`Here`s - Ira Robins

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obsession
Dismissed as a fanatic by some, IRA
ROBINS has
been zealously trying to prove Laurie Bembenek’s
been right all along? BY ERIK GUNN
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KEVIN J. MIYAZAKI
innocence for almost 20 years. Has the driven PI
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o
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KEVIN J. MIYAZAKI
courtroom 310 in the Downtown Safety Building under a glare of
television lights. Microphones bristled in her face and cameras clicked
with the sound of mechanical locusts.
Just minutes before, Judge Jeffrey A. Conen had granted a motion
to test DNA samples from evidence in the murder of Christine Schultz.
A weary, serene smile crossed Bembenek’s face as she gave the swarming press an impromptu news conference.
Bembenek, the subject of two TV docudramas and three books, including
her own memoir, was resolute in asserting once again her innocence of the
notorious murder of her former husband’s ex-wife. She told reporters she sought the “closure” that would come when her name was cleared. Then she turned to the burly, balding
man with the drooping left eye standing beside her.
“I want to thank Ira Robins for bringing it all back together,” Bembenek said quietly.
Replied Robins: “I’m at a loss for words, which for me is pretty unusual.”
In the months since that October morning, Bembenek’s quest to clear her name turned
maddeningly unsatisfying and then bizarrely tragic. Bembenek told reporters that morning: “I haven’t really thought about” the possibility that the DNA findings would be inconclusive. But that, to date, is what has happened. In her favor, none of the materials from
the scene of the murder showed signs of her own DNA. But they also have yet to show signs
of DNA from any other potential suspect, although more tests are slated. Meanwhile,
through an almost surreal turn of events, Bembenek has lost her foot in an accident
brought on, in some ways, by the very celebrity of her case.
It is a plot twist worthy of a soap opera. At the center of the long, lurid story is Laurie
Bembenek – the woman cast by prosecutors as a femme fatale, by herself and her advocates as a wounded innocent. Yet if she is the star, another figure has come to be virtually
as pivotal in this tale: Ira Robins.
A former cop and then one-time private investigator, the 61year-old Robins has been carrying the banner of Bembenek’s innocence for nearly one-third of his life. He’s done so while going into thousands of dollars of debt, sleeping on couches and
squeaking by from paycheck to paycheck.
Even Bembenek’s lawyer credits Robins with jump-starting her
latest appeal. Mary Woehrer, a diminutive, intense former Veterans Administration counsel who is handling Bembenek’s DNA
petition free of charge, explains that the most recent turning point
comes thanks to a 2001 state law allowing criminal defendants
to seek DNA evidence that could exonerate them. After the law
passed, Woehrer says, “Ira brought us back together.”
In many ways, Robins has been the public face and mouthpiece of Bembenek’s battle, doggedly combing through old
records in search of new clues, by turns cajoling and browbeating
the media, raising funds to pay for the proceedings. More than
one person, he acknowledges, has speculated he was in love with
the woman whose looks, calendar girl modeling stint and
GEORGE ANICH
N A WET MORNING LAST OCTOBER, Laurie Bembenek stood outside
L AW R E N C I A B E M B E N E K , 1 9 8 9 . S H E L AT E R C H A N G E D H E R N A M E T O L AUR I E .
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four-week tenure as a Playboy Club waitress helped stoke the media machine that has followed the case from its inception. Not
so, he insists.
“I’m not in love with Laurie Bembenek and I never have
been,” Robins says in a voice that suggests the question was old
long ago. “And these people that would choose to beat the messenger up rather than hear the message, I’m astounded with.”
And the message? That not only is Bembenek innocent but
that she has been the victim of 22 years of determined prosecution that ignored evidence that would have exonerated her long
ago.That police errors and prosecutorial zeal crossed the line into
cover-up. That cops and attorneys combined to let not only an
innocent woman go to prison but to let guilty people go free.
And that it could happen to anyone.
It is a message that is at once captivating in its clarity and audacious in its implications. Parse it out, and it’s no wonder Robins
is so disliked in some lawyers’ offices around the county, including that of District Attorney E. Michael McCann. After all,
Robins has been making a career of calling the county’s top law
enforcement official – and there’s no other way to put it – a liar.
someone entered
the home of Christine Schultz on West Ramsey Avenue, tied her
up and gagged her. The intruder pressed a gun to her back, fired
one shot, killing her, and fled. Schultz’s sons, who had struggled
briefly with the invader, described a man nearly 6 feet tall with
pale hair tied in a ponytail and a scarf wrapped around his head
and nose. They gave inconsistent descriptions of what the person wore – a jacket? a jogging suit? – but 11-year-old Sean
Schultz described the footwear as black police shoes. Sean and
his 7-year-old brother, Shannon, tried to comfort their dead or
dying mother and stop her bleeding with her old T-shirt. They
called their mother’s boyfriend, a police officer, who called 911.
Christine Schultz was the ex-wife of Milwaukee Police detective Elfred Schultz, who was now married to a former Milwaukee police officer named Lawrencia Bembenek.The daughter of
a retired Milwaukee cop, Bembenek had realized a lifelong dream
when she joined the force in 1980. In her first month after graduating from the Milwaukee police academy, however, she was fired.
In her autobiography, Bembenek says that she was first investigated while still in training, after an anonymous caller falsely told police she had smoked marijuana at a party and then
bragged she could not be arrested because she was a cop. Weeks
later, Bembenek attended a rock concert with police officer Judy
Zess. At that concert, police arrested Zess and charged her with
possession of marijuana. Zess was later fired.
When Bembenek graduated in August, it was under a cloud.
She blames her dismissal on what she says was a false report by
Zess that she, too, had smoked marijuana at the concert.
During the fall of 1980, however, Bembenek was shown some
pictures of parties at Lake Park sponsored by The Tracks tavern
on Locust Street. Naked women and men – many of them police officers – danced and preened before the cameras. Bembenek
complained to the Milwaukee office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging that she was disciplined much more harshly for an alleged infraction she denied than
were men who were committing more serious and clearly documented violations. She also turned copies of the Tracks picnic pictures over to the police department’s Internal Affairs division.
During this same period, Bembenek began dating police detective Elfred Schultz, himself one of the figures in the pictures.
Schultz divorced his wife, Christine, in November 1980 and
married Bembenek on January 31, 1981, in Waukegan.
Bembenek and Schultz began their married life sharing an
SHORTLY AF TER 2 A.M. ON MAY 28, 1981,
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apartment with Judy Zess. Bembenek was working part time at
a health club. By April, the marriage was already under strain.
Schultz was paying the $383 monthly mortgage for Christine
Schultz’s house, and in addition, $365 a month in child support.
Then Zess moved out, driving up the couple’s rent costs.
On the night Christine Schultz was killed, Elfred Schultz and
his partner, detective Michael Durfee, were working the overnight
shift. Bembenek was home alone. Shortly after the shooting
was reported, a detective captain called Schultz and Durfee into
the station and told Schultz about his ex-wife’s killing. Several
hours later, Durfee and Schultz went to the 20th Street apartment Schultz and Bembenek shared and collected Schultz’s offduty gun as part of the investigation.
After the shooting, Schultz and Bembenek moved into Bembenek’s parents’ home. About two weeks later, tenants in their
former apartment complained of overflowing toilets and a
plumber fished what was later described as a reddish-brown wig
from a drain in the apartment complex. Police later learned of
the incident and recovered the wig at a landfill.
On June 24, police charged Bembenek with Christine Schultz’s
murder. In the trial nine months later, prosecutors charged that
Bembenek had complained about the financial strain imposed
by Schultz’s child support and his ex-wife’s mortgage.They presented witnesses who claimed to have seen Bembenek wearing
a green jogging suit and sought to match that to the description
the Schultz children had given of the intruder’s clothing. Yet the
older child, Sean, who knew Bembenek, had testified firmly
that he was certain she was not the intruder.
Ballistics reports and testimony linked the murder bullet to
Elfred Schultz’s off-duty gun, and blond and red hairs apparently
collected from the gag used on Christine Schultz were tied to
Bembenek and to the red wig. Jurors convicted Bembenek and
Judge Michael Skwierawski sentenced her to life in prison.
Bembenek went to Taycheedah prison proclaiming her innocence. Her appeals in the years that followed all failed. Then, in
July 1990, she escaped, aided by Dominic Gugliatto, a Milwaukee factory worker who had fallen in love with her while on visits to his sister, another Taycheedah inmate. The escape became
a media sensation and sympathizers in Milwaukee rallied with
signs and T-shirts proclaiming, “Run, Bambi, Run!”
Four months later, the two were arrested in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Bembenek sought refugee status but ultimately returned
to Taycheedah.
Spurred on by a series of problems that had already emerged
in the evidence, Ira Robins and lawyer Mary Woehrer filed a petition seeking a secret John Doe inquiry into the case. Judge
William Haese ordered the proceeding in October 1991 and the
final report was issued in August 1992. Soon afterward, new
lawyers for Bembenek moved to seek a new trial, outlining
holes in the case. Prosecutors and Bembenek reached a deal: In
return for a new plea of no contest to a charge of second-degree
murder, Bembenek would be sentenced to 20 years in prison,
be given credit for 10 and allowed to serve the final 10 years on
parole.
IRA ROBINS HAD PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to Laurie Bembenek’s original trial and conviction. The week before Christine
Schultz’s death, Robins had turned in his badge after 14 years
as a Wauwatosa police officer.
Robins grew up in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. His
father was a police officer turned machinist, his mother a pianist
who played for radio programs. After three years in the Army,
Robins signed on as a railroad cop, then made his way to Wisconsin, working as a house detective at Gimbel’s and joining the
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Wauwatosa Police Department in 1967.
On the Tosa force, Robins trained with Jim Strauss.“He’s a gogetter,” Strauss says of Robins, who’s been a friend ever since.“He
was always looking to find something wrong – he caught a lot of
burglars. Every moment he was out, he’d give you 100 percent.”
And, says Strauss, now retired, Robins was always honest.
For much of his career at the Wauwatosa Police Department,
however, Robins, who’s Jewish, complained that supervisors harassed him, calling him “Hebe” and “kike.” Harassment, he
charges, took other forms as well, including unfair disciplinary
reports. Strauss and Robert Staffaroni, a police union president
during Robins’ service, confirm Robins’ account. Finally, in 1981,
Robins quit and sued the department for discrimination, won a
probable cause finding from the state’s Equal Rights Division and
later accepted a confidential settlement.
Robins, who is divorced with two grown sons, set up shop as a
80,000 miles on this car since he bought it used a few years ago.
Robins is no longer a self-employed investigator; his state
private investigator’s license lapsed in 1997 and he chose not to
renew it. He works exclusively for lawyer Joe Owens, and because
of this arrangement is not required to hold a license. He calls his
work not investigation but “consulting.” “I give opinions and help
people put their own cases together,” says Robins. “I just tell ’em,
‘Here’s what you’re looking for and here’s where you find it.’ ”
On this particular day, Robins is poking around in the apparent suicide by shotgun of a young racecar driver. He’s learned of
another death – also billed a suicide – with remarkable similarities, down to the fact that both dead men had the same girlfriend.
He suspects murder in both cases but has little faith police will
follow up. “Every time I come on the scene, the police will go out
of their way to not solve the crime rather than giving anyone credit.”
That sort of conspiracy mongering laced with bombast may
What was at work, Robins says, wasn’t procedural
error but outright tampering with evidence.
private detective. He first grew interested in Laurie Bembenek’s
case two years after her conviction, when a mechanic passed him
information about the case. Robins, in turn, went to attorney
Thomas Halloran, who was handling Bembenek’s appeal at the
time and who then sent him on to Bembenek’s parents.They hired
him for $400 up-front and a promise of $600 more later.
The lead never panned out, but Robins was hooked.“After that,
I started reading the reports,” he says. “I was absolutely stunned.
There was no way in the world I could believe this had happened.”
What caught Robins’ attention was a series of discrepancies.
Blood stains on Elfred Schultz’s on-duty gun – the same type as
Christine Schultz’s – apparently were never investigated. Blood
stains in a second-floor hallway at Christine Schultz’s home – which
almost certainly could not have been from the victim, since she
died in the bedroom where she was shot – were never tested. Information about the purported murder weapon – Schultz’s offduty gun – puzzled him as well. For one thing, there was no record
of its serial number; in fact, Schultz’s detective partner, Michael
Durfee, had thrown away his investigator’s notebook from the day
of the murder, a violation of procedure. Moreover, at the time
Durfee collected the gun from Schultz’s home, he had made a point
of noting it appeared not to have been fired that night.
“I wrote to E. Michael McCann, saying, ‘There’s something
radically wrong here. I’m sure you’re going to want to know about
it,’ ” Robins recalls. “McCann obviously didn’t want to know.”
CANINE IMAGERY CLINGS TO ROBINS. A Washington Post
story about the case (which Robins now dismisses as a hatchet
job against himself and Bembenek by a writer who had attended law school with McCann and went on to team up with
Schultz to sell rights to the story to ABC) called him a basset hound
in print. Bembenek calls him “my own personal pit bull.”
A more appropriate comparison, however, might be a bloodhound. In the 19 years he’s been a part of the case, Robins has
been collecting scraps of information and amassing it in files stuffed
in boxes that he stores in a vacant, windowless office at a South
Side factory. “I’ve gotten to be a lot stronger from lifting all
these boxes,” he quips. He brings to the quest to prove Bembenek’s
innocence an obsession with being heard, a relentless conviction
that he is right and a passionate need for others to admit it.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Robins is navigating his
1998 gold Camry on I-43 toward New Berlin. He has put
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help explain why some lawyers and investigators so readily dismiss Robins. But while many clearly don’t like him, they don’t
go on the record. Martin Kohler, who worked on one of Bembenek’s three appeals, refuses to comment on Robins. Sheldon
Zenner, the Chicago attorney who represented Bembenek when
she reached the 1992 deal that released her from custody, hangs
up the phone when I ask him about the investigator. Robins sued
Zenner – and Bembenek herself – in 1993 for breaking a contract to share proceeds from her story. Jurors later dismissed the
complaint. Robins and Bembenek have since reconciled and
Robins is now suing Robert Donohoo, the assistant DA who handled the Bembenek appeals and who negotiated the deal that led
to her release, for interfering with the original contract.
Robins isn’t popular with some investigators who worked for him.
Lori Gonion, who worked for Robins for eight months and shares
his belief in Bembenek’s innocence, sizes him up as a moneygrubbing, self-aggrandizing publicity hound.“Just look at his idea
of running for mayor,” she sniffs. (Robins was trounced in a 1992
bid to oust John Norquist.) “He’s got delusions of grandeur to think
he was qualified to run for mayor.”
The hostility isn’t universal, however. Jim Shellow, a dean of
the local defense bar, gives Robins an evenhanded appraisal. “I
think he brings an imaginative and creative mind to the investigative process,” says Shellow. “But I have always been concerned
that the assumptions on which he proceeds aren’t thoroughly
thought through.”
Shellow’s former law partner, Stephen Glynn, says of Robins:
“I think he’s very aggressive and he’s also a very good self-starter.”
He’s always fully committed to the client, adds Glynn, “and he
views anyone who isn’t as the enemy.”
Among his partisans, Robins inspires fierce loyalty. Bembenek’s
current attorney, Mary Woehrer, calls Robins “a zealot.” “Jesus’ first
apostles were zealots,” says Woehrer.“Ira never, ever, ever gives up.”
The man she knows isn’t motivated by the lure of riches to be mined
from the Bembenek saga. “There’s not a penny for justice,” says
Woehrer. “It’s a case you don’t get paid on. Ira’s sacrificed a hell of
a lot for this case. He’s not going to rest until we get an answer.”
real or imagined, Robins
has managed to keep a spotlight on the Bembenek case in a way
no one else has. “It’s very fair to say he kept it alive,” says one otherwise harsh critic.
INDEED, WHATEVER HIS FLAWS,
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The case Robins assembles can be broken down into three discrete layers.
Layer one is that Elfred Schultz – whose testimony was key to
the prosecution’s case, although he professed to believe in Bembenek’s innocence at the trial – had a record of lying and was the
subject of a criminal police investigation at the time of the murder.
Layer two consists of the questions about guns linked to the
case. Virtually all of the evidence relating to possible murder
weapons was botched.
Layer three consists of a flurry of questions surrounding the
autopsy of Christine Schultz’s body, including an indication that
the murder at one point was viewed as a possible sexual assault.
Robins can support each of those broad assertions. Police
records show that Elfred Schultz – who lives in Florida and now
says he believes Bembenek killed his first wife – had been the subject of internal investigations that revolved around evidence that
he broke state laws by marrying Bembenek too soon after his di-
Bembenek had access to the gun and the prosecution used that
as part of the web of circumstantial evidence to convict her.
“The guy who’s had custody of this gun for 21 days, who has
lied over and over again – and they let that guy put the gun in
her hands!” Robins fumes.
Robins also points out that there was never any record of the
serial number of the gun that Durfee retrieved. Because of the delay before police ordered Schultz to turn it in, it could have easily been switched. Bullets fired for the ballistics tests were withdrawn from the formal evidence available to the jury at the trial,
Robins says, and they were later reported lost in a 1986 flood.
Robins says the missing test bullets are important because the 1992
deal that freed Bembenek is based on the prosecution’s claim that
they had enough evidence to convict her again.“They didn’t,” says
Robins.“They didn’t have the bullets.That’s a fraud on the court!”
But the most recently discovered discrepancy has led to a new
twist. As Bembenek attorney Woehrer reviewed state crime lab
“All I've been doing is telling the truth.
I won't stop until I'm dead or Laurie is exonerated.”
vorce, knew as much and lied about it on several different occasions. Police reports also said Schultz appeared to have lied (regarding claims about whether or not he carried a gun at work)
at an unemployment compensation hearing pertaining to six
weeks he took off of work during the summer of 1981.
Even before his ex-wife’s murder, Schultz had been under investigation for more serious issues. Internal investigators wanted
to charge the detective criminally with breaking department rules
by attending the Tracks picnics – with their wet T-shirt contests
transformed into nude beauty pageants – and never taking “proper police action” or enforcing laws against public nudity. McCann
declined to prosecute, citing weak evidence and advising investigators to pursue it as an internal personnel matter.
The point, Robins argues, is that prosecutors should have
owned up to defense lawyers about allegations of Schultz’s alleged
lying. Bembenek’s defense had a right to that information and
might have been able to use it to undermine Schultz’s testimony.
Yet another piece of evidence further undermines Schultz’s
credibility. Although Schultz and his squad partner, Michael Durfee, who is now retired, stated in reports they filed the night of the
murder that they were patrolling the North Side of Milwaukee in
the first couple of hours of their shift, Schultz testified at Bembenek’s trial that he and Durfee were in a tavern.The tavern’s owner later signed an affidavit that Robins helped take, stating that
Schultz and Durfee drank with him there and at another spot.
The problems with the supposed murder weapon started from
the moment Schultz and Durfee picked up Schultz’s off-duty gun,
the gun prosecutors claim killed Christine Schultz. At 7 a.m. on
May 28, about five hours after the murder, Durfee, acting on orders of a commanding officer, went with Schultz to Schultz’s apartment and retrieved the off-duty gun. Durfee later reported that
the gun was fully loaded, dusty and gave no telltale smell of powder, suggesting it had been neither shot nor cleaned recently.
Schultz put the gun in his briefcase and the two detectives went
with Bembenek to identify Christine Schultz’s body at the morgue.
Later that morning, the weapon was handed around at a
meeting of high-ranking police officers, then returned to Schultz.
Not until three weeks later did police order Schultz to turn in
the off-duty gun, his on-duty gun and various bullets. Ballistics
tests then appeared to link the bullet retrieved from Christine
Schultz’s body to the off-duty weapon. Schultz testified that
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reports this past December, she came across a handwritten notation that suggested a link between the supposed murder bullet and Elfred Schultz’s on-duty gun – rather than the off-duty
gun identified in the same crime lab reports as the murder
weapon. That finding led Woehrer to seek new ballistics tests,
which Judge Conen ordered in February.
“The reports have been altered and their conclusions are false,”
says Robins. If the fatal bullet is matched to the on-duty gun,
“It means Elfred Schultz’s gun was the murder weapon.”
He remains outraged that the blood from the muzzle of Elfred
Schultz’s on-duty gun was never adequately investigated. “If it’s
Christine Schultz’s,” Robins says,“Laurie should be acquitted immediately.” (The blood is now being tested with other DNA evidence.) Robins points out that five defense experts said that handdrawn depictions of the fatal bullet wound were more consistent
with the on-duty gun than the off-duty weapon.
Finally, there are the autopsy problems. Dr. Elaine Samuels,
the assistant medical examiner who conducted Christine Schultz’s
autopsy, wrote a formal statement in 1983 asserting that the bullet presented at trial was not marked the way she had recorded
marking the bullet she obtained from the body. Samuels also asserted that while the prosecution at Bembenek’s trial presented
dyed blond hairs and fiber perhaps from a wig that were said to
be recovered from the gag used on Christine Schultz’s mouth,
she had never found those fibers during the autopsy – only dark
hairs that matched the victim’s.
There is an additional discrepancy as well, says Robins. Although
it has never previously been reported, the state crime lab crossreferenced evidence from the Schultz murder (traces of a chemical found in semen) with two other sexual assault homicides. Yet
that information, too, was never shared with Bembenek’s defense. Robins points out that if Christine Schultz was raped by
her assailant, that person obviously could not have been Bembenek.
The 1992 John Doe investigation addressed some of these discrepancies, but not all. In his special prosecutor’s report to Judge
William Haese, attorney E. Campion Kersten castigated investigators for mishandling the weapons investigation. But Kersten
was silent on the subject of blood on the muzzle of Schultz’s onduty gun and on the issue of Schultz’s alleged lies and the prosecution’s failure to reveal those lies to the defense. He discounted medical examiner Samuels’ 1983 statement with its implicaW W W. M I LWA U K E E M A G A Z I N E . C O M
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Please join us for a Saturday
GOAOLTDH
ARS
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HERE'S TO
SEMIN
tions of evidence tampering; Kersten suggested the fiber evidence that Samuels did
not find might have been detected on the
gag by more careful crime lab work later. He
also dismissed Samuels’ claim of discrepancies between the bullet she described at
the autopsy and the bullet presented at the
trial, suggesting that the medical examiner’s records might have been in error.
And here’s where the dispute between Ira
Robins and the DA’s office turns into open
warfare. Robins ties all of the discrepancies
he’s documented together by asserting that
they demonstrate that prosecutors willfully
failed to inform Bembenek’s defense about
facts that could have helped exonerate her.
“They tipped this case by concealing information and by allowing their witnesses to
commit perjury,” he says. Robins goes further.
What was at work, he says, wasn’t merely procedural error, as the Doe report suggests,
but outright tampering with evidence.
As additional support for his claim, Robins
cites a 1991 dispute about files he sought under open records laws, including fingerprints
and a photo album of the Tracks parties.
Police had found the pictures at the murder
scene and filed them with fingerprints taken from there. The police initially withheld
the pictures, claiming they were part of a
continuing internal investigation. Robins,
though, contends they, too, could have helped
Bembenek’s defense. To this day, he insists
that the failure to turn the records over was
simply part of the alleged cover-up.
McCann declined to return several Milwaukee Magazine phone calls about the case
or Robins. But Donohoo, the assistant DA
who negotiated the deal that led to her release, has made no secret of his dislike for the
investigator. At the 1996 trial of Robins’
lawsuit for a share of Bembenek’s profits,
Donohoo said Robins “had no credibility”
and he would never have negotiated with
Bembenek’s lawyers if Robins was involved.
“I based my opinions upon not only his
conduct in the case but his conduct in his
statements,” Donohoo testified.“His namecalling, some of the things he said.” In particular was Robins’ long-standing claim
that McCann was “involved in a cover-up,”
the assistant DA continued. “There are lots
of real questions in the Bembenek case.
The law enforcement independence of Mike
McCann isn’t one of them.”
The John Doe investigation also rejected suggestions of a prosecution cover-up,
and special prosecutor Kersten explicitly
stated there was “no criminal intent” in the
errors documented in the Bembenek case.
That conclusion, however, just stokes
Robins’ righteous fury. He cites several instances in which prosecutors failed to turn
over information he sought, and on top of
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that, the repeated allegations in police investigative files of Elfred Schultz’s lying.
In Robins’ eyes, those can only be added up
one way: “This John Doe was a fix! It was
rigged from the beginning!”
and her lawyer asked
Judge Conen to order DNA tests, they insisted the materials be sent to a private laboratory in Tennessee instead of the Wisconsin State Crime Lab.
To defray the costs, Robins again turned
to the media, first trying to work out an
arrangement with the CBS news program
“48 Hours,” then ultimately striking a deal
whereby “Dr. Phil” McGraw’s talk show
would pay for the testing in return for
putting Bembenek on as a guest.
The arrangement went bizarrely awry.
Bembenek taped an initial appearance with
McGraw in Los Angeles, then was brought
back a few weeks later with the expectation
that the results would be released in a day
or so. McGraw’s producers wanted to create a scene in which Bembenek would, for
the first time, learn the results of the testing
on camera so that they could record her initial reaction. So when Bembenek returned
to LA, producers kept her on constant watch
in an apartment they had rented for that
purpose. Hemmed in, Bembenek had a
panic attack and jumped from the apartment’s second-story window. She broke her
foot and it was subsequently amputated.
When the initial inconclusive DNA results
were released showing Bembenek’s DNA
was not among them, she wasn’t in Dr.
Phil’s studio but in a hospital bed.
The latest round of DNA testing is aimed
at determining whether any DNA from the
scene matches that of Frederick Horenberger. Horenberger, a convicted armed robber who died in 1991, is the person whom
Bembenek’s supporters advance as the leading alternative suspect in Christine Schultz’s
death. About a month after her murder,
Horenberger and two accomplices broke
into Judy Zess’ apartment. Zess, who knew
Horenberger, escaped. Horenberger was subsequently sentenced to prison for the robbery.
Horenberger also was an acquaintance
of Elfred Schultz. In prison, Horenberger is
said to have confessed to killing Christine
Schultz, but the John Doe report also states
he denied having done so and that both he
and “some of the persons to whom he supposedly confessed are not particularly credible.” After his release, Horenberger was involved in a November 1991 armed robbery
in which he took two homeowners hostage.
“He declared to several persons just before
taking his life that he had not been involved
in the murder of Christine Schultz,” the
John Doe special prosecutor’s report noted.
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For Robins, however, that is just more
smoke and mirrors. Ask him about Horenberger and he’ll tell you he probably didn’t
kill himself. “I think he was murdered.”
Robins turns his outrage to the fact that
Bembenek, by choosing an outside lab, had
to bear the costs of DNA testing. He argues
that the county should still pay.“We paid for
the John Doe to do nothing,” he says. “Yet
McCann doesn’t want to pay $20,000$30,000 to find the truth in the Bembenek
case? That’s a sin!”
before Christmas.
Snow flurries stir in the dark, chill night. In
a cavernous banquet room at Serb Hall,
perhaps 35 people sit at tables or mill about
the room, gazing at blown-up copies of legal documents that Ira Robins has posted.
These oversize papers underscore the story Robins purveys day and night: the gaps
in the case against Laurie Bembenek, the
proof pointing to a cover-up.
The sparse crowd is here to raise money
for Bembenek, money to offset the cost of
the new prosthetic foot she must wear. At
the microphone is a husky, bushy-haired
singer who goes by the name Friday Eve.
Now in his final number, he croons one of
his own songs. And the words that come out
seem as though they might have come from
Ira Robins himself: “So here’s to you, my
friends who believe in me.…”
The last guitar notes fade, polite applause
ripples through the audience and Robins
lumbers up to the microphone. He recounts
the story of how Bembenek lost her foot
and complains that Dr. Phil’s producers rebuffed pleas to help with the medical bills.
“They told everybody Laurie was pulling
a prank and that’s how she got hurt,” Robins
grumps. Then, as quickly as he recounts it,
that insult transforms into a symbol for
everything wrong with the reckless press.
“The people have been misinformed by the
media!” he thunders. “We’ve had our rights
taken away, and if they take away rights
from any of us, they take ’em away from all!”
Just two days before, Robins had been exulting in the prospect that this same rally
would be overflowing with people. Now
he laments the light attendance.
“I’m desperately concerned,” says Robins,
and you can hear the note of pleading in his
voice. “All I’ve ever been doing is telling the
truth. I will not stop until I’m dead or until Laurie has been exonerated.”
A season has passed since that lonely
night and Robins has repeated those words
countless times. Now he waits to see which
will happen first. M
IT IS THREE DAYS
Erik Gunn is a regular contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.
W W W. M I LWA U K E E M A G A Z I N E . C O M
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