Mel Ignatow

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Mel Ignatow is a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, who murdered his girlfriend, Brenda Sue Schaeffer, in 1988. The case was controversial because Ignatow was acquitted of the charge, but photographs that proved his guilt were uncovered after the trial. Under the legal principle of double jeopardy, however, Ignatow could not be tried a second time for the murder. He was, however, convicted and jailed for perjury in his grand jury testimony for the case on several occasions.

1 Background
2 Murder
3 Investigation and trial
4 New evidence
5 Aftermath
6 Further reading
7 Reference
8 Note

[edit] Background

Ignatow and Schaeffer had been in a relationship for two years at the time of the murder, but Schaeffer, who had complained that Ignatow was abusive, was planning to break off the involvement, an intention that Ignatow was aware of. Intending to murder Schaeffer, he worked with a former girlfriend, Mary Ann Shore, to lay out plans for the murder, spending several weeks laying out extensive preparations. Shore testified they had "scream tested" her house and dug a grave in the woods behind it.

[edit] Murder

On September 23, 1988, Schaeffer met Ignatow to return some jewelry of his that she had in her possession. Instead, Ignatow took Schaeffer to Shore's house, where he pulled a gun on Brenda and locked her in the house. Brenda was blindfolded, gagged and bound hand and foot.

Ignatow forced Brenda to strip, photographed her in suggestive positions, raped, sodomized and beat her before killing her with chloroform. Ignatow and Shore buried her behind Shore's house. He took Brenda's jewelery and the exposed film.

[edit] Investigation and trial

Police suspected Ignatow almost immediately, but were unable to locate any witnesses or physical evidence linking him to Schaeffer's disappearance, or even to locate Schaeffer's body. In search for any lead that could let them move forward with the case, police invited Ignatow to clear his name by testifying before a grand jury. There, he mentioned Shore's name, bringing her into the investigation for the first time. The police interviewed Shore, who eventually confessed to helping plan the murder, and to taking pictures of Ignatow as he tortured and abused Schaeffer. Shore also lead the investigators to the gravesite, where Brenda's badly decomposed body had been buried for over a year. The autopsy showed she had been abused, but any DNA evidence, from blood and semen, had decomposed.

The investigators convinced Shore to wear a wire, by promising only to charge her with tampering with evidence. In the surveillance, Shore told Ignatow that the FBI was hounding her and she was afraid the property behind her house was being sold and developed. He was on tape berating her for letting the FBI "rattle" her and told her he didn't care if they dug up the whole property because "that site we dug is not shallow".

With this apparently damning piece of evidence in their hands, prosecutors brought Ignatow to trial for the murder in 1991. In court, however, the jury decided that one word on the tape was "safe", not "site", as the police believed, which led them to conclude that the discussion involved a buried safe. Furthermore, Shore, the prosecution's star witness, wore a tiny miniskirt to court and laughed during her testimony, undermining her credibility in the eyes of the jury. The defense argued that Shore had killed Schaeffer, not Ignatow.

In light of these considerations, the jury acquitted Ignatow, although the judge was so embarrassed by this result that he took the unusual step of writing a letter of apology to the Schaeffer family.^[1]

[edit] New evidence

Six months after Ignatow's acquittal, however, a carpetlayer working in Ignatow's old house found a plastic bag under the carpet containing the jewelry Schaeffer had taken with her to return on the night of her disappearance. Police re-searched the house, and discovered three rolls of undeveloped film in a heating duct. When developed, the film showed Ignatow torturing and raping Schaeffer, just as Shore had described. Ignatow's face was not in the pictures, but body hair patterns and moles matched him perfectly.

[edit] Aftermath

Ignatow was brought to trial for perjury in his grand jury testimony. Knowing that he could not be retried for the murder because of double jeopardy, Ignatow confessed in court at his perjury trial. He turned to Brenda's brothers in court and said that he had killed her, but that she had died peacefully.

Ignatow served five years of an eight year sentence for perjury. The state later prosecuted him on perjury charges in a case against Brenda's employer for threatening to kill Ignatow if he didn't tell where Brenda was. He was sentenced to nine years for that perjury charge.

Author Bob Hill wrote a book on the case called Double Jeopardy. This book became a top bestseller and provoked widespread interest in the case.