It’s true—blood really is thicker than water. So while Lori Avery understandably moved on with her life, Allan Avery continued to fight for his son’s release. He would never give up on Steve. He was certain Steve was innocent and was determined to convince the justice system to set him free.
But Allan Avery knew the burden of proof had shifted, that no court would buy his son’s claim of innocence unless, this time, the defendant proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. So in late 1992, he hired a private investigator by the name of James Stefanic to see what he could dig up. Stefanic got hold of the police reports from Jack Schairer and spent the better part of a week reviewing the file. Then he started snooping around.
First he interviewed Frank Butler, the local private investigator who worked with Schairer on Avery’s first appeal. Butler told Stefanic that he’d always felt there was something that just wasn’t right with the Avery case. One of the deputies saw cement dust on Steve’s clothes when he was arrested, for example, but the deputy was told he’d lose his job if he signed an affidavit saying so. Also, since Steve was denied visitors and phone privileges until eight days after he was arrested, it would have been impossible for the defense witnesses to make up the alibi. Butler said he didn’t know whether it had anything to do with how the case was handled, but the victim and her husband were prominent members of the community, and the sheriff knew them. Also, during the five years he worked in Manitowoc, Butler said he never saw Sheriff Kocourek personally investigate another case—not once.
“There’s something people know [that] they aren’t saying,” Butler explained. He was all set to interview Don Belz, the captain at the sheriff’s department who Allan Avery called the morning after his son’s arrest, but then the door slammed shut and Belz wouldn’t talk.
So Stefanic called Captain Belz himself. Belz said he told Allan Avery he knew his son was innocent, but he couldn’t do anything about it because the sheriff told him not to talk about the case. “Between you and I,” Belz told Stefanic, “there’s a damn good possibility he’s innocent.”
Then Stefanic interviewed Arland Avery, Steve’s uncle. Arland said Steve got “a railroad job.” He told Stefanic the reason he helped arrest Steve that night was because he didn’t want the SWAT team storming the house. He also said he saw cement powder on Steve’s shirt and told Denis Vogel about it, but Vogel never asked him about it while he was on the witness stand. Stefanic noted in his report that “the cop who saw cement dust on Steve at the time of his arrest was told that if he signed an affidavit saying so, he’d lose his job.”
Arland didn’t have much good to say about the officers who interviewed Penny at the hospital that night either. He said Judy Dvorak was a reserve officer at the time and she would have done anything to get on the department full time. As for Gene Kusche’s composite drawing, Arland said he thought Judy Dvorak described Steve to Kusche before he even started the drawing.
Stefanic also spoke with retired Detective Leo Jadowski. Leo said he never thought Avery was guilty. He wanted to reopen the case, but the sheriff stood in the way.
He also interviewed Lori Avery. Lori told him that the sheriff’s department never liked Steve because he was always in trouble. “It was a vendetta,” she said. “Steve fit the description, and they hung him; he was convicted before he went to court.” Lori said there was no way Steve could have committed the assault because he was with her the entire day.
Like every other investigator and attorney who worked on the case, Stefanic quickly became convinced that Steven Avery was innocent. But that wasn’t enough to free him. For that, Stefanic would have to find the guy who did it, which meant some more digging.
He came up with three suspects, two from Sheboygan and one from Manitowoc. Then he called a detective friend at the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department and asked him to check if any of them were on file, and if they were, could he run a check on the suspects to see if any of them matched the victim’s description of her assailant. He explained that Avery wasn’t even close to matching Penny Beerntsen’s initial description of the assailant. Penny said he was five six or seven, with long sandy hair, a brown scraggly beard, and brown eyes. But Avery’s only five feet tall—five foot one at most, and he has blue eyes, not brown. She’d also said the assailant was in his early thirties, but Avery was only twenty-three at the time.
The detective from Sheboygan came up empty; none of the three names fit the description. But Stefanic didn’t give up. On May 22, 1993, he sent a letter to WBAY TV in Green Bay outlining the case for Steve’s innocence. He included the relevant documents that proved it and concluded with, “I believe that an innocent man is in prison for a crime he did not commit.”
WBAY never followed up.