With the NBC mini-series “Woman on the Run,” Lawrencia “Bambi” Bembenek finally gets to tell it her way. And with Tatum O’Neal’s portrayal of her, Bembenek’s canonization as “woman wronged by the system” may almost be complete.
If she’s not canonized, director-writer Sandor Stern says she at least should be pardoned. Bembenek, a former police officer on parole after serving nine years for the 1981 murder of Christine Schultz, has maintained that she is innocent.
O’Neal can’t help being who she is: a breathy-voiced, fragile-seeming woman with earnest eyes and a smile that lights a room. She communicates none of the ambiguity, toughness, impatience, complexity and power of Lawrencia Ann Bembenek.
But O’Neal is not the half of it. “Woman on the Run” (8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, WMAQ-Ch. 5), an adaptation of Bembenek’s book, “Woman on Trial,” distorts a key piece of evidence and relates none of the bizarre twists of the full Bembenek saga, with its littered trail of ex-champions.
It jumps from her first-degree murder conviction to her escape to Canada eight years later and subsequent rescue by an adept team of Canadian and Chicago lawyers. The Canadian half of the team already had the deal signed for “Woman on the Run” before the ink dried on Bembenek’s extradition papers.
The team arrived to scoop up a decade of assorted investigative work by others, added some of their own, and gave it shape and coherence it never had.
Then they proceeded to punch holes in a prosecution case frail with age and error. Rather than risk another trial, the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office agreed to a deal last December in which Bembenek pleaded no contest to second-degree murder.
Did Bembenek, as the mini-series relates, agree to the plea bargain only out of concern that her aging parents might not be around if she stuck it out in prison for another appeal? Maybe yes, maybe no. But her ex-lover Dominic Gugliatto, who aided her escape, signed a confession late last year in which he claims Bembenek essentially risked her parents’ freedom by enlisting them in the escape.
According to Gugliatto’s confession, Fond du Lac County District Atty. Thomas Storm acknowledged, the folks stored the escape car in their garage, packed it with traveling gear and waited at a Fond du Lac restaurant until Bembenek was over the wall and the lovers, waving as they passed by, were on their way to Canada.
The mini-series gives us a sense of how upset Elfred Schultz, then a Milwaukee police detective, was about having to pay his ex-wife $700 a month in alimony and child support. But we get no sense of how it affected Bembenek, then his wife, who on the night of the murder was packing her and Elfred’s belongings to move to a smaller apartment.
This was the prosecution’s theory in the 1982 trial: that Bembenek was a material girl cum feminist, frustrated over a financially cramped lifestyle, and angry at Christine Schultz, a mother of two boys, for not earning her own way in the world.
The Canadian-U.S. defense team cast doubt on the origin of blond, color-treated hairs that put Bembenek at the crime scene. It attacked the credibility of a key 1982 prosecution witness, Judy Zess.
She linked Bembenek to a wig and a green jogging suit believed to have been worn by the killer; to a plastic-coated clothesline rope used to bind Christine Schultz; and to a motive. Zess testified that she once heard Bembenek say that “it would pay to have Chris blown away.”
But what brought the 1982 jury to convict Bembenek was the .38 Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver that was Elfred Schultz’s off-duty gun, and was identified in ballistics tests as the murder weapon. Bembenek was home alone with the gun the night of the murder (Elfred was at work with a partner).
None of the detectives who looked at the gun the morning of the murder thought to record its serial number. When suspicion focused on Bembenek three weeks later, the gun was collected for ballistics tests. It proved a positive match with the murder bullet.
But how, claimed the Canadian-U.S. defense team, do we know if the gun collected was the same gun detectives saw the night of the murder, since no serial number was recorded? With the lion’s sense of a limping gazelle, they focused their resources on discrediting this evidence.
Pathologists were produced who claimed that the muzzle blast imprint around the contact wound-a burn caused by hot escaping gases-was too large to have been made by Schultz’s .38 snubby.
But the district attorney’s expert concluded that there are too many variables to draw such conclusions. Among them, skin thickness; depth of fat; bullet shape and velocity; pressure of the contact; and so-called tenting of the flesh due to gases that emerge beneath the surrounding skin through the wound. He said he had seen muzzle blast burns twice the size of the fired gun’s muzzle circumference.
The dispute was not easily resolved, because the Milwaukee medical examiner at Christine Schultz’s autopsy, Dr. Elaine Samuels, failed to include a scale of measurement in the photographs of the wound. It was from these photographs that defense experts drew their conclusions.
In the mini-series, an important distinction is lost-or abandoned-to bolster the muzzle evidence: The dialogue has the Canadian lawyers and their expert saying that the circumference of the wound-the actual bullet hole, not the muzzle blast burn on the surrounding skin-is much larger than the muzzle of Elfred Schultz’s off-duty .38, and therefore could not have been the murder weapon.
This sounds much more credible than all that fuzzy talk of muzzle blast circumference.
But wait a minute: Remember that the gun viewed on the night of the murder and the gun collected for ballistics testing nearly three weeks later were both S&W snubby airweights, the same model, with the same muzzle circumference. The bullet removed from Christine Schultz’s body matched those fired from the tested snubby.
This was a problem for the defense. If they were going to have a switched-gun theory, they would have to have a switched-bullet theory as well. So what about the bullet?
Dr. Samuels made that easy. When she removed the bullet and placed it in an evidence bag, she failed to adequately describe and document its condition and identifying marks. After a decade of evidence-room jostling, the woman showed signs of wear.
Her failure enabled the Canadian-U.S. defense team to challenge the bullet. They were aided by a curious record-keeping anomaly in the crime lab. The bullet was sent over on May 29, the day after the murder.
A defense search of crime lab records, however, turned up a receipt dated June 8, for a bullet. The receipt carried the same inventory number as that of the May 29 bullet.
Sheldon Zenner, the Chicago lawyer who worked the deal that freed Bembenek, says this shows that the bullet made two trips to the lab-and one was a substitute.
Other crime lab documents, however, indicate that the May 29 bullet never left the lab after it arrived, and that the June 8 receipt was labeled “incorrect.” During a circuit court investigation last year of possible police misconduct in the case (of which none was found), no evidence was found to support the switched-bullet theory.
But the biggest flaw in the switched gun/switched bullet theory has to do with who would have been doing all this switching. Who was getting into the police evidence room and the crime lab to work this sleight of hand, and for what purpose?
It is not likely to have been Elfred Schultz, who was in bad favor with the department brass, not especially liked by his peers and, after the murder, confined to desk duty.
So who could have gone to all this trouble and risk to nail Lawrencia Bembenek?
Or is it all, as Assistant District Atty. Robert Donahoo said last December, just a display of “high lawyerly skills”?
