The Cases That Haunt Us (41 page)

After hearing Gilmore’s tape and his firsthand account of meeting with Smith, Detective St. John knew he had to get to Smith directly. A parallel investigation found no proof that Al Morrison, the violent sexual sadist, existed, bolstering St. John’s belief that Arnold Smith/Jack Anderson Wilson was really the killer.

But in one of those eerie twists of fate, before a meeting between Gilmore and Smith at which the police planned to pick him up for questioning, Smith—an alcoholic and heavy smoker—passed out in his bed at the Holland Hotel and set the room on fire. He was burned to death in the flames, which apparently also consumed any photos or personal effects of Short’s he had shown Gilmore.

In another book on the case,
Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer
, written with the respected crime writer Michael Newton, Janice Knowlton offers another theory. Knowlton claims that her late father, George Knowlton, was a child molester, serial killer of at least three, a baby-killer, satanist and necrophiliac—and Beth Short’s murderer. Her understanding of the connection to the Dahlia case, she claims, emerged when deeply repressed memories surfaced while recovering from a hysterectomy. According to Janice Knowlton, Short called George from the Biltmore. In Janice’s memory, after beating Short to death with a hammer, George Knowlton used a power saw to cut Short in two, then forced his daughter to accompany him as he took the body to dump it in the ocean at Seal Beach. When it floated back, he washed and gutted it, took it to a cemetery, then changed his mind and dumped it in the vacant lot.

In a
Los Angeles Times
story that ran two days after the murder, sources recalled Short saying she was engaged to an army pilot named George. At the end of January, someone named George visited a cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard several times, identified himself as an
FBI
agent but refused to show credentials, and asserted that he knew who killed Short. Knowlton believes from the description that this was her father. Newton concedes there is no proof of what she claims, but cites many coincidences in her father’s life and the known facts of the Dahlia case. He also demonstrates striking similarities between the case and the unsolved murder of Frances Cochran in Lynn, Massachusetts, in July, 1941.

In an
Orange County Register
article in June 1991, John St. John declared, “The facts as she presents them to me are not compatible with the murder of the Black Dahlia.” It remains unsolved to this date.

Other case devotees have claimed that the
LAPD
knew the identity of the Dahlia’s killer, but covered it up to protect influential people. (Some of these sources claim the same thing about the death of Marilyn Monroe.)

Theories—conspiracy and otherwise—abound. But this much we can state with certainty: Elizabeth Short was a victim of opportunity. Her killer was the type who would project blame on the victim: she brought it on herself, or she had to be punished for the kind of life she led. He’d had an emotional need to find someone he considered lower than himself, then degraded her to drive home the point. He would be a risk-taker who showed a mixed presentation in his criminal work. After the crime, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some major emotional disintegration. If it was severe enough, it could have precluded him from committing and getting away with additional crimes of this nature, but then we’d expect him to have been picked up or identified. Either way, with modern techniques it should have been possible to recognize someone’s postoffense behavior, whether that behavior involved another lust murder, a nervous breakdown, institutionalization, or suicide.

This crime was driven by fantasy, which would continue after the murder. So I would surveil the dump site to see if the
UNSUB
came back to relive it. I think checking the grave site would also be a good idea. He would be interested in the case, possibly hanging out in bars or coffee shops frequented by the police. He may have confided details of the crime to someone, although this person, too, would be someone who lived on the fringes of society, as this
UNSUB
wouldn’t have a lot of “normal,” successful friends. If he did confide in someone, it was likely at a moment of weakness—such as during a drinking binge—and he’d realize afterwards he’d made himself more vulnerable, putting his confidant in great personal danger.

We will probably never know for sure who killed the Black Dahlia. Had Detective St. John had the opportunity to interrogate Arnold Smith, the outcome might have been different. But figuring out what kind of person killed her is not that difficult. As in so many of the cases we’ve discussed, he told us through his crime.

LAWRENCIA
BEMBENEK

If Elizabeth Short represents a rather feeble and somewhat antiquated version of an American icon, Lawrencia Bembenek represents a stronger, more modern one. In its own way, however, her story is equally poignant and sad.

Again, in Bembenek’s life, the myth and reality played side by side. She called herself Laurie, but the public decided she would be better known as Bambi: a gorgeous, Midwestern, blond Playboy bunny who became a capable and tough career girl, breaking into the traditionally all-boy realm of police work. She engendered the romantic notion of a beauty horribly wronged, convicted of a violent crime she swore she didn’t commit, and once imprisoned, saved by a handsome prince who helped her escape and offered her true love. Then there was the life on the lam, encapsulated by any PR man’s dream of a tag line—“Run, Bambi, Run!”—in headlines, on T-shirts and talk shows. Even this phrase demonstrates the inherent contradictions in the story, hearkening back as it does to an archetypal Disney scene of innocence lost. The nickname was actually attached by male officers when she was a police recruit.

The reality of all of this was considerably different, yet no less haunting.

On May 28, 1981, shortly after 2:30 A.M., police officers responded to an emergency call at 1701 West Ramsey Street, on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They were let in by Sean Schultz, age ten, and his eight-year-old brother, Shannon. In the bedroom officers found the boys’ mother, Christine Jean Schultz, thirty years of age, evidently dead, lying on her right side in bed. She had dark brown hair and brown eyes and was wearing a yellow Adidas T-shirt and white panties. The shirt was torn around a large bullet entry wound in her right shoulder. A clothesline cord bound her hands in front of her, and a blue bandanna-type scarf was wrapped around her head, gagging her. There was no sign of a breakin, and the doors had heavy-duty dead-bolt locks. The home was on a well-lit street, in a safe neighborhood, near other houses. It did, however, back up onto a freeway overpass. The back door was secluded and shielded from view. The freeway could have therefore provided an intruder with an escape route.

It took two hours before the medical examiner was called, and an ambulance an hour later. When police wrapped the victim’s body for transport, they removed a brown hair from her calf.

Sean told police he had awakened to the feeling of something like a rope tightening around his throat. A large gloved hand covered his face. He struggled and screamed, then heard his assailant utter a deep growling sound and run across the hall. Sean followed his brother into the hallway and saw a man in his mother’s room.

Shannon described a large white male with a long ponytail, wearing a green jogging suit. He thought he held a pearl-handled gun. The younger boy heard a female voice from his mother’s bedroom say, “God, please don’t do that!” then a sound like a firecracker.

When the man ran out past them and scrambled down the stairs, both boys thought they noticed him wearing a green army jacket and low-cut black shoes, similar to the kind police officers wear. On this point the boys could be expected to know what they were talking about, since their father—Christine’s ex-husband, Fred—and their mother’s current boyfriend were both cops.

Sean raced back to his mother, who was still alive, and ripped open her shirt to try to tend to her wound. At around 2:30 A.M., he called his mother’s boyfriend, forty-one-year-old Stewart George Honeck, for help. Sean would remember Honeck saying, “I knew this would happen. I think Freddie did it.”

Honeck called the police emergency number, then immediately went to Christine Schultz’s house, accompanied by his roommate, Kenneth Retkowski, another police officer. They arrived at virtually the same time as the patrol car Honeck had summoned. Once inside, Honeck went upstairs and rolled Christine’s body over to check on her. Although this is a natural reaction on the part of a victim’s boyfriend called in by her panicking children, technically he disturbed the crime scene. This would be just one in a series of investigative irregularities.

Elfred O. “Fred” Schultz, divorced from Christine the previous November after eleven years of marriage, was on duty that night when he was notified of the crime. He went to the crime scene while Christine was still in the house. Again, I can understand why he’d want to be there—especially with his sons in the house—but he should have been kept away. As the ex-husband, regardless of his alibi of being on duty, he would have to be considered a potential suspect. I know only too well, though, what must have transpired because we’ve seen it in so many cases where a cop’s family is involved. These other officers know him, know these are his kids, this is his house, etc., and see him as a victim. It’s a natural and common reaction.

Schultz called and awakened his twenty-one-year-old current wife, Lawrencia Bembenek, to let her know what had happened. Then he and his partner, Detective Michael Durfee, drove to his and Laurie’s apartment, sixteen blocks from the crime scene. Fred felt the hood of her car, which he said was cold, and in Durfee’s presence, examined his off-duty .38. Durfee smelled it and examined it himself. There was dust on the weapon and Durfee determined that it had not been fired that night nor recently cleaned. Fred asked Laurie to accompany him to identify the victim—his ex-wife—and took the off-duty pistol with him in a briefcase. In what would prove to be another investigative miscue, Fred failed to have his off-duty revolver—which would later be determined to be the murder weapon—properly registered with the crime lab. The serial number of the weapon was not recorded and the weapon remained in his possession for three weeks before he turned it in for examination.

Later in the morning, around 4 A.M., two detectives came to the Schultz-Bembenek apartment and asked Laurie if she owned a gun or a green jogging suit, then asked her some questions about her husband and Stewart Honeck. In fact, the two men had once been roommates. Now, however, Fred was said to be unhappy about Honeck dating his ex, and they strongly disliked each other.

As for Laurie, she said that at the time of the murder she was home in the apartment alone and asleep. That evening, she’d been packing to move them into a smaller apartment. She had also planned to go out with a friend, but their date had been canceled.

Police reconstructed the events of what proved to be the last night of Christine Schultz’s life. That evening, she had made dinner for Honeck and they had several drinks together, finishing around 9 P.M., when the boys went to bed. The two adults watched television, and then Christine drove Honeck home, about three minutes away by car. Another account has him leaving on his own with Christine requesting that he lock up behind him.

Twelve area residents, including two officers, had seen a man matching the boys’ description jogging in the neighborhood a few weeks before the murder. He had reddish brown hair tied in a ponytail, wore a green jogging suit, and carried a blue bandanna similar to the one used to gag the victim. Two nurses at a facility a mile from the scene had noticed a man lying in the parking lot around 2:50 A.M. the morning of the crime. They called police and, when they returned, observed a man with reddish brown hair and a green jogging suit standing in the bushes. Ray Kujawa, a neighbor of the victim’s, told police that on the night of the murder, when he was staying at a friend’s house, someone had broken into his garage and stolen a .38 revolver and a green jogging suit.

The postmortem examination by Dr. Elaine Samuels indicated that, when fired, the gun had been held against the victim’s back, touching the skin. It entered her right shoulder and cut a direct path to her heart. A contact gunshot of this nature would produce a “blow back” effect, in which blood and tissue would have exploded back from the wound into the gun barrel.

Christine’s friends and relatives described her as a fine athlete, physically fit, and a lover of the outdoors. She also reportedly had a temper, and they felt it unlikely that she would have remained tied up in the kind of knot the killer used unless someone was holding a gun on her. Blood was found under her fingernails and on both walls near the head of the stairs.

From here, things start to get complicated.

Despite his partner’s earlier assessment that Fred’s service weapon hadn’t been fired or cleaned recently, the regional crime lab’s ballistics analysis indicated that the revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 with a four-inch barrel, showed traces of type A blood, both Fred’s and Christine’s blood type, and that the slug that killed Christine matched markings inside the gun barrel. In the house after the murder, Fred discovered a box of 200-grain Speer bullets, which he said belonged to him. Speer bullets had been standard issue for Milwaukee PD service revolvers, and Monty Lutz, a nationally recognized firearms expert, stated that enough markings linked the off-duty gun with the fatal bullet to make a definitive match. Other analysts also declared that the bullet that killed Christine Schultz could only have come from her ex-husband’s weapon. Both Fred and Laurie became suspects.

Ex-husbands are always suspect at least initially, and Fred Schultz could be seen to have a potential motive. Christine and the boys lived happily in the home that he himself had built, while he and Laurie lived in a small apartment. On top of that, to help control costs since he was paying alimony, child support, and the mortgage on the house, the newlyweds briefly shared an apartment with a friend, Judy Zess. According to Laurie, Fred was extremely bitter over the amount of money the divorce settlement was costing him. He complained that his ex-wife was getting everything. And Christine reportedly told her attorney that she was afraid of Fred, saying he had threatened her life and wanted to maintain control over her and the children. She also felt she was being followed. Of course, bad feelings and harsh words are common in divorce cases, and nothing indicated Fred had acted on his.