Boots in the Snow (Yvonne Menke)
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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.
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What happened on the morning of Yvonne Menke's murder?
1:53–3:50
2
What clues did investigators find at the crime scene?
3:50–8:56
3
Who was Yvonne Menke's boyfriend and what was their relationship like?
8:56–12:50
4
How did Mary Jo Lunsman become a suspect?
12:50–18:27
5
What was Mary Jo Lunsman's alibi for the morning of the murder?
18:27–52:30