Making a Murderer, Netflix’s acclaimed docuseries, recently took an interesting turn. The series, which debuted on Netflix in 2015 and later premiered Making a Murderer Part 2 last October, followed the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and included interviews with convicted murderers Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey. New evidence, however, alleges that it was another man who killed Halbach.
All throughout Season 1 of Making a Murderer, Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey kept to the story of their innocence in the murder of Teresa Halbach. The first season drew such an impressive number of viewers and high-profile coverage that the case invited a second look. Were Avery and Dassey wrongly convicted? The docuseries seemed to believe so. And, a confession has emerged that suggests Avery and Dassey may be as innocent as they claim.
Speaking with Fox News, Shawn Rech, the director of Convicting a Murderer, a spinoff of Making a Murderer, says that an unnamed Wisconsin inmate confessed to the murder of Teresa Halbach. Rech, who was able to get the confession on tape and submitted the evidence to investigators and the attorneys for Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, thought the whole ordeal was “very strange.”
Although the inmate’s name has not yet been released, Shawn Rech says that they’d been investigating this particular man for a year and a half while doing research for Convicting a Murderer. The inmate had been involved in an entirely separate case from that of Teresa Halbach, but had reportedly admitted to killing her.
Here’s what Shawn Rech had to say about the bizarre turn of events:
He's a convicted murderer in the state of Wisconsin and he wrote us a letter trying to further implicate Steven Avery some time ago. So, we're now wrapping up our 10-part series, which is an independent series of Making A Murderer, and we're fact-checking and trying to debunk certain information, and we set up a jail call to challenge him on some of the things he wrote in this nine-page letter, and rather than sticking to this letter, he immediately said the letter was false and took the blame for killing Teresa Halbach. He characterized it as a tragic accident.
After the first season of Making a Murderer, attorney Kathleen Zellner, well-known for overturning cases for the wrongly convicted, took over Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey’s case. However, Shawn Rech confirmed that Avery and Dassey had nothing to do with Convicting a Murderer or the new evidence he’d managed to retrieve about Teresa Halbach’s murder, noting that they see his documentary "as an adversarial project" because it includes the point of view of law enforcement.
While he did his due diligence and handed the confession over to authorities, Shawn Rech also said that he's unsure of the truthfulness of it:
He already admitted to lying, he's a convicted felon, so that tells you, maybe he's not the most believable guy in the world. But, at the same time, he killed someone in the state of Wisconsin and he was walking around free when all this happened, and maybe this was the reason he was trying to point the finger at Steven Avery in the first place. So, it's kind of a balancing act you kind of have to do.
Hopefully, authorities will take the confession seriously and see if there's any truth behind it. Making a Murderer Part 1 and Part 2 are available to stream on Netflix. Convicting a Murderer does not yet have a release date. In the meantime, you can check out what other true crime dramas and documentaries are streaming on Netflix.
