You think you’ve got lingering questions about Making a Murderer, Netflix’s 10-part documentary about wrongfully convicted Wisconsin man Steven Avery and his eyebrow-raising 2007 trial for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach?
Writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi spent a decade whittling down over 700 hours of footage to craft the docuseries that’s turned viewers into Internet-sleuthing conspiracy theorists since it hit the streaming service on Dec. 18—and even they still wrestle with The Big Question: Did Avery do it?
“What I learned from making this series is the humility to accept that I don’t know, and I may never know,” Demos told The Daily Beast over the holiday break that she and Ricciardi properly hijacked, filling newsfeeds and social media streams with the shocked, angry, and outraged reactions of viewers making their way through Making a Murderer.
That was one of the things we learned doing this: Just because you have questions doesn’t mean that you’re going to get an answer,” she said. “If you’re so committed to finding the truth and finding the answer, it’s very hard to be comfortable with ambiguity and you’ll often settle, just for some finality.”
The directors were NYC graduate film students when the saga of Steven Avery first caught their attentions, splashed across national news headlines. Avery, a working-class local with a record from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, had been exonerated by DNA testing in 2003 after spending 18 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit.
Two years later Avery was a high-profile pebble in the shoe of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, which he was suing for $36 million—the same authorities who eagerly locked him away again when the murder of a local woman led them right back to Avery’s door.
After reading a story in The New York Times about Avery’s plight, filmmaking (and romantic) partners Demos and Ricciardi borrowed a camera and hit the road to Manitowoc County in a rental, set on staying for a week to document Avery’s trial. As the case wore on they moved in to temporary digs in town, scoring key access to Avery’s beleaguered family by writing a letter to Avery, who gave his blessing from behind bars. The trial lasted six weeks and took an unexpected turn when Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz held a press conference that threw a sensational wrench into the case, and into Demos and Ricciardi’s plans, just as they were packing up to head home
Avery’s 16-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey was arrested four months after his uncle, having implicated himself in the rape and murder of Halbach. Taped footage of his confession provides Making a Murderer with one of its more troubling elements, suggesting that Dassey was railroaded by investigators and his own counsel into spinning a fantasy version of the Halbach murder after repeatedly denying his involvement in the crime.
“One of the things I hope viewers who really engage with the series will take away from this is this question of, if they have lingering questions, are they comfortable living with that?” said Ricciardi. “There are now two people who are behind bars, probably for life. Do our viewers feel satisfied with the process that led to those convictions?”
The filmmakers had no idea how vast the scope of their film would grow when they first began the project, seeing in it a provocative case study of how the American legal system treated one man, twice accused.
“Here was a man who in 1985 was wronged by the system,” Ricciardi remembered. “It failed him and here he was, 20 years later, pulled back in. The question really was, had there been any meaningful progress within those 20 years? Would the system be any more reliable in 2005 than it was in 1985?”
In 2003, advances in DNA testing exonerated Avery of the rape of Penny Beernsten. But in 2007, after science saved him once, it damned him as prosecutors leaned heavily on FBI laboratory testing for a substance called EDTA in a blood sample that, Avery’s defense argued, had been tampered with.
I think it really begs the question of the role of science in our criminal justice system,” said Demos. “Our system is made up of human beings, and human beings are muddy and complex and flawed, as we all know. Science is this very tempting black-and-white sort of thing. It’s tempting to believe that there is what some refer to as a ‘truth meter.’ You have DNA and we often get asked, ‘Was there DNA evidence proving he did it?’ We like to think that any kind of evidence, whether it be DNA evidence or any other kind, would just be the beginning of the inquiry, not the end of it.”
“I remember in this process beginning to understand that science and criminal justice, it’s very dangerous to put them together,” Demos continued. “Our criminal justice system is based on a presumption of innocence until you’re proven guilty—whereas in science, something is true until it’s disproved. So it’s exactly the opposite. We have one kind of test after another that used to be relied upon being revealed to be not so reliable, and there’s a problem there.”
Some have wondered why Avery’s defense didn’t fight harder to discredit the FBI’s EDTA testing, a method that had been used 10 years prior in the O.J. Simpson case. But as Avery laments to his mother, Dolores, by phone early in the series, “Poor people lose all the time.”
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