http://www.dispatch.com/live/conten...d-tabloid-fame-for-prison-escape.html?sid=101
Lawrencia Bembenek, a former Playboy bunny and Milwaukee police officer whose conviction for the murder of her husband's ex-wife and audacious escape from prison became tabloid and TV-movie fodder and a cause celebre for supporters who insisted on her innocence - as she always did - died Saturday in a hospice in Portland, Ore. She was 52.
The cause was liver failure, said Bembenek's lawyer, Mary Woehrer.
Known as Bambi, Bembenek joined the Milwaukee Police Department in March 1980 after a stint as a waitress at a Playboy Club. Within a year she was married to Elfred Schultz, a Milwaukee police detective.
Then, on May 28, 1981, Schultz's former wife, Christine, was found dead in her bedroom, bound, gagged and shot in the back at point-blank range. Three months later Bembenek was arrested, and the case immediately became a media sensation.
Bembenek contended that vindictive colleagues had framed her because she was assisting a federal investigation into corruption and sex discrimination in the Police Department. She had also caused a storm by giving supervisors photographs of off-duty officers (including her future husband) posing naked at a party.
During her two-week trial, some of the most damaging testimony showed that Bembenek, who married Schultz four months before the killing (they later divorced), had bitterly complained about the $700-a-month alimony he was paying his former wife. Bembenek was sentenced to life in prison, and her appeals were rejected by appellate courts and the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Eight years later, Bembenek squeezed through a laundry room window, climbed a 7-foot barbed-wire fence and fled from the Taycheedah Correctional Institution, about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. Aiding her escape was her fiance, Dominic Gugliatto, whom she had met while he was visiting his sister, an inmate at the prison.
Again Milwaukee was electrified by the case. A rally celebrating her escape attracted 300 people. Bars and restaurants named menu items after her, including a Bembenek Burger. T-shirts reading "Run, Bambi, Run" proliferated. Television stations conducted call-in polls asking viewers if they believed she was innocent.
On Oct. 17, 1990, three months after the escape, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Bembenek and Gugliatto in Ontario after she was recognized by a restaurant patron who had seen her on the Fox television show America's Most Wanted.
Within a year, supporters produced a low-budget documentary, Used Innocence. And in a three-hour television movie, Woman on Trial: The Lawrencia Bembenek Story, Tatum O'Neal played the title role.
Another television movie about Bembenek, starring Lindsay Frost, was called Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer? And a 1992 book by Kris Radish titled Run, Bambi, Run was subtitled "The Beautiful Ex-Cop and Convicted Murderer Who Escaped to Freedom and Won America's Heart."
A reinvestigation of the case followed, and in December 1992 a judge reduced Bembenek's life sentence to 20 years after she struck a deal with prosecutors in which she pleaded no contest to second-degree murder. She was immediately released for time served.
Lawrencia Bembenek was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 15, 1958. She is survived by two sisters, Melanie and Colette.
On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Pardon Advisory Board declined to consider Bembenek's petition for a pardon. It remained unclear whether the board, which meets twice in December, will reconsider her petition before Gov. James E. Doyle leaves office. The final decision is up to the governor.
Woehrer, her lawyer, said that she would continue to seek a pardon, and that she believed newly uncovered ballistic and DNA evidence would exonerate Bembenek.
Last month Mike Jacobs, a news anchor at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, interviewed Bembenek at her home in Vancouver, Wash.
In a telephone interview, Jacobs said: "I asked, `If you are innocent, why did you plead no contest to second-degree murder in 1992?' And her response was that her parents were in failing health and the only way that she could be guaranteed that she would be able to spend time with them was to plead no contest. Her father's dying wish was that she get the family name cleared."
In the televised interview, Jacobs asked Bembenek whether her attractiveness had hurt her credibility during her murder trial. "All they did was talk about what kind of blouse I wore," she said, referring to the news media. "I would do it a lot differently now."
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