The Murder of Teresa Halbach
Before we go on, I should warn you that I am going to spend some portion of this book ridiculing criminal attorneys. I can’t help it. They are a ridiculous group of people. They are among the most educated and intelligent people we have in this country and have devoted their lives to civil service. They should be revered like doctors or astronauts, but instead they are derided like old-timey carnival barkers. The burden of proof is entirely on their shoulders, yet prosecutors are mocked as buffoons if they lose a case. Prosecutors who are too successful are portrayed as heartless henchmen for an oppressive government machine. Defense attorneys are villainized for protecting criminals even though we all understand it is their exact job to protect the rights of their clients, who are mostly criminals, and they would be disbarred for giving anything less than an honest effort.
But that’s the job they chose and most of the absurdities of the criminal justice system were created by their hands. They stacked one absurd brief or motion on top of another for two centuries until our courts were trapped in a slog of arcane case laws and nonsensical gibberish that only lawyers and sovereign citizens pretend to understand. I’ll give you a couple of observations from a decade I have spent as an occasional guest of the court: The judge is God in the courtroom, but God’s will can always be appealed to a council of higher deities; logic is suspended for the sake of ritual; and at least three jurors haven’t paid attention to a word the last witness just said.
Since I know that I am a weak man who will take numerous unprovoked shots at the attorneys involved in these cases, I do feel compelled to admit a couple of important things that I have noticed about attorneys. In their own little way, they always seem to tell the truth. I’ve seen doctors lie. I’ve seen clergy lie. I’ve seen my mother lie. I can’t recall seeing an attorney lie in court. Despite their reputation to the contrary, as a whole, attorneys seem to have a real commitment to their own narrow concept of truth. That’s not to say that they won’t mislead the shit out of you with an argument, because they will absolutely do that. But you can be sure that the argument is based on some truthful fact. Listening to attorneys is a lot like negotiating with the devil. They aren’t going to lie to you, but pay very close attention to the words they choose. Second, they tend to be much better mannered than you expect a professional arguer to be. I’ve heard horror stories about attorneys being jerks to witnesses on the stand but I’ve never actually seen it. I’ve always been treated with respect and decency when I testified. I’ve had my work criticized by defense attorneys while I was on the stand and that stung. But they were never jerks about it and the criticisms were always reasonably valid (probably why they stung).
So there you are, that’s a quick guide to attorneys from Barney Doyle. They virtually always tell the truth, even if only in a very literal and lawyerly sense of the word “truth,” and they aren’t nearly as bad as all of the jokes would have you believe.
I say all of that because we are going to talk about the tragic murder of Teresa Halbach and we can’t do that without reviewing the trial of Steven Avery. The defense attorneys who represented Avery, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, became a pair of modern day Atticus Finches to a throng of worshipers on the internet after a flattering portrayal in the Netflix documentary Making A Murderer. The prosecutor, Ken Kratz, resigned in disgrace over allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances towards several victims in domestic violence cases that he was prosecuting.
In Avery’s trial, each side presented a theory on this case and the two theories were mutually exclusive. Lots of times in a murder trial the defense won’t present a theory, they will just poke holes in the prosecutor’s theory. Other times the defense will accept the bulk of the prosecutor’s theory without argument and try to insert doubt through insanity, self-defense, accident or some other gray area in the law. The Steven Avery trial was the rare case where the prosecution and the defense offered specific theories that directly contradicted each other. One of them, at a minimum, has to be wrong. What we think happened to Teresa Halbach depends largely on who we are going to believe, the modern day Misters Finch or an alleged sexual predator. I know whose side you want to take on this one. Hell, I know whose side I want to take on this one. But as I mentioned before, attorneys virtually always tell the truth in court. So let’s wade through all of this contradictory truth and see if we can’t figure out what actually happened.
Also, before we go any further, I want you to take a moment and consider your own interest in these cases. I love true crime stories. You love true crime stories. Lots of people love true crime stories. There is nothing wrong with loving true crime stories. The subject matter is macabre, but that doesn’t make it off limits for decent people like us to discuss. We don’t love murder and we certainly don’t want to celebrate murderers. If anything, our love of true crime is mostly borne of an obsession with finding the truth and holding murderers accountable. The crimes we are going to look at, like the murder of Teresa Halbach, were devastating events to a lot of innocent people who cared about the victims. And that is before you even account for the horrors that the poor victims themselves suffered. We recognize the tragedy, hate the suffering, and love the story still. We are searching for the truth among muddied details in most of these cases, but we are never confused about where our sympathies lie. The victim is the most important person in every one of these stories. Even though we enjoy studying these crimes, we still wish they had not happened in the first place.
And I know a lot of you developed your interest in these things in relation to some personal tragedy in your own life. Studying horrific crimes is, for some people, a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. I’ve seen more death and violence in my life than I ever imagined I could handle. These murder stories should stir up a lot of terrible memories for me. But they don’t. They allow me to dissect the horrors of this world from a comfortable arm’s length away, secure in the knowledge that I can always just close the book or the laptop at any time. It’s a weird way of distracting yourself from the boogieman under your bed by reading about the boogieman three states over. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
That said, we all have those true crime cases that hit too close to home. If any of these cases are like that for you, or if, God forbid, you personally knew one of the victims, please just skip that chapter. You won’t miss anything important, I promise, and you’ll catch up on the next case.
Also, now is an appropriate time to offer my sincere thanks to Skip Topp and his friends over at stevenaverycase.org for compiling the trial transcripts and all of the supporting exhibits from the Steven Avery trial. Trial transcripts are public records but are usually prohibitively expensive, so I am very grateful that they acquired and shared them. The facts below come from those transcripts, several other motions filed by attorney Kathleen Zelner and, to a much lesser extent, the Making A Murderer documentary.
Teresa Halbach was a 25-year-old photographer living in semi-rural Wisconsin. She was relatively new to the business so she shared studio space with another photographer and supplemented her income by doing freelance photography for an Auto Trader magazine. If you aren’t familiar with Auto Trader, picture Craigslist car ads compiled in a free newspaper that was available in a filthy display box outside of every gas station. If you aren’t familiar with newspapers, imagine printing a collection of articles from the internet onto awkwardly large and absurdly thin paper that you could take with you to the bathroom. If you don’t remember articles, they were like memes but with 800 to 1,000 words and sometimes no picture.
On Halloween day of 2005, Teresa Halbach was taking photos of vehicles for three different customers in and around Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. One of those customers was a man named Steven Avery who lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard. Everybody agrees that Teresa visited the Avery Salvage Yard that day. And everybody agrees that Teresa’s burned remains were found in a burn pit behind Steven Avery’s home several days later. But what happened between those moments is fiercely debated.

The prosecution’s version of events:
Teresa Halbach had taken photos at the Avery Salvage Yard on several occasions before. She complained to a coworker about Steven Avery’s peculiar behavior. She said that Avery once met her at the door wearing nothing but a towel.
On October 31, 2005, Avery called Auto Trader magazine and specifically requested that Teresa come take photos. Avery gave the Avery Salvage Yard address, but gave the name B. Janda instead of his own. Avery’s sister’s name was Barb Janda and the vehicle that Teresa was supposed to photograph belonged to her. Avery had Teresa’s cell phone number and called her twice before she came out to the salvage yard. Both times he used *67 to block his name and number on her caller ID. She didn’t answer either call. He called again later in the day, presumably after her visit, but did not use *67 on the third call.
Bobby Dassey lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard with his mother (Barb Janda) and brothers. He saw Teresa taking photos of his mother’s van that afternoon, then saw Teresa walking toward Avery’s trailer. Bobby took a shower and left to go hunting. He saw Teresa’s green Toyota Rav4 parked out at the property but did not see Teresa anywhere when he left.
Multiple witnesses reported seeing a bonfire and/or a fire in a burn barrel at Steven Avery’s residence on the afternoon and/or evening of October 31. The statements conflict as to the exact time of the fires, but consensus seems to place them at around dusk into dark.
Friends and loved ones did not see or hear from Teresa after October 31, and her mother reported her as a missing person on November 3 in Calumet County Wisconsin, where Teresa lived. Police accounted for her whereabouts up to where she visited the Avery Salvage Yard, then the trail went cold.
A large search party of citizen volunteers, organized by Teresa’s ex-boyfriend and her roommate, combed the countryside looking for Teresa and her missing Toyota Rav4. Teresa’s second-cousin located the Rav4 semi-concealed among the junk vehicles in the Avery Salvage Yard. The car was locked and partially covered with debris.
Police were notified and responded immediately. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office was on scene first, but the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office because of a conflict of interest. Standby for details on the conflict of interest because it makes up the bulk of the defense’s theory.
The Rav4 was hauled off on a wrecker to the Wisconsin crime lab. Lab technicians found Avery’s blood on the back of the gear shift and on the passenger side of the center console. His DNA, from a non-blood source, was also found under the hood on the latching mechanism. A small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair was also found in the rear cargo area of the Rav4.
Through a series of searches over the course of several weeks, investigators found Teresa’s bone fragments in a burn pit outside of Steven Avery’s trailer and in a burn barrel outside of the Janda home. They also found charred remnants of Teresa’s camera and cell phone in a burn barrel outside of Steven Avery’s trailer. Inside the trailer, investigators found a key to Teresa’s Rav4 in Avery’s bedroom and a fired bullet with Teresa’s DNA on it in the garage. The key also had Avery’s DNA on it.
Investigators interviewed Avery’s nephew, Brendan Dassey, several times over the course of a few months. He initially denied knowledge of what happened to Teresa, but eventually confessed to helping Avery rape and kill Teresa then burn her corpse.

The defense’s version of events:
An adult female (not Teresa) was brutally raped on a beach in Manitowoc County on July 29, 1985. DNA eventually showed that the rape was almost certainly committed by a man named Gregory Allen. But a poor investigation and a mistaken eyewitness identification led to the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery.
Avery was freed in September of 2003 and rightfully sued the bejeezus out of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office. Either by winning the lawsuit or by agreeing to an out-of-court settlement, Avery was going to receive a huge settlement from the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office after 20 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. Circumstances changed when Teresa Halbach went missing the same day she visited the Avery Salvage Yard.
Among the officers deposed in Avery’s lawsuit against Manitowoc County were Lieutenant James Lenk and Sergeant James Colborn. Even though the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office, Lenk and Colborn each participated in searches in which crucial evidence was discovered.
As is custom, investigators kept a log of everybody who came in and out of the crime scene at the salvage yard. There was one day when Lenk signed out of the scene log, but there was no entry for him signing in.
The Rav4 was found parked with the battery disconnected. There was a car crusher at the salvage yard not far from where it was located. The car crusher did not belong to the Averys, but they were known to use it on occasion.
One day prior to the actual discovery of the Rav4, Sergeant Colborn ran a license plate check of the vehicle through his dispatch. The majority of license plate checks are conducted by radio, but Sergeant Colborn ran this particular license plate check by cell phone.
Steven Avery’s trailer was searched three separate times before the key was discovered in his bedroom. It was discovered by Lenk and Colborn, who were searching under the supervision of a Calumet County detective. Lenk spotted the key on some slippers beside Colborn, who theorized that the key had fallen out of a small bookshelf while he was moving it. The key was also by itself, with no accompanying house keys or office keys.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was not discovered until months after the first search, and was discovered by Lenk. The garage had been searched multiple times before that, including a search that yielded fired .22 cartridge cases (or shell casings, as the cool kids call them).
The lab technician who identified Teresa’s DNA on the bullet deviated from her usual protocol on the test. Whenever technicians test for DNA, they also run a simultaneous “control” test to show that there was no contamination. On that particular control test, the sample was contaminated with the technician’s DNA. That usually isn’t a big deal. They throw out the test and try again. But the DNA test on the bullet consumed the entire sample, so she was unable to run another test. In all probability, the test shouldn’t have been considered valid for court purposes.
There was already a vial of Steven Avery’s blood in a box of evidence at the Manitowoc County Clerk of Court’s office. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office had keys to the Clerk’s office, and Lenk was aware that evidence in Steven Avery’s original rape case was held there. Lenk had previously ordered one of his deputies to send some evidence from that box to the crime lab for testing. The vial appeared to have been opened at some point.
The vial of Avery’s blood had an anticoagulant called EDTA in it that is used to preserve blood samples in liquid form. The FBI tested Avery’s blood from the SUV and determined that it did not have EDTA in it, which would seem to refute the notion that the blood in the SUV was planted by law enforcement. The FBI only tested three of the six samples from the SUV, however. And the defense introduced an expert who suggested that there were problems with the test that the FBI used.
Teresa’s bones were discovered in both the burn pit in Avery’s backyard and a burn barrel near the Janda residence. There was also a third site near the Avery property where burned bones were discovered, but the crime lab was unable to determine if they were also bones from Teresa. At a minimum, either Teresa was dismembered and burned at two sites, or her burned bones were moved at least once before they were discovered.
The Avery Salvage Yard also had a commercial incinerator on site. It was not used to dispose of Teresa’s body.
Before we continue, I want to tell you a little story. I am not particularly handy but I am very cheap. Consequently, I do a lot of projects around the house that should be hired out to the professionals. I built a laundry room one time that didn’t have a straight edge or 90-degree angle in it. It wasn’t obvious to the naked eye, so I didn’t really care. Until I tried to buy a door. Door manufacturers make a lot of different sizes, but they are virtually all perfect rectangles. My opening was not. I shimmed and jimmied it every which way I could, but you can only be so precise when you don’t have straight edge to orient off of. It’s in the wall now, but I don’t trust that door to hold out a stiff draft.
The prosecution and the defense both have timelines for when they say Teresa was at the Avery Salvage yard, but they are built on imprecise and contradictory witness recollections. I don’t have any more faith in their timelines than I do in my laundry room door.
So now that we’ve laid that groundwork, let’s do a little reckless speculation about what happened to Teresa Halbach.
I love the care and craft that went into Dean Strang and Jerome Buting’s defense. A man wrongfully convicted of a rape he didn’t commit is released from prison only to be framed for murder. Lieutenant Lenk is lurking in the shadows of every search with another piece of fraudulent evidence. His henchman, Sergeant Colborn, covers for every misdeed in a zeal to preserve the reputation of his beloved department. Scientists at the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation cast aside their sacred oaths to jump into the conspiracy. Maybe the police are protecting the real killers. Maybe the police are the real killers. I love everything about this story. As fiction, it’s a winner. As an actual explanation for what happened to Teresa Halbach, it just doesn’t work for me.
It sucks that the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office participated in the investigation. They wouldn’t have asked Calumet County to take over the investigation if they didn’t believe there was a conflict of interest. Ideally they shouldn’t have even participated in the search. But practically speaking, they had to. It was a ridiculously large crime scene. The Avery Salvage Yard is 5 acres with over 4,000 vehicles and a dozen buildings. The Calumet County Sheriff’s Office was a 30-officer department trying to run a massive investigation in somebody else’s county. You could search that salvage yard around the clock for a week with a hundred trained investigators and not cover everything. Conflict of interest or not, Manitowoc County was going to have to lend a hand in that search.
James Lenk and Andrew Colborn did not have any reason to frame Steven Avery. They weren’t being sued. They had nothing to do with the investigation that led to Avery’s wrongful conviction. Neither man even worked for the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office at that time. They were deposed in Avery’s lawsuit because a phone call from a neighboring agency about Avery was misdirected to Colborn while Colborn was working in the jail. He properly directed the caller to the Sheriff’s Office detectives and had no further involvement in the matter. Lenk was deposed because Colborn told Lenk about the phone call. Neither man was at the slightest risk of being held personally liable in a lawsuit from Avery.
You could argue that loyalty to the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office might motivate Lenk and Colborn to frame an innocent man. You could argue that, if you enjoy losing arguments. Police don’t give a shit about their departments. It’s just an employer. The job is dangerous. It doesn’t pay that well. And police jobs are a dime a dozen. No police officer in the world is going to commit a felony to protect the reputation of their department or save the department from a lawsuit. Certain unscrupulous police officers might be willing to commit a felony to protect their own reputation or save themselves from a lawsuit, but not the department. Especially in a sheriff’s office, where the top guy is some politician that half the department didn’t even vote for and who could be gone at the next election.
But since we are recklessly speculating here, let’s follow this thread a little ways. If Steven Avery didn’t kill Teresa Halbach then who did? She didn’t have a boyfriend that we know of. Her ex-boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, was still in her life in some capacity and would make for an obvious suspect. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me in reviewing the trial transcripts, the investigating officers ruled Hillegas out as a suspect fairly early in the investigation. I found a lot written about him on the internet, but nothing from any source that I would consider credible.
Avery hired attorney Kathleen Zellner to represent him on his appeal, which took place after his Making A Murderer fame. She has been very bold in proclaiming Hillegas as the actual killer. I wish I could afford to hire this woman to write the forward for this book. She is a marvel. You and I do a decent job of recklessly speculating about murders; Zellner is a master at it. Where we are bound by logic and decency, Zellner transcends reason and scoffs at decorum. We trust experts who have studied science while she directs doctors who invent science to conform to her theories. We are skeptical of witness statements that can’t be corroborated. She tells you exactly who is lying, why they are lying, and why anything that contradicts her theory is also a lie. We restrict logical inferences to only those things which can be logically inferred, and then we dampen those inferences with an acknowledgment of their uncertainty. Zellner can draw you a straight line from Teresa Halbach’s murder to Ryan Hillegas’ guilt using any small witness statement or piece of evidence and her own unique brand of deductive reasoning.
At the risk of infuriating Avery’s supporters by shortchanging the “newly discovered evidence,” I am going to abridge Zellner’s theory for you here:
Ryan Hillegas was a jealous and abusive boyfriend. None of Teresa Halbach’s friends or family ever mentioned anything about Hillegas being abusive, but the guy she shared a photography studio with did. He told detectives that, years ago, Teresa mentioned having an abusive ex-boyfriend. Therefore, Hillegas is a murdering woman-beater.
Teresa Halbach had a secret life where she was taking nude photographs, sleeping with her roommate and sleeping with a married man. Hillegas killed her because he was jealous. (I couldn’t find the affidavits that Zellner used to support the claims about Halbach’s personal life. For what it’s worth, true or not, it was shitty the way she used those “facts” to degrade the victim. And if I had to bet based on the rest of her arguments, I’ll take “or not” over “true” in a landslide.)
Hillegas told investigators that damage to the brake light and bumper on Halbach’s car was months old. No insurance claim was ever filed, so obviously Hillegas was lying to cover up the fact that he is a murdering liar.
Hillegas was an unemployed nurse at the time of the murder. He had the time to commit the murder (unemployed) and the advanced medical training (nurse) that would be required to plant Steven Avery’s blood in Halbach’s car.
The door to Avery’s trailer was unlocked. We can be certain of this because Avery said so himself in an affidavit and had absolutely no reason to lie. Obviously, since the door was unlocked, Hillegas snuck into the house and used his advanced nursing training to sneak Avery’s blood from the bathroom sink to Halbach’s car to frame Avery.
There were no phone calls made from Hillegas’ phone during the time of the murder (as calculated by Zellner). This was because his hands were occupied strangling Halbach to death. There were also no phone calls made at various points over the following few days because his hands were occupied with burning Halbach’s body and framing Steven Avery.
Investigators took photographs of Hillegas’ hands during the initial investigation. Those photographs showed scratches on the back of his left hand. Other photographs taken of Halbach during her lifetime showed that she had fingernails. Forensic pathologist Larry Blum prepared an affidavit saying that he was certain, “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” that the scratches were caused by fingernails. Furthermore, he believed that they were caused by Halbach’s fingernails while Hillegas was strangling her. He deduced all of that from photos of Hillegas’ hands and reenactments he conducted with female staff members in his office. Presumably, Zellner didn’t require the doctor to carry the reenactment all the way through cremation.
Another doctor, Lawrence Farwell, has invented a technique he named “brain fingerprinting.” He is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist whereas I am but a humble state-educated police officer, so I will defer to Dr. Farwell as to the matter of whether or not the brain has fingers. But through brain-fingerprinting, Dr. Farwell can measure scientifically whether or not a person has knowledge of something. He measured with 99.9 percent certainty that Steven Avery didn’t know how Teresa Halbach was killed. Other neuroscientists have pointed out that Dr. Farwell’s claims seem farfetched and that his research doesn’t really adhere to the standards of what we consider “science.” But they are probably just bitter that they didn’t discover all of those fingers on the brain before he did.

I can’t recommend reading Zellner’s motion for a retrial highly enough. She torched every single person involved with the case, including Dean Strang and Jerome Buting. My favorite passage is when she asserts matter-of-factly that Sergeant Colborn conducted a clandestine illegal search of the Avery salvage yard with Hillegas’ help.
“The headlights were from Sgt. Colborn's personal vehicle and he had a friend of Ms. Halbach with him to search the Avery property without a search warrant because he did not have probable cause to be on the Avery property at that point in time.”
She just flat out says that a sworn police officer committed multiple felonies as if she were pointing out that the sky was blue. Her proof? Colborn called in for a license plate check on Halbach’s vehicle and he used a cell phone instead of his radio. And she could hear a voice in the background say “it’s her.” Colborn obviously made the call while trespassing at the Avery Salvage yard and the voice in the background couldn’t have been anybody but the lying, murdering, evidence-planting Hillegas.
As you might have imagined, the judge was unpersuaded and denied Zellner’s motion for a new trial.
Perhaps by the sequel you and I will be audacious enough to propose Zellner’s type of fantastically imaginative speculation, but we aren’t there yet. For now, let’s bound our recklessness in at least the realm of plausibility.
I think that Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach. His blood was in her vehicle. His DNA was on her hood latch. Her car key was found in Steven Avery’s bedroom with Steven Avery’s DNA on it. A bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in his garage and it was fired from a .22 caliber rifle that was found hanging in Steven Avery’s bedroom. Her bones were found in a burn pit outside of his house. Her cell phone and camera were found in a burn barrel beside his house. Each and every piece of that evidence is pretty damning.
I know you have concerns about the integrity of some of that evidence. Rightfully so. The bullet wasn’t found on the first search and it probably should have been. The story of how the key was found is a bit perplexing. It’s really weird that her bones were found at multiple locations on the Avery property. I will grant you all of those things. But murder isn’t a perfectly logical act and you will drive yourself mad trying to understand the how and why of every little thing the killer did. The kind of person who would brutally murder an innocent person is the kind of person who would do a lot of other peculiar stuff as well. Moving bones? It obviously made sense to the killer at the time because bones were moved. Maybe somebody moved the bones in an attempt to frame Steven Avery for the murder. But that person would have had to stage all of the other evidence as well, and the logistics just don’t seem possible to me (unless the police killed her, which is absurd). The most logical explanation I see is that Steven Avery moved the bones for reasons that probably made sense to him at the time. Steven Avery’s blood was in the car because Steven Avery bled in the car. Steven Avery’s DNA was on the hood latch because Steven Avery touched the hood latch when he disconnected the battery. The key was eventually found in Steven Avery’s room because Steven Avery hid the key in his room. The bullet was found in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it because that’s where the bullet was fired. I admit that it lacks the imagination and flair of Zellner’s and Strang’s theories, but it fits the facts a lot easier.
So if we accept that Steven Avery was the killer, then why did he do it? They weren’t romantically involved so it wasn’t a case of domestic violence. Teresa was early into her photography career while Avery was in line for a huge settlement from Manitowoc County, so robbery doesn’t make any sense. Neither of them was involved in a street gang nor were they distributing narcotics. There is no reason to suspect self-defense, murder-for-hire, silencing a witness or any of the other oddball murder motives that occur in rare instances. I’m going to step out on a pretty sturdy limb and guess that it was sexually motivated. You knew that already, didn’t you? One step ahead of me as usual. But just for the sake of being thorough, let’s analyze it a little bit.
Making A Murderer would have you believe that Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist and the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation. In truth, Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation and Steven Avery’s behavior made it really easy to believe that he would rape somebody.
According to a report by Kurt Chandler in Milwaukee Magazine, Avery was convicted of burglarizing a bar when he was 18 and burning a cat alive several months later. I haven’t seen the court records or police reports from either of those charges, but they fit into the general pattern of Avery’s life. In September of 1984, a neighbor reported that Avery had been harassing her for months. When she drove past his house on the road to her own home, Avery would run and stand on the side of the road naked or stand at the front of his car and masturbate in plain view.
In his report, the investigating detective noted, “He has field glasses on the house and he knows just when she will be driving past the residence. At this point he will then run out to the road and do his tricks.”
In January of 1985, Avery was arrested for running a woman’s vehicle off the road and pointing a rifle at her. In April of 1985 he was accused of repeatedly driving by another woman’s house and shouting obscenities. In May of 1985 an 11 year old girl in a neighboring community was kidnapped and raped. Avery was never charged with the crime, but officers noted that he fit the physical description of the suspect and was identified by a witness as fishing in the area at the time. In June of 1987, Avery’s wife accused him of sending threatening letters from prison. In September of 2004, one year after being released from prison, Avery’s girlfriend accused him of domestic assault.
It’s a tragedy that a rapist was left on the streets because of Manitowoc County’s shoddy investigation. Gregory Allen, the actual rapist, was free for another ten years and committed atrocities that we likely won’t ever even know about before he was eventually caught for another rape. It’s infuriating. But let’s be honest, there were going to be concrete and bars in Avery’s future eventually anyway.
If the earlier reports of Avery’s roadside self-gratification were true then it’s not a stretch to think that he later developed a fixation on Teresa. The 1984 police report accuses Avery of targeting a specific female with his roadside shenanigans, going so far as to watch her house with binoculars so that he wouldn’t miss her. I’ve never known prison to do a really good job of curing perverts of their impulses. Sometimes it does teach them to conceal those impulses better. A man waving his weiner at a woman from the side of the road could just be a few years in prison away from learning to cover himself with a towel when he attempts to shock his future victims.
You and I may disagree on this one because I seem to think it’s a bigger deal than everybody else does, but I believe it is very relevant that Avery made two phone calls to Teresa using the *67 feature before she arrived at his house and one call afterward without using it. What legitimate reason would he have for blocking his number? This was in the early 2000s. I’m suspicious that a man Steven Avery’s age even knew about *67. A middle-aged guy in Wisconsin in 2003 who dismantled junk vehicles for a living was not aware of *67 unless he was using it for nefarious reasons. I didn’t know about *67 until 2006, and that was only because I became a police officer and saw it used for nefarious reasons. I am also nearly two decades younger than Steven Avery.
The phone call afterwards without *67 shows he had a plan. When she was reported missing and they checked her phone records, he could point to that call as proof that he hadn’t made the two blocked calls earlier. Obviously that fell apart when they checked his phone records, but those things happen when simple people attempt complex crimes. I said he had a plan, but I never said it was a good one.
It is also relevant that this happened while Steven Avery’s live-in girlfriend was in jail. I won’t go so far as to say that it is necessarily evidence, but it is an interesting fact nonetheless. If Steven were truly innocent, how unfortunate for him that Teresa was murdered while his alibi wasn’t available. But if he’s guilty, of course he would plan it for a time when his girlfriend was away.
OK, I’m satisfied that Steven Avery probably killed Teresa Halbach and that it was a sexually motivated crime. Now let’s get a little reckless with the speculation. Let’s theorize how it happened.
The autopsy revealed two bullet defects in Teresa’s skull and the .22 caliber bullet fragment located in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it was fired from a .22 rifle found in Steven Avery’s bedroom. It’s fair to say she was shot. But where did it happen and what led up to it?
Bobby Dassey testified that he last saw Teresa walking toward Steven Avery’s trailer. Assuming she made it inside, what happened next? None of Teresa’s blood was found in the trailer, so I think it’s fair to say that she was not shot in the trailer. A gunshot wound to the head is bloody, even with a smaller round like a .22 caliber. I just can’t envision a scenario where Steven Avery would be able to clean up all of that blood without leaving a trace. If she was on carpet when she was shot, the blood would have soaked into the carpet pad and the subfloor. Even if she were on linoleum or tile, the blood would have spread over such a large area that it would almost certainly have made it into cracks and crevices that Avery wouldn’t have been able to clean. And that isn’t even factoring in the spatter that would have hit the walls. It is really hard and requires time and effort to make an indoor bloody murder scene disappear, and Avery would have been in a big hurry.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in the garage so it makes sense that she was shot in there. In Zellner’s appeal she made a very big deal out of the fact that the bullet did not have any bone fragments embedded in it. For reasons that confound me even on multiple readings, Zellner was convinced the lack of bone material on the bullet somehow proved that Avery didn’t shoot Halbach. There seem to be two pretty obvious explanations. The first being that her expert might be full of crap. The second is that the bullet found in the garage might have passed through Teresa without striking a bone. A .22 is a small and fast-moving bullet, so I doubt the round found in the garage was one of the rounds that hit Teresa in the head. Forensic pathologists have explained to me in the past that .22 caliber bullets are notorious for ricocheting off bones around the inside of a person’s body without ever exiting. I have a tough time believing that a .22 caliber bullet that penetrated the skull in one spot would still have enough momentum to make it out the other side and onto the garage floor still intact. But there are a lot of places where a round could pass in and out of a human body without striking bone, and we have no idea how many times Teresa was actually shot.
So if she was shot in the garage, then that raises the question of why none of Teresa’s blood was found in there. If you were to get upset with old Barney Doyle for some undoubtedly legitimate reason and punch me in the nose, I’d bleed all over the bare concrete floor in my garage where I am typing this. So as not to upset my wife and risk another punch in the nose, I’d wipe that blood puddle up with a shop rag before it stained the floor. If you came back a month later and sprayed a crime scene product called Luminol on the floor, the spot where that puddle had been would light up, especially under an alternative light source. Then you wouldn’t have to hit me again, you could just point to the floor and remind me to watch my manners.
Crime scene technicians used Luminol in Steven Avery’s garage and saw a stain come out that was about the right size to be from a gunshot wound to the head.
So with the same scenario as above, what if old Barney Doyle didn’t feel comfortable leaving puddles of DNA everywhere and decided to clean up that blood puddle with bleach instead of just wiping it up with a shop rag? What happens if you come back a month later with a bottle of Luminol this time? The spot still lights up, but because of the bleach not the blood. Bleach kills everything in the blood that reacts with the Luminol, but the bleach itself causes a reaction.
The evidence technicians in Steven Avery’s garage used a presumptive blood test on the stain and determined that it was not blood.
So what if we discussed our problems like adults and you never punched old Barney Doyle in the first place? I’m clumsy and it is a garage, so I have at various times spilled brake fluid, antifreeze, medicated shampoo and Heinz 57 sauce on the floor. You bring the Luminol over and what happens then? First, I ask where you are getting all of this Luminol. After that, I have no idea. There are a lot of things that react with Luminol. Maybe the floor lights up, maybe it doesn’t.
So maybe the Luminol lit up in Steven Avery’s garage because he used bleach to clean up blood on the floor or maybe it picked up on something else. Either way, I don’t understand how he managed to shoot Teresa in the garage multiple times without making a giant bloody mess. It was a cluttered garage and clutter has a way of catching blood spatter. If she were standing when she was shot in the head, the blood spatter would have originated five-and-a-half feet off the ground and high-velocity spatter should have traveled all over the clutter. So I don’t think she was standing up when she was shot. And I’m not entirely convinced she was conscious at the time, if alive at all.
Back to Teresa in Steven Avery’s trailer. If she was shot in the garage, then what happened between the trailer and the garage? Obviously Avery could have been waiting with the rifle and walked her into the garage at gunpoint. That would explain why there was no sign of a big bloody struggle in the trailer. But we agreed earlier that this was a sexually motivated crime. What would he get out of it by walking her out to the garage and shooting her?
They found a set of shackles in Avery’s house when they searched it. They were kinky shackles and he claimed that he purchased them to spice things up with his girlfriend. I would have thought that sex with a portly middle-aged felon would have been all of the spice a woman could ask for, but I guess I’m a prude. At any rate, Avery could have met Teresa at the door with the rifle and ordered her into the shackles. Teresa’s DNA wasn’t found on the shackles, but maybe Avery was the type of gentleman to clean his sex toys between uses.
The theory that I keep coming back to, even if I can’t fully articulate why, is that Avery strangled her. I hate the theory because it would have been a painful and terrifying way for Teresa to die. I’d feel better knowing that Avery lured her out to the garage with some clever ruse and that she died instantly and painlessly from a gunshot to the head that she never saw coming. But I have this gut feeling that the sick son of a bitch strangled her to death. Let me outline it for you and see what you think.
During his interview with police, Steven Avery was adamant that Teresa never came in to his house. That is a bold claim to make if it wasn’t true. Police recognized the opportunity to catch him in a lie and tried to scare him off that story. There is so much trace evidence that could be left behind when a person is in a house. Police laid out how hairs, fibers, fingerprints and DNA evidence works and Avery had to have recognized what it would mean if they found anything linking Halbach to his trailer. It would have been so easy for Avery to just say that she stepped in the trailer for a minute to collect his money or leave a receipt. Then he would have had an excuse if they found any traces of her in the trailer. But he didn’t waiver. He insisted she was never in there. Maybe he was bluffing because he was that confident in how well he cleaned the place. But I think he was telling the truth. I don’t think Teresa was in there.
Avery said he followed Teresa out to her car to give her the money for the photo shoot. He described talking with her at the driver’s side door. This would have been in plain view of anybody who was passing by on the roadway or looking out the window of his sister’s house. It would have been too risky for him to walk out there holding a rifle. He could have knocked her unconscious by smashing her over the head with something, then thrown her in the back of her own car. But that would have also made a bloody mess. There was a small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair in the rear of her car, but not consistent with having her head split open from a crushing blow.
I think Avery strangled Teresa at the door of her car, either with his hands or with some sort of makeshift ligature. He could have done it quickly and would have been mostly concealed from view by the vehicle. When he was done, he could have thrown her into the rear of her car and moved the car into his garage. If she nicked her head on something during the struggle or while he was moving her, it could have opened up a minor cut that would have left a small amount of blood and hair in the back of the car.
Once in the garage, Steven Avery could have acted on his sexual intentions while Teresa was bound, unconscious or already dead. I don’t care to speculate on what Steven Avery did here. I’m going to think happy thoughts about what prison is like for murderers and skip to the end.
Like a million other guys in the midwest, Avery was a deer hunter. As such, he had undoubtedly used his garage to dress a dead deer before. From experience, he surely knew that he could make cleanup easier and prevent a bloody mess by strategically placing plastic or newspaper and putting Teresa in a convenient spot before shooting her. And if she was already dead from the initial strangulation (which is the theory I choose to believe because there is less torture and suffering involved), then the gunshots would have produced minimal blood loss anyway.
“Why would he shoot her if she was already dead?” you ask. I refer you back to my earlier analysis: Weird people do weird stuff sometimes and we won’t always know why. Or you can go with the alternate theory that she didn’t die until he shot her, but I’m writing this so I am going with the lesser of two horrors.
From that point, it’s pretty straightforward. Over the next two days he hid her vehicle in the salvage yard, hoping it wouldn’t be found before he had a chance to do something more permanent, and burned her body and all of the evidence in the burn pit and burn barrels around his house. He didn’t use the car crusher or the incinerator because he rarely used either of those things in the course of his job and didn’t want his brother and father asking questions like “What car are you crushing?” or “What the hell are you burning in that incinerator?” while he was at the center of a missing person investigation. Eventually the plot was discovered, and Dean Strang became an unlikely heartthrob through Netflix.
OK, OK, stop screaming at me. We’ll talk about Brendan Dassey. This was a terrible story to begin with, and it isn’t going to get any better if we bring Brendan Dassey into it. But since you insist, here it is.
Brendan Dassey confessed to assisting his uncle Steven Avery with the rape, murder and disposal of Teresa Halbach. He was convicted. That conviction was overturned. Then it was upheld. Then depending on the day of the week, he is either free pending an appeal or back in jail.
Dassey told a story that was, according to the prosecutor, so rich in detail that it could not possibly have been made up. Dassey only could have gotten those details from being involved. In the professional opinion of old Barney Doyle, the confession is absolutely made up and the details Brendan Dassey gave don’t match the crime scene at all. But what do I know? I wasn’t there for the investigation and, even if I was, we have already established that I am a moron. Maybe he did do it after all.
Brendan was 16 years old at the time of the murder and lived with his mother and brothers next door to Steven Avery. Like everybody else in his family, Brendan was interviewed by police several days after the murder. He gave a story that was complete and utter horseshit, which put him on the police radar. His initial story was that he didn’t see Teresa at the Avery Salvage Yard, but then he might have seen her, but then he definitely saw her leaving and driving away. Police rightfully suspected that Steven Avery had coached Brendan on what to tell them, and the details of his story crumbled under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Several months later, police did a follow up interview with Brendan at his school. This time Brendan said that he saw Teresa’s body in the burn pit behind Steven Avery’s house on Halloween night while Avery was having a bonfire. He said that he was scared of Steven and didn’t want to get him in trouble, so he didn’t say anything.
The police came back and interviewed Brendan two more times. In those interviews, Brendan claimed that he actually first saw Teresa tied to Steven Avery’s bed. Avery told Brendan to rape Teresa, which he did, then Steven slit Teresa’s throat. They loaded her body into her car, for some unknown reason, and then burned her in the burn pit.
This was the story that got him convicted and I don’t understand how. I will grant the prosecutor that it was rich in detail, but the details seem like nonsense to me. If Steven Avery slit Teresa’s throat on his bed then there would have been blood all over that room. Blood would have absolutely soaked into the mattress. The prosecutor argued that Avery burned the sheets, and that was apparently good enough. Also, while Teresa’s car was supposedly in the garage, why in the hell would they put her body in it? It’s not like they drove her fifteen feet to the burn pit. And there was only a small amount of blood in the back of her car. If she had her throat slit there would have been a lot of blood leading all the way from the bedroom to the car, and there is no way Avery could have cleaned that up well enough to hide it from the crime scene technicians.
I was working on a cold case homicide a few years ago where two men were wrongly convicted in the 1990s. A key piece of evidence was the testimony of a supposed co-conspirator, who was mentally challenged. While I was reviewing the transcripts of his police interview, I was struck by how completely off the guy’s story was. He didn’t get a single detail right that the investigators didn’t tell him first. I met the investigators and knew them to be good men. I also knew that they firmly believed they had the right guys, right up until DNA proved otherwise. It’s a really bad feeling when you aren’t making progress in a murder case. It gets downright desperate if the case is high profile. Put enough pressure on an investigator and they will start to see things that aren’t there and find meaning in things where there is none. I know why they believed what that guy was telling them, but with the benefit of time and distance it was clearly garbage.
I say that because I got a very similar sense reading the transcripts of Brendan Dassey’s interviews. While I don’t believe Dassey was as slow as his defense attorneys alleged, he was a sixteen year old kid and not a particularly smart one. He was a textbook candidate for a false confession. As I read his confession, I was troubled by how much of his story was either wrong or common knowledge. It seemed like the only time he got things “right” was when he was agreeing with statements that the investigators made.
Police were right to make him a suspect because he was clearly lying on the initial interview. I actually believed most of the second interview, when he described seeing the body in the fire. It was logical, it didn’t contradict the known facts in any meaningful way, and it seemed like he was providing the information not agreeing to it. But I don’t believe the rest of his confession and I certainly don’t think it was believable enough to sustain a criminal conviction.
Plus, his confession contradicts our strangling theory and we have entirely too much invested in that to give up now.
That’s not a bad start huh? We believe Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach, acting alone. We have concerns about the integrity of some of the evidence, but ultimately not enough to come to a different conclusion. We think he attacked her in the driveway near her car and shot her in the garage, without ever taking her into his home. I think she was strangled and shot, but you aren’t certain if you agree with that or not. We think Brendan Dassey learned about the crime after the fact, possibly seeing Teresa’s body in Avery’s burn pit, but that he loved and/or feared his uncle too much to say anything initially. We would hire Dean Strang and Jerome Buting if we were ever accused of murder. And this book would be a thousand times better if it were written by Kathleen Zellner.
I hope all of our cases go this smoothly.

The Murder of Teresa Halbach
Before we go on, I should warn you that I am going to spend some portion of this book ridiculing criminal attorneys. I can’t help it. They are a ridiculous group of people. They are among the most educated and intelligent people we have in this country and have devoted their lives to civil service. They should be revered like doctors or astronauts, but instead they are derided like old-timey carnival barkers. The burden of proof is entirely on their shoulders, yet prosecutors are mocked as buffoons if they lose a case. Prosecutors who are too successful are portrayed as heartless henchmen for an oppressive government machine. Defense attorneys are villainized for protecting criminals even though we all understand it is their exact job to protect the rights of their clients, who are mostly criminals, and they would be disbarred for giving anything less than an honest effort.
But that’s the job they chose and most of the absurdities of the criminal justice system were created by their hands. They stacked one absurd brief or motion on top of another for two centuries until our courts were trapped in a slog of arcane case laws and nonsensical gibberish that only lawyers and sovereign citizens pretend to understand. I’ll give you a couple of observations from a decade I have spent as an occasional guest of the court: The judge is God in the courtroom, but God’s will can always be appealed to a council of higher deities; logic is suspended for the sake of ritual; and at least three jurors haven’t paid attention to a word the last witness just said.
Since I know that I am a weak man who will take numerous unprovoked shots at the attorneys involved in these cases, I do feel compelled to admit a couple of important things that I have noticed about attorneys. In their own little way, they always seem to tell the truth. I’ve seen doctors lie. I’ve seen clergy lie. I’ve seen my mother lie. I can’t recall seeing an attorney lie in court. Despite their reputation to the contrary, as a whole, attorneys seem to have a real commitment to their own narrow concept of truth. That’s not to say that they won’t mislead the shit out of you with an argument, because they will absolutely do that. But you can be sure that the argument is based on some truthful fact. Listening to attorneys is a lot like negotiating with the devil. They aren’t going to lie to you, but pay very close attention to the words they choose. Second, they tend to be much better mannered than you expect a professional arguer to be. I’ve heard horror stories about attorneys being jerks to witnesses on the stand but I’ve never actually seen it. I’ve always been treated with respect and decency when I testified. I’ve had my work criticized by defense attorneys while I was on the stand and that stung. But they were never jerks about it and the criticisms were always reasonably valid (probably why they stung).
So there you are, that’s a quick guide to attorneys from Barney Doyle. They virtually always tell the truth, even if only in a very literal and lawyerly sense of the word “truth,” and they aren’t nearly as bad as all of the jokes would have you believe.
I say all of that because we are going to talk about the tragic murder of Teresa Halbach and we can’t do that without reviewing the trial of Steven Avery. The defense attorneys who represented Avery, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, became a pair of modern day Atticus Finches to a throng of worshipers on the internet after a flattering portrayal in the Netflix documentary Making A Murderer. The prosecutor, Ken Kratz, resigned in disgrace over allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances towards several victims in domestic violence cases that he was prosecuting.
In Avery’s trial, each side presented a theory on this case and the two theories were mutually exclusive. Lots of times in a murder trial the defense won’t present a theory, they will just poke holes in the prosecutor’s theory. Other times the defense will accept the bulk of the prosecutor’s theory without argument and try to insert doubt through insanity, self-defense, accident or some other gray area in the law. The Steven Avery trial was the rare case where the prosecution and the defense offered specific theories that directly contradicted each other. One of them, at a minimum, has to be wrong. What we think happened to Teresa Halbach depends largely on who we are going to believe, the modern day Misters Finch or an alleged sexual predator. I know whose side you want to take on this one. Hell, I know whose side I want to take on this one. But as I mentioned before, attorneys virtually always tell the truth in court. So let’s wade through all of this contradictory truth and see if we can’t figure out what actually happened.
Also, before we go any further, I want you to take a moment and consider your own interest in these cases. I love true crime stories. You love true crime stories. Lots of people love true crime stories. There is nothing wrong with loving true crime stories. The subject matter is macabre, but that doesn’t make it off limits for decent people like us to discuss. We don’t love murder and we certainly don’t want to celebrate murderers. If anything, our love of true crime is mostly borne of an obsession with finding the truth and holding murderers accountable. The crimes we are going to look at, like the murder of Teresa Halbach, were devastating events to a lot of innocent people who cared about the victims. And that is before you even account for the horrors that the poor victims themselves suffered. We recognize the tragedy, hate the suffering, and love the story still. We are searching for the truth among muddied details in most of these cases, but we are never confused about where our sympathies lie. The victim is the most important person in every one of these stories. Even though we enjoy studying these crimes, we still wish they had not happened in the first place.
And I know a lot of you developed your interest in these things in relation to some personal tragedy in your own life. Studying horrific crimes is, for some people, a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. I’ve seen more death and violence in my life than I ever imagined I could handle. These murder stories should stir up a lot of terrible memories for me. But they don’t. They allow me to dissect the horrors of this world from a comfortable arm’s length away, secure in the knowledge that I can always just close the book or the laptop at any time. It’s a weird way of distracting yourself from the boogieman under your bed by reading about the boogieman three states over. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
That said, we all have those true crime cases that hit too close to home. If any of these cases are like that for you, or if, God forbid, you personally knew one of the victims, please just skip that chapter. You won’t miss anything important, I promise, and you’ll catch up on the next case.
Also, now is an appropriate time to offer my sincere thanks to Skip Topp and his friends over at stevenaverycase.org for compiling the trial transcripts and all of the supporting exhibits from the Steven Avery trial. Trial transcripts are public records but are usually prohibitively expensive, so I am very grateful that they acquired and shared them. The facts below come from those transcripts, several other motions filed by attorney Kathleen Zelner and, to a much lesser extent, the Making A Murderer documentary.
Teresa Halbach was a 25-year-old photographer living in semi-rural Wisconsin. She was relatively new to the business so she shared studio space with another photographer and supplemented her income by doing freelance photography for an Auto Trader magazine. If you aren’t familiar with Auto Trader, picture Craigslist car ads compiled in a free newspaper that was available in a filthy display box outside of every gas station. If you aren’t familiar with newspapers, imagine printing a collection of articles from the internet onto awkwardly large and absurdly thin paper that you could take with you to the bathroom. If you don’t remember articles, they were like memes but with 800 to 1,000 words and sometimes no picture.
On Halloween day of 2005, Teresa Halbach was taking photos of vehicles for three different customers in and around Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. One of those customers was a man named Steven Avery who lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard. Everybody agrees that Teresa visited the Avery Salvage Yard that day. And everybody agrees that Teresa’s burned remains were found in a burn pit behind Steven Avery’s home several days later. But what happened between those moments is fiercely debated.

The prosecution’s version of events:
Teresa Halbach had taken photos at the Avery Salvage Yard on several occasions before. She complained to a coworker about Steven Avery’s peculiar behavior. She said that Avery once met her at the door wearing nothing but a towel.
On October 31, 2005, Avery called Auto Trader magazine and specifically requested that Teresa come take photos. Avery gave the Avery Salvage Yard address, but gave the name B. Janda instead of his own. Avery’s sister’s name was Barb Janda and the vehicle that Teresa was supposed to photograph belonged to her. Avery had Teresa’s cell phone number and called her twice before she came out to the salvage yard. Both times he used *67 to block his name and number on her caller ID. She didn’t answer either call. He called again later in the day, presumably after her visit, but did not use *67 on the third call.
Bobby Dassey lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard with his mother (Barb Janda) and brothers. He saw Teresa taking photos of his mother’s van that afternoon, then saw Teresa walking toward Avery’s trailer. Bobby took a shower and left to go hunting. He saw Teresa’s green Toyota Rav4 parked out at the property but did not see Teresa anywhere when he left.
Multiple witnesses reported seeing a bonfire and/or a fire in a burn barrel at Steven Avery’s residence on the afternoon and/or evening of October 31. The statements conflict as to the exact time of the fires, but consensus seems to place them at around dusk into dark.
Friends and loved ones did not see or hear from Teresa after October 31, and her mother reported her as a missing person on November 3 in Calumet County Wisconsin, where Teresa lived. Police accounted for her whereabouts up to where she visited the Avery Salvage Yard, then the trail went cold.
A large search party of citizen volunteers, organized by Teresa’s ex-boyfriend and her roommate, combed the countryside looking for Teresa and her missing Toyota Rav4. Teresa’s second-cousin located the Rav4 semi-concealed among the junk vehicles in the Avery Salvage Yard. The car was locked and partially covered with debris.
Police were notified and responded immediately. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office was on scene first, but the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office because of a conflict of interest. Standby for details on the conflict of interest because it makes up the bulk of the defense’s theory.
The Rav4 was hauled off on a wrecker to the Wisconsin crime lab. Lab technicians found Avery’s blood on the back of the gear shift and on the passenger side of the center console. His DNA, from a non-blood source, was also found under the hood on the latching mechanism. A small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair was also found in the rear cargo area of the Rav4.
Through a series of searches over the course of several weeks, investigators found Teresa’s bone fragments in a burn pit outside of Steven Avery’s trailer and in a burn barrel outside of the Janda home. They also found charred remnants of Teresa’s camera and cell phone in a burn barrel outside of Steven Avery’s trailer. Inside the trailer, investigators found a key to Teresa’s Rav4 in Avery’s bedroom and a fired bullet with Teresa’s DNA on it in the garage. The key also had Avery’s DNA on it.
Investigators interviewed Avery’s nephew, Brendan Dassey, several times over the course of a few months. He initially denied knowledge of what happened to Teresa, but eventually confessed to helping Avery rape and kill Teresa then burn her corpse.

The defense’s version of events:
An adult female (not Teresa) was brutally raped on a beach in Manitowoc County on July 29, 1985. DNA eventually showed that the rape was almost certainly committed by a man named Gregory Allen. But a poor investigation and a mistaken eyewitness identification led to the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery.
Avery was freed in September of 2003 and rightfully sued the bejeezus out of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office. Either by winning the lawsuit or by agreeing to an out-of-court settlement, Avery was going to receive a huge settlement from the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office after 20 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. Circumstances changed when Teresa Halbach went missing the same day she visited the Avery Salvage Yard.
Among the officers deposed in Avery’s lawsuit against Manitowoc County were Lieutenant James Lenk and Sergeant James Colborn. Even though the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office, Lenk and Colborn each participated in searches in which crucial evidence was discovered.
As is custom, investigators kept a log of everybody who came in and out of the crime scene at the salvage yard. There was one day when Lenk signed out of the scene log, but there was no entry for him signing in.
The Rav4 was found parked with the battery disconnected. There was a car crusher at the salvage yard not far from where it was located. The car crusher did not belong to the Averys, but they were known to use it on occasion.
One day prior to the actual discovery of the Rav4, Sergeant Colborn ran a license plate check of the vehicle through his dispatch. The majority of license plate checks are conducted by radio, but Sergeant Colborn ran this particular license plate check by cell phone.
Steven Avery’s trailer was searched three separate times before the key was discovered in his bedroom. It was discovered by Lenk and Colborn, who were searching under the supervision of a Calumet County detective. Lenk spotted the key on some slippers beside Colborn, who theorized that the key had fallen out of a small bookshelf while he was moving it. The key was also by itself, with no accompanying house keys or office keys.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was not discovered until months after the first search, and was discovered by Lenk. The garage had been searched multiple times before that, including a search that yielded fired .22 cartridge cases (or shell casings, as the cool kids call them).
The lab technician who identified Teresa’s DNA on the bullet deviated from her usual protocol on the test. Whenever technicians test for DNA, they also run a simultaneous “control” test to show that there was no contamination. On that particular control test, the sample was contaminated with the technician’s DNA. That usually isn’t a big deal. They throw out the test and try again. But the DNA test on the bullet consumed the entire sample, so she was unable to run another test. In all probability, the test shouldn’t have been considered valid for court purposes.
There was already a vial of Steven Avery’s blood in a box of evidence at the Manitowoc County Clerk of Court’s office. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office had keys to the Clerk’s office, and Lenk was aware that evidence in Steven Avery’s original rape case was held there. Lenk had previously ordered one of his deputies to send some evidence from that box to the crime lab for testing. The vial appeared to have been opened at some point.
The vial of Avery’s blood had an anticoagulant called EDTA in it that is used to preserve blood samples in liquid form. The FBI tested Avery’s blood from the SUV and determined that it did not have EDTA in it, which would seem to refute the notion that the blood in the SUV was planted by law enforcement. The FBI only tested three of the six samples from the SUV, however. And the defense introduced an expert who suggested that there were problems with the test that the FBI used.
Teresa’s bones were discovered in both the burn pit in Avery’s backyard and a burn barrel near the Janda residence. There was also a third site near the Avery property where burned bones were discovered, but the crime lab was unable to determine if they were also bones from Teresa. At a minimum, either Teresa was dismembered and burned at two sites, or her burned bones were moved at least once before they were discovered.
The Avery Salvage Yard also had a commercial incinerator on site. It was not used to dispose of Teresa’s body.
Before we continue, I want to tell you a little story. I am not particularly handy but I am very cheap. Consequently, I do a lot of projects around the house that should be hired out to the professionals. I built a laundry room one time that didn’t have a straight edge or 90-degree angle in it. It wasn’t obvious to the naked eye, so I didn’t really care. Until I tried to buy a door. Door manufacturers make a lot of different sizes, but they are virtually all perfect rectangles. My opening was not. I shimmed and jimmied it every which way I could, but you can only be so precise when you don’t have straight edge to orient off of. It’s in the wall now, but I don’t trust that door to hold out a stiff draft.
The prosecution and the defense both have timelines for when they say Teresa was at the Avery Salvage yard, but they are built on imprecise and contradictory witness recollections. I don’t have any more faith in their timelines than I do in my laundry room door.
So now that we’ve laid that groundwork, let’s do a little reckless speculation about what happened to Teresa Halbach.
I love the care and craft that went into Dean Strang and Jerome Buting’s defense. A man wrongfully convicted of a rape he didn’t commit is released from prison only to be framed for murder. Lieutenant Lenk is lurking in the shadows of every search with another piece of fraudulent evidence. His henchman, Sergeant Colborn, covers for every misdeed in a zeal to preserve the reputation of his beloved department. Scientists at the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation cast aside their sacred oaths to jump into the conspiracy. Maybe the police are protecting the real killers. Maybe the police are the real killers. I love everything about this story. As fiction, it’s a winner. As an actual explanation for what happened to Teresa Halbach, it just doesn’t work for me.
It sucks that the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office participated in the investigation. They wouldn’t have asked Calumet County to take over the investigation if they didn’t believe there was a conflict of interest. Ideally they shouldn’t have even participated in the search. But practically speaking, they had to. It was a ridiculously large crime scene. The Avery Salvage Yard is 5 acres with over 4,000 vehicles and a dozen buildings. The Calumet County Sheriff’s Office was a 30-officer department trying to run a massive investigation in somebody else’s county. You could search that salvage yard around the clock for a week with a hundred trained investigators and not cover everything. Conflict of interest or not, Manitowoc County was going to have to lend a hand in that search.
James Lenk and Andrew Colborn did not have any reason to frame Steven Avery. They weren’t being sued. They had nothing to do with the investigation that led to Avery’s wrongful conviction. Neither man even worked for the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office at that time. They were deposed in Avery’s lawsuit because a phone call from a neighboring agency about Avery was misdirected to Colborn while Colborn was working in the jail. He properly directed the caller to the Sheriff’s Office detectives and had no further involvement in the matter. Lenk was deposed because Colborn told Lenk about the phone call. Neither man was at the slightest risk of being held personally liable in a lawsuit from Avery.
You could argue that loyalty to the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office might motivate Lenk and Colborn to frame an innocent man. You could argue that, if you enjoy losing arguments. Police don’t give a shit about their departments. It’s just an employer. The job is dangerous. It doesn’t pay that well. And police jobs are a dime a dozen. No police officer in the world is going to commit a felony to protect the reputation of their department or save the department from a lawsuit. Certain unscrupulous police officers might be willing to commit a felony to protect their own reputation or save themselves from a lawsuit, but not the department. Especially in a sheriff’s office, where the top guy is some politician that half the department didn’t even vote for and who could be gone at the next election.
But since we are recklessly speculating here, let’s follow this thread a little ways. If Steven Avery didn’t kill Teresa Halbach then who did? She didn’t have a boyfriend that we know of. Her ex-boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, was still in her life in some capacity and would make for an obvious suspect. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me in reviewing the trial transcripts, the investigating officers ruled Hillegas out as a suspect fairly early in the investigation. I found a lot written about him on the internet, but nothing from any source that I would consider credible.
Avery hired attorney Kathleen Zellner to represent him on his appeal, which took place after his Making A Murderer fame. She has been very bold in proclaiming Hillegas as the actual killer. I wish I could afford to hire this woman to write the forward for this book. She is a marvel. You and I do a decent job of recklessly speculating about murders; Zellner is a master at it. Where we are bound by logic and decency, Zellner transcends reason and scoffs at decorum. We trust experts who have studied science while she directs doctors who invent science to conform to her theories. We are skeptical of witness statements that can’t be corroborated. She tells you exactly who is lying, why they are lying, and why anything that contradicts her theory is also a lie. We restrict logical inferences to only those things which can be logically inferred, and then we dampen those inferences with an acknowledgment of their uncertainty. Zellner can draw you a straight line from Teresa Halbach’s murder to Ryan Hillegas’ guilt using any small witness statement or piece of evidence and her own unique brand of deductive reasoning.
At the risk of infuriating Avery’s supporters by shortchanging the “newly discovered evidence,” I am going to abridge Zellner’s theory for you here:
Ryan Hillegas was a jealous and abusive boyfriend. None of Teresa Halbach’s friends or family ever mentioned anything about Hillegas being abusive, but the guy she shared a photography studio with did. He told detectives that, years ago, Teresa mentioned having an abusive ex-boyfriend. Therefore, Hillegas is a murdering woman-beater.
Teresa Halbach had a secret life where she was taking nude photographs, sleeping with her roommate and sleeping with a married man. Hillegas killed her because he was jealous. (I couldn’t find the affidavits that Zellner used to support the claims about Halbach’s personal life. For what it’s worth, true or not, it was shitty the way she used those “facts” to degrade the victim. And if I had to bet based on the rest of her arguments, I’ll take “or not” over “true” in a landslide.)
Hillegas told investigators that damage to the brake light and bumper on Halbach’s car was months old. No insurance claim was ever filed, so obviously Hillegas was lying to cover up the fact that he is a murdering liar.
Hillegas was an unemployed nurse at the time of the murder. He had the time to commit the murder (unemployed) and the advanced medical training (nurse) that would be required to plant Steven Avery’s blood in Halbach’s car.
The door to Avery’s trailer was unlocked. We can be certain of this because Avery said so himself in an affidavit and had absolutely no reason to lie. Obviously, since the door was unlocked, Hillegas snuck into the house and used his advanced nursing training to sneak Avery’s blood from the bathroom sink to Halbach’s car to frame Avery.
There were no phone calls made from Hillegas’ phone during the time of the murder (as calculated by Zellner). This was because his hands were occupied strangling Halbach to death. There were also no phone calls made at various points over the following few days because his hands were occupied with burning Halbach’s body and framing Steven Avery.
Investigators took photographs of Hillegas’ hands during the initial investigation. Those photographs showed scratches on the back of his left hand. Other photographs taken of Halbach during her lifetime showed that she had fingernails. Forensic pathologist Larry Blum prepared an affidavit saying that he was certain, “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” that the scratches were caused by fingernails. Furthermore, he believed that they were caused by Halbach’s fingernails while Hillegas was strangling her. He deduced all of that from photos of Hillegas’ hands and reenactments he conducted with female staff members in his office. Presumably, Zellner didn’t require the doctor to carry the reenactment all the way through cremation.
Another doctor, Lawrence Farwell, has invented a technique he named “brain fingerprinting.” He is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist whereas I am but a humble state-educated police officer, so I will defer to Dr. Farwell as to the matter of whether or not the brain has fingers. But through brain-fingerprinting, Dr. Farwell can measure scientifically whether or not a person has knowledge of something. He measured with 99.9 percent certainty that Steven Avery didn’t know how Teresa Halbach was killed. Other neuroscientists have pointed out that Dr. Farwell’s claims seem farfetched and that his research doesn’t really adhere to the standards of what we consider “science.” But they are probably just bitter that they didn’t discover all of those fingers on the brain before he did.

I can’t recommend reading Zellner’s motion for a retrial highly enough. She torched every single person involved with the case, including Dean Strang and Jerome Buting. My favorite passage is when she asserts matter-of-factly that Sergeant Colborn conducted a clandestine illegal search of the Avery salvage yard with Hillegas’ help.
“The headlights were from Sgt. Colborn's personal vehicle and he had a friend of Ms. Halbach with him to search the Avery property without a search warrant because he did not have probable cause to be on the Avery property at that point in time.”
She just flat out says that a sworn police officer committed multiple felonies as if she were pointing out that the sky was blue. Her proof? Colborn called in for a license plate check on Halbach’s vehicle and he used a cell phone instead of his radio. And she could hear a voice in the background say “it’s her.” Colborn obviously made the call while trespassing at the Avery Salvage yard and the voice in the background couldn’t have been anybody but the lying, murdering, evidence-planting Hillegas.
As you might have imagined, the judge was unpersuaded and denied Zellner’s motion for a new trial.
Perhaps by the sequel you and I will be audacious enough to propose Zellner’s type of fantastically imaginative speculation, but we aren’t there yet. For now, let’s bound our recklessness in at least the realm of plausibility.
I think that Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach. His blood was in her vehicle. His DNA was on her hood latch. Her car key was found in Steven Avery’s bedroom with Steven Avery’s DNA on it. A bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in his garage and it was fired from a .22 caliber rifle that was found hanging in Steven Avery’s bedroom. Her bones were found in a burn pit outside of his house. Her cell phone and camera were found in a burn barrel beside his house. Each and every piece of that evidence is pretty damning.
I know you have concerns about the integrity of some of that evidence. Rightfully so. The bullet wasn’t found on the first search and it probably should have been. The story of how the key was found is a bit perplexing. It’s really weird that her bones were found at multiple locations on the Avery property. I will grant you all of those things. But murder isn’t a perfectly logical act and you will drive yourself mad trying to understand the how and why of every little thing the killer did. The kind of person who would brutally murder an innocent person is the kind of person who would do a lot of other peculiar stuff as well. Moving bones? It obviously made sense to the killer at the time because bones were moved. Maybe somebody moved the bones in an attempt to frame Steven Avery for the murder. But that person would have had to stage all of the other evidence as well, and the logistics just don’t seem possible to me (unless the police killed her, which is absurd). The most logical explanation I see is that Steven Avery moved the bones for reasons that probably made sense to him at the time. Steven Avery’s blood was in the car because Steven Avery bled in the car. Steven Avery’s DNA was on the hood latch because Steven Avery touched the hood latch when he disconnected the battery. The key was eventually found in Steven Avery’s room because Steven Avery hid the key in his room. The bullet was found in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it because that’s where the bullet was fired. I admit that it lacks the imagination and flair of Zellner’s and Strang’s theories, but it fits the facts a lot easier.
So if we accept that Steven Avery was the killer, then why did he do it? They weren’t romantically involved so it wasn’t a case of domestic violence. Teresa was early into her photography career while Avery was in line for a huge settlement from Manitowoc County, so robbery doesn’t make any sense. Neither of them was involved in a street gang nor were they distributing narcotics. There is no reason to suspect self-defense, murder-for-hire, silencing a witness or any of the other oddball murder motives that occur in rare instances. I’m going to step out on a pretty sturdy limb and guess that it was sexually motivated. You knew that already, didn’t you? One step ahead of me as usual. But just for the sake of being thorough, let’s analyze it a little bit.
Making A Murderer would have you believe that Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist and the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation. In truth, Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation and Steven Avery’s behavior made it really easy to believe that he would rape somebody.
According to a report by Kurt Chandler in Milwaukee Magazine, Avery was convicted of burglarizing a bar when he was 18 and burning a cat alive several months later. I haven’t seen the court records or police reports from either of those charges, but they fit into the general pattern of Avery’s life. In September of 1984, a neighbor reported that Avery had been harassing her for months. When she drove past his house on the road to her own home, Avery would run and stand on the side of the road naked or stand at the front of his car and masturbate in plain view.
In his report, the investigating detective noted, “He has field glasses on the house and he knows just when she will be driving past the residence. At this point he will then run out to the road and do his tricks.”
In January of 1985, Avery was arrested for running a woman’s vehicle off the road and pointing a rifle at her. In April of 1985 he was accused of repeatedly driving by another woman’s house and shouting obscenities. In May of 1985 an 11 year old girl in a neighboring community was kidnapped and raped. Avery was never charged with the crime, but officers noted that he fit the physical description of the suspect and was identified by a witness as fishing in the area at the time. In June of 1987, Avery’s wife accused him of sending threatening letters from prison. In September of 2004, one year after being released from prison, Avery’s girlfriend accused him of domestic assault.
It’s a tragedy that a rapist was left on the streets because of Manitowoc County’s shoddy investigation. Gregory Allen, the actual rapist, was free for another ten years and committed atrocities that we likely won’t ever even know about before he was eventually caught for another rape. It’s infuriating. But let’s be honest, there were going to be concrete and bars in Avery’s future eventually anyway.
If the earlier reports of Avery’s roadside self-gratification were true then it’s not a stretch to think that he later developed a fixation on Teresa. The 1984 police report accuses Avery of targeting a specific female with his roadside shenanigans, going so far as to watch her house with binoculars so that he wouldn’t miss her. I’ve never known prison to do a really good job of curing perverts of their impulses. Sometimes it does teach them to conceal those impulses better. A man waving his weiner at a woman from the side of the road could just be a few years in prison away from learning to cover himself with a towel when he attempts to shock his future victims.
You and I may disagree on this one because I seem to think it’s a bigger deal than everybody else does, but I believe it is very relevant that Avery made two phone calls to Teresa using the *67 feature before she arrived at his house and one call afterward without using it. What legitimate reason would he have for blocking his number? This was in the early 2000s. I’m suspicious that a man Steven Avery’s age even knew about *67. A middle-aged guy in Wisconsin in 2003 who dismantled junk vehicles for a living was not aware of *67 unless he was using it for nefarious reasons. I didn’t know about *67 until 2006, and that was only because I became a police officer and saw it used for nefarious reasons. I am also nearly two decades younger than Steven Avery.
The phone call afterwards without *67 shows he had a plan. When she was reported missing and they checked her phone records, he could point to that call as proof that he hadn’t made the two blocked calls earlier. Obviously that fell apart when they checked his phone records, but those things happen when simple people attempt complex crimes. I said he had a plan, but I never said it was a good one.
It is also relevant that this happened while Steven Avery’s live-in girlfriend was in jail. I won’t go so far as to say that it is necessarily evidence, but it is an interesting fact nonetheless. If Steven were truly innocent, how unfortunate for him that Teresa was murdered while his alibi wasn’t available. But if he’s guilty, of course he would plan it for a time when his girlfriend was away.
OK, I’m satisfied that Steven Avery probably killed Teresa Halbach and that it was a sexually motivated crime. Now let’s get a little reckless with the speculation. Let’s theorize how it happened.
The autopsy revealed two bullet defects in Teresa’s skull and the .22 caliber bullet fragment located in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it was fired from a .22 rifle found in Steven Avery’s bedroom. It’s fair to say she was shot. But where did it happen and what led up to it?
Bobby Dassey testified that he last saw Teresa walking toward Steven Avery’s trailer. Assuming she made it inside, what happened next? None of Teresa’s blood was found in the trailer, so I think it’s fair to say that she was not shot in the trailer. A gunshot wound to the head is bloody, even with a smaller round like a .22 caliber. I just can’t envision a scenario where Steven Avery would be able to clean up all of that blood without leaving a trace. If she was on carpet when she was shot, the blood would have soaked into the carpet pad and the subfloor. Even if she were on linoleum or tile, the blood would have spread over such a large area that it would almost certainly have made it into cracks and crevices that Avery wouldn’t have been able to clean. And that isn’t even factoring in the spatter that would have hit the walls. It is really hard and requires time and effort to make an indoor bloody murder scene disappear, and Avery would have been in a big hurry.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in the garage so it makes sense that she was shot in there. In Zellner’s appeal she made a very big deal out of the fact that the bullet did not have any bone fragments embedded in it. For reasons that confound me even on multiple readings, Zellner was convinced the lack of bone material on the bullet somehow proved that Avery didn’t shoot Halbach. There seem to be two pretty obvious explanations. The first being that her expert might be full of crap. The second is that the bullet found in the garage might have passed through Teresa without striking a bone. A .22 is a small and fast-moving bullet, so I doubt the round found in the garage was one of the rounds that hit Teresa in the head. Forensic pathologists have explained to me in the past that .22 caliber bullets are notorious for ricocheting off bones around the inside of a person’s body without ever exiting. I have a tough time believing that a .22 caliber bullet that penetrated the skull in one spot would still have enough momentum to make it out the other side and onto the garage floor still intact. But there are a lot of places where a round could pass in and out of a human body without striking bone, and we have no idea how many times Teresa was actually shot.
So if she was shot in the garage, then that raises the question of why none of Teresa’s blood was found in there. If you were to get upset with old Barney Doyle for some undoubtedly legitimate reason and punch me in the nose, I’d bleed all over the bare concrete floor in my garage where I am typing this. So as not to upset my wife and risk another punch in the nose, I’d wipe that blood puddle up with a shop rag before it stained the floor. If you came back a month later and sprayed a crime scene product called Luminol on the floor, the spot where that puddle had been would light up, especially under an alternative light source. Then you wouldn’t have to hit me again, you could just point to the floor and remind me to watch my manners.
Crime scene technicians used Luminol in Steven Avery’s garage and saw a stain come out that was about the right size to be from a gunshot wound to the head.
So with the same scenario as above, what if old Barney Doyle didn’t feel comfortable leaving puddles of DNA everywhere and decided to clean up that blood puddle with bleach instead of just wiping it up with a shop rag? What happens if you come back a month later with a bottle of Luminol this time? The spot still lights up, but because of the bleach not the blood. Bleach kills everything in the blood that reacts with the Luminol, but the bleach itself causes a reaction.
The evidence technicians in Steven Avery’s garage used a presumptive blood test on the stain and determined that it was not blood.
So what if we discussed our problems like adults and you never punched old Barney Doyle in the first place? I’m clumsy and it is a garage, so I have at various times spilled brake fluid, antifreeze, medicated shampoo and Heinz 57 sauce on the floor. You bring the Luminol over and what happens then? First, I ask where you are getting all of this Luminol. After that, I have no idea. There are a lot of things that react with Luminol. Maybe the floor lights up, maybe it doesn’t.
So maybe the Luminol lit up in Steven Avery’s garage because he used bleach to clean up blood on the floor or maybe it picked up on something else. Either way, I don’t understand how he managed to shoot Teresa in the garage multiple times without making a giant bloody mess. It was a cluttered garage and clutter has a way of catching blood spatter. If she were standing when she was shot in the head, the blood spatter would have originated five-and-a-half feet off the ground and high-velocity spatter should have traveled all over the clutter. So I don’t think she was standing up when she was shot. And I’m not entirely convinced she was conscious at the time, if alive at all.
Back to Teresa in Steven Avery’s trailer. If she was shot in the garage, then what happened between the trailer and the garage? Obviously Avery could have been waiting with the rifle and walked her into the garage at gunpoint. That would explain why there was no sign of a big bloody struggle in the trailer. But we agreed earlier that this was a sexually motivated crime. What would he get out of it by walking her out to the garage and shooting her?
They found a set of shackles in Avery’s house when they searched it. They were kinky shackles and he claimed that he purchased them to spice things up with his girlfriend. I would have thought that sex with a portly middle-aged felon would have been all of the spice a woman could ask for, but I guess I’m a prude. At any rate, Avery could have met Teresa at the door with the rifle and ordered her into the shackles. Teresa’s DNA wasn’t found on the shackles, but maybe Avery was the type of gentleman to clean his sex toys between uses.
The theory that I keep coming back to, even if I can’t fully articulate why, is that Avery strangled her. I hate the theory because it would have been a painful and terrifying way for Teresa to die. I’d feel better knowing that Avery lured her out to the garage with some clever ruse and that she died instantly and painlessly from a gunshot to the head that she never saw coming. But I have this gut feeling that the sick son of a bitch strangled her to death. Let me outline it for you and see what you think.
During his interview with police, Steven Avery was adamant that Teresa never came in to his house. That is a bold claim to make if it wasn’t true. Police recognized the opportunity to catch him in a lie and tried to scare him off that story. There is so much trace evidence that could be left behind when a person is in a house. Police laid out how hairs, fibers, fingerprints and DNA evidence works and Avery had to have recognized what it would mean if they found anything linking Halbach to his trailer. It would have been so easy for Avery to just say that she stepped in the trailer for a minute to collect his money or leave a receipt. Then he would have had an excuse if they found any traces of her in the trailer. But he didn’t waiver. He insisted she was never in there. Maybe he was bluffing because he was that confident in how well he cleaned the place. But I think he was telling the truth. I don’t think Teresa was in there.
Avery said he followed Teresa out to her car to give her the money for the photo shoot. He described talking with her at the driver’s side door. This would have been in plain view of anybody who was passing by on the roadway or looking out the window of his sister’s house. It would have been too risky for him to walk out there holding a rifle. He could have knocked her unconscious by smashing her over the head with something, then thrown her in the back of her own car. But that would have also made a bloody mess. There was a small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair in the rear of her car, but not consistent with having her head split open from a crushing blow.
I think Avery strangled Teresa at the door of her car, either with his hands or with some sort of makeshift ligature. He could have done it quickly and would have been mostly concealed from view by the vehicle. When he was done, he could have thrown her into the rear of her car and moved the car into his garage. If she nicked her head on something during the struggle or while he was moving her, it could have opened up a minor cut that would have left a small amount of blood and hair in the back of the car.
Once in the garage, Steven Avery could have acted on his sexual intentions while Teresa was bound, unconscious or already dead. I don’t care to speculate on what Steven Avery did here. I’m going to think happy thoughts about what prison is like for murderers and skip to the end.
Like a million other guys in the midwest, Avery was a deer hunter. As such, he had undoubtedly used his garage to dress a dead deer before. From experience, he surely knew that he could make cleanup easier and prevent a bloody mess by strategically placing plastic or newspaper and putting Teresa in a convenient spot before shooting her. And if she was already dead from the initial strangulation (which is the theory I choose to believe because there is less torture and suffering involved), then the gunshots would have produced minimal blood loss anyway.
“Why would he shoot her if she was already dead?” you ask. I refer you back to my earlier analysis: Weird people do weird stuff sometimes and we won’t always know why. Or you can go with the alternate theory that she didn’t die until he shot her, but I’m writing this so I am going with the lesser of two horrors.
From that point, it’s pretty straightforward. Over the next two days he hid her vehicle in the salvage yard, hoping it wouldn’t be found before he had a chance to do something more permanent, and burned her body and all of the evidence in the burn pit and burn barrels around his house. He didn’t use the car crusher or the incinerator because he rarely used either of those things in the course of his job and didn’t want his brother and father asking questions like “What car are you crushing?” or “What the hell are you burning in that incinerator?” while he was at the center of a missing person investigation. Eventually the plot was discovered, and Dean Strang became an unlikely heartthrob through Netflix.
OK, OK, stop screaming at me. We’ll talk about Brendan Dassey. This was a terrible story to begin with, and it isn’t going to get any better if we bring Brendan Dassey into it. But since you insist, here it is.
Brendan Dassey confessed to assisting his uncle Steven Avery with the rape, murder and disposal of Teresa Halbach. He was convicted. That conviction was overturned. Then it was upheld. Then depending on the day of the week, he is either free pending an appeal or back in jail.
Dassey told a story that was, according to the prosecutor, so rich in detail that it could not possibly have been made up. Dassey only could have gotten those details from being involved. In the professional opinion of old Barney Doyle, the confession is absolutely made up and the details Brendan Dassey gave don’t match the crime scene at all. But what do I know? I wasn’t there for the investigation and, even if I was, we have already established that I am a moron. Maybe he did do it after all.
Brendan was 16 years old at the time of the murder and lived with his mother and brothers next door to Steven Avery. Like everybody else in his family, Brendan was interviewed by police several days after the murder. He gave a story that was complete and utter horseshit, which put him on the police radar. His initial story was that he didn’t see Teresa at the Avery Salvage Yard, but then he might have seen her, but then he definitely saw her leaving and driving away. Police rightfully suspected that Steven Avery had coached Brendan on what to tell them, and the details of his story crumbled under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Several months later, police did a follow up interview with Brendan at his school. This time Brendan said that he saw Teresa’s body in the burn pit behind Steven Avery’s house on Halloween night while Avery was having a bonfire. He said that he was scared of Steven and didn’t want to get him in trouble, so he didn’t say anything.
The police came back and interviewed Brendan two more times. In those interviews, Brendan claimed that he actually first saw Teresa tied to Steven Avery’s bed. Avery told Brendan to rape Teresa, which he did, then Steven slit Teresa’s throat. They loaded her body into her car, for some unknown reason, and then burned her in the burn pit.
This was the story that got him convicted and I don’t understand how. I will grant the prosecutor that it was rich in detail, but the details seem like nonsense to me. If Steven Avery slit Teresa’s throat on his bed then there would have been blood all over that room. Blood would have absolutely soaked into the mattress. The prosecutor argued that Avery burned the sheets, and that was apparently good enough. Also, while Teresa’s car was supposedly in the garage, why in the hell would they put her body in it? It’s not like they drove her fifteen feet to the burn pit. And there was only a small amount of blood in the back of her car. If she had her throat slit there would have been a lot of blood leading all the way from the bedroom to the car, and there is no way Avery could have cleaned that up well enough to hide it from the crime scene technicians.
I was working on a cold case homicide a few years ago where two men were wrongly convicted in the 1990s. A key piece of evidence was the testimony of a supposed co-conspirator, who was mentally challenged. While I was reviewing the transcripts of his police interview, I was struck by how completely off the guy’s story was. He didn’t get a single detail right that the investigators didn’t tell him first. I met the investigators and knew them to be good men. I also knew that they firmly believed they had the right guys, right up until DNA proved otherwise. It’s a really bad feeling when you aren’t making progress in a murder case. It gets downright desperate if the case is high profile. Put enough pressure on an investigator and they will start to see things that aren’t there and find meaning in things where there is none. I know why they believed what that guy was telling them, but with the benefit of time and distance it was clearly garbage.
I say that because I got a very similar sense reading the transcripts of Brendan Dassey’s interviews. While I don’t believe Dassey was as slow as his defense attorneys alleged, he was a sixteen year old kid and not a particularly smart one. He was a textbook candidate for a false confession. As I read his confession, I was troubled by how much of his story was either wrong or common knowledge. It seemed like the only time he got things “right” was when he was agreeing with statements that the investigators made.
Police were right to make him a suspect because he was clearly lying on the initial interview. I actually believed most of the second interview, when he described seeing the body in the fire. It was logical, it didn’t contradict the known facts in any meaningful way, and it seemed like he was providing the information not agreeing to it. But I don’t believe the rest of his confession and I certainly don’t think it was believable enough to sustain a criminal conviction.
Plus, his confession contradicts our strangling theory and we have entirely too much invested in that to give up now.
That’s not a bad start huh? We believe Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach, acting alone. We have concerns about the integrity of some of the evidence, but ultimately not enough to come to a different conclusion. We think he attacked her in the driveway near her car and shot her in the garage, without ever taking her into his home. I think she was strangled and shot, but you aren’t certain if you agree with that or not. We think Brendan Dassey learned about the crime after the fact, possibly seeing Teresa’s body in Avery’s burn pit, but that he loved and/or feared his uncle too much to say anything initially. We would hire Dean Strang and Jerome Buting if we were ever accused of murder. And this book would be a thousand times better if it were written by Kathleen Zellner.
I hope all of our cases go this smoothly.