“I can tell by the way that you’re acting that you’re thinking about running,” the prosecutor told the inmate he was escorting from Pennsylvania to meet justice in Greene County.
“Now I hope you won’t do that,” he added, in his folksy manner. “Because I wouldn’t want to shoot you.”
The man didn’t run.
In private, Schenck’s other companion, investigator Mark Adkins, pointed out the one flaw in his plan: “It’s going to be a little tough to shoot him because you don’t have a gun.”
The incident was vintage Schenck: part bluff, part guts, part shrewd instinct. Not to mention dogged determination to get the job done, no matter how unconventional the means. It’s a potent mix that has helped him survive 13 years as prosecutor in a county with more than its share of sensational crimes.
Maybe some curious alchemy of fate and character has linked many of the area’s most bizarre and complex cases with one of its most unorthodox public figures, the man otherwise known as “Wild Bill.”
Why Wild Bill?
“Because he’s crazy,” his wife, Teri, deadpans.
Schenck winces a little at the nickname, much as his hero, Robert F. Kennedy, used to wince at “ruthless.” But he is disarmingly candid about the flaws - and virtues - that earned it.
“Most people know I’m hyper and manic and somewhat of a character,” Schenck says. “It’s not that I’m wild in my conduct. I’m wild in my personality. I’m so enthusiastic about anything for which I have a passion and a cause for which I believe.”
Maybe only a hyper and manic personality could have withstood the barrage of improbable horrors that have plagued Greene County.
It wasn’t what he expected when in 1981 he took over as prosecutor of a rural county of 129,769 people scattered throughout small, strait-laced farm towns. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the opportunities and challenges I’ve faced,” Schenck marvels. “We don’t have any explanation for it. Maybe it’s the gargoyles (flanking the courthouse entrance) or the courthouse clock.”
Yet the cases kept coming, one after another: the triple homicide in a Beavercreek farmhouse; the drowning of 2-year-old Cassandra Slaven by two boys, ages 6 and 10; the railroad-spike murder of an 18-year-old Caesarcreek Twp. woman; the slaying of 21-year-old Sherry Byrne, despite her lipstick-scrawled pleas for help dangled from the trunk of a car; and, most recently, the Carroll case.
Just when Schenck thought it was time for a break, another strange case would pop up, until he and his staff came to expect them the way wheat farmers expect locusts.
From time to time, politicos have tried to lure him into a judgeship or a state Senate race, to follow the political star for which his glad-handing, gregarious personality seem ideally suited.
Schenck never took the bait.
“He knows he makes a difference,” explains his close friend and former law partner, Lt. Gov. Mike DeWine. Schenck was chief trial counsel in Greene County while DeWine was prosecutor. “There are tough cases that ended up in convictions that would not have been pursued by most prosecutors,” says DeWine about Schenck.
Is that a function of simple zeal or excessive zeal? That has been the subject of a prolonged battle between Schenck and Columbus attorneys Dennis Pusateri and Barry Wilford. They’ve charged Schenck with prosecutorial misconduct in his prosecution of their client, David Lee Myers. Myers was charged in the murder of Amanda Jo Maher, who in 1988 was found along railroad tracks near downtown Xenia with a railroad spike driven through her head.
Myers waited in jail for 2 1/2 years as his trial for aggravated murder was postponed again and again. In February 1991, the murder charges were dropped because of inconclusive genetic tests on a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair found on the body. Myers was free for two weeks, only to be jailed two weeks later on unrelated forgery charges. He pleaded guilty, and was about to be released from prison when served with the second aggravated murder indictment.
The defense attorneys are angry because they say Schenck didn’t notify them of the second indictment. Schenck has removed himself from the trial, which is set for July. “Schenck is one of those guys who’s too small to kick and too wet to step on,” Wilford says. “In other words, we don’t trust him.”
But some other opposing attorneys grudgingly admire the panache with which Schenck pushes the envelope.
Louis Hoffman, a Dayton attorney who represented Christian Wells in his highly publicized trial for the murder of 14-year-old Cathy Sano of Kettering, says Schenck tests the limits of the law - without crossing over ethical boundaries.
“After the Wells trial, even Bill had to chuckle at how close he had gotten to the line of rules of evidence,” Hoffman says. “His charm and wide-eyed innocence allow him to do things others might not be able to carry off.”
Not that there aren’t plenty of people who will openly criticize him - notably his staff, his wife, his lifelong friends. They recite his faults as if from a well-worn catechism: he runs late; he’s disorganized; he opens his mouth when he shouldn’t.
Schenck’s staff tattles on him fearlessly, almost with a touch of pride. “It’s a challenge every day because of his disorganization,” sighs assistant office manager Deneese Hilderbrandt, who has worked for Schenck for 18 years.
Her first assignment was to clean out his office. “It took about a week - you can’t imagine what it looked like,” she recalls.
Now Hilderbrandt makes Schenck clean his own room. But she still types everything at the last minute, once even transcribing a legal brief Schenck dictated from Hawaii.
She puts up with it because any other boss would seem boring now. And after all the aggravation, she loves to see him “go in and smoke ‘em in the courtroom.”
Even his frequent courtroom adversary, Dayton attorney John Rion, calls Schenck “one of the most gifted trial lawyers I’ve seen.” Rion recently faced off against Schenck in the Carroll case, winning an acquittal for his client, James Carroll. The loss hit Schenck hard, his staff says, although he says he has put the defeat behind him.
“Oh, he hates it,” Adkins says. “He’s very competitive; he likes to win. But at the same time it’s not a sport to him. He’s driven by a desire to put people away who have committed crimes and hurt people. Those people you see again and again - he wants to put them in prison where they belong.”
It’s easy for defense attorneys to underestimate Schenck - the first time - says first assistant Montgomery County prosecutor Dennis Langer, who has worked with Schenck on several cases. “He can appear so disorganized, yet when he gets into the courtroom, it all almost mysteriously comes together.”
Schenck rarely works from notes and maintains almost constant eye contact - not to mention an uncanny rapport - with jurors.
“He’s the best at giving a closing argument I’ve ever heard,” says DeWine. Using sports analogies, folk wisdom and a dash of theatrics, “he takes the facts and puts them into perspective for jurors,” DeWine says.
His rapport with victims enables him to prepare a stronger case, DeWine adds. The duo won 12 of the 13 rape cases they tried together in Greene County. “His compassion for victims is not abstract. He gets to know the victims and know them well, and that makes you feel different about a case,” DeWine says.
Schenck, who established the county’s Victim-Witness division in 1982, recently served as president of the National Organization for Victim Assistance.
Though now a staunch Republican, he grew up in a family of “true Southern Democrats” in Winchester, Va., where his father was a dentist and talented musician who jammed with neighbor Patsy Cline.
Even in grade school, “he was very charming, very suave, and dated the prettiest girl in Winchester,” recalls childhood friend John Eddy, a Winchester accountant. “In high school he was the best-looking guy in our class and the most popular. Everyone was very envious.”
They still are - especially at the high school reunions Schenck has never attended. “We’re there, but the girls all ask about him. I tell them he’s terrible, he’s old, he’s haggard, you don’t want to see him,” says Eddy. He’s not, of course, but instead blessed with the boyish earnestness and shock of Kennedy-esque hair that make him seem 10 years younger than his 48 years.
His youthfulness isn’t the function of a carefree, uneventful life. Even in high school, he was Wild Bill, the kid who straddled middle-class respectability and impulsiveness; the conscientious student who sweet-talked his way out of scrapes.
One night, the 15-year-old Schenck threw an egg through the window of a converted barn where actors were rehearsing a play. The egg landed smack on Schenck’s father, who was not amused.
The local paper played up the incident as “an egg from an unknown assailant.” Schenck’s father came home with the tale, lamenting the state of modern youth.
Alongside such high jinks came early sorrow and responsibility.
The boys all drove too fast along those Virginia mountain roads. In 1962, Schenck was a passenger in a car that went over an embankment. The driver died beside him.
The tragedy gave him an early sense of the perils of life - and, perhaps, a sense of urgency to be a grown-up. He married at 18, and his oldest daughters, Elizabeth and Ashley, were born while he was an undergraduate at the University of Richmond, studying journalism and political science.
To support his family, Schenck played the role of Deputy Dog for a children’s TV program at WTVR in Richmond. He studied during three-hour breaks between shows.
That was enough of a pressure-cooker, but Ohio State College of Law, which he entered in the fall of 1967, was even worse. Schenck drove a taxi at night and his wife waited tables. Then he started blacking out and hyperventilating, and dropped out after only two quarters. Ultimately, neurologists ruled out any permanent disorder. To this day, Schenck can’t explain his illness, other than “stress and anxiety.”
He landed a job loading boxes at a truck terminal and “started feeling better and better.”
He took a pay cut to become a paid member of RFK’s staff during the 1968 presidential primaries - an experience that gave birth to his political ambitions, then almost killed them.
He sat in on strategy meetings with Kennedy and his staff, watching with fascination as his idol admitted and learned from his mistakes. Devastated by the candidate’s assassination, Schenck vowed he would stay out of politics forever.
But he went back to law school, and RFK remained a guiding light. Even today, Kennedy’s image shares office space with Reagan, E.T., and a Leroy Neiman print of Jack Nicklaus. And, of course, Ohio State paraphernalia; Schenck has missed only five Buckeye home football games in 25 years.
It’s the same office where he came to work, fresh out of law school, as an assistant prosecutor in 1970. That’s when he and DeWine, also an assistant prosecutor, became “fast and furious friends.”
The two are still so close that Schenck was one of three friends who came to the hospital when DeWine’s daughter Becky was killed in a car accident last year. “That’s the type of friend he is,” DeWine says. “He’s always been there.”
Schenck left the prosecutor’s office to work briefly in the Montgomery County public defender’s office, and then in private practice for three years with the Dayton trial firm of Bieser, Greer and Landis.
By 1977 he was back in the Greene County prosecutor’s office, this time working for DeWine. In 1980, DeWine won a seat in the Ohio Senate, and Schenck was elected prosecutor. Although he has weathered his share of controversy, he has yet to be challenged in a race for the prosecutor’s office.
His personal life has been rockier. Twice divorced, he acquired a reputation as something of a playboy in the early ’80s. His staff loves to tell the story of the April Fool’s joke they played on the boss one year when he was dating two women at the same time. Schenck was chatting in his office with one woman when the second was announced.
Schenck excused himself and escaped by way of a secret stairwell, ducking under the “April Fools” note rigged across the exit with a string.
“He was so scared he didn’t even stop to read it,” Hilderbrandt says with a laugh.
“But he’s not that Bill Schenck any more; he has mellowed and matured and has a family,” attorney Hoffman says.
Schenck and Teri and their 3-year-old daughter Savannah live in the modest gray frame house in a working-class Xenia neighborhood. He bought the house for $24,000 in 1973. It’s tastefully decorated with antiques, prints - “all Teri’s work,” he says proudly.
The pair met when Teri worked as an advocate for Victim-Witness. On their first date, Schenck drove her to a covered bridge - a touch that might have been more romantic had he packed more than a box of Saltines and two Dum-Dum suckers in the picnic basket.
Still, before long they were enmeshed in a serious attraction of opposites: he needed her quiet strength and discipline; she needed his volubility and spontaneity. It was three years after his second divorce, and Schenck was hungry for stability “and someone I could truly talk to.” They were married July 21, 1984.
Teri, now deputy director of Victim-Witness, rarely discusses work with her husband. Their focus is vivacious, outgoing Savannah - “She has her father’s personality,” Teri notes. They maintain a close relationship with Schenck’s three daughters, Elizabeth, 28, Ashley, 26, and Sarah, 14.
Teri tries not to be bothered by public criticism of her husband. “But it does bother me, because I know what he puts into a case.”
He tries to keep the heat off, to keep his impetuosity from getting him into trouble. “In a controversial situation, a little bit of talking is like a little bit of knowledge,” he says, with a ruefulness born of experience.
He remembers, though, the advice doled out by his former Latin professor in college.
“Bill,” he said, “your personality is bound to get you in some difficulty. But any time you fail to be yourself and what you are, it will catch up with you.
“Just try and use a little discretion.”
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