‘Making a Murderer’: The Story Behind Netflix’s Hit True-Crime Show
For anyone connecting with Netflix over the holidays, it was anything but a merry Christmas. Premiering on Dec. 18, the streaming service’s docu-series Making a Murderer plunged viewers deep into one of the strangest and most disturbing true-crime cases in recent memory. In 1985, Steven Avery, a 22-year-old whose family runs an auto salvage yard in Wisconsin, was found guilty of rape and sent to prison. Eighteen years later, he was released when DNA evidence proved he was innocent, as he’d asserted all along.
But then matters took the first of many dark twists: Two years after his release, just as Avery was about to sue the county and local officials for $36 million, he was arrested for the murder of a local photographer, Teresa Halbach. Avery once more asserted his innocence, but in 2007 he was found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide and is serving life in prison with no chance of parole; Brendan Dassey, Avery’s nephew who lived next door to him and allegedly took part in the murder, was also sentenced to life but will be eligible for parole in 2048.
Produced and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos — two filmmakers with backgrounds in the law and film editing, respectively — Making a Murderer devotes its first hour to Avery’s initial arrest and trial in the Eighties. The next nine episodes follow Avery’s arrest in the Halbach murder and the subsequent trial. From the crime itself to suggestions of tampered evidence and repeated shots of bleak Wisconsin winters, Making a Murderer is unrelenting, intense and sometimes infuriating. (Was Avery set up as payback for his lawsuit? Was Dassey’s confession coerced?) It’s also become the Internet-watercooler series of the moment; Alec Baldwin, Rosie O’Donnell, Ricky Gervais and Rainn Wilson have all recommended it on Twitter.
And the subjects’ situations are still fluid. Avery is working on an appeal, and thanks to the series, an online petition from Change.Org for release has generated over 300,000 signatures; a petition to the White House asking for President Obama to pardon Avery and Dassey has reached over 100,000 signatures. Meanwhile, Ricciardi and Demos just announced they were contacted by a juror who claims some jurors felt Avery was framed but that they voted guilty for fear of their “personal safety.” (“The person felt burdened for eight years and was hoping some new evidence would come out and lead to a new trial,” says Ricciardi.) In the midst of this hubbub, Rolling Stone spoke with Ricciardi and Demos about their left-field sensation.
You’ve said this all started with a New York Times article about Avery’s arrest in 2005. What made you want to investigate further?
Ricciardi: In terms of what appealed to us about this story, unfortunately lots of people in America are charged with serious violent crime, including murder. This was not going to be a murder story to us. From reading the initial Times piece, this was a man who we thought, if we embark on this journey with him through the American criminal justice system, we’d go from one extreme of it to another. When we read this was someone exonerated in a DNA case now charged with a new crime, that struck me as unprecedented.
Demos: What we saw in Steven’s story was this incredible and valuable window he provided into the system. He had been in the system in the mid-Eighties. It had failed him. He’d been wrongly convicted and here he was back in that system in 2005. It was this opportunity to say, okay, in those 20 years, DNA [testing] and legislative reforms were developed — all these things being heralded as a new and improved system. So let’s test that system and see what happens. Are we better off or not?