Hi guys, this is one of my very first posts on reddit. i read about serial at work a few days ago and decided to give it a listen on my walk home from the office. From the introduction of episode one i was hooked to the point of even delaying my own podcast this week to get through every episode of serial, and i've subsequently listened to every episode again more than once. I am thoroughly hooked on this story and i'd like to think i'm critical of every detail i hear because of the nature of the whole story, lack of memories, Jay's testimony, accounts of Adnan. It's not my place to say whether or not Adnan is guilty but from what i can see, there is clearly enough unreliability in the evidence to definitively say that Adnan is guilty. That's not to say i believe he is innocent, rather i don't think there's enough evidence there to say he is definitely guilty.

So let's say Adnan is not guilty, that he didn't in fact kill Hae, the first thing missing is a motive for anyone else to do so.

In trying to figure out a motive for anyone else to kill Hae, I keep coming back to the testimony of Jay. He knows too much about the crime itself to not be involved somehow so if Adnan is not guilty the buck has to come back to him right?

In terms of motive, something has stuck in my mind i believe from episode one where Adnan mentions getting Jay's girlfriend a gift and asking if Jay had gotten her one and this being the reason Jay had Adnan's car and phone.

All the questions of Adnan's character have, in my opinion not been applied to Jay in the same way. Maybe Jay is a sociopath, maybe Adnan's gift to Stephanie hurt Jay's pride and triggered some repressed jealousy in Jay, and he killed hae to take adnan down a peg or two?

It may be a tenuous link but we can never know what's going through another person's mind at any given time. however there are that many inconsistencies in Jay's story that i can't help but think the lies are there to cover his true involvement in Hae's tragic death, whether he acted with Adnan or without.

This is a small, admittedly maybe throwaway detail that i've picked up on and i'd like to find out if anyone has any similar theories with regards to motives for Jay or anyone else for that matter.