People around the world became compulsive followers of the saga of convicted Manitowoc County killers Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey since "Making a Murderer" appeared on Netflix in December 2015. Over the past two years, Downers Grove, Illinois, wrongful conviction attorney Kathleen Zellner took up Avery's case, vowing to prove that Avery was framed for the Halloween 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and that the real killer was still at large.

On Tuesday, the wind was let out of their sails by Sheboygan County judge Angela Sutkiewicz. The special judge appointed to oversee Avery's post-conviction filings in neighboring Manitowoc County rejected Avery's bid for a new trial. The timing of Tuesday's ruling was a complete surprise.

Many legal observers had figured it would be several more months before the Wisconsin judge began to analyze the evidence, but that apparently was not the case.

The Wisconsin judge did not find the more than 1,200-page post-conviction filing submitted by Zellner in June convincing enough to persuade her to overturn Avery's 2007 murder conviction and give Avery, now 55, a new trial. Sutkiewicz also made her ruling without even granting Zellner the chance to have an evidence hearing inside a Wisconsin courtroom.

"The reports submitted by the defendant were equivocal in their conclusions and do not establish an alternate interpretation of the evidence," the judge wrote in her six-page ruling, according to a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin article. "Given the totality of evidence submitted at trial and the ambiguous conclusions stated in the experts' reports, it cannot be said that a reasonable probability exists that a different result would be reached at a new trial based on these reports."

Steven Avery still maintains he did not killed Teresa Halbach nor burned her body near his garage.

On Tuesday afternoon, Patch spoke with Zellner by phone from Seattle. She said Tuesday's ruling by the Sheboygan judge should not be viewed as a major setback for her and her client. Zellner said she and the Wisconsin Attorney General's Office recently worked out an agreement to allow for additional physical evidence testing upon Halbach's RAV4, and the judge apparently did not know this at the time she decided to move forward and issue her ruling against Avery.

"It's not really a big deal," Zellner said of Tuesday's decision. "We'll be submitting a motion to vacate the order because we have an agreement reached between both parties, and the judge assumed that all the scientific evidence had been submitted. We'll have more scientific evidence as well as new witness affidavits that we'll be submitting before Thanksgiving."

Zellner later issued a press statement explaining that her motion to vacate the judge's ruling will be based on a Sept. 18 agreement she made with the Attorney General's Office in Wisconsin. "With the addition of these new scientific test results and new evidence, Mr. Avery's attorneys remain confident that his conviction will be vacated," Zellner said in her statement.

Zellner's post-conviction motion had alleged a handful of Brady violations against special prosecutor Ken Kratz, allegations that Kratz withheld or hid from Avery and his original criminal defense lawyers evidence that would have been favorable to the defense. A Brady violation is when prosecutors are found by the court to have withheld exculpatory evidence that is favorable to the defendant and his lawyers.

Since the summer time, Zellner said, she has been contacted by a few people who have signed affidavits, providing information that wasn't known to Avery's trial lawyers Jerry Buting and Dean Strang back in 2006 and 2007, at the time they were preparing for their client's high-profile murder trial.

"We have a Brady witness who reported seeing Teresa's car after the murder partially hidden off of State Highway 147, and he reported it to (Manitowoc County Sheriff's Sgt.) Andrew Colborn in person," Zellner told Patch. "This witness also implicates another person in concealing this information from Brendan Dassey's attorneys."



Photos via Illinois Patch Editor John Ferak

