Keegan Kyle

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Our seven-month quest for state prison emails about Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” series has come to an end.

State authorities on Friday released a final batch of email attachments in response to our Jan. 26 request under government transparency laws for messages referencing the series, Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey.

The attachments appear to contain no significant information about the case that hasn’t previously been reported by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. We requested copies of the records mainly for the sake of thoroughness.

Just to be clear, the release does not mark the end of our “Making a Murderer” coverage. USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin plans to continue following the case and provide updates through its free email newsletter and other publications.

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Our quest for the prison emails was partly a journalistic effort. We wanted to better understand how the state Department of Corrections responded to a wave of public scrutiny that followed the popular online series being released in December. Avery and Dassey have been incarcerated in state prisons since their convictions in 2007 for the murder of a freelance photographer.

But our quest also had a broader goal. We hoped to bring readers along for the ride, publicly documenting some of the challenges that journalists face in their searches for government records. After overcoming technical and financial barriers — we were charged $220 for digital copies of the prison emails — we found that time proved to be the biggest hurdle in public access. We waited five months before seeing any emails and seven months for the last records.

Wisconsin law doesn’t say precisely how fast government records such as prison emails must be turned over upon request. The subjective language in the law is “as soon as practicable and without delay.”

The prison emails ultimately provided some new insights about the Netflix series, revealing how prison officials responded to safety concerns and inquiries from news reporters. The attachments released Friday echoed some of those same details.

If you followed our "Making a Murderer" quest, we hope you learned something along the way and will take a moment to share your feedback. We'd appreciate your thoughts on this storytelling format. What worked? What didn’t? What could we improve next time? A full chronology is below.

Please send feedback to kkyle@gannett.com. Feedback will not be published without your permission.

Keegan Kyle is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and producer of the Wisconsin Investigations email newsletter. He can be reached at kkyle@gannett.com or on Twitter @keegankyle.