Serial - Episode 3

Serial Podcast

Episode 3: It’s February 9, 1999. Hae has been missing for three weeks. A man on his lunch break pulls off a road to pee, and stumbles on her body in a city forest. His odd recounting of the discovery makes Detectives Ritz and MacGillivary suspicious. For instance, why did he walk so far into the woods - 127 feet - to relieve himself? And that’s just the start. A look into the man’s past reveals some bizarre behavior.

Oh my!  Today's episode was specifically about a place in Baltimore called Leakin Park.  Apparently it's downtown, or close to downtown, it's quite large, and it's a well known place to find bodies!  The person who discovered Hae Min's body did so about 6 weeks after she disappeared.  He claims to have stopped at the park to take a piss and stumbled across the body.  But the police are suspicious of his story.

First off Sarah talks about the park in general.  This park is no where near the school.  It's also a place Adnan has never visited before, and isn't even sure how to get to.  In general, it's not a place the students from that particular high school go to.  This should have raised some questions and doubts ... I guess it didn't.

Second, the guy who found the body, Mr. S, doesn't have the greatest of stories.  He claims to have gone home at lunch time to pick up a tool he needed for work.  In the process he grabbed a large sized beer and drank it in the car on his way back to work.  Then, while driving, needed to pee.  He stopped at a pull over spot at the park and walked 127 feet from his car looking for a private spot to pee.  While looking around he noticed some hair on the ground and possibly something that looked like a foot.  It's at this point he realizes he's found a body.

Here are the problems with his story.  First, why did he stopped at the park at all?  He lived 2 miles from the park, and his work was another 3 miles from the park.  Could he not make it to work, or why didn't he pee at home before he left?  Second, why did he walk so far into the forest to pee?  Third, the body was found behind a large fallen tree, how did he happen to be behind this tree?  And why would he step around or over a large tree when he could have gone another way?  Fourth, there was an alcohol bottle found on the scene and Mr. S admits to driving and throwing alcohol bottles out his car window into this park all the time.  Fifth, how the hell did he actually spot the body?  There's so many fallen leaves and dirt on top of it that barely anything is sticking out.  Police officers who go to look at the body after it's reported had a hard time finding it.  Obviously the police are suspicious of him, and think he might possibly be a suspect.

However, when you break everything down, he begins to just look like a guy in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  He's apparently known to police for streaking, and has been spotted in and around that park many times.  He probably didn't actually stop to pee, but to streak and just didn't want to admit it.  When Sarah went to the actual location and walked in 127 feet she found that's the minimum you'd have to walk in order to get any privacy, and even from there you still see the cars on the road.  He was probably behind the fallen log because he was going to streak, so maybe he planned to take his clothes off and leave them there.  The alcohol bottle found beside the body is a brandy bottle, and while Mr. S admits to drinking and throwing empty bottles in there, he only drinks the cheap stuff, and never brandy.  How he spotted the body?  That could simply be because he was looking down or maybe even crouching down and spotted it.  The police gave him a polygraph test and he came back clean.

In the end the area where the body was found revealed nothing useful to the police.  The area is so ridden with crime that there's all sorts of weird stuff in there that had nothing to do with this murder.  And the body had been there long enough that items like bottles would probably have been washed clean if they were related to the murder.

The police have nothing.