In filing, sisters say ‘Serial’ alibi witness vowed to lie
New filings in the pending retrial of Adnan Syed, the convicted murderer at the heart of the popular “Serial” podcast, throw into doubt a much-discussed alibi offered by a key witness in the case.
In sworn affidavits filed Monday by the Maryland attorney general’s office, two unidentified sisters say Asia McClain, a friend of Syed’s, vowed to lie to keep him out of jail.
McClain has said she saw Syed at the Woodlawn High School library about the same time his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, was murdered in January 1999. Syed was convicted of her murder in 2000 and is serving a life sentence in prison.
The sisters were classmates at Woodlawn. In an email sent to Deputy Attorney General Thiru Vignarajah on July 7, a week after a judge ordered a new trial for Syed, one of the pair wrote that McClain’s alibi for Syed “is a lie.”
The sisters “very much” remember a conversation prior to Syed’s first trial, in which McClain said she “believed so much in Adnan’s innocence she would make up a lie to prove he couldn’t have done it.”
“Both my sister and I (more so my sister) argued with Asia about how serious this situation was,” the e-mail continued. “She just said that it wouldn't hurt anything — that if he was truly guilty then he would be convicted.”
The attorney general’s office wants the sisters’ affidavits to be used in court if McClain’s alibi claim is introduced. It has appealed a judge's June 30 decision to overturn Syed's conviction.
Convicted murderer Adnan Syed getting a new trial
In his first trial in 2000, Syed’s defense lawyer never contacted McClain, a detail that got a thorough airing in the 2014 “Serial” Season One podcast. But the oversight wasn’t part of Baltimore Circuit Judge Martin Welch’s ruling for a new trial. Welch ruled that Syed’s attorneys failed to note the unreliability of cellphone tracking evidence that put Syed’s phone near the site where Lee was buried.
In the new affidavits, one of the sisters recalled telling McClain “how serious this was and that someone had lost their life.” If Syed was innocent, she wrote, McClain “should let the evidence show that and that she shouldn't play around with something so serious.”
The sister said McClain “never mentioned seeing Adnan in the library or said she saw him at all the day Lee went missing. The conversation got very heated and my sister had to ‘break up’ our verbal altercation.”
The statement continued, “I have a daughter who is around the age we were when we had that conversation. Being young we can do stupid things but for her to continue with this story after all these years and being grown with families of our own; I could not stand by anymore without saying something.”
In a statement, McClain's attorney, Gary Proctor, said: "Given that the case is now before an appellate court, we question the timing of these bizarre, and wholly factually untrue, allegations," The Baltimore Sun reported.
The new filings include 134 pages of testimony, letters and other evidence in the case, including a hand-written 1999 letter from McClain to Syed as he sat in jail. In it, she told Syed, “I hope that you’re not guilty and I hope to death that you have nothing to do with it. If so I will try my best to help you and account for some of your unwitnessed, unaccountable lost time.”
She added in a postscript: “If you were in the library for awhile, tell the police and I’ll continue to tell what I know even louder than I am. My boyfriend and his best friend remember seeing you there too.”
McClain last June published a book called Confessions of a Serial Alibi.
In Facebook message conversations included in the filing, one of the sisters confronted her about the alibi, to which McClain replied, "Wow ... this is crazy. I'm not lyig (sic) about any of this."
Contributing: Associated Press; Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo