‘Making a Murderer’ Turns 10: What’s the Latest on Steven Avery & Brendan Dassey?

Ten years ago, Netflix viewers got their first look at Making a Murderer, a docuseries following the conviction and exoneration of Steven Avery on one crime and his conviction on another crime. The Emmy-winning series debuted on December 18, 2015, and ran for two acclaimed seasons.

In case you missed the press coverage at the time, Avery served 18 years out of a 32-year sentence after being wrongfully convicted of sexual assault at a 1985 jury trial, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. After DNA evidence exonerated him, Avery was freed from prison in 2003. Just over two years later, however, Avery was arrested and charged with the murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old freelance photographer who disappeared after heading to the Avery family’s auto salvage yard in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin.

So what’s the latest on Avery, now 63, and Dassey, now 36?

Both Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are serving life sentences for the killing of Theresa Halbach.

Prosecutors accused Avery of Halbach’s murder, pointing to her car being found hidden in his family’s salvage yard with droplets of his blood inside, a bullet fragment with Halbach’s DNA in his garage, bone fragments from a woman’s body in a burn pit, and remnants of her camera and cell phone in a burn barrel.

Plus, Avery’s nephew Brendan Dassey, then 16, confessed that he had sexually assaulted Halbach on orders from Avery and that he had assisted him in killing her and burning her body. Dassey later recanted his confession, and his attorneys contended that he had intellectual challenges and questioned why law enforcement allowed him to be interrogated without a parent or attorney in attendance.

As for Avery, he maintained his innocence in the case, and his attorneys argued he might have been framed by a law enforcement system he had sued for his wrongful conviction. In 2007, Avery and Dassey were found guilty of being a party to first-degree intentional homicide, sexual assault, corpse mutilation, and the men were sentenced to life in prison, per USA Today.

Avery is still in prison and seeking a federal appeal.

Now, 10 years after Making a Murderer’s debut and 18 years after his sentencing, Avery is still trying to get his conviction overturned. According to the Journal Sentinel, his motions for relief have been denied at both the circuit court and appellate court level, and this May, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to review his case.

Kathleen Zellner, Avery’s appeal attorney, said at the time that an appeal in federal court was the next step. “The average time to undo a wrongful conviction in the United States is 15 years, but many cases have spanned decades with dozens of motions being filed before an individual is freed,” she wrote on social media, per WLUK. “Two things are certain at this point: (1) Steven Avery will never give up on proving his actual innocence. (2) Steven Avery’s legal team is more dedicated to winning his freedom than ever before.”

Avery spoke out about his situation this March in a letter to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, one that his legal team did not write or advise him to file. “The criminal justice system is broken, and it has to be fixed, and this is the time to fix it and get it right,” he wrote, according to the Appleton Post-Crescent. “Because I’m a victim of a setup, and it has to be fixed now.”

Wisconsin Department of Corrections records show Avery is serving his sentence at the medium-security Fox Lake Correctional Institution in Fox Lake, Wisconsin — a facility at which he spent part of his imprisonment on the 1985 wrongful conviction — as of the time of this writing.

Dassey is also behind bars but may be eligible for supervised release in 2048.

Dassey’s conviction was overturned in 2016, and the following year, that decision was upheld by a three-judge panel in the Seventh District Court of Appeals, per WTTW. The Wisconsin Department of Justice challenged that ruling, however, and when the full seven-member appeals court reviewed the case, they voted 4-3 to uphold the conviction.

Then in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Dassey’s appeal, and in 2019, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers declined to consider a pardon or a commutation of Dassey’s sentence, according to a letter posted to X by reporter Patrick Marley.

Dassey may be eligible for release on extended supervision in 2048, when he will be around 59 years old, according to the Journal Sentinel.

In 2019, Dassey was transferred from the maximum-security Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, to the medium-security Oshkosh Correctional Institution in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, according to the Associated Press. Laura Nirider, an attorney for Dassey, said he had earned the transfer because of good behavior. Records show Dassey is still at the Oshkosh facility as of the time of this writing.

Making a Murderer, Netflix