Making a Murderer dir. by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos (review)

“Poor people lose. Poor people lose all the time.”¹

—Steven Avery

Making a Murderer, directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, is a ten-part documentary series that debuted on Netflix on December 18, 2015, and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Filmed over the course of ten years, the program centers on Wisconsinite Steven Avery, who served eighteen years in prison from 1985 to 2003 for sexual assault and attempted murder, despite having an alibi. Improved dna testing eventually led to Avery’s acquittal. The majority of Making a Murderer details Avery’s arrest on murder charges in 2006 and subsequent trial that resulted in a sentence of life in prison without parole. During the trial, Avery’s high-profile defense attorneys Dean Strang and Jerome Buting were able to present, at least to the Netflix viewing audience, evidence of considerable mishandlings on the part of law enforcement agents involved in the case. According to Demos, “These are things that are happening in every county in this country. . . . We hope that the dialogue gets beyond this case, and beyond Manitowoc County. I think that would be an opportunity squandered if the dialogue did not broaden to look at what the broader things going on here are.”²

After being exonerated in 2003, Avery returned to rural Manitowoc County and lived on his family’s property, which was also the site of their auto salvage yard. Stemming from his wrongful incarceration, Avery filed a thirty-six-million-dollar lawsuit against Manitowoc County and various county officials. In the wake of Avery’s unjust sentencing, Wisconsin legislature passed “The Avery Bill,” which dealt with facets of dna evidence including its retention and testing, the establishment of policies that required juvenile and adult suspects to be recorded electronically, and police policies governing the eyewitness identification procedure.³ Before the bill became law, however, police arrested Avery for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, who had been on the Avery property to shoot a picture of a car for sale at the family’s auto salvage business. Months after Avery was taken into custody, his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, was seemingly coerced into also confessing to the crime. In 2007, Avery and Dassey were both convicted of murder in separate trials. Dassey, who did not have the privilege of his uncle’s defense attorneys, was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole set for 2048. Making a Murderer made a villain out of prosecuting attorney Ken Kratz, who felt the documentary was one-sided, and resulted in a petition demanding that President Obama pardon Avery and Dassey.

Beyond these legal issues, though, what can this documentary’s dialogue tell us about the Midwest or, more specifically, about the rural Midwest? Making a Murderer presents an opportunity to complicate the traditional trope of whiteness studies—as viewed by historians—that depict how a European immigrant assimilates into American society by becoming white, which is often defined as “not African American.” Instead, Making a Murderer engages with whiteness in two ways. First, its geographic setting, the rural Midwest, adds a dimension to historical studies of whiteness, mostly set in urban areas.⁴ Second, it demonstrates that the genre’s trope of how people of European descent became white is far more complicated and ignores the fact that many whites become “unwhite” or slip to the undesirable level of “white trash.”

A Netflix press release concisely summarized the program: “Set in America’s Heartland, Making a Murderer follows the harrowing story of Steven Avery, an outsider from the wrong side of the tracks.”⁵ Importantly, “the wrong side of the tracks” is found in the rural, small-town Midwest. Two Rivers, Wisconsin—the birthplace of Avery’s father and the location of Avery’s Auto Salvage—is a town with a population of roughly twelve thousand people. The city of Manitowoc consists of thirty-five thousand people, while the entirety of Manitowoc County has a population of eighty-five thousand. The county’s inhabitants...