Obsession - Ira Robins
Obsession - Ira Robins
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[ obsession]<br />
Dismissed as a fanatic by some, IRA ROBINS has<br />
been zealously trying to prove Laurie Bembenek’s<br />
innocence for almost 20 years. Has the driven PI<br />
been right all along? BY ERIK GUNN<br />
48 MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE APRIL 2003<br />
KEVIN J. MIYAZAKI
KEVIN J. MIYAZAKI<br />
MM049__41350.ps 2/28/03 5:42 PM Page 49<br />
[oN<br />
A WET MORNING LAST OCTOBER, Laurie Bembenek stood outside<br />
courtroom 310 in the Downtown Safety Building under a glare of<br />
television lights. Microphones bristled in her face and cameras clicked<br />
with the sound of mechanical locusts.<br />
Just minutes before, Judge Jeffrey A. Conen had granted a motion<br />
to test DNA samples from evidence in the murder of Christine Schultz.<br />
A weary, serene smile crossed Bembenek’s face as she gave the swarming<br />
press an impromptu news conference.<br />
Bembenek, the subject of two TV docudramas and three books, including<br />
her own memoir, was resolute in asserting once again her innocence of the<br />
notorious murder of her former husband’s ex-wife. She told reporters she sought the “closure”<br />
that would come when her name was cleared. Then she turned to the burly, balding<br />
man with the drooping left eye standing beside her.<br />
“I want to thank <strong>Ira</strong> <strong>Robins</strong> for bringing it all back together,” Bembenek said quietly.<br />
Replied <strong>Robins</strong>: “I’m at a loss for words, which for me is pretty unusual.”<br />
In the months since that October morning, Bembenek’s quest to clear her name turned<br />
maddeningly unsatisfying and then bizarrely tragic. Bembenek told reporters that morning:<br />
“I haven’t really thought about” the possibility that the DNA findings would be inconclusive.<br />
But that, to date, is what has happened. In her favor, none of the materials from<br />
the scene of the murder showed signs of her own DNA.But they also have yet to show signs<br />
of DNA from any other potential suspect, although more tests are slated. Meanwhile,<br />
through an almost surreal turn of events, Bembenek has lost her foot in an accident<br />
brought on, in some ways, by the very celebrity of her case.<br />
It is a plot twist worthy of a soap opera. At the center of the long, lurid story is Laurie<br />
Bembenek – the woman cast by prosecutors as a femme fatale, by herself and her advocates<br />
as a wounded innocent. Yet if she is the star, another figure has come to be virtually<br />
as pivotal in this tale: <strong>Ira</strong> <strong>Robins</strong>.<br />
A former cop and then one-time private investigator, the 61year-old<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> has been carrying the banner of Bembenek’s innocence<br />
for nearly one-third of his life. He’s done so while going<br />
into thousands of dollars of debt, sleeping on couches and<br />
squeaking by from paycheck to paycheck.<br />
Even Bembenek’s lawyer credits <strong>Robins</strong> with jump-starting her<br />
latest appeal. Mary Woehrer, a diminutive, intense former Veterans<br />
Administration counsel who is handling Bembenek’s DNA<br />
petition free of charge, explains that the most recent turning point<br />
comes thanks to a 2001 state law allowing criminal defendants<br />
to seek DNA evidence that could exonerate them. After the law<br />
passed, Woehrer says, “<strong>Ira</strong> brought us back together.”<br />
In many ways, <strong>Robins</strong> has been the public face and mouthpiece<br />
of Bembenek’s battle, doggedly combing through old<br />
records in search of new clues, by turns cajoling and browbeating<br />
the media, raising funds to pay for the proceedings. More than<br />
one person, he acknowledges, has speculated he was in love with<br />
the woman whose looks, calendar girl modeling stint and<br />
LAWRENCIA BEMBENEK, 1989. SHE LATER CHANGED HER NAME TO LAURIE.<br />
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GEORGE ANICH<br />
MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE APRIL 2003 49
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four-week tenure as a Playboy Club waitress helped stoke the media<br />
machine that has followed the case from its inception. Not<br />
so, he insists.<br />
“I’m not in love with Laurie Bembenek and I never have<br />
been,” <strong>Robins</strong> says in a voice that suggests the question was old<br />
long ago. “And these people that would choose to beat the messenger<br />
up rather than hear the message, I’m astounded with.”<br />
And the message? That not only is Bembenek innocent but<br />
that she has been the victim of 22 years of determined prosecution<br />
that ignored evidence that would have exonerated her long<br />
ago.That police errors and prosecutorial zeal crossed the line into<br />
cover-up. That cops and attorneys combined to let not only an<br />
innocent woman go to prison but to let guilty people go free.<br />
And that it could happen to anyone.<br />
It is a message that is at once captivating in its clarity and audacious<br />
in its implications. Parse it out, and it’s no wonder <strong>Robins</strong><br />
is so disliked in some lawyers’ offices around the county, including<br />
that of District Attorney E. Michael McCann. After all,<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> has been making a career of calling the county’s top law<br />
enforcement official – and there’s no other way to put it – a liar.<br />
SHORTLY AFTER 2 A.M. ON MAY 28, 1981, someone entered<br />
the home of Christine Schultz on West Ramsey Avenue, tied her<br />
up and gagged her.The intruder pressed a gun to her back, fired<br />
one shot, killing her, and fled. Schultz’s sons, who had struggled<br />
briefly with the invader, described a man nearly 6 feet tall with<br />
pale hair tied in a ponytail and a scarf wrapped around his head<br />
and nose. They gave inconsistent descriptions of what the person<br />
wore – a jacket? a jogging suit? – but 11-year-old Sean<br />
Schultz described the footwear as black police shoes. Sean and<br />
his 7-year-old brother, Shannon, tried to comfort their dead or<br />
dying mother and stop her bleeding with her old T-shirt. They<br />
called their mother’s boyfriend, a police officer, who called 911.<br />
Christine Schultz was the ex-wife of Milwaukee Police detective<br />
Elfred Schultz, who was now married to a former Milwaukee<br />
police officer named Lawrencia Bembenek.The daughter of<br />
a retired Milwaukee cop, Bembenek had realized a lifelong dream<br />
when she joined the force in 1980. In her first month after graduating<br />
from the Milwaukee police academy, however, she was fired.<br />
In her autobiography, Bembenek says that she was first investigated<br />
while still in training, after an anonymous caller falsely<br />
told police she had smoked marijuana at a party and then<br />
bragged she could not be arrested because she was a cop. Weeks<br />
later, Bembenek attended a rock concert with police officer Judy<br />
Zess. At that concert, police arrested Zess and charged her with<br />
possession of marijuana. Zess was later fired.<br />
When Bembenek graduated in August, it was under a cloud.<br />
She blames her dismissal on what she says was a false report by<br />
Zess that she, too, had smoked marijuana at the concert.<br />
During the fall of 1980, however, Bembenek was shown some<br />
pictures of parties at Lake Park sponsored by The Tracks tavern<br />
on Locust Street. Naked women and men – many of them police<br />
officers – danced and preened before the cameras. Bembenek<br />
complained to the Milwaukee office of the U.S. Equal Employment<br />
Opportunity Commission, charging that she was disciplined<br />
much more harshly for an alleged infraction she denied than<br />
were men who were committing more serious and clearly documented<br />
violations. She also turned copies of the Tracks picnic pictures<br />
over to the police department’s Internal Affairs division.<br />
During this same period, Bembenek began dating police detective<br />
Elfred Schultz, himself one of the figures in the pictures.<br />
Schultz divorced his wife, Christine, in November 1980 and<br />
married Bembenek on January 31, 1981, in Waukegan.<br />
Bembenek and Schultz began their married life sharing an<br />
apartment with Judy Zess. Bembenek was working part time at<br />
a health club. By April, the marriage was already under strain.<br />
Schultz was paying the $383 monthly mortgage for Christine<br />
Schultz’s house, and in addition, $365 a month in child support.<br />
Then Zess moved out, driving up the couple’s rent costs.<br />
On the night Christine Schultz was killed, Elfred Schultz and<br />
his partner, detective Michael Durfee, were working the overnight<br />
shift. Bembenek was home alone. Shortly after the shooting<br />
was reported, a detective captain called Schultz and Durfee into<br />
the station and told Schultz about his ex-wife’s killing. Several<br />
hours later, Durfee and Schultz went to the 20th Street apartment<br />
Schultz and Bembenek shared and collected Schultz’s offduty<br />
gun as part of the investigation.<br />
After the shooting, Schultz and Bembenek moved into Bembenek’s<br />
parents’ home. About two weeks later, tenants in their<br />
former apartment complained of overflowing toilets and a<br />
plumber fished what was later described as a reddish-brown wig<br />
from a drain in the apartment complex. Police later learned of<br />
the incident and recovered the wig at a landfill.<br />
On June 24, police charged Bembenek with Christine Schultz’s<br />
murder. In the trial nine months later, prosecutors charged that<br />
Bembenek had complained about the financial strain imposed<br />
by Schultz’s child support and his ex-wife’s mortgage.They presented<br />
witnesses who claimed to have seen Bembenek wearing<br />
a green jogging suit and sought to match that to the description<br />
the Schultz children had given of the intruder’s clothing. Yet the<br />
older child, Sean, who knew Bembenek, had testified firmly<br />
that he was certain she was not the intruder.<br />
Ballistics reports and testimony linked the murder bullet to<br />
Elfred Schultz’s off-duty gun, and blond and red hairs apparently<br />
collected from the gag used on Christine Schultz were tied to<br />
Bembenek and to the red wig. Jurors convicted Bembenek and<br />
Judge Michael Skwierawski sentenced her to life in prison.<br />
Bembenek went to Taycheedah prison proclaiming her innocence.<br />
Her appeals in the years that followed all failed. Then, in<br />
July 1990, she escaped, aided by Dominic Gugliatto, a Milwaukee<br />
factory worker who had fallen in love with her while on visits<br />
to his sister, another Taycheedah inmate.The escape became<br />
a media sensation and sympathizers in Milwaukee rallied with<br />
signs and T-shirts proclaiming, “Run, Bambi, Run!”<br />
Four months later, the two were arrested in Thunder Bay, Ontario.<br />
Bembenek sought refugee status but ultimately returned<br />
to Taycheedah.<br />
Spurred on by a series of problems that had already emerged<br />
in the evidence, <strong>Ira</strong> <strong>Robins</strong> and lawyer Mary Woehrer filed a petition<br />
seeking a secret John Doe inquiry into the case. Judge<br />
William Haese ordered the proceeding in October 1991 and the<br />
final report was issued in August 1992. Soon afterward, new<br />
lawyers for Bembenek moved to seek a new trial, outlining<br />
holes in the case. Prosecutors and Bembenek reached a deal: In<br />
return for a new plea of no contest to a charge of second-degree<br />
murder, Bembenek would be sentenced to 20 years in prison,<br />
be given credit for 10 and allowed to serve the final 10 years on<br />
parole.<br />
IRA ROBINS HAD PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to Laurie Bembenek’s<br />
original trial and conviction.The week before Christine<br />
Schultz’s death, <strong>Robins</strong> had turned in his badge after 14 years<br />
as a Wauwatosa police officer.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> grew up in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. His<br />
father was a police officer turned machinist, his mother a pianist<br />
who played for radio programs. After three years in the Army,<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> signed on as a railroad cop, then made his way to Wisconsin,<br />
working as a house detective at Gimbel’s and joining the<br />
50 MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE APRIL 2003 WWW.MILWAUKEEMAGAZINE.COM
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Wauwatosa Police Department in 1967.<br />
On the Tosa force, <strong>Robins</strong> trained with Jim Strauss.“He’s a gogetter,”<br />
Strauss says of <strong>Robins</strong>, who’s been a friend ever since.“He<br />
was always looking to find something wrong – he caught a lot of<br />
burglars. Every moment he was out, he’d give you 100 percent.”<br />
And, says Strauss, now retired, <strong>Robins</strong> was always honest.<br />
For much of his career at the Wauwatosa Police Department,<br />
however, <strong>Robins</strong>, who’s Jewish, complained that supervisors harassed<br />
him, calling him “Hebe” and “kike.” Harassment, he<br />
charges, took other forms as well, including unfair disciplinary<br />
reports. Strauss and Robert Staffaroni, a police union president<br />
during <strong>Robins</strong>’ service, confirm <strong>Robins</strong>’ account. Finally, in 1981,<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> quit and sued the department for discrimination, won a<br />
probable cause finding from the state’s Equal Rights Division and<br />
later accepted a confidential settlement.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong>, who is divorced with two grown sons, set up shop as a<br />
private detective. He first grew interested in Laurie Bembenek’s<br />
case two years after her conviction, when a mechanic passed him<br />
information about the case. <strong>Robins</strong>, in turn, went to attorney<br />
Thomas Halloran, who was handling Bembenek’s appeal at the<br />
time and who then sent him on to Bembenek’s parents.They hired<br />
him for $400 up-front and a promise of $600 more later.<br />
The lead never panned out, but <strong>Robins</strong> was hooked.“After that,<br />
I started reading the reports,” he says. “I was absolutely stunned.<br />
There was no way in the world I could believe this had happened.”<br />
What caught <strong>Robins</strong>’ attention was a series of discrepancies.<br />
Blood stains on Elfred Schultz’s on-duty gun – the same type as<br />
Christine Schultz’s – apparently were never investigated. Blood<br />
stains in a second-floor hallway at Christine Schultz’s home – which<br />
almost certainly could not have been from the victim, since she<br />
died in the bedroom where she was shot – were never tested. Information<br />
about the purported murder weapon – Schultz’s offduty<br />
gun – puzzled him as well. For one thing, there was no record<br />
of its serial number; in fact, Schultz’s detective partner, Michael<br />
Durfee, had thrown away his investigator’s notebook from the day<br />
of the murder, a violation of procedure. Moreover, at the time<br />
Durfee collected the gun from Schultz’s home, he had made a point<br />
of noting it appeared not to have been fired that night.<br />
“I wrote to E. Michael McCann, saying, ‘There’s something<br />
radically wrong here. I’m sure you’re going to want to know about<br />
it,’ ” <strong>Robins</strong> recalls. “McCann obviously didn’t want to know.”<br />
CANINE IMAGERY CLINGS TO ROBINS. A Washington Post<br />
story about the case (which <strong>Robins</strong> now dismisses as a hatchet<br />
job against himself and Bembenek by a writer who had attended<br />
law school with McCann and went on to team up with<br />
Schultz to sell rights to the story to ABC) called him a basset hound<br />
in print. Bembenek calls him “my own personal pit bull.”<br />
A more appropriate comparison, however, might be a bloodhound.<br />
In the 19 years he’s been a part of the case, <strong>Robins</strong> has<br />
been collecting scraps of information and amassing it in files stuffed<br />
in boxes that he stores in a vacant, windowless office at a South<br />
Side factory. “I’ve gotten to be a lot stronger from lifting all<br />
these boxes,” he quips. He brings to the quest to prove Bembenek’s<br />
innocence an obsession with being heard, a relentless conviction<br />
that he is right and a passionate need for others to admit it.<br />
A few days before Thanksgiving, <strong>Robins</strong> is navigating his<br />
1998 gold Camry on I-43 toward New Berlin. He has put<br />
80,000 miles on this car since he bought it used a few years ago.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> is no longer a self-employed investigator; his state<br />
private investigator’s license lapsed in 1997 and he chose not to<br />
renew it. He works exclusively for lawyer Joe Owens, and because<br />
of this arrangement is not required to hold a license. He calls his<br />
work not investigation but “consulting.”“I give opinions and help<br />
people put their own cases together,” says <strong>Robins</strong>.“I just tell ’em,<br />
‘Here’s what you’re looking for and here’s where you find it.’ ”<br />
On this particular day, <strong>Robins</strong> is poking around in the apparent<br />
suicide by shotgun of a young racecar driver. He’s learned of<br />
another death – also billed a suicide – with remarkable similarities,<br />
down to the fact that both dead men had the same girlfriend.<br />
He suspects murder in both cases but has little faith police will<br />
follow up.“Every time I come on the scene, the police will go out<br />
of their way to not solve the crime rather than giving anyone credit.”<br />
That sort of conspiracy mongering laced with bombast may<br />
What was at work, <strong>Robins</strong> says, wasn’t procedural<br />
error but outright tampering with evidence.<br />
WWW.MILWAUKEEMAGAZINE.COM<br />
help explain why some lawyers and investigators so readily dismiss<br />
<strong>Robins</strong>. But while many clearly don’t like him, they don’t<br />
go on the record. Martin Kohler, who worked on one of Bembenek’s<br />
three appeals, refuses to comment on <strong>Robins</strong>. Sheldon<br />
Zenner, the Chicago attorney who represented Bembenek when<br />
she reached the 1992 deal that released her from custody, hangs<br />
up the phone when I ask him about the investigator. <strong>Robins</strong> sued<br />
Zenner – and Bembenek herself – in 1993 for breaking a contract<br />
to share proceeds from her story. Jurors later dismissed the<br />
complaint. <strong>Robins</strong> and Bembenek have since reconciled and<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> is now suing Robert Donohoo, the assistant DA who handled<br />
the Bembenek appeals and who negotiated the deal that led<br />
to her release, for interfering with the original contract.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> isn’t popular with some investigators who worked for him.<br />
Lori Gonion, who worked for <strong>Robins</strong> for eight months and shares<br />
his belief in Bembenek’s innocence, sizes him up as a moneygrubbing,<br />
self-aggrandizing publicity hound.“Just look at his idea<br />
of running for mayor,” she sniffs. (<strong>Robins</strong> was trounced in a 1992<br />
bid to oust John Norquist.) “He’s got delusions of grandeur to think<br />
he was qualified to run for mayor.”<br />
The hostility isn’t universal, however. Jim Shellow, a dean of<br />
the local defense bar, gives <strong>Robins</strong> an evenhanded appraisal. “I<br />
think he brings an imaginative and creative mind to the investigative<br />
process,” says Shellow.“But I have always been concerned<br />
that the assumptions on which he proceeds aren’t thoroughly<br />
thought through.”<br />
Shellow’s former law partner, Stephen Glynn, says of <strong>Robins</strong>:<br />
“I think he’s very aggressive and he’s also a very good self-starter.”<br />
He’s always fully committed to the client, adds Glynn, “and he<br />
views anyone who isn’t as the enemy.”<br />
Among his partisans, <strong>Robins</strong> inspires fierce loyalty. Bembenek’s<br />
current attorney, Mary Woehrer, calls <strong>Robins</strong> “a zealot.” “Jesus’ first<br />
apostles were zealots,” says Woehrer.“<strong>Ira</strong> never, ever, ever gives up.”<br />
The man she knows isn’t motivated by the lure of riches to be mined<br />
from the Bembenek saga. “There’s not a penny for justice,” says<br />
Woehrer. “It’s a case you don’t get paid on. <strong>Ira</strong>’s sacrificed a hell of<br />
a lot for this case. He’s not going to rest until we get an answer.”<br />
INDEED, WHATEVER HIS FLAWS, real or imagined, <strong>Robins</strong><br />
has managed to keep a spotlight on the Bembenek case in a way<br />
no one else has.“It’s very fair to say he kept it alive,” says one otherwise<br />
harsh critic.<br />
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The case <strong>Robins</strong> assembles can be broken down into three discrete<br />
layers.<br />
Layer one is that Elfred Schultz – whose testimony was key to<br />
the prosecution’s case, although he professed to believe in Bembenek’s<br />
innocence at the trial – had a record of lying and was the<br />
subject of a criminal police investigation at the time of the murder.<br />
Layer two consists of the questions about guns linked to the<br />
case. Virtually all of the evidence relating to possible murder<br />
weapons was botched.<br />
Layer three consists of a flurry of questions surrounding the<br />
autopsy of Christine Schultz’s body, including an indication that<br />
the murder at one point was viewed as a possible sexual assault.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> can support each of those broad assertions. Police<br />
records show that Elfred Schultz – who lives in Florida and now<br />
says he believes Bembenek killed his first wife – had been the subject<br />
of internal investigations that revolved around evidence that<br />
he broke state laws by marrying Bembenek too soon after his di-<br />
vorce, knew as much and lied about it on several different occasions.<br />
Police reports also said Schultz appeared to have lied (regarding<br />
claims about whether or not he carried a gun at work)<br />
at an unemployment compensation hearing pertaining to six<br />
weeks he took off of work during the summer of 1981.<br />
Even before his ex-wife’s murder, Schultz had been under investigation<br />
for more serious issues. Internal investigators wanted<br />
to charge the detective criminally with breaking department rules<br />
by attending the Tracks picnics – with their wet T-shirt contests<br />
transformed into nude beauty pageants – and never taking “proper<br />
police action” or enforcing laws against public nudity. McCann<br />
declined to prosecute, citing weak evidence and advising investigators<br />
to pursue it as an internal personnel matter.<br />
The point, <strong>Robins</strong> argues, is that prosecutors should have<br />
owned up to defense lawyers about allegations of Schultz’s alleged<br />
lying. Bembenek’s defense had a right to that information and<br />
might have been able to use it to undermine Schultz’s testimony.<br />
Yet another piece of evidence further undermines Schultz’s<br />
credibility. Although Schultz and his squad partner, Michael Durfee,<br />
who is now retired, stated in reports they filed the night of the<br />
murder that they were patrolling the North Side of Milwaukee in<br />
the first couple of hours of their shift, Schultz testified at Bembenek’s<br />
trial that he and Durfee were in a tavern.The tavern’s owner<br />
later signed an affidavit that <strong>Robins</strong> helped take, stating that<br />
Schultz and Durfee drank with him there and at another spot.<br />
The problems with the supposed murder weapon started from<br />
the moment Schultz and Durfee picked up Schultz’s off-duty gun,<br />
the gun prosecutors claim killed Christine Schultz. At 7 a.m. on<br />
May 28, about five hours after the murder, Durfee, acting on orders<br />
of a commanding officer, went with Schultz to Schultz’s apartment<br />
and retrieved the off-duty gun. Durfee later reported that<br />
the gun was fully loaded, dusty and gave no telltale smell of powder,<br />
suggesting it had been neither shot nor cleaned recently.<br />
Schultz put the gun in his briefcase and the two detectives went<br />
with Bembenek to identify Christine Schultz’s body at the morgue.<br />
Later that morning, the weapon was handed around at a<br />
meeting of high-ranking police officers, then returned to Schultz.<br />
Not until three weeks later did police order Schultz to turn in<br />
the off-duty gun, his on-duty gun and various bullets. Ballistics<br />
tests then appeared to link the bullet retrieved from Christine<br />
Schultz’s body to the off-duty weapon. Schultz testified that<br />
Bembenek had access to the gun and the prosecution used that<br />
as part of the web of circumstantial evidence to convict her.<br />
“The guy who’s had custody of this gun for 21 days, who has<br />
lied over and over again – and they let that guy put the gun in<br />
her hands!” <strong>Robins</strong> fumes.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> also points out that there was never any record of the<br />
serial number of the gun that Durfee retrieved. Because of the delay<br />
before police ordered Schultz to turn it in, it could have easily<br />
been switched. Bullets fired for the ballistics tests were withdrawn<br />
from the formal evidence available to the jury at the trial,<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> says, and they were later reported lost in a 1986 flood.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> says the missing test bullets are important because the 1992<br />
deal that freed Bembenek is based on the prosecution’s claim that<br />
they had enough evidence to convict her again.“They didn’t,” says<br />
<strong>Robins</strong>.“They didn’t have the bullets.That’s a fraud on the court!”<br />
But the most recently discovered discrepancy has led to a new<br />
twist. As Bembenek attorney Woehrer reviewed state crime lab<br />
“All I've been doing is telling the truth.<br />
I won't stop until I'm dead or Laurie is exonerated.”<br />
reports this past December, she came across a handwritten notation<br />
that suggested a link between the supposed murder bullet<br />
and Elfred Schultz’s on-duty gun – rather than the off-duty<br />
gun identified in the same crime lab reports as the murder<br />
weapon. That finding led Woehrer to seek new ballistics tests,<br />
which Judge Conen ordered in February.<br />
“The reports have been altered and their conclusions are false,”<br />
says <strong>Robins</strong>. If the fatal bullet is matched to the on-duty gun,<br />
“It means Elfred Schultz’s gun was the murder weapon.”<br />
He remains outraged that the blood from the muzzle of Elfred<br />
Schultz’s on-duty gun was never adequately investigated. “If it’s<br />
Christine Schultz’s,” <strong>Robins</strong> says,“Laurie should be acquitted immediately.”<br />
(The blood is now being tested with other DNA evidence.)<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> points out that five defense experts said that handdrawn<br />
depictions of the fatal bullet wound were more consistent<br />
with the on-duty gun than the off-duty weapon.<br />
Finally, there are the autopsy problems. Dr. Elaine Samuels,<br />
the assistant medical examiner who conducted Christine Schultz’s<br />
autopsy, wrote a formal statement in 1983 asserting that the bullet<br />
presented at trial was not marked the way she had recorded<br />
marking the bullet she obtained from the body. Samuels also asserted<br />
that while the prosecution at Bembenek’s trial presented<br />
dyed blond hairs and fiber perhaps from a wig that were said to<br />
be recovered from the gag used on Christine Schultz’s mouth,<br />
she had never found those fibers during the autopsy – only dark<br />
hairs that matched the victim’s.<br />
There is an additional discrepancy as well, says <strong>Robins</strong>. Although<br />
it has never previously been reported, the state crime lab crossreferenced<br />
evidence from the Schultz murder (traces of a chemical<br />
found in semen) with two other sexual assault homicides. Yet<br />
that information, too, was never shared with Bembenek’s defense.<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> points out that if Christine Schultz was raped by<br />
her assailant, that person obviously could not have been Bembenek.<br />
The 1992 John Doe investigation addressed some of these discrepancies,<br />
but not all. In his special prosecutor’s report to Judge<br />
William Haese, attorney E. Campion Kersten castigated investigators<br />
for mishandling the weapons investigation. But Kersten<br />
was silent on the subject of blood on the muzzle of Schultz’s onduty<br />
gun and on the issue of Schultz’s alleged lies and the prosecution’s<br />
failure to reveal those lies to the defense. He discounted<br />
medical examiner Samuels’ 1983 statement with its implica-<br />
52 MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE APRIL 2003 WWW.MILWAUKEEMAGAZINE.COM
MM053__41350.ps 2/28/03 5:54 PM Page 53<br />
tions of evidence tampering; Kersten suggested<br />
the fiber evidence that Samuels did<br />
not find might have been detected on the<br />
gag by more careful crime lab work later. He<br />
also dismissed Samuels’ claim of discrepancies<br />
between the bullet she described at<br />
the autopsy and the bullet presented at the<br />
trial, suggesting that the medical examiner’s<br />
records might have been in error.<br />
And here’s where the dispute between <strong>Ira</strong><br />
<strong>Robins</strong> and the DA’s office turns into open<br />
warfare. <strong>Robins</strong> ties all of the discrepancies<br />
he’s documented together by asserting that<br />
they demonstrate that prosecutors willfully<br />
failed to inform Bembenek’s defense about<br />
facts that could have helped exonerate her.<br />
“They tipped this case by concealing information<br />
and by allowing their witnesses to<br />
commit perjury,” he says. <strong>Robins</strong> goes further.<br />
What was at work, he says, wasn’t merely procedural<br />
error, as the Doe report suggests,<br />
but outright tampering with evidence.<br />
As additional support for his claim, <strong>Robins</strong><br />
cites a 1991 dispute about files he sought under<br />
open records laws, including fingerprints<br />
and a photo album of the Tracks parties.<br />
Police had found the pictures at the murder<br />
scene and filed them with fingerprints taken<br />
from there. The police initially withheld<br />
the pictures, claiming they were part of a<br />
continuing internal investigation. <strong>Robins</strong>,<br />
though, contends they, too, could have helped<br />
Bembenek’s defense. To this day, he insists<br />
that the failure to turn the records over was<br />
simply part of the alleged cover-up.<br />
McCann declined to return several Milwaukee<br />
Magazine phone calls about the case<br />
or <strong>Robins</strong>. But Donohoo, the assistant DA<br />
who negotiated the deal that led to her release,<br />
has made no secret of his dislike for the<br />
investigator. At the 1996 trial of <strong>Robins</strong>’<br />
lawsuit for a share of Bembenek’s profits,<br />
Donohoo said <strong>Robins</strong> “had no credibility”<br />
and he would never have negotiated with<br />
Bembenek’s lawyers if <strong>Robins</strong> was involved.<br />
“I based my opinions upon not only his<br />
conduct in the case but his conduct in his<br />
statements,” Donohoo testified.“His namecalling,<br />
some of the things he said.” In particular<br />
was <strong>Robins</strong>’ long-standing claim<br />
that McCann was “involved in a cover-up,”<br />
the assistant DA continued.“There are lots<br />
of real questions in the Bembenek case.<br />
The law enforcement independence of Mike<br />
McCann isn’t one of them.”<br />
The John Doe investigation also rejected<br />
suggestions of a prosecution cover-up,<br />
and special prosecutor Kersten explicitly<br />
stated there was “no criminal intent” in the<br />
errors documented in the Bembenek case.<br />
That conclusion, however, just stokes<br />
<strong>Robins</strong>’ righteous fury. He cites several instances<br />
in which prosecutors failed to turn<br />
over information he sought, and on top of<br />
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that, the repeated allegations in police investigative<br />
files of Elfred Schultz’s lying.<br />
In <strong>Robins</strong>’ eyes, those can only be added up<br />
one way: “This John Doe was a fix! It was<br />
rigged from the beginning!”<br />
WHEN BEMBENEK and her lawyer asked<br />
Judge Conen to order DNA tests, they insisted<br />
the materials be sent to a private laboratory<br />
in Tennessee instead of the Wisconsin<br />
State Crime Lab.<br />
To defray the costs, <strong>Robins</strong> again turned<br />
to the media, first trying to work out an<br />
arrangement with the CBS news program<br />
“48 Hours,” then ultimately striking a deal<br />
whereby “Dr. Phil” McGraw’s talk show<br />
would pay for the testing in return for<br />
putting Bembenek on as a guest.<br />
The arrangement went bizarrely awry.<br />
Bembenek taped an initial appearance with<br />
McGraw in Los Angeles, then was brought<br />
back a few weeks later with the expectation<br />
that the results would be released in a day<br />
or so. McGraw’s producers wanted to create<br />
a scene in which Bembenek would, for<br />
the first time, learn the results of the testing<br />
on camera so that they could record her initial<br />
reaction. So when Bembenek returned<br />
to LA,producers kept her on constant watch<br />
in an apartment they had rented for that<br />
purpose. Hemmed in, Bembenek had a<br />
panic attack and jumped from the apartment’s<br />
second-story window. She broke her<br />
foot and it was subsequently amputated.<br />
When the initial inconclusive DNA results<br />
were released showing Bembenek’s DNA<br />
was not among them, she wasn’t in Dr.<br />
Phil’s studio but in a hospital bed.<br />
The latest round of DNA testing is aimed<br />
at determining whether any DNA from the<br />
scene matches that of Frederick Horenberger.<br />
Horenberger, a convicted armed robber<br />
who died in 1991, is the person whom<br />
Bembenek’s supporters advance as the leading<br />
alternative suspect in Christine Schultz’s<br />
death. About a month after her murder,<br />
Horenberger and two accomplices broke<br />
into Judy Zess’ apartment. Zess, who knew<br />
Horenberger, escaped. Horenberger was subsequently<br />
sentenced to prison for the robbery.<br />
Horenberger also was an acquaintance<br />
of Elfred Schultz. In prison, Horenberger is<br />
said to have confessed to killing Christine<br />
Schultz, but the John Doe report also states<br />
he denied having done so and that both he<br />
and “some of the persons to whom he supposedly<br />
confessed are not particularly credible.”<br />
After his release, Horenberger was involved<br />
in a November 1991 armed robbery<br />
in which he took two homeowners hostage.<br />
“He declared to several persons just before<br />
taking his life that he had not been involved<br />
in the murder of Christine Schultz,” the<br />
John Doe special prosecutor’s report noted.<br />
54 MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE APRIL 2003 WWW.MILWAUKEEMAGAZINE.COM
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For <strong>Robins</strong>, however, that is just more<br />
smoke and mirrors. Ask him about Horenberger<br />
and he’ll tell you he probably didn’t<br />
kill himself. “I think he was murdered.”<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> turns his outrage to the fact that<br />
Bembenek, by choosing an outside lab, had<br />
to bear the costs of DNA testing. He argues<br />
that the county should still pay.“We paid for<br />
the John Doe to do nothing,” he says. “Yet<br />
McCann doesn’t want to pay $20,000-<br />
$30,000 to find the truth in the Bembenek<br />
case? That’s a sin!”<br />
IT IS THREE DAYS before Christmas.<br />
Snow flurries stir in the dark, chill night. In<br />
a cavernous banquet room at Serb Hall,<br />
perhaps 35 people sit at tables or mill about<br />
the room, gazing at blown-up copies of legal<br />
documents that <strong>Ira</strong> <strong>Robins</strong> has posted.<br />
These oversize papers underscore the story<br />
<strong>Robins</strong> purveys day and night: the gaps<br />
in the case against Laurie Bembenek, the<br />
proof pointing to a cover-up.<br />
The sparse crowd is here to raise money<br />
for Bembenek, money to offset the cost of<br />
the new prosthetic foot she must wear. At<br />
the microphone is a husky, bushy-haired<br />
singer who goes by the name Friday Eve.<br />
Now in his final number, he croons one of<br />
his own songs. And the words that come out<br />
seem as though they might have come from<br />
<strong>Ira</strong> <strong>Robins</strong> himself: “So here’s to you, my<br />
friends who believe in me.…”<br />
The last guitar notes fade, polite applause<br />
ripples through the audience and <strong>Robins</strong><br />
lumbers up to the microphone. He recounts<br />
the story of how Bembenek lost her foot<br />
and complains that Dr. Phil’s producers rebuffed<br />
pleas to help with the medical bills.<br />
“They told everybody Laurie was pulling<br />
a prank and that’s how she got hurt,” <strong>Robins</strong><br />
grumps. Then, as quickly as he recounts it,<br />
that insult transforms into a symbol for<br />
everything wrong with the reckless press.<br />
“The people have been misinformed by the<br />
media!” he thunders.“We’ve had our rights<br />
taken away, and if they take away rights<br />
from any of us, they take ’em away from all!”<br />
Just two days before, <strong>Robins</strong> had been exulting<br />
in the prospect that this same rally<br />
would be overflowing with people. Now<br />
he laments the light attendance.<br />
“I’m desperately concerned,” says <strong>Robins</strong>,<br />
and you can hear the note of pleading in his<br />
voice.“All I’ve ever been doing is telling the<br />
truth. I will not stop until I’m dead or until<br />
Laurie has been exonerated.”<br />
A season has passed since that lonely<br />
night and <strong>Robins</strong> has repeated those words<br />
countless times. Now he waits to see which<br />
will happen first. M<br />
Erik Gunn is a regular contributor to Milwaukee<br />
Magazine.<br />
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