I suppose the cops coached Jay Wilds etc., but I can have no reasonable doubt Syed did this murder. Wilds spent that day with Syed, and he was able to take police to the victim's car. That is a core of fact that won't budge.
... the basic narrative of killing the girl, moving her car, and burying her body holds up.
The cell phone evidence doesn't show that they spent the day together. It shows that for about an hour and a half in the late morning (11 - 12:30) they were together, and again for about two hours in the evening (5:50 pm - 8 pm).
That's it. An hour and a half in the morning, two hours in the evening. They didn't spend the day together.
There's strong evidence that Wilds' testimony about the events of the afternoon were crafted to match the cell tower records the police were showing him. During one interview they showed him a map with a tower incorrectly located, and he gave them a story about where he was with the phone when that tower was pinged. After they realized their mistake, they showed him a corrected map, and he gave them a story to match that one.
Why should any of his testimony be taken at face value?
The police believed that the key to the case was two incoming calls to Syed's phone just after 7 pm, both of which pinged a cell tower near the burial site.
That evidence lost a lot of its value recently for two reasons. One is that Wilds himself said in an interview last December that the burial took place "closer to midnight" and admitted to lying during the trial. The other is that the autopsy photos show that the victim was lying face down for 8-10 hours before she was placed in the shallow grave on her side.
So the burial site cell tower pings at 7 pm don't mean what the jury was told they mean. The victim was alive at 2:20 pm. She wasn't buried on her side 5 hours later, or the autopsy photos would show it.
Wilds also testified in court that his normal routine took him past the place where the victim's car was found . . . meaning that he didn't have to be involved in the murder at all to know where it was.
If you read the statements Wilds gave about the burial, you'll find a variety of colorful and self-contradictory details. I don't think there is a true story of that burial in which Wilds and Syed are together, because if there were it would be simple to tell. Instead Wilds changes it up over and over.
That can't be to protect himself or anyone else, because according to him only the two of them were there. Whatever happened to the victim, it doesn't seem to have any relationship to what the State presented in court, or to any of the stories told to detectives in an apparent effort to support their theories.
