Following the news that there will be a second season of Making a Murderer, interest in Steven Avery's case has been piqued once more. However for the internet sleuths out there working the case, they've never given up on trying to prove Steven Avery's innocence.
They've come up with a few good theories too, and most recently a pretty solid piece of evidence that could work in Avery's favour. It involves a piece of bone that was found on the sight of Avery's fire pit which was said to have been Teresa Halbach, however on closer inspection, it appears to be the bone of a bird.
In Avery's trial, the prosecution claimed that the fire had obliterated her remains, leaving only tiny bone fragments without any DNA left. This bird bone brings up the question of how that could have come through the fire in tact and Teresa Halbach's been reduced to flakes, while it also ties in with the defense's claim that Avery often used the fire to dispose of deer, rodents and fowl.
IDing Teresa's remain was done with one small bit of tissue that had just enough DNA for a test. However, the test has to have a reading of 16 points to be usable. The lab only got results of seven. During the trial, the forensic scientist Shelley Culhane said the chance of it being anyone other than Halbach was “one in a billion", however the actual statistic would be much much lower than that.
During the trial, the defense said; "It is unclear whether some, all, or none of the fragments had been previously determined by the state’s forensic anthropologist to be human or not. In short, the defense has no way of knowing from this cryptic report what was sent to and examined by the FBI Lab."
It's yet another example of the dodgy proceedings that went with the evidence gathering before Steven Avery's arrest, and will no doubt be addressed by his new lawyer Kathleen Zellner when she files new evidence for an appeal later this month.
Via Uproxx
