"I'm the Making a Murderer lawyer – what you didn't see changed my life"

When Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi made a short film for their Master of Fine Arts in Film course at Columbia University, they didn’t expect it to turn into a Netflix viral juggernaut.

Making a Murderer is a 2015 documentary about Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, filmed over 10 years. At the age of 22, Avery served 18 years in prison from 1985-2003 after his wrongful conviction for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Ann Beerntsen, before being exonerated through DNA testing.

In 2005, 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach was murdered. Avery and Dassey were convicted in separate trials and were both sentenced to life in prison for this crime. However, the documentary presents the possibility that Avery and Dassey, who was 16 at the time and has learning difficulties, were not responsible for Halbach's death.

Lawyers Dean Strang and Jerry Buting defended Avery, and became cult heroes, with more than 19 million people in the US watching the series in its first five weeks. Now Strang, who has a new podcast, I Rest My Case with Jonathan Goldberg KC, explains how it impacted his life, 10 years after the documentary was released.

Why did you want to become a lawyer?

I didn't want to become a lawyer. Since being young, I had my heart set on being an editorial cartoonist, but my dad was never excited about it – he thought it was doodling. During my undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College [in New Hampshire], I realised as much as I love cartooning, it wasn’t a full-time job. My dad’s sister was a lawyer and he pushed law school, and at the time there was a huge demand for new lawyers.

I got into University of Virginia School of Law [he graduated in 1985]. During my first year, I got a call from the editor of the Milwaukee morning paper I had freelanced for offering me the cartoonist role as theirs was leaving. I already really liked law school. Within a week or two, I was like, “Wow, I had no idea this would be so interesting,” so I turned down my dream job. In 1990, I had my first high-profile trial that the media called the Dairy Princess murder. There was no internet and no social media, but it got intense television and radio coverage, and a made-for-TV movie made about it later.

How did you get involved in Making a Murderer?

There was a civil lawsuit going on [Avery filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against Manitowoc County for his wrongful conviction in the 1985 assault case], and the two lawyers who were representing Steven, Walt Kelly and Steve Glenn, gave Steven mine and Jerry’s name, and a few others. Steve called to say, “I don’t know if they’ll call you, but if you get in, you should know there's these two student filmmakers on the scene, they're great, they're smart, they're likeable, nice, interesting people, but just be aware they're there all the time.” I did get in, and then I suggested bringing Jerry in and the two of us doing it together. We could split the fee and make it work better than either one of us alone.

How did your first meeting go with filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi?

They had already been in Manitowoc for three months, talked with Steven via phone from jail, met all his family and established a good rapport. Jerry and I met with them in 2006/2007 and sounded out their project, what they were doing and their goal.

They were really impressive, bright people. We said we have a murder case to defend, we can’t be distracted, and we have lawyer-client privilege. Laura practised law for a couple of years, so she understood and said they wouldn’t interfere or get in the way, so that was reassuring lawyer to lawyer. We struck an agreement with them on what the terms of our cooperation would be and they kept their word.

There's no murder porn in this, and that was really important to us and them. There's no reenactment or spooky music. They weren't going to make theatrical someone's death. They were going to pursue a documentarian's vantage point and try to query how this system is working for everybody affected by it. I have fewer qualms about Making a Murderer than I do about the [true crime] genre in general.

Are you a fan of true crime?

Not at all. I think there's a lot that's unhealthy about it. At its worst, it exploits human pain for profit. It’s some of the most intense pain people can feel – for instance, losing a child to murder or seeing a son, a brother, a husband go off to prison for the rest of his life.

Other than the lawyers, the cops and the paid volunteer participants in the system, all the involuntary participants are having the worst experience of their lives, which lasts, especially in a murder. You're never getting that loved one back. There is legitimate public interest in how the system functions. Is it failing victims? Is it failing the accused? Is it failing the public more broadly? It's about walking the line between allowing a broader public to gauge how ethically, accurately, responsibly the system is working on the one hand, and then simply exploiting pain and tragedy and peering voyeuristically into people on the other. It's treacherous territory from my perspective.

Do you think Making a Murderer sparked a new interest in true crime?

The podcast Serial came out first [in October 2014], then The Jinx [February 2015], then Making a Murderer [December 2015]. I think the coalescence of those three things, at least in North America, produced a resurgence of interest in true crime.

I think one of the reasons for the uptake of Making a Murderer is that very few countries in the world allow cameras in their courtrooms – they started being allowed in the US in the 1980s and still photography was allowed back in the 1930s. During the Steven Avery trial, even in a small-town America courthouse, it had a soundproof room at the back of the courtroom with a glass wall where the media could shoot through the glass and there were remote cameras on the ceiling. The rule is you just can’t film the jurors. Outside the courtroom, there’s still the scrum where people run up to you with cameras and microphones – it can be a little disorienting, but it just becomes part of what you have to do.

Did you ever think the series would reach as many people as it did?

I thought this was a very low-risk, low stakes undertaking for us, that the chances anybody outside of a classroom at Columbia would see or hear me were very low. Moira and Laura had to make a final 15 or 20-minute short film to get their master’s degree, and they did hope for more than that, which they described to us as a documentary. To me, it meant 90 to 120 minutes in an arthouse theatre with a total audience of 30 people, 18 of whom were family members and filmmakers. They got their master's degrees, and then maybe a year later, they entered a 30-minute version in the Tribeca Film Festival under the name 18 to Life, and it got accepted.

My wife and I, and Jerry and his wife, went out. We'd never been to a film festival and we had a nice weekend in New York, hanging out in Tribeca and trying to be cool and all. In this short film, I'm not sure either one of us was in that at all – I don't remember the lawyers playing any significant role. Then we didn't hear a thing from them for years.

What happened next?

In 2014, Laura and Moira called up out of the blue and said, “We’re still working on this, and we want to shoot some follow-up footage.” They came out to Wisconsin for half a day or something, shot some footage, and then we didn't hear anything until November 2015. I got a call saying they had sold the film and they were turning it into 10 episodes, which would be out right before Christmas. I snorted and laughed – a murder trial in an obscure corner of Wisconsin... what great Christmas fare! It sounded like the dumbest marketing scheme to me.

Moira and Laura said they’d send Jerry and me a watermarked DVD of all the episodes, but I passed. I had lived it. It was and is painful. We lost the case we should have won. I don’t like watching videos or seeing photos of myself. Jerry watched it and we went to see Steven in prison before it came out, because he would never be able to see it. Jerry said, “It’s pretty good, it’s basically fair to you, there’s no cheap shots, there’s nothing libellous or wrong with it.” My wife made me watch it two or three weeks after it came out because it was blowing up. I’m not sure I watched the whole second season.

What was the initial response like?

It sort of was a catapult, because it came out on 18 December 2015, and I got my first email from a stranger in South Carolina that night who had gone to the trouble to find my email through my firm website and write me this long, thoughtful, well-written email. By Monday, I had hundreds of emails.

I would say foremost in Ireland, followed by Australia, then England, the reaction was, “Oh my God, all the bad stuff that happens here also happens in the US. We thought the US justice system was supposed to be so great, because you're always telling us it is, but wow, you’ve got the same problems we have.” In the Scandinavian countries, it was a very different reaction on the whole. There was this really high confidence of: “This wouldn’t have happened here.” I would write back saying, “Good, and maybe you're exactly right, but just be careful, because criminologists will tell you the system misfires everywhere, no matter how your system is structured.”

That same Monday, our assistant said a guy claiming to be Alec Baldwin wanted to leave a voicemail for me. I thought one of my college friends was playing a prank on me, but it was him. He was very kind to me, and continued to be. Right before his movie career took off, he was going to apply to law school, and was still interested in law.

How long would you say the interest lasted after the show came out?

Only about two years, but that can seem like a long time, but mostly it was a great ride. I was away from home 250 days a year for the first couple of years, so I had to drop back dramatically from practising law. It became hard to get back in full throttle. Other lawyers who referred me cases would say I was too busy or was off speaking somewhere, and so the phone stopped ringing. I've been teaching full-time since 2019. I've gone from almost every student in my classroom having seen Making a Murderer to zero students having heard of it. The collective memory is very short.

What was your hope after Making a Murderer came out?

For the Avery family, the Halbach family, and the cops and lawyers involved, this is a really, really important case. For everybody else on the entire planet, it’s not. If you don't like what you saw happening in one tiny rural community in one country, ask yourself, what's happening in the courthouses near me, in an area where I could do something about it? Wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals happen everywhere.

Watch seasons 1 & 2 of Making a Murderer on Netflix. Episodes of I Rest My Case are released weekly from Thursday 8 January.

Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.