On average, they checked up on him about four times a day. He was under constant surveillance by the department after a string of disturbing sexual crimes and had had a detail of police assigned to track his movements for the 13 days leading up to the Beerntsen attack. There’s good reason for the Manitowoc city police to suspect Allen. Bergner recalls Kocourek responding, “We’ve got our man.” Shortly after his arrest, Manitowoc Police Detective Thomas Bergner visited Sheriff Kocourek and told him about Allen. It didn’t take long for people in law enforcement to note the attack on Penny Beerntsen sounded like the work of Gregory Allen. The sheriff didn’t want him to be able to talk to anybody, including a lawyer. “So I went over and asked to see him and the deputy told me that the sheriff (Kocourek) had told him to leave him off the jail list, that he not be given access to the phone, which is illegal, that he not be allowed any visitors, and that he be held in a cell block all by himself so he could have no contact with anybody. And the only reason I knew he was in jail - and they knew I was his lawyer because Man is a small town - a lawyer called me and told me he was in jail.” “And that was so the public defender could go in and make sure they had an attorney for the first appearance. “The public defender’s office gets a list every day of people who were arrested the night before,” Evans, Avery’s lawyer, says in Making a Murderer. And here’s where things start to get really strange. At 11:30 on the night of the attack, Avery was arrested at his home by Manitowoc Deputy Kenneth Petersen, who would later become sheriff. It was also enough for Avery to be picked up. Plus she had the sheriff’s deputy saying ‘I think it sounds like this guy.’ That’s pretty suggestive.” “And then she sees a lineup later and Steven is the only person she’s seen before. “So they show Penny Beerntsen Steven’s picture,” she says in Making a Murderer. Steven Avery’s lawyer Reesa Evans was not happy with the way any of that went. They then showed her a lineup of mugshots with the image of Avery. They presented that image to Beerntsen, who confirmed it looked like the assailant. brown).Īccording to Deputy Arland Avery (Steven Avery’s uncle), Sheriff Kocourek’s right hand man Deputy Sheriff Gene Kusche made a composite drawing based not on Penny Beerntsen’s description but a copy of Steven Avery’s mugshot from the incident with his cousin (a charge Kusche denies). blue), and different hair color (blonde vs. That’s despite several key differences in Penny’s original written statement between the perpetrator and Avery: different height (5-foot-11 vs 5-foot-1), different builds (athletic vs. Avery was charged with two felonies: endangering safety regardless of life and being a felon in possession of a firearm.īut where things go really bad for Avery is when Deputy Judy Dvorak takes Beerntsen’s statement after her assault and tells her superiors the perpetrator sounds like Avery. Morris was married to a deputy sheriff and Steven’s lawyer Reesa Evans contends is the reason he had the book thrown at him. The following evidence was gathered from depositions made during the 2004 Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office investigation into the handling of the Penny Beerntsen / Steven Avery case, Avery’s 2005 civil suit against Manitowoc County, and the Making A Murderer documentary itself.īefore the Penny Beerntsen case, the Manitowoc Sheriff’s Department had come down like a ton of bricks on Steven Avery in another case where he ran his cousin Sandra Morris off the road. Let’s take a deep look at that original case and the relationship between Steven Avery and the sheriffs of Manitowoc County. A strong accusation, but it all starts to make sense when you look into his treatment by them in his 1985 case. When Steven Avery was again arrested in 2005 for the murder of Teresa Halbach, he claimed he was being framed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department. DNA evidence would free him in 2003, revealing the true culprit to be Gregory Allen, a man with an extensive rap sheet that local police were actively monitoring at the time of the crime. While the trial in Netflix’s popular crime documentary Making a Murderer takes place in 2006, the story behind it spans back all the way to 1985, when Steven Avery was first jailed for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen.
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