The Cases That Haunt Us (43 page)

I also have trouble with the case against Bembenek because I just don’t see the motive as it was presented. Do I think she would have been happier with more money? Certainly. Who wouldn’t? But if she were coldblooded enough to kill for money, she would have taken out the kids, too. She didn’t want to be the instant mother of two, no matter how much they may have gotten along during visits. She was a newlywed. And while it was a decent house, after the murder she and Fred fought over how she
did not
want to move there. We might expect her to protest a bit to throw off suspicion, but not to the point of risking damage to her relationship with her husband.

For me to see greed as a motive, it would have to have been affecting her relationship with Fred. There would have been reports from witnesses about how their previously great relationship had gone to seed because he was so upset over the loss of the house, or that their money troubles were ruining everything. But we didn’t see this. To the contrary, instead of this being one of the world’s great romances gone bad, Bembenek’s relationship with Fred Schultz was really more of a rebound. He’d been married to Christine more than a decade and was only divorced a few months when he married Laurie. And they’d only known each other briefly when they married. No matter how sincere their affections, it was still a new, somewhat superficial relationship.

If we argue that she hadn’t intended to kill her husband’s ex-wife but merely scare her out of the house and then was forced to kill when Christine recognized her, this makes even less sense. First, it doesn’t jibe with the chronology of the crime as outlined earlier. It’s also terribly high risk—especially for a trained law officer—to assume that none of the three victims would recognize her. And then we might have expected to see some staging—such as a TV set taken or the victim’s clothing pulled off—to make it look like something other than personal-cause homicide. Certainly, we wouldn’t expect Bembenek—again, a trained police officer—to discard evidence (such as the wig) in such a way as to lead investigators right back to her doorstep, and to forget or to neglect to have an alibi.

So if Laurie Bembenek didn’t kill Christine Schultz, who did? It’s hard to answer that when the investigation could have gone off in so many different directions, with the conflicting leads generated. It is safe to say, though, that with this type of personal-cause homicide, the individual responsible would have been an obvious suspect and would have known this, so he or she would have gone out of the way to establish an alibi.

Laurie Bembenek’s story didn’t end with her trial, conviction, and incarceration. In 1983, the conviction was upheld by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. Four months later, she and Fred filed for divorce, which was granted in June of 1984. During the trial, Fred had been supportive and later established a defense fund for her. But after the Court of Appeals decision, he said he had become convinced that she was guilty.

Bembenek fought unsuccessfully to get a new trial for several years. In the meantime, she continued to inspire passion. Several men reportedly became infatuated with her, or should we say, her image. One apparently even paid an imprisoned hit man to “confess” to the Schultz murder to get Laurie off the hook. But when prosecutors refused to grant the convict immunity, he refused to testify.

There was one positive aspect to her notoriety. As long as there was interest in her, new people were willing to work on her case. One such individual was Milwaukee private investigator Ira Robins, who spent years reinvestigating the Schultz murder. Before Robins and Bembenek’s relationship soured over financial issues, Robins uncovered potentially exculpatory evidence attorneys would use in future bids to get Bembenek a new trial.

Then, on July 15, 1990, her story entered its next phase when she climbed out a small window in the prison laundry and escaped, fleeing with her handsome boyfriend, Dominic Gugliatto, brother of another inmate. While she may have be seeking a normal life, with this move she sealed her notorious celebrity status. Seventy-two percent of callers to a popular Wisconsin radio program said if they knew where she was, they wouldn’t report it or turn her in. Coverage of her case, and the slogan “Run, Bambi, Run,” grew well beyond the borders of the state.

The couple was arrested just three months later in Thunder Bay, Canada, following a segment on
America’s Most Wanted
, which led to a tip that she was waiting tables at a local restaurant.

In an interesting move, Bembenek applied for refugee status under Geneva Convention rules, citing her inability to get a new trial in the face of mounting evidence of her innocence. After a number of legal maneuvers back and forth between Bembenek forces and U.S. and Canadian authorities, including an American judicial investigation into Bembenek’s case, she was returned to Milwaukee.

Bembenek’s attorneys prepared a motion for a new trial that included affidavits from witnesses who said a career criminal, Frederick Horenberger, told them that Fred Schultz had paid him $10,000 to kill Christine. Horenberger later recanted just before killing himself during a botched robbery and hostage situation in 1991.

The attorneys also secured affidavits from two forensic pathologists that the handgun used to convict Bembenek was not consistent with the muzzle imprints on the victim’s body, eliminating it as the murder weapon. The following month a government lawyer produced a letter from a leading authority on gunshot wounds contradicting the affidavits of the pathologists. But at the very least, this exchange demonstrated that the issue was open to serious dispute.

Facing Horenberger’s original story, the switched-gun theory, and other evidence developed by the defense, plus the loss of witnesses on their side over time, the DA’s office was ready to deal. Laurie was afraid a new trial would come too late. She wanted to spend more time with her aging parents, so she agreed.

In a December 1992 arrangement, her prior conviction was set aside and she pleaded no contest to the lesser charge of second-degree murder in return for being released on parole, based on time already served. In recent years she has faced bankruptcy, lawsuits, and serious health problems, including hepatitis C.

We tried to interview her for this book, but she declined our request, which I have to say I can understand. Whether viewed as guilty or innocent, this woman has lived her entire adult life under the specter of this case and the image of her it created in the public eye. We’ll close with words from an interview she did give years ago, when she summed up, “I’m tired of being Laurie Bembenek.”

THE
“
BOSTON
STRANGLER”

With the “Boston Strangler” murders, we get a different angle on myth versus reality and the quest for recognition and fulfillment: a man who gained lasting fame by holding himself out as the great American antihero and superman of serial crime, confessing to the brutal and sadistic killing of eleven women.

On the evening of June 14, 1962, Anna Slesers, a fifty-five-year-old seamstress, had just finished dinner in her small third-floor apartment in a converted townhouse at 77 Gainsborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay. She had moved in only two weeks earlier. Most of her neighbors were students and retired people on limited budgets.

She drew the water for a quick bath before her twenty-five-year-old son, Juris, was to pick her up for the Latvian memorial service being held at their church.

Just before 7 P.M., Juris knocked at his mother’s door and got no answer. He pounded on the locked door, first annoyed, then increasingly worried. She had sounded depressed on the phone the night before. Finally, he threw his weight against the door twice and broke it open.

Inside, he found Anna lying on her back on the bathroom floor with the blue silk cord of her robe tied in a tight, exaggeratedly large bow around her neck. He called the police, then his sister in Maryland, to say he believed their mother had committed suicide. It soon became clear, though, that this was not the case.

Boston PD homicide detectives James Mellon and John Driscoll arrived and found the victim in a blue taffeta housecoat with red lining, but it had been spread completely apart in front so that she was exposed from her shoulders down. She lay grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her left leg stretched straight and the right spread wide, bent at the knee. There was blood on her right ear and a laceration on the back of her skull. Her neck was scratched and abraded, and a there was a contusion on her chin.

The apartment had been ransacked. Anna’s purse was lying open and its contents strewn on the floor. Wastebaskets had been turned over and dresser drawers pulled open and messed around with, as if the killer just wanted to handle her personal items. A case of color slides had been carefully placed on the bedroom floor. The record player was on, but the sound had been turned off. Despite this attempt to make the scene look like a robbery, a gold watch and other pieces of jewelry had been left untouched.

The autopsy showed that Anna Slesers had died from strangulation, complicated by head injuries. Her vagina showed evidence of sexual assault with some hard object, possibly a bottle.

Victimology revealed a woman completely involved in her church, her children, her work, and her love of classical music. Divorced, she kept to herself and had few friends. There were no men in her life aside from her son. Police figured the crime had started out as a burglary, but when the burglar saw the woman in her robe, he was overcome by an urge to molest her, killing her afterward to avoid being identified.

Between that June 14, 1962, that Anna Slesers was murdered and January 4, 1964, thirteen single women in the Boston area became victims of one or more serial killers. At least eleven could be tied to the same
UNSUB
, who became known as the Phantom Fiend or the Boston Strangler. Most were strangled with their own stockings or other items found on the premises, such as pillowcases, scarfs, bras, or other clothing.

Within ten weeks, six women had been murdered, the first four within twenty-seven days, then two more in August, nine days apart. All were older victims; Anna Slesers had been the youngest, by ten years, and the second victim, Mary Mullen, was eighty-five.

A second wave began in December 1962 with much younger victims—one just twenty-one—then a third wave ran from September 1963 to January 1964. These women were also younger. One of the complications with the Strangler case is found in the Zodiac murders, discussed in the last chapter. As the body count rises, there is a tendency to link future cases to a series—appropriately or not—and this certainly muddied the waters here.

In the crimes listed above, except for one woman who was killed in a hotel room, all of the victims were murdered in their apartments. All had been sexually molested. With no signs of forced entry, each victim apparently knew her assailant, voluntarily let him in, or failed to lock a door. Most of the women led quiet, modest lives.

The Boston community lived in terror. Warnings went out to all women to keep their doors locked and to be wary of strangers. For a time police commissioner and former
FBI
agent Edmund McNamara canceled all leave and transferred every available detective to homicide. A thorough investigation was conducted of all known sex offenders and violent former mental patients. More than thirty-six thousand people were examined and suspect lists ran into the thousands. Hundreds were fingerprinted and forty polygraphed. Six of them failed. But police were no closer to their killer.

Toward what would prove to be the end of the Strangler series in 1964, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire were being terrorized by a rapist who became known as the Green Man, because he was generally dressed in dark green clothing of the type workmen might wear. He would either talk his way into a woman’s home by claiming he was there to repair something or else break in. On one occasion, he raped four women in a single day. Police believed he might have been responsible for as many as three hundred sexual assaults, and the fear was so great that legitimate repairmen and deliverymen were being refused admittance.

The Green Man would threaten his victim with a knife, caress her, then rape her. But he conducted himself in a friendly, almost casual way and would often apologize before he left. In October of 1964, he broke into the bedroom of a twenty-year-old woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, threatened her with the knife, tied her up, raped her, then asked for her forgiveness. He was about to leave when she complained that he had tied her painfully tight, so he loosened the binding.

This woman helped police produce a sketch good enough that it triggered a memory from one detective. The Green Man looked like the “Measuring Man.”

The Measuring Man had worked the Cambridge area three years before, back in 1961. He would surveil attractive young women, then knock on their door, claiming to be from a modeling agency. Saying he was looking to sign up new talent, he would ask if he could take body measurements. That was all he would do, then he would leave. Most of the women didn’t even realize there was anything strange about this until there was no follow-up from the agency.

In March 1961, Cambridge PD arrested a man attempting to break into a house. He fit the description and confessed to being the Measuring Man. Albert Henry DeSalvo was a twenty-nine-year-old factory worker and army veteran who lived in nearby Malden with his German-born wife and two small children. He had numerous arrests for breaking into apartments and stealing whatever money he could find.

When asked why he perpetrated this odd and distasteful measuring charade, he responded, “I’m not good-looking. I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people. They were all college kids and I never had anything in my life and I outsmarted them.”

He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and released in April of 1962, two months before Anna Slesers was found strangled. He told his parole officer he required sex at least six times a day, but no one suggested he seek or receive psychiatric help.