Via Serial’s Facebook page.

Since the first episode premiered in October, Serial, a spinoff podcast of This American Life, has everyone hooked on the case of Adnan Syed, who was sentenced to life in prison for killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999.

But did he really do it? That’s the question that producer/host Sarah Koenig explores through excruciating detail and analysis. Adnan, who was arrested when he was 17 years-old, maintains his innocence. The state’s case against him relied entirely on the testimony of Jay Wilds, a pot-dealing friend of Adnan’s who told police that he helped him bury Hae’s body.

Of course, as Sarah says on the last episode of the podcast’s first season (the second season will be a completely different story), we may never know the truth: is Adnan lying, or is Jay lying? Or are both of them?

While listener’s have heard Adnan obsessively tell his side of the story each week, the only thing we’ve heard of Jay are the interviews he gave to police back in 1999. He declined to be interviewed by Sarah and her producers.

But now, in part one of his first public interview, with First Look Media’s The Intercept, we finally get to read Jay tell his side of the story. And? Things are even more confusing than ever.

One of the big things Sarah focused on during Serial’s first season was the inconsistencies in Jay’s story. Over the course of several interviews with police, details of Jay’s story shifted—from where he first met Adnan after he allegedly killed Hae, to what he had done during the day previously, to where he went after Adnan told him he just killed Hae.

The reason his story changed so much, he told The Intercept, is because he was afraid of the cops trying to lock him up for his weed dealing:

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.

You can read the full interview here, and, like the rest of us, frantically re-listen to every episode to figure out every inconsistency Jay says and then lose sleep obsessively trying to figure out What It All Means.