» Bembenek mystery:
Dead man had Bambi Bembenek’s card in wallet
Journal Sentinel columnist Jim Stingl investigates how the ID card of Lawrencia “Bambi” Bembenek — convicted in the 1981 killing of her husband’s ex-wife — wound up in a dead man’s wallet in 2002.
An autopsy and investigation answered every question about the death of Raymond Neeser except one.
What was Lawrencia Bembenek’s photo ID doing in his wallet?
This is not a new mystery. Neeser died in 2002 on the couch of his south side home. He was 45 and had overdosed on pain drugs.
But the ID resurfaced this month when Marissa Ordinans, a forensic supervisor at the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s office, was purging backlogged evidence from the morgue basement.
“It was just in an envelope in one of the cabinets,” she said, and it was marked as evidence to be saved.
The name didn’t resonate fully with her. Ordinans was born in 1984, three years after the homicide that made Bembenek, or “Bambi,” infamous around here as she was convicted, escaped from prison, and lived out her days trying to prove her innocence in the sensational murder.
But who was Neeser to her? Did they ever cross paths?
“Maybe you can find out why this man had Lawrencia Bembenek’s ID from 1981,” Karen Domagalski, the medical examiner’s operations manager, challenged me in an email this week.
A quick search on Google and the Jourond-degree nal Sentinel’s archives provided no hits putting the two together.
The identification card was issued by the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds on Nov. 27, 1981, which is five months after Bembenek was charged with the shooting death of Christine Schultz at her south side home. Schultz was the ex-wife of Milwaukee police detective Elfred Schultz Jr. He then married Bembenek, who had formerly worked as a police officer in Milwaukee and briefly as a Playboy Club waitress.
On that Nov. 27 date, Bembenek was free on bail and she went to the courthouse with Elfred Schultz to apply for a second marriage license, a newspaper article from the time says. They had already married in January 1981, but questions arose about the validity of that marriage because Schultz had not waited long enough after his divorce.
Apparently, Bembenek also applied for and received the county ID the same November day. It says Lawrencia, though she later changed her name to Laurie. She was 23 at the time, and Schultz was 31. The county stopped issuing such IDs in 2003.
In March 1982, Bembenek was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. She escaped from Taycheedah Correctional Institution in 1990 and was recaptured three months later in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she was living under a false name with a man named Dominic Gugliatto, who had helped her bust out of prison.
Bembenek pleaded no contest to sec- murder in 1992 and was allowed to go free on parole. She died at age 52 of liver and kidney failure in 2010 in Oregon, where she had moved.
She and Neeser were born a year apart. The medical examiner’s report says Neeser worked as a mail carrier, which made me wonder if perhaps Bembenek was on his route or if he had somehow obtained the ID when someone found it and tossed it in a mailbox.
But his daughter, Jennifer Neeser, who is 32 and lives in Milwaukee, told me Thursday that her father had worked for Briggs & Stratton but never for the Postal Service. He had back trouble much of his life and became disabled and reliant on pain pills.
Raymond Neeser also was a landlord for various properties owned by him and his mother, but his daughter does not think Bembenek was ever a tenant. She never saw the ID or heard her father mention Bembenek.
“When we went through my dad’s belongings we found other IDs. Some of them were from past tenants,” she said.
I checked with Ira Robins, an investigator long associated with trying to help Bembenek clear her name. He knew nothing of Neeser, he said. But he offered a theory as good as any. “Sometimes guys find something like that and keep it as a souvenir.”