The Four Confessions of Brendan Dassey – Postscript
Despite all the hoopla and the attempts to make a murder conviction of Steven Avery a slam dunk, there were troubles for Special Prosecutor, Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz.
Avery was an example of the result bad law enforcement that culminated in his false conviction many years earlier. As soon as there was a possibility that Avery was involved in the October 2005 disappearance and murder of Teresa Halbach all efforts were focused on incriminating him.
The trouble was that Avery had an alibi witness.
Avery’s sixteen‑year‑old nephew Brendan Dassey was the problem since he placed Avery’s vehicle in the Avery garage. Police wanted the Halbach vehicle placed there instead. And, Dassey’s statements were contrary to the desires of Kratz since Dassey’s timeline would not support the State’s case .
Dassey was a special education student at the Mishicot, Wisconsin High School. It was at his school on 27 February 2006 that the lead investigators, Calumet County Investigator Mark Wiegert and Wisconsin Special Agent Tom Fassbender, began grooming Dassey to become the fall guy.
The initial session at Mishicot High School contained most of the elements that the investigators believed they needed to able to incriminate Avery. These included placing the Halbach SUV in the Avery garage; Avery killing Halbach; burning the body; and placing some of the items found in a burn barrel days after the search of the Avery property took place.
These were among the themes that the interrogators returned to in the subsequent interrogations. I compiled a list of first mentions regarding the themes. This list is available as a PDF file.
What I found was that the interrogators made the vast majority of the first mentions. Of the seventeen that I listed, fourteen were first stated by Tom Fassbender or Mark Wiegert. At the Mishicot High School session, the investigators introduced twelve of their fourteen pushing points.
At the Manitowoc County interrogation on 01 March, 2006, throat cutting was first mentioned by Dassey as a guess when investigators pushed for a statement about shooting. Dassey had no idea what they wanted. There was no evidence to corroborate the elaborate story elicited from Dassey after that statement. In all the sessions, there was little consistency in Dassey’s story of the events except he always returned to saying that the Avery vehicle was in the Avery garage instead of the Halbach SUV.
One of the themes that Fassbender introduced immediately was that Dassey was feeling bad. This was the putative reason for the meeting at Mishicot High School and the two interrogators kept stating this as a reason for Dassey’s guilt. They used this throughout the case as an excuse for the interrogations.
All Dassey’s attorneys were remiss in not challenging this claim. The only reason for the interrogations was for the Special Prosecutor Ken Kratz to have a reasonable case. Fassbender and Wiegert coerced Dassey’s fifteen‑year‑old cousin to become a victim of threats and to give false testimony. It appears that the prosecution was also depending on the teenage girl to give medical testimony. This backfired at trial.
The State had problems with the inconsistencies between the various sessions. The only way to deal with this was to suppress the three recorded session that fit the least with the claims of the State.
There was another reason for the State to suppress the earlier sessions. These sessions clearly show the interrogators were telling Dassey what they wanted from the start.
The prosecution friendly Manitowoc County Judge Jerome Fox allowed the suppression of the sessions requested by the prosecution. Thus, the judge allowed the State to pick and choose what evidence it needed and denied the defense access to important evidence of police misconduct.
Plus, Dassey’s defense attorney allowed the State to suppress a portion of the Manitowoc County session used in court. That omission showed Dassey recanting the confession.
The two interrogators were unwilling or unable to understand that they were force feeding what they wanted from Brendan Dassey. They were clearly unwilling to accept anything that was contrary to the needs of the prosecution. They were railroading an innocent human being.
Tom Fassbender attempted to add a couple more of his own wrinkles. He tried to get a statement from Dassey that he was raped by his uncle. Fassbender also tried to make a Satanism connection because that is what Fassbender attached to October 31.
A curious aspect was the lack of evidence to corroborate the confession used at trial. This lead to State employed witnesses to claim that no evidence meant evidence. The manner of the various statements suggests that they were speaking from the same script.
The interrogators had canned responses to why they did not test crucial pieces of evidence. They claimed that the crime scene was cleaned so well that no trace of the victim could be found. Or they claimed that they already tested too much evidence.
During the closing arguments, Wisconsin Special Prosecutor Tom Fallon argued a scenario that had been developed during the Sheboygan County interrogation session. The fact that this was suppressed by the judge did not stop Fallon from using it. For some reason, defense attorneys did not object to this.
Clearly Dassey was targeted from the start because of the need of law enforcement and prosecution to incriminate Steven Avery in the disappearance and murder of Teresa Halbach. Brendan Dassey was an alibi witness and therefore had to be taken out.
by Brian McCorkle
in category Brendan Dassey
