As Slog's resident "person who cares too much about Making a Murderer," it falls to me to tell you about a new interview up today on the Marshall Project with Penny Beernsten, whose testimony sent Steven Avery to prison for 18 years.
"I absolutely wanted the earth to swallow me," she says about hearing that she had put away the wrong guy.
The Marshall Project is "a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the American criminal justice system." Beernsten touches on a few of the facts Making a Murderer viewers might remember from the early episodes, including the flawed photo/lineup procedure for identifying her assailant and that fact about her assailant's underwear. As she testified, her assailant wore white underwear; as you learn from Making a Murderer, Steven Avery didn't own underwear. The poverty of the Avery family is one reason, the series argues, Avery didn't get a fair shake.
In the interview with Marshall Project, Beernsten reflects on the underwear thing specifically:
I would find a way to explain away any bit of information that suggested he was innocent. In the trial, I had testified that when the perpetrator unzipped his pants and exposed himself, I saw white fabric and I assumed he was wearing white underwear. His wife testified that Steve never wore underwear, he didnât own any underwear. So that troubled me. But then one day Iâm hanging clothes on a clothesline outside and I see the white pockets on the jeans and I think, Oh, thatâs why I saw white.
She also mentions that, after getting out of prison, Avery asked her to buy a house for him. Ugh. This whole story is so sad.
More of my thoughts on Making a Murderer here and here.
