Was Steven Avery, a man already wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for sexual assault, railroaded by the Wisconsin legal system on charges of rape and murder back in 2005? Did Making A Murderer, the popular Netflix documentary series about his case, withhold crucial, damning evidence against Avery in order to better make its case for his innocence? These are just some of the questions that have ignited the imaginations of amateur criminologists across the nation. In the weeks since the show debuted in December, Making A Murderer fans have been doing their own investigations into the Steven Avery case and the murder of Teresa Halbach. And now, Uproxx is reporting that these efforts have yielded some dividends. As a result of an ongoing FundAnything campaign, transcripts of Avery’s 27-day trial are now available at a site called StevenAveryCase.org. Visitors to the site can, at their leisure, search through PDFs of trial transcripts. The initial success of this campaign can be partially attributed to the active Making A Murderer subreddit.
But the campaign is not over. Its organizers have further financial goals, each one tied to the release of more documents related to the Steven Avery case. With a few thousand dollars more in donations, fans of Making A Murderer will have access to additional evidence exhibits and transcripts of some pre- and post-trial hearings in the case. Anything collected beyond $9,000 in this fundraiser will be donated to The Innocence Project, a nonprofit endeavor devoted to exonerating and freeing those who have been wrongly convicted. Whether Steven Avery belongs under that definition is still being debated, but at least now viewers will have more evidence with which to make their judgments.