SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoiler information from the Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”
To many Texas Tech students, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, is the county from the popular documentary series “Making a Murderer, described by Netflix as featuring “a DNA exoneree, who while exposing police corruption, becomes a suspect in a grisly new crime.”
To Kelsey Cottrell, a senior finance major at Tech, Manitowoc is the city where her mother was born and raised. Her aunt and uncle still live in Manitowoc.
Netflix
Cottrell’s aunt, Connie Van Steenburgh, remembers the case of Steven Avery, the man featured by Netflix, was the biggest story in local media, which “made a big deal about him getting out, as they should have.”
She agrees with the series’ argument about flaws in the court system that prosecuted Avery after he was arrested and charged with murder.
“It didn’t change my perception of the city,” Van Steenburgh said about the show. “It changed my perception of our court system,”
Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were both convicted, in separate trials, of the rape and murder of a 25-year-old photographer named Teresa Halbach and sentenced to life in prison. The documentary chronicles what Avery’s lawyers argue is a case of planted evidence and coerced confession from the learning-disabled 16-year-old Dassey.
The series was convincing enough to start an online petition, requesting that President Barack Obama pardon Steven Avery and release him from jail. However, because this is a Wisconsin case, not a federal one, the president has no such power.
A New Yorker article titled “Dead Certainty” describes the case in detail and points out some of the flaws in the documentary’s making. Van Steenburgh said the series was well-made, but one-sided.
Robert Peaslee, chairman of Tech’s Journalism and Electronic Media department, studies and teaches documentary filmmaking. He said one-sidedness is typical in the genre.
“In any film that is made with the purpose of entertainment, there’s always going to be a certain lack of fidelity to absolute truth,” Peaslee said.
He said the public reaction was not surprising to him, especially in a social media era.
“I think it’s a very predictable but also very positive thing that people want to do something about that,” Peaslee said.
As the New Yorker article points out, “Making a Murderer” does not include some of the serious evidence used to convict Avery of murder. The filmmakers were able to spend close to an hour-long episode showing that the blood found in Halbach’s SUV, on the Avery property, could have come from a vial of blood already possessed by law enforcement.
But, Dassey’s confession that he helped Avery move the SUV into the junkyard and saw him lift the hood and disconnect the battery cable, was never mentioned. Neither was the fact that Avery’s DNA was found on the hood latch of the car.
“Although ‘Making a Murderer’ is structured chronologically, it fails to provide a clear time line of events, and it never answers such basic questions as when, where, and how Halbach died,” Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker.
Steven Avery’s mugshot from his first conviction. Picture provided by Netflix.
Peaslee said he understands how difficult it can be to include every detail in a documentary.
“I can just imagine they had hundreds of hours of footage, so editing that thing down even into 10 or 12 hours — I’m sure it was a nightmare,” he said.
When asked about the missing evidence, the filmmakers responded they tried to include the most damning evidence that could point to Avery’s guilt.
Other concerns have emerged as well. Van Steenburgh said she was unsettled by the picture the documentary painted of Manitowoc.
“Manitowoc is a nice, small community, and for the most part, our law enforcement are on the up-and-up, and in this particular instance, there may have been a few things that were mishandled,” she said.
She and her husband run a business in Manitowoc, just like the Avery family, and she did not like the representation of their level of education.
“I want people to know that’s not the type of people that live here,” she said. “That’s just one family.”
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