re: New Netflix docu-series "Making a Murderer" (Spoilers)

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I am never going to WI.

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I was born and raised in Green Bay, and I remember very well when the Teresa Halbach case started. I was pretty young, still in elementary school, so I wasn't able to grasp everything that was happening but payed enough attention to get the gist of the scene. It was probably the biggest individual crime to hit the area during my childhood, so it was hard to miss with all of the reporting going on.

I knew that Steven Avery had just been exonerated from his previous conviction, and there was a lot of uncertainty about who did it and what was going on on his property. People still gave him the benefit of the doubt, and his guilt was still in question. Then when the Brendan confession dropped, that was it. I remember the broadcast when it aired and not watching it when they said anyone under 15 should turn it off (I was a good little boy), but I heard second hand that it was incredibly grisly and incriminating.

I and everyone around me was convinced that Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey did it. Not a shred of doubt left in my mind. The media storm around it was as real as portrayed in the series, it was virtually impossible to be a person in northeast Wisconsin and not believe they were not simply guilty but monsters of the most gruesome nature, as is the tradition set in Wisconsin by Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein. People wanted capital punishment to be reinstated, because nobody who committed a crime like this deserved to keep on living. And I've believed they were guilty, that Steven Avery was this idiot who got out of prison and then immediately turned around and murdered someone, for the last ten years.

When my coworker told me about the series, I was shocked. No way he could be innocent. He told me some of the things they had found, and I was hooked before I'd even started the show. I went home and began with episode one, and for the last few days with what little free time I've had I've pushed through the whole series. It feels like reality has completely unraveled. I never heard a word about the evidence possibly being planted or tampered with (or how legitimately good a possibility that was). I never heard about the lawsuit. I never heard about the officers being involved in Avery's previous conviction. I never heard about the charges being dropped due to the bullshite of Brendan's confession. I never even heard that Brendan's confession was bullshite in the first place. Not once was either of them painted in a remotely human light in my mind. And it wasn't just because I was a child. I told my parents about these things as I learned from the documentary, and they were just as shocked as I was. I'd like to think they keep up with the news enough to be reasonably informed. Something I was convinced of for a decade, and convinced of it because the sources I considered to be honest, trustworthy, and reputable during my childhood assured me so, turned out to be far less sure than I thought, if not completely false.

I'm coming away from this angry, sickened, and fearful. I'm disgusted with the media in the Green Bay/NEW area for their portrayal of Avery, Dassey, and the trial. I'm disgusted with the Manitowoc County PD and, while I didn't grow up in that county, I've lost a lot of comfort I've had before with police. It's one thing to know about police corruption, but to know that the justice system got so fricked in a place so small and so close to where I grew up, to the point where Brendan Dassey currently resides in a prison within half a mile of my childhood home, makes me sick to my stomach. And I'm disgusted with myself for having latched on to the story that was being shoveled out, not simply believing that they murdered Teresa Halbach but that they were indeed two of the most evil, detestable people I'd ever heard of.

Living in a place like Chicago now, it certainly doesn't help with being comfortable with authority after all of the scandal currently unfolding. I know that there are many trustworthy people working in law enforcement, and I know that the odds of me getting railroaded like these two are pretty slim. It's just getting harder to give the benefit of the doubt. I can't help but now feel that, even as a law-abiding citizen, I'm never perfectly safe. All it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Edit: a word

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