81-year-old woman sentenced to life in prison

A judge sentenced an 81-year-old woman to life in prison Tuesday for an unsolved murder in western Wisconsin.

Mary Josephine Bailey is eligible for parole after 20 years, which was the law in 1985 when the crime was committed, but that does not mean she will be released, Polk County Prosecutor Jeffrey Kemp said.

A jury recently convicted Bailey of first-degree intentional murder in Polk County Circuit Court in the killing of Yvonne Carol Menke, 45, who was shot outside her St. Croix Falls apartment before work on Dec. 12, 1985.

Bailey was considered a suspect in the early days of the investigation because multiple people told law enforcement that Jack Owen, Menke and Bailey, whose last name was then Lunsmann, had been “involved in some sort of 'love triangle,'” according to the criminal complaint.

That aspect of the case grew stronger during the eight-day trial, said Polk County Assistant District Attorney Holly Wood Webster.

“We learned from one of Ms. Bailey's friends at the time that she was outside Yvonne's apartment when Jack was there, and she had sort of pointed to the window where Jack and Yvonne were” and was jealous, Wood Webster said.

Another witness saw Bailey parked outside Menke's apartment one night after midnight. Evidence showed Bailey was “harassing Jack and Yvonne,” Wood Webster said.

The victim's children spoke of their loss

According to Kemp, Bailey did not speak at the sentencing hearing. Bailey's attorneys did not return calls seeking comment.

Menke's children told the court Tuesday that “it not only killed their mother, but it impacted their entire family not to have their mother there,” Wood Webster said. Menke's youngest child was 16 when his mother died.

Another child spoke of the guilt she felt “because she felt like she had given the killer information to commit this crime,” Wood Webster said. In a phone call the day before Menke’s murder, someone asked her about her morning routine. One of Menke’s daughters thought the caller was a friend of her mother’s, “just wondering when she would be available to talk,” never knowing that it was “someone who was planning to kill her mother the next morning,” the prosecutor said.

The crime also ruined the family's Christmas, Kemp said. “Every December, they remind themselves of their loss,” he added.

Case closed resolved

Prosecuting a cold case was difficult because some witnesses had died and some people's memories had faded, Kemp said.

Menke was shot three times in the head and neck in a stairwell of her apartment complex shortly before 6:30 a.m. Investigators found a boot print in the snow near Menke's body, with the word “Arctic” visible in the area where the front of the heel would have been, and similar boot prints about a block away.

It was “the strongest physical evidence” in the case, Wood Webster said. It was a women's size 5 Arctic Cat boot. About 1,000 of that style and size of boot were sold worldwide between 1973 and 1985.

“It's a small number of boots,” Kemp said.

Bailey's boots, a pair of size 5 Arctic Cat snowmobile boots, were submitted to the Wisconsin State Crime Lab for comparison with boot prints found at the murder scene. The lab concluded that her boots matched sulfur casts made by officers at the scene in terms of tread pattern, size and wear pattern, according to the criminal complaint.

“The rest is part of a puzzle — you have to put all the pieces together,” Wood Webster said. “Some of it was known at the time and some of it was only learned more recently. … But when you put all those pieces of that puzzle together, it was really all about Bailey.”

Polk County investigators worked the case again in late 2021 and into the winter of 2022, re-interviewing witnesses and others who had knowledge of Owen, Bailey, and Menke. Owen died in October 2021, while living in Montana with his wife.