Steven Avery

Steven Avery, born on July 9, 1962 was born and raised in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Avery’s parents, Dolores Avery and Allan Avery owned an auto salvage yard that Steven Avery worked at in his earlier years. Steven Avery and his family were not really liked in the town and mostly stayed to themselves. The Avery’s believed that the town’s people thought very little of them and always isolated them around town. At the age of 22, Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape. Avery’s first incident with the law was when he was 18; March 1981, Avery was convicted of raiding a bar with a friend and sentenced to two years in prison. The sentence was stayed and instead Avery served ten months in the Manitowoc County Jail, he was placed on probation for

Avery fought several times for an appeal, but each time was denied. Fortunately for Avery, a petition for DNA testing was granted in 1995 and showed that scrapings taken of Beernsten’s fingernails contained the DNA of an unknown person. The tests were unable to eliminate Avery, however, and a movement for a new trial was denied. In April of 2002, attorneys for the Wisconsin Innocence Project obtained a court order for DNA testing of 13 hairs recovered from Beernsten at the time of the crime. The state crime laboratory reported that, using the FBI DNA database, it had linked a hair to Gregory Allen, a convicted felon who bore a striking resemblance to Avery. Allen was then serving a 60-year prison term for a sexual assault in Green Bay that occurred after the attack on Beernsten. On September 11, 2003, a request brought by the Manitowoc District Attorney’s Office and the Wisconsin Innocence Project to dismiss the charges was granted and Avery was released. In 2005, with support from Beernsten and Avery, the Wisconsin Department of Justice implemented a model eyewitness identification procedure. Unfortunately for Avery, that wasn’t going to be his only bad encounter with justice. On October 31, 2005, photographer Teresa Halbach was scheduled to meet with Steven Avery at his home on the grounds of Avery 's Auto Salvage to photograph a minivan for Auto Trader Magazine. She went missing the same day.On November 11, Avery was charged with the murder of Halbach after her car and overdone bone fragments were found at the salvage yard. He upheld that authorities were attempting to frame him for Halbach 's vanishing to make it harder for him to win his pending civil case regarding the false sexual assault conviction. To avoid a conflict of interest, Mark R. Rohrer, the Manitowoc County district attorney, requested that authorities from bordering Calumet County lead the investigation. Manitowoc County authorities remained involved in the case, however, leading to