Steven Avery’s Ex: ‘He Threaten Me'
Steven Avery’s disturbing letters to his ex-fiancée show the Making a Murderer star in a terrifying new light
Don’t ever tell me to never stop calling again or you will make me mad,” Making a Murderer’s Steven Avery warns his ex-fiancée Lynn Hartman in a rambling letter obtained exclusively by In Touch. Avery also wrote that he’d be forced to do something awful if she didn’t obey. “You got me doing this. I would never do something like this in my life but I have to….”
Hartman cut off all contact anyway, and now she’s terrified of what he’ll do next. “Even though he’s locked up behind bars, I’m scared of him,” she exclusively tells In Touch, admitting that Avery’s communication turned frightening after her October appearance on Dr. Phil. (Avery, 54, accused her of portraying him in a bad light and was livid that she admitted she’d never live alone with him in the woods.) “I felt threatened by him, and I’ve also gotten threats from his followers.” It got so bad that she contacted Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution, where Avery is serving a life sentence for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, and “had them issue a ‘no contact’ from Steven on my behalf,” she says. In the chilling letters, which Hartman, 54, shares exclusively with In Touch, Avery makes cruel threats, then orders her to
burn the written evidence of his anger — a marked contrast to the mildmannered innocent victim of legal injustice the hit Netflix series painted him to be. “He’s very manipulative,” adds Hartman, who dated Avery for eight months. Avery wrote the letters last fall, after their breakup. “I’m afraid for my life,” she says.
He’s filled with rage. In one of the missives, Avery tells Hartman to “through out this Letter or Burn it destroyed by fire This Letter.” (Quotes from his letters are reproduced here without corrected spelling or grammar.) It’s a chilling choice of words for the man who cops say burned his 25-year-old victim’s body and personal effects to cover up his crime. He also pleaded guilty to animal cruelty in 1982 after throwing his family’s cat into a bonfire. “Given his history and experience with fire, this certainly is a warning sign or red flag,” New York–based psycholo- gist Dr. Jean Cirillo, who has not worked with Avery, tells In Touch. “He gets a lot of press for being a victim, but anybody who writes like this to a woman he has affection for has a dark side.”
The letters are also laced with threats. “I dont wont to hurt you or the kids! So you have to Promise me you will help us forever,” Avery scrawls, vowing to publicly release sensitive information about Hartman. “This is a manipulative attempt to hold onto the relationship,” Beverly Hills–based psychologist Julie Armstrong, who has not evaluated Avery, tells In Touch. “His words also have overtones of stalking and harassment behavior.”
Avery instructs Hartman to follow his orders. “When I call you will pick up the phone you are only a house Wife so you ant doing nothing!” he writes. That was his attempt, says Armstrong, to “make her feel inadequate, insecure and meager.”
When Hartman disobeys Avery, he snaps. “I am so mad at you I cant think you got me so mad!” he writes. “I need some time so I dont get mad thin I will call you.” Armstrong says Avery was “using his anger to threaten her. This is a very common tactic of abusers.”
And his words only got more ominous. In one of his final letters, Avery indicates that he talked to a woman who “is going to send me everthing that here is on you and your family and your related to you,” he warns.
Hartman regrets ever reaching out to Avery. “I kick myself because I believed he was innocent,” she says. “I truly loved him [and] was in denial. But I now believe Steven’s guilty of killing that girl.” ￭