As many, many Ira Glass-adoring novice Agatha Christie NPR fans did, I listened to Sarah Koenig's crime podcast Serial and agreed strongly with Joe Streckert's take on the final episode, which left a lot open in the story of Hae Min Lee's murder. But one key stumbling block in figuring out what happened came from Koenig and Co.'s inability to get much information out of Jay, the state's key witness against Adnan Syed at trial. Koenig had some big questions about Jay's story that were, frustratingly, never answered. And it didn't look like they would be. Until yesterday, when The Intercept published the first in a series of in-depth interviews with Jay, where he explains what's behind the holes in his story. It's worth a read for Serial purists, and it's also interesting to see what Jay's willing to say on the record to someone else, that he didn't divulge to Koenig:

Why is this story different from what you originally told the police? Why has your story changed over time?

Well first of all, I wasn’t openly willing to cooperate with the police. It wasn’t until they made it clear they weren’t interested in my ‘procurement’ of pot that I began to open up any. And then I would only give them information pertaining to my interaction with someone or where I was. They had to chase me around before they could corner me to talk to me, and there came a point where I was just sick of talking to them. And they wouldn’t stop interviewing me or questioning me. I wasn’t fully cooperating, so if they said, ‘Well, we have on phone records that you talked to Jenn.’ I’d say, ‘Nope, I didn’t talk to Jenn.’ Until Jenn told me that she talked with the cops and that it was ok if I did too.

I stonewalled them that way. No — until they told me they weren’t trying to prosecute me for selling weed, or trying to get any of my friends in trouble. People had lives and were trying to get into college and stuff like that. Getting them in trouble for anything that they knew or that I had told them — I couldn’t have that.

I guess I was being kind of a jury on whether or not people needed to be involved or whatever, but these people didn’t have anything to do with it, and I knew they didn’t have anything to do with it.

That’s the best way I can account for the inconsistencies. Once the police made it clear that my drug dealing wasn’t gonna affect the outcome of what was going on, I became a little bit more transparent.

Also discussed: growing up in Baltimore in the '90s, which Jay describes as a community "where people would have their house firebombed and still tell the police they knew nothing about it rather than to try to make some sense of what’s going on. And that’s not necessarily me—but that is my family, that is my uncles and cousins. It’s where I’m from." This, I think, provides some necessary context for the story—and for Jay's narrative—that seemed blatantly missing from the podcast, and perhaps even explains why Jay was so difficult for Koenig to get on the record in the first place. Read the whole thing here.