Could Notorious Serial Killer Edward Edwards Be Responsible for the ‘Making a Murderer’ Death?

If Steven Avery didn’t kill photographer Teresa Halbach in 2005 — a possibility we were forced to consider after watching the hit Netflix documentary Making a Murderer — then who did? Some people, including a prominent police detective, think serial killer Edward Edwards was responsible for the murder, then framed Avery.

Edwards, who died in jail on April 7, 2011, killed at least five people, if not more. His known victims are two people in Ohio in 1977, two people in Wisconsin in 1980, and another person in Ohio in 1996. Even before these murders, though, he landed himself on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list following a prison escape.

John Cameron, a retired police detective who worked on FBI serial killer task forces and whose cases have been profiled on America’s Most Wanted and Dateline NBC, thinks it was Edwards who killed Halbach 12 years ago.

“What it turns out Edwards would do is he would create horrific murders that were in the press constantly that created terror, and he would set people up,” he told Coast to Coast AM in May 2014, per The Independent.

“It was always about the setup. Starting at a very young age, when he was 12 years old, he was able to set up a guy for a murder he had done. And [for] the rest of his life, he would get off on not only killing people but then setting up someone close to the victim and then watching the system execute them. Just before Edwards came to Great Falls, MT, in 1956, he set up a guy in Berkeley, CA, exactly like he set up Steve Avery.”

Cameron laid out other evidence linking Edwards to the Halbach killing — mentioning how, for example, Edwards committed multiple murders on Halloween night, and Halbach went missing on Oct. 31. Cameron also claimed Edwards lived just an hour away from Avery in 2005 when the murder took place. And, most eerily, he reportedly visited the trials of the people he framed, and it’s rumored that he can be seen in the background of footage shown in the sixth episode of Making a Murderer.

The death of Teresa Halbach isn’t the only high-profile crime Edwards has been linked to. He’s also been accused of the still-unsolved Zodiac killings. In fact, on Investigation Discovery’s recent special, My Father, the Serial Killer, Edwards’ daughter recalled seeing him watch news coverage about the Zodiac and yelling, “That’s not how it happened!”

In any event, if Edwards did kill Halbach, he took that secret to the grave. Avery, on the other hand, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.