Editor’s note: This episode contains some swearing and strong sexual language. It also mentions sexual assault and murder, including of a child. So, take that into account before listening.
Remember the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic? Way back in 2020, when we were all stocking up on hand sanitizer and toilet paper?
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JERRY LINGNOFSKI: The way things are going, everything sells itself. (laugh)
That’s Jerry Lingnofski. That spring, he was working as the “head sales guy” at a gun store. On Facebook, I saw he had a buy-one-get-one-free special: rifles with an unwrapped roll of toilet paper on the barrel.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Are things just flying off the shelves?
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: I just, uh, I just got off the phone. I just ordered $17,000 more of ammo. Just one kind of ammo.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Wow.
I called Lingnofski because I heard he had a story to tell about the power of the prosecutor. But it wasn’t about former Outagamie County District Attorney Vince Biskupic.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: I got no bones with Vince. You’re going to have to be on your own with that one. Paulus, of course, I did, uh, a little bit of work on that one as you guys all know.
He’s talking about Joe Paulus. The former District Attorney of Winnebago County — Outagamie’s neighbor to the south.
But before Lingnofski would tell me more, he said I needed to “do my homework.”
Years earlier, he’d testified to a judge, under oath, in a secret hearing investigating Paulus.
And Lingnofski wanted me to read his testimony.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Polish up on that a little bit because that’s going to be very informative for you.
To read the transcript of that hearing, I needed a judge to dissolve a secrecy order, which took a couple of weeks. But finally, I got it. As far as we can tell, no member of the public had ever seen it before.
And I read all about what Lingnofski told a judge about this former prosecutor Joe Paulus.
From Wisconsin Watch and Wisconsin Public Radio, I’m Phoebe Petrovic, and this is Open and Shut.
MIKE BALSKUS: It seemed like a pretty much, open shut case.
KATE O’BRIEN: I mean, this was open and shut.
JERRY BURKE: Nobody would have had to lie. It was an open and shut case.
DEE HALL: Why don’t you call him —
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Okay (laughs)
DEE HALL: And tell him where we are?
My boss, Dee Hall, and I are driving a couple hours northeast of where we live in Madison to a region known as the Fox Valley.
We’re here to talk to someone who covered Joe Paulus and Vince Biskupic for years. At least, that’s the plan.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Hi, Jerry. It’s Phoebe here. Uh, we seem to have been turned around. We’re on the corner of [fades out]
Yes, there are two Jerrys in this story.
For 35 years, Jerry Burke was a TV reporter in Green Bay. Nowadays, he’s retired and lives on a tidy street in Oshkosh, right by Lake Winnebago.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: (laughs) He’s like, ‘Oh, I know where you are. You’re by the doctor’s house!’
DEE HALL: Of course we are.
When we finally arrive, Burke greets us warmly, and we start with a little bit of geography.
JERRY BURKE: The Fox Valley? Well, it depends upon what city you’re in. The Fox Valley, to me, stretches from uh, on the north end Kaukauna all the way down to Fond Du Lac. I always say it’s a bunch of suburbs without a main metro.
It’s about a half hour south of Green Bay. The Packers are big here — and, well, everywhere in Wisconsin. Burke and his wife have a “Packer room” decked out floor to ceiling in green and gold.
For almost three years, I’ve been looking into cases prosecuted by Vince Biskupic, and I’ve come across some troubling behavior.
Like in Dale Chu’s case, where Biskupic relied on a witness he later charged with perjury to press arson charges — despite experts’ inability to pinpoint how the fire started.
And then there’s the way Biskupic used Chu’s Korean heritage to suggest a motive.
But Jerry Burke has had a very different experience than Dale Chu.
JERRY BURKE: I always thought a lot of Vince. Still do. I always found him very up and up. Good Christian family. Good kids.
Biskupic became the Outagamie County District Attorney in 1994. A Republican prosecutor in a mostly conservative county.
JERRY BURKE: He was a clean cut guy. Um (laughs, stutters) he was a good looking guy. He was a nice guy.
Over the years, Burke saw Biskupic prosecute some high profile cases.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: What makes a good prosecutor? JERRY BURKE: Ethics. Vince had ethics.
But when you ask Burke about Winnebago County’s Joe Paulus…
JERRY BURKE: Well, I’m going to tell you something. For the longest time, Joe was called the Golden Boy. He could do no wrong. If you said anything bad against Joe, what the hell is wrong with you? He’s really good. Boy, look at the convictions he’s getting. Well, that was before we knew some of the crap he was pulling under the table.
Don’t worry. We’re gonna get to some of that crap.
Joe Paulus became Winnebago District Attorney in 1988 when he was just 29 years old.
The young DA hired an even younger assistant DA — Vince Biskupic, who was fresh out of law school.
MIKE BALSKUS: Joe was his mentor.
This is longtime Fox Valley prosecutor Mike Balskus.
MIKE BALSKUS: Vince would follow Joe around like a puppy dog. Essentially, he would do whatever Joe wanted. And, I think, also learned from Joe.
ARCHIVAL JOE PAULUS: It was a very ugly case, a very ugly situation.
That’s Joe Paulus. Talking to the media.
MIKE BALSKUS: When Joe would try a case, it’s all about Joe. And he was front and center. There wasn’t going to be any sharing of the limelight.
ARCHIVAL JOE PAULUS: We all know what the truth is here. Don’t get sidetracked. Just let the truth flourish.
MIKE BALSKUS: And he started with cases that were, if you want to call it, very difficult to prove.
Within a few years of taking office, Paulus tackled cases that seemed tailor-made for the headlines.
MIKE BALSKUS: And he did so, so he could say when he got a conviction, he could say, ‘I’m the first DA ever to get this type of conviction.’
In 1990, Paulus prosecuted a man for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman who had what is now called dissociative identity disorder. At the time, the so-called “Multiple Personality Rape Case” got written up in big newspapers like The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun.
That same year, he won one of Wisconsin’s first no-body homicide convictions.
And in 1992, he won the first conviction in the Fox Valley using DNA evidence.
About a decade later, Paulus would make headlines again — just not the kind that anyone would want.
That story begins with a young assistant district attorney named E.J. Jelinski.
E.J. JELINSKI: These are scrapbooks of things that happened between 1995 and 2004 that my mother put together.
In November of 2021, we visited Jelinski at his office in the Fox Valley city of Menasha.
Jelinski is in private practice now. He has an office in a building that, to me, looks like the TV version of an attorney’s office. There’s lots of leather and wood, and stuffed birds mounted on the walls.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: What does your mom think of Paulus?
E.J. JELINSKI: Hate is a good word. (laughs)
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Okay, yeah.
And those scrapbooks she made? They’re painstakingly compiled.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Is your mom an archivist or a librarian or something?
E.J. JELINSKI: No, she’s a first grade school teacher. (laughs)
EJ Jelinski started working for Joe Paulus in 2001, while he was still in law school.
E.J. JELINSKI: I mean, he was funny, could be very kind man, when you actually talk business with him. But the majority of the time he spent playing with people just for his own amusement. And he was cruel. He was quite cruel. It was Christmas of 2001, he called me Christmas day 16 times. And I wouldn’t answer. And finally, on the 16th time I answered and he said, I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about me on this important holiday. Ha ha ha, click.
As Jelinski sees it, Paulus valued one quality above all others: loyalty.
Jelinski learned this early on, when Paulus decided to go after fellow prosecutor John Daniels.
E.J. JELINSKI: Daniels had done something to upset Joe. And again, I don’t remember what it was.
I checked with Daniels. He said police officers had started bringing cases directly to him because they didn’t trust Paulus.
E.J. JELINSKI: And so the word went out from on high that no one was to speak to Daniels. Daniels was being frozen out, and he was not to be acknowledged as a living person while at work.
Jelinski didn’t want to play that game. So he walked into Daniels’ office.
E.J. JELINSKI: ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ He said, ‘Fine. I’m doing okay.’ ‘How you holding up?’ ‘Things are good.’ ‘Okay. I’ll see you later. Good luck. Sorry about all this.’ And I walked out.
After that conversation, Jelinski was summoned to talk to Paulus.
E.J. JELINSKI: ‘You know why you’re here?’ ‘Yup. I know why I’m here.’ ‘What did you do wrong?’ ‘I talked to Daniels.’ ‘Yup. So what I want you to do is I want you to go out into the hallway and I want you to yell as loud as you can, fuck Daniels, fuck Daniels, fuck Daniels. And then we’ll be square.’ ‘Nope. I’m not going to do that.’
Jelinski left Paulus’ office. The next thing he knew, he heard Paulus making an announcement over the PA.
E.J. JELINSKI: ‘Everybody ought to be aware of the fact that Mr. Jelinski has elected to be fired. Um, I want his stuff packed up out of his office and in the, um, uh, elevator, uh, within 15 minutes and he has to be escorted from the office.’ And I was, and I went down to my car and I got in my car and I put my stuff in the trunk and I started driving out of the parking lot.
As he started to drive away, Jelinski watched Paulus methodically close the blinds of each office window.
E.J. JELINSKI: So I went back up. And I stood in the hallway and I said, ‘Fuck Daniels, fuck Daniels, fuck Daniels, you asshole.’ And went back to my office. And 20 minutes later when I’m out having a cigarette behind the building, Joe comes down and he says, ‘Well, you know, you’re going to have a lot of controversies in your life. And every one of those you’re going to face, you’re going to have to decide, is this the hill that I’m going to die on? And you made the right choice today and you’ll do well.’ That was a typical Monday morning.
And look, it might seem like we’re just telling horror stories about a bad boss. But Joe Paulus’ power trips seeped into the courtroom — where they could affect the safety of the entire community.
A couple of months after I first talked to gun store salesman Jerry Lingnofski, I got the transcripts of that secret hearing, did my homework, and called him on Skype.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Hello.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Hi Jerry. How’s it going?
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Good. How are you tonight?
And here’s what he told me. Before he worked at a gun shop, Lingnosfki was a detective with the town of Menasha police department.
One day in July 1991, he got an awful call about a toddler named Amy Breyer.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Amy Breyer was a beautiful little girl, lived with her parents in the mobile home park at 888 East Shady Lane. Kelly Coon was a subject that we dealt with on and off for different things. Uh, lived right across the street actually from the Breyer family. And one night he kidnapped that young child, sexually assaulted her and murdered her.
Her parents discovered her missing the next day and called the police.
Lingnofski was there to help collect evidence.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: We were out in the field where the incident occurred where the child died. There was a diaper that was located in some buckbrush. So of course you glove up, moved in to retrieve the evidence, and my arms got scratched up.
Winnebago District Attorney Joe Paulus began to prepare a case against Kelly Coon. At the time, Vince Biskupic was his deputy and co-prosecuted the case.
And since Lingnofski had collected evidence, Paulus considered calling him as a witness. So one day, Lingnofski came in for a pre-trial meeting.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Which is normal.
When Lingnofski entered the room, he noticed that a higher ranking Menasha police officer was already there.
Lingnofski says the two men told him to lie about how he found the evidence — to say he was rolling around in the grass, instead of digging in the bushes.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: I said, ‘Why the hell would anyone be rolling around in the grass and in the sticks collecting evidence?’
I asked Lingnofski how this lie would’ve improved Paulus’ case. He said quote – “It was Joe Paulus, so you tell me. They were off the tracks.”
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: Trying to put their spin on it or trying to, I don’t know, enhance their egos. It didn’t need to be done.
But Lingnofski says Paulus and the officer insisted.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: ‘This is how you need to testify. If you don’t then you won’t testify.’ I said, ‘Hey you got this guy 5 ways from Sunday. You don’t need me.’
And then, the higher ranking cop put his hand on Lingnofski’s shoulder and told him to be a team player. Meaning, listen to the District Attorney. He’s telling you to lie, so lie.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: He was informed that I wouldn’t lie. And he was also informed to take his hand off of me.
And that officer? His name was Steve Malchow.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: I called him Paulus’ lap dog. Whatever Joe wanted, Stevie Boy make it happen.
Eventually, Malchow would leave the police force to join the Outagamie County District Attorney’s Office as an investigator for Vince Biskupic. And at the DA’s office, Malchow would work behind the scenes in several high profile cases — like Dale Chu’s: the arson case we told you about in the last episode.
We tried to interview Malchow for this series, but he didn’t respond.
After Lingnofski said he refused to lie, Paulus did not call him to testify.
And it cost Lingnofski to stand up for himself against Paulus.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: After my incident with the two of those knuckleheads, I was kept beyond arm’s length with everything. I mean, I, normally you’d go down and talk about cases and stuff before you went to court. Didn’t happen (laughs). Paulus didn’t want you in the building, you weren’t going in the building.
But, Lingnofski says, telling the truth was worth the cost.
JERRY LINGNOFSKI: That family’s lost a child. Everything I saw, what a beautiful little girl. And I still, I still see her uncle every now and again and, and he still pats me on the back, and thanks me. And, if nothing else, you do it right for that, for the future. ‘Cause if you lose that case, you’re done. Somebody got away with murder.
By the time Lingnofski was asked to testify in that secret hearing, Paulus was already in prison for — something else.
It’s extremely rare for the state to bring criminal charges against a prosecutor. And civil court has its own challenges.
Prosecutors have qualified immunity when investigating cases. That’s the same standard that makes it difficult to sue police officers for misconduct.
And prosecutors have something more: absolute immunity for their actions in a courtroom and preparing a case for trial.
VALENA BEETY: Meaning they’re completely protected.
Valena Beety is a law professor at Arizona State University.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: In practice, what does that leave us for recourse?
VALENA BEETY: Very little.
Prosecutors have gotten away with a lot because of absolute immunity.
VALENA BEETY: Cases where they falsified the evidence, cases where they coerced witnesses, cases where they solicited perjured testimony, uh, where they withheld exculpatory evidence, and when they introduced evidence, they knew that police had illegally seized, they introduced that evidence at trial.
All of those actions completely violate prosecutors’ obligations to their office and the court.
VALENA BEETY: Uh and yet they still maintain absolute immunity.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: Oh my God.
VALENA BEETY: Yeah.
PHOEBE PETROVIC: That’s wild, um.
VALENA BEETY: Right, it is. It is. I mean, this is why reforming, um, both absolute immunity and qualified immunity are such a big deal and such a big concern right now.
So, let’s recap. According to Lingnofski, Paulus jeopardized a conviction for the sexual assault and murder of a toddler by asking a detective to lie on the stand. And, by at least one account, he was a horrible boss.
But none of these things are what actually got Joe Paulus in trouble.
Somewhere around the year 2000, he doesn’t remember the date, TV reporter Jerry Burke started picking up on some rumors in Winnebago County.
JERRY BURKE: We were hearing about drunk driving cases that were being hidden, or if you paid a certain amount of money, it went away and we’re going, ‘What?’
So he went down to the District Attorney’s Office, and tried to get some answers from Paulus.
JERRY BURKE: He got so wickedly mad at me. Uh, he yelled at me. He ordered me to get out of the building or he’d have me arrested. And I got back to the office and one of his secretaries, she called me and said, ‘Lose Joe’s number. Don’t ever call that number again.’ And I went, ‘OK.’ And after that, I never got another tip from the district attorney’s office. There were a couple of reporters at another station that he was constantly feeding information and my boss was getting mad at me ‘cause they had stuff we just couldn’t get.
After being shunned by Paulus, Burke found it harder to investigate those rumors about the drunk driving cases. But they continued to bother him.
JERRY BURKE: There was — um, and I don’t want to use the name of the individual or the company he was associated with — that he had been stopped for OWI, drunk driving. And his BAC was like three, four times the legal limit. And it went away. And every time I saw one of this individual’s trucks around town, I would just go, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He’s got, he got it — he got away with it. He didn’t hurt anybody, thank God. But he was drunk, very drunk. We never reported it because we couldn’t prove it.
Jerry Burke couldn’t prove it. But E.J. Jelinski — the guy with all those scrapbooks — he could.
E.J. Jelinski hadn’t been working at the Winnebago County DA’s office for very long before he decided he had heard and seen enough. He wanted Paulus out of office.
So Jelinski teamed up with a co-worker, and decided to run against Paulus in the upcoming election.
E.J. JELINSKI: Let’s run against him and let’s expose his personality to the community and see if we can’t get him out of there.
Jelinski and his coworker began campaigning quietly, and they kept the news from Paulus. But word got around that someone planned to take on the Golden Boy.
Jelinski started hearing from people who knew some things about Paulus.
E.J. JELINSKI: There was a probation agent who said, ‘Hey, I hear you guys are diggin’. I have another agent who has a story about money and a dismissal.’
“Money and a dismissal.” It was enough to send Jelinski, his coworker, and their friend, a police officer, digging through Paulus’ case history. Looking for, as Jelinski put it, “hinky cases.”
PHOEBE PETROVIC: What were you looking for? What in your expertise was like, that’s weird?
E.J. JELINSKI: If you had an OWI second, that was a 0.20. The blood was taken 45 minutes after the stop…
A pattern emerged about what made a case hinky. A person got a lesser charge in a plea deal, or sometimes the charges were dismissed entirely on a technicality. After the case was closed, the files disappeared. And most importantly—
E.J. JELINSKI: It’s Mitch Schierland’s case.
Schierland had been a private defense attorney in the Fox Valley. Jelinski suspected that Schierland had funneled cash payments from his clients to Paulus in exchange for sweetheart deals.
So Jelinski and the others spent a couple of weeks looking into this pattern.
E.J. JELINSKI: Trying to remember cases, figure out where ones were, get the files recreated, call up the court reporters, get the transcripts and see if they fit the pattern. And we found 22.
22 “hinky” cases.
And this is important: Paulus pocketed those payments.
E.J. JELINSKI: Which is bribery. So that’s bribery and corruption.
Jelinski and his co-investigators reported their findings to the FBI in January 2002.
Then, they waited. And waited. And waited.
But Jelinski and his coworker had one more trick up their sleeves. They knew that once Paulus discovered their campaign, he’d fire them.
So they secretly — but legally — recorded their conversations with him so they could use those recordings in a future employment suit.
E.J. JELINSKI: I think we went to Radio Shack and just bought pocket recorders with the little mini tapes in them. And we had microphones attached and we ran them through our arms and into our watch bands.
ARCHIVAL PAULUS: She came to see me during the business fucking day, maybe 10 o’clock, 10:30.
But they got more than they bargained for. Paulus bragged to them about having sex in the District Attorney’s Office.
ARCHIVAL PAULUS: She locks the door. She leans over the fucking desk. She’s got her hands on the desk, spread eagle, right?
I’ve listened to the tapes. And frankly, I found them disgusting and misogynistic. So we’re going to spare you.
Jelinski officially announced his candidacy in April 2002. Paulus fired him and his coworker in May. They released the tapes in July.
Even the Golden Boy couldn’t survive those scandals. Jelinski’s candidacy helped split the vote, and Paulus lost the Republican primary to a candidate who vowed to clean up the office. After 14 years as a district attorney, Paulus’ reign came to an end.
But E.J. Jelinski and his co-investigators all faced consequences for taking down Paulus.
E.J. JELINSKI: No one would hire me. There was a great deal of talk in the community about how I was just kind of a dick. And, of course, in 2004, when he was federally indicted, then that changed.
After the indictment, Paulus pleaded guilty in federal court to filing a false tax return and taking nearly 50-thousand dollars in bribes.
TV reporter Jerry Burke was there.
JERRY BURKE: He walked into that courtroom that day, and I went, ‘Good. It finally caught up with you.’ They put us in the jury box and Joe was sitting maybe five, uh, ten feet away from us. He never looked at us once. Never looked at us. And we went, ‘Adios. Goodbye. Have fun in prison.’
Paulus served six years in federal prison, and he lost his Wisconsin law license. I tried to get in touch with him through phone, email and certified mail. He didn’t respond.
Burke told me he doesn’t think Vince Biskupic was anything like Joe Paulus.
JERRY BURKE: I’ve heard people say things about Vince that I just went mm, it’s not true. And there was a lot of guilt by association on Vince because there were a lot of rumors running around.
And look, I fully acknowledge, Vince Biskupic is no Joe Paulus.
But all of this makes me wonder: what was Paulus doing in his other prosecutions?
MARK PRICE: He goes, ‘Oh, I know you didn’t do it. But if you don’t want to play ball with us, I’m going to put you away right along with Richie.’
SHEILA BERRY: And I’d had enough experiences by then with Joe Paulus to recognize what he had pulled off.
And what, if anything, did Biskupic learn from Paulus?
MIKE BALSKUS: I was told, the Mark Price case, there’s problems with it.
To hear the related podcast, go to Open and Shut (wpr.org/openandshut) or wherever you get your podcasts. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR and other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates. This story is a collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and WPR as part of the NEW News Lab, a consortium of six news outlets covering northeastern Wisconsin.
