Brendan Dassey transferred from Allouez prison

ALLOUEZ - One of the men convicted in the brutal slaying that spawned the "Making a Murderer" documentary has been transferred out of a Green Bay-area prison.

Brendan Dassey, serving a life sentence for his role in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, was transferred Wednesday to the Columbia Correctional Institution, a 500-inmate facility in Portage, according to the state corrections website. He had been at the Green Bay Correctional institution, which houses more than 1,000 inmates, in Allouez. Both are maximum-security facilities.

Dassey and his uncle, Steven Avery, were convicted of killing Halbach, who had gone to the Avery family's auto-salvage business in Manitowoc County to take pictures of a car Avery had said he wanted to sell.

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Dassey, then 16, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide as party to a crime, second-degree sexual assault as party to a crime and mutilating a corpse as party to a crime. He appealed the conviction in 2013, but a higher court refused to hear the case.

The website TMZ.com, which first reported the transfer, said a state corrections spokeswoman would not say why Dassey had been moved.

Dassey spent the first 26 months of his sentence at Columbia before being transferred to Green Bay Correctional in December 2009, state prison records show.

Dassey will be eligible for parole in 2048, records show.

dschneid@greenbaypressgazette.com and follow him on Twitter @PGDougSchneider