Customer Reviews

Run, Bambi, Run: The Beautiful Ex-Cop and Convicted Murderer Who Escaped to Freedom and Won America's Heart

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is a comprehensive factual account of the Laurie Bembenek case, starting with her admission to the Milwaukee police academy in 1979 and ending with her prison escape and subsequent capture in Ontario Canada in 1990. It's a complex story revolving around the question of whether she was possibly framed and later wrongly convicted of first degree murder in the shooting death of her husband's ex-wife.

Kris Radish does a good job of organizing and presenting the wealth of conflicting evidence, testimony and conjecture surrounding the case. It's clear she sides with Bembenek (who wrote the foreword and provided the author with information) but her presentation of the facts is revelatory, not manipulative. Right from the outset, troubling doubts surfaced on the handling of and validity of the evidence collected. Even the judge at the preliminary hearing admitted he'd never seen a more circumstantial case. Other suspects, who had equally compelling motives and means to commit the murder, soon began cropping up (including Bembenek's husband). Yet the Milwaukee police remained single-mindedly focused on Bembenek and the reasons behind that give strong credence to a possible cover-up.

Following her release from prison in 1992, Bembenek continued fighting to clear her name and one hopes the author will someday publish a follow-up to this continually evolving and intriguing story.

This is the story of a female police officer in 1980's milwaukee wisconsin who got on the wrong side of the Police Hierarchy by exposing corruption and incompetence, later fired,in the course married one of the corrupt detectives who framed her for the murder of his ex wife,and sold her down the river tothe legal system providing her with an attorney who was paid to throw the case.

True crime accounts might be one of the last guilty pleasures of the literary world, now that erotica has come out of brown paper wrappers and entered the mainstream. In a genre frequently laden with numerous factual details,it takes a skilled writer to weave all the necessary elements into a vivid and absorbing storyline. This book, while apparently well researched, falls short of that mark. In many parts it offers little more than a flat, emotionless recounting of events with little insight into the human aspects of this case and the individuals involved.

I agree with the other 1 star review on here, with one more element: This book ends before the story actually ends in real life. In the book, she's still in jail in Canada, and it tells nothing about her winning a new trial and changing her plea to no contest. I was very disappointed in how abruptly the book ends, after sloughing through all the boring facts and even spelling and grammatical errors. I regret reading it.