He had taken up with a similarly lost soul by the name of Jodi Stachowski not long after he was released from prison. Steven moved in with Jodi, who was living in the trailer next to his sister, owned by Rollie Johnson and it was love at first sight.
The honeymoon didn’t last long because a few months after they began seeing each other, Jodi had to call the police. Shortly after Steven moved in with Jodi, one weekend when he was up north, he found out she was out at the races and she hadn’t let him know she was going out. This was a major offense in a domestic violence abuser’s controlling mind.
When Jodi came home a little after eleven at night, she and Avery got into an argument. She told him “to pack his shit up and move out.” He pushed her, causing her to fall into a chair and hit her head. He got on top of her and hit her, telling her he should kill her. He ripped the phone out of the wall when she tried calling 911. Before she reached the dispatcher, he strangled her and she lost consciousness. He dragged her out to the car when she came to and said, “I should get the gun and kill you.”
In light of the conflict of interest stemming from Avery’s wrongful conviction lawsuit, we sent the case to a local attorney who agreed to serve as a special prosecutor. Due to discrepancies between Jodi’s original version and what she told the officer a few days later and her request to drop the charges, the special prosecutor told the police to issue a disorderly conduct citation instead of issuing criminal charges. Somehow the media never got wind of the incident. As far as the public was concerned, Steven Avery was still an innocent lamb.
Interviewed nine years before Making a Murderer aired, Jodi had stood steadfast with Avery, holding hands with him and telling the documentarians that the sheriff’s department was trying to set him up again. However, she changed her tune in an interview with Nancy Grace a month after the documentary aired.
Making international headlines, she said she was pressured by Steven Avery to come off right on Making a Murderer and she wasn’t telling the truth. It was all an act, she said. He told her to smile and be happy and threatened her if she didn’t obey his demands.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to get hurt. Steven is one person I don’t trust. He’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” she said. “A nice person, semi-nice person, and then behind closed doors he’s a monster. He told me once—excuse my language—‘all bitches owe him’ because of the one that sent him to prison the first time. We all owed him—and he could do whatever he wanted.”
She said she believed Avery and his nephew raped Halbach while she was tied up on the bed and then murdered her, just as Brendan Dassey had said. Crying, she told Nancy Grace that she still felt guilty because she was supposed to be with Avery the day Teresa Halbach was murdered and felt she could have stopped him and saved her life. Asked why she believed Steven Avery was guilty, she recounted an incident when he tied her to the bedpost with rope and wanted to videotape having sex with her, only backing down after she repeatedly refused.
“He’s not innocent,” she said later. “I ate two boxes of rat poison just so I could go to the hospital and get away from him and ask them to get the police to help me.”
Avery responded from prison in a three-page handwritten letter sent to WISN TV/Radio in Milwaukee.
How much money Jodi get to talk bad! he wrote. The state $.
A typed statement was attached to his letter, reading, The real killer is still out there. Who is he stalking now? I am really innocent of this case and that is the truth!!! The truth will set me free!!!!!!!
The documentarians responded, telling a reporter from TV Guide that they could not speak to what Jodi was saying now: “But when we filmed nine years ago, this is an accurate portrayal of what she was saying at the time.”
* * *
Which of Jodi Stachowski’s versions was the truth? To find out more, I consulted the Calumet County police reports.
On September 13, 2006, about five months before Steven Avery’s trial, Calumet County investigator Mark Wiegert and Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) special agent Thomas Fassbender interviewed Jodi’s mother.
Sandra Stachowski and her husband had legal custody of Jodi’s thirteen-year-old daughter. They stopped letting her go to Avery’s trailer because she “hated” Steven Avery and cried when she had to go there. Sandra and her husband had to go through Avery before they could speak with Jodi on the phone. In one conversation he threatened to take their granddaughter away from them and put her in a foster home.
Jodi told her mother that Avery beat her in front of her granddaughter and told her on many occasions that he could kill her and nobody would miss her. They locked themselves in the bathroom on one occasion because they thought he was pouring gas around the trailer to light it on fire.
Their granddaughter wrote them a letter not long before Jodi began serving her jail sentence for the drunk-driving offense: I love you and papa with all my heart and I hope nothing happens to you or papa and I’m sorry that on Mother’s Day weekend I went with my mom because all they did was fight, fight, and fight. I didn’t really have any fun because Steve made me stay in the trailer for one day because I was really hyper and I was playing cards with (redacted) boys. Goodness I hate Steve Avery. I wish he would go to prison. Oh my goodness.
Now, with Jodi’s mother’s and daughter’s statements, it was no longer just Jodi’s words building the accusation against Steven Avery. Still, just because Avery was violent and sexually abusive with Jodi, that doesn’t prove he murdered Teresa Halbach. Taken in total, while not proof in and of themselves, Avery’s strangling of Jodi to the point where she lost consciousness, threatening to kill her, and tying her to the bedpost, essentially intending to rape her, are legitimate factors to consider.
Besides, as we will now see from other court documents, Jodi was not the only victim of his propensity for violence and sexual rage.
* * *
“Other acts” evidence is evidence of a crime or “other bad act” committed by a defendant other than the crime for which he is on trial—at least as it pertains to the Avery case. The general rule is that other acts evidence is not admissible at trial because jurors might think, If he did that one, he probably did this one, too. If the prosecution wants to use the “other act” not to prove that the defendant “acted in conformity therewith,” but for one or more of a traditional set of criteria instead, the court may allow it to be admitted.
There’s an entire body of law interpreting this evidentiary rule that would fill another book. But for our purposes it is enough to know that the general criteria include “proof of motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident” and that a judge can admit the evidence, but only if “its probative value is not substantially outweighed by the risk or danger of unfair prejudice.”
The prosecution had so much ammunition in Steven Avery’s case that they had to file a first and then a second supplemental motion to their initial motion to admit evidence of “other acts.” All of it, they said, should be admitted because it was relevant to his “motive, intent, and plan.”
With her uncle safely behind bars, awaiting trial for Teresa Halbach’s murder, on January 23, 2006, Steven’s niece sat down with Calumet County officer Wendy Baldwin and told her about her relationship with her uncle. She was seventeen when Avery was released from prison in 2003 and she often hung around with him, going “ice fishing and stuff,” as she explained it.
He started asking her to meet him at Walmart and other stores because he didn’t know what to get for his house. He always bragged about his money and got angry if she refused.
She began to feel uncomfortable when he started kissing her good-bye. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? I don’t kiss nobody good-bye except for my ma and dad,’” she said. “And then he would say, well, he would tell me how, like, my mom and dad hated me.”
“You know that’s not true, right?” the officer interjected.
“
Ah, now I do,” Avery’s niece replied. “But before, I would believe him, because, I don’t know why, I think it was because I was around him so much.”
She was describing classic “grooming” behavior, and the details rang true.
“Your mom loves you a lot,” the officer interjected again, before asking her to describe what happened later.
The niece cried as she described how her then-forty-two-year-old uncle raped her on her cousin’s bunk bed.
She told him to stop, because he was just in prison for a rape that he did not commit. “So why would he try doing something dumb like that?”
Her uncle laughed and told her that it was meant to be, and “I’m gonna marry you someday when I get all my money, you’ll see.”
His niece became upset when she described what she did to try to make him stop: “I kept on telling him no, and . . . when I would try to get up and pull away, he would spread my legs with his elbows. And—and then he, like, held my hands back down and he just . . . I don’t know, it’s—it’s sick, I don’t . . .” At this point the officer’s report said the niece started crying.
During this and other encounters Steven Avery threatened not just his niece but her family, too, saying he would set her house on fire if she didn’t do what he wanted.
“He said he would hurt my dad, or he would hurt my mom,” she told the officer, “and I didn’t want them to get hurt.”
When she heard Avery might be released on bail, she told her dad she wasn’t going anywhere by herself, and “I even told my managers that I won’t work alone if I knew he was out.”
Like many victims of sexual violence, she blamed herself.
“I hated all the stuff he did to me,” she said. “So I would just be upstairs, writing journals saying that ‘I hate myself, I hate myself,’ and I have one of these planners, and I wrote all the bad stuff. I blacked it all out now ’cause then he started forcing me against my mom and dad saying that they’re bad. And I believed him, ’cause, I don’t know, I used to hang out with him a lot, thinking he wasn’t a bad guy.”
* * *
Concerned about its inflammatory nature and the risk of poisoning the jury pool if the information was released, Judge Willis ordered that the parties’ briefs and his written decision concerning the “other acts” evidence and be kept under seal. But shortly after the trial it was unsealed, and thanks to the crowd-sourcing efforts of a group of concerned citizens, it is now available online for anyone with access to the Internet.
I knew Steven Avery was far from a Boy Scout, both before and after his wrongful conviction in 1985. Still, as I continued reviewing the prosecution’s motions to admit “other acts” evidence, I was surprised how much I did not know about him. Some of it dated back nearly a quarter century and was extremely disturbing.
* * *
In an interview in January 2006, forty-two-year-old Amy Harris (pseudonym) told a Calumet County officer that Avery had sexually assaulted her when she was seventeen or eighteen years old—she couldn’t remember which. It happened while she was staying at his and his ex-wife’s house a few years before his wrongful conviction in 1985 while he was still married to Lori. She was lying on the couch when Avery came over and began fondling her. She told him to stop, but he put his hand over her mouth and then forced her to have sex. He told her during the assault “there would be trouble” if she yelled or screamed.
* * *
The next allegation against Steven Avery concerned a more recent event. Seventeen-year-old Melissa Hansen (pseudonym) told Wisconsin DCI special agent Steven Lewis that Avery had called her on her cell phone the day before Teresa Halbach disappeared. He asked if she wanted to join him in his trailer and “have a little fun” and that they could “have the bed hit the wall, real hard.” Melissa told Avery he was wasting her cell minutes and hung up the phone.
* * *
The other acts motion continued with Avery’s history of physical violence against women—starting with the abuse he heaped upon his ex-wife, Lori, before his wrongful conviction in 1985.
Lori stayed at the domestic violence shelter several times after he beat her during their marriage. She said the abuse was so extreme that she thinks her husband would have killed her if he hadn’t been sent to prison in 1985. Typical among perpetrators of domestic violence, he threatened to kill her if she ever left.
Avery continued to abuse Lori and their children from inside the prison walls by sending them threatening letters. I hate mom; she will pay; I will kill you, he wrote in one of the letters. I will get you when I’m out; Daddy will git mom when daddy gits out, he wrote in another.
The Findings of Facts from their divorce case are instructive: Mr. Avery is impulsive; had threatened to kill and mutilate his wife; and refused to participate in programming while in prison.
* * *
Citing what they termed an “escalating pattern of abuse,” the prosecutors turned next to the violence Avery’s girlfriend Jodi Stachowski suffered at his hands. With her boyfriend safely behind bars, on January 19, 2006, Jodi told Calumet County officer John Dedering that Avery frequently abused her during the eighteen months they lived together. He struck her hard enough on three or four occasions to leave bruising, including a big one on her right cheekbone after one of the beatings.
Recounting an incident that made international headlines after her interview with Nancy Grace a full ten years later, Jodi told Officer Dedering more about the night Avery strangled her. She remembered falling to her knees and blacking out. When she regained consciousness, he was trying to drag her out the front door of the trailer. She was able to get to her feet, but he grabbed her by her sweatshirt and dragged her over to his truck and forced her to get in. It was the only time she stood up for herself, Jodi said, and “look what happened.”
There was corroborating evidence for Jodi’s claim of abuse, including a recorded jail telephone conversation between them on January 27, 2006. Steven asked her to deny he ever abused her, and said “if she cared about him,” she should “tell the police that she just fell down while she was drunk and that’s how she got the bruises.”
It’s amazing how many inmates ignore the notice above the phone in the jail warning that calls to and from the jail are recorded.
* * *
In their next bid for “other acts” evidence, the prosecution sought to admit the circumstances surrounding the now-infamous cat-burning incident. When it occurred, nearly a quarter century earlier, Avery was twenty years old.
“The jury must be allowed to consider the vicious and coldhearted torture and death of Avery’s cat,” the prosecution argued, because of its “striking similarity” to the “object of Avery’s torture on a bonfire.” In this last phrase they were presumably referring to Halbach’s body. His “sadistic personality . . . is highly relevant to whether he killed Teresa and mutilated her body after she died.”
Righteous indignation is one of the occupational hazards prosecutors should strive to avoid, but the prosecution team’s zeal concerning the cat-burning incident, as illustrated in the following words, shows that we don’t always succeed:
“The state argues that facts at trial will include after stabbing Teresa Halbach, the defendant took a rifle and shot her several times, including in the head while in his garage. Importantly, the cat, which Avery threw on the fire (alive), jumped off the fire, while burning, and the defendant was forced to reapply flammable liquid to the cat, and, once again, throw the cat on the fire until it burned to death. The state argues that to ensure a similar episode would not occur with the victim, Teresa Halbach, the defendant ‘made sure’ the victim was dead by shooting her with a rifle (for up to ten times). Without knowledge of the burning-cat story, the jury may be left to speculate as to why the defendant would shoot Ms. Halbach so many times after having possibly caused life-ending injuries to her minutes before by stabbing. The state agrees that burning a live cat is disgusting and sensational behavior. However, it is behavior the defendant
alone engaged in, and its relevance cannot be ignored due to what is sure to be a graphic description of the animal’s killing.”
No doubt, Avery’s lighting a cat afire twenty-four years earlier was reprehensible, but the prosecutors were stretching the argument well past its breaking point. If the cat-burning incident was relevant at all, “its probative value,” as the law puts it, “is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.”
* * *
While also remote in time, the prosecution’s next request had teeth. Referring to Avery’s ramming his pickup truck into Sandra Morris’s car, and then holding her at gunpoint, the state argued that the issue “of whether this defendant ‘seized’ Ms. Halbach should include consideration by the jury of this defendant’s ‘seizure’ of Sandra Morris at gunpoint in1985.”
Regardless of the merits of the motion to admit it as evidence in Avery’s murder trial, the details of the Sandra Morris incident were revealing—especially in light of Making a Murderer’s portrayal of the event as little more than Avery not handling his emotions in an appropriate way.
Sandra, a second cousin of Avery’s, and her husband, Bill, a reserve deputy at the sheriff’s department, lived just up the road from Steven and Lori. Avery had been watching her with a pair of binoculars, off and on for months, as she got into her car before leaving for work at five-thirty in the morning. Standing at the edge of the road, he would expose himself and occasionally masturbate as she drove by.
She spoke with Avery’s father, Allan, to get Steven to stop—a fact omitted by Making a Murderer—but when the problems continued, an anonymous neighbor went to the police and told them about some of what he had been doing in the neighborhood. At approximately five-thirty a.m. on September 20, and again on November 27, 1984, he jumped into the middle of the road without any clothing on as Sandra drove past. She almost ran into him once, because it was raining and visibility was poor.
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