Hotshot lawyer
Meet Making a Murderer’s Kathleen Zellner
‘There’s nothing as satisfying as doing this,” says Kathleen Zellner. “Once you’ve experienced the success of saving someone’s life, you can’t really top that.” The Chicago attorney, whose spellbinding presence dominates the second series of Netflix’s true-crime documentary Making a Murderer, first saved an innocent man from death row in 1994. Since then, she has freed more wrongly convicted men than any other lawyer in America (20 in total).
Zellner’s goal in the series is to overturn the verdict against breaker’s yard worker Steven Avery – sentenced to life without parole in Wisconsin in 2005 for the murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. Sensitivities do not come into her attempts to dismantle the story told to the jury. A dummy with hair dripping in blood is flung into the boot of a car to try to reproduce the spatter of the victim’s blood; bullets are fired through the shoulder blades of a dead cow to imitate them passing through her skull.
“You’ve got to be an obsessive kind of personality to do this,” Zellner says.
At 61, the lawyer is visually arresting, dressed in suits and snakeskin prints, her face a controlled mask, her precise arguments framed in a side of the mouth drawl; you notice the eloquence of her long fingers, with their long, painted nails, as she points out another hole in the prosecution’s case – “it was full of holes”, she tells me.
Zellner is aware that her methods are being scrutinised by millions. “I’ve tried to block that as much as I can,” she says. For some people, she notes, “it’s as if they’re handling the case”.
Some have suggested she was drawn to take part in the high-profile series for the fame. “When people talk about that I wanna laugh,” she says. “It’s just not true. I was already well known, and I’d already accomplished financial success.” She was originally a corporate lawyer (“I won a lot of verdicts”) and the Joseph Burrows case in 1994, where a female killer finally confessed to the murder, had international news coverage. “I’ve turned down book deals, I’ve turned down TV – Dick Wolf [the creator of Law & Order] approached me about doing a series in the mid-nineties. If I were interested in all of that, I wouldn’t be sitting here doing these cases pro bono.”
She funds her work on wrongful convictions through other work at her practice and has spent up to $1million of her own money to win a case, as she did to free Ryan Ferguson in 2013. He had spent nearly 10 years in prison for the murder of a sports journalist in Columbia, Missouri, based on two false testimonies.
She escapes from her days dwelling in darkness and death to a five-acre wooded country estate where she lives with her husband, Robert, and their dogs. Her daughter, Anne, is a lawyer in Nevada. Robert is a commodities trader and a former CEO of Citicorp. Kathleen says she’s thought “a million times” that it’s lucky he is not a lawyer, too. “It would have driven me to craziness if I’d been married to a lawyer,” she says. “We just walk totally away from all of this. I swim a lot, I find that really relaxing. I love watching movies, reading books. Outside of this, my life is very quiet and peaceful.”
Zellner was born in Texas, but grew up in Oklahoma, the second-eldest of seven children. She got her empathy from her mother, a chemist who later went into nursing. Her father discovered oilfields all over the world. “He was a very incisive thinker – I got my sense of adventure from him but also the ability to deconstruct arguments, look at evidence.”
Zellner agreed to take on Avery’s case in 2016, after she saw Making a Murderer. “I realised there was something really wrong with the forensic evidence,” she says.
Zellner says she thinks there was a “tremendous pushback from the state” after the first series, which followed the case of both Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted of Halbach’s murder on the basis of a controversial confession. “They thought they’d been embarrassed on a worldwide stage.” Her 1,272-page motion for a retrial was denied. She is now applying for a hearing at the appeal court.
She may have a better chance with this since the midterm elections last week changed Wisconsin’s political landscape. Out went Republican governor Scott Walker, losing to Democrat Scott Evers, and out went Republican attorney general Brad Schimel (who features frequently in the documentary) to be replaced by Democrat Josh Kaul.
“I have always believed that Schimel had never spent any time on the case files of Steven Avery and Brendan, he knew nothing about the facts,” Zellner says. Has she been on the phone to the incomers? “I have not and that wouldn’t be my approach,” she says, but adds, “I think it’s a good sign. The new attorney general has a very impressive background, he has a Stanford law degree. His mother was the attorney general, but he is not tied to the kind of old boys’ club in Wisconsin in the legal community. That’s extremely important because you don’t have somebody who’s tied back to the prosecutor and is going to be biased.”
She stresses that, if people think she
‘If I were interested in the fame, I wouldn’t be sitting here doing all these other cases pro bono’
may approach Evers and Kaul seeking a pardon for Avery, “that will never happen – you don’t seek pardons for clients who are innocent”.
Making a Murderer may even have influenced the election: Zellner says she had messages from Wisconsin residents who said they were going to vote against Walker and Schimel after watching it. She says that there is “no question” the American justice system is set up to protect the strong over the weak. “A guilty person who is wealthy is much more likely to get away with a murder than someone who is poor. They just have enormous resources. I would say without hesitation that the O J Simpson case is the example of that.”
The biggest flaw in the system, however, Zellner says, is that prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity, “so they can literally violate the constitution, suborn perjury, hide evidence and they’re never gonna be held accountable… no one should be above the law. We’ve got great prosecutors,” she insists, “but we’ve definitely got corrupt prosecutors.
“The way to stop this behaviour of stealing people’s lives away from them is accountability, and the punishment has to be severe. That’s why these officers in police shooting cases must be held criminally accountable. So far in the US, there’s just been one prosecutor who went to jail for framing somebody. But that’s got to happen to make it stop.”
Since the second series was released in October, viewers have been contacting her. “We’ve gotten a tip in the last 24 hours that we think is really significant. It has to do Teresa Halbach’s car – we spent most of yesterday following up on it.” Scientists have been volunteering their time and potential witnesses claim to have information on alternative suspects – “people are starting to talk”.
On Twitter she regularly discusses developments and responds to #Askzellner questions, including one recently from pop star Lily Allen. Ricky Gervais and Avril Lavigne are also following the case, she says. Does she think the high-profile nature of the series might have harmed Avery’s chances? “I think that it’s created an additional risk, but I still believe that the system works.” And what if she fails? “Nothing can take away from me what I’ve already accomplished… I am funding this as a private individual. Who else is doing that in America?”
Making a Murderer is on Netflix