This is it. Serial, the podcast that has earned millions of listeners, inspired countless thinkpieces and kept us all on the edge of our seats for more than two months, will finally air its finale this coming Thursday, Dec. 18.
To the uninitiated, Serial is a spin-off of the popular public radio show This American Life hosted by Sarah Koenig. Over the course of soon-to-be 12 episodes, the podcast, which averages more than 1.5 million listeners an episode, has investigated the murder of Maryland high school senior Hae Min Lee on Jan. 13, 1999 and the subsequent conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed for the crime.
With the podcast's conclusion quickly approaching, we're all of course more curious than ever about what will be the final takeaway. Many are hoping for a huge, final twist that no one saw coming and that shows there's an explanation for everything, even the most inconsistent of inconsistencies. Many more are worried that Serial won't be able to tie up its loose ends and will just conclude with a meditation on the nature of truth.
No matter how Serial actually ends, it won't stop people from speculating about who really did this whodunnit. One of the most active online repositories of Serial conspiracy theories is the podcast's subreddit, which is a rabbit hole you may or may not want to go down. We've still got some time before the (hopefully) exciting conclusion of Serial, but until then, could these five conspiracy theories help clear up any part of the mystery? It's worth noting here that these conspiracy theories are completely speculative and have not been proven in the Serial podcast or, more importantly, in a court of law. There are also major spoilers of the entire Serial series ahead.
Without further ado, here are five of the most intriguing conspiracy theories found on the Serial subreddit.
1. Someone not mentioned on Serial did it
Many Redditors, including u/serial99, believe there's another suspect in this case that Koenig hasn't even touched on in the podcast at all. In 2004, a man named Roy Davis was sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 rape and murder of 18-year-old Jada Danita Lambert from Woodlawn, Maryland, the same Baltimore town where Hae's murder took place about seven months later. Similar to Hae's death, Jada's body had been found in a park, Herring Run Park in northeast Baltimore. And the cause of death was strangulation. What's more is that Davis lived not too far from Campfield Early Learning Center, according to court records, which was where Hae was headed to pick up her cousin before she went missing.
However, many Redditors have pointed out holes in this theory. If someone else actually did it, why would Jay have confessed to helping bury Hae's body and have such vivid details like the location of the car? Koenig has also pointed out in the podcast that there was no evidence that Hae had been sexually assaulted, which further differentiates the two cases. Plus, if Davis was a serious suspect in the case, wouldn't Koenig have known about this and brought it up already? If Redditors can dig up this old article from The Baltimore Sun, I'm sure a journalist spending a year reporting on this story, not to mention a former reporter of The Sun, would also have investigated a possible connection if there really was one.
2. Jay was a criminal informant
Some people think Jay was actually working with the police, giving them information about the murder because he was a criminal informant. Reddit user aeslehcssim points out that Jay claims to be the "criminal element" when he talked to the police and references getting picked up by the police multiple times. Aeslehcssim also points out that the police don't seem to consider Jay "much of anything," which might have been a way of protecting his status as a criminal informant. He also received a lawyer from the prosecution pro bono, which the podcast made clear was something that doesn't really happen. Jay also received no prison time, even though he admitted to being an accessory to the murder. Aeslehcssim's criminal informant theory seems to explain some of the more confounding aspects of the police and prosecution's interactions with Jay, but this theory still seems like something out of a Hollywood movie, so it may be a stretch.
3. The police pressured Jay to testify against Adnan
Time and again, Koenig has spoken about some seemingly odd investigative techniques on the part of the detectives working on this case, some of which seems like it could reveal who really committed the crime. Some Redditors believe that neither Jay nor Adnan committed the crime, but that the police wanted to build a case against Adnan because it seemed like a logical explanation. They used Jay to back up their theory of the case to build the strongest one possible, regardless of what the truth actually was, as was discussed on Serial. The police could have threatened Jay, saying they know he was an accessory to the murder, and he would go to prison if he didn't cooperate. In this theory, Jay is just telling the police whatever they want to hear so that he can save himself from being sent to prison, even though he wasn't really involved in the murder or burial at all. This explains why some of the possibly more revelatory evidence was never tested, such as the DNA evidence and fibers found in Hae's car, and why the prosecution supplied Jay with a lawyer. This also sounds elaborate and something straight out of Hollywood, but police misconduct has obviously happened in real life, too.
4. The "Nisha Call" really is a red herring
On Serial, Koenig has referred to the "Nisha Call" as a "smoking gun," a phone call from Adnan's cell phone to his friend named Nisha, who didn't know Jay, about an hour after the state says Hae was murdered. NIsha testified that she spoke to both Jay and Adnan on the phone. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence presented against Adnan because it corroborates the story that Jay and Adnan were together at that time, giving weight to Jay's timeline of events. However, in the podcast Adnan says Jay may have butt-dialed Nisha on his phone by mistake, accidentally leaving a two-minute voicemail, which some say Nisha didn't realize she had, which is why she doesn't remember ever receiving it. Many have pointed out that Adnan's phone, a Nokia 6160, could be very prone to butt-dialing. There were also reports in 1999 that the nation's biggest wireless companies began billing customers for phone calls from the moment they pressed sent, meaning once the phone started ringing, to the moment they ended the call. However, it's unclear if that just affected billing or if it had an impact on the recorded length of the call as well. The "Nisha Call" is still so very shrouded in mystery, I'm not sure it can really be used to tell us anything about the case at all.
5. Koenig hired Jay to kill Hae and frame Adnan
Yes, someone actually posted this theory on Reddit. Reddit user thylacine222 started out this post by saying, "How else could she know so much about the crime?" The user goes on to posit that Koenig left the dying newspaper industry for public radio, but she needed a really juicy story to boost her career. Koenig is actually Nisha, and she became friendly with Adnan, who told her all about his break-up with Hae. She also convinced Adnan to get a cell phone and convinced Jay to kill Hae, all for a story. Of course, this theory is completely bananas and has no truth to it whatsoever, but since the end of the post includes an advertisement for the Serial parody podcast Cereal, throwing out a bizarre-o theory like this to mess with our heads is kind of the point.
