81-year-old woman sentenced to life in prison for killing rival

• Mary Jo Bailey, 81, was sentenced to life in prison on July 2 for the first-degree murder of Yvonne Menke
• Yvonne Menke was fatally shot three times in December 1985 and her case was reopened in 2021
• Bailey and Menke were both involved with the same man, Jack Owen, at the same time

An 81-year-old woman was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday, July 2, after being convicted in June of murdering her love rival in 1985, Kare 11, WQOW and The Osceola Sun report.

Mary Jo Bailey was convicted of the first-degree murder of Yvonne Menke on June 5. At her sentencing hearing on July 2 in Polk County Court, Bailey was sentenced to a mandatory life sentence. However, due to a Wisconsin state law dating back to the year Menke was murdered, Bailey was given the possibility of parole in just over 19 years. Bailey’s defense team said her conviction could be appealed.

Because of Wisconsin law from 1985, Judge Scott Nordstrand could not add or subtract time from his sentence. But he told the court he would have set his parole eligibility at 38 years, according to WQOW. “I think it has to be said how brutal and horrific this crime was. And callous,” Nordstrand said.

“Besides her lack of denial, Ms. Bailey has not admitted what she did, she has not taken responsibility for her actions, she has shown no remorse,” Assistant District Attorney Holly Wood-Webster said, according to The Osceola Sun. “In fact, she told the bailiff after she was sentenced that she could retire now and not worry about it anymore. This is first-degree murder… Ms. Bailey should not be eligible for parole.”

Before Bailey's sentence was announced, three of Menke's children – Julie Connors, Sue Raska and James Menke Jr. – made statements.

“You waited in a dark stairwell to maliciously murder my mother. You condemned us to a life filled with pain, sadness and suffering,” said Connors, who was 20 at the time of his mother’s murder. Connors also read a statement from his sister Raska, who was pregnant at the time of Menke’s death.

“To me, it’s not justice,” said James Jr., who was 16 in 1985. “She got to live her life. We didn’t get to live ours. But this is the closest we can get. So now we can finally put this behind us. But [Bailey] should never be released again.

The cold case surrounding Menke’s death wasn’t revisited until 2021, when a criminal complaint reported that both women were romantically involved with the same man, Jack Owen, at the same time. (Owen married another woman and moved to Montana. He died in 2021, according to WQOW.)

On December 12, 1985, Menke, a 45-year-old mother of four, was fatally shot, once in the neck and twice in the back of the head, allegedly by Bailey outside her apartment building. After telling her daughter she was going outside to warm up her car before going to work, her daughter reportedly heard the gunshots, then looked out the window and saw a person running from the scene. Her mother was later found dead at the bottom of the apartment building's exterior stairs.

Evidence revealed that Bailey's boots matched shoe prints in the snow and a note in the victim's purse with Bailey's car information. Additionally, Menke's family claimed to have received repeated phone calls from an unknown woman asking what time Menke left for work in the morning.

Thirty-six years later, in 2021, Polk County Detective Lieutenant Andrew Vitalis and Deputy Mark Biller began reinvestigating the cold case with new witness interviews.

“Since the initial investigation was conducted, it was likely that many subjects had learned additional information about the case that may be relevant and had not yet been reported to law enforcement. Additionally, officers suspected that some subjects who lived in the area at the time of the homicide had not come forward with information about the homicide due to fear of retaliation,” the criminal complaint states, according to WQOW.

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A representative for the Wisconsin courts did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for further information Tuesday.