Adnan Syed Will Not Return to Prison After 2000 Murder Conviction

After giving testimony at Syed’s murder trial, Wilds retreated into anonymity and refused on-the-record interview requests for Serial. In December 2014, after the podcast’s season one finale aired, he told The Intercept in his first public interview that he felt Sarah Koenig had “demonized” him.

Wilds became a key witness for the prosecution, while the defense contended he was lying to protect himself. Koenig would raise the question of why Adnan, who at the end of the day didn’t seem that close to Jay, would have enlisted him to help bury a body. She also spent a lot of time talking about the inconsistencies in Jay’s story between his two interviews with detectives and his testimony at trial.

“People have to realize, we try cases in the real world,” Kevin Urick, who prosecuted Syed, told The Intercept when asked about Jay’s story changing multiple times. “We take our witnesses as we find them. We did not pick Jay to be Adnan’s accomplice. Adnan picked Jay. Remember, Jay committed a crime here. He was an accomplice after the fact in a murder. A very serious crime…People can very seldom tell the same story the same way twice. If they did, I’d be very suspicious of it because that would look like it was rehearsed.”

“My wife knows about my involvement in this case,” Wilds said. “Because I eventually cooperated with the police and testified, I know that there are people back home who would consider me a snitch and would hurt me. So, for the most part, we’ve been really protective about our privacy.”

He told The Intercept that Syed first showed him Hae’s body in the trunk of his car outside Wilds’ grandma’s house, not in the Best Buy parking lot—a revelation that was not relayed during the trial or by Serial. But Wilds insisted he had nothing to do with the act of murdering Lee.

“There’s nothing that’s gonna change the fact that this guy drove up in front of my grandmother’s house, popped the trunk, and had his dead girlfriend in the trunk,” he said. “Anything that’s going to make him innocent doesn’t involve me. Hae was dead before she got to my house. Anything that makes Adnan innocent doesn’t involve me. There is a specific point where I became involved in this. What happened before that, I don’t know.”