Wisconsin Law Blog

Date: 3/27/2009

TODD RICHMOND
Associated Press Writer

BEAVER DAM, Wis. (AP) — Lane McIntyre’s world stopped in March 1980.

McIntyre, then 23, came home from his third-shift job to the one-bedroom apartment in Columbus he shared with his 18-year-old wife, Marilyn. He’d saved her from an abusive foster father and married her when she was 17.

“I’ve never felt that strong of love since. It was pure,” he said Thursday. “Marilyn was a living angel.”

But his angel was dead. A knife stuck out of her chest. Her skull had been fractured. Her neck was bruised from being strangled. A coroner later reported “evidence of traumatic sexual contact.”

Their 3-month-old son, Christopher, lay sleeping, untouched, in his crib. Lane McIntyre managed to call his mother, who called police. As five officers pushed past him into the apartment, he remembered, “my brain didn’t want to believe what I was seeing.”

Since that day, McIntyre watched his life crumble. Two more marriages dissolved. His son, now 29, doesn’t speak to him. Through it all, the murder hung over him like a shadow.

“You’re darn right I’m angry,” he said.

On Tuesday, detectives acting on new DNA evidence arrested McIntyre’s longtime friend Curtis Forbes in connection with Marilyn McIntyre’s death.

Forbes, 51, of Randolph, remains in the Columbia County Jail. District Attorney Jane Kohlwey said charges could come on Monday but that she hasn’t decided what specific counts to file.

Authorities typically can hold a person for only 48 hours without an initial court appearance, but Kohlwey said a judge has granted the jail permission to hold Forbes beyond that.

Kohlwey said Thursday that Forbes hadn’t retained a lawyer yet. The Baraboo public defender’s office, which handles Columbia County cases, said Forbes hadn’t asked for representation. Public defender Mark Gumz said he hasn’t been allowed to see Forbes.

For Lane McIntyre, now 52, the arrest has generated a mix of vindication and anger. He now lives in Beaver Dam, a city of 15,000 about 40 miles northeast of Madison and a dozen miles from Columbus, where Marilyn McIntyre was killed.

Sitting on the porch of his apartment Thursday, he recounted meeting Marilyn when she was 16.

He said she had bounced from foster home to foster home, but she still cared about other people. He remembered collecting donations for UNICEF with her one Halloween and how she wouldn’t let him stop, even when he grew tired.

He said he helped her flee from an abusive foster father, and that was when she decided to marry him.

He’s known Forbes since grade school. They were mortal enemies, he said, always getting into fights until they finally became friends in high school.

But Forbes abused his girlfriend, McIntyre said, and the girlfriend turned to Marilyn McIntyre for help.

The girlfriend left Forbes a week before the killing, he said. He theorized that Forbes stopped at the McIntyre apartment looking for the girlfriend. According to court documents, Lane McIntyre told investigators the day after the murder that Forbes should be their prime suspect.

But the investigation went nowhere. Meanwhile, Lane McIntyre said, people talked about him, wondered if he did it.

His son told the Wisconsin State Journal in 2008 that stories about his father being involved in his mother’s death were a big factor in their estrangement. No phone listing for Christopher McIntyre could be found Thursday.

In 2007, the state crime lab matched DNA from the McIntyre apartment to hair samples Forbes gave police in 1980. The body was exhumed in March 2008 for collection of more evidence.

This past February detectives interviewed an informant, unnamed so far in court documents, who said he witnessed a conversation between Forbes and Forbes’ son around 2002. Forbes began talking about how he took a wife’s friend home from a bar and she didn’t breathe anymore that night.

Now Lane McIntyre, bitter and angry, is looking for payback from those who thought he killed his wife. He wants to write a book about the murder and “the way people are in a small town.”

He chose to stay in Wisconsin because an innocent man doesn’t run, he said. If the book sells, though, he hopes to retire someplace far away.

“I want to go where nobody knows me, where I don’t have to defend myself, and live the rest of my days in peace,” he said. “I have a right to be happy. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.