JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Jad. Just popping in to let you know that the story that you're about to hear was first put out in 2013, and since that time an amazing documentary series called Making a Murderer landed, which focused on this same story that you're about to hear. Actually, just on one piece of the story that comes up toward the end. It's an aspect of the story we didn't really focus on too much, but they go super deep on it, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna play you the story as we put it out, and then we'll update it a tiny bit with a conversation with the filmmakers. So here's the story as first aired it, podcasted it in 2013.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're still talking about certainty versus doubt. And in this final story, the two once again collide. But this time it's in a way that's almost unimaginable.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I remember running along railroad track, a seldom used railroad track, but just thinking, God, it would be a blessing if a train just came along and flattened me. It was like ...

JAD: We need to warn you now. If there are younger, sensitive listeners listening right now, this next piece depicts graphic violence and it can be pretty disturbing. So if you're listening with kids, this would be a good time to ask them to leave the room or to—for you to put on headphones.

ROBERT: This piece comes from our producer, Pat Walters.

PAT WALTERS: I guess we could just start at the beginning. So could you just, I don't know, set the scene? It was 1985?

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Yes, it was 1985.

PAT: So this is Penny.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Penny Beerntsen.

PAT: And in 1985 Penny and her husband, Tom.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Yeah, I—I'm here.

PAT: ... were living in Wisconsin.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: On the shores of Lake Michigan.

PAT: In a little town called Manitowoc.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Owned a small third generation and family business.

PAT: And what kind of business was that?

TOM BEERNTSEN: Beernsten’s Candies, we’re open seven days a week, 10 to 10, 363 days a year.

PAT: But sometimes in the summer Penny and Tom would cut out early and ...

TOM BEERNTSEN: Go to the beach. That's where we went that day.

PAT: July 29, 1985.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Blue skies, probably in the 70s. Perfect day to be at the beach with your family.

PAT: They parked the car.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Two, three o'clock in the afternoon and ...

PAT: Set up camp near the water.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And I was reading a book about Lizzie Borden, the infamous ax murderer.

PAT: But after about an hour of reading this book, Penny set it down and ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Said to my husband, I can't believe I'm reading this gruesome book on a beautiful day. I'm going to go for a jog.

PAT: Penny heads north along the water.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And when I was within about a half mile of my starting point, there was a guy standing with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder. And as I jogged by, he said, "It's a great day." I glanced at him and said, “It's a beautiful day for a jog.” I didn't really think anything of it. Jogged three miles, turned around, and I saw ...

PAT: Same guy.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: …come out from under a half fallen tree and head towards me.

PAT: She started to run, and we should say this next part gets graphic and violent.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Made the mistake of running into the water to try and get away from him and realized how slowly I was running in the water. As I got—ran back to the beach, this man caught up with me, put me in a chokehold and said, “We're going to take a little walk up into the sand dunes.” He pushed me up over this sand first dune where were no longer visible to anybody, started asking me to do sexual things. He was trying to remove my swimsuit and I twisted to try and get away and he tightened his grip and said, “Do what I tell you, I've got a knife.” Two thoughts went through my mind. Stay really calm and get a good look at this guy. PENNY BEERNTSEN: Caucasian, sandy blond hair, curly beard and mustache, hairy hands, short, stubby fingers.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: He pushed me down on the ground and was kneeling over me and when I was refusing, he would what he would do was he would strangle me until I would about lose consciousness, then he would loosen his grip and say, now, are you going to do it? And I would refuse. And as I'm talking, I managed to get one leg up and I kicked him in the groin. But unfortunately it didn't incapacitate him. It enraged him, and he said, Now I'm going to kill you now. You're going to die.

PAT: Meanwhile, Tom is getting worried.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Because she was so predictable in her patterns, she would normally be gone 45 minutes to an hour. 

PAT: After an hour and a half, he started pacing the beach.

TOM BEERNTSEN: At two hours ...

PAT: He called the cops.

TOM BEERNTSEN: The police brought in jetskis.

PAT: Like, were you thinking that she had?

PAT: I thought—I was fairly convinced that she probably had drowned. In Manitowoc, you don't think about crime. You didn't lock your doors. You didn't—you know, many people left their keys in their car.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: He started hitting my head either on a rock or a tree stump, some hard object. At one point he broke my nose and then strangled me till I lost consciousness.

PAT: Sometime later, Penny woke up.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: When I came to, I was lying on my back in the sand.

PAT: She saw that she was naked and alone.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I thought, maybe he's in the woods, you know, watching to see if—if I have survived or if he's accomplished what he set out to do. So I tried to stand up, was too weak and fell over.

PAT: And she noticed when she fell down that her hands were covered in blood.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And I thought, this is evidence. I need to preserve this. So I crawled through the sand kind of on my knees and the heels on my hands.

PAT: Making sure she was keeping her fingers up out of the sand.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: As soon as I saw her, I knew that she had been beaten. You never want to see someone like that. And, you know, I hope I never see that again.

PAT: The paramedics rushed Penny to the ER. Next thing she remembers, she was lying in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Stitching facial cuts. And then there's a female deputy who's questioning me.

PAT: She asked Penny to describe the guy.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Caucasian, sandy, blond hair. Curly. Hairy hands, stubby fingers.

PAT: And the next morning, the cops brought Penny down to the police station for a lineup.

PAT: And this is where you go into a room and there's a one way mirror.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: You can see them, they can't see you.

PAT: There were nine guys.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Each of the nine had a number around their neck from one to nine.

PAT: She looked at one guy, then another, then another.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And when I came to, I don't know if he was number three, I don't recall exactly.

PAT: One particular guy of the nine.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I remember the color draining from my face, visceral gut reaction, like, "Oh my God, this is the guy."

PAT: Barely any time had passed since the attack. She was positive. The sheriff wasn't surprised—they'd had their eye on this guy for a while. His name was Steven Avery. He'd been arrested for some small-time stuff, burglary, cruelty to animals and most recently ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Attempted assault at rifle point.

PAT: He’d pulled a gun on a woman.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: So ...

PAT: So the DEA indicted him for attacking Penny. The trial was fast.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Very fast.

PAT: Penny got on the stand and said ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I was 100 percent certain that Steven Avery was the man who assaulted me.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: She—she—she had no doubt. She looked people squarely in the eye. Her recollections were unequivocal. She was a very strong witness.

PAT: This is Fred Hazelwood. He was the judge on the case.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Here in Manitowoc county.

PAT: Tell—tell me about his alibi.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: His alibi was that he just didn't have the time to commit the crime.

PAT: Because he was shopping.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: He bought some paint, I believe, or drywall compound. I'm not sure what. He was also working that day before the alleged assault, helping his family pour cement for some project at home. That was his testimony, and the testimony of a whole bunch of other witnesses.

PAT: Sixteen. Only problem was nearly all of them were family.

TOM BEERNTSEN: And the stories were too similar.

PAT: This is Tom again.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Virtually identical.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Sounded like they had gotten together and talked.

TOM BEERNTSEN: That was a credibility issue that affected the defense witnesses.

PAT: And there was one other big problem for Avery, his clothes.

TOM BEERNTSEN: There was not a microscopic speck of concrete dust on any of the clothes that he wore that day. And he indicated at the trial that he had worked the end of the concrete chute. Well, anyone that has ever done that at the end of a concrete truck knows that that just comes out and splashes.

PAT: After deliberating for two days, the jury found Steve Avery guilty.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Guilty on three counts, as I recall.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Yeah. Sexual assault.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: 15 years.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Attempted murder.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: 15 years.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: And I believe false imprisonment.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Two years for false imprisonment.

PAT: 32 years all together.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: To be served consecutively.

PAT: So you go back to the chocolate shop and try to carry on with life as it was before?

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Right. Essentially.

PAT: But that obviously wasn't so easy.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Nightmares, flashbacks.

PAT: She was angry.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: You know, blowing up at my kids.

PAT: Her husband.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Sometimes I wouldn't want my husband to be protective, and other times you would think he was being protective. And I would say, like, I can take care of myself.

PAT: When a guy in the street whistled at her.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I turned around and just let loose with every obscenity in the book, you know?

PAT: So she started seeing a therapist, which helped a little. But even a year after Steve's conviction, she was still struggling with all this anger. And then one snowy afternoon.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Maybe winter of '86, '87.

PAT: She went to see a talk by this social worker.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Dr. Mark Umbreit from the University of Minnesota. And I don't remember exactly what he said. I don't think he used the word 'forgiveness,' but he said at some point victims reached the point where they understand that the anger and hatred they're feeling is really damaging themselves and their families, and they need—need to let go of it. And I left the presentation at the next break. I went home, I got my cross-country skis, I went to Point Beach State Park and skied to the point where I was—exact spot where I'd been assaulted and basically said to myself, Steve, you don't have power over me anymore. So that was a turning point.

PAT: Penney actually started working in the prisons. She'd go and tell inmates her story.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Hoping to teach the impact of crime and hope that they might make the leap to changing their behavior. 

PAT: Meanwhile ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Steven Avery has a number of appeals and he's turned down at all his appeals.

PAT: She told the district attorney.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: If anyone, someone just breathed Steven Avery's name in court I want to be notified and I want to be there for every hearing. I did show up, and I'm getting more and more angry every time there's appeal. Like, is there no finality? Is there no closure to this?

PAT: He kept asking the court to review the evidence over and over again.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And I'm thinking, why is he so persistent?

PAT: And then one Sunday morning.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: In early September.

PAT: In 2003, 18 years after Steve Avery's conviction, Penny gets a call from her lawyer friend Janine.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And Janine has called and said, "Can I stop by? I want to talk to you about a restorative justice initiative at Marquette."

JANINE GESKI: That, frankly, was the truth. But it wasn't why I was driving to Manitowoc on a Sunday.

PAT: On her way, Janine called Penny's husband, who had left town for a business trip that morning.

TOM BEERNTSEN: Janine told me what she had just discovered and heard.

PAT: It was about a DNA test. She asked him to turn around.

JANINE GESKI: Tom and I both pulled into the driveway ...

TOM BEERNTSEN: Together.

JANINE GESKI: …simultaneously.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I walk outside and both of them are ashen.

PAT: And in that moment ...

TOM BEERNTSEN: She knew. 

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I knew instantly.

TOM BEERNTSEN: I’ll always remember the look on her face.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: The DNA is back. It is not Steven Avery.

JANINE GESKI: She just—she just fell apart. I told her I wanted to go in and sit down. And she went and sat on the couch next to Tom and ...

PAT: And they explained to her the Wisconsin Innocence Project had reevaluated some of the biological material from the crime scene.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Some hairs.

PAT: And determined ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: That an innocent person has spent 18 years, I think it was 18 years, one month and 13 days in prison for something he did not do.

JANINE GESKI: You know, she looked very frightened. And I said, Penny, I want you to remember all the good you've done.

JAD: Working in the prisons, all the men you've reached.

JANINE GESKI: You know, I mean, she didn't say much.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I remember feeling if I wrote down every good deed I had done from the day I was born until today, it would not possibly be sufficient to balance the scales in terms of this horrendous error that I've made. That day was worse than the day I was assaulted.

PAT: And there was one more thing.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Then I learned. Not only was there exoneration, but there was a hit.

PAT: The court told Penny that the DNA belonged to a man.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Named Gregory Allen.

PAT: Who at that moment was in prison for a ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Very brutal rape of a woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he had actually been charged with an attempted assault on the same beach where I was assaulted. His nickname was The Sandman because he liked to come up over the sand dunes and grab someone.

PAT: And for 10 years, while Steve Avery was in prison, he’d walked free.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: So I'm thinking, how many other women have had their lives turned upside down and inside out because I misidentified the man who assaulted me.

PAT: As it turned out, Gregory Allen was serving his sentence, a 60-year sentence.

TOM BEERNTSEN: At the prison in Green Bay.

PAT: Where Penny had actually been working.

TOM BEERNTSEN: And as a matter of fact, he was about two weeks from being in Penny's next class.

PAT: No way!

TOM BEERNTSEN: And—no, absolutely. And so Penny would never have known this man that would have been sitting feet away from her. In his cell they found a scrapbook where he had documented all the appeals of Stephen Avery over all those years.

PAT: Oh, that's really creepy.

TOM BEERNTSEN: That's more than creepy.

PAT: September 11, 2003, Steve Avery was set free. As soon as he walked out of the gate at the prison, he was mobbed by reporters.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: It was the news story in Wisconsin, and he was considered a celebrity. There was a legislator who actually put together a Steven Avery fund that people could contribute to because he really had no resources and no job skills because he's been in—in prison for 18 years. You know, there was a beauty salon in Green Bay that gave him a makeover. I remember sending my husband out at home and saying to him "I just need to be alone." And I decided I'm going out running. And I remember running along railroad track, a seldom used railroad track, but just thinking, God, it would be a blessing if a train just came along and flattened me. It was like, what do I do? I can't make this right.

PAT: She says every time she saw Steven Avery's face ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: He was on the front page of our local Manitowoc newspaper every day for two to three weeks.

PAT: Two things would happen. She'd think, "How could I have done this to this man?" But at the very same moment, she thought that ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: The hair on the back of my neck would stand up.

PAT: Even after you knew?

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Even after I knew, I knew intellectually he was innocent. But emotionally, this is the man who I've seen in my nightmares and flashbacks for 18 years.

PAT: So those two weeks after where his face is in the paper every day must have been very strange.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: It was strange. And then it's also strange to feel like an offender. A little aside here, when I saw Gregory Allen's picture, a picture of my actual perpetrator, there was absolutely no physical reaction from me. I would swear I'd never seen it before in my life. So my therapist said to me, "You will never be able to attach to Gregory Allen the feelings you had towards Steven Avery. What you have to do is work on removing those feelings from Steve and looking at Steve as this is an innocent person."

PAT: Not long after his exoneration, Penny had written to Steve asking if she could meet him and apologize in person. And about a year and a half after his exoneration, he agreed.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I was so nervous.

PAT: Can you set the scene? Are you in like a—a little room?

PENNY BEERNTSEN: We're in a very small office, like a two-room office.

PAT: In a legislative building in the state capitol.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: There's a sofa and a few chairs.

PAT: Penny you got there first. And eventually Steve walked in.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Steve had his attorney, Keith Finley, there from the Innocence Project. I stand up, I extend my hand to Steve. He gives me this hearty handshake. Our lives have been intertwined for almost two decades, and it's the first time we've physically touched. He sits down. We talked about things, like he had a nephew who was killed in a car accident when he was in prison and couldn't go to the funeral. His grandmother died. He couldn't go to her funeral. His wife had divorced him. He's estranged from his children, and some of them I know, he had one daughter who really stood by him. And so I brought up these losses and ...

PAT: Apologized for each one individually.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: He—he's very quiet, sort of just acknowledging him with a nod of his head. And he said, "I don't blame you. I blame the police."

PAT: Because it turned out in the weeks before Penny was attacked, the police had been watching Gregory Allen.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Because he was a known sex offender. They were actually tailing him for two weeks prior to my assault, checking on him sometimes as often as a dozen times a day. On July 29, 1985, the day I was assaulted, they checked on him once in the morning and then, due to a high volume of police calls, were unable to check on him any more that day. And that's the afternoon I was assaulted.

PAT: Eventually, after Penny and Steve had been sitting in that little room for a while ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Time was up and we—there was no more to be said. And I stood up and walked over to Steve and said to Steve, "Is it okay if I give you a hug?" And he didn't even respond, he just grabbed me in a big bear hug and I said so only he could hear "Steve, I'm so sorry." And he said, "It's okay. This is over." And for him to say, "It's okay, it's over," when I know full well it's—his journey is just beginning and he's got a hell of a road. That's one of the most graceful things that's ever been said to me. Fast forward ...

PAT: About two years after that meeting ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I get a call from Janine Geske, my attorney friend.

PAT: The one who delivered the news about the exoneration.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Who says ...

PAT: Something's happened.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: There's a woman photographer who's missing.

[NEWS CLIP: Teresa Halbach disappeared October 31 after visiting the suspect, Steven Avery, to take pictures of a car he was selling.]

PENNY BEERNTSEN: And they are searching the Avery property.

JANINE GESKI: I encouraged her. I tried to tell her, stay out of this.

PAT: But Penny went on the local news.

JANINE GESKI: And said ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I cannot believe this.

JANINE GESKI: That she didn't believe it could be Steven Avery, that she didn't believe he would be capable of such a thing.

PAT: And other people in town thought that, too, that this was just another false accusation.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: But eventually, after a couple of days of searching the remains of Teresa's body ...

[NEWS CLIP: Burned human bone and teeth.]

PENNY BEERNTSEN: …were eventually found in a burned barrel at the Avery auto salvage yard.

PAT: Steven Avery claimed that he was innocent, that he was set up by the police. But a few months later, his nephew came forward and he tells police in an interrogation that the day of the murder, he went to Steven Avery's trailer, he heard screams inside, Steven came to the door in a t-shirt and gym shorts. He was sweating. And inside the nephew sees Teresa Halbach bound to the bed. And what happens next, according to Steven's nephew, is one of the most awful things I've ever heard. Steven asks his nephew to rape Teresa with him, and then together they kill her.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Oh, my—oh, my God. You start questioning your own judgment. I can't even trust my senses. I can't trust my eyes to tell me what, you know, what I thought I recorded accurately about the world. And then when he gets convicted for killing Teresa, it's like, you know what kind of character judge am I? Now I can't even judge character. I can't.

PAT: She'd been certain twice—and wrong twice. And then a worse thought occurred to her.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Would Teresa Halbach be alive today if I hadn't misidentified my assailant?

PAT: Meaning what exactly? Like ...

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Well, I accuse Steve of something he doesn't do. He's convicted. He spends 18 years in prison. Prison is enormously damaging to guilty people. What happens to someone who is innocent?

PAT: In other words, did her initial certainty that Steve Avery was her assailant, did that turn him into the guy who murdered Teresa Halbach?

FRED HAZLEWOOD:  No, I—no, no ...

PAT: Judge Hazelwood doesn't buy that argument.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Not at all. Not at all.

PAT: For one, if you look at the group of people who've been set free after a wrongful conviction, the vast majority of them do okay. They don't commit serious crimes after they've been released from prison. And this was a man with a violent past.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Oh, yeah.

PAT: Well before Penny, he pulled a gun on a woman.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: In the broad light of day.

PAT: And demanded that she ...

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Come with him.

PAT: Nothing happened because the police intervened. But what if they hadn't?

FRED HAZLEWOOD: I saw the potential for violence in him, but I—I would be wrong to say I saw in him a Teresa Halbach. I—I didn't.

PAT: So I asked him if this case had shaken his confidence in his judgment, the way it had for Penny.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: At first I tried to figure out what in the world did we do wrong? And I pretty much came to the conclusion that ...

PAT: At least as far as the courts were concerned ...

FRED HAZLEWOOD: We did get it right and we still got a bad result. That's—that's gonna be a problem as long as humans judge other human activity, we're not always going to get it right.

PAT: That's actually the one thing we can be certain of, he says.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: But cases like Avery are—are rare. I was 25 years on the bench and 15 years or more as a lawyer before that, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like Steven Avery.

PAT: He says Steven Avery is an outlier. He’s the lesson you don't learn.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: It's like I was fishing last spring in Sanibel, on Sanibel Island, and I was in up to my waist trying to—fly casting for snook.

PAT: It's a kind of fish.

FRED HAZLEWOOD: And all of a sudden this rather dark shape swam right by me about eight feet long. And I thought to myself, that's a bull shark. And here I am, waist deep and this shark swam maybe a foot away from me as he went by. What if he’d bumped into me?

PAT: Yeah.

FRED HAZLEWOOD:  What are the odds of this happening? But, you know, life is like that, we—we face the unexpected, the unknown, and ...

PAT: But you're not gonna never go fishing there again, are you?

FRED HAZLEWOOD: Oh, no, no, I wouldn't. That wouldn't keep me from going fishing.

PAT: Then again, the judge didn't get bitten. I kept thinking over and over at the end of this, like the Halbach family, how do they move on after something like this?

JAD: Did you call them?

PAT: I tried. Like, I reached out to a couple of the family members, but I never heard back.

JAD: And what about Penny?

PAT: Well, she and Tom sold the chocolate shop and moved to Chicago.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: Well, I'm retired, so right now I do a lot of volunteer work. Center on Wrongful Convictions, Children's Hospital. I volunteer at the Morton Arboretum, and so a variety of things, and ...

PAT: And all together she seems to be doing just fine.

PENNY BEERNTSEN: I mean, I question much more. I question things a lot more. Yeah, I think there's much more doubt and I think I'm much more comfortable living with uncertainty. I've kind of had—I mean, I have to be.

JAD: Producer Pat Walters. For more information on anything that you heard in this hour, visit radiolab.org. Thanks to Pat. Thanks to Lulu and all the producers who helped us with this episode and thank you guys for listening.

JAD: So that was the story as we told it back in 2013. A couple years later, Netflix released a documentary series called Making a Murderer. It's a really deep dive into a part of the story that we only mention towards the end, and rather quickly, which is the conviction of Steven Avery for the murder of Theresa Halbach. Now we sort of talked about it based on our best understanding of the evidence at the time. Making a Murderer goes really, really deep, 10 hours deep into this question. And there are some details that they uncover—many, many details—that made us think differently about how we understood that aspect of the story and how we presented it. Here's Pat with more detail.

PAT: So let me just walk you through real quick a few of the things that are important to that part of the story, given the way that we told it in our original piece. First thing is the confession. We say that, you know, Steven was arrested for this murder, and then his nephew came forward and confessed. Turns out that that confession is not a very straightforward piece of evidence. It came from his 16-year-old nephew, who has a very low IQ and a fourth grade reading level; that the nephew didn't come forward exactly, but rather the police pulled him out of class, questioned him many times without an attorney, asked him hundreds of very leading questions.

PAT: And the kicker of that part of it is that this story that he told about all those awful things that happened in the bedroom, there's no actual physical evidence to back up any of it. So that's the confession. The other thing is the context in which this whole thing is happening. Steve had filed a huge $36-million civil suit against the county right after he'd been exonerated. It was going really well. Some major evidence against the county had come out. This is what was happening when Teresa Halbeck's body was found in Steven Avery's backyard. So when we said Steven Avery claimed that he was framed by the police, there's actually a little more teeth to that statement than you might have assumed when you listened to our story originally.

JAD: And there's lots, lots more, because the filmmakers spent 10 years on this. They find out things that make you question the evidence the police use to convict Steven Avery. And it made Pat start to wonder if Avery should have ever been convicted at all. So he called up the filmmakers.

PAT: Hello.

MOIRA DEMOS: Hi, Pat. This is Moira.

PAT: And hi, Laura.

LAURA RICCIARDI: Hi, Pat.

JAD: Their names are Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi. And he basically asked them ...

PAT: Do you think Steven Avery is innocent?

MOIRA DEMOS: I mean, one of the many things I learned through this decade-long experience is, you know, the humility to accept that I don't know.

LAURA RICCIARDI: We don't think the truth emerged here with respect to the Halbach case. We don't know what happened to her. It doesn't mean that we're convinced of Steven Avery's innocence or that that was even of concern to us.

MOIRA DEMOS: You know, I think of it as, you know, I don't know whether it's the carrot or the sort of cardboard rabbit that's on the dog track that's—you know, it's making the dogs run. I mean, it's the engine that gets this story going. But it's the story that's the point, not the thing that we know that people are interested in.

LAURA RICCIARDI: Clearing Steven Avery or Brendan Dassey's name was never our objective.

MOIRA DEMOS: You know, one of the themes in the series is the danger of a rush to judgment. And, you know, we now see that in 2015 in the responses to the series, you know, people are being very quick to name suspects, to spout opinions about who did it, and ...

PAT: But I feel like it just makes me wonder, like, if, like, you spend a week learning about something, and then at the end of the week you say, "Okay, now I'm gonna say something about what I know," or you spend a month thinking about something, or three months, and at the end of it, you have to say something.

MOIRA DEMOS: Well, I actually think that's one of the points of the series. I do understand how that's hard to grapple with, and I think we are trying to challenge the viewer to deal with how hard it is to embrace ambiguity. Perhaps you can never reach a place of certainty, but you should put some energy into it. So if we let go of certainty and, you know, demand a system that gives you a sense of reliability, at least that can be a goal that can maybe alleviate some of those terrible feelings.

JAD: Thanks again to reporter Pat Walters, and of course, to filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos.

[TOM BEERNTSEN: Tom Beerntsen calling.]

[PENNY BEERNTSEN: Penny Beerntsen calling.]

[TOM BEERNTSEN: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[PENNY BEERNTSEN: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler …]

[TOM BEERNTSEN: Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe ...]

[PENNY BEERNTSEN: Lynn Levy and Andy Mills. With help from Lulu Miller.]

[LULU: Nate Falls, Douglas Q Smith, Kelsey Padgett, and Megan Pam.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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