A woman is gunned down outside her home. Jealousy and greed were suspected motives, but it would take many years, and a prosecutor willing to take a risk, to prove it. View source material and photos for this episode at: https://anatomyofmurder.com/boots-in-the-snow/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Chapter 1: What happened on the morning of Yvonne Menke's murder?
In 2020, Holly Wood-Webster was a new prosecutor suddenly thrust into a very old homicide investigation, the 1985 murder of Yvonne Menke in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.
St. Croix Falls is your average small town America. It's largely a farming community. St. Croix Falls is right on the border with Minnesota, right on the border of the city. It's a town where most everybody knows most everybody else.
And that included Yvonne, a 45-year-old mother of four who had grown up in the same town and raised her family there.
Yvonne was a kind, quintessentially salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner, known for her warm personality and dedication to her children, even when that meant working long hours at multiple jobs just to keep food on the table.
I believe at this point she was working as a seamstress at a local factory. She'd also worked at a car wash, and she sometimes would work at a bar in town.
In December of 1985, the single mother was living with her 20-year-old daughter, Julie, in a second-floor apartment located above a storefront in what passed for a downtown in tiny St. Croix Falls.
She was up early for work. It was December 12, 1985, which, being winter in Wisconsin, was a typically frigid morning.
December in Wisconsin, it was bitter cold, but Yvonne had a routine actually because of how cold it was in the mornings. She would go outside in the morning, start up her car, drive it around the building and leave it on the street to continue warming up for a little while before she got back in and headed to work.
And so at approximately 6.15 a.m., despite being out until nearly midnight at a birthday party the night before, Yvonne bundled up and began her morning routine.
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Chapter 2: What clues did investigators find at the crime scene?
Her daughter Julie was home in the apartment. She had just woken up. Her mom indicated she was going to go out and start her car like she normally does and made a comment to Julie that she had something to tell her. So Julie was waiting at the kitchen table, essentially, for her mom to come back in and tell her whatever it was she had to tell her.
Yvonne headed out the door of her apartment and down the enclosed exterior stairwell up the building, which led directly to the parking lot on the ground floor.
As Julie was sitting there, she was listening to some music. She heard some noises outside. She didn't initially recognize the noises. To her, they sounded to be like a whip-like noise. So Julie ran to the windows, thinking someone was outside hurting her mom.
The sudden noises were so startling and so out of the ordinary for a cold, dark Thursday morning that Yvonne's daughter immediately sensed something terrible had happened to her mother. She had no idea just what.
She couldn't see anything out the front windows, so she ran to the back windows. And at this time in December, it was again freezing cold outside. All of the windows on the front side had been iced up, fogged up with the cold. She ran to the back windows and looking out the back bathroom window, she was able to see a figure underneath a light post in the back parking lot.
She saw the person walking quickly away from the area of the stairwell where her mom would have gone down to start the car. And the person continued to quickly walk north through the alley behind the buildings.
Julie struggled to make out a description of the person who appeared to be fleeing the scene. But there was no mistaking the overwhelming sense of menace and dread.
It would have been dark outside. The person happened to stop briefly underneath that streetlight and turn to look back at the stairwell. So Julie was able to see the person when they were underneath the light, but she wasn't able to see a face.
Several minutes passed and Yvonne didn't return to the apartment. Fearing for her own safety and that of her mom, she picked up the phone to call for help.
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Chapter 3: Who was Yvonne Menke's boyfriend and what was their relationship like?
And the close-range shots to the head made the shooter's intention clear. Yvonne's murder was premeditated and personal.
The odds of it being a homicide, a stranger murder, were very low. The fact that there wasn't a robbery, the fact that it wasn't a sexual assault, and the fact that it was such a personal killing. It wasn't a person who shot her from a distance away. It was somebody within feet of her when they murdered her.
Despite the cold weather, Yvonne's body temperature when police arrived confirmed her daughter's story that the attack had occurred within the hour, which meant the killer had a head start, but not a big one.
Initially what they did was call for a canine deputy to come out and assist and see if they might still be able to track the individual that Julie saw. So that canine deputy comes out to assist. He does do a track. He ends up doing a track leading up through the alley from that area where Julie saw somebody.
Ultimately doesn't find a person, but he does notice a set of boot tracks leading through the snow up through that alleyway. And then law enforcement, as they're looking around at the scene and around Yvonne's body, end up noticing that same boot print next to Yvonne's body.
Footprints in the snow. I can tell you as a former cop in Florida, I can definitely say I was never that lucky. But I will say, as a former K-9 handler myself, starting the track with a warm body and a scene that just occurred is a great start.
The crime lab actually sent out a field response team to come help collect any potential evidence at the scene. They tried to take a sulfur cast of two boot prints. One was in a snow area, and they were successfully able to cast that boot print.
And if you're wondering how you use molten sulfur to cast a mold from a boot print in the snow, you're not alone.
The really neat thing about sulfur is when it hits the cold, it almost immediately starts to harden. It doesn't melt the snow. Instead, it's able to take a cast of the snow of the boot print that was there.
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Chapter 4: How did Mary Jo Lunsman become a suspect?
When 45-year-old Yvonne Menke was murdered as she left her home, her family and friends in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, were left wondering why.
But this being a tight-knit community, there were some ideas about who. According to her children, Yvonne had been romantically involved with a local man named Jack Owen for years.
Jack was someone that Yvonne had known her entire life. He was also divorced, and so the two of them often had spent time together. The children all knew Jack very well. He was at a number of different events. They had photographs of Jack being essentially part of the family as they were growing up.
Jack Owen was also who Yvonne was with the night before she was killed. And according to witnesses, she had attended a birthday party for him at his father's house in nearby Eureka.
But to those in the know, Jack and Yvonne's relationship was not always the picture of stability. Jack had a reputation as a playboy, and his relationship with another woman was a frequent source of friction between them.
Jack was very involved with training horses and with showing horses. And during the horse season, he would break up with Yvonne and would date another individual named Mary Jo Lunsman. Mary Jo was also very much into horses. She had horses that she would show. So Jack and Mary Jo would often show horses together and clearly also engaged in a relationship during that time as well.
And anytime a homicide investigator hears love triangle, their ears are going to perk up because with infidelity comes a viper's nest of motives, including jealousy, obsession, and revenge.
So obviously, investigators were keen to interview Jack to both size up and secure his alibi for the morning of Yvonne's murder.
So he claimed that at 6.30 a.m. on the morning of December 12th, he was still asleep at his parents' house and didn't learn about Yvonne's death until he had visited the bank later that morning. But his reaction to the news of her murder did strike investigators as odd.
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Chapter 5: What was Mary Jo Lunsman's alibi for the morning of the murder?
And so investigators press Mary Jo about what she knew about Yvonne and whether there was any animosity between them.
She admits that she knows who Yvonne is. She denies, however, that she's ever really met Yvonne. She denies knowing what Yvonne looks like or where she lives.
In that answer, it directly contradicted what Yvonne's kids had told police. Remember, her daughters had overheard Mary Jo and their mom talking at the door.
When asked about their mutual friend Jack Owen, Mary Jo claimed she had ended her relationship with the horse trainer years earlier, meaning she would have had no reason to be jealous of another woman.
She denied having a romantic relationship with Jack. Although, interestingly to me, both Mary Jo and Jack admitted that Jack had just been there a couple of days before the homicide. He had stopped over apparently to pick up some photos that Mary Jo had taken. And so the two of them hung out for a few hours, but both of them denied that there was anything romantic between the two of them.
So this is a small town, and Jack Owen and Mary Jo Luntzman are both in the horse business and have known each other for years. It's not unthinkable that they would have interacted in the days before Yvonne's murder. But given the rumors about their ongoing relationship and the tension between Jack and Yvonne, it did raise suspicions that Mary Jo could be hiding something.
So what about Yvonne's kids? Well, they were already convinced that Mary Jo was not just jealous, but obsessed.
both talked about how they would get phone calls. Somebody would call the residence any time after Yvonne and Jack would leave for a date. They would get this phone call with nobody on the other end of the line. They never actually talked to whoever it was, but the suspicion was that it was Mary Jo because of the timing of it being whenever their mom and Jack would go out on a date.
Which is more than a little creepy because it kind of suggests that she was either watching them or somehow knew when Jack and Yvonne had plans to go out. And according to investigators, these mysterious phone calls to Yvonne's house were backed up by phone records.
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