#BBCtrending: Amateur fans of Serial podcast investigate true-life murder

It's one of the most popular podcasts ever, and amateur detectives are trying to get to the bottom of the true-life murder at the heart of it. But how is social media sleuthing influencing the case and the real people caught up in it?

Serial, external is a spin-off of the US public radio programme This American Life, external. (If you're already among its legions of devoted fans you can skip this paragraph.) For nine episodes it's been re-investigating the case of Hae Min Lee, a teenager who was murdered in Baltimore. Her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted of the murder and has been in prison for the past 15 years. In a huge journalistic undertaking, Serial's producers, led by Sarah Koenig, external, have examined the case from nearly every angle.

And because it's a real-life crime, the series has inspired fans to start their own investigations. A section of reddit devoted to Serial, external has attracted more than half a million s, and fans have been hunting for clues both online and at key locations in and around Baltimore.

"I was hooked from the beginning," says one reddit who goes by the handle "wtfsherlock". His real name is Mike and he lives in California, but he didn't want to reveal any more than that to BBC Trending.

Amateur detectives have dug up and shared links to the criminal records of witnesses, pointed out similar cases, external nearby and have even travelled to the Best Buy electronics store at the centre of the case, to try to track down evidence of a pay phone, external that a key phone calls allegedly came from.

Sources: Serial, Apple, iTunescharts.net

Mike says he's done some fact-checking himself. In an early episode, it was revealed that a potential witness might have been able to provide an alibi for Adnan Syed when she claimed to seeing him just before a snowstorm.

"I went and looked back at National Weather Service data, external, and it showed there was no snow on that day at all - it was actually quite warm," he says. "There was a storm, but it was the next day."

The weather discrepancy was later noted in a Serial blog post, external.

The producers of Serial, citing deadline pressure, said they didn't have time to answer our questions about how social media has affected the course of the series. In a New York Times interview, external, Sarah Koenig said she was surprised at the popularity of the podcast and denied that was guiding the future of the series. But she also said producers were keeping one eye on the online conversation.

"I'm not looking at reddit. But we do have people on the staff who are dipping into it to make sure there's nothing crazy on there or something we're missing - they might know something we don't."

But Mike, aka wtfsherlock, thinks the social media discussion has influenced the course of the series. For example, one of the recent discussion points on reddit and elsewhere has been about the lack of comment by Hae Min Lee's family. Episode nine, external then included a age in which Sarah Koenig detailed the lengths the podcast's producers have gone to find family , including hiring two private detectives and Korean-speaking researchers.

"In my 20 plus years of reporting, I've never tried so hard to find anyone," Koenig said of Lee's mother. "I learned a few days ago that they [the Lee family] know what we're doing. My best guess is they want no part of it, which I respect."

Mike says reddit s have had some minimal with the producers and that he understands why they haven't leaned more on reddit for research tips.

"They are very much doing their own thing," he says. "I think it would be very risky for Serial to say, 'could you find out where so-and-so lives"A mugshot of a man with short, brown hair and a beard. He is staring into the camera and wearing a black hoodie. " loading="lazy" src="https://image.staticox.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fichef.bbci.co.uk%2Face%2Fstandard%2F385%2Fsprodpb%2Fe3e8%2Flive%2F5aa87e70-44fa-11f0-b6e6-4ddb91039da1.jpg" width="385" height="216" class="ssrcss-11yxrdo-Image edrdn950"/>