Sorry, hit the 40K word limit with pt. 1. This part begins with an addendum to the Leaving Baltimore Post. Nothing that follows will make any sense if you are not familiar with the original post. Again, no hard feelings at all if you stop right here and decide to use your time productively. There are far more interesting things out there like TikTok videos of staged pranks.

I still stand by the conclusions in the original post, but one thing never sat well with me. I could not understand why Bilal Ahmed would risk being associated with Hae’s murder by having his name on Adnan’s AT&T cell phone account. If you have read thus far and do not know what I am talking about, you should really read that Leaving Baltimore post for context. And thank you for taking the time to read my verbose ramblings. Now that we are on the same page, I still believe Bilal was a criminal informant with his three cell phones on a government account since at least 1998. His penchant for molesting boys and ability to stay out of prison (until he moved on to raping adults) fit the profile. But that did not explain his willingness to have his name splashed across the top of the records for Adnan’s brand new cell phone.

This is where u/FrankieHellis gets a major shout out from me. Had she not provided me with the complete, unfiltered, unannotated police file, I would still be puzzling over this. Among the Woodlawn students interviewed by the cops was Adnan’s friend, Peter Billingsly. Peter’s interview took place on April 9, 1999 (MPIA (15 459) 945-954). Peter told the cops that he accompanied Adnan to the AT&T store at Security Mall to get the infamous cell phone. But Peter also said that ADNAN ALREADY HAD A CELL PHONE FROM SPRINT. (MPIA 15 459 951). Do you know which child molesting, grand jury tampering, evidence manufacturing, dental patient raping, Medicare fraud committing piece of human filth also had a phone from Sprint? For those who happen to know more than one such person, it was Bilal Ahmed.

“GTFO, SalmaanQ! That Sprint phone Peter was talking about coulda belonged to anyone!” Valid point! I turn your attention to Peter Billingsly’s phone number, 410-747-6482 (MPIA 15 459 472). Got it? Now turn to Bilal’s Sprint phone records at MPIA 15 459 1090. Seven numbers from the bottom left we see an incoming call from 410-747-6482. I know that there will be some who will provide fantastic reasons why Peter Billingsly would be calling Bilal’s phone at what appears to be close to the day Peter accompanied Adnan to the mall to pick up the new AT&T phone that Bilal got for Adnan two days before Hae was murdered. In addition to being the youth (molesting) director at the local mosque, did Bilal also secretly serve as an advisor on the Woodlawn yearbook committee of which Adnan and Peter were members?

Let's review what we know. Adnan was using one of Bilal's Sprint phones until two days before Hae's murder. Peter told the cops that he accompanied Adnan to pick up a phone that had previously been purchased. That means that before Peter and Adnan went to the AT&T store, Bilal had gone to the store and bought the phone. Finally, during Bilal's grand jury testimony, Bilal testified that he accompanied Adnan to the AT&T store to pick up the phone. There is a lot to unpack here but this is significant. Before ascribing any innocent connection between Bilal purchasing the phone for Adnan and Bilal's involvement in Hae's murder you need to say this it in proper context like this:

THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN THIS KNOWN CHILD MOLESTER AND SERIAL RAPIST WHO WAS LATER CONVICTED OF KNOCKING OUT HIS PATIENTS WITH ANESTHETICS AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTING THEM, WHO AVOIDED CRIMINAL CONVICTION FOR HIS MULTIPLE SERIOUS FELONIES FOR AT LEAST 15 YEARS AFTER HAE'S MURDER, WHO IS NOT A MEMBER OF ADNAN'S FAMILY, WHO MADE SURE THAT HE AND ADNAN SHARED PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE SAME ATTORNEY, WHO WAS ALLOWING ADNAN TO USE ONE OF HIS THREE GOVERNMENT-ISSUED SPRINT PHONES UNTIL TWO DAYS BEFORE HAE'S MURDER WHEN HE SEPARATELY WENT TO THE AT&T STORE TO BUY ADNAN A PHONE TO PICK UP BUT LATER PERJURED HIMSELF BY SAYING THAT THEY WENT THERE TOGETHER--THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTION BETWEEN BILAL AHMED AND THE PLOT TO MURDER HAE MIN LEE.

Context is everything. If you have disabused yourself from the absurd notion that Bilal has the criminal Midas touch for everything except his securing Adnan's AT&T phone that was used in the plot to murder Hae Min Lee, you might be ready to consider the following. Under the original plan Adnan was going to use Bilal’s phone (the 410-499-5396 line) to carry out the murder. Remember, Bilal had three lines (410-262-9282 and 410-499-0355 are also listed in Bilal’s Sprint phone record). At the 11th hour, Bilal reconsidered. It was too risky for him to let Adnan use one of his Sprint phones. If things went south and Adnan had Bilal's phone in his possession, the cops would definitely look hard at Bilal as being involved. It was actually less risky for Bilal to simply sign off on Adnan’s new AT&T phone. Given Peter Billingsly's statement to the cops, we know that Bilal went to the AT&T store separately from Adnan. Bilal thought that he could simply purchase the phone for Adnan, have it put in Adnan's name and leave without his fingerprints being on the transaction. Unfortunately for Bilal, AT&T had to put his name down as the account holder. Still, this was better than having Adnan use one of Bilal's Sprint phones on January 13, but he created a new problem for himself by attempting this shady move of going to the store separately. Bilal attempted to fix this problem during his grand jury testimony when he testified that he and Adnan went to the AT&T store together. Apparently, Bilal was unaware of Peter's statement to the cops that it was Peter and Adnan who went to the AT&T store together to pick up the phone. Peter's statement has gone ignored for the past 23 years. Bilal perjured himself during his grand jury testimony because he knew that it would look bad if he separately went to the AT&T store in advance without Adnan and left the phone for Adnan to pick up by himself two days before Hae was murdered. Thus, Bilal invented the story that he and Adnan went together to the store to innocently pick up the AT&T phone without all the cloak and dagger bullshit that really happened. If you have a better reason why Bilal would lie while testifying to the grand jury while being represented by a top criminal defense attorney who he would later make Adnan switch to taking over the defense, lay it on me.

This may not seem like much of a distinction in hindsight, but hindsight only serves to muddle our perception of the facts and must be removed to see things clearly as they happened and to understand why people did what they did based on what they knew at the time.

Consider how Bilal likely saw how things might play out at the time he made the decision to get Adnan a separate AT&T phone. If Adnan fucked up and got caught by the cops on January 13, 1999, Adnan having Bilal’s Sprint phone on him would implicate Bilal as a co-conspirator. If Adnan was caught with his own AT&T phone, the cops would more likely believe that he acted alone. So Bilal went to the AT&T store first, without Adnan. This is critical importance of this cannot be overstated. Bilal's move of going to the store separately was to distance himself so that there would be no witnesses at the store who would see Adnan and Bilal come together. AT THE TIME, Bilal thought that he could simply purchase the phone under Adnan's name and leave it for Adnan to pick up without leaving any of his own fingerprints on the transaction. Bilal was wrong. When he went to the store without Adnan, Bilal discovered that his name would have to be listed on the account. Although this was far from ideal, Bilal knew it was less of a risk than having Adnan use one of Bilal's own phones on January 13th. Bilal tried to clean up his shady move of purchasing and leaving the phone for Adnan to pick up separately when he lied to the grand jury, but god bless Peter Billingsly for exposing that lie.

It does not seem that way in hindsight, but Bilal was being extremely cautious in how and why he secured the AT&T phone for Adnan. Because he was too cautious, he inadvertently exposed his participation in the murder plot. Hindsight must be removed to appreciate Bilal's careful maneuverings, especially given how his name is splashed across the front page on Adnan’s phone record. But based on Bilal's cloak and dagger plan for having Adnan pick up the phone separately, Bilal thought that he could avoid having his name associated with Adnan's cell. Like an adult buying an underage kid a beer. As meticulous a planner as he was, Bilal could not anticipate how the events linking the phone to Hae's murder would unfold. How foreseeable do you think it was that Hae would write down Adnan's phone number on the same page in her diary that she wrote down Don's name 127 times? How foreseeable was it that Hae's brother would check her diary after she went missing and mistake Adnan's number as Don's who was currently dating his sister? How foreseeable was it that Hae's brother would give the cops the number after using it to unsuccessfully reach Don? How foreseeable was it that the cops would call Adnan on his cell while he and Jay were at Kristi’s house almost immediately after Hae was murdered? How foreseeable was it that Adnan would panic and deviate from Bilal’s plan by doing a half-assed job burying Hae in a shallow grave while Jay watched/participated? How foreseeable was it that a traumatized Jay would spill his guts to Jen Pusateri?

All those steps were tied to Adnan's cell phone. [CUE THE SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC THAT MAKES A SUMMATION SOUND MORE COMPELLING]. The one that has Bilal listed as the account holder. That Bilal got for Adnan two days before Hae was murdered. That replaced Bilal's Sprint phone that Adnan was using until Bilal helped Adnan get this new one. That Bilal lied about during his grand jury testimony by falsely stating that he accompanied Adnan to the AT&T store to pick it up.The phone that was pinging the tower by Bilal's dental school in downtown Baltimore the night before Hae was murdered. I did not previously delve into this aside from noting the fact that Adnan was near Bilal's school. But why go to Bilal's dental school? Could Adnan have not gone over the final details of the plan with Bilal somewhere closer to home on a school night? Recall that Bilal is in prison for knocking out his patients with anesthetics before sexually assaulting them. We know that he did this. Recall that Hae lacked defensive wounds or skin under her nails. Recall that team Adnan crows about the lack of scratches on him. There would be an arsenal of various anesthetics at the dental school. Could that trip to Bilal's dental school have been to pick up some anesthetic that is not routinely picked up during an autopsy? Was Hae sedated with said anesthetic before she was strangled? Could it be that Hae was patient zero of Bilal's anesthetized victims? We are to believe that Adnan was acting weird at Kristi's house because he was high on weed. Witnesses remarked on how he asked how to quickly come down from being high. Adnan was not new to weed. Did he need to come down from weed or from the contact high of an anesthetic supplied by Bilal that he used on Hae? Granted that Hae being anesthetized is speculative. Let's go back to what we know. After Adnan was arrested, did he call his older brother or mom (dad was out of town)? He called Bilal. Did Adnan's family arrange for his lawyers? No Bilal did. Bilal desperately inserted himself into Adnan's defense. To Adnan's parents--particularly Shamim--Bilal was a godsend. In the month following Adnan's arrest Bilal and Shamim called each other 85 fucking times. She was eating out of Bilal's hand and relying on him to make decisions about Adnan's case. Like having Adnan change his attorney to Gutierrez--the same attorney who represented Bilal when he testified during the grand jury proceedings. The same attorney who represented Saad Chaudry, Rabia's brother, after he was served with a subpoena to testify before the grand jury. Because of Gutierrez's previous representation of grand jury witnesses, having her subsequently representing Adnan was no easy task. There was a hearing and the judge had to sign off on Gutierrez representing Adnan after she had already represented Saad and Bilal. Getting Gutierrez as Adnan's lawyer insulated Bilal and Saad because her hands were tied from suggesting that her former clients may have participated in the murder. Given how Bilal suddenly and immediately threw himself into Adnan's defense, is it not odd that Adnan hardly ever called Bilal from his cell phone from the time it was activated until the cops pulled his call records? As though Adnan was under orders to not call Bilal on the phone that Bilal fucking got for him. Bilal only broke protocol and called Adnan three times over the five week period following Hae's murder. Each time was in the immediate wake of Adnan freaking out after being questioned or contacted by the police regarding Hae's disappearance (her body was not yet recovered). Bilal broke protocol because it was necessary to talk Adnan down to keep the plot from being exposed. Bilal's assistance wasn't about protecting Adnan as much as it was about protecting himself. Until, of course, Bilal took himself out of the equation by molesting a refugee boy before the trial. Is the fact that Bilal's disgusting fingerprints are all over this case completely coincidental? Given his participation in key aspects of the case, is it not odd that Bilal is completely absent from the innocence narrative pushed by team Adnan in Serial and the HBO doc? Still think that Bilal wasn't involved?

There. Having resolved that nagging loose end for myself, I can now (again) detach from this case. The work on fleshing this out was actually done 2 years ago, but I tried stick to the promise that I made to myself to stop writing about this case. Because the cow was out of the barn with pt. 1, I figured, "what the hell." I know many will still doubt that Bilal was involved to the extent that I claim. That is fair because who the fuck am I? Some rando on reddit for whom the “tl/dr” concept was invented. Which is a good segue to...

Most Recent Final Thoughts…

I hate the lines that were drawn between individuals who identify as one of the two dumbest fucking designations: “guilters” and “innocenters.” No such designations exist. There are those who were conned and those who were not. Pretty much everyone falls into the former category, self included. Sure, I and several others may have exposed some of the lies that were being peddled, but how much fucking time did we sink into this cesspool?

I spent at least as much time scrutinizing the facts of this case as Sarah Koenig and came to, what I hope we can agree, are more accurate conclusions. I hope we can also agree that the story as reported in this and previous posts by me and others actually provides a more logical and conclusive narrative than the pseudo-neutral, indefinite “maybe he did it/maybe he didn’t” open-ended drivel that was the first season of Serial. Don’t get me wrong. That music with the fucking plinking piano keys is a Dune-sized earworm that will never leave my head. And Sarah told a compelling story. But that is all it was. A story. Actually, a demonstrably false story. A false story that gained her global fame. A story that resonated with the best instincts of good people who feel driven to speak out against injustice. A story that brought podcasting to the masses. That garnered journalism’s top awards. That resulted in Serial being purchased by the paper of record for $25 million. All based on a lie.

I am not the only one who got closer to the truth than Sarah. Several other anonymous shit-heads like me spent an inordinate amount of time on a case that no one asked us to delve in to. We didn’t do it for the money. There wasn’t any in it for us. We did so because we are obsessive lunatics who are incapable of stopping ourselves from seeking that dopamine rush that comes from figuring something out. We get mad that those who were (also) conned refuse to do their own research and read all the facts. We get mad that those who were conned refuse to believe our obsessively researched ramblings. Why won’t you gullible fools believe the protracted posts of anonymous, obsessive lunatics?

Because you are not supposed to.

This is not my job. As far as you know, I have no credentials or credibility to comment on this case. I’m just another anonymous tool on reddit who--to steal from what a user said of me in the comments to pt.1--partakes in literary masturbation. How different would it be for me to expect people to accept my conclusions than that QAnon fucker? Sure, I would like to believe that my writing is grounded in facts and is not batshit crazy, but what if I'm wrong? I face no accountability.

As to believing that everyone should waste their lives researching this case, that is not a fair expectation. For those keeping score, this is my mea culpa that I promised in pt. 1 for tossing out that pejorative crack about Rabia's "fuck-tard" followers. Normal people with jobs, families and friends do not have time to obsessively research raw data, extract a cogent narrative and report their findings. Normal people rely on others to do this analysis and reporting for them. Others who have credibility to perform this type of analysis and reporting because they do it for a living. I don't mean others like me and my fellow obsessive fuck-tards who conned ourselves into thinking that our anonymous, unaccountable perspectives are more important than anything else. I mean others like Sarah Koenig.

But Sarah was not aware of her blind spots and how susceptible she was to manipulation. She spent a year researching a case only to get it wrong. Demonstrably wrong. But that did not matter. Paraphrasing what she said to her dad, hers "was a better story." All that mattered was the wild popularity of that entertaining story. I am concerned by Sarah’s lack of effort to set the record straight. I am concerned at how hard it was to conclude that she did not work at the Baltimore Sun in 1999. I am concerned that the dearth of information about the exact dates of Sarah’s tenure at the Sun may somehow be linked to Rabia’s false statements at the beginning of the HBO documentary. Because in that regard, Sarah and Rabia’s interests are aligned. This looks and sounds conspiratorial, but the simple adage, “follow the money,” has rarely steered me wrong. As indicated in pt. 1, I know that Sarah was at the Sun in 2000. But I do not think that I should not have had to go into the Sun's archives to extrapolate that info. Not for someone of Sarah's celebrity. Especially since Sarah's supposed link to Adnan's case is the reason Rabia initially reached out to her. I wish Sarah or her bosses would simply list her past positions by year somewhere to prove my conspiracy radar wrong. I sincerely do not want "follow the money" to apply to a fucking podcast as a valuable asset to protect the lies on which it was built.

The adage obviously extends to how we consume information. Serial is a case study on how the powers that be believe that we prefer to consume what is popular over understanding the truth. That we prefer being entertained over being informed. That we are more likely to tune in to information that neatly fits into our world view instead of being open to information that challenges us. In that milieu, our journalists cease to be the tellers of truth. They are incentivized to be storytellers. They become afraid of the consequences of telling the truth.

• 2003: “Everyone thinks we need to bomb Iraq. If I challenge the obviously false conventional wisdom about WMD, I will be labeled unpatriotic and lose my job.”
• 2007: “The Dow is at its all-time high. If I report the results of my investigation on the subprime market, Wall Street will crucify me.”
• 2016-2019: “It is obvious that Donald Trump is incapable of colluding with himself, but the public wants to read stories about how he colluded with Russia.”

Who has the time to exhaustively research the news that actually impacts our lives? We used to rely upon journalists to break down complex facts into understandable pieces to inform us. If the journalist learned that they got the story wrong, they would set the record straight and print a retraction. Now they just move on to the next story that they are told will resonate with their audience whether it is true or not.

This abdication of journalistic responsibility coincided with the so-called “Democratization” of journalism. Where any idiot with a cell phone or internet connection can pollute the marketplace of information with unresearched bullshit that resonates with their followers. And why not? Those holding themselves out as journalists are telling a version of the truth that resonates with those who occupy the corridors of power and is in service of the wallets of those with linked financial interests. We become jaded by the so-called research funded by corporations to manufacture "facts" that are cited by journalists. These "facts" give a veneer of legitimacy but only serve to support the corporate interests that paid for them. So, we turn to social media where validity of information is based less on verifiable facts than the number of “likes” and retweets. This results in our abandoning journalists like Sarah Koenig and joining the legion of followers (fka "fuck-tards") of uncredentialed nobodies like Rabia Chaudry. Because what the latter has to say resonates more with what we want to hear and believe.

The murder of Hae Min Lee was an open and shut case that blew up into a global debate. It was the antics of team Adnan that made this case compelling. We were drawn in by the appearance of a gross injustice that falls apart when examined with logic instead of emotion. Rabia jealously guarded the case documents to hide the obvious flaws. By the time the docs became available, Adnan's supporters were riled into a frenzy. The truth was a casualty in a one-sided media blitz where it was more important to pick a side and stick with it. Aside from those directly involved, Adnan Syed's guilt or innocence has no impact on our lives. What about all the other cons that are being played against us every day that do affect us? Our wars. Our health care. Our environment. Who are we trusting to provide provide us with reliable information on these matters? Serial is a symptom of a much larger problem that I have been trying to articulate for the past few years. I will stop trying and simply direct you to the succinct words written by Neil Postman in his forward to his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. He says it better than I ever will.

As to Adnan Syed, I don’t give a shit what happens to him. Although his mom sucks, dumping on her doesn't feel great. I suppose that I should try to say something positive. Here goes: Shamim makes me want to hug my mom and tell her, "on behalf of myself and all the women I didn't murder, thank you for setting limits and not letting me get away with anything." Adnan's dad and brothers seem like decent guys. There should be a disgorgement of the money made by the parasites who profited from this tragic story with the funds transferred to Hae’s family. Sarah Koenig should come full circle and dedicate an episode to clarifying the record about Cristina Gutierrez, including interviews with people who knew her. Sarah understands the importance of legacy and setting the record straight from the piece that she did on her father. But will any of this come to pass? Yeah, I know. As if the truth matters...