Making a Murderer (2015-2018)

I had a pretty good groove going last fall on true-crime documentaries and then I ran into the very hard wall of the Netflix series Making a Murderer. It's relatively long, with both its 2015 and 2018 seasons running to 10 one-hour episodes each, but that was not the problem. I made it to episode 9 of the first season before I foundered. Sometimes you have to take care of your soul. I'm sure there are greater travesties and outrages of flawed criminal justice, but I can't think of one at the moment. By ep 9, the handwriting in this case is on the wall, and I just couldn't bear it any longer. This is the story of Steven Avery, who was accused in 1985 of a rape he did not commit, lost at trial, and went to prison for 18 years. He got out because DNA technology arrived and then became sophisticated enough to prove not only that he didn't do it, but that a man who had gone on to rape again did. Terrible tragedy, set right. But let's not be hasty. As Avery moved to sue Manitowoc County in Wisconsin for the malice and incompetence, Manitowoc County responded by getting him (read: framing him) for a heinous crime: the murder of a young woman whose body had been burned to hide the evidence. Avery's innocence is the position of this documentary anyway, written and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, and they make their case a lot better than Manitowoc law enforcement did for his guilt—the first time or the second. To make it worse, Avery's nephew Brendan Dassey finds himself caught up in it, still a minor, and he goes to prison too. They are still there—the second season basically details the heartbreaking efforts to get them out. If I have any complaint about this TV series (other than the unusually pungent unremitting bleakness, generally a true-crime known quantity) it is that it waits until the second season to start really looking into alternate theories of the crime.

I know the show made quite a splash on its initial release, and I wonder how those viewers could stand the three-year wait for answers (which are still incomplete) to the questions raised in the first about specifically the murder. It was the convincing depiction of the monstrous corruption of Manitowoc County law enforcement that sent me into the tailspin. I didn't want to live in a world with people like them. But eventually I came back and finished. Ricciardi and Demos show many different ways how unlikely if not impossible it is that Avery and Dassey killed the victim. In the second season, the attorney Kathleen Zellner arrives like a rock star and starts investigating the murder the way it should have been, making the show both more heartening and more interesting. She uses more standard if highly sophisticated investigation techniques. (As opposed to spending time making up lurid stories for press conferences and coercing confessions. A few years after the trial, the prosecutor Ken Kratz was forced to resign for sending sexually coercive texts to a domestic violence victim. That's his moral compass.) There are gaps and questions in Zellner's theory too—if it's a compulsive sex crime, for example, why is it an isolated one, with most of the alternate suspects still living in the area? But more things make much more sense as a result of her work. In the context of this show it's thrilling to see someone actually try to figure out what happened. It's hard to recommend anything that affected me so strongly that I stopped watching it for almost two months. But, if you can stand it, it ultimately does everything a true-crime story can in terms of shock, outrage, and eternal human truths. It's especially remarkable for a case that is still as wide open as this one. There may be a third season yet.