Nobody can stop talking about Making a Murderer. Whether it’s a rap song or a failed quest for a presidential pardon, Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey have become overnight superstars in the fight for exoneration. The documentary series advanced a fairly comprehensive case that Avery and Dassey were not given fair trials, and that seems to be the prevailing sentiment among most of its viewers.
So it should come as no surprise that when series creators Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos sat down with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, that they would continue in that line of argument.
Colbert asked the question on everybody’s mind: Is Steven Avery guilty?
"I mean, my personal opinion is that the state did not meet its burden either in Steven Avery's case or Brendan Dassey's case," Ricciardi told him. "So I would say, in my opinion, not guilty."
"I mean there are things that he could be guilty, but is he guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Nothing I've seen, and I've seen a lot of stuff, nothing I've seen has convinced me of that," Demos said.
But Avery’s ex-fiancee Jodi Stachowski has a very different perspective on things. In an interview with Nancy Grace producer Natisha Lance, Stachowski dropped a bombshell.
“What do you want people to know?” Lance asked.
“The truth,” Stachowski said.
“Which is?”
“What a monster he is. And he’s not innocent.”
That seems like a pretty unequivocal statement from someone that’s as close to Avery as can be. Stachowski went on to say that she had received letters from Avery while he was incarcerated — the two have broken up — of which she’s opened only one. That letter was filled with threats.
"I ate two boxes of rat poison just so I could go the hospital… and get away from him, and ask them to get the police to help me," she told Lance.
Her response to whether or not she ever loved Avery was similarly unequivocal: “No.”
The full interview, which represents Stachowski’s first public statements since the docuseries was released, will air Wednesday night at 8 PM on HLN.