12 Burning Questions About “Making A Murderer” Answered
In the final episode of
Making a Murderer, archival footage plays of George Stephanopoulos on
Good Morning America
asking, “What is going on in the Wisconsin Department of Justice?!?”
That’s one of many questions fans of the true crime docuseries about a
Wisconsin man wrongly convicted of rape who was also eventually found
guilty of murder have been asking themselves, their friends, and the
internet ever since all 10 episodes dropped on Netflix on Dec. 18.
The
series chronicles the life of Steven Avery, a Manitowoc, Wisconsin, man
who was convicted of rape in 1985 and imprisoned for 18 years, despite
never wavering in his claim of innocence. Newly tested DNA evidence
exonerated him in 2003 and he became a free man. But not for long. In
2005, in the midst of a $36 million civil suit Avery filed against
Manitowoc County for wrongful incarceration, he found himself charged
with the murder of car photographer Teresa Halbach, who was killed after
she visited the Avery family’s auto salvage yard. The blame quickly
spread to Avery’s young nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was later charged in
the crime as well. They are both currently serving life sentences.
The two trials contained so many insane twists and turns — from
accusations of evidence tampering to sexting scandals — that it takes
Making a Murderer
more than 10 hours to lay them out, but the three most important claims
the series, and Avery and Dassey’s respective lawyers, posited, are:
1. That Manitowoc
County Sheriff’s Department targeted and framed Avery for the crime as retribution for long-held grudges.
2. That law enforcement coerced Dassey’s confession in an attempt to further frame Avery.
3. That there is a fundamental inequity at work in countless branches of our legal system.
It’s
a story that spans more than 30 years and one that filmmakers Moira
Demos and Laura Ricciardi have spent the last 10 turning into
Making a Murderer.
Since the series was released, viewers have vocalized their
frustrations over the alleged law enforcement and prosecutorial
misconduct in a way that closely replicates how
Serial listeners
questioned the guilt of Adnan Syed. The documentary has also come under
fire from key players involved in the prosecution, who say that Demos
and Ricciardi omitted compelling evidence that would have made the
state’s case less ambiguous.
The filmmakers recently sat down with
BuzzFeed News at M Cafe in Los Angeles to discuss how they executed
their documentary, to respond to their critics, and to answer these
pressing questions
Making a Murderer viewers want to know.
1. How did they come to make this documentary?
Ricciardi (left) and Demos (right) with cinematographer Iris Ng. Selena Salfen
Demos and Ricciardi first learned of Steven Avery’s case in November 2005, when it made
the front page of the
New York Times
while they were film students at Columbia University. “I found it
riveting and kept elbowing poor Moira and saying, ‘I cannot believe
this,’” Ricciardi said. “The focus of that story was the backlash the
Wisconsin Innocence Project was experiencing as a result of having been
instrumental in freeing Steven. Of course, as it got deeper into the
article, I realized that there was an apparent conflict of interest
between the county and him.”
So Ricciardi called the Manitowoc
County Clerk’s Office and discovered reporters were allowed to watch,
and given access to, video footage from inside the courtroom. The two
headed to Wisconsin in November 2005 to attend Avery’s preliminary
hearing (which is seen at the beginning of Episode 3 of
Making a Murderer).
In February 2006, Avery’s trial was scheduled for that September. Demos
and Ricciardi were packing up to return home and await that date when
they got an unexpected call saying the law enforcement were going to
hold a press conference.
“We couldn’t figure out why they were
holding a press conference,” Demos said. “They hadn’t held one for three
and a half months.” That was when officials first named Dassey as a
suspect in Halbach’s murder. “It caught everyone off guard,” Demos said.
“It caught the family off guard, as you can see — they’re reeling from
it. At that point, we knew that this was going to be more than we had
thought.”
The two decided to move to Wisconsin. “Part of that was
so we could be there for every court date and every development, but
also so that we could start to reach out to subjects and do interviews
about the past and go through archival materials,” Ricciardi explained.
2. How did they gain such intimate access to the Avery family?
Demos and Ricciardi in the Avery home with Delores Avery and Barb Tadych. Danielle Ricciardi
Throughout the documentary, the Avery family — most notably Steven’s
parents, Delores and Allan, and Brendan Dassey’s mother, Barb Tadych —
are incredibly press averse. But Demos and Ricciardi not only secured
repeated interviews with them, they also filmed them in their homes.
“Steven
wanted his voice to be heard and he was sort of a gatekeeper in terms
of our access to the family,” Ricciardi said of their unique access. “As
with most of the subjects who became sit-down subjects, we would reach
out with a letter. We wrote to Steven while he was in the county jail —
this was after his preliminary hearing and he had just learned in
December of 2005 that there was enough evidence to hold him for trial.
He knew he was facing mandatory life should he be convicted, so things
were pretty bleak for him and the stakes were very high. I would say he
was immediately open to us and made it possible for us to meet his
mother and his brother. We drove out to the yard and visited with them
in the shop and basically, through that, we were able to find a way in.
“I
think what they seemed to respond well to was that it was so clear we
were not there to judge. There was no sense of urgency on our part — we
could take our time. We were there to listen, we were as respectful as
we could be, we would make appointments with them, and it wasn’t as if
we would drive up and start filming the second we got out of the car. We
just started to build a rapport with the family and it was incredible.
They were incredibly gracious to us. They had this 40-acre lot, which
was not only their business, but also their home. They opened all of it
up to us.”
Branden Dassey in his 2006 interrogation. Netflix
The series goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the trials
affected not only the defendants, but their families as well. “They were
in such a unique position because they had already lived through a
wrongful imprisonment for 18 years. And one of the things we both
learned was when someone with such a support system goes to prison in a
situation like that, it’s not as if that person alone is suffering — the
whole family is suffering,” Ricciardi added. “It affected the family’s
reputation, how they felt when they went out into the community; it
affected their business. So for them to find themselves back in that
position again, it was very tragic. Steven was our protagonist, but in a
way, we had a group protagonist because Steven was actually
incarcerated the whole time we were filming. We spent some of our most
intimate time with his family. We felt a tremendous sense of
responsibility to tell their story as accurately as possible and to just
be fair to them and not caricature them in any way or judge them in any
way.”
When asked about the claim Michael O’Kelly — an
investigator hired by Dassey’s original lawyer, Len Kachinsky — read in
an email during the 10th episode that the Averys are “criminals” and
“engaged in sexual activities with nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws,”
the otherwise even-keeled Demos grew immediately angry. “That statement
is incredibly offensive,” she said. “This family has deep bonds, an
incredibly sound moral system, and has been vilified by people who don’t
know them.”
3. Did they intentionally tone down Steven Avery’s past crimes?
Avery Netflix
One of the chief critiques of the series from those with intimate
knowledge of the case is that the filmmakers gloss over some of the less
savory aspects of Avery’s criminal past in order to make him a more
sympathetic figure. For example, the first episode briefly discusses an
incident where 20-year-old Avery pleaded guilty to harming an animal. In
the series, Avery is heard saying, “We were fooling around with the cat
and I don’t know, they were kind of negging it on and I tossed him over
the fire and he lit up. I was young and stupid.” In reality, Avery and
another man pleaded no contest to pouring gasoline and oil on Avery’s
cat and throwing it into a fire.
“His priors, the thing that
happened at the bonfire with the cat, running his cousin off the road…
not smart things to do,” Demos said. “It was really important to us to
make sure we didn’t leave those things out. I don’t think you
necessarily have to dive in on his side, but at the same time, you show
all his flaws and then you show what others are doing to him and how
they’re spinning what he’s doing and I think that’s where people get
sucked in.”
Demos said she and Ricciardi thought Avery was a
compelling protagonist because of — not in spite of — his past misdeeds.
“I would add that in some ways that’s part of the point,” she
continued. “If you want to push him away at the start and by Episode 10,
you care about him, you’ve grown as a person and that’s really
important.”
4. How did they obtain audio of all the phone calls?
Netflix
The filmmakers faced a huge problem right off the bat in making a
documentary about Steven Avery: They had almost no access to him as they
were repeatedly denied visitations. One way they got around that
problem was through the use of audio interviews that make Avery’s point
of view — captured throughout the trial — front and center in the
documentary.
“All calls they made from the county jail or the
juvenile detention center are recorded, so we have thousands of hours of
phone calls,” Demos said. “Basically interviews that Laura was doing —
we do take out Laura’s questions. Some of what Steven is saying, he’s
saying to reporters — he did do a few calls with local reporters over
the course of a year and a half. When it’s a conversation between Barb
and Brendan, that’s just a recorded call between Barb and Brendan. We
didn’t hear it until a year later.”
Getting such a huge piece of the puzzle more than a year after the
fact was incredibly illuminating for the filmmakers: It not only gave
them insight into Avery and Dassey’s emotional state from outside the
walls, but it also revealed that many members of the Avery family were
ill-equipped to be dealing with such life-or-death stakes. “I remember
the first time we listened to some of the calls where she’s confronting
him over the phone, like, ‘Did you do this?’ As somebody with a legal
background, I’m thinking,
Don’t ask your son that over the phone!” Ricciardi recalled.
“It
was amazing that this family was even remotely trusting of law
enforcement when this had all happened to them,” Demos said. “I think
class and education are just two ways one can be vulnerable.”
“We
would be shocked sometimes,” Ricciard added. “It would be one thing to
hear Brendan ask Barb, when he’d have an upcoming court date, if he
would get out as a result of his pretrial court date. But to then hear
the adults talk about that… There were times when Mrs. Avery would bring
clothes to court for Steven because she thought he might get out that
day. You would think that because this is a family that has been through
it once before, they’ve been educated by the system, and in fact, they
still didn’t know any better.”
5. Did they ever feel unsafe while making the documentary?
Netflix
“I don’t think I do ever feel physically unsafe, but I think part of
it was we were very public,” Demos said. “We were there all the time
filming. Everybody knew we were there. We were collaborating with the
media. There was a certain sense of what it would look like if I
suddenly wasn’t there. And that was really the only source of safety, to
just be out there.”
But the government did certainly go out of
their way to try and quash their documentary. In the fall of 2006, the
state essentially tried to subpoena the footage. So Demos and Ricciardi
hired a lawyer. “The state wanted any statement Steven made … and
statements by others who might have knowledge or claim to have knowledge
about who was responsible for the death of Teresa Halbach,” Ricciardi
said. “Our argument in trying to get the court to throw out the subpoena
is that the state has access to all of this material. Steven is
currently incarcerated. All of his calls, all of his visits are being
recorded, so they don’t need to get that from us. It was a fishing
expedition, and we really think it was an effort by the state to shut
down our production. There was a way in which, on the one hand,
Wisconsin is a very media-friendly state. It was great for us that
cameras were allowed in the courtroom, it was great for us that they had
a very expansive public records law so we could get the types of
materials [we did]. On the other hand, the people on the ground, the
people in power, weren’t always happy we were there.”
6. Did they consciously omit evidence that was used to convict Avery?
Ken Kratz Netflix
To the layperson, it appears that most of the physical evidence —
Halbach’s mysteriously appearing car key, Avery’s blood in her car, the
lack of Halbach’s blood in Avery’s garage — that led to Avery’s murder
conviction is questionable. Ken Kratz, the former Calumet County
district attorney who prosecuted this case,
said in an interview
following the documentary’s release that the filmmakers ignored almost
90% of the physical evidence that he used to convict Avery of the
homicide.
“I would say that Ken Kratz is entitled to his opinion,
but he’s not entitled to his own facts,” Ricciardi said in response to
Kratz’s interview. Another point of contention is that Kratz said he was
never asked to participate in the documentary, though he repeatedly
appeared in archival and courtroom footage. Ricciardi refuted that
allegation — and said they have proof. In gathering court documents, the
filmmakers had to file dozens of motions, which became part of the
trial’s permanent record, and in one of those is “our letter to Ken
Kratz from September 2006 inviting him to participate,” Ricciardi said.
“We wanted to speak to lawyers, we wanted to speak to judges, we wanted
to speak to law enforcement, we invited the Halbachs to sit down with
us, we had coffee with Mike [Halbach, Teresa’s brother], and ultimately,
people could decide for themselves whether they wanted to participate.
But how would you feel if you invited someone to participate, they
declined, and later said, ‘I’m not in it?’”
Archival footage from Good Morning America. Netflix
It is also revealed in the final episode that Kratz — who has become the
subject of many fans’ ire since the release of
Making a Murderer
— engaged in sexual text messages with a domestic violence victim when
he was prosecuting her abuser. The case gained national attention and
led to the governor of Wisconsin seeking Kratz’s removal from office in
2010 — a development the filmmakers had to figure out how to include
without turning it into a “gotcha” moment. “It certainly didn’t shape
how we portrayed what had already happened,” Demos said. “We made the
decision that the only thing that mattered with that is the way it
affected these cases. You could have had a whole 20-minute thing about
it that would have just been a tangent, so we tried to include what was
relevant to the story.”
Ricciardi added, “We did not want it to be
perceived as a low blow for Ken Kratz. It really needed to be relevant
to the story and we hope this story works on multiple levels: There’s
Steven’s whole throughline, but then there’s also the opportunity to
look at the system itself and the question was,
How is this particular community going to respond when news like this breaks?
What we thought was so interesting is after the AP reporter, Ryan
Foley, broke the story, it became public soon thereafter that the
Department of Justice knew for a year and covered it up.”
“That felt like, ‘Oh, here we go again,’” Demos said.
7. Do they believe there’s a vast government conspiracy at work?
Ricciardi (left) and Demos (right). Netflix
If, as many viewers believe, countless state witnesses and officials
lied and coerced in an attempt to frame Steven Avery, one could conclude
that there must be a vast government conspiracy at work in Wisconsin.
The filmmakers, however, do not believe this to be the case. “As
[Avery’s defense lawyer] Jerry Buting said, it could be done by one or
two people,” Demos said. “If the mode of operation is not that there are
strict rules of justice and we just follow them no matter how we feel
about them, if people are willing to go along or not challenge their
supervisor, or not say, ‘He didn’t do those other things, he probably
didn’t do this,’ it’s a pretty murky area where it’s more about a
character assessment than really looking at the facts. And one thing can
tip that and it’ll just be a snowball effect without people feeling
like they’re colluding or part of any conspiracy.”
Ricciardi added, “There’s so much room for abuse if there’s malfeasance and people are operating with impunity.”
8. Who killed Teresa Halbach?
Teresa Halbach Netflix
After spending more than 10 years of their lives in the minutiae of
this case, Demos and Ricciardi are undeniable experts in everything
Avery — so do they have a theory as to who killed Teresa Halbach? “I
don’t have a theory, but I don’t feel like what the prosecution
presented is a convincing narrative — especially since there were two
narratives presented,” Demos said. “I don’t know how I can be satisfied
with that. I feel beyond terrible for Teresa and her family, first that
something terrible happened to her but that we don’t know what it is and
that has not been solved.”
And that’s a very important point in
the eyes of the filmmakers. “Potentially, the Halbachs are victims
because they don’t know what happened to their daughter. Potentially,
Steven and Brendan are victims because they are potentially in prison
for something they didn’t do,” Demos said. “But if all of those things
are true, that means whoever did this is still out there, and you should
care about that whether you care about Steven or Brendan or Teresa —
for your own sake.”
9. Why didn’t they talk to more jurors?
Barb Tadych (left) with excused juror Richard Mahler. Netflix
The jury is a big question mark in the latter half of the series. The
doc informs viewers that, at the start of deliberations, seven people
believed Avery was innocent. But in the end, three jurors were able to
sway the collective into guilty votes. “How did seven people get
swayed?” Demos wondered aloud. “The one person who talks about what was
going on [an excused juror named Richard Mahler] says that the three who
said guilty refused to deliberate. And if they weren’t going to change
their minds, what could the other seven do?”
Both Demos and
Ricciardi feel the verdict itself was confusing: Avery was found guilty
of murder but rendered innocent for mutilating the body. “What story are
they telling about what happened to this woman?” Ricciardi said, adding
that she’s long viewed it as a compromise between the jurors — a theory
she’s been unable to prove because the jurors “entered into a pact,
essentially, and would not speak publicly about their process.”
Ricciardi
continued, “If it’s an unjust process, how will you know what has
emerged is the truth? That’s really the question. I don’t think you can
have truth without justice, so the question is: Can we trust the
verdicts in either case?”
But some jurors ended up coming to
Brendan’s trial, and the filmmakers take that as a sign they had
lingering doubts about Avery’s guilt. “They clearly had questions after
delivering an answer,” Demos said.
10. Were any state government employees penalized?
Sgt. Andrew Colborn
Netflix
Aside from the allegation that the law enforcement framed Avery for
Halbach’s murder, there’s undeniable proof that certain members failed
in their duties. For example, Sgt. Andrew Colborn ignored a call from
another office that could have freed Avery from his original
incarceration much earlier, and Sg. Jason Orth’s log of visitors to the
crime scene was lacking, to say the least. But to the filmmakers’
knowledge, no one was reprimanded or demoted as a result.
“It’s
quite the opposite, actually,” Demos said. “People received awards. I
think Kratz was named prosecutor of the year for winning the case; Tom
Fassbender received an award for his role as an investigator on this
case. So, no — their careers have been bolstered by this case.”
“And
they’ve been promoted,” Ricciardi added. “I believe Colburn is a
lieutenant now in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department.” Lt. James
Lenk has since retired.
11. Do they hope citizens will investigate the case as well?
The Making a Murderer subreddit. Reddit
In the aftermath of the documentary’s release, the Innocence Project
is looking into some aspects of Avery’s case,
countless Reddit threads have begun digging into the details, and the hacker group that goes by the name Anonymous is
reported to be
looking into the case as well. “We weren’t there to solve the crime, we
were there to document the experience of being accused in this
country,” Demos said. “We’ll never know what happened on Oct. 31, but
what we could do was document what the state and the prosecution was
doing,” Ricciardi added.
“We’d always hoped the series would
promote a dialogue,” she continued. “The idea that people might take it
upon themselves to do some research or want to look into things more, I
think that’s really exciting, too. Because there’s so much rhetoric out
there about the public having apathy about these things, and there’s so
many programs that are devoted to the sensational. Part of what’s so
exciting and refreshing about the response we’re getting is we made a
series where we, first and foremost, cared about the integrity of the
project, and accuracy and fairness were the two guiding principles. And
to have people respond, to have this outpouring of support, is really
great, and I think it speaks to how we as a culture are not apathetic
about these things. We do care. We do want to get involved. We do want
things to change for the better. And that’s really great.”
12. Do they plan to keep documenting Avery’s story?
Netflix
With both Avery’s and Dassey’s cases active in the judicial system,
the 10th episode is hardly the end of the story, and the filmmakers plan
to keep telling it. “We’ll have to see what’s happening, but we do
intend to continue to follow this story, the response to it, whether
things change in their cases, or whether things happen in the justice
system as a result of this. Because this is about our system, and we’re
just using these cases as an example,” Demos said. “I mean, if you look
at Twitter, there’s so much talk about Wisconsin and Manitowoc, but
people just need to look in their own town. I guarantee it’s no
different.”
And that, more than anything else, is the reason Demos
and Ricciardi wanted to tell this story: to expose a broken system that
not only fails to protect the innocent, but can be wielded like a
weapon by the corrupt. “There are no systems in place to protect us — if
we don’t demand they work the way they’re supposed to, what’s there is
not going to do us any good,” Demos said. “I feel like spending these
years in Wisconsin documenting this case, going deeper than what the
press conference said, getting into documents, I will never look at this
process the same again. Some people do seem to be profoundly affected
by watching it. Our intention was not only to start a dialogue, but to
give people an experience. This journey we’ve taken has changed us, and
if everybody had gone on this journey, the system would be better.”
CORRECTION
Avery pleaded no contest to pouring gasoline and oil on a cat and
throwing it into a fire. A previous version of this story misstated that
he pleaded guilty.
credit:huffington post