A Wisconsin Reporter Thinks Steven Avery's Guilty

A local radio reporter who was in the courtroom during Steven Avery's trial has slammed Making A Murderer, saying it was based on "innuendo and insinuations" about motive — and not actual evidence. The reporter, Dan O'Donnell, a conservative commentator with a law degree who has his own show on WISN in Milwaukee, covered the case against Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, who are both behind bars, serving time for the murder of Theresa Halbach. Unlike many viewers of the series, he thinks Avery's guilty, and he's covering the case once again to explain why.

O'Donnell was just 25 when he started covering the case for WTMJ, his former station, and he can actually be seen in the Netflix series at news conferences and walking the courthouse halls. He told a local Wisconsin TV station that he never thought it would get so much attention. "I never realized it would be this big. I never thought it would become this global phenomenon," O'Donnell told WTAQ's Melissa Barclay. He has started his own podcast on the matter entitled Rebutting A Murderer, delving into evidence he thinks Making A Murderer left out or downplayed that leads him to think Avery did it — beyond any reasonable doubt.

He say's he's confident Avery that guilty. Avery was convicted of the murder of Teresa Halbach, but has always maintained that he is innocent.

Yes, justice absolutely was served. Any doubt is not reasonable doubt...and it is not reasonable to base reasonable doubt on a conspiracy to plant evidence unless there is affirmative evidence that that conspiracy existed. ... Nowhere was their affirmative evidence of anyone planting any evidence against Steven Avery. There was just innuendo and insinuations based on supposed motivation.

His podcast can be heard on iHeartRadio and his own radio station's website. He said that as he watched Making A Murderer, he realized that the narrative on the series did not match what he remembered. He told Adweek:

I was like, "Wait a second, that's not how I remember it." It was Steven Avery's story. It got me thinking that this was just one side of the story. This was one perspective. The Avery family's perspective. I think people owe it to themselves to get the other side of the story. To get another view on this. To take into account the evidence that was either omitted or glossed over. I decided to tell that other side of the story. Let's let people watch the series, listen to my podcast and decide for themselves.

The single biggest piece of evidence in O'Donnell's mind? He told Billy Hallowell and Chris Field on the podcast The Church Boys that he thinks it's the bullet fragment with Halbach's DNA. "There was almost, literally a smoking gun found. To me, it was the bullet," he told Hallowell and Field.

His last installment of the podcast talks about one of the other individuals featured on the documentary that has since accused Avery of guilt, Jodi Stachowski. That's his ex-fiancee, who went on Nancy Grace's HLN show to accuse Avery of a violent past and threatening her to keep quiet about it.

In the end it won't be Making A Murderer or Rebutting A Murderer that decide Avery's fate. Avery's new lawyer Kathleen Zellner is still pushing for an exoneration. Many of her tweets talk about planted DNA evidence. Stay tuned and catch up on the series on Netflix if you still haven't seen it.