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Ryan Hillegas, Teresa Halbach’s ex-boyfriend, was one of the people involved in the search for the young photographer. Halbach’s death was dissected in Making a Murderer on Netflix. Hillegas comes up several ways in trial testimony, and he’s become one of the most scrutinized people in the murder victim’s circle.
Kathleen Zellner, in a 2017 court motion, pointed the finger at Hillegas as someone she argues law enforcement should have investigated more thoroughly. Zellner is the lawyer for Steven Avery, the man convicted, along with his nephew, of murdering Halbach. Making a Murderer season 2 premiered October 19, 2018 on Netflix, and it heavily features Zellner’s theories. (You can see crime scene photos from the case here.)
You can read about Zellner’s accusations and Hillegas’s trial testimony later in this article.
According to the Appleton Post-Crescent, in 2017, “Zellner declared in documents filed at the Manitowoc County Courthouse that she suspects Teresa Halbach’s killer was her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas.” You can read that court motion here.
This upset some people, and Zellner’s efforts have not succeeded in Wisconsin courts. The court records for Avery’s case say, in October 2017: “the motion of the defendant for a new trial is denied in its entirety.” You can read the court record listing here. The Wisconsin judge criticized the defense conclusions as “speculative” and based on “interim opinions” by experts.
For example, the judge, Angela Sutkiewicz, wrote in one passage in her decision, according to Law and Crime: “[T]he court quoted the defendant’s experts, indicating that they could not reach definitive conclusions regarding items of evidence without further testing. Without such conclusions, the reports are speculative and do not present facts that the court must consider. The defendant did not wait for the final tests to be run and conclusive reports to be issued before submitting his motion. The court must accept the allegations in the motion as true only if there are facts of record to support them; the court is not required to accept as fact the defendant’s interpretation of the expert’s interim opinions.”
Some think that Zellner has been very unfair to Hillegas.
“It’s alarming that in the face of such overwhelming evidence of Mr. Avery’s guilt, Ms. Zellner, who has devoted her career to righting wrongful convictions, has so recklessly accused the victim’s former boyfriend without a shred of legitimate evidence backing her claim and with no regard for the harm she has caused,” said Michael Griesbach, who worked as an assistant district attorney in Manitowoc and is an author, to the Appleton Post-Crescent. Heavy has reached out to Hillegas for comment through his Facebook page.
Authorities have never arrested, charged, nor accused Hillegas of having any complicity in the crime at all. Rather, they prosecuted Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey for the murder, winning convictions before juries.
Avery, a Manitowoc County, Wisconsin man, and his then-teenage nephew, Dassey, were convicted in 2007 of murdering Halbach, whose bone and teeth fragments were unearthed from a burn pit and barrels behind Avery’s trailer on the family salvage yard property where Avery, Dassey, and other family members lived. Avery had been recently freed from a Wisconsin prison after serving years for a previous sexual assault DNA evidence later showed he didn’t commit. At first, Halbach, who had gone to the junkyard property at Avery’s request to photograph his sister’s van for a magazine, was regarded as a missing person. Then, her vehicle was discovered by civilian searchers on the junkyard property, and, eventually, investigators found her burnt remains. Avery was convicted on the basis of forensic and circumstantial evidence – such as his blood being found in the victim’s car, which was found on his family’s property – and Dassey was convicted largely on the basis of videotaped confessions that the defense challenged, ultimately unsuccessfully, in court. In Making a Murderer Part 2, Zellner aggressively pokes holes in the prosecution’s theories in the case, involving the blood evidence, burn location, and other things.
Who is Ryan Hillegas? What are his ties to Teresa Halbach?
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Ryan Hillegas Was Involved in Early Search Efforts for Teresa Halbach
Ryan Hillegas and Scott Blaedorn testified that they were not asked for alibis for the day Teresa disappeared.
Ryan Hillegas dated Teresa Halbach for about five years, starting in high school in Hilbert, Wisconsin, the Appleton Post-Crescent reported.
When Teresa Halbach went missing, not returning the phone calls of family and friends, a search effort ignited that quickly involved Hillegas in a central way. The following details come from Manitowoc County court records and trial testimony in both the cases of Avery and Dassey.
Tom Pearce was the first person to raise an alarm. Teresa didn’t show up at his photography studio in Green Bay, when usually the young photographer would stop by once a day. Pearce called her cell phone, a Motorola RAZR V3, but her voicemail was full. He thought that was odd. Teresa always returned people’s calls, according to trial testimony. Three days after Teresa’s Monday appointment at Avery’s Auto Salvage, Pearce called Teresa’s mother, Karen Halbach. (Read Tom Pearce interview with investigators here.) Read a Tom Pearce affidavit here.
Manitowoc CourtsTeresa Halbach
Karen called Teresa’s brothers, Tim and Mike, who would become director of football technology for the Green Bay Packers. The brothers grew worried, too, and they started calling around. Karen Halbach’s account is documented in court transcripts.
Karen’s husband, Teresa’s stepfather, was plowing the fields on the family’s dairy farm in Calumet County, so she went and brought him home. The Halbach homestead was located about 43 minutes from Avery’s Auto Salvage, according to testimony.
“We need to look for Teresa to find out where she is,” Karen said.
Her husband went to find Teresa’s roommate, Scott Bloedorn, to see whether he had seen Teresa.
Halbach’s ex-boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, testified that Teresa and Scott (who was also his friend) did not have a romantic relationship but were “just roommates.” While her husband went to track down Bloedorn, Karen called AutoTrader Magazine to see when the magazine had last heard from her daughter. No one answered at first, so she called the Calumet County Sheriff’s Department, which was the agency in the jurisdiction where the Halbachs lived. A patrol deputy took the mother’s complaint of a missing person. The increasingly frantic family called Teresa’s friends. A phone tree soon ignited.
Karen eventually was able to get information from AutoTrader. Teresa’s last three appointments were with Craig Sippel, B. Janda (Dassey’s mother), and George Zipperer. She gave these names to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Department, and they started following up on them. Sippel said he owned a car with Steve Schmitz, and they had contacted AutoTrader to take pictures, but he did not see the photographer. Schmitz confirmed he’d seen her. She came and went.
Bloedorn told sheriff’s officials it was unlike Teresa to be gone overnight and so long. “He was thinking maybe she had met a guy when she was out over the weekend, however, she did not mention that when he last spoke with her.”
This is where Ryan Hillegas gets involved in the story.
Hillegas testified that Bloedorn called him.
Hillegas went to the house, and a group of people printed Teresa’s cell phone records off the Internet. Hillegas had just graduated from college at that point, and he was unemployed and living with his parents. He had called Teresa midweek, but her voicemail was full, he said.
One of the reasons that people focused on Hillegas: He was so heavily involved in the search efforts.
Volunteers helping the family thought maybe Teresa Halbach had gone back to Green Bay, so they retraced the possible roads she could have taken, looking in ditches. On Friday, Hillegas picked up missing posters from the family to start distributing, describing himself as “kind of the unofficial leader, coordinator.” On Friday night, Scott and Ryan planned a “road search.” They stayed up late, sectioning the search area into grids and printing off maps for each volunteer. The effort grew to about 100 searchers.
The Wisconsin State Patrol dispatched more than 60 troopers to join in the search efforts. From 45-60 volunteer firefighters were also brought in to help with the massive search area, which at first included a much larger area than Avery’s Auto Salvage. Law enforcement agencies from several counties came to help. Winnebago County sent in dive teams. Some ponds were pumped.
Hillegas pulled a group of people together at Teresa’s house to organize more searches. They wanted to look along more roadways and under bridges. Her mother would later tell the jury that their main thought was still that Teresa had a car accident. No one recalled her having any enemies, after all.
A former private investigator who was Teresa’s second cousin, Pam Sturm, showed up that Saturday morning at 9 a.m. to help search with her daughter, Nikole. When the Sturms arrived at Teresa’s farmhouse, most of the other volunteers were gone. They spoke with Hillegas. Pam Sturm testified that she learned Teresa was missing from a news release. She wasn’t searching for law enforcement per se and hadn’t talked to anyone in law enforcement, but rather had learned from the news that Halbach had been on Avery’s property, she said.
“She just basically came out and said had anybody gone to the car yard yet?” Hillegas recalled in court. He said no one had and gave her a map and a camera. Hillegas told Pam that the salvage yard was not part of the search, inexplicably, but she could go ahead and search it if she wanted. This account shows that authorities, rather than zeroing in on the property, were still ticking down the list of other places Halbach had also gone.
The Sturms drove to Avery’s Auto Salvage. They received permission to search the property and, it was there that they found Teresa’s vehicle. Hillegas and Teresa’s brother, Mike, were also among those freely talking to the media.
2. Ryan Hillegas Was Involved in Efforts to Guess Teresa’s Password
Thank you #MakingAMurderer followers. My story on Ryan Hillegas was one of the most popular this week for @USATODAY t.co/R9ax1XwZJ2
During the court testimony, Ryan Hillegas was quizzed about his role in Teresa’s family’s efforts to get into her email to see if they could find clues about where she was.
Hillegas said that a couple of people tried to figure out Teresa’s password to access the records, and they guessed her password to access the account. She hadn’t told him the password before, but they figured it would be something related to her sisters. He testified that he thought it was their birth dates that got them into the account. He said he had last seen Teresa on Sunday. He was dropping something off “for Scott and she was sitting at her computer.” She talked about being a cowgirl for Halloween. To police, though, and on the stand, he elaborated that a female friend of Teresa’s helped guess the password.
When then Steven Avery defense attorney Jerome Buting asked, “You just went online to Cingular Wireless and just guessed her password?” Hillegas responded, “(Teresa’s friend) had just figured that it would fairly be something relating to her sisters. I believe, I think it was their birthdays that got into it for us. I’m not exactly sure what the password was.” He said her username came up automatically.
3. Hillegas Didn’t Initially Tell Police He Had Dated Teresa Halbach
In court testimony, Hillegas acknowledged that he didn’t immediately inform police that he was Halbach’s ex-boyfriend.
When he was first interviewed by police, Hillegas didn’t mention he was Halbach’s ex-boyfriend, he said in court. It was clear, at least to him, that the police were not looking at the circle of those closest to Teresa. Instead, Hillegas became the informal leader of the search. He even had the Calumet County sheriff’s direct number.
“It came out eventually. I just didn’t feel that it mattered,” Hillegas testified, of his earlier romantic relationship to the missing woman. Of the sheriff’s officials, he said, “I don’t think they really probed into that.” He said the police never asked about his alibi or whereabouts and never probed as to whether Halbach ever had intimate relations with Bloedorn, either. He said he wasn’t treated as a suspect.
Manitowoc courtsSteven Avery’s blood in Teresa Halbach’s car, according to the state
Calumet Investigator Mark Wiegert, asked about this on the stand, said he pursued the question of Bloedorn’s relationship with Teresa a little bit. He also talked to “another fellow,” a third man who was an acquaintance, the DJ, and “determined it was both a business and a personal relationship.”
However, investigators were vigorously pursuing another path: The final appointments that Teresa had that day. Hillegas said he and Bloedorn were interviewed by the Calumet County Sheriff’s Department in the same room.
4. Ryan Hillegas Became the Target of Internet Sleuths
Bone fragments were found in the burn pit behind Steven Avery’s garage on November 8, 2005– three days after Halbach’s car was found on the lot.
Amateur Internet sleuths later unearthed an old copy of Hillegas’ college newspaper from 2002 in which he was asked in a man-on-the-street interview “What scares you most?” He answered, “Women, because they’re evil,” according to the University of Stevens Point newspaper.
Around the time of the first Making a Murderer furor, his Facebook page showed him with a large fish, feeding deer at a cabin up north, and parasailing. He posted a photo of Teresa.
Hillegas has no criminal record, according to the state court website. The web sleuths also unearthed screenshots of interviews he gave during the searches for Teresa that allegedly showed him with cuts on his hand
After the murder, Hillegas moved to the Milwaukee area, where he worked for a major hospital as an outpatient therapist. Bloedorn moved to Arizona and then to the state capital, Madison, where he worked in a residential energy efficiency program, according to his public LinkedIn page.
5. What Kathleen Zellner’s Court Motion Alleged
In the court motion she filed in 2017, Steven Avery’s lawyer, Zellner lodged a series of accusations against Hillegas. Keep in mind, again, that these are just accusations from the defense attorney in a court motion. They have not ever resulted in an arrest or charge against Ryan Hillegas nor a public accusation from prosecutors.
Zellner alleged in the motion that Halbach’s relationship with Hillegas was troubled.
In several passages, Zellner refers to the “killer” generically in the motion. Zellner alleged that “the killer, who knew the password to her voice mailbox, deleted several of Ms. Halbach’s voice messages to buy himself time before Teresa’s family and friends realized that she was missing and began searching for her.”
Zellner’s theory is that the person she labeled the “killer” “devised a plan to burn the body and plant evidence which would focus law enforcement on someone else. Because the killer found appointment details in the paperwork in the RAV-4, he knew Ms. Halbach had an appointment with Mr. Avery earlier that afternoon. The killer formulated a plan to move the body and the vehicle near the Avery property with the intent of planting the RAV-4 on the Avery property and Ms. Halbach’s bones and electronic components as soon as the body and electronic components were burned in the adjacent gravel pit.”
She continued, “The killer wanted to control the investigation and direct it towards the single goal of framing Mr. Avery for the murder. To accomplish that goal, he volunteered to take control of the citizen search as a means of both staying informed and controlling the focus of the investigation. In his initial contact with law enforcement, the killer immediately attempted to misdirect their investigation by not telling them about his relationship with Ms. Halbach or her relationship with other men.”
Zellner argues that the alleged killer “entered the trailer, intent on finding an item of Mr. Avery’s with his DNA that he could use to plant DNA in the RAV-4 to connect Mr. Avery to Ms. Halbach’s murder.” She claimed the alleged killer “noticed fresh blood in the bathroom sink.”
She added that the alleged killer learned vital information from law enforcement during his police interview. He quickly realized that law enforcement was focused on Mr. Avery and not on him, Zellner’s motion alleges. He was not asked to explain his past relationship with Ms. Halbach or to provide an alibi, it alleges, and he was not asked about the scratches on his left hand or why he knew Ms Halbach’s voicemail password, according to the Zellner motion, which adds that the alleged killer was not treated like a suspect.
Again, those are simply allegations raised by defense counsel in a court filing.
Zellner’s motion further made a series of specific accusations against Ryan Hillegas.
“Mr. Hillegas was Ms. Halbach’s ex boyfriend. Mr. Hillegas and Ms. Halbach knew each other since they were freshmen in high school, and dated on and off for five years,” the motion alleges. “Although Ms. Halbach and Mr. Hillegas were romantically involved during their high school and college years, they were no longer together in 2005, although Ms. Halbach reported to friends that Mr. Hillegas continued to check her out despite being broken up for years. According to Mr. Pearce, a friend and colleague of Ms. Halbach, Ms. Halbach had been in a verbally and physically abusive relationship prior to or during her internship with Mr. Pearce. Ms. Halbach interned with Mr. Pearce in 2003 during her senior year of college when she was still involved with Mr. Hillegas.”
She alleged in the motion that Hillegas wasn’t upfront with law enforcement about Halbach’s relationship with Bloedorn. Again, prosecutors have never accused Hillegas of any such thing.
When Bloedorn was “told that current post-conviction counsel planned to name a suspect in Ms. Halbach’s murder, Mr. Bloedorn immediately blurted out, ‘You mean Ryan Hillegas,’” claims the Zellner motion.
The motion contends: “Another point of jealousy for Mr. Hillegas might have been the fact that Ms. Halbach as part of her business took nude photographs of men and women and this activity led her to become sexually involved with one of her clients.” That client was married, according to Zellner.
“For some unknown reason, Mr. Hillegas called (that man) on November 3, 2005. According to their phone records this was the first time Mr. Hillegas talked to (the man) on the phone,” alleges the Zellner motion.
She alleged in the filing that Hillegas reported “that the damage to the driver’s side bumper and parking light of Ms. Halbach’s RAV-4 occurred months before her disappearance and that she had filed an insurance claim for the damage…” Zellner said she confirmed that Halbach never filed an insurance claim for this damage to her vehicle and further contends that the damage to Halbach’s vehicle occurred after she left the Avery property on October 31, 2005.
“Mr. Hillegas was trained as a nurse but was unemployed in October and November 2005. He had no alibi for October 31, 2005, the date Ms. Halbach was murdered or the subsequent days when her body was burned and bones planted. Mr. Hillegas was never asked by law enforcement to provide an alibi for October 31 2005. Trial defense counsel failed to conduct any substantive investigation of Mr. Hillegas, choosing to name him as a potential suspect at one point but failing to meet the requirements of Denny,” alleges the Zellner motion.
She further alleged that “Mr. Hillegas’ cell phone records show significant gaps during time periods in question. On October 31, 2005, there was a six hour gap – a time frame in which there were neither incoming nor outgoing calls – from 9:41 a.m. to 3:48 a.m.”
She added, “Also on October 31, there was an over two-hour gap in Mr. Hillegas’s phone records.”
She listed other alleged gaps. “Mr. Hillegas’s phone records have an over 17 hour gap from 7:47 p.m. on October 31, 2005 to 1:31 p.m. on November 1, 2005, during the time… Ms. Halbach’s body was transported and burned,” the motion alleges.
Zellner alleged in the motion that “scratches are visible on the back of Mr. Hillegas’s left hand in footage taken prior to the discovery” of Teresa’s car.
Manitowoc CourtsTeresa Halbach family
She also alleged that “after hearing Ms. Halbach’s voicemail was full Mr. Hillegas who had no trouble accessing Ms. Halbach’s Cingular Wireless account would be able to delete some of her voicemails in order to prevent family and friends from becoming concerned by a full voicemail box.”
She alleged that “in the days following Ms. Halbach’s disappearance, Mr. Hillegas spearheaded the citizen search for Ms. Halbach.” He was described in a Wisconsin Department of Justice report as “Ryan Kilgus” and “a very close friend of Teresa’s.” He provided addresses for where Teresa donated blood and plasma and addresses of her doctors and a phone number for her pharmacy, alleged Zellner.
“Mr. Hillegas made maps for searches and directed volunteers as to where they should be looking for Ms. Halbach,” the motion alleges, contending that he also made a hand-drawn sketch of his investigation, noting that he found a condom wrapper on the corer of the lot by the first house on Jambo Creed Road.
The motion alleges that Hillegas directed Pam Sturm to search the Avery property and “gave her the phone number of the direct line to Manitowoc Sheriff’s Deparment in case she found anything.”
She added, “Mr. Hillegas moved into the house shared by Mr. Bloedorn and Ms. Halbach while the searches were ongoing in order to maintain tighter control over investigators’ access to Ms. Halbach’s belongings and home.”
Zellner wrote that Hillegas “personally searched property surrounding the Avery Salvage Yard and entered the slavage yard on multiple occasions.” She says he was “not asked to provide an alibi.”
Again, it should be noted that these are just accusations made by the defense attorney in a court motion, and rejected by a judge, and Ryan Hillegas has never been arrested nor charged in the case – which led to convictions of Avery and Dassey.
You can read Ryan Hillegas’s phone records here.
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