'Making A Murderer' Attorney Pushes For Access To Halbach's RAV4

Three days after Steven Avery's post-conviction lawyer sustained a major setback in her quest to prove her client's innocence, Kathleen Zellner filed a motion asking Sheboygan judge Angela Sutkiewicz to grant Zellner permission to conduct a series of extensive forensic tests upon the Toyota RAV4 of murder victim Teresa Halbach. Zellner filed her motion Friday asking the court to vacate Tuesday's surprise ruling that rejected Avery's bid for a new trial, a ruling that wasn't anticipated for many more months. Avery is the convicted killer from Wisconsin who gained world-wide attention after the Netflix documentary "Making a Murderer."

"At the time the order was granted, the parties through Defendant Attorney Kathleen Zellner and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Fallon had an agreement that further testing would take place on certain evidentiary items," Zellner's filing from Friday states. "The parties also had an agreement that the previously filed Motion for Relief would be amended."

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In sum, Zellner wants the Wisconsin judge to basically rescind Tuesday's ruling on the grounds that the judge acted in a premature fashion. The testing that the Wisconsin Attorney General's Office agreed to support, on September 18, Zellner wrote the judge, covers the following critical items of evidence:

1. The RAV4 would be available to Zellner's nationally renowned scientists Dr. Karl Reich and Christopher Palenik so they could examine and swab the RAV4's battery cables, the bar underneath the driver's seat, the hood crutch and interior hood release.

2. A complete forensic exam of the inside and outside of the RAV4. "The prosecution stated that they would schedule the examination of the RAV4 testing in the very near future before the weather worsened," Zellner wrote Friday.

3. Access to the license plates for Halbach's vehicle. The pair of plates were not found on the vehicle at the time the RAV4 was found on the back edge of the 40-acre Avery Salvage Yard on Saturday, November 5, six days after Halbach vanished. Zellner suspects the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, notably road patrol Sgt. Andrew Colborn, had removed the license plates from the vehicle because Colborn found the vehicle at a different site other than Avery's property. Zellner contends that Colborn and Detective Jim Lenk were responsible for moving the RAV4 onto the Avery property to ensure Avery was arrested for Halbach's disappearance and murder. The license plates turned up on Tuesday, November 8, 2005 inside a junked station wagon on the Avery property that was in close proximity to Avery's red trailer. The station wagon had no windows on it, making it easy for a cop to plant evidence here, if that's what transpired. Lenk and Colborn are suspected of being dirty cops, according to other court documents submitted by Zellner.

4. Access to the lug wrench that turned up inside Halbach's RAV4. The lug wrench was downplayed during the original murder investigation because it didn't fit into prosecutor Ken Kratz's theory of how Avery committed the murder inside his tiny bedroom and his cluttered detached garage.

5. Access to the charred pelvic bones found at the Manitowoc County quarry. Avery's prosecutor Kratz scoffed at the idea that these pelvic bones were even human at the time of Avery's 2007 murder trial. Avery's lawyers Dean Strang and Jerry Buting argued the pelvic bones were an enormous piece of evidence because they raised the likelihood that Halbach was murdered or dismembered at one of the quarries behind Avery's property, roughly a half-mile away. "The prosecutors agreed that Drs. Steven Symes and Leslie Eisenberg would be allowed to do a microscopic examination of the pelvic bones located in the Manitowoc County gravel pit," Zellner informed the judge Friday.

6. Under the agreement hatched with the Wisconsin attorney general's office, Zellner stated, she agreed "to remove the issues of ethical violations perpetrated by prosecutor Kenneth Kratz" and "remove the references to brain fingerprinting tests of Steven Avery performed by Dr. Lawrence Farwell."

On Friday, Zellner told Patch that she had a message to her legions of Making A Murderer fans to keep the faith. Zellner, who is one of the country's most prolific wrongful conviction lawyers, pointed out that most exonerees are victorious at the appeals court levels, not at the state courts level, which is where Avery's case is currently. Still, she said, it's almost unheard of for a sitting judge to reject a post-conviction motion on a wrongful conviction claim without even conducting an evidentiary hearing to weigh the merits of the lawyers' arguments from both sides.

"This is not the end of the road," Zellner said. "This is the first time in one of our cases that (a judge) has not allowed us to have an evidence hearing ... We just want an opportunity to test all the evidence. We already have very powerful evidence and the most powerful, we have not had the opportunity to file it yet."

Steven Avery image via Wisconsin Department of Corrections