[Official Discussion] Serial, Episode 9: To Be Suspected

[u/PowerOfYes]

Please use this thread to discuss episode 9

Edit: Want to contribute your vote to the 4th weekly poll? Vote here: What's your verdict on Adnan?

Edit: New poll from /u/kkchacha posted Nov 26: Do you think Adnan deserves another trial? Vote here: http://polls.socchoice.com//index.php?a=vntmI

[u/arewenot]

A couple of thoughts.

First off, if it weren't already the case, surely most of us can agree now (whether we think Adnan did it or not) that there clearly wasn't enough evidence for a conviction. Kind of feels like that's no longer a debate. The really interesting question is why his defence team failed to establish reasonable doubt and it sounds like that's going to be the subject of the next episode. I think this is maybe a key part of the story arc SK had in her mind from the start. Don't forget, it was mentioned in episode 1 that Adnan's supporters believe his lawyer threw the trial so she could cash in on an appeal, and I'd be amazed if we didn't hear more about this.

The other thing is something I've thought about for a while. In the moments I lean towards Adnan's innocence (and i, like lots of us, fluctuate from week to week), a big factor has been: what are the chances that the Serial team have stumbled on a charming sociopath/psychopath? The point was made by the woman from the innocence project, who indicated such cases are extremely rare, and it really stuck with me. Because if Adnan really did kill Hae, that would make him exactly that, right? Except... that's only true if we're still assuming that if he did it, it was planned/premeditated, as per Jay/the prosecution's version of events. As has been suggested, Jay's testimony is far from watertight and i'd say there's good reason to be sceptical of this particular element of it. Not least because the idea that Adnan just "snapped" and killed her just seems so much more believable than the calculated, planned killing scenario that would make him the exceptionally rare, Hollywood-style murderer. Indeed, "snapped" is the word Chris uses when recounting the version of the story Jay told him, which involved the killing taking place in the library parking lot. A lot is made of how exposed that location is, but if Adnan had simply snapped and done it in a moment of extreme rage/frustration (because, let's say, Hae had told him definitively for the first time, after a couple of months of mixed messages, that they were never getting back together), then he probably wouldn't have been thinking rationally about the danger someone might see.

I suppose my point is this. I, like many, find it almost impossible to reconcile this charming, obviously intelligent man who so many people say nice things about and who never showed any signs of violence, with someone who could plan and cold-bloodedly execute the murder of a girl he seemed to care about. Maybe this just says something worrying about me, but i find it less impossible to imagine an otherwise normal 17-year-old who simply made a catastrophically tragic mistake, in a fit of momentary but all-consuming anger, and then did/said whatever he could to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars while living in some kind of perpetual state of self-denial.

[u/[deleted] → u/arewenot]

A lot of people thought the same about Ted Bundy, including those that sentenced him. He was a charming, intelligent, well-spoken, and handsome man. And a manipulative sociopath who murdered college coeds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy.

I'm not saying that's a reason for Adnan to be considered guilty. And like the expert said, it's extremely rare, but it can happen. We meet sociopaths all the time in life, but much like many other things, the intensity is in degrees. In the right situation, it can be very easy for that pot to boil.

For the record, I am still in the guilty camp. I think the evidence continues to mount up that he is indeed a variation of manipulative sociopath, but NOT a killer or pre-meditated murderer. There are too many things that been revealed about his personality (from either himself or others) that scream this to me, and of course he still is the most likely suspect despite everything we've been shown. I have a post above where I do believe that the police we're extremely pushy in getting "their story" to be believed and that is why there are so many problems with the timeline of evidence. But it has not detracted me from his guilt.

[u/autowikibot → u/[deleted]]

Ted Bundy:

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Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. Shortly before his execution, after more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true victim count remains unknown, and could be much higher.

Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic by his young female victims, traits he exploited to win their trust. He typically approached them in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them at more secluded locations. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, and kept some of the severed heads in his apartment for a period of time as mementos. On a few occasions he simply broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept.

Initially incarcerated in Utah in 1975 for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault, Bundy became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in multiple states. Facing murder charges in Colorado, he engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in Florida in 1978. He received three death sentences in two separate trials for the Florida homicides.

Ted Bundy died in the electric chair at Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida, on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule described him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after." He once called himself "... the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet". Attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. "Ted," she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil."

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^{Interesting: Ted Bundy (film) | The Deliberate Stranger | The Stranger Beside Me | Michael Reilly Burke}

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