Like many of you, I was enamored with Making a Murderer. The Netflix true crime docu-series covers the life of Steven Avery, a man who wrongly spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit before being freed by DNA evidence.
Spoiler warning: if you go beyond this point, you will be subjected to spoilers from the show. If you have not watched it yet, do not proceed. You have been warned.
After Avery was freed, he was charged (and ultimately convicted) in the murder of Theresa Halbach. If you watched the documentary series, you know that there were a whole bunch of fishy things in the investigation that, at the very least, seemingly made Avery's murder trial unfair. Some of you, like me, may have come to the conclusion that Avery was innocent and was being railroaded by the very same cops he was suing for wrongful imprisonment.
Perhaps Avery is innocent. But as it turns out, there was a bunch of evidence the filmmakers left out of the documentary, and some of that evidence might just make you see Avery in a new light.
I'm not going to present every piece of missing evidence today; for that, you can visit this excellent story and get the full picture.
But here are a few things that made me think Avery is not what he seemed in the documentary.
1. Avery once doused his cat in gasoline and threw it on a fire: This was hinted at during the documentary, but not fully explained, and the full explanation makes me absolutely hate him. Mistreating animals is one of the worst things a person can do, and this is disgusting.
2. Intertwined with Halbach's bones were steel cables from the tires Avery threw on top of her in the fire pit: This pretty much eliminates the theory that someone burned Halbach's body elsewhere and then transferred it to Avery's fire pit in an attempt to frame him.
3. Avery called Halbach three times on the day of the murder; two of those times, he used Star 67 to block his caller ID information
4. Investigators found DNA from Avery's sweat under the hood of Halbach's car: The filmmakers try to paint a picture that someone framed Avery by placing blood from a sample he'd given during his first case inside Halbach's car, and even showed that the vial of Avery's blood had seemingly been tampered with. But the presence of Avery's sweat makes that very much unlikely.
5. Avery once answered his door to Halbach while wearing only a towel.
6. Avery also called Auto Trader to specifically request Halbach on the day she was murdered.
There's plenty more where those pieces of evidence came from, and there's also a Reddit thread collecting all of the court documents if you want to do more research. But needless to say, there's more to this case than Making a Murderer presented, and it is unfortunate that millions of people have been swayed to believe in Avery's innocence without actually seeing the full picture.
What do you think?