The Case Against Adnan Syed Director On Why We’re Still Obsessed With The Story

We like to think we know Adnan Syed. He’s known the world over as the man who was jailed for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee at the age of 17, despite huge gaps in the evidence that was used to put him there. In the years since Serial, the podcast that catapulted the case to stratospheric recognition, fans and conspirators have turned keyboard detectives, unearthing information that hadn’t been discovered before. Millions followed in real time as his case teetered around the promise of retrial.

Many of us feel like we know all about Adnan Syed and how he wound up serving a prison sentence. So how, then, would you go about producing a documentary about one of the most famous murder cases in recent history? You turn away from the trend of the true crime shows before it and tell the victim, Hae Min’s side of the story, too.

"Often in true crime, the victim gets lost in the storytelling because we’re just analysing the case and we’re so intoxicated by that," Amy Berg, director of Sky and HBO’s new documentary series The Case Against Adnan Syed, tells Refinery29. "I wanted to make sure that this film gave proper life and breath for Hae's character and journey."

The documentary is as intricately layered as the testimonies that make up the case itself. Among the clips from the courtroom where Adnan was tried back in 2000, newspaper clippings, interviews with a range of witnesses and the police who investigated the murder 20 years ago, is content from Hae's diary. Illustrations accompany narration lifted straight from the words she wrote in the months before her death and it’s probably the most intimate, personable insight we’re likely to be given into who this young woman was.

Amy knew that this was going to be central to how she framed the documentary before she started. Where did the inspiration come from? "I’d seen The Diary of a Teenage Girl recently," Amy explains. "I loved that world of the teenage girl and I feel that told us so many things about her in such subtle visuals and so I worked with the woman who did that film on the animations and it was great. It was very important."

One of the most interesting (and perhaps disarming) things about how society's fascination with true crime operates is that, despite knowing that these sorts of cases happen the world over at a depressingly high frequency, we have a habit of compulsively zooming in on a select few. When asked why Hae Min and Adnan Syed's story captured and retained such attention, Amy thinks it’s all to do with the high school aspect. "I think it’s just the time when kids are supposed to be growing and dreaming and having steps towards their future and this case, all these different people had this traumatic experience happen to one of their friends and it stuck with them – that’s not what’s supposed to happen at high school," she says.

There are other wildly curious interests too, of course. Namely that there’s a huge question around Adnan’s innocence and an even bigger one around the forces that determined his guilt. "All the different blends of storylines are so strange and unique," Amy adds. "I think Baltimore is such an interesting community and place to dig in … and just, you know, the interracial dynamics, the corrupt police department. Baltimore PD is known for Freddie Gray [the 25-year-old black man who died while in police custody] and The Wire and all these different stories that tell us what is really going on down there. It’s a difficult place, so I think this story just kind of resonates for a lot of people."

The resonance goes deeper than many of us could even imagine for Hae’s family, who have historically distanced themselves from the public narrative of their daughter’s death and Adnan’s arrest – a consideration that doesn’t go overlooked. "Hae was an 18-year-old girl when she went missing and her whole life was her school community and there was just so much there to grasp. As much as I totally understand why her parents, why her mother wouldn’t want to be involved in the story, I imagine it must be traumatic for this story to come out in any way – in a podcast, a film, a news story – I’m sure it’s very traumatic for them because they feel that justice was done in 1999 but if it wasn’t, then there’s another family that is suffering right now and that is on the state."

Those familiar with the case will already be well versed in its discrepancies. The phone records weren't as airtight as they should've been before being lent on to guide the state's case against Adnan, for example. "The state should’ve done a better job of the original trial so we don’t have any questions," Amy adds. "They could’ve easily requested to get Hae’s pager records, to get the security footage from the Best Buy, there are things they could’ve done to corroborate Jay’s story which has changed so many times and so with all those changes you wonder why and how – how difficult is it to remember where you saw the body if it was such a traumatic episode? And why are there five different spots of where he saw it? So many different things don’t make sense."

Amy's documentary takes the case even further than where the podcast left off. More witnesses were spoken to, the production team's investigation uncovered some things that could help Adnan's case and the big picture surrounding it, and Amy is already receiving emails with tips and further information about what really happened to Hae Min all those years ago. For better or worse, the story hasn't come to a conclusion yet. "We’re getting a lot of tips and a lot of new information coming in now since the first episode aired, so I guess we’ll have to follow up on all of that."