Well, the Making A Murderer news is coming thick and fast today.

For those of you who have watched all of the Netflix show, you’ll remember that one of the key pieces of evidence for the defence was the fact that a blood sample from Steven Avery had been tampered with whilst logged as police evidence and there was a small hole in the top of it. The defence argued that this could have been used to plant Avery’s blood in Theresa Halbach’s car.

Of course, the blood EDTA test came back negative, but the documentary made us believe that that wasn’t really that conclusive a test. Even so, the fact of the matter was that the evidence had been tampered with and there was a hole in the vial, which was still pretty suspicious. Only it turns out that there might be an explanation for that after all.

OnMilwaukee was able to get a hold of court documents that state the following:

The prison nurse who originally drew Steven Avery’s blood and put it into the vial featured prominently and dramatically in the Netflix “Making a Murderer” documentary “would testify that she was the one who put the hole in the vacutainer tube at issue,” a court document obtained by OnMilwaukee says.

Featured Image VIA

Image VIA

The nurse, Marlene Kraintz, wasn’t called to testify because the prosecution didn’t think the defense had raised the blood hole theory at trial strongly enough to warrant rebuttal. This runs in contrast to the Netflix documentary, which presents the defense finding the hole in the Avery blood vial as a virtual “eureka” moment to advance its framing theory.

OnMilwaukee also followed this up by interviewing two ‘experts’ in the field who both said that it wasn’t uncommon at all for the vials to have holes in the top, and in fact this was the way they worked and they were designed like that. It seems pretty strange that both Jerry Buting and Dean Strang and the makers of the documentary didn’t manage to figure this out during their time working on the case, but it seems like they screwed up over that point.

Of course, just because the hole is common doesn’t mean that the cops didn’t plant any blood in the car as there are still a bunch of unanswered questions about the situation, like how the hell was his blood in the car but none of his fingerprints were in it and why the evidence sticker on the blood was broken. So it doesn’t really confirm anything but it does answer one question – it’s just a shame that there are about a million more that don’t have any answers.

Check out some of the other theories that have emerged about the show here.