"Making A Murderer - The Tale of Sheriff Hermann," Published on February 20, 2016 by The Other Side Productions
- Cleveland Salvage seems to have taken the county salvage/tow business away from the Averys.
- The nurse who took Avery's groin swabs was Hermann's neighbor.
- In that same small area and within a stones throw of each other are Remiker, Kocourek and Jacobs, as well as Hermann and the address given by this nurse. Also shocking is that this area is a reclaimed Radandt quarry from the 1950's...and very close to where the body of Debbie Sukowaty was found in 1977...
- In all Wisconsin counties the sheriff has towing car theft rings. Sawyer County Wisconsin is the worst with charges of $1200 for a sheriff's tow in most of the county. Towing, phone call, and food service kickbacks make sheriffs rich.
- I participated in a discussion (non-reddit) way back in December 2015, with a person who said she was an area resident. She said, specifically, "the answer is in the land records."
In July of 1985, the salvage yard owned by Sheriff Hermann's family (Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage, which has a smelter) was annexed land (image above). That's the same month of the Penny Beerntsen rape. They were in competition with the Avery's, and it's not a stretch to say it had an impact on business. It's truly weird to allege annexation as a special benefit without offering any commentary as to why it would be characterized that way. Typically, businesses fight annexation like hell in the Midwest because the primary outcome is a higher property tax bill. It's not so much that it's a motive to frame Avery in 1985, but it's a reason to keep your mouth shut about Gregory Allen being guilty. Just another person with a vested interest in seeing Steven Avery going to jail. [Source]
Current Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann was undersheriff when Teresa Halbach disappeared on October 31, 2005.Citizen calling CASO dispatch on 11/10/05 at 7:23am:— NotAC (@Rookie1082) August 9, 2018
"I think Everybody forgot that Teresa's car left Steven Avery's property also. But it suddenly it appeared again 3 days later."#MakingAMurderer didn't start the chatter of a frame job. MTSO did.https://t.co/SUEBzUo4WF
The Hermann family has a long history in the Cleveland, Wisconsin, area.
GOTTLIEB HERMANN
http://www.2manitowoc.com/10obit.html
Gottlieb Hermann, 67, of Rt. 1, Cleveland, who died Wednesday at Providence Hospital, El Paso, Texas. Burial will be in a Sheboygan cemetery.
Mr. Hermann was born Sept. 20, 1900, at Schaeffer, Russia, son of the late Sophia and Christ Hermann. He came to Sheboygan in 1912, married Viola Kalk in 1923 and moved to Cleveland in 1929. He started the Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage Inc., formerly Cleveland Auto Parts, of which he was president.
He was a member of Manitowoc County Sheriff and Deputies Assn., the Wisconsin and National Sheiffs and Deputies Associations, Cleveland Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, Cleveland Fire Dept., Volga Aid Society and the Ebenezer Society of Sheboygan.
ROBERT KARL HERMANN
Gottlieb Hermann, 67, of Rt. 1, Cleveland, who died Wednesday at Providence Hospital, El Paso, Texas. Burial will be in a Sheboygan cemetery.
Mr. Hermann was born Sept. 20, 1900, at Schaeffer, Russia, son of the late Sophia and Christ Hermann. He came to Sheboygan in 1912, married Viola Kalk in 1923 and moved to Cleveland in 1929. He started the Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage Inc., formerly Cleveland Auto Parts, of which he was president.
He was a member of Manitowoc County Sheriff and Deputies Assn., the Wisconsin and National Sheiffs and Deputies Associations, Cleveland Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, Cleveland Fire Dept., Volga Aid Society and the Ebenezer Society of Sheboygan.
ROBERT KARL HERMANN
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=24792820
Robert Karl Hermann, age 82, of Cleveland, passed away on Monday, February 18, 2008, at Holy Family Memorial Medical Center in Manitowoc.
He was born March 11, 1925, in the Town of Centerville, the son of the late Gottlieb and Viola (Kalk) Hermann.
Robert served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the European and Pacific Theaters.
Robert worked for his father at Cleveland Auto Sales & Salvage, Inc., eventually becoming owner/operator of the business. During this time he also worked for the Manitowoc County Traffic Department as a traffic officer, retiring in 1974. He retired as owner/operator of Cleveland Auto in 1997 but he was still active in the business until his time of death.
ESTHER M. HERMANN
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/htrnews/obituary.aspx?pid=170946142
Esther M. Hermann, 86, of Cleveland, passed away Tuesday, May 06, 2014 at Holy Family Memorial Hospital, Manitowoc.
Esther was born April 26, 1928 in Port Washington to the late Edward and Anna (Kleckner) Biever. On November 27, 1948, she married Robert Hermann. She was employed by Cleveland Auto Sales as the secretary/treasurer.
Esther is survived by four sons and two daughters.
Manitowoc is a Flat Circle
By aether_drift, TickTockManitowoc
September 3, 2016
I’ve posted fragments of this theory in several threads, but in this post, a more complete attempt to elucidate some of the confounding “emotional logic” I see in the primary agonists is offered... In particular, I am searching for a motive - or set of motives actually - that has an intuitive truth and explains the data points.
I also have to say that this theory is somewhat extreme, and may be distasteful and unlikely to some. But it is hardly more distasteful than the murder and burning of a young woman, a person who had every right to a full life and was clearly loved by many in her family and beyond. I have no concept of how something like this even happens, what kind of deranged people are involved. I in no way wish to darken Teresa Halbach's memory or life, but it seems like we are missing something essential in this case.
This is also an imaginative scenario that probably means I've watched too much television along the lines of True Detective, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet. So read this as fiction if you want… I'm certainly not going to defend this post any more than to say that it seems about as likely as anything else in this case. Or not. I don't know.
Rather than starting with the usual timelines and minutiae of the case, here are some things that bother me from an intuitive/psychological level:
I have difficulty with LE committing the murder of a young woman outright for $36m. I wouldn’t put it past a corrupt individual, but a widespread conspiracy just feels unlikely to me. Why TH? Couldn't it have been anybody visiting Steven Avery? My gut on Andy Colborn’s testimony is that he is telling the truth about the plates. He is not in on any conspiracy, was not by the RAV4 when he called the plates in, because he’s the kind of underling you want as a “true believer” or pawn in a much larger game articulated above his pay grade. I hate the idea of a widespread LE conspiracy in fact. One or two people at most.
The glance between Ryan Hillegas and Mike Halbach in the video clip where they discuss access to the Avery property contains unfathomable multitudes. Indeed almost all the statements of MH and RH have a strange quality to them that just feels off. In my opinion, these are not indicators of direct guilt in Teresa’s murder but rather reveal they know more than they can tell. The question is - what exactly are these two hiding?
The words and body language of SA come across as genuinely innocent to me. Yes, some of the facts of this case do point to him as the perp, but I confess to finding his denials believable from a emotional level. SA feels innocent to me... There is a tension between this apparent authenticity and the forensic “facts” of the case. This causes cognitive dissonance to me and many of us on this sub. It's an intuition you won't find over on SAIG for example.
I am personally at a loss to assign a violent, murderous motive to Bloedorn, RH, MH, Tom Pearce or others in the case that some consider suspects. While they could be direct players, I don’t personally get the sense that LE would bother involving these people (assuming LE killed TH) because of the risk to the conspiracy.
Teresa didn’t just photograph happy Midwestern families, she apparently also did erotic couples photography. The true complexity of her sexuality are in fact a question mark. I won’t be saying anything more about this than let’s just accept she was a curious person, artistic, and confident. If I classify her as similar to "edgier" young women I have known, one’s 20’s are time of risk taking and finding boundaries, sexual and otherwise. This is normal and healthy in my opinion. But this "edgier TH" may have been a foil to the straight-laced narrative of the Halbach family which has been seriously lacking in depth imho. We simply do not know much about TH and likely never will. Intuitively, I get a baby-Dyke vibe from her, just saying...
Dave and Sandra Begotka's testimony could have something to them. I’m going to assume two data points here are true: (1) They saw SA at the gas station around sundown October 31 (possibly exculpatory for SA), and (2) There was some kind of underground “Sex Club” activity in the Manitowoc area that catered to swing parties, etc. I find Dave at least as credible as anyone else but, in this case, that may not be saying much.
The deviant behavior of Ken Kratz was the tip of an disgusting iceberg of badness in Manitowoc. He very well could be involved at some level, but it isn't necessary. It's just an indicator of general sleaze tolerance in the area. KK, purveyor of fine Wisconsin sleaze. Barf.
So what am I saying exactly?
Let’s start with two men:
1. Man number one is a powerful Wisconsin businessman or politician, and
2. Man number two is highly placed in law enforcement.
I could assign some actual initials to these men, but let’s use the names Yellow King (YK) for the politician and Blue King (BK) for the law enforcement.
In Manitowoc, there is a sexual underground of sorts. Dave Begotka’s testimony suggest that at least one of these “clubs” is for closeted gay/bi men but it’s easy to imagine there is something similar for other tastes as well. The situation is swingers doing their swingin' thing in the long Midewestern Winters. With or without drugs, whatever, I don't care. Schwingers.
We know RH and TH were lovers in college but let's imagine that after, TH moves on from the confines of this more heteronormative relationship and begins experimenting with a lifestyle that RH is not particularly happy with. Still, he supports TH and they remain in contact. RH’s role is one of a supportive, if often bewildered, male friend. Teresa’s brothers also have a sense of their sister's sexual risk taking but are not aware of the depth of these curiosities. MH and RH discuss TH’s behavior from time to time. They both share a love for TH and I have no reason to question this at all. They are not suspects.
My theory has TH eventually going to some kind of Wisconsin underground sex parties and taking pictures of some sort. Is this shocking? I don't know. Perhaps it was her erotic couples photography that was the inroad to this lifestyle, perhaps it was through TP. Something feels a bit off with TP, like he knows more than he is telling us, but like most of the players here he doesn’t know the precise killer or circumstances of TH’s death. He is not the killer, he's a good guy for the most part, very supportive of TH and saddened by her murder.
Anyway, TH begins a relationship with a married man or woman, or some other highly placed person close to the YK.
Or perhaps she simply has a set of negatives of YK/BK in a compromising act.
At some point, she uses the existence of these photographs to exert leverage in a relationship either against a wife/husband for example, or simply for money.
Or perhaps she is asked to turn over this set of negatives but refuses.
I really don’t have any idea... What I do infer is that she is unaware of the consequences of using this leverage. She's in a real mess.
In October of 2005, YK and BK are at one of these swing parties.
The BK is getting serious heat because of the Avery depositions and the case is building towards a disastrous outcome for Manitowoc LE.
Similarly, the YK is about to be exposed - or at least fears some kind of exposure - by TH.
The harassing phone calls that TP describes TH getting may not be a stalker but, in fact, calls threatening her to turn over the negatives.
RH is involved here in the sense that TH has communicated enough details to make RH upset for his friend. He is calling and fighting with TH over her terrible situation. Part of this is RH carrying the flame for an old love, the other is simply him not “getting” her lifestyle choices and arguing the more conservative case. The point is, neither of these local kids really has any idea what they are dealing with. They are out of their depth, way the fuck out. And shit is getting real as Halloween approaches...
(I realize one weakness of this theory is assuming TH has the strength/wit to go up against some heavy hitters for some reason. Love? Revenge? A drug deal? For all I know, it was simple extortion - she wasn’t making much money from Auto Trader as we all know. If we had tax records etc. this might help. This is weak I realize.)
Anyway... as the Avery case nears a conclusion, the YK and BK hatch a plan to kill TH and plant the body on SA’s property as a way out of their situations.
TH becomes the victim of choice because she solves two problems.
The call to the Whitelaw tower is the "luring" call and is made after the Avery stop.
The killer is not necessarily YK or BK but, if not, I suspect a contract killer is possible. A person with a white Jeep. A person who is skilled and careful.
After TH is killed and her body burned (location TBD, could be quarry or other property), the voice mail deletions are made to obscure the link to YK/BK.
RH did crack into the Cingular system after these deletions (and this was outside the bounds of legality to a degree) but it was, in fact, innocent.
RH is never taken as a serious suspect by LE because the BK is directing everybody towards SA. They are acquiring evidence there after all, the car, then bones, blood, etc.
However, once TH is reported missing, RH and MH have a good sense of why TH was killed but they don’t know who...
As they attempt to solve the murder, organize a search party, etc., they are contacted and effectively THREATENED into cooperating with the Avery frame job by the BK. The language used would be along the lines of: “As you know, TH got too close to the flame - she was that type of girl. What we now need, RH, is for you to work with us. Can you do that? We wouldn’t want anyone else to get hurt now would we?”
When I watch RH and MH in the video clip, this is what I see: two people who care about TH deeply but are hiding something. In particular, there is an almost world-weary inevitability in MH’s expression over TH’s death. He doesn’t appear particularly surprised but almost resigned. The phrase “the grieving process could take days” is like, wtf? There is something so crazy off here I’m not sure what else to say.
To solidify the frame job, a certain detective "L" is brought into the setup by the Undersheriff.
So my bet on the BK’s identity is Undersheriff Hermann (UH).
Then UH with Detective Lenk (DL) take additional steps to nail SA.
There is no one else in LE involved at all. No one in LE physically commits the murder. We may never know who this person is actually.
I’m not even sure DL understands anything more about TH’s death than as a good foot soldier - he is told augment the evidence - which he does. This is not that uncommon, and I think most of LE members honestly believe SA killed TH.
So what does this model predict?
Here are some possible outcomes to look for in the coming months:
There will be no significant evidence of LE participation in the murder itself. We may get context hints that the blood, bullet, key were planted, but, most likely, we will not get inculpatory certainty from re-testing. Recall that UH trained at Quantico and was likely involved with the FBI.
God only knows what KZ is going to find in the RAV4 evidence. Maybe this will turn out to be planted, but this does not mean LE killed TH.
There will be no direct evidence to support RH, Lenk, Colborn, etc. in the murder.
There will, however, be cryptic and inconclusive evidence pointing to the real killer.
The cell tower data is one of these points. The deleted calls perhaps another.
But the 22 calls from LE to RH will not be particularly useful if we don’t ever identify the content of these calls. We need to know who precisely was on the other end of the line with RH and what they said. Otherwise these will simply be dismissed as “calls from LE to help organize the search party.” Which they were in a sense.
There may or may not be clear prints on the RAV4 from the killer. If he was a pro, I bet he wore gloves. But there might be some indication here, some odd evidence from geoforensics, etc. It's hard to say. This evidence will NOT match anyone in LE or others involved in the case (RH, AC, etc.). It will point to someone unknown to the case thus far.
Pam of God is not part of the direct murder conspiracy. She was directed, in a general way, to find the RAV4 by RH who was, in turn, directed by the BK up the chain. PoG believes SA killed TH and will continue to believe God directed her to the RAV4. I'm not sure what God thinks about all of this. PoG is actually helping cover up the real killer but doesn't realize it.
RH and MH don’t know the killer either, but they do have a glimpse into the dark underbelly of Manitowoc. They sensibly decide to play ball with the YK and BK and play their part. They do not know the identity of these men (though they may suspect certain people) but they fear for their own lives to this day. Maybe RH is coming forward now with Kathleen Zellner providing legal cover.
I don't think this case is necessarily going to be solved using forensics. The killers are not stupid, though KZ may get lucky on the blood C14 testing and spring SA on proving planting. But this doesn't mean we know who killed TH.
What I'm suggesting here is that there is no solving this case from the facts of the murder.
The killer is a cypher who will never be found.
TH's death was ultimately at the confluence of two motives that reinforced one another.
A. It had been shortly after the reporter called.
Q. I will bet. By telephone?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. And at that point, he told you that he had already decided to shift the primary responsibility for the investigation to the two other law enforcement agencies I described?
A. Yes.
Q. Did he tell you when he had made that decision?
A. No. He had talked about conferring with Corp Counsel and that was what he advised. Normally we follow his advice.
Q. You agreed with that advice?
A. Yes.
Q. You had a discussion with him on his reasoning?
A. Yes.
Q. And in a nutshell -- and you are free to disagree or explain this -- but in a nutshell, the reason he described to you, after consulting with Corporation Counsel, was to avoid the appearance or the reality of a conflict of interest?
A. Correct.
Q. Because at least a person of interest at that point was Steven Avery?
A. Yes.
Q. You were told that?
A. No, they didn't give me any specific suspects or people of interest. They merely stated that the vehicle had been found on the Avery Salvage Yard property.
Q. Correct. And what further information did you need, or ask for, or inquire about, to decide whether, in fact, there was a conflict of interest or the appearance of one?
A. I didn't need anything more than that at that point.
Q. Avery Auto Salvage Yard, car found, that was enough?
A. Sure.
Q. The reason you perceived, or you agreed with Inspector Hermann's assessment, that there was a potential conflict of interest, is that at that time a civil lawsuit by Steven Avery was pending against Manitowoc County and some former officials?
A. Correct.
Q. That was a civil lawsuit for 36 million dollars in damages?
A. Correct.
Q. It related to the 1985 conviction that you and I have discussed this morning?
A. Correct.
Q. Did you see that as a real and present conflict of interest on November 5?
A. I don't see it so much as a conflict of interest, I would say a prudent decision just to keep accusation free.
Q. All right. And what did you -- what did you understand the decision to be, in terms of the shifting of responsibility?
A. That the Calumet County Sheriff would run the investigation and I would pay for it.
Q. Okay. In addition to paying for the investigation, what role was the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department to play, if any?
A. Support.
Q. What does support mean?
A. Logistics, equipment, whatever they needed, manpower.
Q. So the Calumet County Sheriff, Mr. Pagel, was to communicate with you, or your department?
A. As far as?
Q. Logistics, support, manpower, whatever he needed?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. So he would request it of you, or someone in your department?
A. Yes.
Q. And then you would provide it?
A. Yes.
Q. The Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, in that way, continued to play an active role in the investigation into Ms Halbach's disappearance?
A. Yes, I believe so.
Q. You monitored the progress of that investigation?
A. No, I have never seen a report on the actual investigation.
Q. All right.
A. I have gotten copies of bills, we have had conferences on security, that type of thing.
Q. The guy in charge usually gets the bills.
A. Yeah.
Q. But in your department, reports generated by deputies, or detectives, or sergeants, or lieutenants, don't necessarily all come up to your desk?
A. Most of them do.
Q. And this one may have or haven't?
A. Have not.
Q. Why?
A. I divorced myself from the early investigation.
Q. You personally?
A. Correct.
Q. All right. When did that happen, Sheriff Petersen?
A. On that Saturday.
Q. Immediately?
A. Right.
Q. Okay. Who did you leave as the liaison, or the contact person, or the reviewing person within your department, for your department's role in the investigation?
A. Deputy Inspector Schetter.
Q. With a formal directive to him of some kind?
A. No.
Q. With a conversation?
A. No, I didn't talk to him. He may have talked to the inspector, he didn't talk to me.
Q. Oh. Okay. Do you know whether someone directed Deputy Inspector Schetter to play a reviewing role?
A. No.
Q. How do you know he is?
A. Because he was out at the scene with the sheriff and his people.
Q. All right. And who is getting the reports generated by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department on the Halbach investigation and, ultimately, the arrest and prosecution of Mr. Avery?
A. I would believe Calumet County Sheriff's Department would.
Q. Not Deputy Inspector Schetter?
A. Well, they would still be in our files, there would be copies there -- or originals there. The copies would be -- would be shipped.
Q. All right. I will see if I can do this efficiently, and the problem is, you may not know some of the facts I'm going to suggest to you.
A. Okay.
Q. Because it sounds like I have seen Manitowoc Sheriff's Department reports that you probably have not. All right?
A. Sure.
Q. But let me suggest these things and we'll see what you know and what you don't know, or what you dispute. All right. The first law enforcement officer to speak with -- speak personally with Steven Avery about Teresa Halbach, which was on November 3, was Sergeant Andrew Colborn of your department; is that right?
A. Don't know.
Q. One way or the other?
A. Yeah, don't know.
Q. You don't dispute that?
A. Yeah, I don't know.
Q. All right. The first law enforcement officers to search Mr. Avery's trailer, this time with consent, on Friday, November 4, were two members of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, Lieutenant Lenk and Detective Remiker?
A. I believe they were with a Calumet County officer.
Q. You think they may have been with a Calumet County officer?
A. I believe so.
Q. But you know that Lenk and Remiker --
A. Had been at the trailer.
Q. -- did a consent search of the trailer on Friday, November 4th?
A. Yes, I believe so.
Q. On Saturday, November 5, the first law enforcement officer, as opposed to citizen, unsworn citizen, to see Teresa Halbach's Toyota Rav 4, was a member of your department, Detective Remiker?
A. I don't know that.
Q. You don't dispute it, you just don't know one way or the other?
A. I don't know.
Q. All right. The first search of Mr. Avery's trailer, with a search warrant, occurred later on Saturday, November 5. And that involved, again, Detective Remiker of your department and Calumet County Investigator Gary Steier, or is that something you know?
A. That, I believe, is what I was referring to.
Q. All right. The first law enforcement officers that day to collect any suspected blood in Mr. Avery's trailer, or on it, was, again, Detective Remiker of your department, correct?
A. It's possible, yes.
Q. He gave that to Sergeant Colborn of your department?
A. That I don't know.
Q. Don't dispute, but just don't know?
A. Yeah.
Q. The detached garage between Mr. Avery's trailer and Barb Yanda's trailer, I believe first was searched pursuant to warrant on Sunday, November 6. Were you aware that Detective Remiker and Lieutenant Lenk and Sergeant Colborn, along with a Calumet County deputy, were the first law enforcement officers to search the detached garage?
MR. FALLON: Excuse me, your Honor, I'm going to impose an objection on this particular line of questioning as -- and the reason is, the previous testimony of Sheriff Petersen indicating that as of earlier that day, 11:30, 11:45, control of the investigation was passed. And given that fact, the fact that there may have been some logistical or support personnel provided by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department to assist in these searches or contacts, was all under the control and direction of Sheriff Pagel at Calumet County. Thus, this particular line of questioning, I would suggest to the Court, is irrelevant.
THE COURT: Mr. Strang.
ATTORNEY STRANG: Let me ask some clarifying questions, because I'm not necessarily in disagreement with the factual portion of Mr. Fallon's statement, and I will clarify that.
Q. (By Attorney Strang)~ Any actions that members of your department took after, let's say 11:30, on Saturday, November 5, you believe would have been taken with the knowledge, or under the direction, at the request, however you want to put it, of either the Calumet County Sheriff's Department or the DCI?
A. Correct.
Q. That is, neither you, nor Inspector Hermann, nor anybody above the level of the people in your department involved, were directing, or controlling, or supervising the steps of those people?
A. Correct.
Q. My -- And I think you and I are in agreement, I'm not trying to suggest otherwise, my questions really are just inquiring into who the boots on the ground were, who the people were, not who's directing them, or telling them what to do and not to do; do you understand me that way?
A. Correct.
Q. Okay. So with that limitation, Lenk, Remiker and Colborn, along with a Calumet deputy -- Calumet County deputy, were the first to search the detached garage on Sunday, November 6th?
MR. FALLON: I'm going to renew the objection. I understand counsel's point, but I still fail to see the relevance as it pertains to the motion to dismiss and/or the motion to exclude.
ATTORNEY STRANG: It bears more on the motion to exclude. I have moved to exclude not just Sheriff Petersen from further involvement in this case, supervising the jury, or in a logistical or support role to the Court, but have moved to exclude the entire department from providing that logistical or support role. So, I think this has a bearing, the involvement of others in the department clearly has a bearing on that motion, your Honor.
THE COURT: I believe it relates to the motion to exclude, so I'm going to allow it.
ATTORNEY STRANG: Do you recall my last question?
THE WITNESS: No.
Q. (By Attorney Strang)~ Sunday, November 6, detached garage, first law enforcement officers to search, Lenk, Remiker, Colborn, and a deputy from Calumet whose has a name, and that's Dan Kucharski?
A. I wouldn't know who searched it.
Q. Don't know one way or the other?
A. No, I don't know who was in the garage.
Q. Don't dispute that the three Manitowoc people were among the first law enforcement people to enter the garage?
A. It's possible.
What 'Making A Murderer' Got Wrong, According To The Manitowoc Sheriff's Department
By Melanie Schmitz, Romper
January 29, 2016
In an interview with Romper this week, Manitowoc Sheriff Robert Hermann finally spoke out about at least a few of the things that Making a Murderer got wrong.
"I think we’re doing rather well," Hermann said, when asked about the department's overall outlook of late. "You know there’s a level of frustration, because a lot of the information out there is twisted and turned — obviously shedding a bad light on us. But I think the community here lived through this once before, so it’s kind of déjà vu for them."
Hermann himself remembered the case well — he was there the first time Avery was arrested and then again in 2005, when Avery was arrested for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach.
"Locally, I think that the community has been supporting us [since Making a Murderer was released]," Hermann explained this week. "But you know, you’re always going to have people out there on the other side who disagree."
Specifically, Hermann said, the rest of the public's contention that the Manitowoc department's "inept" behavior had led to Avery's 2007 murder conviction was unfounded.
"We were not the lead investigators on this," he said. "I guess I always think that it’s kind of ironic how people watching a film for entertainment can rush to this conclusion."
He quickly added that he was "confident" that the Calumet County investigators behind much of the original trial had done the best job possible. "I stand behind them," he said.
Hermann then cited several key points from the Netflix documentary — which he insisted on referring to as a film ("I call it a film, because it doesn’t document everything like I believe it should," he told Romper) — that he claimed were wrong.
Here, a breakdown of a few of those points.
The Manitowoc Sheriff's Department Refused To Take Part In The Docu-Series
This rumor, largely circulated by social media and the national public dialogue, was without merit, according to Hermann. "You’re kind of playing off what these filmmakers were saying, like, 'We tried to have them people involved, but they didn’t want no part of this documentary,'" Hermann said, when asked about the department's relative absence throughout the filmmaking process. "Back when the hearings started with Judge (Patrick) Willis, he asked that law enforcement no longer make any comments publicly — so we weren’t able to even comment on that case at all to the press. Basically, he put a gag order on us, and obviously we didn’t want to create any problems for the judicial system, so we stopped."
Hermann said that while he and his department did eventually make comments to the filmmakers, they were purposely silent until that point. "I did speak with those filmmakers, I’m in the documentary," he said. "So, I think their claim [that we wouldn’t speak to them] is false. We legally couldn't."
Avery's Account Of The Infamous "Cat Incident"
According to Hermann, the account Avery's gave in the documentary of a previous animal cruelty charge was wildly "downplayed."
"He downplayed that cat incident, you know," Hermann bristled. "'Oh, when I was young and foolish'—well, he was actually about 20—'I took some friends and grabbed the cat, and I kind of waved it over the fire, and it caught fire.' No, you didn’t. You doused it with oil and then put it in the fire. So it’s all downplayed. And then when it came time to discuss the law enforcement’s [account], it was twisted."
When asked whether the filmmakers had reached out to him at the time to confirm Avery's story, Hermann said he couldn't remember.
The Averys Were Social Pariahs In The Community
Despite claims made by the Averys themselves in the Making a Murderer series, Hermann said that the family was never ostracized in the way that the documentary's audience might think.
"You know… the documentary—or film—paints a picture that they were, you know, kind of—I don’t know which name you’d use," said Hermann. "But they paint this picture of the Avery family, which I think is totally wrong. And they paint that picture themselves, too."
He stated that the department had maintained a relatively uneventful relationship with Avery Auto Salvage itself over the years, frequently employing the business' services for various roadway accidents and tow-aways.
"Quite frankly, we use their facility for towing," Hermann said. "We had officers go up there and handle stuff that had been towed. [The Avery’s salvage services] were one of three agencies that would tow away disabled vehicles for us on a regular basis, and so our officers would then have to go up there and get information about the vehicles to have them impounded. You know?"
Leaning back in his chair, he then added, "They are who they are. I don’t know that they were any better known than anyone else in the community."
Carl Wardman, one of the jurors for Steven Avery's murder trial, was also a volunteer for the Manitowoc sheriff's department
By Jessica McBride, OnMilwaukee.com
January 6, 2016
Carl Wardman was an official and very active volunteer for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the same time he was serving as a juror on the Steven Avery murder trial, Sheriff Robert Hermann confirmed to OnMilwaukee on Wednesday.
According to the court file, Wardman was a regular voting juror in the Avery case and was not one of the two jurors excused before deliberations. The jury was not sequestered.
Hermann – and court transcripts – also confirmed that Carl Wardman's son, Chris Wardman, worked as a Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department supervisor in the jail during the trial. He was a sergeant for the department at the time his father served on the Avery jury, ultimately finding Avery guilty of murdering photographer Teresa Halbach.
This matters, at least to some, because Avery's defense focused on allegations that officers with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department had framed Avery and planted evidence.
Furthermore, the Netflix "Making a Murderer" documentary about the case focuses on that narrative: the same department was also involved in Avery's earlier wrongful conviction case, for which he spent 18 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence.
According to the court transcripts of the jury selection process, Wardman disclosed his volunteer work and son's employment, but neither the state nor the defense made a motion to strike him. He was quite open about his ongoing Sheriff's Department ties, saying at one point that he wasn't sure he wanted to be a juror because, "I like what I do for the Sheriff's Department. I hate to miss it."
Asked whether he actually had a squad car that he drove around as a safety volunteer, he said, "Yeah. It says 'volunteer' on the side."
In jury selection, Wardman was asked if his sergeant son "had any involvement in the Steven Avery case?"
Wardman replied, "Yeah. He's standing outside the door."
He was asked, "Okay. So, um, so he's had du—duties here in – in the courthouse, right?"
Wardman: "Yes."
Why didn't defense attorneys strike Wardman?
This may have been because, during questioning, Wardman, who used to work in a foundry, said that he had been arrested once for OWI 10 years ago, during which an officer from another agency took $3 cash he had and then lied under oath about Wardman "robbing" him, suggesting Wardman might be open to a framing defense despite his ongoing ties to the Manitowoc Sheriff's Department. Asked if he thought officers could plant evidence or alter evidence, he said in jury selection "depends if they didn't like him." He also said he had "no opinion" about Avery's guilt or innocence and that he believed he could give Avery a fair shake.
"I ain't really got no view," he said.
He also said he believed that police officers are capable of lying under oath, and that he had not talked to his son about the Avery case. "No," he said. "But he had to take training or something for some kind of gizmo they've used. Other than that, no." He said he was referring to a stun belt, according to the court transcripts obtained by OnMilwaukee.
"Do you think that, um – do you think the police officers would come into court and lie?" Wardman was asked during jury selection. "Yeah," he said. "Because they can get away with it. Some judges believe them." Juries, too, he agreed.
When he worked for the department
Wardman said of his work for the Sheriff's Department, "We go on—uh, out on patrol and we check, uh, houses and that, if people have went on vacation, and abandoned cars, and just keep our eyes open." He said he did this once a week.
"I take it you're still doing that today?" he was asked during jury selection questioning.
"Yes," he said, once a week for four hours. Asked, though, if he had met or become familiar with members of the Department, he said "Not – not right now, no," because he had just started. He said he got his assignments from a book.
A review of the jury selection process shows other jurors were struck for cause for various reasons, including exposure to media coverage of the case. And others because they knew people in law enforcement. OnMilwaukee will have a full report on the jurors' backgrounds Thursday.
Sheriff Hermann said of Wardman's volunteerism for the department, "He applied 9/17/06," and added that Wardman likely started with the department in October 2006 (court transcripts say November). He said Wardman worked four hours as a volunteer in 2006.
In 2007, though, the year that the Avery trial occurred, Wardman worked 301.5 hours as a Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer and was one of the department's most active volunteers in terms of hours, said Hermann.
Wardman is still a volunteer, said Hermann, and he sees Wardman "pretty regularly" when he does things like taking squad cars in for service.
Hermann said that he did not have the specific dates that Wardman worked in 2007, just that he worked a total of 301.5 hours – more than most volunteers that year.
Wardman's application, "just said he was interested in volunteering for patrol," said Hermann. "From what he does for us, he's a good guy. He's dedicated to what he does for us here."
Jury selection in the Avery trial began Feb. 6, 2007. It continued through Feb. 9. The lengthy trial ended March 18, 2007.
To be a volunteer for the Sheriff's Department as Wardman was and still is, applicants' backgrounds are checked, said the sheriff. Those who become volunteers are given a volunteer shirt and hat. They sometimes drive a vehicle that resembles a squad car that has the word "volunteer" on the side, but does not have a siren and has amber, not blue, lights, said the sheriff. The volunteers are not paid but are usually recognized at a dinner and with a certificate. He said they have access to the Sheriff's Department premises.
"They can come in and are buzzed in," he said. "They can get down into the basement where they can pick up keys or talk to the shift commander and get their assignment."
Asked whether Wardman would have interacted or gotten assignments from Andrew Colburn or James Lenk back in 2007, Hermann said it was possible that Wardman would have interacted with Colburn on patrol. He said it was unlikely he would have interacted with Lenk. Those are the two sheriff's officials who were central to the defense contention that evidence was planted against Avery, which the sheriff denies.
"Basically what we do is we have them check residences if people are gone," the sheriff said of the safety volunteers. "They check on disabled vehicles and things like that. A lot of it is moving our vehicles around for service."
Hermann, who was an undersheriff at the time of the trial, said he can't remember for sure whether he knew at the time of the trial that Wardman was an Avery juror. Asked whether this gave Wardman a bias, the sheriff pointed out that both defense attorneys and prosecutors are able to strike jurors and that the defense did not strike Wardman. The sheriff also defended his department, saying that he was certain officers had not planted evidence of framed Avery.
Wardman is the juror whom alternate juror Richard Mahler said earlier this week had a son who worked for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the time of the Avery trial. However, details and the son's rank and the father's volunteerism were not previously reported.
Chris Wardman's online resume says he was a "Corrections Sergeant / Supervisor February 2004 to July 2010" with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department. From 2000 to 2004, Chris Wardman worked as a corrections officer for Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department. His resume says that he was "handpicked by Administration for the development, implementation and management of the Inmate classification system."
In the photo above, Avery juror Carl Wardman poses with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer squad car in 2012. "Volunteers help keep area safe," says the article's headline, which ran on Aug. 10, 2012 in the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter newspaper. "Offer law enforcement 'another set of eyes.'"
The caption under the photo says: "Carl Wardman, left, and Donald Hammel pose with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer car. They are among between 40 and 45 volunteers who help the department keep the community safe."
Here is how the story appears in the newspaper's archives:
OnMilwaukee obtained Carl Wardman's name from the juror list provided by the Manitowoc County Clerk of Courts Office. Here is how it appeared on that list:
Carl Wardman's phone number is disconnected, so he could not be reached for comment. Chris Wardman, who now works in law enforcement for a Florida college, did not answer his phone or respond to email or voicemail seeking comment.
The Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter news story focuses more on the other man in the photo, but it describes the volunteer program. It quotes Hermann as saying of the volunteers, "They're another set of eyes out there. If they see anything, they call us." The article says that more than 5,000 volunteer hours were donated to the department since 2011. It said that the department's Care Call program makes use of "volunteers to call residents living alone or recovering from surgery. Volunteers also help with local parades, deliver ballots to polling places, do house checks, make sure tagged vehicles get removed for roadsides, help with jail-and bail fundraisers, airport events and the department's booth at the Manitowoc County Fair."
According to the article, a deputy inspector said, "There's a lot of things they do that wouldn't get done without them. They have become more of an integral part of our regular operation, making sure squads are where they're supposed to be – for service or installation of equipment."
Carl and Chris Wardman appear together in a family photo on Facebook. Chris Wardman also discusses his Sheriff's Department history on his LinkedIn site. According to that site, Chris Wardman is now acting manager of public safety for a college in Florida.
It also says he worked as a sergeant for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office from January 2000 through July 2010. He writes: "My duties included acting as shift supervisor and sworn officer for the corrections department, including the juvenile detention center. Keeping peace and order within the corrections facility and juvenile detention center, performing background investigations of potential new employee's, sitting on hiring committee review boards, acting as lead member of the Cell Extraction and Removal Team (CERT), performing shift and department training, escorting prisoners to and from court, escorting prisoners to and from other correction facilities, completing performance reviews, corrective training and discipline as needed."
His online resume says that from 2004 to 2010, when a supervisor with the Sheriff's Department, his duties were to "Coordinate operations of correctional facility by supervising and scheduling six to 10 full and part time correctional staff." He also listed the following duties:
By Suzanne Weiss, HTR Media
July 1, 2014
MANITOWOC – Thirty years ago today, Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann began working his way up through the ranks and ended up in the corner office, from where he oversees more than 100 people, a fleet of about 30 vehicles and a 215-bed jail.
Changes over the years
The sheriff’s department today is much different than the department he joined full-time three decades ago.
“Technology has driven law enforcement tremendously” affecting everything from how evidence is collected to tools in an officer’s gun belt to laptops in squad cars and surveillance cameras in the jail, Hermann said.
“Even the squad cars perform so much better. I remember during a chase, the cars would quit” so officers had to stop and remove the gas cap to relieve the vapor lock, he said.
Hermann recalled his early years of typing reports on a manual typewriter, using carbon paper for copies and taking mug shots of suspects with a Polaroid camera. He didn’t have a light touch with the typewriter, he said, recalling how each period he typed left a hole in the paper.
When he joined the department, it had only three or four computers based on DOS, an operating system common in the 1980s and 1990s.
“When I started on the road, you got very little training before you were on your own,” he said. “Now, we have a 12- to 14-week field training program.” New recruits, too, took an eight-week course compared with today’s 13-week academy, he said.
Began career as jailor
Hermann began his full-time career with the department as a jailor on July 2, 1984, after having working as a part-time reserve deputy. He soon set his sights on other possibilities within the department.
“I knew I wanted to be on the road in the squad car. Once I acquired that goal, as time went on, the next position would open up,” said Hermann, 50. “It was always the challenge in front of me. I thought that would be interesting. The neat thing about law enforcement, you had opportunities to take on new challenges.”
When Sheriff Ken Petersen retired, Hermann threw his hat in the ring. It was a natural progression and his experience in various positions gave him a good overview of the department, he said.
Hermann won the election in 2006 against two other candidates, Democrat Ryan Gilbert in the primary, and Republican Andrew Coborn in the general election. He ran unopposed for his second term and will be running unopposed again in fall for his third term, Hermann said.
Interest in cars
Before he chose law enforcement, he had worked in an auto body shop and a salvage yard, skills that came in handy when he and his younger brother, Todd Hermann, would detail the squad cars that used to come directly from the factory as blank slates. Their work, which also included installing radio equipment and light bars, would get more elaborate and professional-looking as time went on, he said.
Today, all the work on vehicles is done by an outside vendor.
Todd followed Robert into law enforcement and is now deputy inspector of operations for the sheriff’s department; their father also was in law enforcement.
Hermann’s expertise in vehicles also has come in handy during certain cases, notably the high-profile case of Richard Hochstetler, a 17-year-old teen who was hit and killed by a vehicle in January 1999.
Hermann said he remembers being awakened by a call about the case at 1 or 2 a.m., going out during a snowstorm to investigate and not getting back home until 9 a.m.
A small piece of the grill, coming from the suspect’s vehicle, had been found near the scene of the rural Manitowoc County accident and he remembers driving through area lots of car dealerships until he found a pick-up truck that matched the grill. His experience with cars helped give him and other law enforcement officers an idea of the kind of vehicle they were looking for, Hermann said.
Unfortunately, the case was never solved, he said.
High-profile cases
Hermann was involved in a number of high-profile cases in the past 30 years, including the case of Steven Avery, who was eventually sent to prison for the October 2005 rural Manitowoc County murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old freelance photographer from Calumet County.
Another was the February 2003 murder of Francis Creek convenience store owner Waheed Akhtar, whose body was eventually found buried in Palermo, N.J.
Yet another was the 1999 vehicular death of Valders teacher Debra Cooper, who was hit by another vehicle. Hermann was off-duty and was called in to reconstruct the accident. The other vehicle, belonging to the suspect, contained a bag of $75,000 cash and evidence of drug activity, Hermann said.
“It was unusual to find that kind of cash in a vehicle,” he said.
Career highlights
A highlight of his career was attending the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., in 1995, he said.
“It was an awesome experience, something you never forget,” Hermann recalled. “It was great training and I made some great law-enforcement contacts.”
Then, of course, there was President Barack Obama’s visit to Manitowoc County in 2011, which required tight security.
“We’ve had political candidates in the community before, but not the actual president of the United States,” Hermann said. “It was amazing how it brought law enforcement together.”
All the area agencies pitched in to help make the visit go smoothly; the key was meeting early on with the Secret Service agents, who outlined their strict requirements, he said.
Background
Hermann, who grew up one of six children in Cleveland, received his Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Mount Senario College in Ladysmith. He has since had more than 3,000 hours of specialized law-enforcement training.
He was a patrol deputy, a Metro Drug Unit investigator, and, as a sergeant, was patrol supervisor and shift commander. As a lieutenant, he was juvenile detention superintendent and training officer, moving on to positions of undersheriff and inspector. Hermann was named 1993 Eagles law Enforcement Officer of the Year.
He has found the past 30 years on the job to be rewarding. “There was never a time when I got up and said, ‘I don’t want to go to work,’” Hermann said.
Related:
Esther M. Hermann, 86, of Cleveland, passed away Tuesday, May 06, 2014 at Holy Family Memorial Hospital, Manitowoc.
Esther was born April 26, 1928 in Port Washington to the late Edward and Anna (Kleckner) Biever. On November 27, 1948, she married Robert Hermann. She was employed by Cleveland Auto Sales as the secretary/treasurer.
Esther is survived by four sons and two daughters.
Manitowoc is a Flat Circle
By aether_drift, TickTockManitowoc
September 3, 2016
I’ve posted fragments of this theory in several threads, but in this post, a more complete attempt to elucidate some of the confounding “emotional logic” I see in the primary agonists is offered... In particular, I am searching for a motive - or set of motives actually - that has an intuitive truth and explains the data points.
I also have to say that this theory is somewhat extreme, and may be distasteful and unlikely to some. But it is hardly more distasteful than the murder and burning of a young woman, a person who had every right to a full life and was clearly loved by many in her family and beyond. I have no concept of how something like this even happens, what kind of deranged people are involved. I in no way wish to darken Teresa Halbach's memory or life, but it seems like we are missing something essential in this case.
This is also an imaginative scenario that probably means I've watched too much television along the lines of True Detective, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet. So read this as fiction if you want… I'm certainly not going to defend this post any more than to say that it seems about as likely as anything else in this case. Or not. I don't know.
Rather than starting with the usual timelines and minutiae of the case, here are some things that bother me from an intuitive/psychological level:
I have difficulty with LE committing the murder of a young woman outright for $36m. I wouldn’t put it past a corrupt individual, but a widespread conspiracy just feels unlikely to me. Why TH? Couldn't it have been anybody visiting Steven Avery? My gut on Andy Colborn’s testimony is that he is telling the truth about the plates. He is not in on any conspiracy, was not by the RAV4 when he called the plates in, because he’s the kind of underling you want as a “true believer” or pawn in a much larger game articulated above his pay grade. I hate the idea of a widespread LE conspiracy in fact. One or two people at most.
The glance between Ryan Hillegas and Mike Halbach in the video clip where they discuss access to the Avery property contains unfathomable multitudes. Indeed almost all the statements of MH and RH have a strange quality to them that just feels off. In my opinion, these are not indicators of direct guilt in Teresa’s murder but rather reveal they know more than they can tell. The question is - what exactly are these two hiding?
The words and body language of SA come across as genuinely innocent to me. Yes, some of the facts of this case do point to him as the perp, but I confess to finding his denials believable from a emotional level. SA feels innocent to me... There is a tension between this apparent authenticity and the forensic “facts” of the case. This causes cognitive dissonance to me and many of us on this sub. It's an intuition you won't find over on SAIG for example.
I am personally at a loss to assign a violent, murderous motive to Bloedorn, RH, MH, Tom Pearce or others in the case that some consider suspects. While they could be direct players, I don’t personally get the sense that LE would bother involving these people (assuming LE killed TH) because of the risk to the conspiracy.
Teresa didn’t just photograph happy Midwestern families, she apparently also did erotic couples photography. The true complexity of her sexuality are in fact a question mark. I won’t be saying anything more about this than let’s just accept she was a curious person, artistic, and confident. If I classify her as similar to "edgier" young women I have known, one’s 20’s are time of risk taking and finding boundaries, sexual and otherwise. This is normal and healthy in my opinion. But this "edgier TH" may have been a foil to the straight-laced narrative of the Halbach family which has been seriously lacking in depth imho. We simply do not know much about TH and likely never will. Intuitively, I get a baby-Dyke vibe from her, just saying...
Dave and Sandra Begotka's testimony could have something to them. I’m going to assume two data points here are true: (1) They saw SA at the gas station around sundown October 31 (possibly exculpatory for SA), and (2) There was some kind of underground “Sex Club” activity in the Manitowoc area that catered to swing parties, etc. I find Dave at least as credible as anyone else but, in this case, that may not be saying much.
The deviant behavior of Ken Kratz was the tip of an disgusting iceberg of badness in Manitowoc. He very well could be involved at some level, but it isn't necessary. It's just an indicator of general sleaze tolerance in the area. KK, purveyor of fine Wisconsin sleaze. Barf.
So what am I saying exactly?
Let’s start with two men:
1. Man number one is a powerful Wisconsin businessman or politician, and
2. Man number two is highly placed in law enforcement.
I could assign some actual initials to these men, but let’s use the names Yellow King (YK) for the politician and Blue King (BK) for the law enforcement.
In Manitowoc, there is a sexual underground of sorts. Dave Begotka’s testimony suggest that at least one of these “clubs” is for closeted gay/bi men but it’s easy to imagine there is something similar for other tastes as well. The situation is swingers doing their swingin' thing in the long Midewestern Winters. With or without drugs, whatever, I don't care. Schwingers.
We know RH and TH were lovers in college but let's imagine that after, TH moves on from the confines of this more heteronormative relationship and begins experimenting with a lifestyle that RH is not particularly happy with. Still, he supports TH and they remain in contact. RH’s role is one of a supportive, if often bewildered, male friend. Teresa’s brothers also have a sense of their sister's sexual risk taking but are not aware of the depth of these curiosities. MH and RH discuss TH’s behavior from time to time. They both share a love for TH and I have no reason to question this at all. They are not suspects.
My theory has TH eventually going to some kind of Wisconsin underground sex parties and taking pictures of some sort. Is this shocking? I don't know. Perhaps it was her erotic couples photography that was the inroad to this lifestyle, perhaps it was through TP. Something feels a bit off with TP, like he knows more than he is telling us, but like most of the players here he doesn’t know the precise killer or circumstances of TH’s death. He is not the killer, he's a good guy for the most part, very supportive of TH and saddened by her murder.
Anyway, TH begins a relationship with a married man or woman, or some other highly placed person close to the YK.
Or perhaps she simply has a set of negatives of YK/BK in a compromising act.
At some point, she uses the existence of these photographs to exert leverage in a relationship either against a wife/husband for example, or simply for money.
Or perhaps she is asked to turn over this set of negatives but refuses.
I really don’t have any idea... What I do infer is that she is unaware of the consequences of using this leverage. She's in a real mess.
In October of 2005, YK and BK are at one of these swing parties.
The BK is getting serious heat because of the Avery depositions and the case is building towards a disastrous outcome for Manitowoc LE.
Similarly, the YK is about to be exposed - or at least fears some kind of exposure - by TH.
The harassing phone calls that TP describes TH getting may not be a stalker but, in fact, calls threatening her to turn over the negatives.
RH is involved here in the sense that TH has communicated enough details to make RH upset for his friend. He is calling and fighting with TH over her terrible situation. Part of this is RH carrying the flame for an old love, the other is simply him not “getting” her lifestyle choices and arguing the more conservative case. The point is, neither of these local kids really has any idea what they are dealing with. They are out of their depth, way the fuck out. And shit is getting real as Halloween approaches...
(I realize one weakness of this theory is assuming TH has the strength/wit to go up against some heavy hitters for some reason. Love? Revenge? A drug deal? For all I know, it was simple extortion - she wasn’t making much money from Auto Trader as we all know. If we had tax records etc. this might help. This is weak I realize.)
Anyway... as the Avery case nears a conclusion, the YK and BK hatch a plan to kill TH and plant the body on SA’s property as a way out of their situations.
TH becomes the victim of choice because she solves two problems.
The call to the Whitelaw tower is the "luring" call and is made after the Avery stop.
The killer is not necessarily YK or BK but, if not, I suspect a contract killer is possible. A person with a white Jeep. A person who is skilled and careful.
After TH is killed and her body burned (location TBD, could be quarry or other property), the voice mail deletions are made to obscure the link to YK/BK.
RH did crack into the Cingular system after these deletions (and this was outside the bounds of legality to a degree) but it was, in fact, innocent.
RH is never taken as a serious suspect by LE because the BK is directing everybody towards SA. They are acquiring evidence there after all, the car, then bones, blood, etc.
However, once TH is reported missing, RH and MH have a good sense of why TH was killed but they don’t know who...
As they attempt to solve the murder, organize a search party, etc., they are contacted and effectively THREATENED into cooperating with the Avery frame job by the BK. The language used would be along the lines of: “As you know, TH got too close to the flame - she was that type of girl. What we now need, RH, is for you to work with us. Can you do that? We wouldn’t want anyone else to get hurt now would we?”
When I watch RH and MH in the video clip, this is what I see: two people who care about TH deeply but are hiding something. In particular, there is an almost world-weary inevitability in MH’s expression over TH’s death. He doesn’t appear particularly surprised but almost resigned. The phrase “the grieving process could take days” is like, wtf? There is something so crazy off here I’m not sure what else to say.
To solidify the frame job, a certain detective "L" is brought into the setup by the Undersheriff.
So my bet on the BK’s identity is Undersheriff Hermann (UH).
Then UH with Detective Lenk (DL) take additional steps to nail SA.
There is no one else in LE involved at all. No one in LE physically commits the murder. We may never know who this person is actually.
I’m not even sure DL understands anything more about TH’s death than as a good foot soldier - he is told augment the evidence - which he does. This is not that uncommon, and I think most of LE members honestly believe SA killed TH.
So what does this model predict?
Here are some possible outcomes to look for in the coming months:
There will be no significant evidence of LE participation in the murder itself. We may get context hints that the blood, bullet, key were planted, but, most likely, we will not get inculpatory certainty from re-testing. Recall that UH trained at Quantico and was likely involved with the FBI.
God only knows what KZ is going to find in the RAV4 evidence. Maybe this will turn out to be planted, but this does not mean LE killed TH.
There will be no direct evidence to support RH, Lenk, Colborn, etc. in the murder.
There will, however, be cryptic and inconclusive evidence pointing to the real killer.
The cell tower data is one of these points. The deleted calls perhaps another.
But the 22 calls from LE to RH will not be particularly useful if we don’t ever identify the content of these calls. We need to know who precisely was on the other end of the line with RH and what they said. Otherwise these will simply be dismissed as “calls from LE to help organize the search party.” Which they were in a sense.
There may or may not be clear prints on the RAV4 from the killer. If he was a pro, I bet he wore gloves. But there might be some indication here, some odd evidence from geoforensics, etc. It's hard to say. This evidence will NOT match anyone in LE or others involved in the case (RH, AC, etc.). It will point to someone unknown to the case thus far.
Pam of God is not part of the direct murder conspiracy. She was directed, in a general way, to find the RAV4 by RH who was, in turn, directed by the BK up the chain. PoG believes SA killed TH and will continue to believe God directed her to the RAV4. I'm not sure what God thinks about all of this. PoG is actually helping cover up the real killer but doesn't realize it.
RH and MH don’t know the killer either, but they do have a glimpse into the dark underbelly of Manitowoc. They sensibly decide to play ball with the YK and BK and play their part. They do not know the identity of these men (though they may suspect certain people) but they fear for their own lives to this day. Maybe RH is coming forward now with Kathleen Zellner providing legal cover.
I don't think this case is necessarily going to be solved using forensics. The killers are not stupid, though KZ may get lucky on the blood C14 testing and spring SA on proving planting. But this doesn't mean we know who killed TH.
What I'm suggesting here is that there is no solving this case from the facts of the murder.
The killer is a cypher who will never be found.
TH's death was ultimately at the confluence of two motives that reinforced one another.
We might want to look for evidence supporting this idea...
I have no idea who the Yellow King is.
[–]aether_drift[S]
I've read Dave's web site and watched probably 20 of his videos. I have no idea regarding the veracity of his story, particularly "The Club".
It was actually Dave's testimony combined with TH's erotic photography that got this whole idea going, heh.
I suppose one of the main mysteries of this case is the behavior of RH and MH, arguably the two males closest to TH. I don't necessarily favor RH as the killer as some do, but there is also many questions about these two I don't understand.
At least I wrote this down.
I have no idea who the Yellow King is.
[–]aether_drift[S]
I've read Dave's web site and watched probably 20 of his videos. I have no idea regarding the veracity of his story, particularly "The Club".
It was actually Dave's testimony combined with TH's erotic photography that got this whole idea going, heh.
I suppose one of the main mysteries of this case is the behavior of RH and MH, arguably the two males closest to TH. I don't necessarily favor RH as the killer as some do, but there is also many questions about these two I don't understand.
At least I wrote this down.
Now we can all go back to cell tower triangulation...
[–]Lonecrow66
There definitely is a cultish club there. A masonic sort of brotherhood you need to be part of.
[–]aether_drift[S]
Dave Begotka seems to think so. I don't really "believe" what I've written, but I think my gut/intuition is trying to make sense of some really strange loose ends in the behavior of certain people.
I think Undersheriff Herman is a huge player in this case somehow.
[–]aether_drift
Sometimes I think the whole point of this sub is to speculate. Because it's fun and the evidence doesn't cinch the case - there are multiple possibilities. I recall a time where 50% of the posts were about RH and the other half about how LE killed TH. Not much of that these days...
I've only posted one theory of the case. And I went balls to the wall conspiracy style with a sex club underground, TH having an affair that went south, a sex tape with TH blackmailing LE, etc. I just went for it because it was FUN. It's called Manitowoc is a Flat Circle.
Now it seems down to which piece of human detritus living at the Avery compound did it... I suspect many in Manitowoc don't much care, they'd just as well have the entire clan in prison. Steve and Brendan will do as far as they're concerned.
That is of course not my position.
Oh no...
TH's gruesome death is the tip of a very large, and very dark, iceberg...
[–]InfiniteAffinity
Is it possible your Yellow King has connections with the Green Bay Packers? In 2005 MH landed a very exclusive job with the Packer's organization. Often you don't land those kinds of jobs without connections.
First motive, rival business. Second, revenge. Third, $36,000,000. Which high-ranking individual beyond questioning would have an incinerator, a tow truck, a crusher, a replacement vehicle with no prints and no real evidence to link the real murderer, VIN switching knowledge, and access to his own pick of vehicles and contacts in the auto business? The Manitowoc County Sheriff. Guess what, he is the President of Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage, in direction competition with Avery Salvage Yard. He was a deputy in 1985, he was the undersheriff in 2005, and he is now the Sheriff of Manitowoc County.
What You Don't Know About Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann
By AngelsOfMercyBlog
February 2, 2016
Hermann Timeline
Rival Businesses
There is also Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage and it is owned by Manitowoc Sheriff Robert Hermann.
In 2005, his father owned the business and Robert Hermann was Undersheriff.
The year that Avery was arrested for the rape of PB was the year Robert Hermann joined the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department.
http://cleveland-auto-sales-salvage.cleveland.wi.amfibi.directory/us/c/18826455-cleveland-auto-sales-salvage
July 17, 1985: The City of Manitowoc Police Department assigns officers to conduct daily surveillance on Gregory A. Allen. Allen was identified as a suspect in several complaints of prowling, window peeping, indecent exposure and sexual assault dating back to January of 1985 through July 14. “He is a dangerous individual with a potential for violence,” the report stated.
From <http://www.sheboyganpress.com/story/news/local/steven-avery/2016/01/28/steven-avery-case-timeline/79450680/>
Was it possible that Robert Hermann was the officer that was suppose to be watching Gregory Allen?
Hermann Opportunities
Salvage Yard VIN Scam:
http://www.vinetching.com/vin-switching.html
I know there is a lot of buzz about Colburn and what this person said and what time line is and so forth, but I have a problem with the entire RAV4 they found. There are many issues with it…
Guess what, he is the President of Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage. He was a deputy in 1985, he was the Undersheriff in 2005, and he is now the Sheriff of Manitowoc County.
He and he alone fits all that would be needed to fulfill the requirements for this type of accident, and he is the one saying, all over, that Netflix is taking things out of context and out of order, and says that’s how it's done to keep every one confused. He is saying this in my opinion because he himself is the one that did this, and so he knows how it works.
Just saying, don’t get distracted. Focus on what a killer would need to accomplish the tasks. That is how you find the real killer.
Hermann Career Highlights Interview
A small piece of the grill, coming from the suspect’s vehicle, had been found near the scene of the rural Manitowoc County accident, and he remembers driving through area lots of car dealerships until he found a pick-up truck that matched the grill. His experience with cars helped give him and other law enforcement officers an idea of the kind of vehicle they were looking for, Hermann said.
From <http://www.stevenaverycase.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Ricky-Hochstetler-MTSO-Report_Redacted.pdf >
The Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, which has been accused of framing Steven Avery for a 1985 rape and planting numerous clues to convict Avery for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, has also been dogged by allegations it mishandled the 1999 hit-and-run death of a 17-year-old boy, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin has learned.
The homicide of Ricky Hochstetler, who was struck by a vehicle while walking to his home along a frontage road, remains unsolved. The crime occurred at about 2:20 a.m. on Jan. 10, 1999 during a snowstorm.
On the morning of the fatality, Robert Jeffery of Newton found parts scattered in the snow at the seldom-used intersection of Center and Newton roads in rural Newton. If the fleeing driver had turned onto Center Road, the village of Cleveland was about five minutes away. Several sources who had ties to the investigation suspected that the hit-and-run driver was probably headed toward Cleveland. But this critical clue soon fell by the wayside under the direction of Lt. Mike Bushman, the road deputy put in charge of the homicide by then-Manitowoc County Sheriff Tom Kocourek. According to Bushman's report, the Newton resident “was unable to tell me which direction the suspect vehicle may have went after the pieces fell off.”
On the day of Hochstetler's funeral, multiple car parts were visible in the thawing snow at the far edge of the victim's driveway along Manitowoc County CR. The boy's body was found 50 yards up the road. "(The parts) were right up by the road," Manitowoc resident Sylvia (Hynek) Schmidt told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "I just remember I was thinking, 'This doesn't look like it had been weathered.'"
The parts appeared to be a section of headlight housing with letters and numbers stamped into it, Manitowoc sheriff's deputy Jason Jost reported at the time. "I also observed three other pieces of plastic lying just around the corner," Jost's Jan. 15, 1999 report stated. All four of the parts "appeared to be from a newer style car," Jost wrote. There had been no other recent collisions along the two-lane highway around the time of her son's death, said Debi Hochstetler, the victim's mother. Nevertheless, Bushman determined that these fresh car parts were not relevant to his investigation.
Within hours of the overnight crash, juvenile detention center Lt. Rob Hermann, now the county sheriff, assured Bushman that the hit-and-run vehicle was a 1985 to 1988 Chevy truck, Suburban or Blazer. Days later, Bushman speculated that the tiny pieces of broken grill found along the rural highway may also belong to a 1988 to 1991 full-size van. It seemed that every decision Hermann and Bushman made put Manitowoc County farther away from identifying Ricky Hochstetler's killer.
From the outset, Kocourek, who did not return a message from USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, didn't make it a top priority for his detectives or deputies to canvass local bars, bowling lanes or late-night diners for leads and suspects; conduct any round-the-clock surveillance near the crash site or near the rural intersection in Newton where signs of evidence were found; inspect the salvage yards near Cleveland and Sheboygan, even though there was a strong chance the hit-and-run driver would fix or destroy his damaged vehicle to avoid suspicion; and scour the rural roads and ditches for additional vehicle debris that may trace back to the hit-and-run driver.
Kocourek also let several weeks pass before volunteer firefighters were summoned to the crime scene along County CR to melt down the snow and ice. The effort yielded 126 gray grill pieces, three black pieces, two small pieces of Chevrolet emblem, one gold glasses frame and one lens, reports show. "Most were very small and of no identifying quality at this point and time," Bushman stated.
Weeks after the boy's death, a number of sheriff's department employees began to suspect that an off-duty deputy — after a night of drinking — struck and killed the rural Manitowoc teenager. Even the traffic patrol lieutenant who was in charge of the investigation was aware of the allegations, indicate reports reviewed by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.
However, both Lt. Mike Bushman and then-Sheriff Tom Kocourek's administration declined to probe the activities of the two deputies who were being mentioned as possible suspects — Lt. Rob Hermann and his brother, Sgt. Todd Hermann.
Rob Hermann is now the sheriff of Manitowoc County...
When reached on his work cellphone by USA TODAY NETWORK, Todd Hermann declined to comment. The 49-year-old Cleveland, Wis., resident directed all questions about the case to Rob Hermann.
After his brother was elected sheriff, Todd Hermann was promoted to the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department's deputy inspector of operations, the third-highest position in the department...
Bushman, the night-shift patrol commander, heard about the hit-and-run pedestrian collision on his squad car radio while at the gas pumps about a mile away. He arrived on the scene at 2:28 a.m. Hochstetler's body was in the middle of the road. Bushman decided to preserve the death scene rather than chase after the fleeing driver, the Division of Criminal Investigation report stated.
Ken Petersen, undersheriff at the time, assured the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter that the hit-and-run driver had not been drinking at the popular club. "I don't know if the person could have gotten up to a speed that would have caused that kind of injury to the victim or damage to the vehicle," Petersen told the newspaper.
The front entrance to the Bil-Mar was close to a quarter-mile from the Hochstetler tragedy.
Although the high-profile crime became the talk of the town, Kocourek decided not to seek help from the Wisconsin State Patrol's technical crash-scene reconstruction experts. And the Division of Criminal Investigation wasn't asked to help, either.
Kocourek did not return a phone call seeking comment for this story.
Before the autopsy — and prior to any daylight searches in ditches and along adjacent roads for more broken vehicle parts — Rob Hermann, Manitowoc County's juvenile jail administrator at the time, set a course that would later prove unsuccessful in finding the person who killed Hochstetler.
As the hit-and-run investigation floundered in 1999, Bushman continued to hear whispers suggesting Hochstetler's death was part of a sheriff's department cover-up. Bushman's investigative reports show he raised the issue of a cover-up during a face-to-face interview with Rick Wetenkamp, a rural Newton resident, who had been the hit-and-run victim's stepfather. By that point, the homicide had been unsolved for 11 months.
"I decided to question him about a statement he made ... reference the opinion that the police may have been involved in the accident and are attempting to cover it up," Bushman wrote in his report. "I wished to catch what type of reaction this would bring."
It was evident from Bushman's report that he did not want the victim's stepfather believing that police corruption might be the root cause for the lack of an arrest.
Months later, in 2000, there was a changing of the guard.
Kocourek retired and Petersen took over as sheriff. Petersen elevated Rob Hermann to under-sheriff/inspector. Bushman was promoted to third in command, supervising the road patrol division and the detectives bureau. That bureau included James Lenk, the same detective who was later accused of planting Avery's blood and a spare key during the 2005 Halbach murder case.
Under Lenk's leadership, little progress was made in bringing Hochstetler's killer to justice, and Petersen's administration wasn't optimistic about an arrest. "What it's going to take to solve the thing would just be luck at this point," Petersen told The Associated Press in January 2002. "I doubt if that truck exists anymore, especially in any kind of evidentiary form."
But not everyone at the sheriff's department shared Petersen's pessimism about solving the high-profile homicide. A former sheriff's employee confirmed resigning from the department, disgusted by what the employee felt was a shoddy investigation. Sources with ties to the Hochstetler investigation told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that it was evident Bushman and Rob Hermann had compromised critical evidence recovered at the scene of the crime, jeopardizing the prospects of a criminal prosecution...
After a Green Bay television station aired a 2004 story, a woman called Debi Hochstetler, asking "if she was the person who lost her son." The woman told Debi Hochstetler "that the person who killed her son was a cop and that she gave the last name of the person as (Hermann)," DCI reports from 2004 showed. "Hochstetler stated that the woman gave her a first name for (Hermann) as well, but that she could not remember it at this time."
According to the tipster, the hit-and-run vehicle ended up at the Cleveland Auto salvage shortly after the crash and was subsequently crushed. Cleveland Auto was the long-time family business in southern Manitowoc County along County XX operated by Bob Hermann and his family. The elder Hermann had worked as a traffic patrolman for Manitowoc County before retiring and two of his sons, Rob and Todd, followed in his footsteps and were hired into the sheriff's department by Kocourek during the 1980s. Years later, when Debi Hochstetler brought her information to Bushman in 2004, he dismissed it, telling her Rob Hermann wasn't involved in the crime.
In July 2009, the Division of Criminal Investigation reopened its investigation of Rob Hermann, the state agency's reports reflect. By then, Hermann was Manitowoc's sheriff. "The caller wanted to remain anonymous and would provide no information on the source of the allegations other than the individuals who provided the information were high school friends of the suspect that did not want to get involved in the investigation and did not know the caller was providing information to authorities," the late Division of Criminal Investigation Craig Klyve wrote in his report.
According to Klyve's report, "the caller said that Robert Hermann had an early- to mid-1980s Chevy pickup truck that has not been seen since the time of the accident. The caller believes this vehicle was the one that struck and (killed) Ricky Hochstetler."
"Based on the breaks in the lower legs, I just did not believe it was a pickup truck," said Baetz, a retired Illinois police investigator. "I think he was scooped, and a pick-up truck isn't going to scoop him up. It's too high."
Baetz said the crime scene evidence was mishandled by Rob Hermann, who was allowed to drive around with crime scene parts in his personal vehicle for several hours after the crash.
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/investigations/2016/09/12/manitowoc-sheriff-under-fire-1999-homicide/80862938/>
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/investigations/2016/09/13/missteps-hamper-1999-hit-and-run-death-probe/87390800/>
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/longform/news/investigations/2016/09/14/mother-wants-forgive-hersons-killer/87542208/>
Yet another was the 1999 vehicular death of Valders teacher Debra Cooper, who was hit by another vehicle. Hermann was off-duty and was called in to reconstruct the accident. The other vehicle, belonging to the suspect, contained a bag of $75,000 cash and evidence of drug activity, Hermann said.
A highlight of his career was attending the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., in 1995, he said.
Hermann won the election in 2006 against two other candidates, Democrat Ryan Gilbert in the primary, and Republican Andrew Coborn in the general election. He ran unopposed for his second term and will be running unopposed again in fall for his third term, Hermann said.
From <http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/local/2014/07/01/sheriff-robert-hermann-recalls-career-highlights-changes/11944007/>
Hermann Quotes
“I won’t call it a documentary, because a documentary puts things in chronological order and tells the story as it is. … I’ve heard things are skewed,” said Hermann, who hasn’t seen the series but has been discussing it with the department. “They’ve taken things out of context and taken them out of the order in which they occurred, which can lead people to a different opinion or conclusion.”
From <http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/local/2015/12/21/sheriff-making-murderer-movie-not-documentary/77715576/>
“I’m still trying to figure it out, and I can’t,” Avery said in a telephone interview from his cell block in mid-February. “The only thing I can come up with is the sheriff and some of them cops. I don’t know why they would’ve wanted to go this far.”
From <http://www.milwaukeemag.com/2006/05/01/blood-simple/>
“Show me the evidence he was framed. There is not going to be any. It didn’t happen,” said Hermann, who joined the department in 1985. “I don’t know why anybody in law enforcement would want to get him, that makes no sense.”
“They relate it to the previous lawsuit. That has nothing to do with law enforcement. The lawsuit was against the county and … while we don’t like to have lawsuits against your county or your city or whatever, really to the individual law enforcement officer, that doesn’t mean a lot because it just doesn’t affect them,” Hermann added.
From <http://www.kcentv.com/story/30877797/sheriff-making-a-murderer-is-not-a-documentary>
Hermann Rumors
This is what happens when the high school quarterback becomes county sheriff and the team’s trainer buys a law degree on EBAY and becomes county prosecutor.
From <https://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments.php?api_key=731161400330877&channel_url=http%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3Fversion%3D42%23cb%3Df1e0a845ce3d90d%26domain%3Dwww.milwaukeemag.com%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.milwaukeemag.com%252Ff3766f5aa151a7c%26relation%3Dparent.parent&colorscheme=light&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milwaukeemag.com%2F2006%2F05%2F01%2Fblood-simple%2F&locale=en_US&numposts=5&sdk=joey&skin=light&version=v2.3&width=100%25>
Questions about Hermann
Who can give promotions like this:
Aside from the allegation that the law enforcement framed Avery for Halbach’s murder, there’s undeniable proof that certain members failed in their duties. For example, Sgt. Andrew Colborn ignored a call from another office that could have freed Avery from his original incarceration much earlier, and Sgt. Jason Orth’s log of visitors to the crime scene was lacking, to say the least. But to the filmmakers’ knowledge, no one was reprimanded or demoted as a result.
“It’s quite the opposite, actually,” Making A Murderer filmmaker, Demos said. “People received awards. I think Kratz was named prosecutor of the year for winning the case; Tom Fassbender received an award for his role as an investigator on this case. So, no — their careers have been bolstered by this case.”
“And they’ve been promoted,” Ricciardi added. “I believe Colborn is a lieutenant now in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department.” Lt. James Lenk has since retired.
From <http://www.popculthq.com/2016/01/11/making-a-murderer-part-3-was-there-a-conspiracy-and-how-manitowoc-p-d/>
Hermann Gag order:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20070318&id=G2QbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WkgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7107,2195370&hl=en
CALUMET COUNTY SHERIFF JERRY PAGEL'S PRE-TRIAL TESTIMONY
Q. Were you, personally, out at the Avery Auto Salvage property on the days following this phone call, at home, on November 3?
A. Yes, I was.
Q. Each day?
A. Yes, I was there every day.
Q. Starting Friday, November 4.
A. No, the 5th.
Q. So, November 5th?
A. Yes.
Q. Saturday, November 5. And then how many days in a row did you remain, personally, out at the Avery Auto Salvage property?
A. I would go out their during the daylight hours and generally would leave anywhere between 7, 8, 9 at night.
Q. How long did that continue, Sheriff Pagel?
A. I was there the entire week that we were out there.
Q. And until the road was reopened and the searching was done?
A. That's correct.
Q. All right. Now, during that time that you were out there, during these long daylight hours, essentially, did you, personally, direct the activities of Lieutenant Lenk?
A. Did I, personally? How did you phrase it?
Q. Direct the activities of Lieutenant Lenk of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department?
A. Not personally, no. It was -- Could have been done either through the command post. Again, they were there as a support group. So we would utilize our investigators, our officers, our personnel, along with agents from the Department of Criminal Investigation and individuals would then be assigned to those particular individuals who would be the lead people doing particular -- particular programs or parts of the investigation out there.
Q. Activities. All right. So you set up a command post?
A. Yes.
Q. You set that up in conjunction with the DCI?
A. Yes.
Q. There were other law enforcement agencies, also, at the command post?
A. Yes, there were other agencies involved in the investigation who were there for support and assistance.
Q. In the command post?
A. Not necessarily inside the command post. We tried to limit individuals who would be in the command post. We had a number of individuals who were out there on any particular day and we couldn't have all those individuals in the command post, but we would have the individuals who were going to be responsible for doing a particular activity, given their assignments.
Q. Okay. Physically, what was the command post?
A. Physically, what was it?
Q. Yeah.
A. It's our command trailer that we have at the Sheriff's Department?
Q. Like a Winnebago type?
A. It's a good size.
Q. Okay. But not everybody can crowd into those things?
A. Right.
Q. Okay. So people, law enforcement officers, would come in as necessary to participate in discussions?
A. Yes. Whoever we needed to discuss matters with would be invited into the command post and we would then discuss our information with them.
Q. The -- You ran this investigation in conjunction with DCI, you said?
A. Yes.
Q. And then, jointly, with a number of other agencies?
A. Yes.
Q. The FBI was involved?
A. Yes, the FBI.
Q. They were in the command post from time to time?
A. They were -- They were only out there for a short period of time. They arrived and indicated that if we needed their assistance for anything we should feel free to contact them. I think they might have been there personally, only a couple of hours.
Q. Okay. But they said, call if you need help?
A. Yes.
Q. The Wisconsin State Patrol was out there for a longer period of time?
A. They were there several days, yes.
Q. They had command officers in and out of the command post?
A. Yes, they would have had individuals in and out.
Q. The Two Rivers Police Department?
A. Yes.
Q. They had senior staff in and out of the command post?
A. I don't know if they would have had individuals in or out, specifically, or if they were just part of the support group.
Q. All right. But what you tried to do was run this as a collaborative, or a joint effort?
A. Yes.
Q. You consulted with Manitowoc County Sheriff's personnel?
A. Yes.
Q. They were in and out of the command post?
A. Yes.
Q. At least the ranking members were?
A. Yes.
Q. So you weren't necessarily, personally, directing things, but you were part of a group that was making conjunctive, or joint, or collaborative, investigative decisions, so that all the tasks got done?
A. Attempting to, yes.
Q. Right. Were you aware, on November 5, let's say, that Lieutenant Lenk and Sergeant Colborn of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department recently had given depositions in Steven Avery's civil lawsuit?
A. No, I was not aware of that.
Q. When did you first learn that?
A. Today, in court.
Sheriff Kenneth Petersen testifies at the 2005 deposition of Steven Avery's $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County
Current Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann (left) was undersheriff when Teresa Halbach disappeared, and Ken Petersen (right) was sheriff (2001-2007; retired after 32 years in the department)
MANITOWOC COUNTY SHERIFF KEN PETERSEN'S PRE-TRIAL TESTIMONY
Q. Do you find, in general, that the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department operates as a well disciplined organization?
A. I believe so.
Q. That is, your directives are communicated, faithfully, to those below you?
A. Yes.
Q. And they are followed?
A. Yes.
Q. On Saturday, November 5, 2005, and just to orient you, that Teresa Halbach, we now know, was last seen on October 31, 2005. I don't expect that you necessarily know this, but I'm led to believe that she was reported missing on Thursday, November 3. All right. So I'm talking about two days later, on Saturday, November 5, 2005, at about 11:30 or 11:45 in the morning, a decision was made to transfer control of the investigation into her disappearance, and circumstances surrounding it, to the Calumet County Sheriff's Department and to DCI, or the Division of Criminal Investigation; is that true?
A. Yes.
Q. That decision to transfer control was made by you?
A. Indirectly, yes.
Q. You say indirectly, the primary focus of the investigation was in Manitowoc County, within the metes and bounds of Manitowoc County, correct?
A. Correct.
Q. To fall within your jurisdiction?
A. Correct.
Q. Your department had been involved in early steps in the investigation of Ms Hallbach's disappearance?
A. Correct.
Q. Maybe you would explain, then, for me, what you mean when you say, indirectly, the decision that Saturday morning was made by you?
A. I had been out of town the previous week. I was out in Seattle, Washington. And I arrived home probably 10:30, quarter to 11, Saturday morning. And that decision to transfer had already been made, I assume, by the inspector. I never inquired. I agreed with the way it was going, so I didn't interfere.
Q. Okay. I need to explore that just a little bit further to nail down timing. When you say you arrived home, do you mean physically at your home?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. You didn't go in to work immediately that Saturday morning?
A. No.
Q. Had you been in contact with the office during the course of that week in Seattle?
A. No.
Q. So you really were --
A. The first I heard --
Q. -- out of loop so to speak?
A. Yeah. The first I heard about the Halbach case was when a reporter called me Saturday after 11.
Q. Do you recall about when, after 11?
A. About 11:15, somewhere in that general area.
Q. Okay. And this was entirely news to you at that point?
A. Yes.
Q. You got in contact with Mr. Hermann?
A. Yes.
Q. Inspector Hermann?
A. Right.
NOTE: Todd Hermann followed his brother Robert Hermann, current sheriff of Manitowoc County, into law enforcement and was deputy inspector of operations for the sheriff's department until he retired early at age 50 in 2017 (their father also was in law enforcement, and the family runs Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage):
Todd Hermann was inspector and third in command at Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the time of Teresa Halbach's disappearance
Q. Do you remember about when you did that?
[–]Lonecrow66
There definitely is a cultish club there. A masonic sort of brotherhood you need to be part of.
[–]aether_drift[S]
Dave Begotka seems to think so. I don't really "believe" what I've written, but I think my gut/intuition is trying to make sense of some really strange loose ends in the behavior of certain people.
I think Undersheriff Herman is a huge player in this case somehow.
[–]aether_drift
Sometimes I think the whole point of this sub is to speculate. Because it's fun and the evidence doesn't cinch the case - there are multiple possibilities. I recall a time where 50% of the posts were about RH and the other half about how LE killed TH. Not much of that these days...
I've only posted one theory of the case. And I went balls to the wall conspiracy style with a sex club underground, TH having an affair that went south, a sex tape with TH blackmailing LE, etc. I just went for it because it was FUN. It's called Manitowoc is a Flat Circle.
Now it seems down to which piece of human detritus living at the Avery compound did it... I suspect many in Manitowoc don't much care, they'd just as well have the entire clan in prison. Steve and Brendan will do as far as they're concerned.
That is of course not my position.
Oh no...
TH's gruesome death is the tip of a very large, and very dark, iceberg...
Is it possible your Yellow King has connections with the Green Bay Packers? In 2005 MH landed a very exclusive job with the Packer's organization. Often you don't land those kinds of jobs without connections.
First motive, rival business. Second, revenge. Third, $36,000,000. Which high-ranking individual beyond questioning would have an incinerator, a tow truck, a crusher, a replacement vehicle with no prints and no real evidence to link the real murderer, VIN switching knowledge, and access to his own pick of vehicles and contacts in the auto business? The Manitowoc County Sheriff. Guess what, he is the President of Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage, in direction competition with Avery Salvage Yard. He was a deputy in 1985, he was the undersheriff in 2005, and he is now the Sheriff of Manitowoc County.
What You Don't Know About Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann
By AngelsOfMercyBlog
February 2, 2016
Hermann Timeline
- So the arresting officer, Petersen, in 1985 becomes the Sheriff in 2005
- Hermann is patrol officer in 1985 and becomes undersherrif in 2005
- Hermann becomes the sheriff in 2007
- Sherry Culhane is the state DNA tech both times, 1985 and 2005
Rival Businesses
There is also Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage and it is owned by Manitowoc Sheriff Robert Hermann.
In 2005, his father owned the business and Robert Hermann was Undersheriff.
The year that Avery was arrested for the rape of PB was the year Robert Hermann joined the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department.
http://cleveland-auto-sales-salvage.cleveland.wi.amfibi.directory/us/c/18826455-cleveland-auto-sales-salvage
July 17, 1985: The City of Manitowoc Police Department assigns officers to conduct daily surveillance on Gregory A. Allen. Allen was identified as a suspect in several complaints of prowling, window peeping, indecent exposure and sexual assault dating back to January of 1985 through July 14. “He is a dangerous individual with a potential for violence,” the report stated.
From <http://www.sheboyganpress.com/story/news/local/steven-avery/2016/01/28/steven-avery-case-timeline/79450680/>
Was it possible that Robert Hermann was the officer that was suppose to be watching Gregory Allen?
Hermann Opportunities
Salvage Yard VIN Scam:
http://www.vinetching.com/vin-switching.html
I know there is a lot of buzz about Colburn and what this person said and what time line is and so forth, but I have a problem with the entire RAV4 they found. There are many issues with it…
- A broken blinker light with a replacement blinker that is laying in RAV4 in the cargo hold, yet Teresa’s vehicle had no damage and according to the John, the propane dealer who saw it drive away, states it looked shiny new with no damage.
- Her real keys are missing, and now we have a valet key? Is it because the real key would not start the duplicate RAV4?
- Its known as a Salvage Yard Scam to switch VIN on two vehicles to sell a stole vehicle. Was a switch made on the Vehicles in order to hide the real murder scene and that explains where all the blood is?
- The battery cable was disconnected, it is standard to disconnect the negative battery cable to tow a vehicle. Why tow it if you can drive it, unless you can’t because its so damaged that it would draw unwanted traffic police attention.
- The blood in the back of the RAV4, there should have been much more unless her heart came to rest prior to being placed there. It would suggest this was post mortem.
- Her license plate was not attached to her vehicle and found crumpled up in the trunk of another vehicle. Is this because to transfer the plates on to the duplicate, would have made fresh metal scratches and drawn even more suspicion?
- Incinerate a body at 1700 degrees to produce just bones
- Tow a vehicle with out showing records of such
- Crush Teresa’s real RAV4 to hide the actual murder scene
- Have access to planting Steven’s blood
- Have the know how and ability to switch VIN’s so easily
- Locate a replacement RAV4 on quick notice
- Have the inside knowledge of how to stage a crime scene
- Have a questionable past issue with the truth
- Have not one but three motives
- We know that Mark Fassbender investigated Avery’s incinerator, it was not used for months.
- Why would Steven tow the vehicle?
- If Steven did it why not crush the vehicle with her body in it and bury it somewhere
- Steven admitted early on and has always stated that he leaded his palms onto Teresa’s vehicle and that’s why they may find his palm prints on her RAV4, yet no prints, NONE, not even the girl that drove this car for 2 years are found?
- The switching of VIN numbers is called “SALVAGE Yard Scam”
- A car dealer would, especially one that had been in the business of Auto Sales his entire life.
- Someone in Law Enforcement
- Someone that had lied for 18 years, keeping an innocent man in prison and allowing a rapist to roam freely.
- First motive, Rival Business. Second, Revenge. Third, $36,000,000.00
Guess what, he is the President of Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage. He was a deputy in 1985, he was the Undersheriff in 2005, and he is now the Sheriff of Manitowoc County.
He and he alone fits all that would be needed to fulfill the requirements for this type of accident, and he is the one saying, all over, that Netflix is taking things out of context and out of order, and says that’s how it's done to keep every one confused. He is saying this in my opinion because he himself is the one that did this, and so he knows how it works.
Just saying, don’t get distracted. Focus on what a killer would need to accomplish the tasks. That is how you find the real killer.
Hermann Career Highlights Interview
A small piece of the grill, coming from the suspect’s vehicle, had been found near the scene of the rural Manitowoc County accident, and he remembers driving through area lots of car dealerships until he found a pick-up truck that matched the grill. His experience with cars helped give him and other law enforcement officers an idea of the kind of vehicle they were looking for, Hermann said.
From <http://www.stevenaverycase.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Ricky-Hochstetler-MTSO-Report_Redacted.pdf >
The Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, which has been accused of framing Steven Avery for a 1985 rape and planting numerous clues to convict Avery for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, has also been dogged by allegations it mishandled the 1999 hit-and-run death of a 17-year-old boy, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin has learned.
The homicide of Ricky Hochstetler, who was struck by a vehicle while walking to his home along a frontage road, remains unsolved. The crime occurred at about 2:20 a.m. on Jan. 10, 1999 during a snowstorm.
On the morning of the fatality, Robert Jeffery of Newton found parts scattered in the snow at the seldom-used intersection of Center and Newton roads in rural Newton. If the fleeing driver had turned onto Center Road, the village of Cleveland was about five minutes away. Several sources who had ties to the investigation suspected that the hit-and-run driver was probably headed toward Cleveland. But this critical clue soon fell by the wayside under the direction of Lt. Mike Bushman, the road deputy put in charge of the homicide by then-Manitowoc County Sheriff Tom Kocourek. According to Bushman's report, the Newton resident “was unable to tell me which direction the suspect vehicle may have went after the pieces fell off.”
On the day of Hochstetler's funeral, multiple car parts were visible in the thawing snow at the far edge of the victim's driveway along Manitowoc County CR. The boy's body was found 50 yards up the road. "(The parts) were right up by the road," Manitowoc resident Sylvia (Hynek) Schmidt told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "I just remember I was thinking, 'This doesn't look like it had been weathered.'"
The parts appeared to be a section of headlight housing with letters and numbers stamped into it, Manitowoc sheriff's deputy Jason Jost reported at the time. "I also observed three other pieces of plastic lying just around the corner," Jost's Jan. 15, 1999 report stated. All four of the parts "appeared to be from a newer style car," Jost wrote. There had been no other recent collisions along the two-lane highway around the time of her son's death, said Debi Hochstetler, the victim's mother. Nevertheless, Bushman determined that these fresh car parts were not relevant to his investigation.
Within hours of the overnight crash, juvenile detention center Lt. Rob Hermann, now the county sheriff, assured Bushman that the hit-and-run vehicle was a 1985 to 1988 Chevy truck, Suburban or Blazer. Days later, Bushman speculated that the tiny pieces of broken grill found along the rural highway may also belong to a 1988 to 1991 full-size van. It seemed that every decision Hermann and Bushman made put Manitowoc County farther away from identifying Ricky Hochstetler's killer.
From the outset, Kocourek, who did not return a message from USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, didn't make it a top priority for his detectives or deputies to canvass local bars, bowling lanes or late-night diners for leads and suspects; conduct any round-the-clock surveillance near the crash site or near the rural intersection in Newton where signs of evidence were found; inspect the salvage yards near Cleveland and Sheboygan, even though there was a strong chance the hit-and-run driver would fix or destroy his damaged vehicle to avoid suspicion; and scour the rural roads and ditches for additional vehicle debris that may trace back to the hit-and-run driver.
Kocourek also let several weeks pass before volunteer firefighters were summoned to the crime scene along County CR to melt down the snow and ice. The effort yielded 126 gray grill pieces, three black pieces, two small pieces of Chevrolet emblem, one gold glasses frame and one lens, reports show. "Most were very small and of no identifying quality at this point and time," Bushman stated.
Weeks after the boy's death, a number of sheriff's department employees began to suspect that an off-duty deputy — after a night of drinking — struck and killed the rural Manitowoc teenager. Even the traffic patrol lieutenant who was in charge of the investigation was aware of the allegations, indicate reports reviewed by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.
However, both Lt. Mike Bushman and then-Sheriff Tom Kocourek's administration declined to probe the activities of the two deputies who were being mentioned as possible suspects — Lt. Rob Hermann and his brother, Sgt. Todd Hermann.
Rob Hermann is now the sheriff of Manitowoc County...
When reached on his work cellphone by USA TODAY NETWORK, Todd Hermann declined to comment. The 49-year-old Cleveland, Wis., resident directed all questions about the case to Rob Hermann.
After his brother was elected sheriff, Todd Hermann was promoted to the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department's deputy inspector of operations, the third-highest position in the department...
Bushman, the night-shift patrol commander, heard about the hit-and-run pedestrian collision on his squad car radio while at the gas pumps about a mile away. He arrived on the scene at 2:28 a.m. Hochstetler's body was in the middle of the road. Bushman decided to preserve the death scene rather than chase after the fleeing driver, the Division of Criminal Investigation report stated.
Ken Petersen, undersheriff at the time, assured the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter that the hit-and-run driver had not been drinking at the popular club. "I don't know if the person could have gotten up to a speed that would have caused that kind of injury to the victim or damage to the vehicle," Petersen told the newspaper.
The front entrance to the Bil-Mar was close to a quarter-mile from the Hochstetler tragedy.
Although the high-profile crime became the talk of the town, Kocourek decided not to seek help from the Wisconsin State Patrol's technical crash-scene reconstruction experts. And the Division of Criminal Investigation wasn't asked to help, either.
Kocourek did not return a phone call seeking comment for this story.
Before the autopsy — and prior to any daylight searches in ditches and along adjacent roads for more broken vehicle parts — Rob Hermann, Manitowoc County's juvenile jail administrator at the time, set a course that would later prove unsuccessful in finding the person who killed Hochstetler.
As the hit-and-run investigation floundered in 1999, Bushman continued to hear whispers suggesting Hochstetler's death was part of a sheriff's department cover-up. Bushman's investigative reports show he raised the issue of a cover-up during a face-to-face interview with Rick Wetenkamp, a rural Newton resident, who had been the hit-and-run victim's stepfather. By that point, the homicide had been unsolved for 11 months.
"I decided to question him about a statement he made ... reference the opinion that the police may have been involved in the accident and are attempting to cover it up," Bushman wrote in his report. "I wished to catch what type of reaction this would bring."
It was evident from Bushman's report that he did not want the victim's stepfather believing that police corruption might be the root cause for the lack of an arrest.
Months later, in 2000, there was a changing of the guard.
Kocourek retired and Petersen took over as sheriff. Petersen elevated Rob Hermann to under-sheriff/inspector. Bushman was promoted to third in command, supervising the road patrol division and the detectives bureau. That bureau included James Lenk, the same detective who was later accused of planting Avery's blood and a spare key during the 2005 Halbach murder case.
Under Lenk's leadership, little progress was made in bringing Hochstetler's killer to justice, and Petersen's administration wasn't optimistic about an arrest. "What it's going to take to solve the thing would just be luck at this point," Petersen told The Associated Press in January 2002. "I doubt if that truck exists anymore, especially in any kind of evidentiary form."
But not everyone at the sheriff's department shared Petersen's pessimism about solving the high-profile homicide. A former sheriff's employee confirmed resigning from the department, disgusted by what the employee felt was a shoddy investigation. Sources with ties to the Hochstetler investigation told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that it was evident Bushman and Rob Hermann had compromised critical evidence recovered at the scene of the crime, jeopardizing the prospects of a criminal prosecution...
After a Green Bay television station aired a 2004 story, a woman called Debi Hochstetler, asking "if she was the person who lost her son." The woman told Debi Hochstetler "that the person who killed her son was a cop and that she gave the last name of the person as (Hermann)," DCI reports from 2004 showed. "Hochstetler stated that the woman gave her a first name for (Hermann) as well, but that she could not remember it at this time."
According to the tipster, the hit-and-run vehicle ended up at the Cleveland Auto salvage shortly after the crash and was subsequently crushed. Cleveland Auto was the long-time family business in southern Manitowoc County along County XX operated by Bob Hermann and his family. The elder Hermann had worked as a traffic patrolman for Manitowoc County before retiring and two of his sons, Rob and Todd, followed in his footsteps and were hired into the sheriff's department by Kocourek during the 1980s. Years later, when Debi Hochstetler brought her information to Bushman in 2004, he dismissed it, telling her Rob Hermann wasn't involved in the crime.
In July 2009, the Division of Criminal Investigation reopened its investigation of Rob Hermann, the state agency's reports reflect. By then, Hermann was Manitowoc's sheriff. "The caller wanted to remain anonymous and would provide no information on the source of the allegations other than the individuals who provided the information were high school friends of the suspect that did not want to get involved in the investigation and did not know the caller was providing information to authorities," the late Division of Criminal Investigation Craig Klyve wrote in his report.
According to Klyve's report, "the caller said that Robert Hermann had an early- to mid-1980s Chevy pickup truck that has not been seen since the time of the accident. The caller believes this vehicle was the one that struck and (killed) Ricky Hochstetler."
December 23, 2009: A high-ranking state Justice Department official has committed suicide in the parking garage under the agency’s headquarters. Craig Klyve, director of the agency’s Bureau of Investigative Services, used his service weapon to kill himself in his car. Klyve’s wife, Assistant Attorney General Rebecca Weise, found his body. Klyve, 52, had been feeling overwhelmed at work and mandatory furlough days made his job even harder, said his stepmother, Susan Gruber. His bureau oversees the agency’s Internet Crimes Against Children unit and the Wisconsin Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children. It also manages all case records and provides technical support for investigations. Klyve sometimes worked until 2 a.m., Gruber said. But he was the family’s rock, and no one ever thought he would commit suicide. “Nobody, nobody had an inkling,” she said, choking back sobs. “Craig was there for everybody. He was a good person to everybody. I don’t think he had an enemy.” [Source]Dean Strang's former criminal investigator, Pete Baetz, told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that he questions Hermann's rushed conclusion that the hit-and-run vehicle was a full-sized truck. The teen's body was found in the middle of the county highway more than 300 feet from impact. Based on his review of the autopsy findings, Baetz said the victim's injuries appeared consistent with someone being struck by a car. “It looks like a cover-up, let's put it that way.”
"Based on the breaks in the lower legs, I just did not believe it was a pickup truck," said Baetz, a retired Illinois police investigator. "I think he was scooped, and a pick-up truck isn't going to scoop him up. It's too high."
Baetz said the crime scene evidence was mishandled by Rob Hermann, who was allowed to drive around with crime scene parts in his personal vehicle for several hours after the crash.
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/investigations/2016/09/12/manitowoc-sheriff-under-fire-1999-homicide/80862938/>
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/investigations/2016/09/13/missteps-hamper-1999-hit-and-run-death-probe/87390800/>
From <http://www.postcrescent.com/longform/news/investigations/2016/09/14/mother-wants-forgive-hersons-killer/87542208/>
Yet another was the 1999 vehicular death of Valders teacher Debra Cooper, who was hit by another vehicle. Hermann was off-duty and was called in to reconstruct the accident. The other vehicle, belonging to the suspect, contained a bag of $75,000 cash and evidence of drug activity, Hermann said.
A highlight of his career was attending the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., in 1995, he said.
Hermann won the election in 2006 against two other candidates, Democrat Ryan Gilbert in the primary, and Republican Andrew Coborn in the general election. He ran unopposed for his second term and will be running unopposed again in fall for his third term, Hermann said.
From <http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/local/2014/07/01/sheriff-robert-hermann-recalls-career-highlights-changes/11944007/>
Hermann Quotes
“I won’t call it a documentary, because a documentary puts things in chronological order and tells the story as it is. … I’ve heard things are skewed,” said Hermann, who hasn’t seen the series but has been discussing it with the department. “They’ve taken things out of context and taken them out of the order in which they occurred, which can lead people to a different opinion or conclusion.”
From <http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/local/2015/12/21/sheriff-making-murderer-movie-not-documentary/77715576/>
“I’m still trying to figure it out, and I can’t,” Avery said in a telephone interview from his cell block in mid-February. “The only thing I can come up with is the sheriff and some of them cops. I don’t know why they would’ve wanted to go this far.”
From <http://www.milwaukeemag.com/2006/05/01/blood-simple/>
“Show me the evidence he was framed. There is not going to be any. It didn’t happen,” said Hermann, who joined the department in 1985. “I don’t know why anybody in law enforcement would want to get him, that makes no sense.”
“They relate it to the previous lawsuit. That has nothing to do with law enforcement. The lawsuit was against the county and … while we don’t like to have lawsuits against your county or your city or whatever, really to the individual law enforcement officer, that doesn’t mean a lot because it just doesn’t affect them,” Hermann added.
From <http://www.kcentv.com/story/30877797/sheriff-making-a-murderer-is-not-a-documentary>
Hermann Rumors
This is what happens when the high school quarterback becomes county sheriff and the team’s trainer buys a law degree on EBAY and becomes county prosecutor.
From <https://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments.php?api_key=731161400330877&channel_url=http%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3Fversion%3D42%23cb%3Df1e0a845ce3d90d%26domain%3Dwww.milwaukeemag.com%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.milwaukeemag.com%252Ff3766f5aa151a7c%26relation%3Dparent.parent&colorscheme=light&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milwaukeemag.com%2F2006%2F05%2F01%2Fblood-simple%2F&locale=en_US&numposts=5&sdk=joey&skin=light&version=v2.3&width=100%25>
Questions about Hermann
Who can give promotions like this:
Aside from the allegation that the law enforcement framed Avery for Halbach’s murder, there’s undeniable proof that certain members failed in their duties. For example, Sgt. Andrew Colborn ignored a call from another office that could have freed Avery from his original incarceration much earlier, and Sgt. Jason Orth’s log of visitors to the crime scene was lacking, to say the least. But to the filmmakers’ knowledge, no one was reprimanded or demoted as a result.
“It’s quite the opposite, actually,” Making A Murderer filmmaker, Demos said. “People received awards. I think Kratz was named prosecutor of the year for winning the case; Tom Fassbender received an award for his role as an investigator on this case. So, no — their careers have been bolstered by this case.”
“And they’ve been promoted,” Ricciardi added. “I believe Colborn is a lieutenant now in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department.” Lt. James Lenk has since retired.
From <http://www.popculthq.com/2016/01/11/making-a-murderer-part-3-was-there-a-conspiracy-and-how-manitowoc-p-d/>
Hermann Gag order:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20070318&id=G2QbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WkgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7107,2195370&hl=en
CALUMET COUNTY SHERIFF JERRY PAGEL'S PRE-TRIAL TESTIMONY
Q. Were you, personally, out at the Avery Auto Salvage property on the days following this phone call, at home, on November 3?
A. Yes, I was.
Q. Each day?
A. Yes, I was there every day.
Q. Starting Friday, November 4.
A. No, the 5th.
Q. So, November 5th?
A. Yes.
Q. Saturday, November 5. And then how many days in a row did you remain, personally, out at the Avery Auto Salvage property?
A. I would go out their during the daylight hours and generally would leave anywhere between 7, 8, 9 at night.
Q. How long did that continue, Sheriff Pagel?
A. I was there the entire week that we were out there.
Q. And until the road was reopened and the searching was done?
A. That's correct.
Q. All right. Now, during that time that you were out there, during these long daylight hours, essentially, did you, personally, direct the activities of Lieutenant Lenk?
A. Did I, personally? How did you phrase it?
Q. Direct the activities of Lieutenant Lenk of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department?
A. Not personally, no. It was -- Could have been done either through the command post. Again, they were there as a support group. So we would utilize our investigators, our officers, our personnel, along with agents from the Department of Criminal Investigation and individuals would then be assigned to those particular individuals who would be the lead people doing particular -- particular programs or parts of the investigation out there.
Q. Activities. All right. So you set up a command post?
A. Yes.
Q. You set that up in conjunction with the DCI?
A. Yes.
Q. There were other law enforcement agencies, also, at the command post?
A. Yes, there were other agencies involved in the investigation who were there for support and assistance.
Q. In the command post?
A. Not necessarily inside the command post. We tried to limit individuals who would be in the command post. We had a number of individuals who were out there on any particular day and we couldn't have all those individuals in the command post, but we would have the individuals who were going to be responsible for doing a particular activity, given their assignments.
Q. Okay. Physically, what was the command post?
A. Physically, what was it?
Q. Yeah.
A. It's our command trailer that we have at the Sheriff's Department?
Q. Like a Winnebago type?
A. It's a good size.
Q. Okay. But not everybody can crowd into those things?
A. Right.
Q. Okay. So people, law enforcement officers, would come in as necessary to participate in discussions?
A. Yes. Whoever we needed to discuss matters with would be invited into the command post and we would then discuss our information with them.
Q. The -- You ran this investigation in conjunction with DCI, you said?
A. Yes.
Q. And then, jointly, with a number of other agencies?
A. Yes.
Q. The FBI was involved?
A. Yes, the FBI.
Q. They were in the command post from time to time?
A. They were -- They were only out there for a short period of time. They arrived and indicated that if we needed their assistance for anything we should feel free to contact them. I think they might have been there personally, only a couple of hours.
Q. Okay. But they said, call if you need help?
A. Yes.
Q. The Wisconsin State Patrol was out there for a longer period of time?
A. They were there several days, yes.
Q. They had command officers in and out of the command post?
A. Yes, they would have had individuals in and out.
Q. The Two Rivers Police Department?
A. Yes.
Q. They had senior staff in and out of the command post?
A. I don't know if they would have had individuals in or out, specifically, or if they were just part of the support group.
Q. All right. But what you tried to do was run this as a collaborative, or a joint effort?
A. Yes.
Q. You consulted with Manitowoc County Sheriff's personnel?
A. Yes.
Q. They were in and out of the command post?
A. Yes.
Q. At least the ranking members were?
A. Yes.
Q. So you weren't necessarily, personally, directing things, but you were part of a group that was making conjunctive, or joint, or collaborative, investigative decisions, so that all the tasks got done?
A. Attempting to, yes.
Q. Right. Were you aware, on November 5, let's say, that Lieutenant Lenk and Sergeant Colborn of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department recently had given depositions in Steven Avery's civil lawsuit?
A. No, I was not aware of that.
Q. When did you first learn that?
A. Today, in court.
Sheriff Kenneth Petersen testifies at the 2005 deposition of Steven Avery's $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County
Current Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann (left) was undersheriff when Teresa Halbach disappeared, and Ken Petersen (right) was sheriff (2001-2007; retired after 32 years in the department)
MANITOWOC COUNTY SHERIFF KEN PETERSEN'S PRE-TRIAL TESTIMONY
Q. Do you find, in general, that the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department operates as a well disciplined organization?
A. I believe so.
Q. That is, your directives are communicated, faithfully, to those below you?
A. Yes.
Q. And they are followed?
A. Yes.
Q. On Saturday, November 5, 2005, and just to orient you, that Teresa Halbach, we now know, was last seen on October 31, 2005. I don't expect that you necessarily know this, but I'm led to believe that she was reported missing on Thursday, November 3. All right. So I'm talking about two days later, on Saturday, November 5, 2005, at about 11:30 or 11:45 in the morning, a decision was made to transfer control of the investigation into her disappearance, and circumstances surrounding it, to the Calumet County Sheriff's Department and to DCI, or the Division of Criminal Investigation; is that true?
A. Yes.
Q. That decision to transfer control was made by you?
A. Indirectly, yes.
Q. You say indirectly, the primary focus of the investigation was in Manitowoc County, within the metes and bounds of Manitowoc County, correct?
A. Correct.
Q. To fall within your jurisdiction?
A. Correct.
Q. Your department had been involved in early steps in the investigation of Ms Hallbach's disappearance?
A. Correct.
Q. Maybe you would explain, then, for me, what you mean when you say, indirectly, the decision that Saturday morning was made by you?
A. I had been out of town the previous week. I was out in Seattle, Washington. And I arrived home probably 10:30, quarter to 11, Saturday morning. And that decision to transfer had already been made, I assume, by the inspector. I never inquired. I agreed with the way it was going, so I didn't interfere.
Q. Okay. I need to explore that just a little bit further to nail down timing. When you say you arrived home, do you mean physically at your home?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. You didn't go in to work immediately that Saturday morning?
A. No.
Q. Had you been in contact with the office during the course of that week in Seattle?
A. No.
Q. So you really were --
A. The first I heard --
Q. -- out of loop so to speak?
A. Yeah. The first I heard about the Halbach case was when a reporter called me Saturday after 11.
Q. Do you recall about when, after 11?
A. About 11:15, somewhere in that general area.
Q. Okay. And this was entirely news to you at that point?
A. Yes.
Q. You got in contact with Mr. Hermann?
A. Yes.
Q. Inspector Hermann?
A. Right.
NOTE: Todd Hermann followed his brother Robert Hermann, current sheriff of Manitowoc County, into law enforcement and was deputy inspector of operations for the sheriff's department until he retired early at age 50 in 2017 (their father also was in law enforcement, and the family runs Cleveland Auto Sales and Salvage):
Todd Hermann, the deputy inspector of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department -- third in command of the entire agency -- has left the county by taking an early retirement. He recently turned 50.
The Cleveland, Wis. native is the younger brother of three-term Manitowoc County Sheriff Rob Hermann, who was elected by the voters in 2006 in a race against Deputy Andy Colborn. After his brother took office, Todd Hermann was promoted from one of the lieutenant positions to third in command. From 2007 through 2016, Todd Hermann was in charge of the traffic patrol division and the detective bureau for Manitowoc County.
Todd Hermann was one of the prosecution witnesses utilized by special prosecutor Ken Kratz during the 2007 murder trial against Steven Avery. His boss, Inspector Gregg Schetter, gave Hermann a special recognition letter praising him for exemplary work on the Steven Avery murder case.
Last September, Todd Hermann declined to comment when I [John Ferak] reached him and asked him several questions prior to publication of my three-day-long investigative series that ran across USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin examining the unsolved hit-and-run death of 17-year-old Ricky Hochstetler. The 1999 pedestrian homicide along a county road south of Manitowoc at bar-closing time has involved longstanding suspicions of a Manitowoc sheriff's department cover-up. Vehicle damage showed that the intoxicated motorist may have been heading toward the village of Cleveland.
Todd Hermann was inspector and third in command at Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the time of Teresa Halbach's disappearance
Q. Do you remember about when you did that?
A. It had been shortly after the reporter called.
Q. I will bet. By telephone?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. And at that point, he told you that he had already decided to shift the primary responsibility for the investigation to the two other law enforcement agencies I described?
A. Yes.
Q. Did he tell you when he had made that decision?
A. No. He had talked about conferring with Corp Counsel and that was what he advised. Normally we follow his advice.
Q. You agreed with that advice?
A. Yes.
Q. You had a discussion with him on his reasoning?
A. Yes.
Q. And in a nutshell -- and you are free to disagree or explain this -- but in a nutshell, the reason he described to you, after consulting with Corporation Counsel, was to avoid the appearance or the reality of a conflict of interest?
A. Correct.
Q. Because at least a person of interest at that point was Steven Avery?
A. Yes.
Q. You were told that?
A. No, they didn't give me any specific suspects or people of interest. They merely stated that the vehicle had been found on the Avery Salvage Yard property.
Q. Correct. And what further information did you need, or ask for, or inquire about, to decide whether, in fact, there was a conflict of interest or the appearance of one?
A. I didn't need anything more than that at that point.
Q. Avery Auto Salvage Yard, car found, that was enough?
A. Sure.
Q. The reason you perceived, or you agreed with Inspector Hermann's assessment, that there was a potential conflict of interest, is that at that time a civil lawsuit by Steven Avery was pending against Manitowoc County and some former officials?
A. Correct.
Q. That was a civil lawsuit for 36 million dollars in damages?
A. Correct.
Q. It related to the 1985 conviction that you and I have discussed this morning?
A. Correct.
Q. Did you see that as a real and present conflict of interest on November 5?
A. I don't see it so much as a conflict of interest, I would say a prudent decision just to keep accusation free.
Q. All right. And what did you -- what did you understand the decision to be, in terms of the shifting of responsibility?
A. That the Calumet County Sheriff would run the investigation and I would pay for it.
Q. Okay. In addition to paying for the investigation, what role was the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department to play, if any?
A. Support.
Q. What does support mean?
A. Logistics, equipment, whatever they needed, manpower.
Q. So the Calumet County Sheriff, Mr. Pagel, was to communicate with you, or your department?
A. As far as?
Q. Logistics, support, manpower, whatever he needed?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. So he would request it of you, or someone in your department?
A. Yes.
Q. And then you would provide it?
A. Yes.
Q. The Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, in that way, continued to play an active role in the investigation into Ms Halbach's disappearance?
A. Yes, I believe so.
Q. You monitored the progress of that investigation?
A. No, I have never seen a report on the actual investigation.
Q. All right.
A. I have gotten copies of bills, we have had conferences on security, that type of thing.
Q. The guy in charge usually gets the bills.
A. Yeah.
Q. But in your department, reports generated by deputies, or detectives, or sergeants, or lieutenants, don't necessarily all come up to your desk?
A. Most of them do.
Q. And this one may have or haven't?
A. Have not.
Q. Why?
A. I divorced myself from the early investigation.
Q. You personally?
A. Correct.
Q. All right. When did that happen, Sheriff Petersen?
A. On that Saturday.
Q. Immediately?
A. Right.
Q. Okay. Who did you leave as the liaison, or the contact person, or the reviewing person within your department, for your department's role in the investigation?
A. Deputy Inspector Schetter.
Q. With a formal directive to him of some kind?
A. No.
Q. With a conversation?
A. No, I didn't talk to him. He may have talked to the inspector, he didn't talk to me.
Q. Oh. Okay. Do you know whether someone directed Deputy Inspector Schetter to play a reviewing role?
A. No.
Q. How do you know he is?
A. Because he was out at the scene with the sheriff and his people.
Q. All right. And who is getting the reports generated by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department on the Halbach investigation and, ultimately, the arrest and prosecution of Mr. Avery?
A. I would believe Calumet County Sheriff's Department would.
Q. Not Deputy Inspector Schetter?
A. Well, they would still be in our files, there would be copies there -- or originals there. The copies would be -- would be shipped.
Q. All right. I will see if I can do this efficiently, and the problem is, you may not know some of the facts I'm going to suggest to you.
A. Okay.
Q. Because it sounds like I have seen Manitowoc Sheriff's Department reports that you probably have not. All right?
A. Sure.
Q. But let me suggest these things and we'll see what you know and what you don't know, or what you dispute. All right. The first law enforcement officer to speak with -- speak personally with Steven Avery about Teresa Halbach, which was on November 3, was Sergeant Andrew Colborn of your department; is that right?
A. Don't know.
Q. One way or the other?
A. Yeah, don't know.
Q. You don't dispute that?
A. Yeah, I don't know.
Q. All right. The first law enforcement officers to search Mr. Avery's trailer, this time with consent, on Friday, November 4, were two members of the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, Lieutenant Lenk and Detective Remiker?
A. I believe they were with a Calumet County officer.
Q. You think they may have been with a Calumet County officer?
A. I believe so.
Q. But you know that Lenk and Remiker --
A. Had been at the trailer.
Q. -- did a consent search of the trailer on Friday, November 4th?
A. Yes, I believe so.
Q. On Saturday, November 5, the first law enforcement officer, as opposed to citizen, unsworn citizen, to see Teresa Halbach's Toyota Rav 4, was a member of your department, Detective Remiker?
A. I don't know that.
Q. You don't dispute it, you just don't know one way or the other?
A. I don't know.
Q. All right. The first search of Mr. Avery's trailer, with a search warrant, occurred later on Saturday, November 5. And that involved, again, Detective Remiker of your department and Calumet County Investigator Gary Steier, or is that something you know?
A. That, I believe, is what I was referring to.
Q. All right. The first law enforcement officers that day to collect any suspected blood in Mr. Avery's trailer, or on it, was, again, Detective Remiker of your department, correct?
A. It's possible, yes.
Q. He gave that to Sergeant Colborn of your department?
A. That I don't know.
Q. Don't dispute, but just don't know?
A. Yeah.
Q. The detached garage between Mr. Avery's trailer and Barb Yanda's trailer, I believe first was searched pursuant to warrant on Sunday, November 6. Were you aware that Detective Remiker and Lieutenant Lenk and Sergeant Colborn, along with a Calumet County deputy, were the first law enforcement officers to search the detached garage?
MR. FALLON: Excuse me, your Honor, I'm going to impose an objection on this particular line of questioning as -- and the reason is, the previous testimony of Sheriff Petersen indicating that as of earlier that day, 11:30, 11:45, control of the investigation was passed. And given that fact, the fact that there may have been some logistical or support personnel provided by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department to assist in these searches or contacts, was all under the control and direction of Sheriff Pagel at Calumet County. Thus, this particular line of questioning, I would suggest to the Court, is irrelevant.
THE COURT: Mr. Strang.
ATTORNEY STRANG: Let me ask some clarifying questions, because I'm not necessarily in disagreement with the factual portion of Mr. Fallon's statement, and I will clarify that.
Q. (By Attorney Strang)~ Any actions that members of your department took after, let's say 11:30, on Saturday, November 5, you believe would have been taken with the knowledge, or under the direction, at the request, however you want to put it, of either the Calumet County Sheriff's Department or the DCI?
A. Correct.
Q. That is, neither you, nor Inspector Hermann, nor anybody above the level of the people in your department involved, were directing, or controlling, or supervising the steps of those people?
A. Correct.
Q. My -- And I think you and I are in agreement, I'm not trying to suggest otherwise, my questions really are just inquiring into who the boots on the ground were, who the people were, not who's directing them, or telling them what to do and not to do; do you understand me that way?
A. Correct.
Q. Okay. So with that limitation, Lenk, Remiker and Colborn, along with a Calumet deputy -- Calumet County deputy, were the first to search the detached garage on Sunday, November 6th?
MR. FALLON: I'm going to renew the objection. I understand counsel's point, but I still fail to see the relevance as it pertains to the motion to dismiss and/or the motion to exclude.
ATTORNEY STRANG: It bears more on the motion to exclude. I have moved to exclude not just Sheriff Petersen from further involvement in this case, supervising the jury, or in a logistical or support role to the Court, but have moved to exclude the entire department from providing that logistical or support role. So, I think this has a bearing, the involvement of others in the department clearly has a bearing on that motion, your Honor.
THE COURT: I believe it relates to the motion to exclude, so I'm going to allow it.
ATTORNEY STRANG: Do you recall my last question?
THE WITNESS: No.
Q. (By Attorney Strang)~ Sunday, November 6, detached garage, first law enforcement officers to search, Lenk, Remiker, Colborn, and a deputy from Calumet whose has a name, and that's Dan Kucharski?
A. I wouldn't know who searched it.
Q. Don't know one way or the other?
A. No, I don't know who was in the garage.
Q. Don't dispute that the three Manitowoc people were among the first law enforcement people to enter the garage?
A. It's possible.
What 'Making A Murderer' Got Wrong, According To The Manitowoc Sheriff's Department
By Melanie Schmitz, Romper
January 29, 2016
In an interview with Romper this week, Manitowoc Sheriff Robert Hermann finally spoke out about at least a few of the things that Making a Murderer got wrong.
"I think we’re doing rather well," Hermann said, when asked about the department's overall outlook of late. "You know there’s a level of frustration, because a lot of the information out there is twisted and turned — obviously shedding a bad light on us. But I think the community here lived through this once before, so it’s kind of déjà vu for them."
Hermann himself remembered the case well — he was there the first time Avery was arrested and then again in 2005, when Avery was arrested for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach.
"Locally, I think that the community has been supporting us [since Making a Murderer was released]," Hermann explained this week. "But you know, you’re always going to have people out there on the other side who disagree."
Specifically, Hermann said, the rest of the public's contention that the Manitowoc department's "inept" behavior had led to Avery's 2007 murder conviction was unfounded.
"We were not the lead investigators on this," he said. "I guess I always think that it’s kind of ironic how people watching a film for entertainment can rush to this conclusion."
He quickly added that he was "confident" that the Calumet County investigators behind much of the original trial had done the best job possible. "I stand behind them," he said.
Hermann then cited several key points from the Netflix documentary — which he insisted on referring to as a film ("I call it a film, because it doesn’t document everything like I believe it should," he told Romper) — that he claimed were wrong.
Here, a breakdown of a few of those points.
The Manitowoc Sheriff's Department Refused To Take Part In The Docu-Series
This rumor, largely circulated by social media and the national public dialogue, was without merit, according to Hermann. "You’re kind of playing off what these filmmakers were saying, like, 'We tried to have them people involved, but they didn’t want no part of this documentary,'" Hermann said, when asked about the department's relative absence throughout the filmmaking process. "Back when the hearings started with Judge (Patrick) Willis, he asked that law enforcement no longer make any comments publicly — so we weren’t able to even comment on that case at all to the press. Basically, he put a gag order on us, and obviously we didn’t want to create any problems for the judicial system, so we stopped."
Hermann said that while he and his department did eventually make comments to the filmmakers, they were purposely silent until that point. "I did speak with those filmmakers, I’m in the documentary," he said. "So, I think their claim [that we wouldn’t speak to them] is false. We legally couldn't."
Avery's Account Of The Infamous "Cat Incident"
According to Hermann, the account Avery's gave in the documentary of a previous animal cruelty charge was wildly "downplayed."
"He downplayed that cat incident, you know," Hermann bristled. "'Oh, when I was young and foolish'—well, he was actually about 20—'I took some friends and grabbed the cat, and I kind of waved it over the fire, and it caught fire.' No, you didn’t. You doused it with oil and then put it in the fire. So it’s all downplayed. And then when it came time to discuss the law enforcement’s [account], it was twisted."
When asked whether the filmmakers had reached out to him at the time to confirm Avery's story, Hermann said he couldn't remember.
The Averys Were Social Pariahs In The Community
Despite claims made by the Averys themselves in the Making a Murderer series, Hermann said that the family was never ostracized in the way that the documentary's audience might think.
"You know… the documentary—or film—paints a picture that they were, you know, kind of—I don’t know which name you’d use," said Hermann. "But they paint this picture of the Avery family, which I think is totally wrong. And they paint that picture themselves, too."
He stated that the department had maintained a relatively uneventful relationship with Avery Auto Salvage itself over the years, frequently employing the business' services for various roadway accidents and tow-aways.
"Quite frankly, we use their facility for towing," Hermann said. "We had officers go up there and handle stuff that had been towed. [The Avery’s salvage services] were one of three agencies that would tow away disabled vehicles for us on a regular basis, and so our officers would then have to go up there and get information about the vehicles to have them impounded. You know?"
Leaning back in his chair, he then added, "They are who they are. I don’t know that they were any better known than anyone else in the community."
Carl Wardman, one of the jurors for Steven Avery's murder trial, was also a volunteer for the Manitowoc sheriff's department
By Jessica McBride, OnMilwaukee.com
January 6, 2016
Carl Wardman was an official and very active volunteer for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the same time he was serving as a juror on the Steven Avery murder trial, Sheriff Robert Hermann confirmed to OnMilwaukee on Wednesday.
According to the court file, Wardman was a regular voting juror in the Avery case and was not one of the two jurors excused before deliberations. The jury was not sequestered.
Hermann – and court transcripts – also confirmed that Carl Wardman's son, Chris Wardman, worked as a Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department supervisor in the jail during the trial. He was a sergeant for the department at the time his father served on the Avery jury, ultimately finding Avery guilty of murdering photographer Teresa Halbach.
This matters, at least to some, because Avery's defense focused on allegations that officers with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department had framed Avery and planted evidence.
Furthermore, the Netflix "Making a Murderer" documentary about the case focuses on that narrative: the same department was also involved in Avery's earlier wrongful conviction case, for which he spent 18 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence.
According to the court transcripts of the jury selection process, Wardman disclosed his volunteer work and son's employment, but neither the state nor the defense made a motion to strike him. He was quite open about his ongoing Sheriff's Department ties, saying at one point that he wasn't sure he wanted to be a juror because, "I like what I do for the Sheriff's Department. I hate to miss it."
Asked whether he actually had a squad car that he drove around as a safety volunteer, he said, "Yeah. It says 'volunteer' on the side."
In jury selection, Wardman was asked if his sergeant son "had any involvement in the Steven Avery case?"
Wardman replied, "Yeah. He's standing outside the door."
He was asked, "Okay. So, um, so he's had du—duties here in – in the courthouse, right?"
Wardman: "Yes."
Why didn't defense attorneys strike Wardman?
This may have been because, during questioning, Wardman, who used to work in a foundry, said that he had been arrested once for OWI 10 years ago, during which an officer from another agency took $3 cash he had and then lied under oath about Wardman "robbing" him, suggesting Wardman might be open to a framing defense despite his ongoing ties to the Manitowoc Sheriff's Department. Asked if he thought officers could plant evidence or alter evidence, he said in jury selection "depends if they didn't like him." He also said he had "no opinion" about Avery's guilt or innocence and that he believed he could give Avery a fair shake.
"I ain't really got no view," he said.
He also said he believed that police officers are capable of lying under oath, and that he had not talked to his son about the Avery case. "No," he said. "But he had to take training or something for some kind of gizmo they've used. Other than that, no." He said he was referring to a stun belt, according to the court transcripts obtained by OnMilwaukee.
"Do you think that, um – do you think the police officers would come into court and lie?" Wardman was asked during jury selection. "Yeah," he said. "Because they can get away with it. Some judges believe them." Juries, too, he agreed.
When he worked for the department
Wardman said of his work for the Sheriff's Department, "We go on—uh, out on patrol and we check, uh, houses and that, if people have went on vacation, and abandoned cars, and just keep our eyes open." He said he did this once a week.
"I take it you're still doing that today?" he was asked during jury selection questioning.
"Yes," he said, once a week for four hours. Asked, though, if he had met or become familiar with members of the Department, he said "Not – not right now, no," because he had just started. He said he got his assignments from a book.
A review of the jury selection process shows other jurors were struck for cause for various reasons, including exposure to media coverage of the case. And others because they knew people in law enforcement. OnMilwaukee will have a full report on the jurors' backgrounds Thursday.
Sheriff Hermann said of Wardman's volunteerism for the department, "He applied 9/17/06," and added that Wardman likely started with the department in October 2006 (court transcripts say November). He said Wardman worked four hours as a volunteer in 2006.
In 2007, though, the year that the Avery trial occurred, Wardman worked 301.5 hours as a Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer and was one of the department's most active volunteers in terms of hours, said Hermann.
Wardman is still a volunteer, said Hermann, and he sees Wardman "pretty regularly" when he does things like taking squad cars in for service.
Hermann said that he did not have the specific dates that Wardman worked in 2007, just that he worked a total of 301.5 hours – more than most volunteers that year.
Wardman's application, "just said he was interested in volunteering for patrol," said Hermann. "From what he does for us, he's a good guy. He's dedicated to what he does for us here."
Jury selection in the Avery trial began Feb. 6, 2007. It continued through Feb. 9. The lengthy trial ended March 18, 2007.
To be a volunteer for the Sheriff's Department as Wardman was and still is, applicants' backgrounds are checked, said the sheriff. Those who become volunteers are given a volunteer shirt and hat. They sometimes drive a vehicle that resembles a squad car that has the word "volunteer" on the side, but does not have a siren and has amber, not blue, lights, said the sheriff. The volunteers are not paid but are usually recognized at a dinner and with a certificate. He said they have access to the Sheriff's Department premises.
"They can come in and are buzzed in," he said. "They can get down into the basement where they can pick up keys or talk to the shift commander and get their assignment."
Asked whether Wardman would have interacted or gotten assignments from Andrew Colburn or James Lenk back in 2007, Hermann said it was possible that Wardman would have interacted with Colburn on patrol. He said it was unlikely he would have interacted with Lenk. Those are the two sheriff's officials who were central to the defense contention that evidence was planted against Avery, which the sheriff denies.
"Basically what we do is we have them check residences if people are gone," the sheriff said of the safety volunteers. "They check on disabled vehicles and things like that. A lot of it is moving our vehicles around for service."
Hermann, who was an undersheriff at the time of the trial, said he can't remember for sure whether he knew at the time of the trial that Wardman was an Avery juror. Asked whether this gave Wardman a bias, the sheriff pointed out that both defense attorneys and prosecutors are able to strike jurors and that the defense did not strike Wardman. The sheriff also defended his department, saying that he was certain officers had not planted evidence of framed Avery.
Wardman is the juror whom alternate juror Richard Mahler said earlier this week had a son who worked for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department at the time of the Avery trial. However, details and the son's rank and the father's volunteerism were not previously reported.
Chris Wardman's online resume says he was a "Corrections Sergeant / Supervisor February 2004 to July 2010" with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department. From 2000 to 2004, Chris Wardman worked as a corrections officer for Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department. His resume says that he was "handpicked by Administration for the development, implementation and management of the Inmate classification system."
In the photo above, Avery juror Carl Wardman poses with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer squad car in 2012. "Volunteers help keep area safe," says the article's headline, which ran on Aug. 10, 2012 in the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter newspaper. "Offer law enforcement 'another set of eyes.'"
The caption under the photo says: "Carl Wardman, left, and Donald Hammel pose with the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department volunteer car. They are among between 40 and 45 volunteers who help the department keep the community safe."
Here is how the story appears in the newspaper's archives:
OnMilwaukee obtained Carl Wardman's name from the juror list provided by the Manitowoc County Clerk of Courts Office. Here is how it appeared on that list:
Carl Wardman's phone number is disconnected, so he could not be reached for comment. Chris Wardman, who now works in law enforcement for a Florida college, did not answer his phone or respond to email or voicemail seeking comment.
The Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter news story focuses more on the other man in the photo, but it describes the volunteer program. It quotes Hermann as saying of the volunteers, "They're another set of eyes out there. If they see anything, they call us." The article says that more than 5,000 volunteer hours were donated to the department since 2011. It said that the department's Care Call program makes use of "volunteers to call residents living alone or recovering from surgery. Volunteers also help with local parades, deliver ballots to polling places, do house checks, make sure tagged vehicles get removed for roadsides, help with jail-and bail fundraisers, airport events and the department's booth at the Manitowoc County Fair."
According to the article, a deputy inspector said, "There's a lot of things they do that wouldn't get done without them. They have become more of an integral part of our regular operation, making sure squads are where they're supposed to be – for service or installation of equipment."
Carl and Chris Wardman appear together in a family photo on Facebook. Chris Wardman also discusses his Sheriff's Department history on his LinkedIn site. According to that site, Chris Wardman is now acting manager of public safety for a college in Florida.
It also says he worked as a sergeant for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office from January 2000 through July 2010. He writes: "My duties included acting as shift supervisor and sworn officer for the corrections department, including the juvenile detention center. Keeping peace and order within the corrections facility and juvenile detention center, performing background investigations of potential new employee's, sitting on hiring committee review boards, acting as lead member of the Cell Extraction and Removal Team (CERT), performing shift and department training, escorting prisoners to and from court, escorting prisoners to and from other correction facilities, completing performance reviews, corrective training and discipline as needed."
His online resume says that from 2004 to 2010, when a supervisor with the Sheriff's Department, his duties were to "Coordinate operations of correctional facility by supervising and scheduling six to 10 full and part time correctional staff." He also listed the following duties:
- Direct the release and transfer of inmates based on court orders.
- Investigate and file reports on inmate disturbances, such as assaults, fights and thefts.
- Maintain facility records and prepare reports in accordance with Department policies.
- Review records of subordinates to evaluate efficiency, suitability for assignments and complete monthly and yearly employee evaluations.
- Issue citations to inmates for County ordinance violations committed while in custody.
- Perform and prepare investigations, interviews and all necessary paperwork required by the Wisconsin courts system to charge an inmate with a criminal charge.
- Conduct and coordinate armed transports of inmates to and from State and County correctional facilities, hospital and other medical facilities.
- Hand picked by Administration for the development, implementation and management of the Inmate classification system.
- Prepare and lead cell extraction teams.
- Streamlined inmate work release record keeping resulting in decreased workload and improved record accuracy.
- Conduct background investigations on potential new employee applications.
By Suzanne Weiss, HTR Media
July 1, 2014
MANITOWOC – Thirty years ago today, Manitowoc County Sheriff Robert Hermann began working his way up through the ranks and ended up in the corner office, from where he oversees more than 100 people, a fleet of about 30 vehicles and a 215-bed jail.
Changes over the years
The sheriff’s department today is much different than the department he joined full-time three decades ago.
“Technology has driven law enforcement tremendously” affecting everything from how evidence is collected to tools in an officer’s gun belt to laptops in squad cars and surveillance cameras in the jail, Hermann said.
“Even the squad cars perform so much better. I remember during a chase, the cars would quit” so officers had to stop and remove the gas cap to relieve the vapor lock, he said.
Hermann recalled his early years of typing reports on a manual typewriter, using carbon paper for copies and taking mug shots of suspects with a Polaroid camera. He didn’t have a light touch with the typewriter, he said, recalling how each period he typed left a hole in the paper.
When he joined the department, it had only three or four computers based on DOS, an operating system common in the 1980s and 1990s.
“When I started on the road, you got very little training before you were on your own,” he said. “Now, we have a 12- to 14-week field training program.” New recruits, too, took an eight-week course compared with today’s 13-week academy, he said.
Began career as jailor
Hermann began his full-time career with the department as a jailor on July 2, 1984, after having working as a part-time reserve deputy. He soon set his sights on other possibilities within the department.
“I knew I wanted to be on the road in the squad car. Once I acquired that goal, as time went on, the next position would open up,” said Hermann, 50. “It was always the challenge in front of me. I thought that would be interesting. The neat thing about law enforcement, you had opportunities to take on new challenges.”
When Sheriff Ken Petersen retired, Hermann threw his hat in the ring. It was a natural progression and his experience in various positions gave him a good overview of the department, he said.
Hermann won the election in 2006 against two other candidates, Democrat Ryan Gilbert in the primary, and Republican Andrew Coborn in the general election. He ran unopposed for his second term and will be running unopposed again in fall for his third term, Hermann said.
Interest in cars
Before he chose law enforcement, he had worked in an auto body shop and a salvage yard, skills that came in handy when he and his younger brother, Todd Hermann, would detail the squad cars that used to come directly from the factory as blank slates. Their work, which also included installing radio equipment and light bars, would get more elaborate and professional-looking as time went on, he said.
Today, all the work on vehicles is done by an outside vendor.
Todd followed Robert into law enforcement and is now deputy inspector of operations for the sheriff’s department; their father also was in law enforcement.
Hermann’s expertise in vehicles also has come in handy during certain cases, notably the high-profile case of Richard Hochstetler, a 17-year-old teen who was hit and killed by a vehicle in January 1999.
Hermann said he remembers being awakened by a call about the case at 1 or 2 a.m., going out during a snowstorm to investigate and not getting back home until 9 a.m.
A small piece of the grill, coming from the suspect’s vehicle, had been found near the scene of the rural Manitowoc County accident and he remembers driving through area lots of car dealerships until he found a pick-up truck that matched the grill. His experience with cars helped give him and other law enforcement officers an idea of the kind of vehicle they were looking for, Hermann said.
Unfortunately, the case was never solved, he said.
High-profile cases
Hermann was involved in a number of high-profile cases in the past 30 years, including the case of Steven Avery, who was eventually sent to prison for the October 2005 rural Manitowoc County murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old freelance photographer from Calumet County.
Another was the February 2003 murder of Francis Creek convenience store owner Waheed Akhtar, whose body was eventually found buried in Palermo, N.J.
Yet another was the 1999 vehicular death of Valders teacher Debra Cooper, who was hit by another vehicle. Hermann was off-duty and was called in to reconstruct the accident. The other vehicle, belonging to the suspect, contained a bag of $75,000 cash and evidence of drug activity, Hermann said.
“It was unusual to find that kind of cash in a vehicle,” he said.
Career highlights
A highlight of his career was attending the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., in 1995, he said.
“It was an awesome experience, something you never forget,” Hermann recalled. “It was great training and I made some great law-enforcement contacts.”
Then, of course, there was President Barack Obama’s visit to Manitowoc County in 2011, which required tight security.
“We’ve had political candidates in the community before, but not the actual president of the United States,” Hermann said. “It was amazing how it brought law enforcement together.”
All the area agencies pitched in to help make the visit go smoothly; the key was meeting early on with the Secret Service agents, who outlined their strict requirements, he said.
Background
Hermann, who grew up one of six children in Cleveland, received his Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Mount Senario College in Ladysmith. He has since had more than 3,000 hours of specialized law-enforcement training.
He was a patrol deputy, a Metro Drug Unit investigator, and, as a sergeant, was patrol supervisor and shift commander. As a lieutenant, he was juvenile detention superintendent and training officer, moving on to positions of undersheriff and inspector. Hermann was named 1993 Eagles law Enforcement Officer of the Year.
He has found the past 30 years on the job to be rewarding. “There was never a time when I got up and said, ‘I don’t want to go to work,’” Hermann said.
Related:
After the text messages escalated in tone and demand, Van Groll reported the behavior to the Kaukauna, WI Police Department. The police referred the case to the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ), headed by Attorney General JB Van Hollen. The DOJ whitewashed the incident. Around September, 2010, someone tipped off the Associated Press and that was the beginning of the end for Kratz. First, Kratz announced that he refused to resign. Governor Jim Doyle scheduled removal hearings and Kratz, who had self‑committed to a treatment program, resigned. Van Hollen blamed others when it was his department that gave Kratz a sweetheart deal that included remaining silent. Kratz manipulated the process and was dishonest in his self‑reporting to other entities. The recording shows that Kratz was fully expecting to continue manipulating the process and the reporter. He was not going to answer any questions. He wanted one answer and his posturing through the session was an attempt to obtain that answer. Kratz wanted the name of the person who tipped the AP about the coverup at the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Ironically, Kratz was insistent that the information was leaked at the direction of Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen although it was Van Hollen’s department that agreed with the proposals of Kratz at the time of the investigation in 2009... At the end of the interview things became interesting. Earlier Kratz had mentioned Van Hollen as the person behind the leak. Kratz’ questioned, “What personally happened between Ken and JB Van Hollen? Do you know the history? Do you know why JB Van Hollen wants this run?” I would like to know what specifically Kratz had in mind when he insisted that Van Hollen was after him. Obviously, Van Hollen was willing to cover the mess up. The Wisconsin Justice Department allowed Kratz to dictate the terms for the resolution of his illegal behavior. Van Hollen allowed Kratz to self‑report to the OLR with no oversight. Of course, Kratz gave a report that minimized his behavior and intimated that his victim was a willing participant and reported because her mother made her do so. Kratz’s bad acts go well beyond this case that finally was made public. His conniving goes well beyond attempted coercing people into sex with him. But, I don’t see Van Hollen taking a close look at the history of Ken Kratz. Van Hollen would rather the innocent sit in prison and perpetrators go free. [ConvolutedBrain.com, November 16, 2010]
Graphic saved on Ken Kratz's office computer as Calumet County District Attorney: Attorney General John Byron Vanhollen is also "Most Worshipful Grand Master" of Wisconsin Masons
