With my hour-long daily commute, I was beginning to get fed up of the music being played on the radio stations so decided to look into podcasts on the AppStore one evening after work.

By pure chance, I found the podcast called Serial. I decided to download all 12 episodes, along with some other podcasts, onto my iPod and looked forward to the following morning commute.

Serial is a spin-off of This American Life, a weekly radio show (which has its own podcast, see below), and follows journalist Sara Koenig’s re-investigation into the 1999 cold case murder of Hae Min Lee.

Hae Min Lee was an 18 year old student in Baltimore, Maryland who went missing on the 13th of January 1999. Her body was found buried in a park around 6 weeks later, and her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Sayed, was convicted for murdering Hae and is now serving life in prison over the case. Seems like a straight forward case, no? Well, not exactly.

The podcast follows Sara Koenig and her team as they slowly try and piece together the case in order to try and find an answer as to whether they really have the right man in jail. The podcast is really well done and consists of excerpts of real interviews with the real people who were involved in the case. Each podcast takes a different focus, allowing the listener to formulate their own ideas on ‘Whodunnit’.

After 1 episode, I was hooked. I couldn’t believe this was a real-life case and I was truly hearing real people talk about what they believed to have happened. As someone who is a fan of CSI, Law and Order, Cold Case etc., this podcast was right up my street.

I spent one night after work looking into Serial and perusing through the website putting faces to names that had been mentioned in the podcast. It became clear to me that Serial was a hit in the US and around the world, and it seemed I was one of the last people to jump on the bandwagon. I could not wait to get in the car to work the next day to hear more!

Each episode varies in length from 30 to 56 minutes. However, that did not stop me listening to the whole 12 episodes in 4 days.

I’m still not sure about who I truly believe killed Hae Min Lee, but one thing I know for sure is that Christina Gutierrez, Adnan Sayed’s lawyer, had a very annoying voice and I believe her approach lost any chance Adnan had of walking away from that trial innocent. If it truly is the case that each person is innocent until proven guilty, then I am not sure Adnan really deserves to be in jail if Jay is walking around freely.

If you, like me, have yet to hear about Serial, I strongly recommend you go and download it immediately. In my opinion, it is truly worth the hype.

You can listen to Serial via their website or download it from the website or the AppStore.

Useful links:

This American Life
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

Serial podcast
http://serialpodcast.org/