The cell tower records that placed Adnan Syed near Leakin Park — and the defense that tore them apart

The note was found in Hae Min Lee's car, and it read "I'm going to kill."

Prosecutors argued Adnan Syed wrote it. The defense disputed that.

Whether Syed wrote the note is not established. Its origin was never definitively established. Its meaning was never definitively established.

The note surfaced during the investigation, a fragment with no clear author and no clear intent. It sat alongside other pieces of evidence, each one partial, each one contested.

It is a detail that raises a question. It is also a detail that answers nothing.

What else in this case is ambiguous?

Years later, the journalist Sarah Koenig examined the evidence on the podcast "Serial." She traced the investigation, the testimony, the records. She raised questions about how the case was built and how it was tried.

The note returned in that retelling, still unsigned, still unexplained.

It was one piece among many. The cell records, the witness, the timeline. Each one carried weight. Each one carried doubt.

The record does not resolve the note. It only shows that it existed, and that both sides claimed it.

That would require evidence. That would require a certainty the case never produced.

So the note remains what it was in 1999: a scrap in a car, read differently by different people.

THE DISAPPEARANCE

January 13, 1999, was a Wednesday.

Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old senior at Woodlawn High School, left school that afternoon and did not come home.

She had a routine errand that day: picking up her younger cousin from daycare.

She never made it.

Her family reported her missing when she failed to arrive.

Police initially treated her as a missing person.

They looked for a girl who had simply not shown up where she was expected.

That search lasted nearly a month.

On February 9, 1999, her body was found in Leakin Park in Baltimore City.

She was buried in a shallow grave.

The cause of death was manual strangulation.

The weapon was not recovered, because there was no weapon.

The case sat unsolved for weeks.

Then an anonymous phone call pointed detectives toward Adnan Syed, Lee's ex-boyfriend and classmate.

The identity of that caller is not in the record.

It is not established who called, or why.

What the record shows is the call happened, and the investigation turned.

Detectives from the Baltimore County and Baltimore City police departments shifted their focus.

A normal day had become a mystery.

A missing person's case had become a murder investigation.

A routine errand had become the last thing Hae Min Lee was known to do.

The record does not say what she was thinking that afternoon.

It only shows that she left school, and that she never arrived at the daycare.

Everything else came later, in testimony and in records that would be argued over for decades.

THE WITNESS AND THE RECORDS

Jay Wilds, an acquaintance of Syed, testified that Syed showed him the body and asked for help burying it.

Wilds led police to the victim's car, a gray Nissan, found in a residential area.

Prosecutors used cell phone records, including incoming and outgoing call logs, to place Syed near Leakin Park at the time of the burial.

The call logs showed the phone pinging off towers, and the towers put the phone in the park's vicinity.

The defense argued the cell tower data was insufficient to prove Syed's location.

Incoming calls, the defense argued, may not have indicated the phone's location if the call went to voicemail.