1845
H.A. Whitney came from Vermont and moved to Columbus in 1845, where he built the first wood-framed store building in the community; it served as a store, tavern, rooming house and post office.
about 0:07:19The story
Marilyn McIntyre was 18 years old when she was killed in her apartment at South Ludington Street in Columbus, Wisconsin, in the early hours of March 11, 1980. She was born Marilyn Rahn, one of identical twin girls. Her mother was killed in a car accident in 1966, when Marilyn was five, and she and her sister Carolyn were raised by their father and a stepmother who was, in Carolyn's words, physically, mentally and verbally abusive. At 13 the twins went into foster care. Marilyn was 16 and living in a foster home she found frightening when she met Lane McIntyre, then 21, who worked at the Monassie Papercorp plant. Her family and friends saw the relationship as a rescue rather than anything sinister. Lane said he was enamoured of her at once, and Carolyn said it was love at first sight. They married on January 19, 1979, when Marilyn was 17 and Lane was 22, and their son Christopher was born that December.
Lane worked the overnight shift, eleven to seven. On the evening of March 10, 1980, he and Marilyn did laundry and he left for work. He later said her last words to him were, "I love you, do you love me?" and that he replied, "Of course I do." A neighbour heard the couple arguing between ten and eleven that evening, shortly before he left. Lane arrived home at 7.10 a.m. on March 11 and found the dog outside on a chain, barking. Marilyn was on the living room floor with a knife in her chest and her head mutilated. Christopher, three months old, was asleep and unharmed in his crib.
There was no forced entry and nothing was missing. The paring knife came from the couple's kitchen. The autopsy found that Marilyn had been stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned and sexually assaulted. She had multiple blunt-force injuries to her head, lacerations and skull fractures, and pieces of bone in her hair; one ear was split. The coroner said the bruising was more extensive than is usual in an assault, more like what is seen in a car crash, and that the attack was brutal. The time of death was put at around 3 to 3.30 a.m., largely on the strength of the neighbour's dog barking at about a quarter past three. A cigarette butt at the scene did not belong to Lane or Marilyn, and there were bloodstains that were not Marilyn's, but in 1980 DNA testing was not available.
The investigation settled on two men. The first was Lane himself. His alibi was not airtight: the plant was nine minutes from the apartment, he worked alone much of the night and was free to move about, and the third-shift breaks were at one, three and five. A co-worker, Darvin Gilbertson, could not remember seeing him in the break room at the three o'clock break. The police also learned that a substantial life insurance policy had been taken out on Marilyn less than a week before her death. Lane answered questions oddly: he said he could only speculate that the apartment door had been locked, and he had told Marilyn not to chain it because he could not get in.
The two had fought through school and then become close friends.
He said he then visited Lori Dilley and Charles Hughes for fifteen or twenty minutes, stopping at Marvin Dilley's home in Fall River on the way, and reached Debbie's parents' house at about two. Debbie and her parents said he got there at about four. He told police he had not driven past the McIntyres' apartment. His truck had been parked off Ludington Street near the Fireman's Tavern, about two blocks from the apartment. Within a few months he left Wisconsin, spent about two and a half months in New Orleans and on a shrimp trawler in Florida, and sent letters to Lane and Debbie protesting his innocence. He came back with longer hair and a beard.
The case went cold. In 1981 the city council gave $500 to a reward fund. Lane remarried, twice, and both marriages failed; his son eventually stopped speaking to him, and people in town treated him as the man who killed his wife. In 2003 the Columbus police found a box of evidence in a storage closet and sent what DNA samples it held to the state crime lab, but nothing happened for years. Detective Lieutenant Wayne Smith had never heard of the case, found it was not in the county's records, and reopened it. The odds were only one in 98. Lane gave a sample in March 2009 and was excluded. Marilyn's body was exhumed after 27 years, but no usable DNA was recovered, even from tissue protected by her artificial fingernails.
Debbie, who had married him and stayed with him for thirty years, told police in 2009 that he had come to her parents' house at about four on the morning of the murder, shaking and agitated, with blood on his shirt, and that her mother had washed the shirt that day.
Bail was set at $750,000 and later reduced to $450,000. Lane testified for three hours and answered most questions that he did not remember. The judge refused to admit the one-in-98 DNA evidence on the ground that dozens of people in the town could match it. Lane and Christopher brought a wrongful death action, but it had been filed in July 2011, four months after the two-year limit, and it failed. Lane moved to Beaver Dam, about a dozen miles from Columbus, and remained estranged from his son.