September 11, 2013
As I write this, it is exactly ten years since Steven Avery was exonerated, and more than a quarter century since the assault itself. My thoughts about him have had a complicated evolution. For the 18 years after I misidentified him, I wondered what had led him to become so violent at such a young age. During his lengthy incarceration I also tried to imagine what life was like for his wife Lori, raising five young children on her own. Were their children better off with Steve out of the picture? What was it like for them when they reached school age and every appeal in their father’s high profile case was front page news, detailed for their classmates to read?
The day my friend, Janine Geske, broke the news that Steve was not my assailant felt infinitely more difficult than the day I was attacked. I was horrified that I had played an unwitting role in a terrible miscarriage of justice, with such far reaching consequences. Steven Avery was incarcerated from age 23 to age 41—crucial years in anyone’s life—for a crime he did not commit. Every wrongful conviction is also a wrongful acquittal, and Gregory Allen remained a free man for ten years after attacking me. In 1995 he was finally convicted of the brutal rape of another Wisconsin woman. How many others became his victims between 1985 and 1995? I was consumed with oppressive guilt.
During Steven’s incarceration I became involved in the restorative justice movement, both speaking on victim impact panels in prisons and facilitating victim/offender dialogues. Following the advice I always gave inmates—to accept responsibility for our wrongdoings—I immediately wrote a letter of apology to Steve. When I finished that letter, the refrain from Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound” went through my mind: “and all my words come back to me, in shades of mediocrity.” No apology could unring the bell of this injustice.
Although I intellectually understood that Steven Avery was not my assailant, I still had a visceral reaction each time I saw his picture. Gregory Allen’s picture, on the other hand, elicited no emotional response. He seemed like a phantom. The psychologist I had been seeing since the exoneration advised me that I would never be able to attach the negative emotions I had experienced for 18 years to Gregory Allen. I had to work, instead, on removing those emotions from Steven.
I had begun that process when I received an alarming call from Janine in early November of 2005. A young woman named Teresa Halbach was missing, and Steven Avery was a suspect in her disappearance. My first reaction was utter disbelief. Steve’s civil attorneys had begun deposing witnesses for his wrongful conviction lawsuit. Why would he jeopardize the outcome by committing such a horrific crime? Besides, it just didn’t seem possible that the soft-spoken man who was so gracious when I apologized could be the perpetrator of this monstrous act. However, as details of Teresa’s murder became public I became convinced that Steve was responsible. The same DNA technology which exonerated Steve as my assailant would help prosecutors rightfully convict him of Teresa’s murder.
If memory is malleable and perspective is molded by both time and experience, where do I find myself 28 years after my fateful jog on the beach? I have recounted my assault in so many presentations that the events of July 29, 1985, no longer haunt me. If only the same was true of the aftermath of that day, with its mind numbing twists and turns. It sometimes feels like I’m living in a parallel universe where the usual rules don’t apply. And I’m acutely aware that I’m a lifetime member of a terrible group I never wished to join: victims who have misidentified their assailants.
Always in the back of my mind is the nagging, unanswerable question: “If I had identified the correct person, would Teresa Halbach be alive today?” Was Steve so filled with rage over his wrongful conviction, and angry with me as his female accuser, that he murdered Teresa?
The sadness I felt over Steve’s wrongful conviction and lost years has been superceded by his atrocity. I did not know Teresa and have not met the Halbach family, but I cannot begin to understand or even imagine the magnitude of their loss. They experienced the singular horror I have always felt I could not transcend—the murder of one’s child. From their public comments at the time of Teresa’s disappearance and during Steve’s trial for her murder, it is clear that their strength comes from an abiding faith.
I think of Teresa on an almost daily basis, and am haunted by the video diary she made three years prior to her murder, which was played at Avery’s sentencing hearing. When I walked our daughter down the aisle at her wedding in 2008 I knew that Teresa’s parents would never have the same joy filled experience. At the birth of our two granddaughters I remembered Teresa’s words, “that’s the one thing I’ve always known that I want to be—a mom. I will be a good mom one day.”
Our oldest granddaughter Chloe is three and a half. She bounds out of bed each morning at an ungodly hour, raises the shade on her window and declares, no matter what the weather, “Look, it’s a beautiful day!” Tim Halbach, in a moving eulogy to his sister, shared, “Every day with Teresa was a good day!” To me, these two women—one just beginning life and one whose life was cut short—have shared the quintessential: today is all we have. Perhaps making each day a good day is how all of us can best pay tribute to Teresa.
Penny Beerntsen