“Our entire review section was tarnished,” said the society’s executive director, “it was getting tainted by the minute.”
Why would ANYONE want to call this place home? rhetorically asked one of the reviews. The exasperated executive director complained to a reporter, “They don’t look at the great things we’re doing.”
Others knew precisely where to direct their rage.
Certain that governmental corruption was afoot, one of several Anonymous groups—self-appointed guardians of American citizens’ constitutional rights—announced they’d hacked into the sheriff’s department’s computers and found a treasure trove of incriminating e-mails proving that evidence had been planted. They promised to make the e-mails public in two days. However, either they came up empty-handed or the illustrious group of hackers had been bluffing, since the day came and went without any disclosure.
A few weeks later one of their masked sympathizers, donning the traditional Guy Fawkes mask, managed to join a crowd of demonstrators at the courthouse to scold the local police and to chant slogans and carry signs demanding Steven Avery’s and Brendan Dassey’s immediate release.
“What do we want?”
“Justice!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
Afraid the demonstrators might disrupt court proceedings, the three judges cleared their calendars, so I pitched my suit and tie in favor of jeans and a hooded jacket. Call me a coward, but I avoided being near the officers in charge of security when small groups of demonstrators occasionally came inside to either use the restrooms or to get out of the cold.
With the exception of a yelling match initiated by a pro-police counterdemonstrator, which nearly turned into a fight, the march was angry and loud, but never got out of control. To ward off trouble and to show national-news television audiences that Manitowoc was a friendly and kind Midwestern town after all, nearby businesses provided hot cocoa and cookies to demonstrators on both sides.
But the lawful expressions of protest did not last long. The FBI was contacted a few weeks later when a sheriff’s department officer received a suspicious package in the mail with a note attached that said, For Steven Avery. When the hazmat team opened the package, a tube exploded with glitter. Nothing else was in the package, but the invasion of privacy upset the officer and his family and made them wonder what was next. In an atmosphere filled with hate, who is to say what people so driven by anger were capable of doing?
It didn’t take long to find out.
“If you don’t do it yourself, I’d do it for you—with a bullet to the head,” came the answer in the form of a telephone call to the sheriff’s department a few days later.
A man called joint dispatch a few weeks later and announced that sheriff’s department officers and the county prosecutors would be executed in their homes on Sunday, January 31. The same message was called into our office later that day. The sheriff promptly informed the FBI, and was told they’d “open a file.”
“Announcing plans ahead of time to execute the nonbelievers,” my colleagues and I joked, with no small amount of bravado.
I had received a few threats on social media, and a particularly deranged citizen said he was going to make my boss, the current district attorney, watch as he murdered her children and then did away with her. The endless string of police shootings that summer and fall had raised the level of anger, by several notches, to one of rage against police and prosecutors, which only added to our uneasiness.
I had received dozens of angry messages in response to my criticism of Making a Murderer and support for the police in several media interviews. One woman named Billie, for instance, whose cover shot on her Facebook page included a blissful picture and the words John 15:12, wrote some rather unholy words I won’t share here. I didn’t have to bother looking up that Bible verse, either. It was right there on her page: My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. It’s a pretty safe bet that those sentiments didn’t apply to me.
Amidst this kind of insanity, anything seemed possible, so with caution the better part of valor, a few of us made plans to be out of town that weekend—just in case.
The appointed day for our execution passed without incident, but as Making a Murderer catapulted into a national, even international, phenomenon in the weeks that followed, it became clear that concerns for our safety were not misplaced.
On February 3, 2016, six and a half weeks after Making a Murderer was released, two bomb threats were phoned into the sheriff’s department. The first caller claimed there were bombs inside the sheriff’s department and that he was getting “Justice for Steven.” Two hours later, at a little after nine p.m., a second caller said there was a vehicle packed with explosives in the parking lot between the jail and the courthouse and there would be a “huge massacre” when the bomb went off.
Officers from surrounding police agencies and a bomb-sniffing dog meticulously searched the sheriff’s department and the courthouse throughout the night. No devices were found, and the buildings were declared safe to open for business the next day. Still, though, the threats had caused plenty of disruption and rattled all of our already shaken nerves.
A police spokesperson told reporters there was a good chance the threat came from outside the state. “I can’t say I’m totally surprised at it,” he said, “I was hoping nothing like this would occur. We will prosecute this to the fullest when this person is caught.”
The callers had employed a complicated calling route to phone in the threats, so city and state police set out to backtrack through the layers of calls to find their origin. As the officer in charge put it, the calls were “intricately spoofed.” In the end they proved too convoluted to trace.
At the same time the bomb threats were phoned in that night, SWAT members were dispatched to the residence of one of the officers castigated by the documentary. A Lifeline emergency signal had come into the sheriff’s department and was followed by a phone call from a purported neighbor of the officer reporting that a man with a rifle was outside his neighbor’s front door.
SWAT members arrived and discovered it was another hoax. The officer and his family were fine, nobody in the house owned a Lifeline alert system, and there had never been a man with a rifle at the door. State police and the FBI later tried to trace how the emergency alert was routed through the officer’s residence. Again, their efforts were unsuccessful.
* * *
For several more weeks the city continued to be on edge. It was a particularly difficult time for third-shift officers who had to deal with the backlash on the streets from Making a Murderer. Like most small towns in Wisconsin—medium and larger cities like Madison, Milwaukee, and Green Bay, too, now that I think of it—Manitowoc has its share of taverns, with more than a few street corners having two or three allowing those who had tipped a few too many to stumble from one to the next without getting into their car.
Several police threat referrals came across my desk with requests for charges. In one of them an officer arrested a man after a fight broke out at Revolutions Bar on the city’s north side. The man started screaming “Avery” from the backseat of the squad car on the way to the jail and then threatened to kill the officer and his “entire family” during a string of expletives that were difficult to make out.
In another incident, an officer was dispatched to the south side at three forty-five in the morning in reference to a man sitting in the front seat of the neighbor’s pickup truck. Asked if he knew whose vehicle he was sitting in, the man said with a dazed look on his face that it was Teresa Halbach’s and he was going to rape and kill her and then frame Steven Avery.
It was very evident the subject was under the influence at this point, the officer dryly noted in his report. The officer didn’t hazard a guess about which drug the man had used to blow away his mind on that particular night. Given the recent scourge that was visited upon our city, heroin would be the safest bet.
Working in
suits and ties from nine to five in buildings designed to instill a modicum of dignity and respect—and where only the most hardened drug and alcohol addicts are nervy enough to show up drunk or high—threats to prosecutors are rare, at least compared to those made to cops on the streets. Still, owing to my book’s firmly expressed position that Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey were rightly convicted, I was on the receiving end of plenty of venom and anger myself.
One woman made it very clear that she was not my friend. She posted in the commentary section of a news article concerning the lack of progress in finding the source of the bomb threats made a few weeks earlier: Ask prosecutor Michael Griesbach—he practically accuses everyone who asks why he has published false facts in his book of being some form of terrorist—making the same false equation. Obviously threats are wrong, but this article with the obtuse “Justice for Steven” is more insinuation publicity, the same corrupt PR used to convict Avery and Dassey out of court.
In compliance with the newspaper’s policy for posting comments, the woman gave her name and identified herself as a film producer at an outfit called Fear the Hills. I Googled it at that time and discovered that Fear the Hills Facebook page had 6,066 likes. That is a list to which I would not have added my name for a number of reasons, not least of which is there are one too many sixes for my comfort level.
* * *
Those who publicly express anger and threaten to inflict physical harm are a small percentage of the number of people in any movement or cause, and the Avery and Dassey supporters were no exception. Over five hundred thousand people signed an online petition asking President Obama to pardon them and to hold Manitowoc County officials, who were complicit in their wrongful convictions, accountable to the highest extent of the law. Tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents signed a similar petition for Governor Walker to sign.
The White House released a statement noting the president had no power to issue a pardon for people convicted in state criminal courts, so a pardon for Avery and Dassey would need to be issued in Wisconsin. While this case is out of the Administration’s purview, the White House added, President Obama is committed to restoring the sense of fairness at the heart of our justice system.
Not quite an endorsement of the movement, but close enough. Four months after dropping out of the presidential race, Governor Walker issued a statement, too. After pointing out how he had never issued a pardon during his five years in office, the governor said he was not going to start with Steven Avery.
As I finished watching the documentary, my own certainty about the guilt of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey had been compromised even more so. Ever since, it continued to vacillate whenever I heard something new, as did the level of discomfort that accompanied my uncertainty. People don’t demonstrate in front of a Wisconsin courthouse in the middle of winter for nothing. Nor do half-a-million people sign petitions asking the president of the United States to pardon a man convicted of murder, especially one as senseless and ruthless as Teresa Halbach’s.
After finishing the documentary, I settled into a resignation of sorts. I didn’t like it, but I could live with my lack of certainty concerning their guilt. Our conflict of interest applied to appeals and possible retrials, so we were not responsible for their cases going forward. I figured the court system would sort it all out while I sat comfortably by and watched the whole mess unravel from a distance.
But I figured wrong.
CHAPTER 5
CONVOLUTED CONCERNS
If Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey didn’t murder Teresa Halbach, then who did? The creators of Making a Murderer tried, and failed, to give viewers a credible alternative—as did Avery’s lawyers, who faced the same problem closing the deal with the jury at trial. The frame-up defense nearly succeeded. We know that because the jury deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. According to one juror, their initial vote was seven to five in favor of acquittal. But all that was about to change—the missing piece of the puzzle may have been found.
* * *
From a concerned citizen, read the subject line of an e-mail I received at work just days after the documentary aired—the kind of e-mail you’re not supposed to open because its source is unknown and you might spread some untoward virus. I opened it anyhow.
The message was brief. In fact, there was none—just a link to a blog that I also opened, probably breaking a techie’s second golden rule. The blog’s author went by the name of “Convoluted Brian,” and his blog boasted a subtitle of “The Importance of Understanding.” Whether his blog adds to or subtracts from his readers’ understanding of the world is in the eye of the beholder, but convoluted or not, Brian McCorkle was clearly a smart guy who had done his homework concerning the Avery case. The blog contained a wealth of what appeared to be accurate information about both the Avery and Dassey cases, but at the moment I was only concerned with the page I’d been directed to.
Posted two years after their trials, the page was entitled “Alternate Suspect.” It offered up a previously unknown suspect, a German national by the name of Wolfgang Braun (pseudonym), who I would soon learn was not unknown to me during the trials. The source of the dirt on Wolfgang Braun was his wife, Sophie (pseudonym), although at this point I knew neither of their names since Convoluted Brian had not provided them on his blog, presumably out of concern for Sophie’s safety. As I read through Convoluted Brian’s account of what Sophie allegedly had told him, I did so with a growing fear.
The couple had separated and Sophie was moving from Bon-duel, Wisconsin, to Maribel, where she had signed a lease with an effective date of November 1 for a country home six miles from the Avery Salvage Yard. Wolfgang was acting strange at the time, Sophie explained, sleeping in their attic and exhibiting other bizarre behavior. One day he told her he’d gone to the rental property and spoke of visiting an auto salvage yard. Sophie claimed she later found out it was October 31, the day Halbach was last seen. Wolfgang said that he felt the photographer was “stupid” and that she asked him if she could take some pictures of the rental property while he was there. Sophie also said that Wolfgang had a cut on his finger, which was intermittently bleeding, and she noticed he had scratches on his back that night.
Continuing what I assumed was a made-up story, Sophie claimed that a few days later she discovered a can of lighter fluid in one of the outbuildings on the rental property with a bloody fingerprint on it. Wolfgang told her he’d burned a doll crib, but when Sophie checked, the crib had not been burned. She described bizarre behavior that grew steadily worse as the week of Halbach’s disappearance unfolded—culminating in Wolfgang’s arrest for a domestic violence incident on November 6 in the early-morning hours after Halbach’s RAV4 was discovered at the salvage yard.
That last bit of information concerned me. Wolfgang Braun’s arrest would be easy to verify, which made it unlikely she was making it up—at least that part. Sophie said a few months later he was arrested again—this time for burglary, intimidation of a witness, criminal trespass to a dwelling, resisting an officer, and bail jumping when he struck her after being released from jail, which was in violation of the no-contact condition of bail.
Per Convoluted Brian’s blog, Sophie claimed that months later she opened a closet at the base of the stairs and discovered a pair of women’s jeans, a top, and a pillowcase with red stains on it. In another location she discovered a pair of women’s underwear with red stains on it. Suspecting her husband may have been involved in Teresa Halbach’s disappearance, she contacted the sheriff’s department. According to Sophie, the detective steered her away from her suspicions and told her they already had their suspect locked up, which was exactly what Wolfgang told her would happen if she reported her suspicions—the police would just laugh and never believe her.
I hoped this was simply a case of someone seeking attention by claiming she had information regarding a very publicized case or that the owner of the blog had taken things out of context. But what if it’s true? I
t might mean that Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey were innocent, or at the very least, it could re-open the case and maybe even result in a new trial. Either way, the prosecution of Avery and Dassey was in serious jeopardy if Sophie Braun was telling the truth.
This can’t be happening, I thought. I had felt for nearly a decade—no, I knew, for nearly a decade—that the jury got it right; that Avery had not been wrongly convicted a second time. Avery and Dassey were responsible for Halbach’s murder, I was sure of it. No way had Making a Murderer gotten it right.
I stared blankly out the window behind my desk, not even trying to gather my thoughts. Then I walked into the hallway and descended the three flights of marble stairs in a building where I’d spent most of my waking hours for the last twenty-five years. The familiar took on the unfamiliar, and nothing looked the same. People I’ve known and worked with for years even seemed different somehow. I was stunned. I walked back up the three flights of stairs and returned to my work, but for the rest of the day, I wondered why.
* * *
Lawyers, scholars, and judges call it exculpatory evidence—a legal term for evidence that suggests may be helpful to the defense. Or as more formally stated in the law: Evidence that tends to negate the guilt of the accused.
The rule, which goes to the heart of the constitutional right to a fair trial, is straightforward enough: If a prosecutor knows of exculpatory evidence that is material, he or she must promptly turn it over to the defense. In Wisconsin, prosecutors have a further duty to turn over all exculpatory evidence, regardless of whether it is material.
While not uncommon, exculpatory evidence exists in fewer cases than you might expect. If we are doing our jobs as prosecutors, we aren’t charging people with crimes unless evidence of their guilt is clear—as in “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” clear. And if guilt is clear, then there shouldn’t be much, if any, evidence that the defendant is innocent. If there is, we need to turn it over to the defense, right away. It’s that simple.
Indefensible Page 6