Where is Jay Wilds now? His secretive life detailed
In hindsight, Adnan Syed’s conviction for murdering Hae Min Lee was fraught with irregularities. It took the viral podcast Serial to highlight the case’s inconsistencies and a determined prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, to dig into Adnan’s case – which she wasn’t obligated to do – and ask the court to set aside Syed’s erroneous conviction.
Syed might still be prosecuted again, but it’s improbable. Jay Wilds was a crucial player in Adnan’s conviction – he testified that Adnan confessed to him about killing Lee, saw Lee’s body in the trunk of her car, and helped bury her body in Leakin Park.
The motion to set aside Adnan’s conviction stated prosecutors no longer trusted Jay Wilds’s wildly inconsistent testimony.
Jay lives with his wife and children in an undisclosed location
Jay Wilds assumed a private life after playing a pivotal role in the prosecution’s case against Adnan Syed. Following a rare 2014 interview with Natasha Vargas-Cooper of The Intercept, the outlet reported that Jay lived with his wife and children in a ‘two-story suburban home.’
Wilds accused Sarah Koenig of trying to strong-arm him into giving an interview on Serial. Jay said: “I feel like [Koenig] created an evil archetype of me and sensationalized my motives. It helped fan the flames of this story that people had already moved on from.”
Jay wouldn’t have appreciated Sarah’s prying into Adnan’s case because it would have exposed his ever-shifting narrative. Sarah pointed to Jay’s inconsistencies as one of the main reasons she believed in Adnan’s innocence. Without Jay’s testimony, the prosecution had no case.
During his interview with The Intercept, Jay came up with another version of events, but throughout the interview, he would sneakily point out that the passing of time would have affected his recollection of events.
Wilds said he gave false testimonies because he feared the police would convict him for selling marijuana. Jay said:
“I was also running [drug] operations from my grandmother’s house. So that would ruin her life too. I was also around a bunch of people earlier that day [at Cathy’s], and I didn’t want them to get fucked up with homicide.”
Jay painted his lying as an act of altruism. He continued: “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.”
One person who missed college because of Jay was Adnan Syed. In HBO’s The Case Against Adnan Syed, Rabia Chaudry, a longtime friend of Adnan and host of the Undisclosed podcast, talked about the impact of Jay’s testimony:
“Jay is the center of gravity in this case. It all revolves around Jay. Jay told the story that convicted Adnan. At trial, he said Adnan killed Hae in the parking lot of Best Buy, and then he also said he helped Adnan bury her in Leakin Park. The thing is that the story Jay told at trial is not the same story Jay told police the first time.”
Without Jay’s testimony, prosecutors have little chance of retrying Adnan. It’s unlikely that we’ll hear from Jay, given the recent events. “I don’t want to talk about this for entertainment purposes,” Wilds told The Intercept.
