Final, last observations about Avery etc.
The Halbach murder 'investigation' pretty likely involved some sort of monkeying with dna evidence, and that is probably its most important similarity to the Hser Ner Moo murder 'investigation'.
It is extremely common for police to give an assist to evidence that they consider weak, and they usually do that under the guise of 'helping victims'.
So far i.e., up to the Halbach murder, there had been no reason for widespread questions about the accuracy of forensic evidence in the state of Wisconsin.
If Ms Zellner is able to show that there are substantial issues within the Wisconsin forensics community then they will necessarily be quite extensive issues. That 'investigation' by 'authorities' did not involve one person and one piece of trivial evidence, it involved quite a few technicians, laboratories etc.
Keeping in mind that so far, up to this case, there has been no reason to doubt the credibility of Wisconsin area forensics, in Utah the issue is quite different.
In Utah there has been abundant reason to question forensics in a wide range of cases, even without looking at the conviction of Esar Met in Salt Lake City.
In other words, there has been a lot of reason to scrutinize forensics involving dna testing in Utah, but nobody has scrutinized it, largely because those individuals who have been monkeying with evidence are closely connected to authorities and to federal agencies. Plenty of evidence of the problems in Utah forensics can be found easily by simply Googling. In Wisconsin though there has been no sign of any corruption in their forensic dna testing except for sporadic isolated cases, such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Stinson_Case
https://web.archive.org/web/20041019034616/http://www.law-forensic.com/cfr_anderson_1.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20040702010308/http://www.law-forensic.com/cfr_stelter_1.htm
Notice that in this case, as with almost all cases of forensic misconduct as well as police corruption, there is no direct evidence in the media involving the misconduct, just secondary or passing references to the misconduct by somebody who knew about it. "A more recent corruption case occurred in Wisconsin when Jack R. Patterson, a former state crime-lab fingerprint analyst, decided dye/laser and immersion tests were a waste of time for basic fingerprint analysis. So he skipped them and then claimed in his reports that he had conducted the tests." https://web.archive.org/web/20040203064336/http://www.law-forensic.com/cfr_patterson.htm
One of the peculiarities of researching both police misconduct and forensics misconduct is that a very high number of the mainstream articles published are removed. If you look for information about a dwi or a drug dealer or any other crime not involving a cop or a forensic tech, you will usually still find the article years later. But articles about police corruption and similar abuses are commonly removed from news sites. This has been going on for a long time, and suggests there is some entity deliberately behind it. Notice that the following page starts with "Just some of the known"
https://komornlaw.com/crime-lab-and-forensic-scandals/
~
Final TLDR ~ Teresa Halbech was killed by somebody who lived near Avery, probably Scott Tadych. The killer then approached Lieutenant Lenk and said he had found the car keys on the ground near the car, and that he saw Avery park the car. Lenk then approached Pam Sturm and asked if she would be willing to work with the police to 'put the killer away', and she agreed. At some point Lenk brought somebody in the local forensic DNA community on board to strengthen the evidence around the vehicle.
Best solution would be an aggressive interrogation of Lieutenant Lenk. The prosecutor in the Avery case, several years after the trial, was found to be undergoing sex addiction and substance abuse treatment relating to his targeting of domestic violence victims for sex. He should probably be interrogated as well, looking for explanations of interactions between him and Lenk. He is a bit sturdier than Lenk so a higher voltage could be used.
Least expensive solution would be to invite the three of them to take lie detector tests arranged by the defense. Tadych would agree to take the test and the other two would initially refuse, but if there were sufficient publicity they would take the test then have to explain how they failed so decisively. Notice the brain fingerprinting test on part 2 episode 2 at 33 minutes.
Revised final TLDR ~ Watching a few more episodes, Ms Zellner has developed enough new information that it's hard to say who the killer was for sure. If she were given access to Lenk, Colburn, Kratz and the upper echelon of law enforcement in that region, along with alligator clips, car batteries and other investigative research tools, she could probably get them to talk.
This type of interrogation has been authorized and approved by the federal government for use in terrorism cases, and this is obviously a terrorism case.
~
Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey were convicted of the murder of a photographer, Teresa Halbach.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Avery
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Dassey
Steven Avery had been convicted, and then exonerated, in a rape some years prior.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3003
Now there is news that another murderer has confessed to the murder, which would seem to exonerate Avery and Dassey.
But there are problems with the exoneration case.
The case got a lot of publicity because it was made into a major tv show.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Murderer
The new 'confession' would seem to support the tv show, except that the confession was actually made years before the tv show, so in fact it is the tv show that supports the confession. A person would guess that the tv show was researched a bit, and it seems likely the producers of the show found out about the confession.
The confession was known to enough people that it probably would have had an impact on the post tv show legal process if it were valid, so it is more likely than not that the confession has been examined for the simple reason that the tv show got a lot of publicity and people unconnected to the case, the prosecution, and the tv show would have studied it.
There would be a reason why the tv show would not mention it's strongest piece of potential evidence.
Next it would be wise to examine the evidence itself. It seems strong, but the premise of the tv show is that it was faked. There seems though, as far as what can be easily researched, to be some strength to the evidence against Avery, though the Dassey confession has obvious problems.
So it kind of looks like the tv show is trying to fit an exoneration into a space where it does not fit, where legitimate evidence would have to be discounted. They seem to have started with the premise that he was not guilty, perhaps motivated by his previous exoneration, then tried to build a second exoneration on top of that.
If they had simply started with a case where the actual evidence supports the convicted person being 'not guilty', for example the Esar Met case and literally thousands of other cases, the tv show would have been on more solid ground going forward.
It's possible Avery is not guilty, but it seems unlikely.
It's also possible Esar Met is guilty, but it is extraordinarily unlikely.
If the exoneration case the tv show is trying to present becomes discredited, and it seems possible that will happen, it will make it more difficult for any future exoneration cases that are supported by evidence, such as Esar Met's.
Brendan Dassey's confession is obviously absurd. It's clear the police had somebody who would say anything they wanted, and the police were cultivating their own opinions with no regard for facts.
But with regard to the bigger 'conspiracy' picture, it seems very unlikely that a group of police would abduct and murder a young photographer after she visited the salvage yard, then hide her car there, then burn her body, all to save their county some millions in potential liability from a previous case. It's possible, certainly many unsolved murders are committed by police officers who believe they will not be caught, and who act on vaguely similar motives, but the police officers who did something like that would have footprints from other acts they committed which were similar. Was the initial false conviction a relevant footprint? Although it's odd that he was convicted when he had an adequate alibi, it did pass by a jury. In order for the initial false conviction to be relevant it would have required a pretty vast conspiracy involving police, prosecutors, jurors and so on. It's possible but not likely without evidence. I have watched less than an hour of the series and have not researched it so my opinion is not too strong. I could imagine people doing that to make millions of dollars, but not to save their town or county millions of dollars.
The real issue though in that case is the level of accountability of people whose capacity is diminished relative to society's norm. Anybody, or any circumstance, can more easily get a person with such diminished capacity to do something, such as commit a crime, a murder in this case, so suggesting that such a murder carries the same degree of personal accountability is another way of shifting responsibility to soft targets.
The initial false conviction set in motion a series of events in which Avery and his clan were given many reasons to deal with future conflicts in a violent and discrete way. The most obvious culpability for the murder therefore falls on those who created the initial false conviction, deliberately or not. They avoid accountability simply because they are the ones who determine accountability and they exist within a system where 'the system' and its employees are immune from scrutiny.
Putting somebody with borderline retardation on trial facing full legal accountability is silly. If a child chews through a couch and a college professor then beats the child bloody, where should accountability be, with the child or the college professor? And if a person supposes that responsibility lies with the child i.e., the child should be held accountable because it has 'diminished capacity' relative to the college professor, in other words if the legal system is proper in focusing accountability on those with the least natural responsibility, then what about if the college professor had been training the child to chew up couches? In other words that county had 'trained' Avery to respond to situations differently, by putting him in a new training environment i.e., a jail, for 18 years, so should they have some responsibility for the training they forced on him if he is guilty?
One small piece of evidence pointing to a police 'framing' conspiracy is the fact that a female deputy makes 'giddy' comments during the videotape of the search. If it were a set up by a group of males, and females were used to give it credibility i.e., a male hunting party using some females, then that is what a person would expect. That does not outweigh the fact that the car was hidden and on his property though.
TLDR 70%+ 40% 15% chance he is guilty. A conspiracy necessarily involving that many people would be hard to cover up. The wild card is that in cases like that, other law enforcement agencies almost always assist with the cover up quietly. So in a high profile case like that, if a group of police did frame him, then they probably could not have maintained the secrecy of their project without assistance from other police and agencies, including probably state and federal agencies since they typically help with coverups if publicity threatens to be very negative.
If a person wanted to prove conclusively whether police arranged to frame Avery the first step would probably be to interrogate the individuals who interrogated him before he was able to speak to his attorneys on November 9, 2005. They appear to be using refined questioning techniques tailored to him, which suggests there may have been more elaborate preparation by the police to get a false confession.
Further, if that interrogator, a shortish man with extensive balding and a tuft of hair at the top of his forehead within the bald area, is the same man who interviewed Dassey, also a shortish man with a similar balding pattern and a similar tuft, but also a van dyke style beard visible, then that person should be interrogated.
Amazingly, Avery is shown on episode 5 talking to a bald man with a tuft of hair on his forehead. The man is being chummy with Avery who mentions that a friend of his named Tammy says she saw cops putting Ms Halbech's car in the salvage yard. The interviewer was trying to plug leaks before they occurred and Avery did not understand what was going on. Even after all of his experiences he was trying to trust individual police, and he paid the price a second time.
Though it appears that individual is Mark Wiegert from a local sheriff's office https://www.bustle.com/articles/136308-who-is-mark-wiegert-the-making-a-murderer-detective-is-still-working-in-wisconsin it is unlikely he would have gotten so far unless he had some more powerful connections. He is the perfect example of the 'law enforcement gangster' whose 'skill' comes entirely from being part of a gang and who specifically targets people based on whether they have the ability to defend themselves, rather than using facts. If he is entirely a local character then his past interrogations and cases involving people with limited abilities should be scrutinized, regardless whether Avery is guilty or innocent.
The similarity between the blatantly silly 'confession' details in this case and the blatantly silly 'confession' details that FBI agents came up with in trying to fabricate a scenario to explain the Brittanee Drexel murder seem like they came from people with similar imaginations.
Dassey supposedly confessed that he heard screaming then was invited into his uncle's house to rape the victim who then had her throat slit and was stabbed and later shot two times. The FBI's fictional Drexel 'confession' had her also abducted, gang raped, then shot two times in front of a bunch of people.
Also note that the photo showing 'Avery's blood' in the car shows the blood in a recessed area near the steering wheel, indicating Avery had a cut on a finger that was deep enough to leave that amount of blood. The blood is solid, not a smear, so it probably came from a finger, but if not from a finger then it would indicate a pretty significant cut elsewhere.
Also, some elements of Dassey's confession are obviously fabricated, https://www.insideedition.com/making-a-murderer-case-what-you-need-to-know-about-steven-avery-51051
Here are a few obvious problems with Dassey's confession
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP9YdUoy81g
1) If you cut somebody's throat on a bed while they are still alive, you will be buying a new mattress.
2) The cat story at 24 minutes invalidates the entire interview
3) Brendan keeps adding the violence that the police want, but it gets ridiculous. She is handcuffed then raped then stabbed in the stomach and her throat slit, then shot two times.
4) At 27 minutes notice the bullets are jumping around, at this point a shot in the head, the heart and the stomach.
5) At 27:28 it looks like the detectives had been trying to coach him to respond more fluidly before that interview, in other words they probably did a 'pre interview' before they turned on the camera.
6) The story sequence has a) Avery starts a fire b) Dassey arrives, the victim is killed etc, c) Avery plans to dump the body in a nearby pond then changes his mind and uses the fire.
7) At 32 minutes the victim was shot with a 22 in the truck which would have left some blood.
8) At 33 minutes, now she was shot 'about ten' times.
9) His comments about the gun make clear the boy has been raised to be averse to violence, but the detectives are encouraging him to commit all sorts of violence in his imagination. Regardless how the case goes they are not doing society any favors and their priorities are dark.
10) Many of his responses end with a questioning inflection, like he wants the detectives to tell him if he gave the right answer.
11) *** At 36:30 he describes how the car was actually found i.e., covered with branches, a possible indicator that he was involved with the murder.*** How did he know that?
12) At 38 minutes the interrogators appear to be leading him in a way that was pre determined. They appear to be trying to cover issues that had been raised involving the key.
13) At 40:30 to 40:50 more indication the detectives prepared him for the video by coaching him before.
14) At 42:00 more evidence yet of coaching involving a cut finger.
15) At 44:50 the key again, obviously coached.
16) The boy is obviously still largely under the spell of his mother and not prone to joining the type of conspiracy which the detectives want to create between him and his uncle. The detectives, however, are quite different, group creatures who are accustomed to using a group of 'male buddies' to do questionable things secretly. They are trying to put their own tendencies onto the boy but it gets absurd at points. Near the end the boy mentions his mother called and told him to be home by 10 pm, so to accommodate both her and the detectives he schedules a clean up of the murder scene at 9:50.
It's certainly possible that the boy, or anybody else, including the deputies, was involved in the murder, there is no conclusive proof he wasn't, like an alibi etc, but aside from saying he helped put branches on the truck there is no evidence of his involvement in the murder on the video. There is quite a bit of evidence though that the detectives staged the interview by preparing him off camera before they started video recording.
TLDR2 He could be guilty but the 'proof of guilt' the detectives tried to present is silly.
The fact that both Avery and Dassey are 'slow learners', and the fact that a) Avery was deliberately isolated and interrogated without a lawyer as interrogators used techniques designed to get confessions from simpler folk, and later b) Dassey was interrogated four times without a lawyer as the police again used techniques deliberately intended to cultivate false information, while c) The police lied to the family and public in both instances in order to have unfettered access during interrogations, leads a person to believe that the police are hiding a lot of factual information in the case, and that they are comfortable doing that. They have probably done that many times and there are probably many wrongfully convicted people in that area.
Best guess about who killed Teresa Halbech
After having watched several episodes of Making a Murderer, here is a fair guess at the possibilities.
Despite the obvious corruption in that group of police, it would have been very difficult to keep such a secret among a large group of police if it involved the police killing her and planting her car on his property. The fact that the key was in Avery's house would tend to point to either Avery or a subgroup of police as the killer. The fact that the car was found when less than roughly 5% of the car yard had been searched is odd, and the fact that the car was 'hidden' on an elevated ridge is also odd and makes it more likely Avery was not the killer.
1) 50% There is a pretty fair chance, based on the characters of the police involved, that a group of police did surveil Avery, were aware that Teresa Halbech was coming by, and laid in wait to abduct and kill her. Killing a woman for such a purpose would be within the realm of the possible for several of the people involved, and getting others to unknowingly support the conspiracy is also possible. A key would be to find out if local police had equipment that let them conduct surveillance, such as snooping telephone calls, without a warrant. The fact that some of Miss Halbach's phone messages were erased, evidently by somebody who had her phone password and wanted to cover up 'something' by eliminating one or more messages, would tend to point to the possibility that police were using surveillance equipment, got her phone password, and did that. Avery had used Autotrader in the past, but the police may have seized upon the fact that the person being sent that day was a young woman which gave them the means to frame Avery for a murder.
The cell phone evidence, which was prevented from being shown in full to the jury, along with other circumstantial evidence, points pretty strongly to police having been monitoring her phone when she disappeared and having erased one or more messages. Why would police be monkeying with her phone after she disappears but before she is reported missing?
The woman who found the car is exactly the sort of person who would be 'thrilled' to help the police catch a 'dangerous rapist who was falsely exonerated'. It's very possible, and strongly suggested by circumstantial evidence, that a senior cop told her some story about the need for her to help the police by doing certain things. Her daughter probably was not in on the project, and that helps her, the mother, be more convincing for example in court testimony. The fact that she and her daughter showed up late to the search, were given special treatment by the head of the search, were given a private direct phone number for the sheriff, then found the car just as they started to search, is odd.
1) 30% A brother and other relatives of Avery, including Scott Tadych, lived near or on the salvage yard. If the DNA tests were such that brothers could have been confused then the brother is a credible suspect. Otherwise a neighbor of Avery or somebody the victim knew. If it was a neighbor then it would indicate that monkeying with evidence was the only part police played directly. If it were the brother then police probably shifted the evidence a bit towards Avery to solve the issue of the millions of dollars in liability for the wrongful conviction. The big question in this scenario would be why would the police place Miss Halbech's key in Avery's house? How would they have gotten the key?
Scott Tadych's testimony is very suspicious. The two main things he testified about, the fire and the timing, were not true. So he was in a situation that should have been neutral, if he were not the killer then he shouldn't be going so far to lie.
https://heavy.com/entertainment/2018/10/scott-tadych/
The issue again though is the key. How would police have gotten the key from Tadych? This would have required Tadych and some higher level cops to have sat down after the killing on October 31 but before November 8 when the key was found. One possibility that fits well with all of the people involved would be that Tadych approached one of the higher level cops, said he found the key on the ground in the salvage yard, and said he wanted to use it to make sure Avery went to jail. The vast majority of police in the United States are willing to fudge evidence 'to put a guilty person in jail', and in this case there were police who had additional motives to lie. This scenario would also explain how Pam Sturm got caught up in the mess. The police would have needed a reliable person to pretend to find the car. Ms Sturm has an 'eager to please authority' personality, which would make her reliable to the police, but more importantly she is a relative of the victim.
Those two individuals, Tadych and Sturm, look like the weakest link in the conspiracy and either could be led to tell the truth if coaxed properly. Because Tadych is more likely the killer, he is more likely to become violent or to use the police to protect his secret, so Ms Sturm would probably be the one a competent investigator would question. If the truth was not gotten during the first talk with her though she would contact Tadych and the police who would then target whoever was researching the issue.
So Tadych is about 29% of this 30%
3) 15% chance Avery Killed her then rationalized it by saying he had already paid the price with his wrongful conviction, which would explain his ability to counter all of the questions addressed to him. If he had killed her there would have been a considerable amount of evidence though, and there is not, or police missed it.
4) 5% some other scenario.
The chance that Dassey was involved in anything in anyway is <1%.
In Progress
At first this page was made out of agravation that somebody who was probably guilty was getting a lot of publicity in the media over supposed innocence, while absolutely nobody was interested in how the Utah murder investigation of Hser Ner Moo in Salt Lake City was botched. Now, having watched quite a bit of the 'Making a Murderer' series it's clear that he is almost certainly not guilty too, and what was done to Brandon Dassey was the same thing that was done to Esar Met. So the first part of this page guesses that Avery and Dassey are probably guilty, until you scroll down to where I bought a Netflix subscription and watched the show, at which point the viewpoint shifts as I watch more and more of the show.
The stunning crookedness and dishonesty of the police in both of these cases is not unique to Utah and Wisconsin.
In episode 3 of the series, at 58 minutes 30 seconds a person sees the first step of the damage done by trusting the police. The boy had been taught by society that police are almost on par with parents as authority figures. He then constructed an elaborate violent fiction in his mind to bring himself closer to those models, at their request.
He will probably spend the rest of his life living out the violent fantasies of the police, tempered a bit by other influences.
An interesting example of a similar case is that of Malthe Thomsen. The NYPD suspected him of abusing a number of students at a school, so the NYPD told him they had video of him doing it, but they wanted him to confess so they could help him and the children. He said that if they had video then it must be true even though he didn't remember it, and he would be glad to confess and help them. He imagined he must have unknowingly had multiple personality disorder or something similar.
https://apnews.com/article/35eee7d8e10548648f5f6b817867cc86
"She stated that although she had initially told the police that her assailant had brown eyes, she realized when she identified him in a photograph that she was 'mistaken.'" Police had been steering her to identify Avery, and anyway the fact that she had just been attacked should have caused a little leeway to be put into her memory. Her recollection should have been considered useful in the investigation pending other facts, but not the sole basis for assigning guilt.
https://www.wicourts.gov/html/ca/96/96-3027.htm
Episode 9 at 30 minutes Brendan compares Halbech to https://www.cbsnews.com/news/3-killed-by-fla-alligators-in-1-week/ In other words he sees the case as 'a woman dying' rather than a murder. He still doesn't have a clear understanding that murder is a common reaction. That will be one of the main things he will learn.
Both Brendan and his sister take responsibility for the false testimony solicited and cultivated by police. The police instinctively know this is a perk of their job, assigning responsibility where it does not belong, to benefit themselves.
~
Brendon Dassey appears to have a genetic condition which may or may not be easily identifiable. I know only one person who resembles him strongly, speaks in that distinctive way and has unusual similarities with Brandon, and that person, a former roommate, is diagnosed autistic. That person is from Texas and has never lived anywhere near Wisconsin, but the similarities are so obvious and unique that there is clearly a genetic condition linking them.
One of the unusual things about the person I know who is similar to Brendan is that he has savant abilities despite his obvious limitations. So it seems extremely likely that both a) Brendan has some similar abilities, and b) a person could look at a collection of photos and videos of people labeled 'idiot savants' and they would share some of the physically and cognitively distinct traits Brandon has. I have not Google searched for images or videos of that type of person but even without having done that it is quite certain that a person could do so and find an unusual overlap in traits between Brendon and those individuals.
Aside from all the things that the two people have in common that are extremely unusual, one 'common' trait they share is left handedness, which, though a common trait, is another statistically meaningful connection. Roughly ten percent of the population is left handed, so the chances of any two random people both being left handed is about 1%. It would be interesting to see if that correlates with savant abilities.
A brief Google search has a number of articles that associate left hemisphere brain damage with savant abilities and left handedness with some types of autism. Because of the distinct evidence of a genetic factor in the person from Texas and Brendan, it could be that there is a genetic condition which has the same effect as left hemisphere brain damage.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-left-handed-syndrome/183432
Almost all of the people involved at the higher level of law enforcement who were depicted in the trial are unusually predatory. Not common mild predatory behavior, but the most dangerous kind of aggressive targeting of people specifically for their vulnerability, something very common among law enforcement personalities.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sexting-wisconsin-da-ken-kratz-to-resign/
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Kathleen Zellner makes an excellent point about researching cases when she says that a guilty person should not hire her because she will further prove his or her guilt. But she makes a huge mistake with the most important unexamined evidence. She does a play science project sort of production with the blood in the car which is absolutely meaningless. Smarter would be to find the facts of the cut on the finger from Avery, and then research related issues like why he said that his blood had been drawn many times when the focus is only on one tube.
~
Another ignored aspect of the case is the difference between the types of leverage authorities used on Brendan Dassey and his mother vs the victim and her family.'
The prosecutor and law enforcement needed both the victim's family and Dassey's mother to support their charade, but Dassey's mother would have to do that against her son's interest, something difficult for prosecutors to accomplish unless they had another hook in the family. The victim's family, including Ms Sturm, were much more easily brought on board. They stand to lose nothing, except the truth which the prosecutor is hiding, and about which they know nothing. But in the false scenario painted by authorities they stand to gain vengeance for their family and the elimination of a supposed murderer. So Wiegert and Fassbender used the types of pressure in those two different situations which they had learned in the past had worked.
~
In part 2 episode 2, from 15 minutes to 17 minutes are several good examples of Wiegert and Kratz using the transference of responsibility from themselves to Dassey, in order to let themselves off the hook for their own crimes, which are unknown at this point. Wiegert is more aggressive in transferring responsibility, so a person can say with a high degree of certainty that whatever responsibility Wiegert is avoiding it is more serious than what Kratz is avoiding. Of course Wiegert will continue being able to hide whatever he is hiding as long as he remains a cop. The 'official functions' aspect of his job is a small part of that ability, the bigger part being his ability to transfer responsibility to others, thus giving him a more solid base in his deceptions i.e., making him appear or exude 'trustworthiness' to others. This is probably the single biggest unconscious motive in police generally, but also in politicians etc.
~
The brief question in part 1 episode 6 at 47 or 48 minutes about Tadych 'trying to sell a .22 belonging to one of the Dassey boys' points to either Tadych as the killer, or Tadych covering for one of the Dassey boys. Which of those two is more likely would be determined by talking to the family. Either way, comments by one of the two defense lawyers later suggests he knew which of those two scenarios was accurate but decided to be coy about it. Tadych's behavior in the parking lot toward reporters after Brandon's conviction strongly supports the opinion of that defense attorney.
~
One of the oddest unreported aspects of the case is the fact that so many people in the prosecution, i.e., cops and prosecutors seemed to be aroused when discussing the most unappealing aspects of the case. Kratz is the most blatant, but Wiegert and Sergeant Colburn and some of the police from the first overturned case also stand out. Most incomprehensible is the investigator for the defense, who, working secretly for the prosecution, asked Dassey to draw pictures of the fictional torture.
Investigator~ 'Please draw a picture of her tied to the bed and being tortured'
Brendan~ 'Okay'
Investigator~ 'Please draw her with bigger breasts and put some scream emojis in. Make her hips a little wider too. Can you give her a pony tail like my wife?'
Brendan~ 'Okay'
The investigator starts breathing more heavily and if Brendan had been more artistically inclined the video would have been nsfw.
~
One more blatantly ignored aspect of the overall evidence is the car. The body was put in the car by the killer, and there would be evidence from the killer in or near the car. The prosecution approached that scene i.e., the car with the intention of proving Avery was there, and they got creative. What would a defense person find if they examined the car strictly for evidence without the intention of making it appear as if one or another person might be guilty? In other words even if there was false evidence in the car that people 'looked for', there would also be real evidence that nobody has looked for yet. Ms Zellner buying a replica of the car obviously would not substitute for studying the real car.
~
Several of the police officers involved in the original wrongful conviction implied that they believed part of their job was to falsify evidence, and the way they implied it suggested that they were comfortable talking about it at a level slightly less than 'explicitly'. The sketch drawer was an obvious example. This is common practice across the United States, in all 50 states, but it really is not the job of police and prosecutors to falsify evidence. No matter how compelling an argument they imagine they make, if they want to falsify evidence against anybody they need to do it to themselves, not random people who they, as a group, agree to target using public resources.
~
Here is a whole new line of evidence that is not mentioned in the episodes I have watched yet.
If true then it seems like major evidence.
~
A big deal is made in researching possible ways the blood evidence could have been planted, but if whoever killed her, then claimed to have found the key, was known to Avery then they would have had access to his blood. Working in a salvage yard with broken autos will result in a lot of small injuries. A person should probably make a map of that extended family with all the different dramas between them to figure out which of them would have approached police and had enough influence to steer other people in the extended family in the wrong direction.
~
One thing that is left out of a lot of investigations where no suspect is obvious is the factor of who would be willing to commit the crime.
As common as murders are, there are not a lot of people who are psychologically willing to kill a young lady for no reason that does not involve some sort of immediate defense.
There are some things, traits, that make it more likely somebody would be willing to do that though.
Relevant to this case are
a) Hunters. Most hunters would not commit this crime, but killing an animal in a non emergency setting is similar to killing a weaker person. It's a trait that can be induced in anybody through their upbringing or circumstances, which would be obvious. Avery is a hunter, so potentially he could prey on a vulnerable person, and the movie alludes to various women saying they were threatened by him, but his actions towards other women makes it unlikely he would be able to commit this type of murder.
b) Police. Law enforcement is one of the few jobs in which certain traits which overlap with this kind of crime are considered desirable. Every job has a mix of positive and negative traits which are sought after in employees, and one of those desirable traits among police officers is a certain type of fear which often leads to targeting women for violence. In all societies the types of people who are hired as police are the same types of people who could commit a crime like this, and one of the common objectives of jobs like that is to sublimate that tendency into something else.
A second quality common among police is the eagerness to be part of a group, and to force or pressure others to accept that group as authoritative. This makes it easier for police to be drawn into 'cover up conspiracies' in which they 'share a secret' or have 'a secret power' which is connected to the artificial authority they are trying to build for themselves through their group.
So a lot of people who are empowered through their jobs as police, but would not be able to commit a crime like that, would be willing to participate from a distance, as a sort of compromise which would be justifiable to them as a 'greater good' issue or a personal benefit issue.
Lieutenant Lenk, Sergeant Colburn etc are probably not able to commit murders like this on their own directly, as individuals, but they are attracted in a visceral way to this type of violence and would get a feeling of power by having a proxy connection to the act.
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It's common in this kind of crime to hear a political question 'What about the victim', in a very different sense from a 'victim's rights' type question.
In this case there is the obvious unnatural element or appearance of 'a man killing a woman', and the natural tension would be between male interests and female interests if the killing were based on some organic difference in interests. The killing almost certainly had some kind of sexual element, and in people murder is not a natural sex strategy. Particularly, killing a woman after sex would not be a sustainable strategy for the species.
So, in this case a person would look at the interests of females associated with the male being held responsible, and examine their possible interests, as well as females around potentially responsible individuals who are not being held accountable. For example the mother of the accused would be conflicted between supporting her son, who has 50% of her dna, and supporting the victim, who is more long term within the group which she supports as her native interest group.
A step from that, though, is the effect individuals within the two groups would perceive as 'beneficial' or 'harmful'.
For example Avery's mother would perceive the harm to females from arresting the wrong person, a perception which would be suppressed among those under the spell of the prosecution.
Looking at Brendan Dasseys appeal to some circuit, there were two female judges and one male judge. The two female judges are distant enough from the case that they are not especially concerned about any harm they might do individuals who have built up the prosecution, but they would perceive a broader necessity to identify the killer properly i.e., not to misidentify him. A person could guess that they also got that job in part because they are not too stupid. Those two female judges voted to release Dassey and retry him or set him free, the male judge voted to keep him in jail.
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An interesting thing about Bobby Dassey is that he appears to be the only person in the Dassey clan with artificial muscles. Most of the other people in that family shown in the videos had 'work muscles' to some extent, but Bobby is the only one who has cultivated artificial muscle.
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One obvious, and funny, point about the headlights / taillights at the beginning of part two episode nine, is that a likely reason Detective Anthony O'neill was garbling the interview as it was occurring was that they were police cars and he knew it. In other words the detective appears to be hiding something as he 'tries to get information', and the most likely explanation was that he was aware that police had been surveilling Avery, perhaps related to the multi million dollar deposition or for other reasons.
Based on the deceitful tone in the detective's voice, he should probably be interrogated along with Lenk and Andrew Colborn.
In any melting pot, artificial 'security' is based on taking away an individual's ability to defend themself e.g. preventing gun ownership, then having an artificial authority that is loyal to the ruling entity step in and say 'we will be your guns, we are the replacement for the security we take from you'.
It becomes a comedy of people knowing that the police are more prone to committing some types of crimes, but not being able to do anything except call the police. In the worst cases everybody knows that police have committed a crime and everybody knows there is nothing they can do about it. It's the original colonizer/colonized relationship except that now the targets of police misconduct and other less powerful groups are the colonized.
In the first 12 minutes of part two episode nine there is a perfect example of this.
The truck driver knows that police have an unhealthy connection to the murder of Ms Halbach. Normally his only option would be to call the police. In this rare case, a tv show was made and a new lawyer was working on the case, so he was able to deal with the situation outside the police. In most cases, going back to the original colonizer vs indigenous root of the legal system, there is no tv show to call.
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Notice also that the older Sturm woman went with her daughter to effectively help the police alter evidence involving the murder of a young woman, and most likely the older Sturm woman did not tell her daughter the secretive part of her law enforcement job.
As of part two episode nine, it appears to be a simple clan war. The Avery's are one clan and the prosecutors and their allies are another clan.
The targeting is probably not that far off in its accuracy, in other words even if Avery and Brendan Dassey are not guilty, guilt is 'in their vague direction' from somebody standing a distance away. Very similar to early colonial wars where, for example, if a crime is committed by colonists against indigenous, or by indigenous against colonists, precise targeting is not a requirement i.e., the guilty is either 'one of them' or 'one of us', and if it's one of them you use a weapon with less specific focus, necessarily. A shotgun rather than a pistol.
It would all be fine and easy if it were two clearly delineated clans, and after the case is fully resolved in courts some people will take the prosecutor's side and say 'they got it close'.
But at this point trying to create such artificial 'clan' alliances to target a more real clan on the basis of what amounts to developmental issues in the target will create more problems than it solves.
If a person wants to argue that criminality, by any definition, is apart from developmental issues, a separate issue, in other words if a person wants to defend the 'legal system' as it is, and also say that it was appropriate to target 'near the guilty party' then they are on a natural path, an organically developing path, which will either change to another path, or, destroy the system it pretends to defend.
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At about 38 minutes on Part two episode nine, Brendan Dassey's success seems to hinge on what police are 'allowed' to do, as far as deceiving people, when 'soliciting a confession'. This goes back to the same issue discussed on another page on this website of what a confession is. Confessing, and being coerced into confessing, and falsely confessing are two or three different things, and the second, if acceptable, leads to less of the first and more of the third. It's sort of like if putting sugar in your gas tank is not good, should you do it? The job of an investigator is to get facts, not confessions. A confession given to an investigator has no relevance to anything about the investigation whatsoever, except as a set of facts related to it. Giving inaccurate information to somebody in order to get accurate information in return is a defensive tactic that comes with a cost. Like any 'emergency' defensive tactic it is appropriate for individuals, in some cases, but building that kind of conduct into an organization is silly.
The question is whether investigators should lie when they are investigating. As a general rule, a competent investigator can get at the truth in almost any case by simply finding and following facts. So it follows logically that an investigator who is less competent will rely more on other things, such as ruses, and further, an investigator, or group of them, who are taught to rely on ruses are not going to be developing investigative skills. If you let somebody run a marathon by driving 26 miles in a car they are probably not going to win a lot of races where the results are open to scrutiny.
The word 'confession' has a natural root, in other words it is a real word with an obvious etymological history. The use of the word 'confession' in the context of a legal case suggests that there is some place for it, but in fact there is only a place for an inferior type of confession, unrelated to the accurate use of the word.
As an example, a person can look at many other cases where police 'created' a context in which what they wanted to happen could be made to appear to happen, and they would use the fiction they created to benefit themselves against whoever their target was.
Schaeffer Cox was never a threat to anybody but he did do a fair amount of complaining about corruption.
In that case police wanted to arrest him but they first had to get him to commit a crime. So they had an undercover officer use deceptive techniques to get him to say something illegal. The undercover cop said something along the lines of 'If a federal cop was killing your children would you kill the cop. He said yes and was convicted of something. In other words he 'confessed', in the modern legal sense of the word, that he would kill a cop under certain circumstances. A person would have to go to that website to get the exact details.
You won't find that website easily on Google, despite it being the most important website focusing on his history and situation. The first Google result is his Wikipedia page which is largely propaganda promoted by the federal agencies which targeted him.
To the extent it is 'appropriate' for a government employee to solicit confessions beyond their factual non confessional elements, it is also appropriate for government agents to target literally anybody as part of a law enforcement gang trying to benefit itself.
The path has been followed many times in many countries in history.
It doesn't end well.
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At 44 minutes 30 seconds of episode 9 the Attorney General of Wisconsin says the federal case is not about innocence or guilt, but rather about 'federalism', meaning does the federal government have an obligation, or even a right, to interfere at the state level.
A similar question could be asked with regard to county vs state, or town vs county, or one person's property vs another.
In this case, at the moment, there is one court i.e., a federal court, which has more 'power' than another court i.e., the county court. Next week or next year the federal court or the county court might not exist. Either could be consumed by some other political entity or divided into several new entities. Pretending that one or the other is a natural monolith which is following some natural order is silly.
The question is whether there is 'more' authority at some temporary level, or a different quality of authority. In a criminal case there could be significant question about guilt by everybody, in which example conviction is inappropriate, or by almost nobody, in which case outsiders should defer, but in this case neither of those applies. In this case a local gang has distorted the legal system in such a way that there is no local remedy to a conviction for which facts which contradict that local authority are abundant and available.
The 'federalism' argument is saying that, for example, if you go to a doctor to treat a cough, and while examining the cough the doctor notices you are bleeding to death, the doctor does not have the right nor obligation to interfere in the more serious issue by virtue of the importance of the less serious issue. It's a dark sort of bureaucratic thinking. Anything can be justified ultimately if a person or group has enough power to force others to accept whatever justification they can come up with.
In cases like this the justification is usually something along the lines of 'educating the public', pretending to be merchants of wisdom. "We are going to let the public learn at their own pace and then they will fix the problem and we will have smarter people." That is a common rationale for a lot of misconduct, because it is often true that interfering in an issue does not improve it. In this case though, jailing somebody for a crime they did not commit is an obvious interference, and declining to correct that interference is the real lesson.
The federal government has a long and ongoing history of playing favorites with certain groups, and the issue of federalism tries to address that as it pertains to artificial groupings such as 'states'.
Trying to extend the limitations of any group's influence towards another group with regard to facts is something very different, and even worse.
If New Jersey says 2+2=4 and the federal government says 2+2=5 then either party should not be limited in presenting their versions of math if that is the basic dispute. If one argued that the shape of the numbers was more important at some step of the process, such that it would not be proper to demonstrate or use a calculator, because of issues involving the shape of the letters, they would be a bit too distracted and should be replaced.
In a trial based on determining factually whether a person did or didn't commit a crime, if a foreign country wanted to present evidence to that Wisconsin court which demonstrated innocence of a convicted person, it would be ridiculous to prevent that. A French or German court, for example, has no limitations on its ability to interpret evidence in this Wisconsin trial, and to prioritize facts over temporary political factors. In this case though, the French and German governments have neither interest nor knowledge, but they have more legal authority to repair the situation than U.S. federal agencies.
When the Wisconsin Attorney General, or the federal court involved in this case, argue that the soundness of the case, the accuracy of the verdict, is subordinate to something else, they are on a weak ledge.
Arguing that the first priority in any conviction review, anywhere, is the authority of the political bodies involved, rather than factual innocence or guilt, is unsound logic.
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Although it was professional cops who misdirected this case for personal reasons, i.e., for their own benefit, the basis for preserving the false confession is built around 'the victim's interests'.
So as long as police can convince people that it is in the victims' interests in criminal cases to defer to the police with regard to facts, there is no solution.
In this specific case, for example, as long as the victim's family believes that the police are acting in the interests of the victim, then there will be no resolution.
So there are two possible paths to resolution.
1) The political path. The tv show tries to build a bigger and bigger base of factual support in opposition to the victim's family's view. the implication is that at some point their view will be 'conquered.'
2) The individual path. An alternate approach would be to convince the victim's family that the wrong person was arrested, and there was a mistake made in trusting the facts which police presented, and a further mistake in helping the police alter facts 'to make sure the right person got convicted.'
Path one has been fruitful, it made an interesting tv show.
But in order to actually solve the issue all that would be needed would be to convince the core of the victim's family that the wrong person was arrested, and that in crimes like that it is not wise to 'catch' the wrong person.
A person who has credibility with the family could probably be found who would be able to get them to spend half a day looking at facts.
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In episode 10, around 30 minutes, Ms Zellner has discovered a new trove of 'human bones', but they have cut marks. In other words they are deer bones unless the killer was cutting meat of the body, which would not be surprising at this point, but is probably unlikely.
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One of the bizarre facets which the Avery case has in common with almost all other cases, is that there is no effort to hold police accountable, neither for big issues nor for little issues. A person sees that again and again in the Esar Met case, and it seems to be a common factor that is more visible in any case the more it is studied.
Specifically in the Avery case, there was one moment when the defense showed that Sergeant Colborn had been at the victim's vehicle after she had disappeared, but before her car had been found. In other words, at that point of the trial there was more evidence pointing to Colborn having committed a crime than there was to Avery having committed a crime.
What did the defense do?
The same thing lawyers seem to do in almost every case when there is evidence police are involved in a crime or coverup.
Nothing.