Investigators Know A Lot More About The 'Serial' Murder Case Than We Heard On The Podcast
Koenig admitted it herself on the last episode of season one of "Serial," which aired last week. The podcast, a spinoff of NPR's This American Life, provided a week-by-week examination of whether Adnan Syed killed his high school ex-girlfriend in 1999, when they were both just teenagers.
On the final episode, Koenig did mention one possible alternate suspect, but those who work for UVA's Innocence Project said in a podcast of their own that there are actually looking at several other people. Some can't be named because of privacy concerns, but the suspect Koenig mentioned - Ronald Lee Moore - is no longer living. He had been in and out of prison for years and he killed himself in 2012.
Enright said on the podcast that only about an eighth of what she and Koenig uncovered during their separate investigations made it onto "Serial."
"The fact that [Koenig] brought up an alternate suspect didn't really surprise me, but there's several alternate suspects, so there's not just the one," Deirdre Enright, the head of the Innocence Project at UVA, said in their podcast.
To find alternate suspects, Enrightand her team of law students are looking at similar crimes committed around the same time and in the same area as Hae Min Lee's murder.
"[Adnan] doesn't make sense a lot of sense as a suspect," Enright said.
Adnan has maintained his innocence since he was first identified as a suspect in Hae's murder. Prosecutors argued that Adnan killed Hae because he was angry that she had moved on after their breakup and started dating someone else. But Adnan - and those who knew him and Hae in high school - said their breakup was pretty normal and that he had also moved on afterward.
Another part of the prosecution's argument centered around Adnan's religion. He is a Muslim, and prosecutors argued that Hae dishonored Adnan by leaving him and that Adnan had dishonored his family by dating her and that was all part of his motivation for killing her.
Enright and her team mentioned they said they have other leads.
The Innocence Project is now seeking to get untested physical evidence from Hae's murder case tested to see if there's a match to any other suspect.