I have solved it. I am the first Hardy Girl. The truth is out there.

This is a little heavy on the cell record, so I here is an image to help you follow the trail. There is also a call list here (obviously, ignore who says they have the phone at what point, that is what we are seeking to establish).

From the defense attorney’s depo notes , we know that when Adnan was asked if Jay and Hae knew each other, he said that he had told Hae that Jay was cheating on Stephanie. Jay had a girl over to his house during a Woodlawn assembly, when he wouldn’t be missed. Adnan saw Stephanie on the way to the assembly and, when she said she was skipping it and going to Jay’s, convinced her to go to the assembly to cover his friend’s back. Later, when Adnan told Hae about this, she was visibly upset and said that she planned to confront Jay the next time she saw him.

Hae is last seen by Inez (the lady who sold her food) or her friend Summer who talks to her about wrestling team management stuff. At around 2:45 she is seen in the parking lot. Before she leaves Woodlawn, Hae spots Adnan’s car and sees that Jay is driving. One of two things happens:

Jay at Woodlawn High, in possession of Adnan’s car and phone. What is he doing? Who knows. Epitomizing the potential energy version of pure evil. Jay is a Bad Man. He’s probably also waiting on Adnan to get out of school so he can return the car. At 2:36 he gets an incoming call which lasts for :05 seconds. It’s probably someone calling for Adnan; Jay says that Adnan will call them back later.

Patrick: I’d heard all of these like renditions and versions of stories from so many people, I figured, I have him in front of me now, I can get to the truth and he said “yeah, I was afraid he was gonna hurt Stephanie.” I said “like Adnan? He was gonna—did he threaten her?” He just said he was afraid that he was going to hurt her so I think he took it as a threat but I remember when I pushed him for detail when I pushed him for more, it wasn’t—I didn’t get it.

Okay, back to the car. She probably tells Jay that she knows about Stephanie and offers him some kind of ultimatum: you tell Stephanie that you cheated on her, or I will. Jay panics and manually strangles her. I won’t pretend to understand blinding man-rage or try to explain this motive in a way that makes logical sense, because it doesn’t make logical sense. He’s most likely a garbage person. We do know that Jay has had a domestic violence charge, is impulsive, and lies consistently. His relationship with Stephanie was so important to him that I don’t think it’s beyond belief that he would kill (or accidentally injure, and then subsequently kill) someone to keep her from finding out that he cheated on her.

He also states the cause of death himself, and tells Jenn soon after + detectives later. This is a significant detail. If Adnan killed Hae and asked Jay for help with burying her, why would he tell Jay that he willfully strangled her? He would say that it was an accident—she hit her head and died, or something. We also know that she was killed, or at least incapacitated, before 3:15 when she was supposed to pick up her cousin from the Campfield Early Learning Center. It’s an easy :10 drive from Woodlawn. This is a small window for Hae’s death—less than :30. Adnan was most likely, as he claims, at the library at this time.

Jay moves Hae’s body to the trunk or back seat of her own Sentra. At 3:15, another incoming call lasts :20. It’s another one of Adnan’s friends. Jay says, again that he will have Adnan call him back later. Jay’s shaken up, so he starts calling people only he knows well: Jenn at her home at 3:21 for :42, Phil at 3:48 for 1:25, and Patrick at 3:59 for :25. All relatively short calls. These could be drug-related—he calls them because he’s trying to act normal, and he’s supposed to smoke with them or sell weed to them later. Or he is trying to chill out and get his head on straight. A third option: Jay is calling these people to ask for a ride back to Woodlawn after he dumps Hae’s car.

The Nisha call at 3:32, which the prosecution loves to use to put Adnan in the car, is a non-starter. Her number was programmed into Adnan’s phone on speed dial. Jay easily could’ve called the number, purposefully or accidentally. It wouldn’t be hard for him to pretend to be someone else and keep her on the phone for a few minutes. Nisha’s memory is already suspect, because we know her recollection of the mysterious video store call did not happen on the day Hae was killed. Something else the prosecution seems to be forgetting—why would Adnan call Nisha here at all? If he just strangled his ex in a car in broad daylight, why would he call the girl he is sweet on? Whatever. Anyway. Adnan says that he went from the library to track practice at 4:00.

At 4:12, Jay calls his best friend Jenn back for a second time, possibly to ask if she can give him a ride later, and then hits the road. He takes I-695 south toward Patapsco State Park. Two incoming calls ping the cell towers along this route. One of them, at 4:27 lasting for almost 3 minutes, is probably from Jenn. This is around the time that she said he was “acting weird earlier in the day.” Dang, she’s so close to sensing that someone close to her did a monstrous thing. He doesn’t tell her that Hae is dead, but she gets that something is really off. He’s considering burying Hae at Patapsco, and later describes the drive at dusk to the police. He decides against it and says that Adnan came to the conclusion. In reality, he does not have time to drive all the way there, bury a body, and be back in time to pick up Adnan from track practice at 5:00.

Jay turns around. He returns to Adnan’s car and leaves Hae in hers. The location of Hae’s car varies in his testimony to the police: he says it was at Best Buy, at the other mall (?!), at Security Square Mall, or at the I-70 Park-N-Ride. It was probably at Security Square Mall, for reasons below.

Jay gets an incoming call at 4:58. This is Adnan getting out of track practice. He’s ready to be picked up. At 5:14 Adnan calls his own voicemail. This is consistent with the behavior of someone who just got his phone back.

At around 6:00, they arrive at Kathy’s house. Adnan gets three more phone calls. One is Aisha letting him know that the police will be contacting him. I think that Kathy’s testimony at this point is bullshit anyway, but it makes sense for Adnan to be acting weird at this moment—he is 17 years old, high, probably in possession of marijuana, and the police are going to call. The other call is Hae’s brother, asking if Adnan has seen Hae. Detective Adcock calls at 6:24. Adnan has no reason to hide the weirdness of these calls from Jay. When they leave Kathy’s, they probably talked about this in the car. Jay testifies that Adnan dropped him off at his house.

Weirdly, Jenn testifies something else. She says that she picked Jay up at Security Square Mall, not his house. Remember too, in one of Jay’s statements, Hae’s car (and her body in the trunk) were in the parking lot of the mall. Each time Jay changes his story to the police on where he saw Hae’s body (at Best Buy, at the mall with a truck, at Security Square Mall, or at the I-70 Park-N-Ride) he is fabricating it a month post-event to try and fit their narrative. But what he tells Jenn, before he has a chance to rehearse, is the truth. Hae’s body was at Security Square Mall. So that is where he asked Adnan to drop him off.

It’s Ramadan. Adnan is headed to his mosque to break fast. He calls his delightful brother, Yasser, at 6:59.

Jay knows that it’s too cold for him to dump Hae’s car somewhere and walk back home by himself. He asks Adnan to borrow his cell, just while Adnan is at the mosque. (I imagine that much like every other church or synagogue, it’s frowned upon to bring your cell phone in anyway. Those clunkers were big back then.) The other possibility is that Adnan left the phone in the car and Jay swiped it because he knew he would need it. Adnan was high, distracted by the police, and carrying a bunch of stuff—he was bringing food for his father at the mosque at 8:00—it’s not out of the question that Jay could take it without Adnan remembering.

Jay immediately pages lesser demon Jenn at 7:00. He steps into the mall or waits outside for Adnan to leave. He knows that the Baltimore Police are looking for Hae’s car, and he can’t risk being seen on the road on the long drive back to Patapsco. The next best thing is Leakin Park, 4 miles away. He takes Hae’s car and goes. at 7:09 and 7:16, two incoming calls ping the cell towers along route to Leakin. The first call is most likely Jenn—it’s a short conversation, only :33, most likely him telling her that he can’t talk yet.

He’s looking for a grave. It’s freezing and very dark—the cold front is coming in. Hae’s lips are completely blue and since it’s been about four hours since she died, rigor mortis is setting in. The ground is too solid for him to really bury her. He drags her far enough from the road that she won’t be seen by a car and hides her behind the log, where Mr. S found her later. You can see the location on the map here

Jenn calls again at 7:16. If he can’t hide the body now, at least he can hide Hae’s car. He asks Jenn to pick him up at a gas station or something in Edmondson, the sketchy neighborhood that will be the last known location of Hae’s car. Conveniently located next to Leakin. He has a bit of time to decide where to dump Hae’s car and make sure that he left nothing in it. He DOES NOT wipe down the steering wheel, because the fingerprints of several people are found their later by the police. This is a detail I will come back to. He calls Jenn’s pager at 8:04 and 8:05 when he’s ready to be picked up. They ping the tower south of Leakin Park from the east side—putting him square in the middle of Edmondson.

Jenn picks up Jay. This is when he tells her that Adnan killed Hae. He tells her that he’s implicated because Adnan forced him to help hide the body. He needs a shovel. She drives him to his house to pick up a shovel, and back to Leakin Park.

Jay spends “20 or 25 minutes,” as he tells the police, trying to dig a hole to bury Hae. He quickly realizes that the ground is frozen solid and settles for shoveling a little dirt onto Hae’s body. He testifies that Jenn helped him dispose of the shovels, clothes, and evidence (weirdly, Adnan is not mentioned here, possibly because he was not there). She takes Jay back to Adnan’s mosque at 9:00, where Jay returns the cell phone.

In the 9:00 hour, Adnan places several casual calls to Krista and Nisha. This would be pretty weird if he had just murdered his girlfriend and hidden the body. This is where Adnan’s (admittedly fuzzy) memory of the day ends.

So, over the next few weeks, everyone is searching for Hae’s body. At first, many of her friends believe that she moved to Cali, as she did for half of 10th grade, to see her father. Or she ran off with Don. It’s not really clear. Jenn is understandably confused why Jay doesn’t go to the Baltimore Police and confess. She is his best friend, so she keeps mum until finally, the cops get the cell records and bring her in for questioning. So many calls were placed to her on the day that Hae went missing, and she isn’t really Adnan’s friend. She tells Jay about the interrogation. Jay realizes that their primary suspect is Adnan, the Muslim ex-boyfriend. How lucky for him.

Jay knows also that the police have the cell records, and several of the calls place him in Adnan’s car, calling people that only he knows, during the time window that Hae disappeared. If Jenn tells them that she brought him back to Leakin alone, there is nothing even connecting Adnan directly to the murder.

Jay tells Jenn to tell the police about Adnan. According to SK, “He says he told Jenn Pusateri to be honest with the detectives because ‘the lies that we were telling to try to protect each other were clouding the truth.’” Jenn’s lawyer aids her in giving her statement to the police. She hands them Adnan on a silver platter. The detectives Ritz and McG finally meet Jay, who tells them straight up that Adnan killed his ex-girlfriend in a violent, pre-meditated way. He marginally changes his story to whatever they want it to be. The kicker is that he knows where Hae’s car was, and this gives him in their eyes unassailable credibility. SK notes that they show Jay the phone record at his very first interview, which allows him to build a frame that provides “evidence” that Adnan was with him.

Jenn later lies for Jay during the time of death around 3:00. We know this is a lie, because Adnan’s phone calls Jenn’s home during the time that Jay claims to be at Jenn’s home. As one person following the podcast put it brilliantly, Jay can’t take himself out of the picture at that point. So he brings Adnan into it.

IMO he got extraordinarily lucky. A lot of people have been asking, how did he know that Adnan didn’t have an alibi? How could he possibly know that? He didn’t need to know that. He saw that the police were zeroing in on Adnan, and he gave them what they wanted. He didn’t need to be brilliant. He only needed to be convincing at lying, which SK has established that he did frequently and at least somewhat skillfully.

——-

The prosecution punched a few holes in Adnan’s testimony by noting that the coach could not definitely place Adnan at track, because they did not take attendance. Adnan says that he was probably there. He can’t remember. In this timeline, it makes sense that Adnan went to track, and like anyone would, he checks his voicemail immediately when he gets his phone back. Why would Adnan go on to track practice if he has to hide a body? This seems like a high-priority problem. If he had killed Hae, he would almost certainly have skipped track, or at least if he planned to use it as an alibi, would have done something to make everyone remember that he was there.

The same logic applies to Adnan not remembering the phone’s location during the time that Hae was murdered. If Adnan killed and buried someone doing a window between school and track practice, why would he say that he didn’t know where his phone was during that time? Why would he say that he possibly had it? If he killed Hae, he would say that he he definitely left it with Jay and he was definitely at the track/the mosque/the library/literally anywhere else at that time.

This timeline accounts for almost all of the theories against Adnan, but there is one thing that SK kept saying that stuck in my mind.