the documents, one female DNA profile not matching Lee was found on a piece of rope found near the place where Lee was buried. But that profile did not match anyone’s DNA in law enforcement databases. The DNA of investigating officers, who might accidentally have left some material behind, was eliminated.
— No Match for the Fingerprints
Latent fingerprints pulled from the rearview mirror of Lee’s car did not match Syed’s. The defense requested that they be compared with prints in the database.
They did not match with anyone’s prints in the system. Whoever left the prints has never been arrested and booked.
— More Questions About the Car
The state’s key witness, Jay Wilds, a former friend of Syed’s, told police that after he helped Syed bury Lee’s body, he went with Syed to ditch Lee’s car at a grassy lot in a residential area of Baltimore. Wilds led police to the car about six weeks after Lee was killed.
Private investigators hired by Berg asked Erik Ervin, a turf physiologist with a Ph.D. in horticulture, to examine the grassy lot, along with photographs of the car from the day police discovered it. Numerous factors — including the freshness of the tire tracks, the freshness of the grass blades visible in the treads and the condition of the grass beneath the car — led Ervin to believe that the car had been there for only a week at most.
— Autopsy May Not Match State’s Theory
The private investigators also spoke with Jan Gorniak, the chief medical examiner of Fulton County, Georgia. She examined the autopsy report and photographs and surmised that descriptions of Lee’s injuries did not in many ways appear consistent with the theory that she died during a struggle in her car.
Because of markings caused by a phenomenon called lividity, which Gorniak described as “the settling of blood after you die,” she said that Lee’s body must have lain for eight to 12 hours somewhere other than where she was ultimately buried, in Baltimore’s Leakin Park. Her assessment contradicts the prosecution’s timeline, which has Syed and Wilds burying Lee’s body about five hours after the slaying.
— New Contradictions in Wilds’ Testimony
Wilds gave two police interviews and testified at trial, and the contradictions among those accounts were well documented in “Serial” and in earlier episodes of the HBO series. They are significant and many.
Berg contacted Wilds, who declined to be interviewed for the series. He did, however, provide statements.
In them, he made several new claims. One was that police had coached him to say in his second taped interview that Syed first showed him Lee’s body, in the trunk of her car, at a Best Buy parking lot, not at a meeting point off Edmondson Avenue, as he had originally said.
The Best Buy location matches a map drawn by investigators based on cellphone geolocation records. Those records have themselves been called into question — a factor cited in the lower courts’ decisions to vacate Syed’s conviction.
In his statement to Berg, Wilds said that Syed showed up to his house in Lee’s car with the body in the trunk. This is new.
Also new: Wilds told Berg that Syed asked him to procure 10 pounds of marijuana. Wilds said that once the marijuana was acquired, Syed threatened to turn him in if he did not help bury Lee’s body.
The police and prosecutors have consistently stood by their methods and conclusions. According to Syed’s defense lawyer, C. Justin Brown, the state’s attorney general refused as recently as November to offer Syed any plea deal without a full admission of guilt and more prison time.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.