The Bambi Chronicles

You Believe her or you don't. There is no middle ground on Lawrencia "Bambi" Bembenek, the ex-blonde, ex-Bunny, ex-cop from Milwaukee who, in May 1981, either murdered or didn't murder her then-husband's ex-wife. You are her acolyte or her accuser. She is either a wronged innocent or a vicious murderer, ardent feminist or femme fatale, helpless repository of other people's desires or Svengali, media victim or media manipulator.

The anti-Bambi forces believe the crime went down like this:

It took her about 30 seconds to find the lock in the predawn dark, and another few beats to steady her hand enough to slip in the key. She opened the door and stepped into the house.

The carpet muffled her steps as she crept up the stairs and into Christine Schultz's bedroom. It wasn't hard to find—Schultz had left the TV on and its bluish light illuminated the room.

Bembenek didn't say a word as she roughly roused Schultz, gagged her with a bandanna and used a length of plastic clothesline to bind her arms behind her back. She waved her husband's .38 in Schultz's face before heading out into the hall.

The idea was to scare Christine so she'd reconsider her decision to stay in big, bad Milwaukee rather than move with the kids to her family's place up north, leaving this house to her ex-husband (and Bembenek's husband at that time), Fred, a police detective.

She stopped in the kids' room, across from Christine's, to put a little fear in them, too. She slipped another clothes-line around the neck of Sean and pulled it tight, keeping a gloved hand on his face so he couldn't get a good look at her. Still, he noticed her black police shoes, her military-style jacket (or was it a green jogging suit?), her reddish-brown hair tied in a ponytail.

But Sean screamed, and Bembenek suddenly realized that Christine wouldn't stay put for long. She let go of Sean and rushed across the hall, where Christine had managed to get off the bed and come toward her— close enough to see her face above Bembenek's mask.

Bembenek saw the flash of recognition. She grabbed Schultz, spun her around and threw her down on the bed, shoved the gun against her upper back, fired one shot, then fled down the stairs, out the door and back the way she'd come. She ran 16 blocks to the apartment she shared with Fred, the apartment they were leaving because it cost too much. Back in the house, 11-year-old Sean was frantically pressing his mother's wound with a roll of gauze, trying to stop the bleeding. She died within minutes.

If you believe that scenario, you are in the minority, along with the Milwaukee Police Department. If you care what other people think, you may prefer the pro-Bambi version:

The key worked like a charm. Hired thug Fred Horenberger—who got the key from former resident Fred Schultz, the sponsor of this hit—shoved the door open and motioned with a gun for his accomplice, Judy Zess, to get in the house. They'd never seen the place, but everything looked pretty much as Schultz had laid it out. When they got upstairs to the ex-wife's room, they found her with the TV on, giving them some light to work by. Horenberger trussed and gagged her, then passed the gun to Zess to stand guard while he went on a reconnaissance mission.

Horenberger stopped in the kids' room, across from where Zess was playing Ma Barker with the gun. The idea was to rouse the kids, let them get enough of a look at him to know he wasn't their father. They noticed his black shoes, his jogging suit (or was it a green military jacket?), his reddish-brown hair tied in a ponytail.

When one of the kids started screaming, it was time to get it done and get out. Horenberger rushed across the hall, grabbed the gun from Zess, plugged it into the woman's back and fired. Zess was already down the stairs when he raced past the kids staring in the doorway. They were out the door within seconds. Back inside, Sean was frantically pressing his mother's wound with a roll of gauze, trying to stop the bleeding. She died within minutes.

The third, Bambi-neutral scenario goes like this: Maybe none of them are guilty. Or all of them, including the entire Milwaukee Police Department. Anybody feel like confessing?

•

There's a problem with writing about murderers: They're murderers. They don't necessarily do things rationally. Small questions will come up, questions of technique or motivation, stuff that doesn't make sense. Why would Bambi jog 16 blocks in die black cop shoes that were noticed by the kids? Why would the kids describe a reddish-brown ponytail, when Bambi was blonde at the time? She was wearing a wig, right? But then why would she safely dispose of the clothesline and the green jogging suit but flush that wig down the toilet, where it would get clogged, as wigs in toilets will? Why would she use her husband's off-duty gun, then put it back in its place, as if nothing had happened?

Hell, why would she marry Fred Schultz in the first place, only weeks after she met him, when she knew he had cheated on his previous wife?

Why did she kill Christine Schultz?

Who knows? Maybe she didn't do it. But if she did, how can we presume to understand what was going on in the murderer's mind?

None of this questioning has stopped the media from proclaiming Bembenek's innocence. People, Vanity Fair, the tabloids, Geraldo and Prime Time Live have fervently enlisted in the Bambi cause. Two television movies, both with the innocent-Bambi angle, have been produced: Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer?, which you probably didn't see a year ago on ABC, and the recent Woman on the Run: The Lawrencia Bembenek Story, a four-hour miniseries with Tatum O'Neal that you probably did see on NBC.

As a result of this exposure, Laurie (no longer Bambi to her friends) Bembenek's Q rating hovers around 100 in Milwaukee. More people have heard of her than have heard of Tommy Thompson, the state's governor. And of the 100 percent of Milwaukeeans who know who she is, the substantial majority simply knows she got a raw deal.

But if these people are right and she's not a murderer, how can we trust our judgment about Bembenek's friends and associates, half of whom have been accused of the murder by this or that Bembenek advocate in the ten years this case has been debated?

The trusting population of Milwaukee aside, there are at least a few Bembenek doubters. John Greenyad a writer who expanded a Washington Post piece into a still unpublished manuscript, Did Bambi Kill?, says, "I'm the only guy who's been following this for a long time who actually believes she's guilty."

Significantly, though, Greenya has never met Bembenek, and neither has the handful of other journalistic skeptics. The glue that holds the Bembenek-innocence theories together is a conviction that she is not the kind of person who could commit such an act. The one sure way to acquire such a conviction seems to be to meet Bembenek. She passes people's sniff tests. She's believable.

Or so I'm told. Bembenek says she's been burned too badly by her Bunny image (she once worked at a Playboy Club for four weeks and everyone thinks she was a Playmate) to get involved with the magazine now.

So, unable to get religion by means of direct contact with Bambi, I was left to pick through dueling theories of the crime. If you look at this story, it begins to seem as if Bembenek's entire life is a tapestry of circumstantial evidence and uncredible witnesses.

•

Bembenek entered the police academy—her lifelong ambition, she said—on March 10, 1980, at the age of 21. She graduated in early August and was almost immediately fired from the force for having filed a false police report that past May defending her friend and fellow recruit, Judy Zess, after her arrest for possession of marijuana at a Rufus and Chaka Khan concert. (The charge against Zess was later dropped.)

Bembenek claims the brass was looking for an excuse to drum her out of the department. In the following months, she would look into suing the Milwaukee Police Department for sexual discrimination and would accuse it of reaping federal money by hiring women and minority recruits and firing them at die slightest provocation.

To bolster her discrimination charge, Bembenek turned in a pile of photographs taken at a picnic in a public park near Lake Michigan. Among the revelers shown dancing around in various stages of undress, or ogling from the sidelines, were at least a couple of Milwaukee cops. If these guys can get away with such blatant lawlessness without sanction, Bembenek reasoned, how can they fire me for supposedly lying on a report? Pictured in several of the shots (and nude in a few that later surfaced) was the group's photographer and Bembenek's hubby-to-be, Detective Elfred Otto Schultz, Jr.

Bembenek partisans often excuse her more glaring failures of judgment during this period by bowing to her age: Didn't we all make a few bad decisions when we were 21?

On reflection, though, the answer is no: I'm not sure we've all made decisions on a par with, say, marrying a newly divorced father of two, ten years our senior, whom we barely know but whose infidelities are infamous enough to have reached our ears, and who is an active, nude participant in parties we're trying to get the police department to investigate.

But that is, of course, just what Bembenek did. She and Elfred Schultz, who were barely acquainted when she turned in the picnic photos in December 1980, eloped to Illinois in January.

They spent the next few months moving in and out of apartments with Judy Zess (another odd decision, since it was Zess' subsequent report that Bembenek had been toking at the concert that gave cause for her firing). Zess got them evicted from their first place by throwing a wild party while the newlyweds honeymooned in Jamaica, and then broke the lease on their second place, forcing Schultz and Bembenek to shop for cheaper accommodations. This was the apartment they were packing up when Fred's ex-wife, Christine, was murdered at about two A.M. on May 28, 1981.

Bembenek didn't become a serious suspect until at least a couple of weeks after the murder. On June 24 she was arrested, based largely on three things: a wig found lodged in a pipe draining her toilet, ballistics tests that pegged Fred's gun as the murder weapon and damaging testimony by zudy Zess.

The motive was said to be money. Schultz was paying his ex-wife half his income in alimony and mortgage payments. That was putting a crimp in the fast life—designer clothes, fancy restaurants, exotic vacations—that Bembenek supposedly liked to lead.

But Sean Schultz and his brother, Shannon, the only witnesses to the crime, thought it was a man who'd killed their mother. Sean said that Bembenek couldn't possibly have done it, that even if she had been wearing football pads, she wouldn't have been as big as the guy.

Ultimately, though, the gun sealed Bembenek's fate. Fred Schultz and his partner inspected it the night of the murder and determined that it hadn't been fired. Remarkably, the department brass left it in Schultz's possession, without so much as recording its serial number. (This breach of procedure has since become a cornerstone of Bembenek-frame-up theories.) It wasn't until three weeks later that the department finally called the gun in for routine tests, just to cover all bases.

To the surprise of everyone, a top ballistics expert determined that it was, without a doubt, the murder weapon. Bembenek and Schultz were said to be the only two with access to it that night, and Schultz was on duty at the time of the murder. That evidence, and testimony from Zess that Bembenek had said "I would pay to have Christine blown away" and had asked Zess' drug-dealer boyfriend if he knew anyone who could do a hit, seemed to be enough for the jury members, who returned a guilty verdict. Bembenek was sentenced to life and sent to the Tay-cheedah women's prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

This is where the TV movies break for commercials and return with a block-lettered Eight Years Later running across the bottom of the screen. But the real story was just beginning. Bembenek and her defense team encountered an unbalanced con man named Jacob Wissler, who proceeded to poison her motion for a new trial by (continued on page 168)Bambi Chronicles(continued from page 118) paying, or promising to pay, witnesses thousands of dollars to testify on her behalf. One convicted murderer was supposed to confess to the killing but then clammed up on the stand.

It was also during this time that a private investigator named Ira Robins decided to make the Bembenek case his life's work. He began an eight-year (and counting) crusade that would see him dredging up all kinds of new evidence, both credible and incredible, that something fishy had led to Bembenek's conviction. He almost singlehandedly kept the story in the news.

He also honed a gift for loopy invective. He called Assistant District Attorney Robert Donohoo and District Attorney E. Michael McCann criminals and called a judge a "paid whore...prostituting herself for the government."

Even with Robins on Bembenek's side, two appeals failed. Nothing much else happened until, as Bembenek recounts in her autobiography, Woman on Trial, her "testosterone radar" went off one day in late August 1989 during visiting hours at Taycheedah.

"Ooooh, who's that!!!" she quotes herself saying—complete with three exclamation points—when she saw Dominic Gugliatto (he was visiting his sister) walking through the prison yard in white tennis shorts and a crisp white shirt. She and Nick met, began corresponding and saw each other at visiting hours. After a trademark whirlwind romance ("She doesn't have a real good track record with guys, period," her friend Wally Janke says), they were engaged.

On July 15, 1990, less than a month before the planned prison wedding, Bembenek squeezed out a laundry-room window, gashed her leg on barbed wire as she scaled a fence, then slipped into Gugliatto's waiting car. The next day they were in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

And there they stayed for three months while Bembenek's story took on renewed momentum. Fred Schultz appeared on Geraldo via satellite from his Florida home to say he feared for his life. "The would do anything," he said. "I have no doubt in my mind. She'd kill again. If she wants something, she will kill." The camera then pulled back to reveal, sitting next to Schultz, Bembenek's original trial attorney, Donald Eisenberg, who dropped his own bombshell. "I also believe she is guilty. Everything I know points to the fact that she did it."

Meanwhile, Milwaukeeans donned Bambi masks, entered Bambi look-alike contests, slapped Bambi on Board stickers on their bumpers and hummed along to Run, Bambi, Run, a novelty song that flooded the local airwaves.

In Thunder Bay, Gugliatto couldn't find a job, so Bembenek took two, one as a fitness instructor and the other, again using her renowned judgment, as a waitress at a busy bar and grill half a block away from a police station.

It was there that she waited on a tourist passing through from California who later, watching America's Most Wanted, saw a face that looked strikingly familiar. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police went to the bar to question her after the tip had been faxed in, and they later arrested the two fugitives as they were trying to make a break for it.

Gugliatto was immediately sent back to Wisconsin, where he was convicted of aiding the escape of a felon and was sentenced to a year in jail. He quickly faded from Bembenek's heart. (The two continue to juggle the hot potato of who dumped whom.)

Still in Canada, Bembenek made a plea for refugee status. "Her refugee claim was that she could not receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States," says Donald Macintosh, the Canadian Justice Department lawyer who conducted the government's case. "That is the single most preposterous allegation that any person has ever made in any court proceeding in either the U.S. or Canada." The architect of this defense was Frank Marrocco, a high-powered Toronto lawyer who wrote the book on Canadian immigration law. Marrocco spun out the proceedings for more than a year, virtually retrying Bembenek's murder conviction and squeezing out every drop of favorable PR he could while the Canadian government squealed that the whole thing was unfair.

Then, on the eve of the Canadian government's case—they'd dug up some stuff that might have tarnished Bembenek's Joan of Arc persona—the fugitive and her lawyers decided it would be more noble to return to Milwaukee, confront her persecutors in the district attorney's office and fight for justice toe-to-toe. Amazingly, that's how her retreat played out in the press: not as a brilliantly calculated public-relations ploy but as a courageous act of conscience.

At the time, a judicial inquiry called a John Doe had been launched in Milwaukee to determine if Bembenek had been railroaded by the police department and the D.A.'s office in its investigation of the Christine Schultz murder. The decision came down in mid-August, about four months after Bembenek returned to the States.

It was largely a slap in the face to her defense. Not only had no crimes been committed, the special prosecutor said, but the pet theory of the Bembenek camp—that Fred Schultz had hired Fred Horenberger to murder his ex-wife, and that somehow Judy Zess was involved—didn't make sense.

But it did offer Bembenek a glimmer of good news in finding that "significant mistakes were made that cannot be condoned or excused" in the original investigation and in detailing seven particularly serious police blunders.

Enter Sheldon Zenner, Bembenek's latest high-powered defense attorney, whose influence waxed while Ira Robins' waned. Says Zenner, "We took the case out of Ira Robins' realm of'I'm working out of the trunk of my car and I have a document I'd like to show you.'" Even those who have a healthy respect for Robins' bulldog approach think Zenner was smart to stiff-arm the guy. "I can see why they froze him out," says Duane Gay, a Milwaukee newscaster and veteran of the Bembenek case. "Robins became an embarrassment. One time, Ira had filed some motion and had been turned down, and he stood up in court, cursed at the judge, walked out and pissed next to the courthouse. Is that the kind of guy you want in your corner when you're arguing the case?"

Getting dumped on by Bembenek and her lawyers has made Robins extremely bitter. To discuss the case with him is to get an earful of bile. "I believe that Lawrencia Bembenek is not guilty in this murder," he says. "I also believe she's a board-certified cunt."

Robins is still pursuing Horenberger. It's easier to blame him now because he can't put up much of a defense: He's dead. That's not his only qualification for taking the rap. He used to hang out at one of the bars Fred Schultz frequented, was a convicted murderer and burglar whose modus operandi—military garb, wig, .38-caliber gun, gagging the victim—was apparently similar to the one used by whoever killed Christine Schultz.

While he was alive, Horenberger loudly proclaimed his innocence in Christine Schultz's murder, and Fred Schultz backed him up. Now that Horenberger is gone, eight confidants, mostly cellmates and other shady characters, have sworn that he confessed to them.

It's the way Fred Horenberger died that has Robins' conspiracy juices flowing. One morning in late November 1991, Horenberger and a friend decided to knock off a Milwaukee doughnut shop. The caper went awry, though, and after a chase, Horenberger, finding himself cornered with two elderly hostages in a south-side bungalow, went into the basement and blew his brains out.

"That he committed suicide, we have a problem with that," Robins says. "There were dog bites all over his legs from the police dog. These fucking people are not above murder. We're dealing with some people who are bad news."

•

In the legal profession, there's an old saw that goes: If the facts are against you, argue the law; if the law is against you, argue the facts; and if the facts and the law are both against you, attack the police department. After years of being pulled along by Robins' scorched-earth, attack-the-cops tactics, the Bembenek defense took a turn toward facts when Sheldon Zenner came on board.

The facts in this case are circumstantial and always have been. Both the judge at Bembenek's preliminary hearing and the one at her trial called it the most circumstantial case they'd ever seen. After years of scrutiny, the case hasn't gotten any less circumstantial. But Bembenek supporters have never been able to come up with anything but their own circumstantial evidence to battle the state's circumstantial evidence. The whole thing is a circus of circumstance, and may the best clown win.

Zenner filed a motion for a new trial. In the supporting brief he subjected the prosecution's original case to death by a thousand cuts. He took every piece of key evidence presented at the trial and cut it off at the knees, suggesting that witnesses were lying or that evidence had been tampered with.

A few examples:

• The wig. At trial the jury was shown a reddish-brown wig that had been removed from a drain common to the Bembenek-Schultz apartment and the one next door. The obvious implication was that Bembenek had flushed her disguise down the crapper. Recently, the neighbor, Sharon Niswonger, has come forward to say that she received an odd visit in early June 1981 from an acquaintance who said she was on her way to the gym and asked if she could change in Niswonger's bathroom. The next time the toilet was used, it overflowed. The visitor? Judy Zess.

• The strands of hair. The jury was told that color-treated blonde hairs—Bembenek was a hair tinter—had been recovered from the victim's body and from the gag in her mouth. At the trial, Dr. Elaine Samuels, who conducted Christine Schultz's autopsy, testified that the envelope the hairs were in was the envelope she'd put hairs in during the autopsy. But she was never told that the prosecution claimed that they were blonde hairs. Since the trial, Samuels has insisted that she never recovered any blonde hairs in her autopsy.

Ira Robins discovered that during the police investigation the gag had been checked out of the crime lab and was unsealed so that it could be shown to a potential witness—Judy Zess. It was only after the gag was returned to the lab that the blonde hairs were found on it.

• The witnesses. Two key prosecution witnesses at the trial were Fred Schultz and Judy Zess. Because no one had written down the serial number of the gun Schultz and his partner had inspected the night of the murder, Schultz was needed to testify that the murder weapon was his off-duty gun, which had been in his apartment with Bembenek that night.

At the time of the preliminary hearing, Schultz was under internal police department investigation for dancing nude at the picnic and also for perjury— something Bembenek's defense team should have been told. When two officers went to District Attorney McCann to get a John Doe inquiry into Schultz's activities, McCann's response was, "Do you want Bembenek or do you want Schultz?"

Zess was used to connect Bembenek with virtually every other piece of prosecution evidence. She testified that Bembenek had owned a plastic travel clothesline, which was never found. She said she'd seen a green jogging suit at the apartment, though it was never discovered. She said Bembenek and Schultz often wore bandannas like the one the murderer had used as a gag. And she quoted Bembenek on having Christine Schultz blown away.

Zess has recanted her testimony (and then recanted her recantations) so many times since the trial that she would be crucified if brought before another jury.

None of this stuff is new, and Assistant D.A. Donohoo has developed an uncontrollable verbal tic when confronted with this kind of evidence. "So what?" he'll say. "So what?" Over and over.

Zess used the neighbor's bathroom before the toilet overflowed? "So what? All it proves is that Judy Zess is capable of going to the bathroom by herself."

As for Elaine Samuels' testimony about the strands of hair, Donohoo seems almost gleeful at the prospect of getting her up on the stand and tearing her apart. Samuels is an eccentric of the 50-cat-owning variety. She made headlines in the late Seventies for collecting jars of human testicles from her autopsy subjects, supposedly for a research project. More to the point, her job was abolished after she ruined key evidence in three murder cases and took too long to complete autopsy reports.

And while District Attorney McCann surely regrets asking if the police would rather go after Bembenek or Schultz, the underlying theory wasn't too outrageous: Schultz's perjury was for such things as lying on his marriage-license application. For that, you're going to let a murderer walk?

But Zenner's brief did highlight one piece of new evidence:

• The gun. According to members of the jury, it was Bembenek's access to the murder weapon that convicted her. But while Bembenek was fighting extradition in Toronto, her defense team struck on a novel argument.

When Christine Schultz was shot, the gun was pressed against her back. The pressure of expanding gases from a close gunshot forms a distinct reddish imprint of the muzzle around the wound. Mary Woehrer, a Milwaukee attorney and cohort of Ira Robins, had the inspiration to send photos of the wound, with measurements, and muzzle impressions made in modeling clay to top forensic specialists in Canada and the United States. The finding, from five separate forensic pathologists, was that the muzzle imprint around the wound was two and a half times as wide as the muzzle of the supposed murder weapon. That gun, they said, couldn't have committed this murder. And if the gun was innocent, so was Laurie Bembenek.

But, of course, it isn't quite that easy. Donohoo produced his own expert, Dr. Vincent Di Maio, a man who has written a book on gusshot wounds and who says he often sees muzzle imprints two or two and a half times the size of the muzzle. Furthermore, Di Maio says his testimony is more credible than those of Bembenek's five experts. "They run medical examiner's offices," he says. "I run a medical examiner's office and a crime lab. I get the body and I get the gun. I just have to put the two together."

So it comes down to dueling experts, dueling theories, dueling contentions about the original evidence. No one knows how a new jury would have reacted, but it's hard to read Zenner's brief and imagine anyone finding Bembenek guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Donohoo was clearly struck by this once the brief was filed. He began negotiating with Zenner over a plea bargain for Bembenek. "Criminal prosecutions rarely improve with age," he said later at her plea-and-sentencing hearing. "This case is no exception, and the state has identified several areas that would make a second prosecution substantially more difficult than the first."

Bembenek was looking at spending three more years behind bars while justice was slowly grinding through a motion for a new trial, the trial itself (if granted) and the inevitable appeals. In the end she decided to sacrifice the hope of exoneration for the lure of freedom, and Zenner and Donohoo struck a deal. They would go to the original trial judge to vacate the conviction for first-degree murder and the life sentence that went with it. Bembenek would then plead no contest to a lesser charge of second-degree murder and would be sentenced to 20 years in prison, reduced to time already served plus parole.

On December 9, 1992, the actors appeared in court and played their roles to perfection. "They went in and basically said, 'Hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo,' and then they walked out," says Jim Rowen, who covered the case for The Milwaukee Journal. "All the reporters swarmed around Zenner out in the hall, asking him what had just happened. He said, 'Oh, she's free.'"

Relatively free, anyway. Bembenek will be under court supervision through the Nineties and needs permission to travel. The government wouldn't let her fly to Toronto to watch the shooting of the NBC miniseries in March, but it did let her go to Los Angeles for a press conference, where she stood onstage in front of the entertainment press and listened while Tatum O'Neal summed up her saga: "She's been betrayed and yet she has so much strength and so much fight in her that it's like nothing could stop her. After spending an evening with her, I was just blown away."

•

It's early March in Toronto and the cast and crew of Woman on the Run are trying to shoot July in Milwaukee. Inside an office building, throngs of anxious media vultures mill about the lobby, then attack as "Laurie" and her lawyer emerge through the revolving door, over and over, from several camera angles.

Upstairs in the room where the crew hangs out, a large stack of accordion cardboard folds out to reveal a shooting schedule for the production, with tersely slugged scenes grouped by days. (Day 33: Nick Receives Laurie Letter. Sex Fantasy Now Reality. Laurie Succumbs to Love. Laurie Primps for Love. Bath Better than Sex.) By the time production wraps, the crew will have spent more than 40 days on set in Toronto and North Carolina, shooting most of the American scenes in Canada and most of the Canadian scenes in the United States.

"There's a pretty clear profile of what works in TV movies," says Todd Leavitt, executive vice president of NBC Productions. "Movies tend to attract a very strong women's demographic, so a story with a strong, appealing female lead is something you always look for. Another category that always works is true crime. The story of Lawrencia Bembenek fits both of those profiles. It has a strong central woman character and it's ripped from the headlines."

Still, NBC Productions optioned the story when Bembenek was in Canada fighting extradition; there was real concern about the risks of tackling a story that didn't yet have an ending. "If she's just extradited and reincarcerated, the story kind of stops there," Leavitt says. "It becomes difficult to make a statement about her innocence. Here, the system has validated our statement. At the ending, you bite your lip a little if you truly believe in her innocence."

Of course, there are those who would argue that a plea of no contest to second-degree murder isn't much of a validation of innocence. CBS, for one, didn't buy it, thereby killing Bembenek's opportunity for an Amy Fisheresque hat trick on network TV.

"CBS said, 'She just ruined the ending for your movie. She's pleaded to second-degree murder. Therefore, she's not in fact innocent,'" says Francine LeFrak, who was set to produce the network's entry in the Bambi sweepstakes, this one based on Kris Radish's authorized biography, Run, Bambi, Run. "I said to the network people, 'Are you kidding? Can you imagine what a dramatic moment it is when they take the shackles off Lawrencia and she hugs her parents in front of the judge? That isn't dramatic to you? And a crawl going up the screen saying she's pleaded no contest but she's still trying to prove her innocence? That's not powerful to you? You don't get goose bumps?' And they said, 'No.'"

Some people just can't tell a heroine when they see one.

"'I have no doubt in my mind. She'd kill again. If she wants something, she will kill.'"