Making a Murderer star reporter Aaron Keller, a.k.a. the “silver fox” of the Netflix docuseries, revealed what questions from Steven Avery‘s case still eat away at him in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
Keller worked at Green Bay, Wisconsin’s local NBC affiliate from 2004 to 2007 and was one of the standout reporters to cover the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and Avery’s subsequent trial. Keller — who told RS that he has yet to watch the entire series — now has a law degree and teaches at a university in New Hampshire. Ten years later, however, questions about the case continue to nag him.
“One of the big questions has been whether Avery’s fingerprints could have, in theory, survived on the Halbach vehicle — assuming that he had touched it — and I’m trying to remember whether there was a really bad thunderstorm within those first couple of days when she was reported missing, when they were looking for her,” Keller recalled, “because my memory seems to indicate that there might have been. Because if there was a deluge, would it have wiped away some potential evidence? But it might have been when they were searching like a year later, because there were a couple of searches in there.” (According to the case, Avery’s perspiration, his “sweat DNA,” was found under the hood of Halbach’s car by authorities. The question is whether cops planted Avery’s DNA.)
“I remember being there [the NBC26 newsroom] with the fax came in,” Keller recalled of Halbach’s disappearance. “I remember holding it in my hand, looking at it and discussing it … The next major element in the story was actually broken by a competitor and, to this day, I’m not quite sure where the information came from. The next element of [the story] was that Steven Avery was the last person to have seen her, and that story was broken by WBAY-TV in Green Bay. And I remember we immediately called and confirmed it and had it on the air within a couple of minutes of when they had it on the air, but I want to know how they got that.”
To Keller, the source who passed along that information “raises the question of whether Steven Avery called them and told them he was the last one to see her, or did law enforcement call them and tell them that he was the one who had seen her?” he reflected. “And the answer to that question — I don’t know if it’s worth anything. To some conspiracy theorist it might be.”
Keller claimed that the station that obtained the info, WBAY-TV, had close ties to authorities. “It paints a picture, potentially, of the media environment in Green Bay at the time. Channel 2 in Green Bay was the legacy station that had primarily been number one through most of its existence, and to this day, they are pretty tight with the law-enforcement community,” he shared. “We [employees of the NBC affiliate] were mostly outsiders. They were insiders. We were more apt to ask really tough questions because we weren’t friends with people from elementary school who worked other jobs in that area. So there were some elements of stories that the NBC station was not able to break because we didn’t have entrenched friendships.”
Since the docuseries’ release, Making a Murderer’s filmmakers, Avery’s former lawyers, his ex-fiancées and many other key figures related to the case have spoken out. Watch Us Weekly‘s six burning questions in the video above!
