Indefensible

by Michael Griesbach

  Having exhausted my memory of Wolfgang, I went up to bed and fell asleep to Steven Avery’s plaintive voice wondering why the police were after him again, along with the documentary’s foreboding theme music, as both sounds made their way up the stairs and through my bedroom door.

  * * *

  It was Christmas Eve and the courthouse was abandoned when I arrived at the office the following day. I’d asked our receptionist the day before if she could retrieve the Wolfgang Braun files out of storage, and I must have shown a sufficient degree of deference because both files were on the top of my desk when I arrived.

  I started with the criminal complaints—the ones I’d filed a decade ago, but had long since forgotten the details. Wolfgang was arrested on domestic violence charges after Sophie called 911 a little after four in the morning on Sunday, November 6, 2005. That was less than eighteen hours after Teresa Halbach’s RAV4 was discovered at the Avery Salvage Yard six miles away. He had punched Sophie on the right side of her head after she told him she would no longer help him get his green card—his visa had expired in August. As officers began escorting him from the house, he braced himself against a door frame and struggled until they were able to “decentralize him to the floor.”

  The second complaint proved more interesting. On January 19, nine days after he was released from jail, Wolfgang showed up at two forty-five in the morning outside Sophie’s door. The bail conditions from his first case were still in effect, including that he have no contact with Sophie, so he was in violation of bail, a crime in itself. He forced his way into the residence and then shoved her around before taking her digital camera and wrestling her cell phone away.

  But it was the resisting charge that jogged my memory of why I considered Wolfgang so emotionally disturbed. When police arrived, Sophie told them that after taking her camera Wolfgang ran out the door toward the northwest corner of the property. They eventually found him sitting in a grassy area in the midst of plowed fields with a pair of black socks and a digital camera at his side. This was at four twenty-one in the morning, in the middle of winter. As soon as he saw the police, Wolfgang tried strangling himself with the socks until they were able to subdue him with a few bursts of pepper spray to the face. He was taken into custody and hauled off to jail, where he remained on a one-thousand-dollar cash bail until his sentencing hearing two months later.

  I leafed through the contents of his disheveled file and came across three photos of jailhouse graffiti written in thick, block-styled letters in pencil that jogged my memory even more as to why I thought Wolfgang was so disturbed. A note from a corrections officer indicated that Wolfgang had drawn the giant words on his cell’s bathroom walls a few weeks before he was released.

  WHAT IS FAIRNESS IN JUSTIFIED—EVER GUILTY, read one of the messages on a six-by-six-foot portion of one wall in half-inch-wide lines to form the letters. It was difficult to decipher, probably in part because his English was poor. Did he mean “What in fairness is justified?”

  GOD BLESS YOU, read another.

  The third message, written on the wall immediately to the right of the cell’s stainless-steel toilet, but too large to have been accomplished while Wolfgang was doing his business, screamed DEAD IS FREEDOM. One or maybe two words were written above those, but they were too blurry to read—at least on the copy of the photo I was looking at in the file.

  Wolfgang’s writings on the jail walls and his behavior in the farm field that night, along with the vibe he gave off later at his sentencing hearing, explained why I told Jody about him a decade earlier. But that’s not what I was looking for. I was there to find out if Sophie told the police or maybe even our office that she suspected he was involved with Teresa Halbach’s murder. If she didn’t pass on this information back then, when it was fresh on her mind, then she probably made it all up several years later when she spoke with Convoluted Brian. If that was the case, I could go back home and continue with our holiday cheer.

  * * *

  I checked the file notes next. We make entries on stapled pages on the left side of the defendant’s file to explain what occurred at every court proceeding or to scribble settlement offers—there is no time to draft final settlement letters in most district attorney’s offices. It’s way too busy.

  One of my colleagues did bail hearings that day and her notes indicated that Wolfgang Braun was a German national with an INS detainer. The fact that he had an INS detainer meant he was in the country unlawfully and would be sitting in jail until the feds deported him—unless for some reason they decided not to do so. The court commissioner set five-hundred-dollar cash bail, just in case.

  I must have been on intake that month because I ended up handling both files and the next entry was mine: MG should handle file, dangerous defendant with victim afraid he’ll kill her if he’s released. Look for max and/or deportation. The victim witness coordinators or I must have spoken with Sophie to generate that note, so I rifled through the file to get to the victim witness, or V/W, section. If Sophie said anything about Teresa Halbach’s murder, this is where it would be.

  A memo written by Tammy Henrickson (pseudonym), one of the victim witness coordinators at the time, recounting telephone conversations she had with Sophie, was on top. Tammy had written the memo to DA Mark Rohrer, at my direction, and an unusual number of e-mails and correspondence filled that part of the file.

  Captioned State of Wisconsin v. Wolfgang Braun, Case No. 2005CM810, and dated December 29, 2005, the memo was addressed to Rohrer and began as follows: Per Mike’s request, I am informing you of information the victim has told me over the telephone on the above entitled matter.

  It began by describing how frightened Sophie was of Wolfgang. Certain that Wolfgang would kill her if he was released on bail, she asked to be placed on the jail’s victim contact list so they could immediately call to give her time to leave the area if he was let out of jail.

  Ten lines down she moved on to the topic that generated my request that she draft the memo.

  Sophie has stated that they live approximately 4 to 5 miles from Steven Avery’s residence and that there have been some “suspicious” incidents happening, such as, she found a pair of women’s panties that are not hers hidden in the house. Wolfgang Braun told Sophie with a suspicious grin that he burnt something. When she asked for an explanation, he said he burnt an old doll crib. She checked the crib and it wasn’t burnt. Then she checked the burn barrels outside and they looked like they hadn’t been used in a long time.

  Sophie called Henrickson a few days later and said she found a gasoline can with “what looked like blood on [it] and some bloody surgical gloves” hidden in Wolfgang’s tool box in one of the outbuildings.

  Less than a month after Teresa Halbach was murdered, with the events fresh on her mind, Braun told our office that she suspected her husband was involved in the murder. Over the next few hours I would find out that she had provided more detail to us than she had to Convoluted Brian two years later, and we weren’t the only ones in law enforcement she told. It made her account much more credible, and it threw my life into a tailspin. The rest of the file only added to the severity of the spin.

  I sat there, frozen, staring over the open file. I couldn’t move. How could I have forgotten, I prosecuted the case myself. Did we do it again; did we wrongfully convict an innocent man? Twice! I leaned back in my chair and looked out my office window at Lake Michigan’s angry, cold, wintry gray waters. The lake turns clear blue in summer and even warms up enough for a swim in the latter part of July through the middle of August, at least for the brave-hearted. But I wasn’t thinking of summer and I wasn’t feeling brave-hearted. I was thinking of Wolfgang Braun.

  * * *

  It turns out that Braun had shared her suspicions about Wolfgang’s involvement in the Halbach murder with the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, but she was met with resistance. According to Sophie, her first attempt via a phone call was met by a response that they were too busy and, as H
enrickson quoted her in another memo, “didn’t have time for such nonsense.” Sophie provided statements and even physical evidence supporting her suspicions to two detectives, but again, according to Sophie, she was met with skepticism and her concerns were rebuffed. As luck—I fervently hoped—would have it, Dennis Jacobs was one of the detectives Sophie spoke with. Jacobs was famously heard in the documentary at the end of the first episode, asking dispatch, “Do we have Steven Avery in custody, though?”

  No matter how I tried to tame the ill winds I confronted in the Wolfgang Braun file, they were headed straight in my direction in a swirling, dark, and devastating cloud—and they were coming in fast. Did the sheriff’s department pass on to Kratz what Sophie told them? If they did, was Sophie’s information followed up on, and were the results of the follow-up investigation disclosed to the defense?

  And what about me? Why did I tell Tammy to document what Sophie had told her? Was it just a cover-your-ass memo I wanted for the file? If it was, it wasn’t a very good one if it just sat in the file. Or did I make sure that a copy of the memo was sent to Kratz?

  Next came the most obvious and largest question of all. Was it possible that lightning had struck twice? Had Steven Avery been wrongly convicted again, framed by the same sheriff’s department that had already taken eighteen years of his life and was apparently willing to take down his sixteen-year-old disadvantaged nephew as collateral damage?

  I didn’t want to believe it. Everything I thought I knew about police and prosecutors and human nature itself would be turned on its head. I’d quit my job rather than continue to be a part of the process. Jim Lenk and Andy Colborn were two of the finest police officers I knew—the last cops I’d suspect of planting evidence. If there’s anything such as honest to a fault, Colborn, in particular, would fit the bill. Lenk, likewise, was as solid as a Wisconsin winter is long. There’s no way these guys would plant evidence, and there’s no way the entire sheriff’s department would follow their lead. Even the prosecutors would have to have known, because when you try a case like this, you work intimately with the police and you know every detail of the case. If evidence was planted, they would have known.

  But if Sophie Braun was telling the truth, her husband, Wolfgang, not Steven Avery, was probably Teresa Halbach’s killer, especially when the information she provided to Convoluted Brian is added to what she told the police. Given what Sophie told the police, I could not see how it could be any different. To find out more, it would take more digging, but it was Christmas Eve and the digging would have to wait.

  I’d been obsessed with Steven Avery’s case since September 2003 when a telephone call from the crime lab proved his innocence of one crime. But not that night—I would not allow a crime saga that began on a summer day in 1985 on the shores of Lake Michigan to ruin one of the most sacred nights of the year. For three decades this crime saga had festered, and no matter what I found out, it was sure to fester more.

  CHAPTER 7

  DEAD END

  The Christmas spirit was alive and well when I returned home late that afternoon. A snowstorm was howling outside, with five inches already on the ground and seven more in the forecast before the storm moved on. With a foot of snow expected, and sustained northeasterly winds of thirty-five miles per hour off Lake Michigan, the storm fit squarely within the category of an official blizzard.

  Looking forward to a relaxing evening with plenty of holiday fare to eat and drink, I went into the kitchen and started telling Jody about Sophie Braun. I was determined to avoid discussing the Avery case for the rest of the day and that night, but I knew she would ask me for the short version of what I had found in Wolfgang’s files.

  Jody and I met in law school, but it took us five years to figure out what was apparently obvious to our friends and our families all along—that we were made for each other. There are few of law’s, or life’s, complicated scenarios that don’t eventually find their way into the middle of one of our conversations. I value my wife’s judgment more than anyone I’ve ever known, with the possible exception of my dad, who taught philosophy for years at Marquette University. Dad is long gone, although when I stop long enough to quiet my mind and bother to listen, I have no doubt that he’s still here to share his comforting wisdom like he always did.

  I started talking, calmly at first, while I handed Jody the pile of documents I brought home from the office. I told her about Sophie reporting her suspicions that Wolfgang might have something to do with Halbach’s murder to both the police and to our office during conversations with Henrickson. I mentioned that when Sophie first called the sheriff’s department, they told her they were too busy and “didn’t have time for such nonsense.” Later, Sophie turned over some physical evidence to one of the detectives, who seemed none too interested in following up. The main point, though, I explained to Jody, was that Sophie’s statement to Convoluted Brian a few years after Teresa Halbach was murdered wasn’t some yarn she had spun after the fact. If Sophie was perpetuating lies, she started perpetuating them almost immediately after Halbach went missing.

  “So what do you think?” I asked two minutes after giving her a stack of documents that had taken me nearly three hours to wade through at work. “Did Wolfgang do it? Was Avery wrongly convicted again? Did the cops set him up?”

  She continued reviewing the paperwork without looking up and ignored me like she always does when I ask multiple questions without waiting for her reply.

  “This is insane, not Colborn and Lenk, they’d never do this—they’re two of the most honest cops I’ve ever known,” I continued.

  Twenty minutes later, having carefully reviewed the documents, Jody told me she really didn’t know—and then she methodically went through the competing scenarios, commenting on those facts that supported and detracted from each. I wish I had an organized mind like that. It would save a great deal of time.

  She thought it was likely—not 100 percent certain, but likely—that if Sophie Braun was telling the truth and, equally important, if Wolfgang was telling Sophie the truth, that Wolfgang was the killer. I had to agree: if you treat the facts in Sophie’s statements as true, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion.

  However, Jody also felt that Sophie’s description of Wolfgang sounded “off.” The report was extremely detailed and expertly written. It seemed more clinical than you’d expect, almost as if it was written by a psychologist or other professional evaluating a patient rather than by a distraught victim who is so afraid she can barely think. She thought that Sophie, who was highly educated and obviously intelligent, could either keep her composure under very nerve wracking conditions and write an exceptional and accurate report, or she was fabricating the story in order to get her husband deported and permanently out of the picture. We both agreed it was difficult to tell if Sophie was telling the truth, but we needed to approach the case as if she was and analyze what it meant about the guilt or innocence of Steven Avery. Braun was at a salvage yard on the day Teresa Halbach disappeared. According to his own words, a “stupid” female photographer wanted to take pictures of their rental property out in the country. He had scratches on his back and a cut on his finger, which was still bleeding that night. She found a pair of yellow lace women’s panties, which weren’t hers, hidden in a closet. Before Halbach’s SUV and her remains were found at the salvage yard, he told Sophie with an “unusual grin” that he burned something. When she asked what, he said he burned a doll crib, but the crib was not burned. Four or five days after Halbach was murdered, Sophie found a bloodstained surgical glove in his toolbox in one of the outbuildings, along with a gas can with a bloody fingerprint on it.

  “Either one or both of them were lying,” Jody succinctly concluded, “or Wolfgang Braun is your killer.” Like I said, my wife has an organized mind.

  * * *

  Calling a halt to their Spoons competition in favor of finding out what their dad was so concerned about on Christmas Eve, the kids joined our discussion in the kitch
en. The oldest started poring over some of the documents and quickly learned that Wolfgang Braun was not just a “typical” disturbed individual—he was as dangerous and depraved as they came. Whether or not he murdered Teresa Halbach, Sophie had provided ample documentation proving that her husband was a severely mentally unstable and dangerous man.

  The incident, which occurred on November 6, 2005, was not an isolated incident, Sophie wrote in one of her letters, but rather a continuation of a long history of aggressive and abusive behavior committed by Wolfgang Braun. Mr. Braun is a serious and immediate danger not only to me, but also to all women, children and animals.

  She said he once laced her food and drink with Klonopin, a major central-nervous-system depressant, and then cleaned out her bank account when she was in the hospital. On another occasion he beat her so severely that her left eardrum was shattered, resulting in some permanent hearing loss. They lived in Pittsburgh at the time, and after his arrest in that incident for assault, “terroristic threats,” and unlawful restraint, he was deported.

  In the throes of the vicious and confusing cycle of domestic violence, she accompanied her husband to Germany, where she spent five years “living in horror,” Sophie explained. He often sexually assaulted her there after “very severe beatings” and drove her to remote areas in both Germany and Austria and beat her. The abuse continued when they returned to the United States, up to the most recent incident on November 6, one week after Teresa Halbach went missing.

  Not atypical in domestic violence relationships, Sophie worked full-time while Wolfgang was rarely employed and stole what he needed from his victim—if you can term prostitutes and Internet and cable-TV pornography as needs. He destroyed plumbing and damaged windows, doors, and walls in their apartments, resulting in their eviction from several apartments. He cut electrical cords, slashed her clothing, and threatened Sophie and others with knives. He burned her important personal documents, including her driver’s license and Social Security card and her children’s birth certificates. He stole her passport, too.