Fugitive in Murder Case Will Return to U.S. : Crime: Bembenek drops her bid for political asylum in Canada. She gambles that Wisconsin will grant her a new trial.

TORONTO —  Lawrencia Bembenek, the American who was convicted of murder, then escaped to Canada and sought asylum as a refugee from persecution, has abandoned her Canadian effort and will be extradited to the United States, her lawyers confirmed Friday.

The move appears to be a calculated gamble by Bembenek--who had not yet exhausted her Canadian legal remedies--that American authorities will eventually grant her a new trial, if she returns home now.

“Ultimately, the barrier to her freedom has been a conviction in the state of Wisconsin,” said Doug Hunt, one of several Canadian lawyers who had taken on Bembenek’s case. “The issues that she faces cannot be resolved in the Canadian courts.”

Hunt had said in the past that Bembenek would not surrender to extradition without a firm guarantee of a new trial in the United States. He declined to say now whether such a guarantee had been made. The Milwaukee district attorney’s office, which handled Bembenek’s original conviction, denied making any promise of a new trial.

Hunt said Bembenek had based her decision to return to America on “timing” and on the belief that the publicity her case has generated in Canada had prodded officials in Wisconsin to take another look at the situation. “I’m confident that the justice system in Wisconsin has begun to respond,” Hunt said.

Since Bembenek escaped to Canada and filed for refugee status, her supporters had assembled an array of new evidence that cast doubt over her Wisconsin conviction.

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence was testimony in Canada, by a number of highly experienced forensic pathologists, that the gun Bembenek was accused of using could not, in fact, have been the murder weapon. The forensic pathologists based their opinions on the size of the gun’s muzzle, which didn’t match a muzzle imprint left on the murder victim’s back.

Authorities in Milwaukee, where the murder weapon was the centerpiece of Bembenek’s conviction, are arguing that muzzle imprints don’t necessarily have to match the guns that make them.

Bembenek was convicted of shooting Christine Schultz, her policeman-husband’s first wife. Her case had gained considerable notoriety even before she fled to Canada, partly because Bembenek is an attractive former model and partly because Bembenek, herself a fired police recruit, had been making allegations of fraud and corruption against the Milwaukee police at the time of her prosecution.

As the new evidence has come to light in Canada, officials in Milwaukee opened a “John Doe investigation” of Bembenek’s case. John Doe hearings are secret proceedings roughly comparable to grand jury hearings. The one in Milwaukee is being presided over by a circuit court judge who recently came to Toronto and took testimony from Bembenek.

Bembenek, 33, had served eight years of a life sentence when she climbed out of a prison laundry room window and fled to Canada. She lived underground for a time; she was finally apprehended in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Her case made its way into the hands of Frank Marracco--this country’s preeminent authority on immigration law--and a number of other well-credentialed Canadian corporate lawyers.

The Canadian team put together a highly unusual bid for refugee status, arguing that Bembenek had probably been framed in Wisconsin, and that her prosecution, trial and conviction amounted to persecution.

Yet, while the Canadian government has been loath to second-guess the American court system, Canadians have been remarkably sympathetic to Bembenek. Judges and immigration adjudicators here have admitted an unusual amount of evidence in hearing her case. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s leading network for news, aired a long, overwhelmingly favorable documentary on Bembenek. And Toronto Life magazine recently highlighted Bembenek in a cover story, calling her trial in Wisconsin “a very sick joke.”