Netflix crime show tracks man’s ill-starred life
Making a Murderer, Netflix’s new true-crime documentary, is as unnerving as it is addictive, in part because it is so addictive.
Over the course of 10 hours, writers-directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos tell the story of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man who served 18 years for a sexual assault he did not commit before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Then, just as he prepared to sue the county and police department that had put him in jail in the first place, Avery was accused and later convicted of a horrific kidnapping and murder that he insists he did not commit.
With painstaking, and often painful, detail, Making a Murderer reconstructs how all of this came to pass. What emerges, at least from the four hours Netflix made available, is a disturbing portrait of tribal politics in small-town America and a chilling reminder that the criminal justice system has many more sides than scripted television’s carefully curated tales of “law and order.”
Part of a well-known if not universally beloved family in the small town of Chilton, Wisconsin, Avery had a history of crime both petty (robbery) and brutal (he set fire to the family cat). More important, he had a hostile relationship with at least one cousin, a woman married to a local police officer who was vocal in her hatred of Avery.
In 1985, when Penny Beernsten was sexually assaulted while running along Lake Michigan, her initial description of her assailant provoked one member of the Manitowoc law enforcement to remark “that sounds like Steven Avery.” Beernsten then picked Avery out of a lineup and identified him specifically in court. Despite Avery having multiple alibi witnesses for the time of the attack, he was convicted and sentenced to 32 years.
The first few hours of Making a Murderer detail how police and the district attorney’s office quickly settled on Avery as the perpetrator (despite there being another suspect similar in appearance and with a history of sexual assault), and efforts by Avery’s family and later members of the Innocence Project to get him exonerated.
Then, just as Avery was preparing to sue those involved, he was charged with the horrific abduction and murder of Teresa Hal- bach, a young photographer last seen heading to shoot a car Avery had restored.
Here the story takes a bend toward the surreal, with evidence that seems to mysteriously appear after several initial searches, and Avery’s young and mentally challenged nephew clearly prompted into telling a fantastical tale of rape and murder that is not supported by any physical evidence and later denied by the young man himself.
That Avery’s presence in the series is provided almost exclusively by telephone makes his eventual conviction a foregone conclusion, and Making a Murderer the latest entrant in the hot new subgenre of potentially corrective truecrime television.