Making A Murderer

[Chris]

This maybe so mate,but their convictions were a totally travesty. This is probably more important because without a less biased trial they could be freed because of the shoddy trial and evidence.

I think the young lad is innocent but Avery is a Person of Interest.

 

Agreed. 100%. But to me it counters any sympathy I may have for them.

[manwiththestick]

If I'm Avery and I've killed that girl, I'm crushing her Rav4 into a small cube then placing that inside another car and then crushing that. I'm not parking it near the front of the yard with a couple of twigs thrown over it.

[Chris]

Based on evidence, mate? Or just a feeling?

 

Both, mate. I think they were fitted up good and proper, but I reckon that was the cops being opportunistic and making sure he went down.

[Chris]

If I'm Avery and I've killed that girl, I'm crushing her Rav4 into a small cube then placing that inside another car and then crushing that. I'm not parking it near the front of the yard with a couple of twigs thrown over it.

 

But then you have more than two brain cells and a complete set of chromosomes too.

[VladimirIlyich]

If I'm Avery and I've killed that girl, I'm crushing her Rav4 into a small cube then placing that inside another car and then crushing that. I'm not parking it near the front of the yard with a couple of twigs thrown over it.

I agree,plus the very small amount of blood when fingerprints were totally absent from the vehicle. The school bus driver statement on the timeline was also more crucial than was mentioned as it destroyed most alibis.

I still think the other prime candidate is the ex boyfriend and the family is strange for completely ignoring his huge potential for a part in this. He readily admitted to seeing her the day before her death and Avery made no effort to deny his meeting with her. If the boyfriend is still close to the Halbech family you also drag in the brother for being close to him too.

There are many other possibilities which were never seriously explored.

[Bob]

The blood but no fingerprints bit doesn't mean much to me.

 

Fabric type or woolly gloves would stop fingerprints and let blood deep through.

[VladimirIlyich]

The blood but no fingerprints bit doesn't mean much to me.

 

Fabric type or woolly gloves would stop fingerprints and let blood deep through.

In the shape that it was on the dashboard and the amount? The whole blood on the dashboard looked totally false,like a squirt with a syringe rather than a scrape where there would have been thicker and thinner splats of blood even gaps in the blood,and a lot more I am sure.

[Longview1982]

As I've mentioned earlier, I thought it was an outstanding series and it absolutely achieved it's objective in exposing the way that access to fair process and justice in that system is entirely dependant on wealth and power and did so brilliantly. But, it has left some collateral damage in the process which I'm not entirely comfortable with. One is the Kratz "sexting" scandal expose. Another is the portrayal of the Halbach family and the brother in particular. Another is the blatant finger pointing at the ex-boyfriend and her flatmate at the time.

 

I've read an interview with the producers where they explain their rationale for the Kratz expose:

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/making-a-murderer-burning-questions-answered#.uiA4N2Oov 

 

"......The case gained national attention and led to the governor of Wisconsin seeking Kratz’s removal from office in 2010 — a development the filmmakers had to figure out how to include without turning it into a “gotcha” moment. “It certainly didn’t shape how we portrayed what had already happened,” Demos said. “We made the decision that the only thing that mattered with that is the way it affected these cases. You could have had a whole 20-minute thing about it that would have just been a tangent, so we tried to include what was relevant to the story.”

Ricciardi added, “We did not want it to be perceived as a low blow for Ken Kratz. It really needed to be relevant to the story and we hope this story works on multiple levels: There’s Steven’s whole throughline, but then there’s also the opportunity to look at the system itself and the question was, How is this particular community going to respond when news like this breaks? What we thought was so interesting is after the AP reporter, Ryan Foley, broke the story, it became public soon thereafter that the Department of Justice knew for a year and covered it up.”

“That felt like, ‘Oh, here we go again,’” Demos said....."

 

That explanation is a bit thin to me. Okay, you can say the attempts to cover up Kratz's sexting scandal continue the theme of misconduct and abuse of power within those offices, but by episode 10 nobody needed convincing of that, so this was only adding about 0.1% more weight to the State corruption argument and definitely smelled of them taking an opportunity to land some blows on Kratz. I have no sympathy for Kratz - he's a cunt - and the irony of him now complaining about them using the media to frame a negative view of him when he can't defend himself is rib-bustingly hilarious given his own press conferences before the trial, but it definitely does detract from the overall objective of the film.

 

The Halbach's, and the brother in particular, seemed to simply do what any other family would do in those circumstances and go along with the police and the prosecutors and hope that there is a conviction and a sentence that is suitable. There's no doubt that the producers intended to portray the brother as a wholly unsympathetic character - almost to the point of inviting a level of culpability in the "framing" of Avery. These are professional film-makers and that simply doesn't happen by accident. They wanted viewers to view him in that manner.

 

Finally, I understand the need to establish one strand of the "framing" and misconduct theory as being the lack of investigation of other potential leads. However, it was surely possible to do that without blatantly shepherding viewers in the direction of the ex-boyfriend and her flatmate. Showing them so fleetingly and only within that specific context basically screamed out "Look how dodgy these ****ers are!" and urged us to immediately cast them as murder suspects with no attempt to offer any breadth of detail or any alternative viewpoint. 

 

I mean, fuck Kratz, Lenk and Colburn - they can have all the fucking mud getting slung their way - but those are serious aspersions being cast at the brother, the ex and the flatmate with almost casual disregard for the lack of fair treatment they are attempting to highlight from Avery's point of view. That's pretty shoddy film making.

 

Overall, it's a superb series but it's not without some significant flaws.

[Longview1982]

The blood but no fingerprints bit doesn't mean much to me.

 

Fabric type or woolly gloves would stop fingerprints and let blood deep through.

 

 

In the shape that it was on the dashboard and the amount? The whole blood on the dashboard looked totally false,like a squirt with a syringe rather than a scrape where there would have been thicker and thinner splats of blood even gaps in the blood,and a lot more I am sure.

 

As I recall, the prosecution case, supported by their own "Expert" witness, was that those blood smears in the back of the RAV4 were caused by a sweep of the victims bloodied hair as her body was placed in the back of the vehicle, but don't recall any suggestion of how the dashboard blood would have got there.

[Dr Nowt]

The blood but no fingerprints bit doesn't mean much to me.

 

Fabric type or woolly gloves would stop fingerprints and let blood deep through.

Knew all that stuff in the Date Thread about secluded country lanes and making women bleed was dodgy.

[Bob]

In the shape that it was on the dashboard and the amount? The whole blood on the dashboard looked totally false,like a squirt with a syringe rather than a scrape where there would have been thicker and thinner splats of blood even gaps in the blood,and a lot more I am sure.

I totally agree, it was planted, but the lack of fingerprints means fuck all

[Bob]

As I recall, the prosecution case, supported by their own "Expert" witness, was that those blood smears in the back of the RAV4 were caused by a sweep of the victims bloodied hair as her body was placed in the back of the vehicle, but don't recall any suggestion of how the dashboard blood would have got there.

In the back, it was her blood. The blood in the front was his, and probably came from the vial from his 1985 evidence file.

[VladimirIlyich]

I totally agree, it was planted, but the lack of fingerprints means fuck all

My point is that a squirt of blood without a smudge of a fingerprint or even a palm print looks a bit 'out of sync' if there was so much in the back of the vehicle,no more than a couple of feet away. The corpse bled profusely in the back but not in the front? A little strange I thought.

[Bob]

As I say, defo planted, but the argument af blood but no fingerprints could be very easily countered.

[VladimirIlyich]

As I've mentioned earlier, I thought it was an outstanding series and it absolutely achieved it's objective in exposing the way that access to fair process and justice in that system is entirely dependant on wealth and power and did so brilliantly. But, it has left some collateral damage in the process which I'm not entirely comfortable with. One is the Kratz "sexting" scandal expose. Another is the portrayal of the Halbach family and the brother in particular. Another is the blatant finger pointing at the ex-boyfriend and her flatmate at the time.

 

I've read an interview with the producers where they explain their rationale for the Kratz expose:

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/making-a-murderer-burning-questions-answered#.uiA4N2Oov

 

"......The case gained national attention and led to the governor of Wisconsin seeking Kratz’s removal from office in 2010 — a development the filmmakers had to figure out how to include without turning it into a “gotcha” moment. “It certainly didn’t shape how we portrayed what had already happened,” Demos said. “We made the decision that the only thing that mattered with that is the way it affected these cases. You could have had a whole 20-minute thing about it that would have just been a tangent, so we tried to include what was relevant to the story.”

Ricciardi added, “We did not want it to be perceived as a low blow for Ken Kratz. It really needed to be relevant to the story and we hope this story works on multiple levels: There’s Steven’s whole throughline, but then there’s also the opportunity to look at the system itself and the question was, How is this particular community going to respond when news like this breaks? What we thought was so interesting is after the AP reporter, Ryan Foley, broke the story, it became public soon thereafter that the Department of Justice knew for a year and covered it up.”

“That felt like, ‘Oh, here we go again,’” Demos said....."

 

That explanation is a bit thin to me. Okay, you can say the attempts to cover up Kratz's sexting scandal continue the theme of misconduct and abuse of power within those offices, but by episode 10 nobody needed convincing of that, so this was only adding about 0.1% more weight to the State corruption argument and definitely smelled of them taking an opportunity to land some blows on Kratz. I have no sympathy for Kratz - he's a cunt - and the irony of him now complaining about them using the media to frame a negative view of him when he can't defend himself is rib-bustingly hilarious given his own press conferences before the trial, but it definitely does detract from the overall objective of the film.

 

The Halbach's, and the brother in particular, seemed to simply do what any other family would do in those circumstances and go along with the police and the prosecutors and hope that there is a conviction and a sentence that is suitable. There's no doubt that the producers intended to portray the brother as a wholly unsympathetic character - almost to the point of inviting a level of culpability in the "framing" of Avery. These are professional film-makers and that simply doesn't happen by accident. They wanted viewers to view him in that manner.

 

Finally, I understand the need to establish one strand of the "framing" and misconduct theory as being the lack of investigation of other potential leads. However, it was surely possible to do that without blatantly shepherding viewers in the direction of the ex-boyfriend and her flatmate. Showing them so fleetingly and only within that specific context basically screamed out "Look how dodgy these ****ers are!" and urged us to immediately cast them as murder suspects with no attempt to offer any breadth of detail or any alternative viewpoint.

 

I mean, fuck Kratz, Lenk and Colburn - they can have all the fucking mud getting slung their way - but those are serious aspersions being cast at the brother, the ex and the flatmate with almost casual disregard for the lack of fair treatment they are attempting to highlight from Avery's point of view. That's pretty shoddy film making.

 

Overall, it's a superb series but it's not without some significant flaws.

I agree with some of this regarding maybe the brother and the Halbech family being treated a little unsympathetically but I'd also say that the State is at fault in this too.

The docu makers were most likely trying to say,and maybe the defence too? was that before going after Avery (5 months with no evidence at all) why werent others questioned and this questioning usually begins with family,boyfriend/girlfriend,spouse,close friends etc. Profilers also tend to say that this level of violence is more likely to come from people who are close to them and can get 'inside their personal space.' I'd imagine the victim was probably a bit wary of Avery due to his notoriety and being in the headlines and maybe wouldnt have let him get as close as a friend or boyfriend?

This could have been explored but simply didnt seem to have been.

[Scott_M]

http://www.nme.com/filmandtv/news/-making-a-murderer-s-steven-avery-s-ex-fiance-beli/397210?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=NME+News+Feed

[Kant]

If I'm Avery and I've killed that girl, I'm crushing her Rav4 into a small cube then placing that inside another car and then crushing that. I'm not parking it near the front of the yard with a couple of twigs thrown over it.

Yup. Wasn't there also a mention of him having some sort of smelter on his premises too?

If I'm Avery and I've got one of those I'm not going to try and burn a body on the ground next to my house.

[Barzini]

Was it ever explained how the victims blood came to be in the back of her car? If the prosecution case was that she was murdered in the garage and burned about 20m away, why was her blood in the car at all?

[Scott_M]

Just watched West Of Memphis. Very good.

 

Eddie Vedder. He's no Gazza with a KFC.

[Crazy Dave]

To be honest, I didn't pick up on the filmmakers portraying the victim's brother in a negative light at all.

 

I did find the Ken Kratz expose a little out of sync with the story but can't exactly feel sorry for him based upon his behavior. 

 

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of the bus driver's testimony that she saw the victim outside and taking pictures at 3:30PM on the Avery property an hour after those two blokes testified they saw her going into Avery's trailer. 

[Elite]

Scott Tardych and Bobby Dassey are dodgy as fuck in this.

[Total Longo]

Based on what exactly?

[Bobby Hundreds]

Scott Tardych and Bobby Dassey are dodgy as fuck in this.

 

 

Im suspicious of them from things Iv'e read after the documentary, that scott seems like a right bastard. He celebrated Avery going down too didn't he.  

[Chris]

He did it.

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

I don't believe her, shes a bad alcoholic and stinks of piss.