Did Adnan Syed do it?

I doubt most people would have been familiar with the relatively unremarkable murder of a Baltimore high school student by her ex-boyfriend in 1999. Until Serial started a couple of months ago. Similarly, you might never have heard of Richard Hickock, Perry Smith or some murder in Kansas. Until Truman Capote. Just as he popularised true crime by making it as exciting as fiction, Sarah Koenig has done the genre a favour by making it a bit more listener-friendly. Now one and a half million are tuning in and Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed are on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

The story goes as follows. While Koenig was a journalist on the Baltimore Sun, she investigated the incompetence of a certain prosecutor Cristina Gutierrez. Koenig – now a producer on This American Life, a popular show on NPR – was subsequently approached by a friend of the Syed family, whose son Adnan had been represented by Gutierrez and had ended up with a life sentence for the murder of his ex girlfriend.