Making a Murderer: new confession puts Steven Avery case back in spotlight

A new confession in the Steven Avery case has built buzz and despite questions about its credibility, the interest is a testament to the voracious appetite for a case that has for years captivated audiences and online sleuths.

A Wisconsin inmate confessed in a letter sent this month to the killing of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach – the high-profile murder at the center of Netflix’s hit documentary series Making a Murderer. According to Avery’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, the confession is probably a not-so-subtle ploy for publicity and cash. Nonetheless, it’s generating headlines and stoking conversation across the internet.

Halbach’s murder has stirred media interest in Wisconsin since 2005, but global attention exploded in 2015 after film-makers released the 10-part docu-series that framed the investigation into Halbach’s murder as having been mishandled by unscrupulous law enforcement officials and the subsequent legal case bobbled by an incompetent defense attorney.

On the day of her murder, Halbach visited Avery’s home, where the family operated a salvage yard, to photograph a vehicle for Auto Trader Magazine. Halbach’s remains were later discovered in the burn pit behind the trailer on the property.

Avery was convicted of the murder alongside his then 16-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, who under police pressure told authorities he took part in the murder and then helped his uncle dispose of the body.

After the series aired, 130,000 people signed a petition asking the then president, Barack Obama, to pardon Avery and Dassey.

View image in fullscreen

Remarkably, at the time of Halbach’s murder, Avery had been previously exonerated in the 1985 rape of Penny Ann Beernsten in Manitowoc county, Wisconsin. DNA testing called for by the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which investigates claims of wrongful conviction, later excluded Avery as the attacker and pointed to Gregory Allen, a man who had been on law enforcement’s radar all the while.

Avery was exonerated in 2003 after serving 18 years of a 32-year sentence – the same year he filed a $36m lawsuit against Manitowoc county, its former sheriff, and its former district attorney for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. Local law enforcement targeted him for Halbach’s murder in retaliation for filing the lawsuit, the documentary Making a Murderer suggested. Avery and Manitowoc county later settled the suit for $400,000.

Audiences were also shocked by the way authorities treated Dassey.

Detectives interviewed Dassey, who has limited cognitive abilities, without a lawyer present. After he confessed to detectives, Dassey appeared in the documentary to be unaware of the consequences, at one point asking the police if he would make it back to school for sixth period because he had a project due.

Legal experts have long argued that children and individuals with limited cognitive skills are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing to crimes under pressure from police.

The National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law, counts 2,497 wrongful convictions nationwide since 1989, 303 of which are tied to false confessions.

In 2016 a federal appeals court tossed Dassey’s confession and overturned his conviction, but a year later the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the conviction and kept it intact. In 2018, the US supreme court refused to hear the case.

Both Dassey and Avery remain in prison. Avery and his attorney, Kathleen Zellner, plan to file an appeal for post-conviction relief on 14 October.

Zellner believes the new confession is unlikely to have any impact on the case.

Confessing to the murder is Joseph Evans Jr, a Wisconsin inmate convicted in 2009 of murdering his wife who is now serving a life sentence. Evans claims to have killed Halbach in a letter sent to Zellner in September. He also shared his story with Shawn Rech, a film-maker working on a new documentary, Convicting a Murderer, whose production is unrelated to Making a Murderer and takes aim at some of the revelations of the original series.

Rech has told reporters he’s been corresponding with Evans for the past year and a half and felt he had to pass along Evans’ confession to authorities, who have yet to vet the claims.

It’s not the first time Evans has thrown himself into Avery’s case. In 2016, after the Netflix series generated global interest in the case, Evans wrote a nine-page letter to various Wisconsin media outlets in which he claimed to have heard Avery confess to the murder in detail. The claim found little traction.

View image in fullscreen

This time Evans leads his confession with a demand for $13,000 – part of the $100,000 an anonymous donor has offered as a reward for information on the case – to be deposited on his “books”, which can be used to purchase food and other items in prison.

In the letter to Zellner, Evans claims to have accidentally struck Halbach with his car.

“A lady stepped out in front of my vehicle and I hit her. She fell to the ground, and hitted her head on a large rock. I got out to check on her but she was unconscious, and her head was starting to bleed,” Evans wrote in a letter dated 18 September. He then panicked, he wrote, and burned Halbach’s body after she died of her injuries.

View image in fullscreen

“Keep your panties on and skirt down because I’m not out to screw you,” Evans wrote to Zellner. “This is a deal relationship you, me, you’ll win when I give all up and the full cover up story that took place and how the state and others used me to get to Steve. I’m done with all that. I’m jumping ship to look out for myself and my children, eight grandchildren. Your choice. I’m already set. Now, it’s up to you for the next move.”

How much faith does Zellner place in the credibility of the confession?

“Zero. Zero. It’s ridiculous,” Zellner told the Guardian.

“It’s totally fabricated. It doesn’t fit any of the evidence. We’ve already talked to a witness who can place Evans somewhere else that day. This guy is obviously not too bright and he’s just listed things he got from public records. He’s just after the money. It’s unfortunate that this has gotten as much attention as it has. And who would more want it to be true than us?”

Zellner told one local media outlet that her client laughed out loud when she read him the confession note.

Even Rech isn’t sure the confession will hold up.

“On the ‘no’ side, he’s a proven liar; he himself has proven he’s a liar. He’s a convicted felon. On the ‘possibly’ side, he’s a convicted murderer in the state of Wisconsin, he was free at the time of [Halbach’s] murder, so I don’t know,” Rech told USA Today. “I probably lean toward ‘no’, but I think it’s pretty important that it’s thoroughly investigated.”