Over 10 Years, 2 Filmmakers Documented The 'Making' Of A Murderer

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

The era of the real-life whodunit series is upon us.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The podcast "Serial" attracted legions of listeners last year, all drawn to the story of a 1999 murder of a Maryland teenager for which her high school boyfriend was found guilty. HBO's documentary, "The Jinx," follows a reclusive, eccentric real estate heir suspected of murder.

MONTAGNE: Now all the talk is about the new Netflix series "Making A Murderer." Here, the central character is a man by the name of Steven Avery. He was freed after spending 18 years in prison when in 2003, DNA evidence proved he did not commit the brutal sexual assault that put him behind bars. A long injustice, it seemed, had finally come to an end. In the 10 years that Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos spent filming their documentary series, they would come to know well Steven and his world.

MOIRA DEMOS: Well, Steven Avery, his family ran an auto-salvage yard in rural Manitowoc County, Wis. So this is a part of the country that's dominated by dairy farms, and his family ran the junkyard. And he grew up working on his family's salvage yard. He did not graduate high school. So in that community, they were sort of the marginalized folk, you know - from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak.

MONTAGNE: As a teenager, Demos says, Steven Avery made a series of bad choices, like burglarizing a local tavern with friends.

DEMOS: These are felonies, but when you look at the actual report, it's about breaking in and making a cheese sandwich and stealing some beer.

MONTAGNE: But what turned out to be his most fateful bad choice was his decision to escalate feud with his own cousin, who was spreading nasty, humiliating rumors about him. One night, he decided he'd had enough. He ran her off a country road and pointed a gun at her he says was not loaded. Turns out, she was the wrong person to intimidate.

DEMOS: She was married to a sheriff's deputy. And there's certainly a line that he crossed there that it became personal.

MONTAGNE: And by extension, personal to the sheriff's department. Not long after that incident, a woman - a prominent member of the Manitowoc community - jogging along a nearby lake one day was sexually assaulted and badly beaten. Hours later, Steven Avery was arrested. The series "Making A Murderer" follows in great detail how small-town detectives and local law enforcement went about making the criminal charges stick, at one point even ignoring a tip by one officer that a known violent sex offender was a more likely suspect. The year was 1985, and it wouldn't be until DNA testing came along that Steven Avery would be exonerated. He returned home to a crush of cameras and a family who always believed he was innocent.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

STEVEN AVERY: Hello.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: How are you?

AVERY: Pretty good.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: How does it feel?

AVERY: It feels wonderful.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Laughter, crying) Oh God, Steven, you're home.

MONTAGNE: Soon after this homecoming, news reports started delving into how Avery had been railroaded. And for that, he sued the county - and he sued big. His relative, Kim Ducat, told the filmmakers she believes that move ultimately sealed Steven Avery's fate.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MAKING A MURDERER")

KIM DUCAT: They weren't going to hand that man $36 million. They weren't going to be made a laughingstock, that's for sure. They just weren't going to do all that. And something in my gut said, they're not done with him; something's going to happen.

MONTAGNE: This, by the way, is a good moment to tune out if you haven't yet started watching the series because, as we find out, one of the most compelling elements of this series is how quickly Steven Avery goes from being a local celebrity for his long overdue release, to someone who - and it's just two years later - he's accused and goes on trial for a grisly murder which sounds unbelievable.

DEMOS: Yeah, I mean, we read the New York Times headline "Freed By DNA, Now Charged In New Crime." And immediately we recognized this as an unprecedented story. But what we really recognized in Steven's story was this valuable window through which to look at our system.

LAURA RICCIARDI: Laura here - what also was so fascinating for us was we were trying really to explore the extent to which history might have been repeating itself here. You know, Steven in the first case was arrested the very same day the victim was attacked - in just a matter of hours. He had, I would think, a pretty ironclad alibi. He was accounted for every minute of the day - before the victim was attacked, all the way through the time that, you know, law enforcement arrives at his house to arrest him. So there was an interesting parallel between the arc of the first case and the arc of the second case, and how law enforcement arguably handled both cases. And that got back to our original question of, has the system evolved? And if it has evolved, is anything now in place that wasn't in place 20 years prior to stop a wrongful conviction from occurring?

MONTAGNE: You found yourself filming twists and turns of new evidence showing up and also of suggestions of manipulation. How did you get that kind of access? It was so public. The press was all around. But you end up filming moments that are quite explosive.

RICCIARDI: You know, essentially the way we reached out to our potential subjects was to write letters to them - letters of introduction to tell them who we were, what we were about, why we thought they would have a valuable place in the story. And we were really interested in hearing people's first-hand accounts.

DEMOS: You know, we were graduate film students at the time that we started this, and we had no money. But what we did have was time. So we moved to Wisconsin. We lived there for nearly two years. So, you know, we were on the ground there to cover anything that was happening, but also there to do research and to build relationships.

MONTAGNE: Do you think Steven Avery's innocent?

RICCIARDI: Part of the reason - my opinion is we don't know. There were so many questions about the quality of the investigation itself here. There was a glaring conflict of interest in this particular case. As we talked about earlier, Steven Avery had $36 million lawsuit pending against local law enforcement - or the county, rather, but this county and former members of law enforcement. And here he was, back in the same system, charged with a serious crime.

DEMOS: One of the things I learned in making this film is - through all of this and all of these different points of view - the humility to accept that I don't know. And what seems more important to me is to be able to trust the process.

MONTAGNE: Filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. Their Netflix documentary series is called "Making A Murderer." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.