After more than 30 years, investigators were able to figure out who killed Bob Mendez.
The murder of a Northwoods man’s wife in the credit union where she worked in 1982 went unsolved for more than 30 years before police finally caught the killer.
After a bench trial, Marathon County Circuit Judge Jill Falstad found Robin D. Mendez of Minocqua guilty of killing Barbara Mendez in the first degree 37 years ago at the $224 million Park City Credit Union building that used to be on Highway 51 in Minocqua.
Judge Falstad decided that the prosecution had met its burden of proof because a cold case investigation had turned up new information about Mendez’s made-up alibi.
Mendez has said that he did not kill his wife or steal money from the credit union, but that someone else did. A murder happened as Mrs. Mendez was closing the branch after hours.
The murder case
Bod Mendez was a 33-year-old worker at a credit union. Mr. Mendez killed him with a pry bar.
An autopsy report says that she died from several blows to the head, abrasions, cuts, and a major skull fracture.
The manager of the branch found her dead. Detectives say that Mrs. Mendez’s deposit bag with $2,700 in it was stolen. However, the safe was open and about $17,000 was clearly visible but not opened.
Police and the 5,000 people who live in Minocqua, a small town in the Northwoods forest in northern Wisconsin, never forgot about the murder, even though the branch was closed and the case has been unsolved for over 30 years.
The prosecution says that an investigation team from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office put together a thorough probable cause report after spending months going through boxes of records, going over the details of the cold case, and interviewing 27 witnesses over and over again.
Dawn, her oldest daughter, was 13 years old, and Christy, her youngest daughter, was 11 years old, according to reports.
When their mother died in January 2018, the girls each told the police what they knew about what happened.
The daughters said that their father lied about where he was on the day of the murder by using them as pawns. They said that they had also asked their father about it.
The daughters told the police that their father never said he didn’t kill his wife.
wife and promised to tell them one day about what happened to their mother.
A 14-year-old girl who went to the same church also had s*x with Mr. Mendez, who used to be the youth pastor at the church. When detectives asked her about Mr. again, she said that she had given a false alibi for him.
