Mel Ignatow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mel Ignatow (born 1941) is a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, who murdered his fiancee, Brenda Sue Schaefer, 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 References
8 Note

[edit] Background

Ignatow and Schaefer had been in a relationship for two years at the time of the murder, but Schaefer, who had complained that Ignatow was abusive, was planning to break off the involvement, an intention of which Ignatow was aware. Intending to murder Schaefer, he worked with a former girlfriend, Mary Ann Shore, to lay out plans for the murder. They spent several weeks making 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, Schaefer met Ignatow to return some jewelry of his that she had in her possession. Instead, Ignatow took Schaefer 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 jewellery 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 Schaefer's disappearance, or even to locate Schaefer'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 Schaefer. Shore also lead the investigators to the grave site, 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 place 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. The trial was moved far outside the Louisville/Jefferson county area, to Kenton county where far less publicity had been generated and in the opinion of some eventually, there was far less concern for the murder of a young woman. One section of the recorded conversation between Ignatow and Shore contained the following dialogue by Ignatow - "That place we dug is not shallow. Beside that one area right by where that safe is does not have any trees by it." In court, the jury decided that one word on the tape was "safe", not "site", as the police believed. This led the jurors 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, not Ignatow, had killed Schaefer.

In light of these considerations and their own desire to get the trial over with before the coming Christmas holiday, the jury acquitted Ignatow. Before giving their decision to the courtroom, laughter and loud talk was heard coming from the deliberation room. The judge was so embarrassed by this verdict given, that he took the unusual step of writing a letter of apology to the Schaefer family. Brenda's parents died before the trial began. According to some family and friends, their deaths were premature due to the heartbreak and stress of Brenda's murder.^[1]

[edit] New evidence

Six months after Ignatow's acquittal, however, a carpetlayer working in Ignatow's old house,which had been sold to fund his defense, pulled up a length of carpet in a hallway. Under it he found a floor vent had been carpeted over. Inside the vent, the carpet layer found a plastic bag, taped to hold it inside the vent. He handed it over to the new owners who knew that the previous owner was Ignatow. Inside the bag was the jewelry Schaefer had taken with her to return on the night of her disappearance and three rolls of undeveloped film. When developed, the film showed Ignatow torturing and raping Schaefer, 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 for testimony he gave 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, which became a bestseller and provoked widespread interest in the case. Television documentaries on the case are occasionally aired on MSNBC and CourtTV.

Mel Ignatow was released from prison for the second time in December 2006. He returned, yet again to Louisville, living in a home four miles from the house where he murdered Brenda Sue Schaefer.

Brenda Sue Schaefer is buried in her family's plot in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.