Justice does not always serve the just
Like so many Bluegrass and Old-Time ballads, this story begins with obsession and ends with a haunting. Not by a ghost or specter, but by the lingering effects of one man’s morbid temptations and lack of conscience. For years, Louisville, Ky., was haunted by the atrocious crimes and ever-present, unrelenting presence of Mel Ignatow, violent sexual sadist, pathological liar and killer. We may expect morality to fail, but justice always finds its voice, or so Law & Order tells us, through the legal system. This is television fiction, of course. The legal system operates by what social scientists call normative values: the rules are set up in the abstract and then, through a battle of wits and wills mediated by a judge and decided by an all-but-random jury, the system seeks to apply the abstraction of the law to the individual. The legal system excels at producing definitive decisions, but in the case of Mel Ignatow justice had nothing to do with a verdict.
On the evening of September 24, 1988, Mel Ignatow tied Brenda Sue Schaefer, his beautiful fiancée, to a glass coffee table and then beat, sodomized, tortured and murdered her. He was tried; he was acquitted, and he was released. But six months later, while an HVAC team was remodeling Ignatow’s former residence, sold to fund his legal defense, they discovered Schaefer’s jewelry as well as several rolls of film hidden in a covered heating vent. The film had long been suspected to exist. One of Ignatow’s former lovers had been cooperating with the commonwealth’s investigation and claimed to have taken photos that documented Schaefer’s final agonizing hours, but neither prints nor the film could be located. Once developed, the film validated the witness: over one hundred photos documented each moment of Schaefer’s humiliation, pain, and death. But it was too late. Ignatow had been acquitted, and, by the U. S. constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy, he could not be tried twice for the same crime. Ignatow got away with murder, and, until his death at home in 2008, Ignatow’s legal victory left the residents of this genteel, refined city with a sour taste in their mouths.
Schaefer’s family had known immediately something was wrong. Brenda Sue Schaefer was a beauty: dark, shoulder-length hair, an easy laugh, and a friendly way about her. She was a dutiful daughter, a good employee, and a reliable friendsomeone about whom you didn’t need to worry until you actually needed to worry. So when Brenda didn’t come home after a date with her fiancé Mel Ignatow on September 24, her family started making calls. The first was to Ignatow at around 4 a.m.; he claimed that Brenda had dropped him off around 11 p.m.
“She was told me that she was going home,” Ignatow told the Schaefer family. So by the morning of September 25, when police discovered Brenda’s car abandoned with a flat tire and broken window, the authorities were already working a missing-person case.
The Louisville community echoed the Schaefer family’s concern. With the exception of the two weeks leading up to the Kentucky Derby each year, when the city descends into a bourbon-soaked bacchanalia of millinery and horseflesh, Louisville is customarily conservative and reserved. Despite its rather large size, Louisville had maintained the sensibility of a small town, so when Schaefer vanished the city seemed to be stifling a scream. In Mel Ignatow, Louisville would find a name for evil.
Mel Ignatow was vain. When he killed Brenda, Ignatow was 50, 14 years older than she was, and he was showing his age. His hair was thinning and his large mustache was starting to look dated. To boost his vanity he often boasted of his travels and his former import-export business. He owned several expensive watches, a new Corvette, and a 36-foot boat, all of which rather too insistently proclaimed an income higher than the Louisville average. Brenda may have seemed another beautiful accessory; soon after they met on a blind date Ignatow began pursuing the idea of marriage. Schaefer wasn’t convinced, though she greatly appreciated the attention and the financial security Ignatow offered. Eventually she relented, and Ignatow and Schaefer were engaged.
Although some people found Ignatow charming, most found him creepy and insincere. As Bob Hill reported in his book about the Schaefer killing, Double Jeopardy, Joyce Smallwood, one of Brenda’s friends, found Ignatow distasteful. Smallwood, wrote Hill, “found him a con-artist, telling stories of working for the CIA, or having $300,000 cash hidden in China, or his liaisons with prostitutes in China.” Ignatow’s vulgarity extended beyond materialist boasting. His conversation was sprinkled with adolescent sexual expressions. His expensive boat was named the Motion Lotion, and he once told a friend that she needed to “sexercise” away some extra weight.
Brenda Sue Schaefer was a happy person. Although she had some misgivings about Ignatow, she felt that he loved her. That went a long way for Brenda, and she tried to make the relationship work. But in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, her friends, family, and co-workers detected problems. Brenda began to complain about Ignatow’s behavior, particularly where sex was concerned.
This wasn’t the first time that Brenda had been in a relationship that she found sexually intimidating. Her ex-husband, Pete Van Pelt, had complained to friends that Brenda wasn’t fully comfortable with her sexuality and that, likewise, she was uncomfortable with his sexual advances.
The trouble with her relationship with Ignatow publicly erupted few days before Brenda’s disappearance. While at her job working for Louisville physician Dr. William Spalding, Brenda’s co-workers overheard her yelling at Ignatow on the phone, “I told you never to call me again!” Much to their relief, Brenda had also told several friends and colleagues that she had ended her relationship with Ignatow. Schaefer once told a friend, Linda Love, a story that Love found difficult to believe. Love told Bob Hill that once, while on vacation with Ignatow, Brenda had awoken to find Ignatow holding a chloroform-soaked cloth to her face. “I just wanted you to relax,” Hill reported Ignatow as saying, “It’s something to help you sleep.” Who knows how many times Ignatow had succeeded in rendering Brenda unconscious without her knowledge?
The Courier-Journal
The investigation of Schaefer’s disappearance quickly focused on Ignatow. Not only was he the last person known to have been with Schaefer, but several irregularities heightened the authorities’ interest in Ignatow. First, despite Ignatow’s assertion that the relationship was thriving, investigators soon discovered the contrary reports of Brenda’s friends and family. Beyond that, no one close to Brenda trusted Ignatow. They feared that just beneath the thin veneer of Ignatow’s smiles and lies lived a callous killer responsible for her disappearance.
The police also found Ignatow’s alibi weak. According to
, Louisville’s largest daily newspaper, Ignatow claimed that Brenda picked him up at his house around 4 p.m. Due to rain they had abandoned their plan to attend a boat show and an art fair in favor of “bumming around” in Brenda’s car. Ignatow claimed that they had then eaten at one of Louisville’s many fast-food chili restaurants and then ended their evening by window-shopping at a local mall. Ignatow claimed that Brenda dropped him off around 11:30 p.m.
Later, Ignatow became hungry again and went to another chili place alone for something more to eat. “I came into the house for awhile,” The Courier-Journal reported Ignatow as saying. “I was getting a little hungry…so I went up to the Skyline Chili place in the Plainview Shopping Center to get something to eat, then came back home.”
According to the police, Ignatow caused a disturbance at Skyline Chili by loudly complaining about the size of his drink. The restaurant worker who served Ignatow was the only substantiated witness to any of Ignatow’s actions on September 24.
Roy Hazelwood, one of the FBI’s preeminent experts on violent sexual sadists, was summoned to Louisville to assist with the investigation once the evidence began to point to Ignatow. Ignatow, in Hazelwood’s estimation, exhibited the hallmarks of the criminal sexual sadist. As the investigation progressed, Hazelwood and his colleagues were vindicated. All of the evidence, however circumstantial, pointed to Ignatow, and every interaction that they had with him seemed to indicate that Ignatow was a textbook sexual sadist: narcissistic, a pathological liar, paranoid, and misogynistic. If Ignatow were going to maintain the pattern, he would also keep souvenirs of his victim. This observation would prove correct, but it would be too late for a full measure of justice to be served.
Even before the police began identifying Ignatow as a criminal sexual sadist, the Schaefer family intuitively understood Ignatow as a threat. In the days after Brenda’s disappearance, Ignatow would come to the Schaefer house, sit in the kitchen with the family and shed alligator tears, claiming that his life was over, that he couldn’t live without Brenda. In particularly audacious moments, he would silence those that hoped for Brenda’s safe return by bluntly saying that he thought she was already dead. Ignatow often broke down sobbing and crying like an inconsolable child.
Like many predators, Ignatow savored turning the tables and claiming a portion of the public’s sympathy. From the beginning of this long, torturous ordeal, he’d placed himself at the Schaefer’s table, a hated suspect demanding sympathy. As the days became weeks and weeks became months, the city became more distraught, and Ignatow became bolder in his claims for the public’s compassion.
After six months, the investigation into Brenda Sue Schaefer’s disappearance was grinding to a halt. Although the police, and much of the surrounding community, were convinced that Mel Ignatow had been responsible for the crime, no conclusive evidence linking Ignatow to the crime had been discovered. For months, Ignatow had been publicly complaining about the interest the police were taking in his actions leading up to Schaefer’s disappearance, accusing investigators of “police-state” tactics. These tactics, however, hadn’t stopped him from dating several other women in the interim.
On March 22, 1989, Ignatow received a letter that seemed to validate his assertions of persecution. Postmarked from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the letter demanded that Ignatow reveal the location of Brenda Sue Schaefer’s body or “a gang of Cubans” would execute him.
The letter continued:
“I have arranged for the Cubans to arrive in Louisville 1 week prior to the termination…and remain in Louisville until contract is completed. Upon proof of your execution, they will receive remainder of the $15,000 plus $5,000 expense money if that amount is needed.”
Through his lawyers, Ignatow demanded, and received, SWAT team protection. The irony of taxpayers footing the bill for Ignatow’s protection seems to have been too much for the police to swallow: soon after the court-ordered SWAT protection had been stationed outside Ignatow’s apartment, the primary investigators on the case revealed that they knew all about the letter. In fact, they had already read the letter and counseled its author, Dr. William Spalding, against mailing the threat. Spalding, Brenda’s employer, had told the police during a previous interview that he intended to send the letter to Ignatow in the hope that the threat would scare Ignatow into confessing. Spalding was devoted to Brenda and had taken the lead organizing the $25,000 reward that was being offered for information about her disappearance. In the months since Brenda’s disappearance, Spalding had grown obsessed with and terrified of Ignatow. Spalding carried a handgun at all times in case Ignatow attacked him.
Never one to miss an opportunity, Ignatow had Spalding arrested for making terroristic threats. During Spalding’s trial, his defense tried to bring to the foreground Brenda’s disappearance rather than Spalding’s attempt at intimidation. As such, the nature and health of Ignatow and Schaefer’s relationship was called into question. Ignatow again, but this time under oath, declared that they had been happily in love. Spalding was convicted, but his trial ultimately became pivotal to Mel Ignatow’s fate.
He’d spent the six months since Brenda’s disappearance claiming that he couldn’t go on and that the police were unfairly targeting an innocent man. In the wake of the Spalding letter he was further emboldened.
It’s rare that a defense attorney will be willing to bring his or her client before a grand jury. The investigating officers knew this, but they were dealing with an infuriatingly hard case. He was holding up against questioning. The investigation had hit a brick wall. With little hope, they approached Charlie Ricketts, Ignatow’s attorney, with an offer: if Ignatow would testify before a grand jury he could hold a press conference promoting his cooperation. Ignatow, eager to proclaim his innocence, agreed.
Double Jeopardy
During the preparations for the grand jury testimony the prosecution did find something with which it could work a weak-willed witness who admitted to having had sex with Ignatow within six months of Schaefer’s disappearance. It was obvious from her demeanor that she knew something, but in order to talk she’d have to fear the law as much as she feared Ignatow.
“Brenda Schaefer was beautiful!” Officer Jim Wesley shouted at Mary Ann Shore-Inlow, according to Bob Hill’s
. “Brenda Schaefer was beautiful, and Mel loved her, and he still killed her. You’re ugly and Mel doesn’t [care] about you…. You’re dead.” Wesley, who had been a lead investigator on the Schaefer disappearance, was at his wits’ end. Wesley and his colleagues knew that Shore-Inlow held the key to the case, but they could not get her to talk.
Mary Ann Shore-Inlow was one of Ignatow’s former girlfriends. Shore-Inlow was often down on her luck and barely scraping by. She had indulged an infatuation with Ignatow for a decade, hoping that her relationship with Ignatow would win out over his engagement with Schaefer. Many times during his engagement Ignatow would visit Shore-Inlow for sex, often complaining about Brenda’s timid sexuality. Shore-Inlow had also been intimate with Ignatow soon after Brenda’s disappearance. It was too close for comfort too strange not to be telling. Time and again, the police questioned Shore-Inlow, and each time she refused to admit anything, though she was obviously straining under the pressure.
Finally, as the grand jury proceedings continued, Shore-Inlow broke and led the police to a wooded area behind her house. In a shallow grave they found Brenda Sue Schaefer’s remains. Two grisly packages were buried in the sodden ground. One contained Schaefer’s clothes, the other her tightly-trussed, horribly decomposed body. According to Hill, the ground in which Schaefer was buried was always moist, which contributed to a particular type of decomposition known as adipocere; all of the soft tissue had turned into a viscous jelly. What remained of Schaefer’s yellowed skin would slip from her body with the slightest touch. Her facial features were unrecognizable. There was no discernable physical evidence that would point to cause of death. Although the medical examiner would eventually rule that she had been killed by asphyxiation, the original coroner’s report listed cause of death as “homicide by undetermined means.”
From the beginning, the trial did not go as the prosecution planned. Given the tremendous publicity as well as the widespread ill will toward Ignatow, his attorney successfully petitioned for a change of venue. Such requests are granted when the court feels that publicity or case visibility has made it difficult to empanel an unbiased jury. This was certainly the case in Louisville. Even if one was not convinced of Ignatow’s guilt, one couldn’t be alive in Louisville in 1990 and remain ignorant of the Mel Ignatow murder trial.
The trial was moved northeast to Kenton County, a rural community across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Ernest Jasmin was assigned to prosecute Ignatow on behalf of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A flamboyant advocate, Jasmin was known as the “Preacher for the Prosecution.” He also happened to be the first black commonwealth’s attorney in Kentucky’s history. At the time, Kenton County was 97% white, and the few African Americans that lived in the community kept to themselves.
Beyond the racial issues, the prosecution’s case had its difficulties. Shore-Inlow had secretly taped Ignatow discussing the murder, but the sound quality was poor. Defense attorney Charlie Rickets did a masterful job reframing Ignatow’s recorded comments. “Site” as in gravesite became a “safe.” “That place we dug” became that place we “got.” In all aspects of the case, in fact, Charlie Ricketts put forth any number of fantastical wild theories, hoping that just one would be enough to create reasonable doubt. It was a smart strategy. With no confession and no physical evidence, convicting Ignatow was challenging enough, and when Shore-Inlow took the stand the case staggered beneath the weight of her dispassionate callousness.
Shore-Inlow, a stern, unpleasant-looking woman at the best of times, had recently gained a lot of weight. The short skirt she wore to court heightened her physical unattractiveness. The defense highlighted the fact that Shore-Inlow had been given a sweetheart deal: for her testimony against Ignatow, the state had agreed to only charge her with tampering with evidence. This was truly a sweetheart deal as during the course of her interviews with the police Shore-Inlow had confessed to witnessing and photographing the entire terrible evening.
Finally, Shore-Inlow’s testimony was by turns unsympathetic and cold. Her clinical description of the crime, as well as her admitted, voluntary participation chilled the courtroom.
Schaefer’s killing had been planned in advance, and down the last detail. The grave had been dug two weeks before the murder, and roughly a week after that Ignatow and Shore-Inlow had “scream-tested” the house. Ignatow had stood by the road while Shore-Inlow shrieked, testing whether any passers-by might overhear Schaefer if she put up a fight or yelled. According to The Courier-Journal, the night before the murder Ignatow dropped off garbage bags, tape, rope, and gloves at the house.
Once Brenda arrived at the Shore-Inlow residence with Ignatow, having been told she was there to meet someone interested in buying the jewelry he had given her, he told her she was there for “sex therapy.” Brenda protested and rose to leave, but Ignatow demanded that she stay. Fearing for her life she became obedient, stripping one article of clothing at a time while Ignatow instructed Shore-Inlow to document each step of the process with the camera Brenda had given to Ignatow as a Christmas present.
Once Schaefer was naked, Ignatow tied Schaefer to a glass coffee table and spent forty-five minutes beating and sodomizing her. Shore-Inlow reported that she took photos of each of these actions, focusing on Schaefer’s face and making sure that Ignatow’s face didn’t appear.
After the first round, Shore-Inlow took Schaefer to the bathroom and gave her a tissue for her tears. Soon, however, Ignatow pulled Schaefer into the bedroom and lashed her to the bed, her ankles tied over her head. For the next several hours he raped, beat and sodomized Schaefer, instructing Shore-Inlow to participate on occasion.
Running out of film, Shore-Inlow retired to the kitchen for a glass of water. Moments later Ignatow entered the kitchen and said that it was over: Brenda Sue Schaefer was dead.
The jury returned quickly. The lack of physical evidence, Shore-Inlow’s strange, trancelike testimony, the black prosecutor, the missing photos. Each of these factors weighed in their decision. The jury felt that the prosecution had not met its burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. Despite an astonished courtroomand a scandalized statethe jury found Mel Ignatow not guilty. He was free to go.
Six months after the trial ended, Ignatow was living with his mother. His house had gone on the market during the trial to help pay for his legal expenses. The house had sold soon after Ignatow had put it on the market. In order to update the home, the new owners had hired Steve Doherty to replace the carpet. During a routine carpet removal he discovered a heating vent that had been carefully covered with carpet.
When Doherty pulled the carpet up, revealing the vent, he immediately saw a small bag filled with jewelry and rolls of 35mm film. Doherty’s first instinct upon inadvertently finding what was obviously a hiding spot was to cover it back up with the new carpet and forget it existed. He didn’t know that this had been Mel Ignatow’s house, but he knew that people often don’t like to be confronted with their secrets. Instead, he took his find to the owners, who immediately knew the value of the find. They called police, who rushed to retrieve and develop the film. “A hundred smoking guns” is what Jim Wesley called the find. Shore-Inlow was vindicated. Just as she’d so luridly testified, the photos showed each stage of Schaefer’s humiliation. And they also showed a man although his face wasn’t visible, it was apparent to anyone that knew him that the hairy arms and watch depicted in the photos belonged to Mel Ignatow. This discovery was bittersweet. As the prosecution team knew, having already been acquitted, Ignatow was protected by the prohibition against double jeopardy from being tried again for Schaefer’s murder. The best they could do would be perjury.
Once confronted with the photographs Ignatow quickly confessed, then immediately tried to spin his confession into an act of good will on his part. He’d save the great Commonwealth of Kentucky the time and effort of the chase, and, he said, he hoped that his confession would bring some level of comfort to the Schaefer family. In his confession, after admitting to spending hours torturing and killing Brenda, Ignatow then claimed, “She died peacefully.” Since chloroform renders its users unconscious, Ignatow somehow persuaded himself that her death had been peaceful. He also claimed that the devil made him do it, literally.
Ignatow was sentenced to two separate jail terms for perjury. He served five years of an eight-year term for perjuring himself during his grand jury testimony. He was also sentenced to nine years for lying about the status of his relationship with Brenda Schaefer during the trial of Dr. William Spalding for terroristic threatening.
Ignatow gained his freedom in 2006 and moved in with his son in Louisville, mere miles from where he had tortured and killed Brenda Sue Schaefer. Throughout the last stages of his life he never relinquished his sanctimonious self-indulgence. Upon his release from prison he made comments disparaging the Schaefer family. As he told The Courier-Journal, “I don’t think they’ve ever forgiven me. That’s between them and the Lord… They place their own soul in jeopardy by not being able to forgive.”
Ignatow died a free man on September 1, 2008. He was home alone when he fell through a glass coffee tablepoetic justice, perhaps, given his employment of a similar table as the platform for his assault on Brenda Sue Schaeferand bled to death. The haunting of Louisville by the specter of Ignatow’s crimes and the failure of the Kentucky judicial system to bring him fully to account was finally at an end.