Following the release of the final episode of the podcast "Serial" earlier this month, Jay Wilds, the key witness in the state's case against Adnan Syed in the murder of Hae Min Lee, has changed the details of his story and also alleges that the show's narrative was inaccurate.
The 12-epidsode podcast, which had a record
40 million downloads as of Dec. 23, is a spinoff of "This American Life." It retells the 1999 murder of the popular high school senior, Hae, and the ensuing investigation and conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan, who is serving a life sentence.
Adnan has maintained he is innocent but his friend Jay told police that the two buried Hae after Adnan admitted to him that he killed her.
In an exclusive interview with
The Intercept released Monday, Jay said Adnan discovered one week before Hae's murder that "she was either cheating on him or leaving him." The podcast's producer, Sarah Koenig, reported the two had broken up weeks before she was killed.
When The Intercept asks Jay about Adnan's decision to lend Jay his car and cellphone, Jay says Adnan did not tell him he was planning to kill Hae that day, but he had testified at the trial Adnan told him in advance that he was going to kill her.
He also said he first saw Hae's body in front of Jay's grandmother's house, not at a Best Buy parking lot as he told the police.
Theories abound about
Jay's role in the actual murder and whether he may have been an accomplice.
The latest change in the details of his story comes after he had previously told conflicting versions to the police on numerous occasions.
Jay told The Intercept that he did not originally tell the police the truth because he was worried about being prosecuted for dealing marijuana. He also said he did not want to involve his grandmother whose house he was dealing from, or friends who he saw on the day of the murder.
"That's the best way I can account for the inconsistencies," he told The Intercept. "Once the police made it clear that my drug dealing wasn't gonna affect the outcome of what was going on, I became a little bit more transparent."
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