Story of the Year- Bill Marquardt: The twists and turns of an alleged murderer
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By JEFFREY HAGE jeff.hage@lee.net
Saturday, December 30, 2006 11:57 PM CST
For more than six years Investigator Jim Kowalczyk followed leads in the murder of Mary Jane Marquardt and collected critical evidence.
“From day one I don’t think we had any other suspect,” said Kowalczyk, who will be sworn in Tuesday as Chippewa County’s next sheriff.
The suspect was Bill Marquardt, whose role in the twists and turns of three murder investigations reaching from Wisconsin to Florida is The Chippewa Herald’s top story of 2006.
In 2006 the story of Bill Marquardt had investigators and prosecutors anticipating a conviction and reeling from the shock of an acquittal. It left a district attorney searching Google for clues to unsolved murders and becoming a Florida hero.
Florida investigators stood on the steps of the Chippewa County Courthouse announcing their own six-year-old murder mystery had been solved, and a sense of closure came to a family that lost Margarita Ruiz and her daughter Esperanza Wells in brutal slayings in a home near Bushnell, Fla. The story came to a climax just two weeks ago with a grand jury indictment of Marquardt on capital murder charges and the possibility of the death penalty if convicted.
The trial
Kowalczyk was convinced that six years of hard work at the hands of the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Department was about to pay off in May when Marquardt was tried for the March 13, 2000 death of his mother, Mary Jane Marquardt. (The trial was moved to Balsam Lake because of pre-trial publicity.)
“When I got on the stand to testify that day there was no doubt in my mind that the jury would find Bill Marquardt guilty,” Kowalczyk said.
But Kowalczyk and Investigator Richard Price didn’t count on Marquardt’s attorney, John Brinckman, convincing the Polk County jury that there were some big holes in the evidence presented by Chippewa County District Attorney Jon Theisen and assistant prosecutor Roy Gay.
The jury also bought into a defense theory that Bill Marquardt was framed for his mother’s death.
The gun used in the murder was found hidden under the refrigerator in a search of Bill Marquardt’s Eau Claire County town of Fairchild cabin on March 29. Eau Claire County investigators had searched the cabin on March 15, two days after the murder, and again on March 18 when Bill Marquardt was arrested after returning to Wisconsin from Florida. The gun was not found in those searches, leading Brinckman to conclude that it had been planted there after the March 18 search.
Marquardt walked away from a Polk County courtroom with an unexpected acquittal in hand.
However, Theisen, shocked by the verdict, failed to accept defeat and used the Internet to see if Marquardt was connected to the Florida slayings.
The blood
“Maybe we were narrow-minded,” Kowalczyk says in hindsight.
Blood found on a knife used to stab Mary Jane Marquardt in the neck also contained the blood of Bill Marquardt and two biologically related females, said John Ertl, a forensic scientist with the Wisconsin Crime Lab in Madison.
“I didn’t think two other people had been killed,” Kowalczyk said. “We thought maybe Bill was involved in some sort of ritual because there were no homicides reported in the immediate area,” he said.
Teletypes searching for potential victims were sent throughout the state, but investigators never heard back from any law enforcement agencies within Wisconsin, Kowalczyk said. Investigators didn’t search outside Wisconsin for other potential victims of Marquardt. Such efforts wouldn’t have connected Marquardt to Ruiz and Wells because Florida doesn’t put DNA of victims in a national DNA database.
The connection
Marquardt had used an alibi with connections to Florida, so Theisen created a timeline. He determined it would have put Marquardt near the scene of the unsolved killings of Ruiz and Wells. He notified Florida detectives that he might have evidence in their case.
Kowalczyk said he and other investigators couldn’t believe that Theisen may have solved two Florida murders with evidence collected six years earlier during the arrest of Marquardt.
“When it did come out, all I could say was ‘WOW!’,” Kowalczyk said.
Florida authorities said the DNA from Marquardt’s knife was found to match the two victims. They had been shot and stabbed in the neck, similar to how Mary Jane Marquardt died.
Charges filed in Florida
In early December Sumter County, Fla. authorities said they were able to connect a gun found in Wisconsin to the Ruiz and Wells murders. Lab tests confirmed that four projectiles and all the shell casings found at the Florida crime scene were fired from Marquardt’s gun, Capt. Gary Brannen of the Sumter County Sheriff’s Department said on Dec. 5.
On Dec. 15, Marquardt was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder in Florida. Authorities are now waiting to extradite Marquardt so he can face capital murder charges. A conviction could result in Marquardt facing the death penalty, according to Florida officials.
In Wisconsin, Marquardt remains in a Wisconsin mental-health facility where he is serving a 75-year sentence for animal cruelty and home invasion. Like his mother and the Sumter County women, the animals were shot and stabbed. Because Marquardt is in a secured institution in Wisconsin, his extradition to Florida could be delayed, according to Sumter County District Attorney Pete Magrino.
Reach Jeffrey Hage at jeff.hage@lee.net.
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