Episode 284: Teresa Halbach

The First Degree

Alexis Linkletter and Jac Vanek

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.5 • 10K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Halloween, 2005, a 25-year-old woman disappears in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Almost a week later, search parties find her Toyota RAV4 concealed in a salvage yard business where the young woman was last headed for a work assignment. Utimately, the property owner and his young nephew are convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. 10 years later, the documentary series ‘Making A Murderer’ raised serious questions about the men’s guilt, including allegations of police corruption in framing at least one of the killers, who had previously been previously wrongfully convicted. The much-lauded series went on to win awards for what many were led to believe was a balanced presentation of all the facts. But the filmmakers had in fact omitted key evidence contradicting their narrative. In episode 284, Jac and Alexis detail the tragic murder of Teresa Halbach at the hands of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, and how the fallout of exposing unethical media practices proves that consumers of true crime content should always be thinking critically.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a degree.
0:02.0	First degree.
0:04.0	First degree.
0:05.0	First degree.
0:06.0	First degree.
0:07.0	The first degree.
0:08.0	The first degree.
0:09.0	You see it on the news.
0:10.0	See it on the paper, you see it on Facebook.
0:13.0	These things are supposed to happen in movies, not real life.
0:16.0	We have mutual friends who told me that they were sort of boxed in and that they were pressured.
0:28.0	And when I saw Netflix's notes to the filmmakers, I understood what they meant by that.
0:34.0	They were being pushed by Netflix a certain direction
0:37.4	to make law enforcement look worse.
0:39.8	If you're going to entertain, say it's entertainment, if you're going to make an advocacy piece,
0:44.5	don't call it a documentary or don't keep hopping back and forth like these filmmakers did.
0:49.4	They changed facts and edited testimony and did some things that I as a filmmaker would never have done.
0:56.0	I decided that I would go ahead and make the response piece and that's what convicting a murderer is.
1:00.0	My goal was that this creates enough of the groundswell,
1:03.8	that filmmakers get together and create a voluntary code
1:07.0	of ethical standards that we can adopt
1:09.5	so that the public is ensured that we're not bending facts in our storytelling for the sake of a good plot.
	...

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