The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • 3

THE COURIER-JOURNAL FROM PAGE ONE MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2001 A3 Igeatow now leads meager lifestyle Woman's killer says he feels remorse for his actions KEY DATES IN IGNATOW CASE Sept 24, 1986: Businessman Melvin Henry Ignatow and doctor's office assis-tant Brenda Schaefer meet on a blind date. Sept 25, 1S88: Schaefer's parents report her missing after she fails to return from a date with Ignatow, whom she had been engaged to many. She had told coworkers she was going to break off the relationship. Aug. 9, 1989: Schaefer's boss, Dr.

William Spalding, who suspects Ignatow is responsible for her disappearance, is convicted of a misdemeanor for sending Ignatow a threatening letter. October 1989: Ignatow tells a federal grand jury he had nothing to do with Schaefer's disappearance. Jan. 10, 1990: After Ignatow's ex-girlfriend and accomplice, Mary Ann Shore-Inlow, confesses her role to authorities, she secretly records a conversation with Ignatow in which he says "that place we dug is not shallow." Schaefer's body is found in a shallow grave behind Shore-lnlow's home. Shore-lnlow is later convicted of tampering with evidence for helping bury the body and serves three years of a five-year sentence.

ijiipiIwwii--iw iii auauiL4iiuiiuw.iii.iul 1 Mi BY KEITH WILLIAMS, THE COURIER-JOURNAL Mel Ignatow now lives in this Jefferson County apartment building, about a half-mile from the house where he tortured, killed and buried Brenda Schaefer 13 years ago. Oec. 22, 1991: A jury in Kenton County acquits Ignatow on charges of murder, kidnapping, sodomy, sexual abuse, robbery and tampering with physical evidence. Oct 1, 1992: The owners of Ignatow's former home find film in a duct showing him torturing Schaefer the day she died. The next day Ignatow admits killing Schaefer and pleads guilty to perjury for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury.

He was scheduled to stand trial on those charges. He is sentenced to eight years and one month in prison. Oct 23, 1997: A week before serving out his federal perjury sentence Ignatow is indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a perjury charge that accuses him of lying during Spalding's trial in 1989. Feb. 25, 1 998: Ignatow is released from jail under a federal decree to control jail crowding.

Jan. 25, 2001: The Kentucky Supreme Court, ruling 6-0, rejects Ignatow's argument that he can't be prosecuted for perjury in state court, based on a legal doctrine that bars the same two parties from relitigcting an issue that has already been decided. Dec. 4, 2001: Ignatow's state perjury trial is scheluled to begin in Frankfort. By ANDREW WOLFSON The Courier-Journal He lives behind a strip joint in a forlorn apartment building where units rent for $300 a month and a large sign advises, "No alcohol or open containers in courtyard." He answered the door at midday one day last week in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, unshaven and haggard.

"I wasn't expecting visitors," he apologized. He spoke through a partly opened door, refusing to release the chain until assured he wouldn't be photographed. Mel Ignatow, 63, a once affluent import-export executive and salesman, said he doesn't work at all now. He survives on disability checks for what he said are a variety of infirmities a heart ailment, spinal injuries, rheumatoid arthritis. He lives only about a half-mile from the house at 4921 Poplar Level Road where he tortured, sodomized, killed and buried Brenda Schaefer 13 years ago.

He said he's recognized occasionally around Louisville but is treated decently. "I just try to keep a low profile and mind my own business and do what the Lord leads me to do," he said. He said he passes his time at BY MARY ANN LYONS, THE C-J Ignatow, seen here in court, said, "I just try to keep a low profile and mind my own business and do what the Lord leads me to do." her. "Now he's found another haven," Mike Schaefer said. Rodgers acknowledged that Ignatow committed an awful crime and that "in no way do we feel a person who commits a crime shouldn't have to pay his dues to society." But Rodgers said that when church members went to pray with Ignatow while he was still in prison, "He was totally delivered from the demonic powers that controlled him and really born again.

teered many times at the Lord's Kitchen," which Evangel operates at 2732 S. Fifth St. But to Mike Schaefer, one of Brenda Schaefer's, brothers, Ignatow's profession of faith is "completely contrived" and "just another tool in his repertoire to get by." To the Schaefer family, Ignatow is simply fooling another congregation, just as they say he did when he attended Southeast Christian Church before the film depicting him torturing Brenda Schaefer was discovered on Oct. 1, 1992, in his former home and he was forced to admit killing church, in Bible study and volunteering at a soup kitchen. "I'm a born-again Christian I serve the Lord now," he said.

"I wish I was serving him back then, because this whole thing wouldn't have happened." His pastor, the Rev. Bob Rodgers of Evangel World Prayer Center, said he believes Ignatow is sincere. "If you didn't know who he was you wouldn't have any idea about his background because he has become a model church member," Rodgers said. "He comes to church, he prays, he pays his tithes and he has volun "All I can testify to is what I see and know now," Rodgers said. Ignatow said he has remorse for what he did and thinks about it every day.

"There's no way a person with a conscience couldn't have remorse," he said. He declined to talk about his upcoming trial, or if he thinks he's been punished enough. "I have peace a deep-seated peace," he said. "I just hope the Schaefers have some peace." Trap set by octor paved way for Igeatow perjury charge Brenda Schaefer, who had once been engaged to Mel Ignatow, was killed by him in 1988. Schaefer had worked as an office assistant to Dr.

William Spalding. certed effort "to deflect official suspicion of himself as a suspect in Bren-da's murder." But in arguing that Ignatow's testimony was material, the prosecutors will be urging jurors to consider exactly what prosecutor Webb admonished the jury 12 years ago to ignore. "Regardless of whether you feel Mr. Ignatow is implicated in Ms. Schaefer's disappearance, your job is simply to determine whether this note was a terroristic threat and whether Dr.

Spalding sent it," Webb told prospective jurors in the doctor's trial. Ryan has ruled that the jury deciding Ignatow's fate this week will be allowed to hear only testimony from the earlier trial not the arguments of lawyers. The prosecution decided on its own not to mention Ignatow's acquittal on the murder charge, to avoid any appearance that the jury, if it convicts him of perjury, is doing so as retribution for the acquittal. "He is being tried on perjury and perjury alone," Cobb said in an interview, "and that is the only comment I can make on whether we are trying to punish him further for the murder." In another pretrial ruling, Ryan barred the commonwealth from introducing details of Ignatow's brutal attack on Schaefer. With her grave dug in advance, Ignatow forced her to strip naked, tied her to the top of a glass coffee table and sexually tortured her, while his accomplice, Mary Ann Shore-lnlow, took pictures.

Then he took a bottle of chloroform and killed Schaefer, whom he was once engaged to Attorneys Carol Cobb and Christie Floyd are the prosecutors. In an interview at his home last week, Ignatow declined to comment on the trial or whether he thinks the state is being vindictive in prosecuting him again. Several law professors, including William Fortune, who teaches criminal law at the University of Kentucky, say it shouldn't be hard for the commonwealth to show that Ignatow's credibility as a witness would have suffered if he'd admitted he was a killer. That would suffice to show his false testimony was material, the professors said. The prosecution also could try to show that Ignatow's bogus testimony influenced Spalding's sentence that if Ignatow had told the truth, the jury might have fined Spalding only $1 instead of $300.

In an important pretrial victory for the commonwealth, Judge Ryan decided last week that prosecutors could present as witnesses the assistant county attorney who prosecuted Spalding and the district judge who heard the case. Cobb said the prosecutor, Robert Webb, will testify that if Ignatow had testified truthfully and admitted the murder, the county would have moved to dismiss the case against Spalding. Former District Judge John K. Carter will testify that he would have granted that motion, Cobb said. Lambert may argue at trial, as he did in a pretrial hearing, that Ignatow could have testified truthfully without admitting wrongdoing.

For example, when asked about his relationship with Schaefer, he could have answered truthfully that he saw no future in it. tow's testimony in Spalding's trial including his "blatant statements of love" for a woman he'd tortured and murdered. And the Kentucky Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, rejected Ignatow's claim that standing trial for perjury in the Spalding case would force him to run the gantlet again for murder. Ignatow last month stipulated that he lied under oath, so the only issue in the trial opening this week is whether his false testimony was material whether it could have influenced the outcome of Spalding's trial. Perjury trial tactics Ignatow's trial, expected to take four days, will be held in Frankfort because of pretrial publicity in Jefferson County.

Jury selection begins tomorrow morning. A. conviction for perjury, a felony, carries a sentence of one to five years in prison, but the stakes are greater for Ignatow, who because of a prior conviction for tax fraud could see a sentence enhanced to 10 years under the persistent felon statute. The defense is expected to argue that even if Ignatow had told the truth and admitted killing Schaefer, Spalding admitted he sent the threatening letter so a jury would have had no choice but to convict him. However, the prosecution has to prove only that Ignatow's falsehoods could have affected the jury not that Spalding would have been acquitted if Ignatow had told the truth.

Neither side would discuss trial strategy last week. Lambert, an assistant public defender, represents Ignatow, and Assistant Commonwealth's Testifying as the prosecution's first witness in Spalding's two-day trial in 1989, Ignatow said he suffered a heart attack after receiving the threatening letter. "It scared the living daylights out of me," Ignatow told the jury. He wasn't asked directly if he had killed Schaefer, but when Tim McCall, Spalding's lawyer, asked Ignatow to describe their relationship, he said: "It was good. And I loved her very much, and she loved me, and we were engaged to be married." McCall then asked Ignatow about the last time he saw Schaefer.

"You had no knowledge of anything wrong with the relationship? It was an absolutely good and loving relationship?" "That's correct," Ignatow said. "When you last saw her, everything was fine?" McCall asked. "Yes, we intended to get together the next day, as a matter of fact," Ignatow replied. Ignatow also misled the jury in other ways, a transcript of the trial shows. Asked if he knew that Schaefer's mother was obsessed with finding her daughter, Ignatow said: "Well, her mother was always hopeful that Brenda was still alive.

And of course, we all were." Ignatow also told the jury about how he called Spalding a week after Schaefer disappeared to "thank him very much for his kindness" in launching a reward fund to help solve her disappearance. Ignatow said he told Spalding he would contribute, as soon as his finances improved. Cobb said the commonwealth will show this week that Ignatow pursued the case against Spalding in a con Continued from Page One perjury for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury and was sentenced to prison. Schaefer's brother, Mike, said the family owes Spalding, who died five years ago, "a lot because he paid a price for his actions. We wouldn't be going to court this week if not for him." The penury trial before Jefferson Circuit Judge Stephen Ryan is expected to be the final chapter in an astounding legal saga that probably has attracted more national publicity than any Kentucky criminal case in decades: Ignatow has been depicted as the man who got away with murder and the poster boy for double jeopardy the constitutional protection that keeps the government from twice trying someone for the same crime.

The families of both Schaefer and Spalding say they consider the perjury trial this week as vindication for the doctor. In the years after his trial, Spalding said that the fine was the best money he ever spent, his son, Tim Spalding, recalled. But in a way, Dr. Spalding, a family physician, turned out to be another of Ignatow's victims. The case "kind of ruined him," recalled a friend and colleague, Dr.

William VonderHaar, a retired family physician and former president of the Kentucky Medical Association. Because of his misdemeanor conviction, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure barred Spalding from private practice, and he was forced to take a job in a Jefferson County Health Department clinic. Concerned about his safety, he began carrying a gun and then lost his privileges at the old St. Anthony Medical Center for bringing it onto hospital property, VonderHaar said. Emotionally distraught about Schaefer's disappearance "consumed by the case," one detective testified Spalding also developed a debilitating lung disease and deteriorated badly in his final years, VonderHaar said.

Spalding died in 1996 and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, about 250 yards from Brenda Schaefer. But Spalding never regretted what he did, said his family, including his widow, Adelyn Spalding. "My father believed strongly in right and wrong, and he was totally outraged" by Ignatow, Tim Spalding said. FBI agents and detectives testified at Spalding's trial that the doctor never intended to act on the threat and had even showed them the letter in advance. "We didn't know what the out-comewould be, but we felt somehow it was going to lead to Ignatow's downfall," Jefferson County police Lt.

Jim Wesley said. "I admired Dr. Spalding for what he did." Facing a new charge Ignatow, 63, faces a possible second stint in prison. He served five years in federal prison after admitting that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury when he insisted he had nothing to do with Schaefer's disappearance. That seemed as if it would be the extent of his punishment.

But just as he was about to be released in October 1997, Jefferson Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel, elected the year before, announced his office would prosecute Ignatow again for perjury this time for lying in Spalding's misdemeanor trial. One of Stengel's predecessors had concluded five years earlier that Ignatow couldn't be prosecuted for that or any other additional offenses that doing so would amount to an unconstitutional end run around the double-jeopardy protection. Ignatow's lawyer, Jay Lambert, charged that Stengel was playing politics. "Surely no citizen, no matter how unpopular or reviled in the community, can be subject to so blatant a flip-flop by the government simply to slake the community's thirst for revenge." But Stengel said his "blood boiled" when he listened to a tape of Igna- n-'i UfE 1 1 11 "IWHf i Vi 1 IWIW1 1 11 1 'Mil p1' HI' 1 TP 'U 'TV IIATURALIZEK BOOTS Designing Comfortable Dress-Casuals, Just Comes Natural! "Fabulous" In black or brown croco. Women's 6M-10M.

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