'Run, Bambi, Run' podcast dissects murder case of Playboy bunny, cop Laurie Bembenek

In the riveting Apple original true crime podcast titled “Run, Bambi, Run,” host and journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis takes us on the journey of the life of Laurie “Bambi” Bembenek, a Playboy bunny, turned police officer, turned convicted murderer.

“I started working on this about a year ago and I had never heard of the case before, which is sort of shocking because I know a lot about true crime,” Grigoriadis told Yahoo Canada.

As the story goes, Bembenek escaped from a Wisconsin prison in 1990, where she was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder of her husband’s ex-wife, Christine Schultz, in 1981.

Bembenek, who joined the Milwaukee Police Department in 1980 after working as a waitress at the famed Playboy Club, stated that she had been framed for the murder by a colleague after her assistance in an investigation on sexual discrimination and corruption within the police department.

Three months after escaping from Taycheedah Correctional Institution and fleeing to Ontario, Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Bembenek and her fiancé Dominic Gugliatto, who were recognized at a restaurant in Thunder Bay.

As you would expect from even this brief description of Bembenek, there was a total media frenzy surrounding this case, with Bembenek supporters even sporting t-shirts that read "Run, Bambi, Run."

Grigoriadis really succeeds taking us through this riveting tale, while analyzing the systemic issues and circumstances surrounding Bembenek's conviction.

“It’s such an interesting nexus of issues that we're concerned about today," Grigoriadis explained. "Being able to reveal in this podcast that this police department was basically run like a frat house,...and the overall question of women in policing."

"Women just don't want to be a part of this, they don't feel welcome to be a part of this and yet, there's so much gold standard research that shows that women deescalate incidents much faster than men,...they're involved in a lot less lawsuits, a lot less incidents that need to be written up. They're just better at the job."

'I would not sit here and say that if she was unattractive...we would be sitting here talking about it'

When the case was initially reported on, there was significant emphasis on Laurie Bembenek's physical appearance, the fact that she was a woman who had a level of attractiveness that allowed her to work at the Playboy Club. What Vanessa Grigoriadis was tasked with doing in “Run, Bambi, Run" was to find a balance with that element of the story.

"I think that there's no question that part of the reason we're talking about this case 40 years later is she was a Playboy bunny, and that she posed for a Miss March calendar for the Schlitz Brewing company, that she was sort of an extraordinary looking person," Grigoriadis explained. "I would not sit here and say that if she was unattractive, or if she was a minority, we would be sitting here talking about it."

"But to me, that question of her attractiveness is really linked in with the question of the way she was treated by the police force, and I believe that because she was an attractive woman who partied, who dressed, as one of her fellow women on the police force said, wore Victoria's Secret under her uniform,...she was seen as a threat to the masculinity in that department at the time."

The podcast host added that in that "frat house" atmosphere of the police department, Bembenek was seen as a "frivolous" person, which "really coloured the rest of her life and all the interaction she had with them, and may have ultimately led to this murder."

'A jailhouse activist'

One aspect of crafting this story that was particularly fascinating for Vanessa Grigoriadis was being able to read letters that Laurie Bembenek wrote from prison.

"Kris Radish, who was her biographer, had kept these letters that Laurie had sent her,...she was totally unfiltered and they're almost like text messages you would write to somebody," Grigoriadis said. "Obviously, she's in prison and she has doesn't have a lot to do, and she's reaching out for lifelines, but I think that people who have studied this case have realized that Laurie was very intelligent,...but they haven't ever keyed into her playful side."

"She was actually very funny and the fact that she was such an optimist, despite everything that had happened to her. She organized an enormous class action suit in the prison for overcrowding, she helped female inmates with their their cases, she really turned into like a jailhouse activist."

At the age of 52, Bembenek died in a hospice in Portland, Ore., with the cause of death linked to liver failure.

But Grigoriadis still has one outstanding question about Bembenek, who died protesting her innocence, why did she plead no contest to second-degree murder?

"That's something I've always wondered, was that a huge regret of hers because she did die branded as a murderer," Grigoriadis said.