All of the FBI's EDTA blood evidence from Steven Avery's murder trial is now online

A Reddit user is gradually uploading the 5,000-page court case file of Steven Avery, and his digital haul now includes 14 crucial documents submitted by the FBI during Avery's murder trial in 2007.

The FBI's reports — some 700 pages in total — are critical because they might have turned jurors against Avery "and maybe not fairly," Dean Strang, one of Avery's defense lawyers during his trial, told The Daily Beast in January.

Avery, a resident of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, was arrested in November 2005 as a suspect in the disappearance of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. Police later found Halbach's bloodied car and burned bones on Avery's property and, after a lengthy trial, jurors in 2007 delivered a guilty verdict, leading to Avery's sentence of life in prison without parole.

Attention to Avery's case has exploded due to Netflix's 10-part series "Making a Murderer," a true-crime documentary that follows Avery and his family before, during, and after that trial.

The show has since amassed countless fans and a community of Reddit users, including Skipp Topp, who's digitizing Avery's enormous case file with crowdfunding help and uploading the PDFs to StevenAveryCase.org.

All 14 FBI evidence exhibits, which are embedded at the end of this post, deal with the presence of a blood preservative called EDTA (short for ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid).

"There are around 700 pages in total, the vast majority being charts and graphs from exhibit 446," Topp told Tech Insider. "This means everything related to EDTA is now online."

Conspiracy theory

Many fans of the show are particularly obsessed with a controversial idea that filmmakers played up in episode seven: that blood stains found in Halbach's car may have been planted by police to help incriminate Avery.

Avery's lawyers argued that the blood stains, which matched Avery's DNA profile, could have been extracted from a vial of Avery's blood collected in 2002 and stored in a police evidence room.

Framing by police is never a popular defense strategy, but in this case the idea wasn't too far-fetched for a few reasons.

Shortly before his arrest as a suspect in Halbach's murder, Avery filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against the county that put him in jail for 18 years on a rape charge. He sued because DNA evidence exonerated him from the 1985 crime in 2003. (That's where the 2002 vial of blood in the evidence room came from; it was used to verify Avery's DNA.)

When the defense team examined that blood vial years later, it showed possible signs of tampering, including a broken evidence seal and a hole in the tube's cap.

Several members of the local police force were also being deposed in Avery's lawsuit as late as October 2005. Those deposed included two officers who collected evidence linking Avery to the scene of Halbach's murder.

But a conspiracy theory and a potentially tampered vial of blood wasn't enough for Avery's defense team to go on; the lawyers had to show the blood stains in the car came from the vial in police custody.

A search for EDTA

This is where the FBI's blood stain analysis reports, filed in February 2007, come in to play.

Almost every vial of blood contains a preservative called EDTA. It's a chemical that isn't found in human blood and prevents it from clotting. Mixed in a sealed vial, EDTA can keep a blood sample liquid for years.

The court asked the FBI to test the samples for the presence of EDTA, and the results came back in the middle of Avery's trial.

Patrick Willis, the presiding judge during the trial, was shown the FBI's reports during a closed hearing without any jurors. Willis ultimately deemed the information admissible as evidence — something that still frustrates Strang today.

"We had no chance at that point to do independent testing, or even to react terribly well to it because we're being handed the report during trial and then, boom—[expert witness] Marc LeBeau is on the stand the next morning," Strang told The Daily Beast.

In a testimony that was damning to Avery's defense, LeBeau, an FBI forensic scientist, said that the blood swabs from Halbach's car showed no signs of the preservative — or planted evidence.

The FBI's reports

All 14 of the FBI's EDTA-related reports — exhibits 433 through 446 — are embedded below.

Ten of them were not publicly posted online and in plain view of outside forensic experts until this week. (We wrote about the first four documents here.)

These 14 FBI exhibits listed in the court record of events include a "white binder with lab sheets and reports" (more than 630 pages long), an "EDTA stability study," a "graph of Poss. Cont. B Q49 sample," an approved EDTA testing order, and more.

Tech Insider has reached out to several scientists and lab technicians to review the documents and offer their feedback.

Strang declined to comment on Avery's case deferring to fellow defense laywer Jerry Buting. Buting replied to an initial query but hasn't responded to our followup queries.

The FBI's LeBeau directed our interview request to FBI public affairs, which denied it (in addition to another interview request).

When we initially asked the FBI for more details about its EDTA testing process, a bureau representative told Tech Insider that "the Avery protocol was based off [a] 1997 study" in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology, "but was updated based on technology advancements." When we asked for clarification on what "technology advancements" meant, we were told to file a Freedom of Information Act request (which we've done).

If you're a forensic scientist, analytical chemist, or lab technician, and you wish to comment on the following documents — especially exhibit 446, which covers the lab reports, methods, validation, and more — please reach out to: dmosher@techinsider.io