Kathleen Zellner, the real-life attorney for Steven Avery, has filed new evidence that she believes will exonerate her client for the murder of Teresa Halbach.
Zellner has submitted video evidence of herself performing an “experiment” to try to prove that police planted Halbach’s car key in Avery’s bedroom. In the original case, police officers testified that after several searches of Avery’s bedroom, they found Halbach’s car key hidden inside Avery’s book shelf.
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The officers claimed that when one officer moved a photo album on the book case, it knocked the key loose, and it fell onto the floor. The crime scene photos show the key lying beside the shelf on the floor.
In Zellner’s video, she attempts to prove that the key couldn’t possibly have ended up in that position through the haphazard rifling of a photo album. She posits that the officers must instead have dropped the key where it was in an effort to get a conviction.
“It shows the case is a complete fraud,” Zellner told reporters at Newsweek. “I don’t know how long this case will take me, but it’s going to fall apart.”
“Cases are won on those kinds of details,” she continued. “There’s no way with the forces of gravity that it would end up by the slippers.”
Zellner is extremely confident about Avery’s innocence, as are many viewers of the Netflix Original true crime series Making A Murderer, which focused on Avery’s case.
Zellner has spent about $175,000 of her own money working on this case, as well as significant funds from the Midwest Innocence Project, the Avery family and donations from viewers.
Zellner’s new evidence comes shortly after the launch of an online petition aimed at removing the show from Netflix entirely. The petition says that the show is unfairly skewed for Avery, and that it has negatively impacted his victims and their families.
The petition, which has over 2,600 signatures, argues that, since Netflix fired Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. for sexual assault, they should cancel the upcoming second season of Making a Murderer and remove the first season from Netflix.
