Making a Murderer: why we’re hooked on true crime

Two great fictional detectives have very different approaches to solving crimes. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a masterly logician, coldly assessing the facts before deducing the killer. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown is the opposite, trusting his emotional instincts and imaginative sympathy. (Think of them as the Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams of the detective world.) Shows like Netflix’s hugely successful Making a Murderer and last year’s Serial podcast (which has just returned for a second series) have turned us all into amateur sleuths—taking the Sherlock approach or the Brown. But by treating these tragedies as mysteries to be unravelled are we missing the point? If anything these programmes show us the difficulty of ever finding out the truth about anything.

After listening to Serial last year—and reading all the commentary on Reddit, and looking up all the original interview transcripts and statements—I concluded that Adnan Syed, the man convicted for killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, was most likely guilty. Don’t get me wrong, I considered all the doubts raised by host Sarah Koenig: the lack of DNA evidence, the prosecution’s muddled timeline of the killing, the mysterious pings from the mobile phones.

But Syed was the only person with a motive and the opportunity. He was a jealous ex-lover. Things got out of hand in an argument, perhaps, and he panicked. To me this emotional narrative trumped the other inconsistencies. Discussions with friends usually ended with me saying: “Fine, maybe he should have been acquitted. But in my heart I know he’s guilty.” Like Father Brown, I thought I could see into Syed’s soul.

Watching Making a Murderer, though, has made me question my own confident speculations. For the whole case turns on the instinctive—even prejudicial—judgements of the police on a defendant’s character. Even if the evidence wasn’t there, in their hearts they knew he was guilty.

The documentary, filmed over 10 years by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, follows the two trials of Steven Avery. In 1985, Avery was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. Avery, of below average IQ, came from the wrong side of the tracks and was regarded by the police as bad news. He had earlier been convicted of burglary and running his cousin off the road. After a sketch was put to the victim, he was identified as the culprit and put away. Except it turned out he was innocent. DNA tests proved he was not the attacker and he was released—but only after 18 years behind bars.

In a bizarre twist, while Avery was suing Manitowoc police force for $36 million, he was arrested for  another crime: the murder of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach. The photographer’s burned remains were found outside his trailer, and her car was dumped on his property. His nephew Brandon Dassey, 16 years old and also with learning difficulties, was arrested for helping him with the crime. Avery is now serving life without parole, and Brandon is eligible for release in 2048.

Making a Murderer explores the idea that Avery was set up. His lawyers Dean Strang and Jerry Buting argued there was a police conspiracy to frame Avery, in revenge for his potentially crippling lawsuit. It sounds extraordinary but there is some evidence that this, or something like this, might have happened. As with Serial, the filmmakers cleverly push you in one direction—Avery’s guilty!—and then back again—Avery was set up!

Once more the arguments on Reddit are fearsome, and articles offer multiple alternative suspects or allegations of collusion between the killer (or killers) and the police. Sherlockians point at the minutiae of the physical evidence (I know more about blood preservation chemical EDTA than I ever thought I would), while Brownites analyse Steven’s character, either damning it or praising it, and concluding his guilt either way.

Part of me loves the speculation, but I dislike myself for it. There is something exhausting—and dangerous—about pretending that real-life murders can be solved as though they were neat fictional puzzles. Given the ambiguity in both cases, whether Syed or Avery are guilty is unknowable and unless incontrovertible scientific evidence is found—unlikely in both cases at this stage—we should stop arguing the toss. What we can say, more modestly, is that in both cases the American justice system failed to convincingly prove their suspects’ guilt.

As Avery’s lawyer, Dean Strang, laments at one point, there is “a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates in our criminal justice system.” The same applies to true crime addicts, like me, who fancy themselves the ultimate detective.