In November 2005, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi were leafing through The New York Times when a headline caught their attention: “Freed By DNA, Now Charged With New Crime”. The report concerned the arrest of Wisconsin man Steven Avery, who had two years previously been released from prison, after fresh evidence proved he’d served 18 years for a rape, of which he was not guilty.
Now, with a $36 million lawsuit pending against authorities in Wisconsin, Avery stood accused of murder. Hundreds of miles away in New York, recent film school graduates Demos and Ricciardi suspected this might be a story worth telling. They were just getting started in the industry and had no other work lined-up. What had they to lose?
A decade on, their little shoe-string documentary has become a global phenomenon. Debuting quietly on Netflix on December 18 last, Making A Murderer is THE water-cooler conversation topic of the moment. Almost everybody, it appears, has an opinion on the guilt or innocence of Avery, who was indeed convicted of the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach – and is currently serving life with no hope of parole. When RTE flew Avery’s defence attorney Dean Strang in for a Ray D’Arcy interview recently, the presenter’s handling of the segment was a national talking-point (Ireland cringed as D’Arcy asked the strait-laced Strang how it felt to be a sex symbol). Making A Murderer has become a focus of mass obsession.
“It has been bigger than any of us anticipated,” Jerry Buting, a member of Avery’s defence team, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “There are people all over the world who are really picking this case apart now. And they are finding things that we just didn’t see.
“I’ve never seen something that goes behind the scenes like this, to see what it’s like to prepare for a serious trial. That was the reason we agreed to participate in the first place. The public is given a sense of being jurors on this case: what would they do? That turns it into the ultimate reality show.”
With knock-out ratings has come intense scrutiny, however. Critics argue that Demos and Ricciardi crossed the line between journalism and advocacy and that Making A Murderer slants the truth, so that the audience is encouraged to believe in Avery’s innocence. Naturally, those close to the story quibble with that interpretation. The facts, they say, speak for themselves. The crux of the argument set forth in the documentary is that Avery was banged up a second time in order to spare local nabobs the embarrassment, and expense, of his $36 million wrongful conviction suit.
“It’s a very unfair swipe at their integrity to suggest they turned editorial judgment on their film over to [the defence],” Dean Strang told The Guardian. “These two women gave Avery’s trial three hours of time. That’s more than is used in Doctor Zhivago to cover the entire Russian revolution. And I don’t think it’s fair when the criticism is coming from people who were repeatedly invited to co-operate – and repeatedly said no.”
Strang himself was initially cautious about co-operating in with Making A Murderer. In the end he did so only at Avery’s insistence.
“Our client wanted us to consider participating,” he continued. “We approached it warily, and over time it became clear that these were thoughtful film-makers, who intended to raise broader questions about the criminal justice system. They were honest with us. They weren’t intrusive. They used one small camera and went away when we told them to. Trust was built up over time – and they have never betrayed that trust. We had no idea what story they would choose to tell. I found out with everyone else when it became available in December, and I sat down with my wife to watch it.”
In the centre of the whirlwind, Demos and Ricciardi come across as quietly shocked by the response to their little doc. A decade ago, they had no inkling as to what they were signing up to. They smelled a story. They did not believe they were about to create a zeitgeist-commandeering smash hit. Indeed for some time it seemed they might not even have a chance to give Avery’s version of events. Making A Murderer was rejected by HBO and PBS before Netflix came to the rescue.
“We anticipated we might be shooting for six months or maybe a year,” Ricciardi told New York magazine. “But we were out there more like two, two-and-a-half years. About four months into production, there was a huge development that spun things around and turned them in a new direction. We were actually packing up, getting ready to go back to our day jobs and raise some money, and we got a call there was going to be a press conference. It was the development with Brendan, the nephew. We went to that press conference and then unpacked our bags.
“The question of guilt or innocence was never our question,” Ricciardi added. “We chose Steven Avery as our protagonist because of this unique and valuable window we thought he could offer, onto the American criminal justice system.”
The success of Making A Murderer has not occurred in isolation. In 2015, HBO had a major hit with The Jinx, a documentary focusing on the alleged crimes of mogul Robert Durst. Meanwhile, the first season of the Serial podcast trained a spotlight on the conviction of high school student Adnan Syed for the 1999 killing of his girlfriend.
We are, it turns out, just getting started. This month, FX debuts American Crime Story, a chronicling of the OJ Simpson murder trial (Cuba Gooding Jr is the accused, with John Travolta as defence lawyer Robert Shapiro and David Schwimmer as OJ’s bro, Robert Kardashian). And in March, James Nesbitt will star in The Secret, a retelling of the couldn’t-make-it-up case of homicidal Coleraine dentist Colin Howell. TV truly is digging up the bodies.
“The public is drawn to true crime because it triggers the most basic and powerful emotion in all of us — fear,” wrote criminology professor Scott Bonn in Time last month. “As a source of popular culture entertainment, it allows us to experience fear and horror, in a controlled environment, where the threat is exciting but not real. For example, the stories of real-life killers are often for adults what monster movies are for children.
“Moreover,” he added, “by following an investigation on TV, people can play armchair detective and see if they can figure out ‘whodunit’ before law enforcement authorities catch the actual perpetrator.”