Over the weekend, I watched all ten episodes of the Netflix true-crime series Making A Murderer. On Saturday night, I couldn’t stop watching until I had finished the series and it was light out.
I was furious at what appeared to be a giant miscarriage of justice.
My bias in general with law enforcement is pro police and pro prosecutors. This time, not so much.
[8-26-22 update. I just read the book, How to Solve a Cold Case: And Everything Else You Wanted To Know About Catching Killers. I now think Steven Avery did it.]
Here is the main prosecutor in the Steven Avery case:
By CRIMESIDER STAFF AP June 6, 2014, 2:09 PM
Ex-DA Ken Kratz’s law license suspended in sexting scandal
A former state prosecutor and victims’ rights advocate who tried to spark a sexual relationship with a domestic abuse victim and made sexual remarks to social workers cannot practice law for four months, the Wisconsin Supreme Court announced Friday.
As well as suspending Ken Kratz’s law license, the court called his actions “appalling” and ordered him to pay $23,904 to cover the costs of the disciplinary proceedings.
“This was exploitative behavior, harassing behavior, and a crass placement of his personal interests above those of his client, the State of Wisconsin,” the court wrote in a collective decision that wasn’t signed by any single justice.
Kratz now works as a defense attorney. He didn’t immediately return a message left at his office Friday morning. He had argued in court filings he didn’t deserve a suspension, saying he has suffered enough.
Kratz’s 18-year stint as Calumet County district attorney came to an end in 2010 after The Associated Press reported that he sent a barrage of racy text messages to a 25-year-old woman a year earlier while he was prosecuting her ex-boyfriend for abusing her. Kratz, then 50, called the woman a “hot nymph” and advertised himself as “the prize” with a $350,000 house and a six-figure salary. He told her he wanted her to be “so hot” and “treat me so well that you’d be THE woman. R U that good?”
The woman went to police, who referred the case to the state Department of Justice. That agency found Kratz hadn’t committed any crimes but told Kratz he should step aside from the domestic abuse prosecution and self-report his conduct to the state Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR).
Kratz removed himself from the case, reported his behavior to the OLR and agreed to resign as chairman of the state Crime Victims’ Rights Board. OLR decided he acted inappropriately but didn’t commit any ethical violations and quietly closed his case in March 2010.
An AP story on the case that September set off a firestorm of outrage. Kratz resigned in October 2010 as then-Gov. Jim Doyle began a little-used process to remove him from office. More women came forward and accused him of making sexual remarks to them; one social worker said he made a comment about oral sex to her before she testified in court and later told her he wanted the case to end so he could go to Las Vegas and have “big-boobed” women serve him drinks. Another social worker said he told her that he thought a court reporter had big breasts.
The OLR reopened its case against him. Kratz ultimately filed a no-contest plea to six misconduct charges. The agency recommended the Supreme Court suspend his license for six months. A referee found a four-month suspension would be more appropriate, noting Kratz has never tried to justify his behavior, he was abusing prescription drugs and was seeking treatment for a sex addiction.
More:
By CBSNEWS AP September 16, 2010, 10:41 AM
Prosecutor Sexted Choking Victim, Won’t ResignA police report shows he repeatedly sent Stephanie Van Groll text messages in October 2009 trying to spark an affair.
“Are you the kind of girl that likes secret contact with an older married elected DA … the riskier the better?” Kratz, 50, wrote in one message. In another, he wrote: “I would not expect you to be the other woman. I would want you to be so hot and treat me so well that you’d be THE woman! R U that good?”
Kratz was prosecuting Van Groll’s ex-boyfriend on charges he nearly choked her to death last year. Kratz also was veteran chair of the Wisconsin Crime Victims’ Rights Board, a quasi-judicial agency that can reprimand judges, prosecutors and police officers who mistreat crime victims…
Van Groll said Kratz sent the first text minutes after she left his office, where he had interviewed her about the case.
He said it was nice talking and “you have such potential,” signing the message “KEN (your favorite DA).” Twenty minutes later, he added, “I wish you weren’t one of this office’s clients. You’d be a cool person to know!” But he quickly tried to start a relationship and told her to keep quiet about the texts.
Van Groll at first was polite, saying Kratz was “a nice person” and thanking him for praise. By the second day, she responded with answers such as “dono” or “no.” Kratz questioned whether her “low self-esteem” was to blame for the lack of interest.
“I’m serious! I’m the atty. I have the $350,000 house. I have the 6-figure career. You may be the tall, young, hot nymph, but I am the prize!” he texted.
Kratz told her the relationship would unfold slow enough for “Shannon’s case to get done.” “Remember it would have to be special enough to risk all,” he wrote.
Van Groll said she went to police after the messages started becoming “kind of vulgar.” She provided copies of 30 messages and her responses, which the department released in response to an AP request.
The department referred the complaint to the state Division of Criminal Investigation. Van Groll, a college student and part-time preschool teacher who has moved to Merrill, said she has been told Kratz won’t be charged because “they didn’t think he did anything criminally wrong.”
In 2003, Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man who had served 18 years in prison for sexual assault, was exonerated through DNA evidence. The victim in the original crime apologized to Mr. Avery and a state bill devised to minimize such wrongful convictions took his name. The high-profile case became a calling card for the Wisconsin Innocence Project, a local version of the national nonprofit devoted to helping those wrongly accused.
…almost Dickensian account of the tragedy of the Averys. The uniformly stoic family members shift allegiances over the years, while Mr. Avery’s parents, as movingly bewildered and terrified as any fictional creations, steadfastly believe in their son’s innocence, even as their long battle takes down their business and any sense they may have had of belonging to a community.
Mr. Avery, heard mostly in prison phone calls and exhibiting a blank affect that leaves you uncertain about how to read him, becomes a secondary character as the series goes along. In his place, other people — his parents, a teenage nephew who becomes ensnared in the second case, the nephew’s mother — take center stage in a story whose astonishing twists and turns are balanced by acute anguish.
Mr. Avery’s nephew Brendan Dassey, goaded into a confession by highly questionable tactics (which we see on tape), tells his mother that he was “guessing” what the interrogators wanted.
“That’s what I do with my homework, too,” he adds.
In heartbreaking moments like those, questions of guilt and innocence, though they’re the heart of the series, begin to seem remote.
Here’s a review of episode four:
First was the indefensible interview with the learning-disabled 16-year-old, who was essentially force-fed details about the crime until he regurgitated them back. It reminded me of the West Memphis 3 case, in which Jessie Misskelley was clearly also coached. When one of the investigators, after ages trying to get Dassey to say something about shooting the victim, Teresa Hallbach, finally cracks and feeds him the information that she actually had been shot… Awful. Brutal. It’s hard to believe that after watching that footage anyone would consider Dassey’s statement a legitimate confession.
But his own comically awful defense attorney did, and so did that attorney’s morals-free investigator, who coached Dassey into signing another confession by insisting multiple times that Dassey participated in Hallbach’s murder, even after Dassey’s multiple denials. The kid has no idea what the consequences of his actions might be, and not only does the system not care, it actively asks him to implicate himself. He thinks he’s heading to sixth period to turn in a project, and later he just wants to watch WrestleMania. His heartbroken mother knows, and listening to their phone conversations is gutting.
Access to all of that information makes Making A Murderer unlike any other documentary I’ve ever seen, save perhaps The Staircase, which I’ll be obliged to mention in every one of these reviews. We see Dassey being interviewed by the police, interacting with his lawyer, and speaking to his mom. How a judge could view some of that material and not allow Dassey to obtain new lawyers is shocking—another blatant, awful look at systematic injustice. (His lawyer was eventually replaced.)
Even if you believe that Dassey played some part in the killing, there is no part of what happened to him that seems even remotely just. Like his uncle 20 years before, he seems to be guilty until proven guilty, with no knowledgeable person available to present him with any type of defense. It’s repellent.
Concentrating on Dassey meant that these two episodes didn’t focus too much on Steven Avery, the “star” of this circus. In the beginning, we hear him threatening suicide, and later he clearly feels despondent after his fiancée is bullied into breaking up with him. Her facts aren’t entirely clear, though what is clear is that the filmmakers want to present her as evidence of a continuing campaign of police bias against Avery.
And then, of course, there’s the bombshell evidence found by Avery’s defense team at the end of episode four. Somebody—and likely nobody with good intentions—pretty clearly tampered with some old blood of Avery’s, which was still in evidence from the 1985 case. There are only two explanations here that make any sense to me: Either Avery killed Hallbach and the dirty-ass cops that put him away the first time around wanted to make sure he was convicted, or those same dirty-ass cops actually murdered an innocent woman and built a whole frame-up around Avery. The former seems much more likely: One of the cops even opines that it would’ve just been easier to murder Avery themselves than to build this elaborate frame up against him.
The first of its 10 episodes introduces Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man released from prison 18 years after DNA evidence proved he didn’t commit a brutal attack. And it’s soon clear that Avery’s unbelievable story—one apparently involving gross misconduct by law enforcement—isn’t just going to end with him relishing in his newfound freedom, or fighting to make sure it never happens to anyone else again.
Because it does happen again—to Steven Avery. That’s what the writers and directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos set out to prove with Making a Murderer, which was released in its entirety Friday. Two years after being released from prison, Avery was bringing a $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County, and the former district attorney and sheriff who helped put him away, when he became the prime suspect in a gruesome new murder investigation. The series, which explores the possibility that Avery was framed, mimics HBO’s The Jinx and the first season of the podcast Serial with its gripping, real-life case that so often feels like fiction. But Making a Murderer, which took 10 years to to make, could very well eclipse those works, for the sheer density of reportage and the scale of the horrifying story it tells—one of rural class politics, bureaucratic opacity, and a seemingly coordinated institutional effort to destroy an innocent man.
Making a Murderer paints the Averys as a family whose members were always outsiders in the community, due to poverty and a lack of education. And, to be sure, these are not a made-for-TV bunch. A throwaway line in one episode references the fact that Avery doesn’t own a single pair of underwear. These are salt-of-the-earth folks from rural Wisconsin, with thick accents and a dubious grasp of the English language (a phone conversation between Brendan and his mother reveals that neither knows what “inconsistent” means). But all that information only drives home the point that Avery was an easy target for police.
Like its high-end true-crime brethren, Netflix’s new ten-episode Making a Murderer is gripping, a little salacious, and about more than its central legal saga — in this case, rural poverty and entrenched power structures. The show fits right in with The Jinx and “Serial,” and it’s at least as good as both, and maybe better in some areas. But The Jinx is much more of a spectacle, and “Serial” is much more of a mystery series. Making a Murderer is an anthem of hopelessness. It’s as engrossing as they come, impactful and devastating, and it left me with a hollowed-out despondence generally treatable only with alcohol and ranting.
Making a Murderer centers on Steven Avery, of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. He was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1985 and spent 18 years in prison before a DNA test finally exonerated him. Two years later, Avery was arrested again — this time for the murder of Teresa Halbach, a photographer and business acquaintance. Avery’s defense attorneys make a compelling case that Avery’s the target of a police conspiracy, and the prosecution relies heavily on the confession of one of Avery’s nephews, then 16 years old. That confession, which was videotaped, is one of the most haunting segments I’ve ever seen, and not because of how disturbing the material within it is, although it is disturbing. Mostly it’s upsetting because of how staggeringly, appallingly coerced it seems. Something horrible clearly happened — a woman was killed, her body dismembered and burned. But justice that comes from coercion and corruption isn’t justice.
… I don’t believe the prosecution’s theory of the crime, and I don’t know if that obligates me to do more than simply carry that knowledge. I already knew wrongful convictions existed. I already knew that confessions could be coerced. Simply bearing witness to the story feels like a cop-out, but the show isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a specific call to action. I don’t know what happens after documentary like this, the kind of social response we should aspire to. Making captures and engenders the tension between wanting to run into the streets and scream — who could hear these wails and do nothing? — and knowing that louder people already did and their cries went unheard, or worse, were heard and ignored.
There were a few moments in Making a Murderer that sent me reeling, but perhaps none more than one of the prosecutors telling the jury, “Reasonable doubt is for innocent people.” That’s a common thread in the show, a feeling of, wait, that can’t be right … can it?, an overall sense of frustration. Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi superbly combine the legal system’s uniquely high stakes with its ordinary tedium and boring bureaucracies. Frustrating ineptitudes and prejudices reign within our criminal-justice processes, just as they do everywhere else on our planet. Let’s note here that Steven Avery is white, Teresa Halbach was white, Avery’s nephew Brendan Dassey is white, all the police officers and judges and lawyers are white. Many, many stories about the American justice system are stories about race. This one is a story about class, unambiguously. It’s about other things, too, but this show doesn’t exist without profound, pernicious in-group/out-group class conflict, one that posits that the Avery clan can never be fully innocent because they’re already guilty of the greatest crime in America: being poor.
I didn’t enjoy Making a Murderer — enjoy makes it sound more pleasant than it really was — I was engulfed, and also crushed, by it. I lied about plans so I could rush home and watch more episodes, though mainlining a show this distressing is not a great way to live. I encourage you to resist the urge just to Google everything about the case until you’ve watched the whole series. Bring friends with you on this voyage, too. It’s a harrowing but worthy trip.
* Anyone else in a state of rage while watching this? How could any person watching the tapes not see that a young boy with intellectual disabilities was being coerced into telling a story that is totally made up by the police? How??? How could any person in legal authority not see exactly what has happened and give Brendan a fair trial with effective legal representation? WTF is wrong with these people?? How do they let these evil scumbags, who used this young boy for their own agenda, get away with this shit?!
I keep needing to step away from the show every few episodes to bring my rage level down. But as soon as I start watching another episode, it shoots right back up. Goddamn the legal system can be so infuriating when evil triumphs and the innocent get hurt.* I’m raging with you! This whole situation is a miscarriage of justice especially for Brenden. The basis of his confession is completely created by the detectives who questioned him. He obviously has a learning disability and appeared confused by all their questions. When he said he “guessed” at what they were looking for, my heart broke. Personally I’d like to start a campaign to get the innocence project of Wisconsin to take on Brendon’s case.
By the way, look up Calumet County Prosecutor, Ken Kratz. He was dismissed from the prosecutor’s office in 2014 because of sexting charges…
Writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi have invested a decade in chronicling the case of the wrongly accused Steven Avery, and the hard work shows, in a story that feels as if it’s equal parts “Rectify” and “Fargo.” A Wisconsin man with a history of petty crimes, Avery spent 18 years in prison for a sexual assault, before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003.
As the filmmakers painstakingly document, Avery’s conviction seemed to require willful misconduct on the part of police and local prosecutors, ignoring alibi witnesses and evidence pointing to another suspect. With the case singled out as a miscarriage of justice, Avery appeared destined to cash in via a civil suit — at least some compensation for an ordeal that, among other things, cost him his wife and children.
Yet as that moment drew near, Avery suddenly found himself charged with another heinous crime, inviting speculation about whether local authorities were seeking to undermine his claims. Adding a discomfiting twist, much of the testimony hinged on a 16-year-old cousin of the accused who possessed limited mental faculties and was extensively questioned (and yes, there’s tape of all this) without a parent or attorney present.
Given how tedious actual legal proceedings can appear to an audience weaned on the whiz-bang-pow cross-examinations of “Law & Order,” Demos and Ricciardi have done an astonishing job of cutting to the heart of the story with clips from depositions and courtrooms. As constructed, the series also plays like an indictment of the media, from the blather of local news anchors to a “Dateline” producer shown discussing how enticing salacious true-crime tales are, both to her show and its competitors…
Still, any skepticism will evaporate long before completing the first few episodes, and viewers will be hard-pressed not to come away with a gnawing sense that a terrible miscarriage of justice occurred, over a span of decades. Because once reeled into the twisted web that is “Making a Murderer,” the temptation will be to binge on it until the bitter end.
