Reddit Has Some Insane Theories About ‘Serial’

Everyone’s listening to the hit new podcast Serial, but nobody’s listening to it quite as intently as the citizen sleuths on Reddit.

Sure, we’ve all speculated as to who is really responsible for its central crime. (In short: Adnan Syed is serving life in jail for strangling his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee back in 1999, the key witness against him being a curiously flaky individual known as ‘Jay’. We wrote about the show at length here.)

One Redditor, however, believes this thing goes right to the top. And by top, we mean Serial host and This American Life producer Sarah Koenig.

Allow thylacine222 to outline their case, and try to imagine Kevin Costner speaking it aloud:

“Theory: Sarah Koenig hired Jay to kill Hae and frame Adnan. Think about it. How else could she know so much about the crime?

“Sarah was working as a newspaper reporter, an industry that she could tell was well on its way to dying. She had heard rumors of a buyout, and that’s never good news. So what is she going to do? Turn to the brave new frontier of journalism: Public radio. But first, she needed leverage: a story that could catapult her career forward.”

They call this motive.

“Remember Nisha, the girl who was called at the time Adnan was supposedly in the library? That’s right, Sarah = Nisha. She inserted herself into Adnan’s life, and he told her the story of his breakup with Hae. And so an idea was born.

“She convinced Adnan to get a cellphone so ‘he could always be in contact with her.’ Cellphone technology was still relatively new at that time, so she figured that aspect of things would make the case exciting. She secretly met up with Jay a few days before and plotted out all of the details of the crime, adding the perfect amount of mystery and confusion.”

By the time thylacine222 starts to implicate Mailchimp alongside Koenig, you begin to realise that this is actually a joke.

BUT, here’s the scary part: there are dozens of equally crazy conspiracy theories that aren’t jokes circling Reddit.

There’s an ongoing discussion about another murderer in Baltimore with a similar MO, provocative claims by someone who apparently knows Adnan that he is a secret psychopath (not to mention rumblings that this person may or may not have placed the anonymous call to police initially implicating Adnan), and a few dangerously lobbed accusations in the direction of Jay’s friend Jenn and his girlfriend Stephanie (because women be shopping).

It’s almost as if Reddit didn’t realise real lives were at stake here, or that one actual human being had already been tragically lost; that this wasn’t some kind of sport; that Serial itself was a fair, journalistic investigation being conducted with integrity, as opposed to the Ted Kaczynski–esque ramblings of a lunatic.

Theirs is a creeping, obsessive madness the likes of which this writer has only ever seen approximated by Jim Carrey in The Number 23, or Jim Carrey in real life.

Feel free to spend your time between Serial episodes listening to this amazing spoof instead.