Considering he’s locked away in jail for life over the murder of Teresa Halbach, 2016 has been a pretty good year for Steven Avery. The Netflix documentary series Making A Murderer went viral this year, leading a huge number of people to believe in his innocence. He’s got a new hotshot wrongful convictions lawyer in Kathleen Zellner who seems primed to blow the entire case open with new forensic testing. And now you can add true love to the list of things he’s gained.
After eight months of daily phone calls and finally meeting each other earlier this September, the 54-year-old Avery is now engaged to 53-year-old Lynn Hartman, a former legal assistant and bankruptcy paralegal from Las Vegas. In a post that has since been deleted from the Steven Avery Project Facebook page, Lynn announced that Steven had proposed and she’d accepted.
“I am very happy to announce that Steven Avery asked me to marry him today, and I accepted. It has been a difficult road getting to this point in our lives but we are very happy,” she wrote. “Despite all obstacles, and Steven’s wrongful conviction and incarceration, we plan to be married shortly after he is released.”
The message ended up stirring up an intense amount of drama, with many people questioning Hartman’s motives and whether she was just chasing the multi-million dollar settlement Avery may earn if evidence of a conspiracy to frame him is uncovered. His previous fiance Sandra Greenman had harsh words for both Steven and Lynn:
“She’s very pretty, there’s no way she’d want Steven Avery usually,” Greenman told the Daily Mail. “All the family are afraid of her, something isn’t right, I know she wants fame, and she’s looking for money.”
“She’s going to be my future wife, we’ll be laughing forever,” Avery said in response to the furor surrounding their announcement. “I’m happy, she treats me decent, she loves me, she’s kind of spoiling me right now. I just want to be happy and enjoy my life, I think I did enough time.”
Curtis Busse, Steven’s friend and the man behind the Steven Avery Project Facebook page, also came to Lynn’s defense. In another since-deleted post on the page, he wrote:
SA [Steven Avery] was robbed of being human let alone a Father/Husband. This man deserves to be in love and after our phone call today he has asked that the project announce his Engagement With Lynn Hartman. Steven and Lynn have spoken every single day for the last 8 months through many phone calls and letters and have become inseparable. Unfortunately, this process has not been easy for either of the two, Lynn has received many threats and nasty allegations from many individuals who seem to just be jealous or have no care for Steven’s happiness.
I wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t honestly believe it was important to address for Steven’s future. One thing I know for sure about Lynn after speaking with her almost as much as Steven has and that is she is truly in love with Steven and real tears are shed when they speak to each other. And no matter what happens to their relationship she would never request to speak to the media to make up completely foolish lies out of jealousy and the obsession of being in the spotlight.
The relationship seems a bit strange, but then again so does any relationship when someone seeks out the company of a convicted murderer serving a life sentence. While I’m sure Steven Avery is grateful for the attention the Making A Murderer documentary brought to his case, he never signed up for having his relationship decisions judged by the public at large. Moving forward, we think we’ll stay out of the drama and stick to the actual murder case instead.
