When defence lawyer Dean Strang worked on Steven Avery’s case twenty years ago, there was no streaming or binge-watching. If you wanted to watch a movie or documentary, you had to wait for it to be posted through your letterbox in a little red and white envelope.
So Dean could never imagine that he would become a Netflix star of one of the most-popular true-crime shows in the world.
Thanks to Making a Murderer, which became must-see binge TV 10 years ago, Avery has become one of the world’s best-known criminals, and his lawyer, Dean, a cult hero.
The documentary explores how the father-of-four Avery from Wisconsin was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1985, exonerated by DNA in 2003, and then convicted again in 2007 for the 2005 murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, alongside his nephew Brendan Dassey.
When the 10-part series dropped in December 2015, the show’s popularity surged within weeks, paving the way for more true crime binge-fests such as Tiger King and Evil Genius.
As the documentary examined evidence handling, potential police and prosecutor misconduct and inconsistencies in witness testimonies, by the end of the series, some viewers were still left wondering: was Steven Avery’s second conviction legally sound? Many remain unconvinced today.
Avery, who was sentenced to life behind bars, had originally enlisted the help of Dean in February 2006, after her had been charged with Teresa’s murder.
‘He was kind of a simple guy, scarred by 18 years in prison. I thought he was likeable. And I don’t remember having an opinion [about whether he was guilty]. I often don’t. I really just try to withhold judgment. He was a fairly easy client, hard to keep on task and jaundiced by the legal system’, Dean tells Metro over Zoom from his home in Wisconsin.
When Avery was convicted, Dean felt ‘awful’. It’s never nice to lose a case, but he also felt there wasn’t enough evidence to prove his guilt.
‘I thought there’s no way this guy should get convicted. There was just no way they can prove this beyond a reasonable doubt or that a fair, rational jury should convict him,’ Dean, co-host of true crime podcast I Rest My Case, remembers.
‘I just thought: Who is going to watch this?’
At the time, the trial was already being filmed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, young graduate film students from New York who were documenting the investigation and trial in the light of the original wrongful conviction as their final project.
Dean believed the result would be a 90-minute documentary that would be shown in a handful of arthouse cinemas. He never predicted the cultural phenomenon Making a Murderer would become.
Just before the show was due to be released, the pair called him to let him know a 10-parter was due to air – but that they couldn’t reveal where yet.
‘I was gobsmacked. I thought – what an idiotic idea,’ Dean remembers. ‘Who thinks people are going to watch ten hours of some obscure murder trial from an obscure corner of an obscure state? And right before Christmas?
I thought – “Well, more good judgment. [Sarcastically] That’s a great Christmas fair. That’s what everybody needs – a nice murder, when they’re gathering around the fireplace for Christmas with family”.
‘I just thought it was preposterous. I was glad for the filmmakers. I really liked them, but I just thought: Who is going to watch this?’
19 million people tuned in. The show dominated social media, front pages, radio phone-ins and workplace chat for weeks. It won an Emmy Award, sparked intense public debate about the US justice system and a White House petition for Avery’s pardon.
On the Friday of its release, Dean received the first of hundreds of emails from strangers.
‘It was a guy from South Carolina – a total stranger, and one of the earliest true-crime binge watchers, who said, “Hey, I’ve been at home sick for more but today I was feeling a little better, so I watched all 10 episodes. I couldn’t shut it off”.’
Dean still gets emails today, the vast majority of which are supportive. ‘Under 1% are nasty or threatening. And I got a handful of pictures from women showing me their breasts or other ridiculous stuff. That was pretty remarkable,’ he remembers.
Pandora’s Box had opened
By the time New Year 2016 arrived, Dean was being mobbed in the street. On one trip to Dublin, he was surrounded by 20-25 people jostling and pressing in on him. ‘It was unnerving’, he remembers.
However, while it may have been ‘unsettling’ for Dean, it’s nothing compared to what Teresa Halbach’s family have gone through.
After the series launched, avid viewers formed fan clubs for Avery’s parents, Dolores and Allan, and spent hours dissecting Dean’s fashion sense (Strangcore) branding him an ‘unlikely sex symbol’. Meanwhile the hashtag #freestevenavery quickly went viral and more than 300,000 people signed petitions for the convicted killer’s release.
Among such frivolity and focus to free Avery, Teresa’s devastated family were all too aware that their daughter’s murder was being played out on screen for entertainment.
In a bid to remember the young woman at the heart of the trial, as the show aired, friends paid tribute, saying that Teresa had ‘a smile that would light up a room’ and described her as ‘always a happy-go-lucky, typical Midwestern girl’.
And although her family declined to take part in the documentary, prior to release, they gave a statement saying: “Having just passed the 10-year anniversary of the death of our daughter and sister, Teresa, we are saddened to learn that individuals and corporations continue to create entertainment and to seek profit from our loss. We continue to hope that the story of Teresa’s life brings goodness to the world.”
Dean admits it must have been incredibly hard on the family. ‘They lost a 25-year-old daughter, sister, niece and they got thrust into this. They didn’t ask for a movie to be made. They didn’t ask for the trial. They are a farm family and they’ve had this horrible tragedy.
‘So what possibly could be welcome about any of this, no matter what the perspective is of the documentary? You just can’t help but feel bad for them. From the moment they lost Teresa, there will always be a hole in their lives.’
However, Pandora’s Box had been opened and the success of Making a Murderer opened the floodgates to a slew of true crime podcasts and documentaries. But as time has passed, it’s become undeniable that these shows possess a unique responsibility in the cultural niche they inhabit.
While they are important stories that need to be told, how can they do it responsibly?
Giving voice to the voiceless
Writer, consultant and campaigner for women’s safety, Jamie Klingler argues that true crime shows can oversimplify complex realities while also holding a very valuable place in holding power to account and ensuring better scrutiny for police and prosecutors.
She says: ‘They can be hugely beneficial. Cold cases can be solved, and they can help get justice for women that have been buried for 50 years.
‘The threat of having somebody else go through and mark your homework can make police actually spend a lot more time on an investigation. If there’s a threat of somebody coming back and doing a podcast about an investigation, if there is a threat that everything you did is going to be critiqued by the general public, that’s going to make you dot your I’s and cross your T’s.’
But she also argues that more needs to be done to ensure victims’ and survivors’ voices are heard.
‘There are real life ramifications from these projects, so it’s important to remember the humanity in them, and to remember the safeguarding of people whose livelihood and whose mental health is at risk – be that the families of the victims and the families of the perpetrators.’
Cindy Kanusher, executive director of legal non-profit the PACE Women’s Justice Centre, argues that with nearly three women being killed by an intimate partner every day in the United States, true crime documentaries have a responsibility to tell women’s stories without falling into tropes or lazy stereotypes.
‘When true crime programmes come out, when they are done right, they give people the opportunity to see the point of view of survivors and victims and to understand the reality of what violence looks like and the trauma that it causes.
‘And it is incredibly important to speak out and give voice to the voiceless. And for the survivors of domestic violence, assault or other types of cases, it’s so important to see that if they speak out, that they won’t be judged, that they will be believed. It is important that when you are watching true crime that you realise – this is one story. The reality is that there are a lot of people out there who are living with abuse, and we have to make sure that their stories don’t get lost or sensationalised.’
Meanwhile, Avery remains behind bars at the medium-security Fox Lake prison in Wisconsin. A second series in 2018 followed his legal team, led by Kathleen Zellner, as they tried to prove her client’s innocence. However, their efforts failed and Zellner has continued to file appeals and motions for Avery, which so far have all been rejected.
Dassey is incarcerated at the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. Despite federal judges overturning his conviction in 2016 due to a coerced confession, higher courts reinstated it.
With questions about the safety of both of their convictions remaining, does Dean Strang have views on the idea that there could still be a killer roaming free?
‘Yeah, but so what? The point is, how reliable is evidence gathering? How reliable are the police, the lawyers on both sides of the system, the jury system? How should we think about the overall trustworthiness of the justice system, and if we don’t think it’s ever going to be entirely trustworthy, are we comfortable with life sentences? Are we comfortable with the death penalty?
‘Making a Murderer was a pop cultural phenomenon,’ he adds. ‘For me, I regret that in its wake there is not a more visible permanent impact in improving the enforcement system and making us a better, more humane society.’
Metro reached out to the Halbach family for comment.
