"Making A Murderer," the wildly popular Netflix series that chronicles the trials of convicted murderer Steven Avery, successfully shows that Avery's case should be reopened, but there are many more pressing cases that deserve to be re-examined, says Luis Bolaños, a private investigator who consults for and can be seen on a number of network and cable true-crime programs.
"I had so many people contact me and ask me to watch the series, so I dedicated 10 hours to watch this whole thing, and my first thought was, are you crazy? This is the case that they chose to highlight? Only because we've been working these cases on a national level for 10 years, and there are so many cases like this in our nation that deserve this kind of attention more so than this case," Bolaños tells Headlines & Global News. "At the end of the series, I don't know how anyone can tell you whether Mr. Avery is guilty or not. There's just not enough there to have a definitive opinion either way. However, there is more than enough to show that he deserves another trial."
One of the most blatantly bungled aspects of the Avery case occurred when a conflict of interest was seemingly ignored, or worse, actively violated. Avery, who had done 18 years in prison for an unrelated sexual assault before he was exonerated and released, later sued Manitowoc County, Wis., and due to that civil suit, a neighboring county took over the murder case to keep parties to Avery's suit against the county from actively involving themselves in the investigation into the murder of Teresa Halbach.
But that didn't stop Manitowoc Sheriff's deputies, namely Lt. James Lenk and Sgt. Andrew Colburn, from doing just that.
"I think the biggest thing that sticks out is the lack of concern for the conflict of interest that was declared," says Bolaños. "In order for somebody to walk into the crime scene, in theory, you have to walk up to the person that is handling the clipboard that has the crime log that documents everyone coming in and coming out. So even if you're a lowly patrol offer and you're tasked with documenting who comes in and who comes out and what time, and your supervisor, your boss, your sheriff, the captain of your station, the mayor, walks up to you, they need to sign in, and there should be a list associated with that of people that are not allowed to come in. In this case, people who were not allowed to come in would be people that the department had a conflict of interest declared. Well, everybody knew that, but they were still allowed entry. Why was that allowed to happen? Was he intimidated, was he allowed to let him in? Why did a normal thing that was supposed to happen, not happen? Why were they allowed entry? I think you could find that there was some friction there. There was an understanding for them to come in."
Another major red flag, Bolaños says, involves a very key piece of evidence that could have been tampered with.
"When they found Mr. Avery's blood inside that vehicle and they found that the blood vial had been opened in evidence, did anyone there address how that was opened, why it was opened, why there was a puncture in the stopper? That by itself is enough reason for a retrial. That is huge," he explains. "How in the world does that happen, and it's not even answered in the series. Was there a legitimate reason that it was punctured? Apparently not, at least law enforcement has not stepped forward to address why it was punctured. So to be investigated on an administrative level, was it just a typo and no one documented why that stopper was punctured, which indicates - the only time I've seen that is when they pull blood out of a vial to draw evidence for further testing - so I don't know."
The makers of "Making A Murderer" "did a very good job to highlight both sides fairly," says Bolaños, who has been involved with similar investigations over the past 10 years and has worked alongside documentaries and TV true crime programs. And, he adds, the timing of the show's release is "amazing" because of the current distrust many Americans have for the police.
"I think that what's going on in the country right now with law enforcement losing credibility with the communities for a variety of reasons, because a lot of it is on cell phone footage now which contradicts what's in some of the police reports that you see, that's huge, and it's really hard to rebuild that rapport," he says. "Timing is everything, and I think that is giving a lot of momentum to the Steven Avery case because of the theme of not trusting our justice system."
That said, the long-time criminal justice insider feels there are many cases that deserve the spotlight more than Avery's. At the top of his list are cases like that of Kimberly Long, who was wrongly convicted of the 2003 murder of Oswaldo "Ozzy" Conde, according to the California Innocence Project, and Brian Banks, who instead of playing football on scholarship for USC, spent five years in prison for an imaginary rape of a high school classmate. Banks, 17 at the time, was denied the right to speak to a parent and was coerced into accepting a plea deal to avoid even more jail time and copped to committing a rape he knew never occurred.
"He gets out five years later, and the girl that accused him contacts him on Facebook and he doesn't reach out to her, but she wants to let bygones be bygones. He does the right thing, he gets a private investigator and contacts an attorney, and long story short, she admits that she and her mom made up the whole thing," Bolaños explains. "They sued the city of Long Beach and got a $4 million payoff because it happened on school campus and they failed to provide a safe environment for this girl, but at the end of the day she and her mom made the whole thing up so they could sue the school, make some bank at the end. He ends up getting completely exonerated because everything's caught on video, with her admission to setting him up, and he continues on with his life and he gets another shot at the NFL. It's an incredible case. There's a guy that did five years in prison, was on five years as a registered sex offender, and his life turned completely upside down, and mind you, he comes from a solid background, solid family, never in trouble with the law, which is an indicator that you might want to look harder at this case. But he basically turned himself around. He's probably the best case on a national level of someone who is wrongly accused, and he works for the NFL today."
While cases like Long's and Banks' are a much higher priority than Avery's in Bolaños' expert opinion, he thinks the "Making A Murderer" phenomenon can be a constructive one.
"The series is a very positive window into what occurs in our justice system on a daily basis, and it's going to bring clarity and hopefully transparency to future cases when it comes to our system," says the investigator. "Unless these types of things happen to someone you know, a relative, somebody you care about, you're probably going to be blind to it unless it lands right at your footstep."
