Indefensible

When I first met Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, the filmmakers and creators of Making a Murderer, they were graduate students from Columbia University’s prestigious film program. Laura was also an attorney. I had interviewed with them nearly a decade earlier in 2007, not long after the Avery and Dassey trials. Although I was already a veteran prosecutor and a good deal older than they were, I shared their enthusiasm for the Avery case’s enormous potential to expose to a large audience the infirmities of a criminal justice system badly in need of reform, more so, I thought, than any other case that had or is likely to come along again. But none of us, least of all Laura and Moira, I suspect, had the slightest idea that the skill and tenacity with which they approached their work would result a decade later in a worldwide television phenomenon. I’m not even sure that Netflix had introduced streaming video to their customers back then.

Fast-forward to autumn of 2015, a few months before Making a Murderer aired. I received an e-mail from Ricciardi, and later a call from someone working on her behalf. She was giving me a heads-up that their persistence had paid off. At long last, she and Moira had found a home for their film, though they did not disclose to me that their producer and distributor was the mother of all streaming-video giants—Netflix!

I was well into my obsession with the Avery case by the time I’d met the future Netflix documentarians, and when I interviewed with them in 2007, it was a cold and bitter time in northeastern Wisconsin, as nearly every scene depicted in their documentary. I was halfway through writing the manuscript for The Innocent Killer’s self-published precursor, with the title Unreasonable Inferences.

I aimed to focus my book on Steven Avery’s wrongful conviction in 1985 and not on what at that time I confidently believed was his rightful conviction for murder twenty years later. The murder case is the more sensational part of the story—mayhem and murder trump everything else in the world of true crime. But Avery’s wrongful conviction spoke much more directly to the criminal justice system and how it can so badly misfire, which is where my interests lay. I knew, too, that anything that brought more public attention to Teresa Halbach’s murder would be difficult for her badly shaken family to bear. A book that concentrated on the lessons for the criminal justice system from Avery’s wrongful conviction would be the lesser of two evils for them versus a cheap true-crime thriller about her gruesome death.

A week or so before my interview, Ricciardi, Demos, and I had shared our admittedly sanctimonious disgust at the former sheriff’s and district attorney’s misconduct when they railroaded Steven back in 1985. In retrospect, this is why I was under the impression that my interview with them was to focus almost exclusively upon the wrongful conviction case, and not the murder.

Our opinions about the murder differed sharply. The physical and circumstantial evidence reported by the media had convinced me—not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but any shadow of a doubt—that Avery and Dassey were guilty as hell. I was confident then that the defense team’s evidence-planting accusation was nonsense, an unfounded allegation that unfairly besmirched the reputation of Lieutenant James “Jim” Lenk and Sergeant Andrew “Andy” Colborn, the two most directly targeted officers whose character was defamed. I had known and worked with Lenk and Colborn for years. They were two of the least likely law enforcement officers I could think of to be involved in any type of misconduct, much less planting evidence to frame an innocent man. I thought Steven Avery had received an exceedingly fair trial, which in the filmmakers’ minds was really the only question that mattered, not whether he was innocent or guilty. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

The interview started predictably enough. They asked me to recount the brutal assault of Penny Beerntsen on an isolated stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline about ten miles north of Manitowoc. Penny was the victim in the case for which Avery was wrongly convicted in 1985 and is one of the unsung heroes in a case lacking many others, unsung or not. I spoke extensively about the misconduct of the former sheriff and the district attorney who led the charge to falsely convict Steven back in 1985, about three minutes of which would make the final cut for the film

But halfway through the interview the mood shifted dramatically. Maybe I was overreacting, but I sensed that Ricciardi and Demos believed Avery had been wrongly convicted a second time or, worse, that they would adopt that narrative even though they had to know he was probably guilty. Either way, they appeared virtually certain that local police had planted evidence to strengthen their case, and it seemed to me that they were doing their level best to get me to agree or, short of that, to say something on camera they could later manipulate so it would look that way.

Now it was less than a week before Christmas, and only a few days after Making a Murderer initially aired. The discomfort I had felt so poignantly during the second half of my interview not quite ten years earlier flooded over me again as I prepared to spend the next several nights, watching the Netflix series that was about to turn our previously unknown little Midwestern town into the center of the Netflix universe.

* * *

I sat spellbound as I began watching episode one—not because of its content, but from seeing the places and faces I have contact with nearly every day. It was an audio and visual masterpiece complete with a pitch-perfect piece of haunting music. The effect was Fargo-ish in a way, but more emotionally complex. If only I had not been involved in the Avery story myself, perhaps then I could have simply enjoyed the craftsmanship that made the film so engrossing rather than turn into an increasingly nervous wreck.

In one of dozens of national media appearances that Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos would make in the upcoming weeks, Ricciardi told an interviewer that “truth is elusive” in the Steven Avery case, and in some respects she is right. Even the title they, or someone at Netflix, chose could be interpreted in different ways. It might suggest that spending eighteen angry years in prison for a crime he did not commit made Steven Avery into a murderer. Or it may signify a belief that police and prosecutors made him into a murderer by planting evidence to frame him for Teresa Halbach’s murder. The ambiguity of the title seemed to foreshadow a fair-and-balanced account of the Avery story.

* * *

It was an emotionally powerful beginning: Steven Avery, walking out of the prison gates in his red flannel shirt, sporting a shaved head, long beard, and twinkling bright blue eyes, reunited with his family on a clear September day, with green grass still covering the gently rolling hills of east-central Wisconsin. His extended family had turned out in full force to greet him at home as Steven’s father, Allan, drove up with Steven in the backseat, smiling from ear to ear. The Avery Salvage Yard, which was also home to Steven’s parents, Allan and Delores, was not filled with darkness and death on that warm September day. Instead, it was filled with happiness and life.

“I missed you,” said Steven’s cousin as they embraced. “It was like the same old Steve was back,” chimed in a voice-over from the same cousin. “He was happy. He was smiling.” Laughter, hugs, and kisses all around, and a genuine heartfelt excitement filled the air at the salvage yard that day. They may not have slaughtered the fatted calf for Steven, but Allan and Delores Avery’s prodigal son had come home!

The tone shifted less than a minute and thirty seconds into the documentary. “This was one of the biggest miscarriages of justice I ever saw in twenty years in criminal defense work and thousands of cases,” intoned Reesa Evans, Avery’s public defender from previous charges.

“But I did tell him be careful. There was just something I felt, Manitowoc County’s not done with you. They are not even close to being finished with you,” added his cousin Kim Ducat as the video cut to a flock of geese taking flight into a gloomy and threatening-looking sky. As the night wore on, I grew increasingly fond of the birds’ mysterious honking, expertly mixed in with the vaguely foreboding theme music, which together made for an excellent opening and closing to each episode.

Referring to his client’s pending lawsuit, Walt Kelly succinctly stated the law as it applies to police misconduct. “There is a distinction in the law between simple mistakes, for which officers like that are immune,” Kelly explained, “and purposeful conduct that violates constitutional rights, for which they’re not immune.” Steven Avery appeared on camera, speaking to reporters, and was heard voicing patience and restraint: “Just a little bit more waiting. I waited long enough. A little bit more ain’t gonna bother me.” The video then cut away to court document highlights from Avery’s wrongful conviction lawsuit: targeting Steven Avery, personal hostility, obstruction of justice.

For the few remaining viewers whose hearts had not been sufficiently filled with sympathy for the protagonist, the camera turned to Judge Fred Hazlewood, who presided over Mr. Avery’s 1985 trial. “The family sticks together. They have a very strong sense of family. They support each other. They do a number of things that are quite admirable,” Judge Hazlewood explained from inside the very courtroom where Avery was wrongly convicted so many years ago.

I knew the focus of the series was the murder case, but I was surprised how little of the earlier case was included. No doubt my perspective played a role in my surprise. Avery and Dassey’s arrest and conviction for Teresa Halbach’s murder only figures into the last section of my book, and then only in the context of the wrongful conviction twenty years earlier. Still, why would they tread so lightly on the egregious abuse of power by the sheriff and the district attorney in the first case?

Past midnight, and with a busy day at work slated for tomorrow, I decided to go to bed. I’d have to watch a few more episodes of Making a Murderer to appreciate why its creators were not satisfied with rehashing a thirty-year-old injustice that had already been resolved. Why would people get riled up over that? The hacker group Anonymous doesn’t threaten to reveal ten-year-old e-mails to prove a conspiracy, unless they think something can still be done about the supposed conspirators. Hollywood stars Alec Baldwin to Khloé Kardashian don’t make fools of themselves trying to outdo each other weighing in on an ancient injustice, with “ancient” defined as more than two weeks old. Thousands of obsessed citizens don’t spend untold hours and considerable energy contriving conspiracy theories, some of them spewing hatred and threats of violence against anyone who has the nerve to disagree. Nor do demonstrators take to the street three stories below my courthouse office shouting for justice for Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. None of this happens unless people are mad as hell and they think they can do something about it.

* * *

I heard Steven Avery’s familiar, folksy voice from somewhere off camera: “I really ain’t got much on my record, two burglaries with my friends. We just rode around, get something to do, and we decided to rob a tavern and that . . . was the first time that I got busted with them friends.”

The camera zoomed into highlights on a court document: crawled into the bar through a broken window, $14.00 in quarters, two six packs of Pabst beer, and two sandwiches.

Avery’s cousin Kim put an even kinder spin on her cousin’s run-ins with the law: “Stevie did do a lot of stupid things. But he always, always owned up to everything he did wrong.

“He was always happy, happy, happy, always laughing,” she continued, “always wanted to make other people laugh. I think the people in the outside community viewed him as an Avery, you know, viewed him as [a] troublemaker. You know, ‘There goes another Avery. They’re all trouble,’ ” she summed up as the camera panned to bleating sheep and crying seagulls off in the distance.

The documentary went on to offer an example of what kind of trouble a young twenty-year-old Steven Avery would get into: “Another mistake I did . . . I had a bunch of friends over, and we were fooling around with the cat . . . and, I don’t know, they were kind of negging it on and . . . I tossed him over the fire . . . and he lit up. You know, it was the family cat. I was young and stupid and hanging around with the wrong people.”

I have heard this excuse many times before. When a criminal defendant minimizes his conduct by saying he was hanging with the wrong crowd, the hangers-on usually say the same thing: “I wouldn’t have done it, Judge, if I had better friends.” It isn’t a very good excuse and almost never finds sympathy with a judge.

I thought back to the police report where I had read about this incident years earlier and remembered that there was more to the story than Making a Murderer was letting on. Not quite ten years earlier, I had spent months researching Steven Avery and his family for my first book, and I knew that the cat-burning incident was much more than a childish prank.

The police report stated that Avery took a cat, poured gas and oil on it, threw it in a bonfire, and then watched it burn until it died. A friend who was present at the time told police that the cat jumped out of the fire, and Avery caught it and poured more gasoline on it before the animal died.

Thousands of Netflix viewers would never know that Avery intentionally threw the cat in a fire, and watched it burn and suffer a miserable death, managing to score two of the most common psychological signposts for potential homicidal behavior—animal cruelty and a fascination with fire—into a single act. As far as they would know, the cat mistakenly ended up in the fire when Avery was messing around with some friends. Happens all the time, right?

Avery told the documentarians that he missed his first daughter’s birth because he was, as he put it, “locked up for that cat incident.. . . It kinda sucked. You know, you’re supposed to be bringing your kid into the world . . . and then you gotta miss it.”

Hmm, I thought as I scratched my head. Interesting way to end a segment about burning the family pet. They had just transformed a deliberate and disturbing act of animal cruelty into nothing more than a harmless accident and suggested that it happened when he was an adolescent when he was actually twenty years old.

I wondered if ordinary viewers, whose only familiarity with the case was what the documentary chose to show them, would view Steven Avery as favorably as the filmmakers intended. Like every human that ever was or will be, Steven Avery is not some biological specimen that can be placed under a microscope and pronounced as either all good or all bad.

In fact, on the few occasions I met him, he struck me as polite, even sincere, and with a hint of lightheartedness about him. However, there is another side to Steven Avery that I came to know while researching my book—a darker side that includes his propensity toward violence and sexual deviance. So far, it seemed that the documentarians were trying to redefine Steven’s trouble with the law, and I thought they were smart to do so early on.

He certainly had racked up a considerable record prior to his wrongful conviction in 1985, and his next brush with the law was a bit more serious.

He had graduated from torturing an animal to endangering a person’s life, and I was eager to see how Making a Murderer would depict that incident. I’d also read the police report on this case and was familiar with the facts.

It was January 3, 1985, less than seven months before his arrest in the wrongful conviction case, when Avery rammed his 1978 Ford LTD into the side of a light green Plymouth Volare driven by his neighbor, Sandra Morris, as she drove past his residence. When Morris stopped her car and was getting out, he approached and held her at gunpoint. Morris, by the way, was the wife of a Manitowoc County deputy sheriff. Morris lived right up the road from Steven and his wife, Lori, and she had to drive past their house on her way to work at five-thirty a.m. Her troubles with him had started a few months earlier. He would get up early, grab his field glasses, and peer down the road to see when Morris was leaving. Then he’d wait for her to drive past and, depending on how messed up he was that day, he’d either rub himself on the hood of the car or expose himself. One time he was wearing nothing but his shoes.

The January incident was a continuation of his prior behavior, and Making a Murderer gave us a watered-down version I’d soon see. Sandra Morris pulled out of her driveway at the usual time and started driving down the road past Avery’s house. She had her infant daughter in the car that morning, and she planned to drop her off at her parents’ house in town. Just past the Avery residence she looked in her rearview mirror and saw lights approaching from behind. The car seemed to come out of nowhere. It began passing on her left, and then without warning it struck the side of her car, causing her to careen back and forth in the road, but eventually gaining control without sliding into the ditch.

She came to a stop on the side of the road, thinking that someone had lost control and hit her accidentally. Before she got out of her car, she looked up and saw Steven Avery walking toward her. He was pointing a rifle at her head. He ordered her to get into his vehicle, but she motioned to her daughter on the front seat, and told him that her baby would freeze to death if she left her alone. He then looked inside the car and told her she could go.

Three deputies arrested him within the hour, and when they searched his house, they found a .30-06 rifle stashed under one of the kids’ beds with a live round in the chamber. Steven Avery even confessed. Yes, he rammed his car into Mrs. Morris’s car. Yes, he pointed the gun at her. And yes, he planned to force her into his vehicle.

This certainly wasn’t the story I was observing being played out in front of me. Ignoring many of the facts outlined above, Making a Murderer was using unscripted, but edited, video footage from Sandra Morris’s deposition to cast her as the villain and Steven Avery as the victim. The storyline seemed to be implying that he acted out of frustration and rammed into her car because she had been spreading lies about him while out drinking at all of the local taverns.

To say I was taken aback would be an understatement. It is not often that the victim is blamed when recounting a past crime, especially in today’s climate. But this is the impression I got.

* * *

DA Denis Vogel, who would be responsible for Steven Avery’s wrongful conviction less than a year later, rightly threw the book at him this time, charging two counts of endangering safety by conduct regardless of life as a repeater, one count for the mother, Sandra Morris, and one for her child, and another charge of felon in possession of a firearm. By virtue of Avery’s prior convictions, he was a “habitual offender” under state law, so the prosecutor dutifully tacked on the appropriate penalty enhancer, increasing the maximum sentence on each count by six years. Avery faced a maximum sentence of forty-eight years in prison, but bail was set at only two thousand dollars and Avery’s mom and dad posted it right away. Judge Fred Hazlewood, who would sentence him to thirty-two years in prison for what would become the wrongful conviction case more than a year later, gave him six years concurrent at the same hearing. Routinely, if not understandably, overlooked by most of the media accounts, from the moment Steven Avery was exonerated until this very day, he would have served six of the eighteen years in prison for his wrongful conviction even if he had not been wrongly convicted.

Avery had committed some stupid crimes over the years, but accosting the wife of a deputy sheriff was one of the most foolish. The men and women in blue, or brown in the case of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, pay close attention when one of their own is the victim of a crime. Right or wrong, you don’t victimize the wife of a deputy sheriff and expect it to go unnoticed. Cops are like family, they have to be, given what we ask them to do, and part of being a family is to watch each other’s back. But the close-knit nature has its downside, an example of which was made tragically clear in our sheriff department’s investigation of the assault and attempted murder seven months later that resulted in Avery’s wrongful conviction.

With his crime against Sandra Morris still fresh in their minds, the sheriff and a few others jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that he was the perpetrator in that case, too. As one of the deputies put it in a deposition twenty years later, there was “talk among the officers” that Steven Avery might have been the assailant. As I will show later in this account, the sheriff, the female deputy who spoke first with the victim, and the department’s eccentric police sketch artist took their suspicion far beyond talk.

* * *

I was looking forward to seeing how the documentary would handle Avery’s wrongful conviction in 1985. I’d spent the better part of three years on weekends and in the early-morning hours before going to work, researching and writing about Manitowoc law enforcement’s darkest hour. Up until recently, Wisconsin enjoyed a reputation as a clean state with little corruption, at least compared to our neighboring state to the south with its corrupt Chicago political bosses and their connection with the mob. To me, Avery’s wrongful conviction remains one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in Wisconsin.

I also knew I would be in this part of the documentary. Having my fair share of vanity, but hopefully not more, I was anxious about how I’d come off. It’s not that I had high expectations. Borrowing the words posted on my Facebook page from another viewer, I would be satisfied as long as I did not make an “utter fool” of myself.

Photo taken July 28th, 1985, read the on-screen caption, referring to a photo of a beaming Steven Avery, posing with his family and new twin boys, taken one day before the assault of Penny Beerntsen. The camera panned to rolling waves on the shoreline, as I began recounting a series of events that would forever change the course of so many lives. I explained how Penny went to the beach with her husband, Tom, and their two young children that day. I explained how in addition to managing the couple’s charming candy store and ice-cream parlor in Manitowoc’s touristy downtown, she was also a physical fitness instructor at the local YMCA. On this day she started off on a six-mile jog along an isolated stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline around three o’clock. I told the viewers about the man wearing a black leather jacket and how odd that was on what was probably an 85-degree day. He made a comment to her as she passed him, about a half mile into her run. I finished my part, describing how she could see him up ahead on her way back, but this time the man was standing directly in her path.

“To get away from him, she ran into the water, but he grabbed her and dragged her off into the woods. He knocked her down. She was clawing at him and he attempted to rape her, but he didn’t succeed in penetrating her,” continued an attorney that would represent Avery years later. Reesa Evans, his public defender, could be heard next, describing the more graphic details of how the man ripped Penny Beerntsen’s clothes off, sexually assaulted her, beat her up, and then basically left her for dead.

Having adequately described the terror Beerntsen encountered on the beach that day, the documentary then shifted to Avery’s wrongful conviction and depositions being taken in preparation for his subsequent thirty-six-million-dollar lawsuit. His attorneys in his wrongful conviction lawsuit, Walt Kelly and Steve Glynn, were featured prominently in this part of the program.

After Penny Beerntsen was taken to the hospital, it turned out that Sandra Morris’s friend Judy Dvorak was the deputy sheriff who was assigned to go to the hospital. This is where the Sandra Morris matter made a difference. When Penny Beerntsen described her assailant, Judy Dvorak said, “That sounds like Steven Avery.” Walt Kelly said this observation into the camera, in his engaging voice, accompanied by his equally engaging personality. It looked like they were filming in the same conference room in Kelly’s office where I’d spent the better part of an afternoon with him and Glynn several years earlier in preparation for writing The Innocent Killer. Prosecutors or not, they gathered from our earlier conversations that I shared their opinion that what happened to Steven Avery back in 1985 wasn’t just a mistake but the product of deplorable official misconduct.

I was, and remain, grateful to them for their openness and for so generously sharing their time.

Making a Murderer’s use of unscripted audio from recorded jail telephone calls and police dispatch tapes, as well as video from court hearings and depositions, is part of what makes it so captivating, and the next scene did not disappoint.

Former Manitowoc County detective Gene Kusche was deposed in Steven Avery’s wrongful conviction lawsuit on October 26, 2005, just ten days before the discovery of a partially concealed RAV4 at the Avery Salvage Yard would catapult the Avery case into national headlines. Thanks to Making a Murderer, I was now watching Detective Kusche’s videotaped deposition ten years later in the comfort of my living room at eleven-thirty on the Monday night before Christmas, 2015.

Walt Kelly was questioning Kusche, who had met Penny Beerntsen at the hospital just a few hours after she was brutally assaulted. He had developed a composite sketch of her assailant.

With eyes nearly swollen shut, the victim’s vision was blurry, but the sheriff, who knew Penny and her husband, and should have stayed out of the investigation, was determined to find her assailant as fast as he could so he could bring him to justice. Having leapt to the conclusion that Steven Avery was the assailant based upon her description, which it turned out did not match Avery that much at all, the sheriff ordered one of his deputies to retrieve Avery’s most recent mug shot taken seven months earlier. The deputy brought it to the hospital, where the sheriff stuffed it into his pocket approximately thirty minutes before Detective Kusche started working on his masterpiece composite. I could almost feel Kusche’s blood pressure rising as I was watching the former detective squirm under Kelly’s blistering interrogation.

“I have one large framed composite drawing, if we could bring that up on the table and put it in camera range,” Kelly instructed as he asked Kusche whether he was the one who framed it.

“It was the only one I ever did that was used in a court case. And I thought it’d make an interesting display in my office.”

“Would you agree with me,” Kelly continued, “that it’s pretty remarkably coincidental that that would depict Steven Avery’s January 1985 mug photo, which was available to you that evening?”

Kusche tried to deny it, but the photos, when placed side by side with his trophy, belied his denial.

Those of us who have closely examined Steven Avery’s wrongful conviction case are convinced that Detective Kusche drew the composite sketch off Avery’s mug shot. He had little training and even less experience. Fred Hazlewood, the presiding judge in the 1985 wrongful conviction case, referred to the two images as bearing an “uncanny resemblance” to each other, made all the more strange since Avery’s hair was different on the day Penny Beerntsen was assaulted, and the drawing looking more like his mug shot taken six months earlier. Kelly put it this way in Making a Murderer:

“We were able to present, embarrassingly, the difference between an older photograph and what we then had, which was the photograph from that night as to how Steven Avery actually looked. That opened the door to us being able to argue that Kusche drew the composite from the photograph of Steven Avery that was already in their files. And to argue that . . . that never would’ve happened without the sheriff’s participation as well. In other words, they made the case against Steven Avery that night themselves.”

Watching all of this unfold on television was an odd experience for me. It was fascinating and disappointing at the same time. Fascinating by virtue of seeing the faces of the main characters in the wrongful conviction story and a visual portrayal of the various roles they played, but disappointing that some of the most compelling facts were left out. I imagine it’s how authors whose books have been made into movies feel—the movie did not do justice to the content in their book.

There was no mention, for example, of Penny Beerntsen receiving disturbing telephone calls from a man who, in hindsight, she suspected was the real assailant, and not Steven Avery. Or the day when the district attorney told his staff that Gregory Allen, the real assailant, could not have been the perpetrator because he was on probation with an airtight alibi, a statement that turned out, like so much in the wrongful conviction case, to be a misstatement of fact, and a serious one at that. The list goes on, but more on that later.

Still, Making a Murderer was a visual masterpiece, and the next scene in episode one drew me in further.

A short clip was shown from September 11, 2003, the date Avery was released from prison after DNA proved his innocence.

“I feel free!” he said, laughing, to a throng of reporters on a clear late-summer day at the moment of his release while the prison gate buzzed in the background.

“When I left the prison, the anger left,” he said somewhere off camera as the moving scenery suggested that he was on his way home after eighteen years. “It was gone. It stayed there behind them gates. It didn’t come out with me,” he continued, in my view, untruthfully.

The video returned to his welcome party, outside in the country, on that same gorgeous late-summer day.

“How you doing?” asked a male friend or relative.

“Oh, hello,” Avery replied sincerely.

“How’s it feel?”

“It feels wonderful.”

When a television reporter asked Avery whether he forgave the victim, he replied both graciously and accurately:

“It ain’t at all her fault, you know. Honest mistake, you know. I mean, most the time, I think the cops put it in her head more.”

Episode one was almost over. With another busy day at work tomorrow, I decided to turn in early. I still had a lot of hours left to watch, but already I was surprised by how engrossed and fascinated I was. I looked forward to sitting down after work tomorrow night to a Making a Murderer marathon.

As the final scene played out, I didn’t realize that I’d had a pretty good idea of what the answer was to my question from just minutes earlier, and I had it before the credits had even started rolling.

“They weren’t just gonna let Stevie out,” one of Avery’s cousins said into the camera. “They weren’t gonna hand that man thirty-six million dollars. They just weren’t gonna do all that. And something in my gut said they’re not done with him. Something’s gonna happen.”

“Do we have a body or anything yet?” An officer’s call to dispatch was overheard over his siren wailing in the background.

“I don’t believe so,” the female dispatcher replied.

“Do we have Steven Avery in custody, though?”