Nancy Grace is not messing around. The HLN host and legal expert appeared on CNN on Wednesday, January 13, to discuss why she’s so convinced that Making a Murderer subject Steven Avery is guilty, and it comes down to something he allegedly disclosed to her during an interview several years ago.
Grace said that Avery once told her he was in the very pit where the remains of the victim, Teresa Halbach, were found back in 2005. “I think he’s guilty of the murder because he told me to my face that Teresa was there in his auto salvage pit the day she goes missing around 2 ‘o clock,” Grace said. “He concealed his identity with *67 to call her twice to get her to come over and then called her after he kills her, letting his identity show up on the phone record going, ‘Hey, you never showed up, what happened? But then fast-forward, he tells me, she came. So what’s the cover-up about?”
She cited key evidence. “All 270 plus bones are found burned in his salvage pit along with her tooth and the ribbons off of her blue jeans,” Grace told CNN. “Another witness says that night, they see Steven Avery tending the fire in his backyard. Her car found on his property . . . His perspiration is found under the hood of her car . . . He did this thing!”
Grace’s HLN show scored an exclusive interview with Avery’s ex-fiancee, Jodi Stachowski, which aired on Wednesday night. During the sit-down, Stachowski said she believed that Avery was “not innocent.” She also claimed that she “ate two boxes of rat poison” to “get away from him.”
“When I hear this woman, it’s so much more than that,” Grace, 56, told CNN on Wednesday. “He actually told her that if she did not make him ‘look good’ on the Netflix documentary, it was that or else. He beat her to a bloody pulp on numerous occasions and we have dug and found a police report to document that. He is even writing her from behind bars and threatening her that he can get her framed and make her land behind bars … None of that made it into the Netflix documentary.”
(The directors behind the 10-part series, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, explained to Vox why they chose to omit certain moments from Avery’s trial. “We looked to the [prosecution] to take our cues on what to include. So we included the things they said were the cornerstones of their case against Steven Avery,” Demos explained.)
On Making a Murderer, Stachowski defended her ex-fiancé — but retracted her words while speaking to HLN in her interview. “According to this woman … she told Netflix that she doesn’t want to be in it, but she ends up in it anyway!” Grace told CNN.
The longtime TV personality has made her sentiments about Avery widely known. At the winter TCAs in Pasadena, California, this past weekend, Grace told Us Weekly and other reporters: “It’s not what I think. It’s what I know. Steve Avery is guilty. He murdered Teresa Halbach. He and his nephew [Brendan Dassey] raped and murdered her. I love Making a Murderer. It’s beautifully put together, it’s just leaving out about 60 or 70 percent of the evidence. I don’t think our justice system should be on the shoulders of two film students. I remember interviewing Steve Avery while we were still looking for Teresa … My knowledge at that time and now is that he brutally murdered this girl. True, he was wrongly convicted on a previous charge, and that’s a miscarriage of justice too. But he killed Teresa Halbach.”
Watch her make her case above.
