Morning Wire XX
[0] In 2015, Netflix released a massive hit that tapped into the true crime craze.
[1] He had no chance against them in that situation.
[2] He was going to lose, and he was going to lose every time.
[3] The series Making a Murderer convinced much of America that a man had been wrongly convicted not once but twice and that a police department had deliberately framed him.
[4] We, the jury, find the defendant, Brendan Ardassy, guilty, the first -degree intentional homicide.
[5] protests and petitions formed as celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Alec Baldwin made public pleas for the men convicted to be set free.
[6] In fact, the cries grew so loud, President Obama felt compelled to announce he had no power to pardon in state cases.
[7] But were the verdicts against Stephen Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, as questionable as the docu series made them seem?
[8] For this episode, culture reporter Megan Basham digs into the Daily Wire's new series, convicting a murderer.
[9] It takes a second look at the case that obsessed and infuriated America.
[10] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[11] It's September 10th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[12] Joining us now is Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham.
[13] So, Megan, when making a murderer first came out back in 2015, it was huge.
[14] It won four Emmys, and a lot of the commentary around the time was that it highlighted how broken our justice system is.
[15] And it represented some of the earliest anti -police sentiment that broke through in a mainstream way.
[16] Of course, we've seen a lot of that since then, but it's interesting to look back now and see that moment that true crime entertainment sort of tipped over into activism.
[17] What was it about that story that got audiences to make this sort of emotional investment in a case that most viewers had probably never heard of?
[18] Well, it's interesting that you bring up that issue of activism, because after the Netflix series released, that was really what it seemed like the creators wanted.
[19] And I think that played a big role in its popularity.
[20] It wasn't just a mystery.
[21] It was a cause.
[22] So the development of making a murderer started with Laura Ritchardy, who was an attorney and an aspiring filmmaker.
[23] And this is a clip from convicting a murderer in which one of the defense attorneys talks about how Ritchardy became interested in his client, Stephen Avery's case.
[24] And interspiced with that, we hear Deb Kemp, who was a friend of Avery's talking to him in prison about Ritchardy's interest in interviewing him for a potential film.
[25] Very shortly after Stephen was charged in November, a lawyer who was not particularly happy, I think, being a lawyer, and was pursuing film at Columbia University in New York.
[26] He was riding the subway, and as you do on the subway, you read a newspaper, right?
[27] She said she saw you were on the front page of the New York Times paper.
[28] No. Yeah.
[29] So it was way old there in New York.
[30] Here she finds a few column inches devoted to the story of an exonerie, released two years earlier, and then re -arrested and charged with murder.
[31] There she is reading those few inches, and she says, I'm going to Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
[32] So Richardi from the get -go seemed interested in pursuing a story where she thought perhaps an injustice had occurred.
[33] Here she is describing how she viewed her work.
[34] I could have a broader reach if I went into the arts and possibly use art for good.
[35] And so it's not surprising to me at all that this was the first project I chose to do out of law school.
[36] Now, obviously, the only way that art might be able to, quote unquote, do good in a case where a jury has already decided is if the jury got it wrong.
[37] And for those who aren't familiar with making a murderer or the Avery case, what's so fascinating about it is that we know the jury did get it wrong the first time out.
[38] The story really does start with a wrongful conviction.
[39] In 1985, Avery had been found guilty of sexual assault and attempted murder.
[40] And he served 18 years of a 32 -year sentence when DNA evidence eventually exonerated him.
[41] So I spoke to Candace Owens, who is the host and producer of convicting a murderer, which interrogates the craze that erupted from making a murderer.
[42] And she says, you know, as she was working on this series, it was very easy to see why Richardi and the audience would have found Avery so compelling.
[43] Obviously, Stephen Avery was in fact wrongfully convicted at first.
[44] And so when somebody's wrongfully convicted of anything, and in this case it was this horrific rape and attempted murder, of another woman.
[45] And then that person is vindicated.
[46] And you realize that, you know, this is prior before they had DNA evidence.
[47] Suddenly DNA evidence gets involved and they realize this man actually is serving a prison sentence for something that he didn't do.
[48] It's already a naturally compelling story.
[49] And then you find that that person is being investigated again for another murder.
[50] And you go, oh, there's no way.
[51] You just got out.
[52] There's no way he could possibly do this.
[53] So I think that their motivations were probably pure.
[54] Okay.
[55] So let's talk about the second case because this is the one that really made making a murderer a cultural phenomenon.
[56] For those who, don't know, can you summarize what happened?
[57] Sure.
[58] So once new DNA evidence clears Avery, he gets released and files a $36 million lawsuit against Manitouac County.
[59] As that suit is still pending two years later, a young woman disappears after meeting with Avery.
[60] So Teresa Halbach was a 25 -year -old photographer and working for Auto -Trader magazine, and she was taking pictures of cars and things like that.
[61] So she goes out to meet with Stephen Avery, and she's never seen again.
[62] Her car is found hidden in his junkyard, his blood is in the vehicle, and then her key is found inside Avery's house.
[63] So the premise of the Netflix series is really whether this police department set out to deliberately frame him and see him wrongfully convicted a second time to avoid paying out for that first wrongful conviction.
[64] And the way the documentary presented his story left many, many people believing that they had.
[65] One of the really big moments from the series involved his blood found in her car.
[66] Netflix strongly suggests that it was planted from a vial of Avery's blood that was collected during the investigation of that first case.
[67] And you can hear in this clip the sort of reaction that that got.
[68] Right in the center of the top of the tube is a little tiny hole.
[69] Once they showed it to you, you're like, oh my God, they planted this blood.
[70] certainly when they came to the big reveal with the blood vile.
[71] I thought this is just astounding.
[72] Some officer went into that file, opened it up, took a sample of Stephen Avery's blood, and planted it in the Raff 4.
[73] I felt like, oh, geez, can it get any worse than this?
[74] So another part of the question was Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was developmentally disabled.
[75] Well, he admitted to being an accomplice in Teresa Hallbach's murder, but there were big questions about whether his confession was coerced and really, you know, whether he understood what he was saying.
[76] Brendan?
[77] What else did you do?
[78] Come on.
[79] What do you do, Brendan?
[80] You see how they interrogate him, and then all the facts that come out, how they feed him everything.
[81] That's what I can remember.
[82] All right, I'm just going to come out and ask you, who shot her in the head?
[83] He did.
[84] Who shot her?
[85] Oh, he did.
[86] Because they were telling him, just tell the truth.
[87] you'll be fine.
[88] Of course the kid's going to say that.
[89] Now, Owens concedes that Dassey is a sympathetic figure for most people who only saw a part of his confession in making a murderer.
[90] I think Netflix was probably the most successful in making people believe that he was just completely innocent.
[91] They showed a very small portion of his testimony.
[92] And I think when you see more of Brendan Dassey's testimony, you will really realize the scale and the scope of what happened to Teresa Hallback on the night that she was murdered and the, you know, the days following it.
[93] And I think that will be the biggest piece because I know that people that do believe that Stephen Avery is guilty still think that Brendan Dassey, his nephew, was not guilty.
[94] So convicting a murderer really examines how the Netflix series left out some key elements of this story.
[95] They implied, for instance, that though Avery had a history of petty burglaries, he was not a violent man. Well, here you see new evidence that very clearly calls that into question, things like letters he wrote to his five children from prison, in which he actually threatened to kill his wife.
[96] Manitouac County Judge Fred Hazelwood terminated Avery's rights to visit with his children in prison in 1993, since Avery was describing in detail his plans to use a gun to murder their mother.
[97] There was some testimony that you were telling the kids you were going to kill her.
[98] with a gun and do all this.
[99] Did you do that?
[100] I don't know what I said.
[101] I don't remember what's all in them.
[102] He also sent them photographs depicting how he planned to sexually mutilate her.
[103] You don't remember telling the kids that you were going to cut out their mom's private parts and kill her?
[104] I have no. You know, if they were young, I figured they didn't know how to read, and she'd be reading it anyway.
[105] you know, that was the wrong way to do it.
[106] So as convicting a murderer goes back over some of this material, you began to see that the making a murderer docuseries really presented a very misleading version of events sometimes.
[107] And not just by leaving out pieces of information, but also by editing statements in a way that I'll just say as a journalist really did shock me. There were things like removing the middle section of a sentence to reframe the context.
[108] And then you also see that in testimony that Stephen Avery's cousin gave.
[109] Between the time that he was exonerated and then charged with Teresa Halbach's murder, he got angry with his cousin for bad -mouthing him around town.
[110] And he ran her off the road and then tried to force her into his car at gunpoint.
[111] Key parts of her statement about that incident were left out.
[112] So Owen said her series is not about arguing over the evidence that has already been presented.
[113] And, you know, that's something that people have been doing a lot since 2015.
[114] But this series is about bringing out new evidence that audiences never saw back then.
[115] So he already had a capacity for violent and was serving time in prison because of that.
[116] And he was threatening people, threatening to kill people while he was in prison.
[117] So we show you letters that he wrote to his kids, to his wife at the time while he was in prison.
[118] So he's always had this capacity within him.
[119] But again, Netflix didn't show you these letters.
[120] It didn't show you these things.
[121] They spent time actually trying to, to almost diminish the things that he said and that he did.
[122] Oh, well, you know, he's in print for something he didn't do.
[123] Maybe he's just angry.
[124] This is why he did this.
[125] He was upset with his cousin.
[126] Yeah, he ran her off the road.
[127] But, you know, she was talking bad about him in town.
[128] And it's really bizarre to see that there were so many clues that he had this capacity for evil within him.
[129] And they were completely ignored.
[130] You know, when you see stories like this where the public is so easily influenced into believing certain narratives, you realize that the implications here are much bigger.
[131] than just one case.
[132] Yeah, you really do.
[133] And I'll say, you know, it kind of reminded me of that Bible proverb that the first person to state his case seems right until another person comes along and examines him.
[134] So this reexamination really put things in an entirely different light.
[135] And it reminds you how important it is to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism and to really question some of these popular narratives.
[136] And then also, I think, to remember the victims and their families that, you know, in these cases, they're not entertainment.
[137] They represent real loss and real suffering.
[138] I'll give Owens the last word on that.
[139] You know, the saddest portion of this, the saddest part of the Stephen Avery story is that a woman died, a woman that was very young and just beginning her life died, and she became the subject of wild conspiracy theories, people believing that she escaped to Mexico to frame this horrific man, Stephen Avery.
[140] And this woman had no record.
[141] She was just a young photographer in her early 20s that was, you know, the previous Friday hanging out at a Halloween party, you know, and she was afraid of Stephen Avery, and she had expressed that she was fearful of Stephen Avery.
[142] And I think that's almost the greatest injustice, the greatest miscarious of justice in the Netflix documentary is the legacy of Teresa Hallback.
[143] And we definitely did not want to make that same mistake in doing convicting murder.
[144] We wanted to tell her story because her life was taken from her in the most horrific means, by the most horrific means possible.
[145] Yes, I always wonder when I see these true crime stories go viral, how it impacts the families of the victims.
[146] Important to remember them.
[147] Megan, thank you so much for reporting.
[148] Any time.
[149] That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham, discussing the new series, Convicting a Murderer, now streaming on Daily Wire Plus.
[150] Thanks for waking up with us.
[151] We'll be back this afternoon with an extra edition of Morning Wire.