Making a Murderer is a 2015 documentary about Stephen Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, filmed over 10 years. At the age of 22, Avery served 18 years in prison from 1985-2003 after his wrongful conviction for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Ann Beerntsen, before being exonerated through DNA testing.
Lawyers Dean Strang and Jerry Buting defended Avery, and became cult heroes, with more than 19 million people in the US watching the series in its first five weeks. Now Strang, who has a new podcast, I Rest My Case with Jonathan Goldberg KC, explains how it impacted his life, 10 years after the documentary was released.
I didn't want to become a lawyer. Since being young, I had my heart set on being an editorial cartoonist, but my dad was never excited about it – he thought it was doodling. During my undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College [in New Hampshire], I realised as much as I love cartooning, it wasn’t a full-time job. My dad’s sister was a lawyer and he pushed law school, and at the time there was a huge demand for new lawyers.
How did you get involved in Making a Murderer?
There was a civil lawsuit going on [Avery filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against Manitowoc County for his wrongful conviction in the 1985 assault case], and the two lawyers who were representing Steven, Walt Kelly and Steve Glenn, gave Steven mine and Jerry’s name, and a few others. Steve called to say, “I don’t know if they’ll call you, but if you get in, you should know there's these two student filmmakers on the scene, they're great, they're smart, they're likeable, nice, interesting people, but just be aware they're there all the time.” I did get in, and then I suggested bringing Jerry in and the two of us doing it together. We could split the fee and make it work better than either one of us alone.
They had already been in Manitowoc for three months, talked with Steven via phone from jail, met all his family and established a good rapport. Jerry and I met with them in 2006/2007 and sounded out their project, what they were doing and their goal.
There's no murder porn in this, and that was really important to us and them. There's no reenactment or spooky music. They weren't going to make theatrical someone's death. They were going to pursue a documentarian's vantage point and try to query how this system is working for everybody affected by it. I have fewer qualms about Making a Murderer than I do about the [true crime] genre in general.
Not at all. I think there's a lot that's unhealthy about it. At its worst, it exploits human pain for profit. It’s some of the most intense pain people can feel – for instance, losing a child to murder or seeing a son, a brother, a husband go off to prison for the rest of his life.
Do you think Making a Murderer sparked a new interest in true crime?
I think one of the reasons for the uptake of Making a Murderer is that very few countries in the world allow cameras in their courtrooms – they started being allowed in the US in the 1980s and still photography was allowed back in the 1930s. During the Steven Avery trial, even in a small-town America courthouse, it had a soundproof room at the back of the courtroom with a glass wall where the media could shoot through the glass and there were remote cameras on the ceiling. The rule is you just can’t film the jurors. Outside the courtroom, there’s still the scrum where people run up to you with cameras and microphones – it can be a little disorienting, but it just becomes part of what you have to do.
I thought this was a very low-risk, low stakes undertaking for us, that the chances anybody outside of a classroom at Columbia would see or hear me were very low. Moira and Laura had to make a final 15 or 20-minute short film to get their master’s degree, and they did hope for more than that, which they described to us as a documentary. To me, it meant 90 to 120 minutes in an arthouse theatre with a total audience of 30 people, 18 of whom were family members and filmmakers. They got their master's degrees, and then maybe a year later, they entered a 30-minute version in the Tribeca Film Festival under the name 18 to Life, and it got accepted.
What happened next?
Moira and Laura said they’d send Jerry and me a watermarked DVD of all the episodes, but I passed. I had lived it. It was and is painful. We lost the case we should have won. I don’t like watching videos or seeing photos of myself. Jerry watched it and we went to see Steven in prison before it came out, because he would never be able to see it. Jerry said, “It’s pretty good, it’s basically fair to you, there’s no cheap shots, there’s nothing libellous or wrong with it.” My wife made me watch it two or three weeks after it came out because it was blowing up. I’m not sure I watched the whole second season.
It sort of was a catapult, because it came out on 18 December 2015, and I got my first email from a stranger in South Carolina that night who had gone to the trouble to find my email through my firm website and write me this long, thoughtful, well-written email. By Monday, I had hundreds of emails.
That same Monday, our assistant said a guy claiming to be Alec Baldwin wanted to leave a voicemail for me. I thought one of my college friends was playing a prank on me, but it was him. He was very kind to me, and continued to be. Right before his movie career took off, he was going to apply to law school, and was still interested in law.
Only about two years, but that can seem like a long time, but mostly it was a great ride. I was away from home 250 days a year for the first couple of years, so I had to drop back dramatically from practising law. It became hard to get back in full throttle. Other lawyers who referred me cases would say I was too busy or was off speaking somewhere, and so the phone stopped ringing. I've been teaching full-time since 2019. I've gone from almost every student in my classroom having seen Making a Murderer to zero students having heard of it. The collective memory is very short.
For the Avery family, the Halbach family, and the cops and lawyers involved, this is a really, really important case. For everybody else on the entire planet, it’s not. If you don't like what you saw happening in one tiny rural community in one country, ask yourself, what's happening in the courthouses near me, in an area where I could do something about it? Wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals happen everywhere.
Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
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