Bambi Bembenek

The Crime Scene



On May 28, 1981, at approximately 2:00 a.m, someone entered the Milwaukee, Wisconsin home of Christine Schultz, age 30, where she lived with her two sons, Sean, 10, and Shannon, 7. The intruder entered Christine's bedroom with a gun and tied her hands together. Then, inexplicably, he went across the hall and put a gloved hand over Sean's mouth and nose, and slipped some wire around his neck. Sean awoke in terror to see a tall man standing over him. His brother also woke up and jumped out of bed to kick the man. They remembered him as having reddish-brown hair tied into a ponytail. The intruder rushed back over to Christine's room, where she cried out. He shot her in the back, and then fled past the two startled boys down the steps and out the door.

It was Sean who phoned for help, calling Christine's current boyfriend, Stewart Honeck, a police officer. He put in a call to the department for backup. Four police officers arrived at the scene and were let in by the frightened boys. Honeck went up the steps and was the first to see Christine. He moved her and saw that she was not breathing.

She was lying on her right side, facing west. She wore a yellow Adidas T-shirt and white panties. A clothesline-type cord was tied around her hands, binding them in front of her, and a blue bandanna-type scarf was wrapped around her head, gagging her mouth. The T-shirt was torn near the wound, a large bullet hole in her right shoulder. There was no sign of a struggle.

Police cut the cord around victim's hands and wrapped her body in plastic. They removed a brown hair from the calf of her leg.

Two hours after the initial report, the medical examiner arrived. An hour later, an ambulance came to transport the victim to the police morgue.

There was no evidence of a break-in, and the doors had heavy-duty locks, including a dead bolt. The crime was puzzling in many respects.

Normally the prime suspect would have been Christine's ex-husband, Elfred ("Fred") O. Schultz, Jr., but he had an alibi: He, too, was a cop, and had been on duty that night. At the time of the shooting, he claimed, he and his partner were investigating a break-in.

Christine Schultz had divorced him the previous year, in November of 1980, after eleven years of marriage, keeping custody with visitation rights of their sons, and living in the family home. She worked part-time. The marriage had been rocky and she had complained to her attorney after the divorce that she was afraid of Schultz, who had threatened her life. When he continued hanging around the house after she asked him to leave, she had the locks changed. She also felt she was being followed, and wondered if it had something to do with Honeck, known to have a drinking problem and to bear some animosity toward Fred, with whom he had once shared an apartment.

The intertwined nature of all the relationships in this unfolding drama was as complex as any soap opera. It turned out to be a much more complicated case than anyone had anticipated.

On the evening in question, Christine had made dinner for Stewart Honeck. Thereafter, the boys went to bed while Christine and Honeck watched television for a while, whereupon she drove him home. When she returned, he called her and they talked on the phone until about 11:30. Then she went upstairs to her room on the second floor to watch television. Not long afterward, she was murdered.

Witness Reports



Sean Schultz claimed that he heard a noise and woke up to the feeling of something like a covered wire tightening around his throat. As he recalled, a large gloved hand moved over his face, covering his mouth, eyes, and nose. He struggled and screamed, hearing his attacker utter a deep growling sound. The intruder ran out and across the hall. He followed Shannon, his 8-year-old brother, into the hallway and saw a man in his mother's room. When the man ran out past them, Sean saw him taking the steps three and four at a time, his green army jacket flapping. At the bottom, Sean noticed that he wore low-cut black shoes, like police shoes. He thought the man also wore a ski mask. Sean then went to his mother, who was still alive, and ripped open her shirt to fix the hole in her back. It was his impression that the man had exploded a firecracker in it. He wrapped gauze around his hand and used it to put pressure on the wound. At 2:30 a.m., he called Stewart Honeck to ask for help.

Shannon says he jumped out of bed when Sean screamed, saw a man, and kicked at the intruder. He described a large white male with reddish hair tied into a long ponytail, wearing a green jogging suit with yellow stripes running down the sleeve. The man then ran from the room and crossed the hall, entering their mother's bedroom. He heard a woman's voice say, "God, please don't do that." Then came a loud noise. He raced to his mother's room and saw a man standing over her bed. The man then ran past him and down the steps.

Twelve area residents (including two police officers) had seen a man matching the boys' description jogging in the neighborhood a few weeks before the murder. He had reddish-brown hair in a ponytail and was wearing a green jogging suit. He was seen carrying a blue bandanna, similar to the one used to gag the victim.

Two nurses at a nursing home one mile from the scene had observed something strange in the early morning hours of May 28. They had seen someone lying in the parking lot, had called the police, and had come back outside around 2:50 a.m. and observed a man with reddish-brown hair and a green jogging suit standing in the bushes.