Wisconsin is probably the most beautiful of the midwestern farm states. Its often dramatic terrain, replete with unglaciated driftless areas, borders not just the Mississippi River but two great inland seas whose opposite shores are so far away they cannot be glimpsed standing at water’s edge. The world across the waves looks distant to nonexistent, and the oceanic lakes stretch and disappear into haze and sky, though one can take a ferry out of a town called Manitowoc and in four hours get to Michigan. Amid this somewhat lonely serenity, there are the mythic shipwrecks, blizzards, tornadoes, vagaries of agricultural life, industrial boom and bust, and a burgeoning prison economy; all have contributed to a local temperament of cheerful stoicism.
Nonetheless, a feeling of overlookedness and isolation can be said to persist in America’s dairyland, and the idea that no one is watching can create a sense of invisibility that leads to the secrets and labors that the unseen are prone to: deviance and corruption as well as utopian projects, untested idealism, daydreaming, provincial grandiosity, meekness, flight, far-fetched yard decor, and sexting. Al Capone famously hid out in Wisconsin, even as Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party was getting underway. Arguably, Wisconsin can boast the three greatest American creative geniuses of the twentieth century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Orson Welles, and Georgia O’Keeffe, though all three quickly left, first for Chicago, then for warmer climes. (The state tourism board’s campaign “Escape to Wisconsin” has often been tampered with by bumper sticker vandals who eliminate the preposition.)
More recently, Wisconsin is starting to become known less for its ever-struggling left-wing politics or artistic figures—Thornton Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder—than for its ever-wilder murderers. The famous late-nineteenth-century “Wisconsin Death Trip,” by which madness and mayhem established the legend that the place was a frigid frontier where inexplicably gruesome things occurred—perhaps due to mind-wrecking weather—has in recent decades seemingly spawned a cast of killers that includes Ed Gein (the inspiration for Psycho), the serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and the two Waukesha girls who in 2014 stabbed a friend of theirs to honor their idol, the Internet animation Slender Man.
The new documentary Making a Murderer, directed and written by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, former film students from New York, is about the case of a Wisconsin man who served eighteen years in prison for sexual assault, after which he was exonerated with DNA evidence. He then became a poster boy for the Innocence Project, had his picture taken with the governor, had a justice commission begun in his name—only to be booked again, this time for murder.
Ricciardi and Demos’s rendition of his story will not help rehabilitate Wisconsin’s reputation for the weird. But it will make heroes of two impressive defense attorneys as well as the filmmakers themselves. A long-form documentary in ten parts, aired on Netflix, the ambitious series looks at social class, community consensus and conformity, the limits of trials by jury, and the agonizing stupidities of a legal system descending on more or less undefended individuals (the poor). The film is immersive and vérité—that is, it appears to unspool somewhat in real and spontaneous time, taking the viewer with the camera in unplanned fashion, discovering things as the filmmakers discover them (an illusion, of course, that editing did not muck up). It is riveting and dogged work.
The film centers on the Avery family of Manitowoc County, home to the aforementioned ferry to Michigan. Even though the lake current has eroded some of the beach, causing the sand to migrate clockwise to the Michigan dunes, and the eastern Wisconsin lakeshore has begun to fill forlornly with weeds, it is still a picturesque section of the state. The local denizens, whether lawyers or farmers, speak with the flata’s, throatily hooted o’s, and incorrect past participles (“had went”) of the region. There is a bit of Norway and Canada in the accent, which is especially strong in Wisconsin’s rural areas and only sometimes changes with education.
The Avery family are the proprietors of Avery’s Auto Salvage, and their property—a junkyard—on the eponymous Avery Road is vast and filled with over a thousand wrecked automobiles. It is a business not unlike farming in that in winter everything is buried in snow and unharvestable. The grandparents, two children, and some grandchildren live—or used to—on an abutting compound that consists of a small house, a trailer, a garage, a car crusher, a barn, a vegetable garden, and a fire pit.
In 1985 Steven Avery, the twenty-three-year-old son of Dolores and Allan Avery, was arrested and convicted of a sexual assault he did not commit. There was no forensic technology for DNA testing in 1985, and he had the misfortune to look much like the actual rapist—blond and young—and the traumatized victim, influenced by the county investigators who had the whole Avery family on their radar, identified him in a line-up as her attacker. Despite having sixteen alibi witnesses, he was found guilty. The actual rapist was allowed to roam free.
After the Wisconsin Innocence Project took on his case, Avery was finally exonerated in 2003. DNA tests showed he was not guilty and that the real attacker was now serving time for another rape. Avery then hired lawyers and sued Manitowoc County and the state of Wisconsin for wrongful imprisonment and for denying his 1995 appeal (a time during which DNA evidence might have set him free), which the state had mishandled, causing him to serve eight more years.
Days after Avery’s release, Manitowoc law enforcement was feeling vulnerable about the 1995 appeal and writing memos, redocumenting the case from eight years earlier. The civil suit was making headway, and only the settlement amount remained to be determined; it was going to be large and would come out of Manitowoc County’s own budget, since the insurance company had denied the county coverage on the claim.
Then, in November 2005, just as crucial depositions were both scheduled and proceeding and Avery stood to receive his money, he was suddenly and sensationally arrested for the murder of a freelance photographer named Teresa Halbach, who had come to Avery’s Auto Salvage on Halloween to photograph a truck for an auto magazine, and whose SUV had been found on the Avery property, as eventually were her scattered and charred remains. Avery had two quasi alibis—his fiancée, to whom he’d spoken at length on the phone the afternoon of Halbach’s disappearance, and his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, who had just come home from school.
No one but Steven Avery ever came under suspicion, and county investigators circled in strategically. After getting nowhere with the fiancée, they focused on the nephew, who was gentle, learning-disabled, and in the tenth grade; they illegally interrogated him and suggested he was an accomplice. They took a defense witness and turned him into one for the prosecution.
Brendan was then charged with the same crimes as Avery: kidnapping, homicide, mutilation of a corpse. Prodded and bewildered, Brendan had made up a gruesome story about stabbing Halbach and slitting her throat in Avery’s trailer (the victim’s blood andDNA were never found on the premises), a fictional scenario that came, he later said, from the James Patterson novel Kiss the Girls. When asked why he’d said the things he said, he told his mother it was how he always got through school, by guessing what adults wanted him to say, then saying it. In an especially heartbreaking moment during the videotaped interrogation included in the documentary, and after he has given his questioners the brutal murder tale they themselves have prompted and helped tell, Brendan asks them how much longer this is going to take, since he has “a project due sixth hour.”
It is a crazy story. And the film’s double-edged title pays tribute to its ambiguity. Either Steven Avery was framed in a vendetta by Manitowoc County or the years of angry prison time turned him into the killer he had not been before. But the title aside, the documentary is pretty unambiguous in its siding with Avery and his appealing defense team, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, who are hired with his settlement money as well as money his parents, Dolores and Allan, put up from the family business.
One cannot watch this film without thinking of the adage that law is to justice what medicine is to immortality. The path of each is a little crooked and always winds up wide of the mark.
Nonetheless, a feeling of overlookedness and isolation can be said to persist in America’s dairyland, and the idea that no one is watching can create a sense of invisibility that leads to the secrets and labors that the unseen are prone to: deviance and corruption as well as utopian projects, untested idealism, daydreaming, provincial grandiosity, meekness, flight, far-fetched yard decor, and sexting. Al Capone famously hid out in Wisconsin, even as Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party was getting underway. Arguably, Wisconsin can boast the three greatest American creative geniuses of the twentieth century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Orson Welles, and Georgia O’Keeffe, though all three quickly left, first for Chicago, then for warmer climes. (The state tourism board’s campaign “Escape to Wisconsin” has often been tampered with by bumper sticker vandals who eliminate the preposition.)
More recently, Wisconsin is starting to become known less for its ever-struggling left-wing politics or artistic figures—Thornton Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder—than for its ever-wilder murderers. The famous late-nineteenth-century “Wisconsin Death Trip,” by which madness and mayhem established the legend that the place was a frigid frontier where inexplicably gruesome things occurred—perhaps due to mind-wrecking weather—has in recent decades seemingly spawned a cast of killers that includes Ed Gein (the inspiration for Psycho), the serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and the two Waukesha girls who in 2014 stabbed a friend of theirs to honor their idol, the Internet animation Slender Man.The new documentary Making a Murderer, directed and written by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, former film students from New York, is about the case of a Wisconsin man who served eighteen years in prison for sexual assault, after which he was exonerated with DNA evidence. He then became a poster boy for the Innocence Project, had his picture taken with the governor, had a justice commission begun in his name—only to be booked again, this time for murder.
Ricciardi and Demos’s rendition of his story will not help rehabilitate Wisconsin’s reputation for the weird. But it will make heroes of two impressive defense attorneys as well as the filmmakers themselves. A long-form documentary in ten parts, aired on Netflix, the ambitious series looks at social class, community consensus and conformity, the limits of trials by jury, and the agonizing stupidities of a legal system descending on more or less undefended individuals (the poor). The film is immersive and vérité—that is, it appears to unspool somewhat in real and spontaneous time, taking the viewer with the camera in unplanned fashion, discovering things as the filmmakers discover them (an illusion, of course, that editing did not muck up). It is riveting and dogged work.
The film centers on the Avery family of Manitowoc County, home to the aforementioned ferry to Michigan. Even though the lake current has eroded some of the beach, causing the sand to migrate clockwise to the Michigan dunes, and the eastern Wisconsin lakeshore has begun to fill forlornly with weeds, it is still a picturesque section of the state. The local denizens, whether lawyers or farmers, speak with the flata’s, throatily hooted o’s, and incorrect past participles (“had went”) of the region. There is a bit of Norway and Canada in the accent, which is especially strong in Wisconsin’s rural areas and only sometimes changes with education.
The Avery family are the proprietors of Avery’s Auto Salvage, and their property—a junkyard—on the eponymous Avery Road is vast and filled with over a thousand wrecked automobiles. It is a business not unlike farming in that in winter everything is buried in snow and unharvestable. The grandparents, two children, and some grandchildren live—or used to—on an abutting compound that consists of a small house, a trailer, a garage, a car crusher, a barn, a vegetable garden, and a fire pit.
In 1985 Steven Avery, the twenty-three-year-old son of Dolores and Allan Avery, was arrested and convicted of a sexual assault he did not commit. There was no forensic technology for DNA testing in 1985, and he had the misfortune to look much like the actual rapist—blond and young—and the traumatized victim, influenced by the county investigators who had the whole Avery family on their radar, identified him in a line-up as her attacker. Despite having sixteen alibi witnesses, he was found guilty. The actual rapist was allowed to roam free.
After the Wisconsin Innocence Project took on his case, Avery was finally exonerated in 2003. DNA tests showed he was not guilty and that the real attacker was now serving time for another rape. Avery then hired lawyers and sued Manitowoc County and the state of Wisconsin for wrongful imprisonment and for denying his 1995 appeal (a time during which DNA evidence might have set him free), which the state had mishandled, causing him to serve eight more years.
Days after Avery’s release, Manitowoc law enforcement was feeling vulnerable about the 1995 appeal and writing memos, redocumenting the case from eight years earlier. The civil suit was making headway, and only the settlement amount remained to be determined; it was going to be large and would come out of Manitowoc County’s own budget, since the insurance company had denied the county coverage on the claim.
Then, in November 2005, just as crucial depositions were both scheduled and proceeding and Avery stood to receive his money, he was suddenly and sensationally arrested for the murder of a freelance photographer named Teresa Halbach, who had come to Avery’s Auto Salvage on Halloween to photograph a truck for an auto magazine, and whose SUV had been found on the Avery property, as eventually were her scattered and charred remains. Avery had two quasi alibis—his fiancée, to whom he’d spoken at length on the phone the afternoon of Halbach’s disappearance, and his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, who had just come home from school.
No one but Steven Avery ever came under suspicion, and county investigators circled in strategically. After getting nowhere with the fiancée, they focused on the nephew, who was gentle, learning-disabled, and in the tenth grade; they illegally interrogated him and suggested he was an accomplice. They took a defense witness and turned him into one for the prosecution.
Brendan was then charged with the same crimes as Avery: kidnapping, homicide, mutilation of a corpse. Prodded and bewildered, Brendan had made up a gruesome story about stabbing Halbach and slitting her throat in Avery’s trailer (the victim’s blood andDNA were never found on the premises), a fictional scenario that came, he later said, from the James Patterson novel Kiss the Girls. When asked why he’d said the things he said, he told his mother it was how he always got through school, by guessing what adults wanted him to say, then saying it. In an especially heartbreaking moment during the videotaped interrogation included in the documentary, and after he has given his questioners the brutal murder tale they themselves have prompted and helped tell, Brendan asks them how much longer this is going to take, since he has “a project due sixth hour.”
It is a crazy story. And the film’s double-edged title pays tribute to its ambiguity. Either Steven Avery was framed in a vendetta by Manitowoc County or the years of angry prison time turned him into the killer he had not been before. But the title aside, the documentary is pretty unambiguous in its siding with Avery and his appealing defense team, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, who are hired with his settlement money as well as money his parents, Dolores and Allan, put up from the family business.
One cannot watch this film without thinking of the adage that law is to justice what medicine is to immortality. The path of each is a little crooked and always winds up wide of the mark.
by Lorrie Moore, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Netflix
