The Cases That Haunt Us (42 page)

Laurie was viewed as a more likely suspect because, while it was Fred’s off-duty revolver that was used to kill Christine, he had an alibi and Laurie had been home alone that night, with access to the murder weapon. And she refused to take a polygraph when Fred’s attorney advised her against it, though Fred agreed to one. He passed, but the test was damaging: he admitted to having punched Christine in the past, to lying about a speeding ticket, and to holding back the truth about where he’d been the night of the murder.

In another departure from normal procedure, Fred Schultz’s partner, Michael Durfee, could not produce his logbook from that night. It was later learned that although they said they had been investigating a burglary, two uniformed officers had actually conducted that investigation. Schultz and Durfee had been in a couple of bars the night of the shooting—while on duty. Schultz still had a solid alibi, but the revelation was embarrassing at the very least.

Circumstantial evidence piled up as people came forward to build the image of Laurie Bembenek as a conniving, greedy second wife. Judy Zess’s mother, Frances, claimed she had heard Laurie talking at a dinner party a few months before the murder about having Christine “blown away.” Judy confirmed this, and both said it was because of how much money Fred had to give his ex-wife. Judy also claimed Laurie had approached Judy’s boyfriend, Thomas Gaertner, about finding someone who could have Fred’s ex-wife “rubbed out.” And according to Judy, Laurie had owned both a blue bandanna and a clothesline similar to those found at the crime scene. A number of people tied Laurie to a green jogging suit (including Judy Zess, who said there’d been one in the apartment she once shared with Laurie and Fred), though none was ever found.

But, as we’ve seen in other cases, accounts and leads went off in a variety of directions. Hairs found on the body and in the bandanna were consistent with those of the victim, according to Dr. Elaine Samuels. But then Diane Hanson, a hair analyst from a Madison, Wisconsin, crime lab, stated that two of the hairs were consistent with samples taken from Laurie Bembenek’s hairbrush, seized by police.

This evidence is open to question, however, and could have been planted. In a 1983 letter quoted in the
Toronto Star
in 1991, Dr. Samuels reaffirmed, “I recovered no blonde or red hairs of any length or texture… . All of the hairs I recovered from the body were brown and were grossly identical to the hair of the victim.”

Samuels continued, “I do not like to suggest that evidence was altered in any way, but I can find no logical explanation for what amounted to the mysterious appearance of blonde hair in an envelope that contained no such hair at the time it was sealed by me.” Then she concluded, “These departures from standard procedure, coupled with the hostile attitude of police during the investigation … lead me to the conclusion that something may be amiss.”

A reddish brown wig was found clogging the plumbing of the apartment where Laurie and Fred lived. Not only did the color match the description of the intruder’s hair provided by the Schultz boys, the wig hair was also consistent with hairs found on the victim’s body. But even this piece of evidence raises more questions than it answers: their apartment shared drainage with another apartment, and a woman who lived in that apartment said that Judy Zess had visited her and asked to use the rest room. The next person to use the bathroom found it clogged, occasioning the retrieval of the wig. Zess later admitted owning a brownish shoulder-length wig. And Laurie said that Judy’s boyfriend, Thomas Gaertner, blamed Fred for the death of his best friend, an off-duty cop shot by Fred, and claimed he would get even.

Despite all of this, the bulk of the largely circumstantial evidence pointed to Lawrencia Bembenek. On June 26, 1981, she was charged with the first-degree murder of Christine Schultz, primarily because she had access to the murder weapon and lacked a confirmable alibi for the night in question. So, while she, Fred, Judy Zess, Thomas Gaertner, and the landlord all had keys to the apartment, Laurie was there alone around the time the murder occurred. It was believed that as a former police officer she’d know how to cover her tracks, and that since she was tall and strong, in disguise she could easily appear to be a man to Christine’s two boys, despite the fact that Sean insisted he had seen a man and even testified that it couldn’t have been Laurie.

Bembenek went to trial on February 24, 1982. Much was made in both the courtroom and the media of the defendant’s beauty and feminist leanings, which led some to suggest Bambi was on trial as much for her image as for the murder of Christine Schultz. Circuit Judge Michael Skwierawski noted, “It was the most circumstantial case I’ve ever seen, with lots of individual pieces that would not have convicted her. But taken as a whole, the jury could reach only one conclusion.”

An example of the kind of ambiguity Judge Skwierawski might have been thinking of concerned the murder weapon itself. In a July 31, 1990, article reviewing the Bembenek case, reporter Rogers Worthington wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
, “Ballistics tests showed the gun collected from Schultz and tested on June 21 was indeed the murder weapon. But at the trial, neither Schultz nor Durfee could say with certainty that the gun shown to them in the courtroom was the same one they had looked at the night of the murder.”

The jury of five men and seven women took three and a half days to find Bembenek guilty and delivered their verdict on March 9. She was sentenced to life in prison. From Taycheedah Correctional Institution, Bembenek continued to protest her innocence, claiming she was framed by the Milwaukee Police Department to stop her from releasing evidence she had of drug use, debauchery, and improper use of government funds by members of the department. This was an important touchstone in the development of Bambi lore. To understand why so many people following the case at the time felt that she had been railroaded, we have to know something of her background.

Lawrencia Ann Bembenek was the youngest of three daughters born to Joseph and Virginia Bembenek in Milwaukee. Joseph had been a Milwaukee police officer, but left after three years because of what he saw as widespread corruption on the force. He then became a carpenter. Laurie, as she was called, grew up wanting to become a veterinarian but lacked the academic background. She took a two-year college course in fashion merchandising and earned money from a variety of brief jobs such as modeling and aerobics instruction, not surprising since she was tall, beautiful, and athletic. She once posed in a slinky dress as Miss March 1978, for a Schlitz Brewing Company calendar, which is where some of the mythology comes from.

But she also had strong feminist views and entered the Milwaukee Police Academy in March 1980. Right from the beginning, she felt harassed for being a woman in a man’s world.

As Kris Radish recounts in her book
Run, Bambi, Run
, Laurie attended a concert in Milwaukee with then fellow recruit Judy Zess and three other friends. While Laurie was using the ladies’ room, Judy was arrested by two plainclothes officers for marijuana possession. The following day, Bembenek’s sergeant and another officer called her in and grilled her about every aspect of her life. Judy was fired when a small marijuana joint was found in a cup under her chair, and Laurie was once again hammered by her superiors, who tried to get her to confess to smoking pot, too. Laurie refused to confess to something she didn’t do. It seemed to her that she was taking abuse for being a woman, but on July 25, 1980, she graduated sixth in her class from the Milwaukee Police Academy and got her badge.

She was assigned to the Second District, not a heavy crime area, and was almost instantly appalled by what she said she saw on the street and within the department: graft, corruption, drinking on duty, drug abuse, oral sex with prostitutes, mistreatment of suspects. Still, she took personal pride in being a cop and enjoyed the time out on patrol or working on her own.

On August 25, just a month after her graduation from the academy, Laurie got a call at home from a captain telling her she was being dismissed. She had no idea why. Two sergeants came by and took her badge, gun, and her uniforms. Chief Harold A. Breier axed three female officers that week, the other two black, all in their probationary period. The only explanation was that it was “for the good of the service.”

According to the
Milwaukee Journal
a few days after this, Laurie “was charged with untruthfulness and making a false official report, but no details were given.”

Weeks later, when she finally got to look at her personnel file, Bembenek found that Judy Zess had signed a statement saying that Laurie had also used marijuana at the concert. Judy admitted signing it but told Laurie it was done under duress, after hours of interrogation. Both women were appealing their dismissals and Laurie forgave Judy, agreeing that they should move in together.

Waiting out her appeal, desperate for money, Laurie got a job as a waitress at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. She only kept the job a few weeks, but the bunny connection solidified the image she was to take on—the confusing combination of tough cop, ardent feminist, and beautiful sex object. As with Elizabeth Short, the public saw one thing and the individual herself lived quite another.

U.S. Attorney James Morrison began investigating allegations that the Milwaukee PD was misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars of affirmative-action funds and firing minorities on flimsy grounds. Laurie came forward to claim that women were being hired and quickly fired, just to satisfy federal quotas and take advantage of grants. She filed a lawsuit against the department, charging discrimination. In October of 1980, she obtained photographs of nude male officers dancing in a public park. After she handed them over to the internal affairs division, her car’s tires were slashed, she found a dead rat deposited on her windshield, and she received repeated anonymous late-night calls. Perhaps significantly, when she was charged with murder, the federal investigation against the police, of which she was a key component, fell apart.

Bembenek met Fred Schultz in December of 1980, a month after he and Christine had divorced. Within a few weeks of their meeting, Fred proposed to Laurie, and they were married on January 30, 1981.

It’s not difficult to see why some thought Laurie Bembenek may not have been treated as a normal murder suspect. I’ve said before that an individual doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to become a murderer. In Bembenek’s case, what we see is a history of going out on a limb to do the right thing. She seemed to believe cops should be held to a higher standard of behavior and she suffered because of her actions.

Does this mean it would be impossible for her to commit an illegal or violent act? No. But I think it makes it a hell of a lot less likely she’s going to blow away the mother of two young children in cold blood.

To be fair in our assessment, though, let’s begin with what we can learn from the crime itself, starting with victimology. What I’ve always said is that you start by looking at what was going on in and around the victim’s life in the days and weeks leading up to the crime.

Christine Schultz was in her own home in a safe neighborhood, which would seem to place her at low risk to be the victim of such a violent crime. But she had worried she was being followed. If her ex-husband was as controlling as she said, and if, as has been reported, her current boyfriend had a drinking problem, a history of difficult relationships would raise her risk level.

The crime, as it unfolded, makes no sense. By this I mean that the chain of events is not logical. Why would an
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start in the mother’s room, then go for the children, then return to the mother to finish her off? It would be one thing if the boys were awakened by the shot and so the offender had to contend with them, but that’s not what happened here. Let’s say the offender surprised Christine in her bed and controlled her by threatening to kill her kids if she awakened them. He tied her up. Why would he then leave her alone—alive—and go into the boys’ room? There’s no motive or logic to that. Keeping those kids alive and asleep would be the best means the subject had for making Christine cooperate; it’s much better control than any binding or weapon.

When the subject left Christine’s room, this woman, described as athletic, would be like a mother bear with instincts to protect her cubs. At the very least, she’d scream out a warning to wake them before the intruder had a chance to start strangling one of them. This makes me wonder whether there wasn’t a second subject, someone to keep an eye on the mother while the other went into the boys’ room.

There has been speculation that the events were staged to unfold that way to make sure the children were awake and close enough to the intruder/murderer so they could get a good look at him and be able to state later who it
was not.
We can’t be sure of this, of course, but it is a possible explanation for the otherwise bizarre chain of events leading up to the victim’s murder. The bandanna ligature would seem to serve no real purpose in the crime and so might be considered an element of staging to try to throw off investigators.

This leads us to the greater question of motive for the crime. First, it seems unlikely this was a robbery, since the timing was high risk and everything indicates the intruder sought out the victim. If Christine Schultz had heard a noise, she would have been found someplace else in the house—where she’d gone to investigate—not still in her bed. There might even have been a call to the police. And we can rule out sexual assault as a motive, since there was no sign of it and the
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actually left his victim to go to the boys’ room.

It’s not a criminal-enterprise homicide and it’s not sexual homicide, so why did Christine Schultz die, and what kind of person would have killed her?

First off, it’s pretty ballsy to enter a home when three people are there, which says to me that we’re dealing with someone who’s comfortable with breaking and entering, someone experienced. There was no sign of forced entry, so this
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either had a key or knew how to get in unnoticed. And if he had a key and/or was that comfortable with the home, he likely knew the victim was the ex-wife of one police officer and girlfriend of another. He would have to consider that she herself might have a gun. Was he nuts? Between the risk level of the crime to the offender, and the way it was perpetrated (not the type of personal-cause homicide we see from female offenders—even strong, feminist ones), I am comfortable saying that Laurie Bembenek does not fit this profile.