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  Her next diary page is full of Don’s name written repeatedly, with flourishes, underlines, in all directions. On the top she notes his cell phone number and then writes, “127 Dons,” the number of times she’s written his name.

  They go out again on January 6, this time to the movies. Sometime around the 10th Hae tells Aisha, who later tells Becky, that she got into a fight with her mother and spent the night at Don’s place. Hae’s uncle reports the same thing a couple of weeks later.

  Don doesn’t mention this when he’s questioned later, but on Tuesday, January 12, 1999, according to Don, she spends the evening at his home. Don recalls her being in a good mood, though she had said she was fighting with her mother.

  According to Don, Hae returns home and calls him around midnight. As she is speaking to him, she gets another call. It’s Adnan, telling her to guess where he’s calling from. Hae takes a couple of guesses and then gets it right—a new cell phone! She takes down his number and says she’ll call him later that night, but Adnan tells her not to worry about it. He is out right now but is heading home to go to bed.

  Then, according to Adnan and others he told, she asks him a question that may haunt him for years to come.

  Did he think it was possible that they would ever get back together?

  Adnan says no, he didn’t think so. They were better as friends.

  The call was short, less than a minute and a half, and then Hae returns to her call with Don. He remembers speaking to her until close to 3:00 a.m, and then she writes another journal entry, one that perhaps belies her question to Adnan, or is a reaction to his response, before going to sleep herself. “I love you Don. I think I have found my soulmate. I love you so much. I fell in love with you the moment I opened my eyes to see you in the break room for the first time.”

  Those would be the last words Hae Min Lee ever wrote in her diary.

  Adnan:

  It was a day in the spring of our 11th grade year that I asked Hae if she would go to the Junior Prom with me. We were sitting on the steps behind the school, and I was really nervous as I began to talk. As she listened, it seemed she was trying to hold back a smile. It soon turned into a giggle, and then finally she was full-on laughing as I stammered through my words. She broke in before I could finish, and I’ll never forget what she said:

  “Oh my God, Adnan, you sound like the biggest dork! Yes, I’ll go to prom with you, but I have to get to lacrosse practice sometime this year! Can we speed this up a bit, PLEASE?”

  Of course, she said all this with that beautiful smile of hers, and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. She had this amazing ability to put you at ease, and all my nervousness had faded away.

  Prior to us beginning to date, Hae and I had been casual friends. We had some of the same classes together, and we would always share a joke with each other. But I don’t recall ever spending time with her outside of school. After our Junior Prom, however, we began to have long conversations on the phone each night.

  It would usually take place fairly late at night. We would wait for our mothers to go to sleep, and then one of us would page the other, and then call the weather service. That way, when the other person would call, the audible ringer would never be activated, i.e., the phone wouldn’t ring. The person receiving the call would already be on the line with the weather recording, and could just click over using the call-waiting feature. Many nights, we would talk on the phone until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.

  We were always mindful of the fact that our mothers would be upset it they knew about any of this. They both had very strict opinions on dating; and neither of us could have a boy/girl call the house. If it were to happen, it would cause a big hassle. We had both grown accustomed to our conservative house rules, however, and we knew how to navigate around them.

  Our relationship progressed that summer in a typical, teenage fashion. Hae was a wonderful person; smart, beautiful, and caring. We’d go out to eat, go to the movies, and do all the normal things high-school kids do. We spent almost every day of that summer together. We had our small disagreements, but never any huge arguments or fights. We both treated each other with a great deal of love and respect.

  Toward the end of the summer, it did begin to become a bit hectic with our mothers. They had both grown suspicious, and we found ourselves in the position of having to evade their attention and their questions. It came to a point where Hae decided we should take a break, around the time when school began.

  Our subsequent break-ups would follow a similar pattern over the next few months. Something would happen with one of our families, and Hae would make the decision to call a halt to our dating. Some time would pass, and then she would initiate us getting back together again. I would be pretty sad at those times, but Hae always made sure I understood that it wasn’t due to us; rather, it was because of our family situations. And she always went out of her way to be a caring and compassionate person to me. During the times we were split up, we always remained on good terms; being friendly, loving, and respectful toward each other.

  Our final break-up was probably the least difficult, as by then it was clear that it would be a constant problem at home. The writing was on the wall, so to speak. It was a decision that made sense, and we had grown so close that our relationship easily transitioned into an amazing friendship.

  We would spend time in school together, always joking and laughing. There were times where we socialized outside of school, in mixed company. We were comfortable enough with each other that we would confide in each other about who we were seeing or interested in. She would tease me about some girl whose phone number I told her I got, laughingly insisting that I had just received the number to Pizza Hut. And I would kid her right back for being interested in an older guy.

  There was one incident in particular, I think, that really demonstrates the closeness of our friendship. One night it was snowing, and Hae had accidentally driven her car into the cinderblock base of a light pole. It happened in the parking lot of the mall where she worked. She paged me, and asked if I could come pick her up and take her home.

  When I arrived, one of her co-workers was with her. His name was Don, and he was the guy she had mentioned that she was interested in dating. She introduced us, and we had a brief conversation as we looked over her car. He had offered to give Hae a ride home, but she had declined. Eventually we left, and during the drive to her home, Hae asked what my impressions of Don were. I responded that he seemed like a very nice guy, and I was impressed that he was concerned enough to offer to give her a ride home. I then proceeded to ask her if he had a twin sister, so we could both date older people. She laughed at that, and we both kept joking with each other for the rest of the drive to her home.

  And that was really the tone of our friendship after we stopped dating. There wasn’t any anger, resentment, pettiness, or anything negative like that. We cared enough to just want the other to be happy. Our relationship was built on love and respect, and those qualities carried over to our friendship. I think a lot of people have a huge misconception that we wanted to get married, have children together, or planned to run away if our parents didn’t approve, and so forth. It was never so dramatic as that. We just really enjoyed each other, and it was very easy to transition from boyfriend/girlfriend to friends. And the fact that we began seeing other people afterward was not some big mystery to solve, so why would we jump back into the same stressful situation we just left.

  The new people we were seeing didn’t have the same strict family settings that we had. And anyone who has experienced this will tell you that it is easy to accommodate one strict mother, but it is almost impossible for a relationship to work with two …

  CHAPTER 2

  VANISHED: MISSING HAE

  Know that if the whole world gathered together to help you,

  they could not unless God had decreed so.

  And if the whole world gather together to harm you,

  they could not unless God had decreed so.
>
  The pens have been lifted, and the pages have dried.

  Prophet Muhammad, Sunan al Tirmidhi

  The jurisdiction of the Baltimore County Police Department (BCPD) is a full 612 square miles, surrounding the City of Baltimore, and it has ten precincts. The Woodlawn Precinct 2 is on Windsor Mill Road.

  Officer Scott Adcock wasn’t assigned to Woodlawn. He was assigned to the 3rd precinct, Garrison (now called Franklin), and he was out on routine patrol on the afternoon of January 13, 1999. Around 6:00 p.m. he was dispatched to a local home to respond to a call about a missing girl, Hae Min Lee.

  When he arrived at Hae’s home, Officer Adcock met with her fifteen-year-old brother, Young Lee. The officer made note of Hae’s routine and her car model, and then asked for relevant telephone numbers. Adcock called the LensCrafters store in Owings Mills, where Hae was scheduled to work that evening, then called Aisha Pittman, Hae’s best friend. Hae’s mother had called Aisha earlier looking for Hae, and Aisha reached out to other classmates and friends—Becky Walker, Krista Meyers, and Adnan—to ask about Hae. No one had seen her.

  The officer then attempted to get in touch with Hae’s new boyfriend, Don. Young had retrieved Hae’s diary from her bedroom (she knew her brother snuck peeks at it) to look for clues about her plans that evening and for Don’s number. Young dialed a number scribbled on her last entry from the night before. But Don didn’t pick up the phone, Adnan did.

  Young initially assumed he had reached Don, and when he realized that he had actually called Adnan, handed the phone to the detective.

  Adnan recalls the phone call, and that it was in the evening, after school. Aisha had already called him to tell him Hae’s family was looking for her and that she had spoken to a police officer. Officer Adcock asked Adnan if he had seen Hae and Adnan replied that he had seen her at school but not since. Adcock asked Adnan for his date of birth, address, and full name.

  Adnan was high when he got the phone call. After breaking his Ramadan fast with a quick bite, he had lit up. He remembers feeling panicked at speaking to a police officer in this condition; he thought maybe the cop would want to meet him while he was high as a kite. But he didn’t. He had other calls to make. The call to Adnan was brief: there were three incoming calls to Adnan’s phone around six o’clock that night, two less than a minute long, and one lasting a bit over four minutes. Adcock’s call was one of them, but there is no way to verify which one because no one—not the police, prosecution, or defense—ever retrieved the incoming call numbers in his call records.

  Adnan remembers another detail: when the phone rang, he reached over from the driver’s seat to get his cell phone from the car’s glove compartment. He wasn’t alone. He had to reach past his passenger, Jay Wilds.

  * * *

  It always seemed strange to me that the police would open a missing person’s investigation for an eighteen-year-old with a car, pager, job, and new boyfriend within hours of her disappearing. After all, Hae was technically an adult. In fact, as of 2005, numerous jurisdictions in Maryland did mandate a twenty-four-hour waiting period before accepting adult missing person’s reports. This was eventually changed through legislation that banned all such waiting periods throughout the state, a change unrelated to Hae’s case.

  While such a waiting period may not have been the Baltimore County Police Department’s procedure in 1999, filing a missing person’s report within two hours—even before the police had spoken to Hae’s current boyfriend—seems highly unusual. But roughly seven months prior, another eighteen-year-old girl had disappeared from Woodlawn and been found killed.

  Jada Denita Lambert disappeared one day on her way to work at a local mall. She was found when an anonymous call to 911 alerted the police that there was a young woman’s body in a shallow stream in Red Herring Park in the northeast part of Baltimore City. Jada was fully clothed but missing all of her personal property. An autopsy would later confirm she had been raped and strangled.

  At the time that Hae disappeared, Jada’s murder was yet unsolved. On the one hand, fear of a serial killer may have prompted a quick response by authorities to Hae’s not showing up. On the other hand, Jada disappeared in Baltimore City. Her case was never with BCPD, so maybe the County Police never even knew about her.

  Original missing person’s report

  According to Adcock’s testimony, the rest of his evening was devoted to filing the necessary paperwork for the case and trying to connect with Don.

  The report prepared for that evening’s activities identifies Hae as “victim,” another thing that has always struck me as odd this early on in a case.

  Back at headquarters that evening Officer Adcock enters Hae’s information from the missing person’s report into the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, a massive FBI-run database.

  But Adcock makes a mistake; he fails to enter Hae’s car information from his written report. These are vital details. After all, Hae disappeared along with her car.

  Around 1:30 a.m. on the 14th, about ten hours after Hae disappeared, Officer Adcock is finally able to reach Don.

  The report is extraordinarily short. It reads, “I spoke to victim Lee’s boyfriend Mr. Donald Robert Clinedinst III, DOB [redacted], M/W. Mr. Clinedinst advised that he does not know the whereabouts of Ms. Lee. Mr. Clinedinst advised that he talked to Ms. Lee last on 1/12/99. It should be noted that I spoke to Mr. Clinedinst on 1/14/99 at 0130 hours.”

  An additional report taken by another officer notes that Don had not seen Hae since January 12th, a slight difference from Adcock’s report, which notes they hadn’t spoken since then. Still, there are no details as to Don’s whereabouts on that day, whether he and Hae had plans to meet, and neither report mentions that he spoke with Hae into the early morning hours of January 13th, though that may be what he meant when he said he spoke to her on the 12th. After the conversations the police do not go meet with him.

  By 2:30 a.m. on the 14th, the parking lots of local hotels, motels, and high schools have been searched for Hae and her car, and the sheriff’s office of Harford County, the county where Don lives over thirty miles away, has also been alerted with requests to check the area for her vehicle. But no clue as to her whereabouts emerges.

  At 2:48 a.m. Hae’s car plates are run through the NCIC system, something that generally happens in two instances: a patrol officer runs the plates of a suspicious car he or she spots, or because the officer, having been alerted to keep a lookout for a car with these plates, uses the query as a method to “save” the plate numbers on their system. The query can be run two ways, through mobile terminals that are actually in the patrol cars themselves, or by calling into headquarters and having a dispatcher run the plates for you.

  The 2:48 a.m. query was run through the Harford County Emergency Services dispatch in response to a “Be On the Look Out” (BOLO) alert from BCPD; a second query run through the NCIC system came from a Baltimore County terminal at 4:46 a.m. Over the following two weeks, Hae’s plates will be run through the NCIC system four more times, all from Baltimore County Police terminals.

  The six times Hae’s license plates were run through the NCIC system

  The first two times the plates are run, it seems certain that they were in response to the BOLO; but the last two queries run on her plates, both on February 4th, seem to indicate something else entirely. Not just to a layperson, but also to law enforcement officers who reviewed the data. The checks are done a number of weeks after the original BOLO was issued, which means they were probably not run in order to “save” the numbers. They are also done by two different mobile terminals, at 3:35 a.m. and 9:35 a.m. respectively, which raises the likelihood that two different police officers on consecutive patrols came across Hae’s vehicle and ran the plates.

  If that is actually what happened, the tragedy of it is that these officers would have gotten no indication that this car was connected to an investigation. Those queries would have returned nothing. Adcock’s failure to enter Hae
’s car information from the missing person’s report into the NCIC system means there was no alert connected to her tags.

  It won’t be until February 10 that the database is revised to include the missing car information and actually link it to the missing person’s case, but then the VIN, the vehicle identification number, is entered incorrectly. On February 20th, the VIN is corrected. But her plates are never run again.

  Quite an investigative failure by any measure.

  In the early morning hours of January 14th, not long after Officer Adcock spoke with Don and shortly after Harford and Baltimore County Police had checked the area for Hae’s car, things got more complicated.

  Shortly before sunrise, a storm hit Baltimore and brought the city to a halt for days.

  * * *

  Overnight, the region had frozen over. From Baltimore to Washington, D.C., trees were coming down left and right, covered in heavy, solid ice, and roads had become treacherous, deadly, with over an inch of frozen cover in some places.

  The National Weather Service reported, “After a half to three-quarter inch of ice accumulated on trees and wires, 40 mph winds was enough to bring many of them down. Trees fell on cars, houses, utility lines and roads. The Governor declared a state of Emergency in Harford, Baltimore, Carroll, Howard and Montgomery Counties. About a half a million customers were without power and 800 pedestrians were reported injured from falls on ice.”

  Emergency rooms were packed with patients who had fallen or suffered a car accident, while newspapers reported hundreds of downed power lines and the struggle of emergency services to respond to storm-related injuries and calls. People were calling it the worst storm in years.

  While Governor Parris Glendenning ordered a state of emergency in six Maryland counties, Baltimore was hit worse than southern areas in the storm’s path—temperatures dropped lower in the city than in other parts of the state, down to 18 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the freezing point.