Pamela Reinwand was a 19-year-old White/Caucasian female who died from a single gunshot wound to the head on May 13, 1984, inside the Plover, Wisconsin, home she shared with her husband, Joseph Bruce Reinwand. The couple had an infant daughter who was about six months old at the time. Joseph told investigators that Pamela had shot herself following an argument after the couple had been out at a bar.
Authorities initially accepted the death as a suicide, and the Portage County coroner officially classified it that way.
Even in 1984, however, people close to Pamela questioned whether she had taken her own life. During the eventual murder trial, jurors heard that one of Pamela's cousins had told police she was excited about being a new mother and did not believe her death was a suicide. Another witness recalled going to the Reinwand home after Pamela's funeral and seeing bags that appeared to have been packed, leading the witness to believe Pamela may have intended to leave Joseph before she died. Those observations did not lead to a murder charge at the time, and the suicide determination remained in place for more than two decades.
The case began to change after another killing brought investigators back to Joseph Reinwand. On March 4, 2008, Dale Meister was shot to death in his Wisconsin Rapids mobile home. Meister had been in a relationship with Joseph and Pamela's daughter and was the father of their granddaughter. As investigators examined Meister's death, they uncovered information that caused them to question the circumstances surrounding Pamela's death. Investigators reopened her case, and advances in forensic technology led authorities to exhume Pamela's body in 2009 for further examination.
Information attributed to Meister became particularly important. According to court records, Meister had told friends and others that Joseph had threatened him and said he could kill Meister and get away with it just as he had gotten away with killing Pamela years earlier. Meister also reportedly said Joseph had admitted killing in the past and believed he could do so again. Meister told people he was afraid Joseph would kill him and make his death appear to be a suicide, and he indicated that Joseph was upset that he was looking into whether Pamela's 1984 death had actually been a suicide. Because Meister himself had been killed by the time Pamela's case reached trial, several people who had heard these statements testified about them.
The renewed investigation also focused on the physical circumstances of Pamela's shooting and Joseph's statements over the years. Forensic witnesses who testified at the later trial said the apparent positioning of the firearm and the angle of Pamela's fatal wound did not indicate that she had been holding the gun herself when it discharged. Prosecutors also emphasized what they characterized as inconsistencies in Joseph's accounts of the events surrounding his wife's death. Joseph continued to maintain that Pamela had killed herself, while his defense argued that the original 1984 investigation and suicide determination remained credible and that the prosecution was reinterpreting decades-old evidence through the lens of a later homicide investigation.
By then Joseph Reinwand had also been prosecuted for Dale Meister's killing. He was charged in the Meister case in 2013 and was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide following a Wood County jury trial in October 2014. Evidence developed through that investigation had already helped revive scrutiny of Pamela's death. In August 2014, Portage County authorities formally charged Joseph with first-degree murder for killing Pamela three decades earlier. He pleaded not guilty, setting the stage for a separate murder trial in Portage County.
Joseph's trial for Pamela's murder took place in February 2016 and lasted five days. The prosecution presented the later-developed forensic evidence, Joseph's statements and behavior following Pamela's death, testimony from people who had known Pamela, and testimony concerning what Meister had said Joseph told him about the killing. Three longtime friends of Meister, a pastor who had counseled him, and Pamela's mother were among the witnesses who testified regarding statements Meister had made before his own death. Joseph's attorney challenged the reliability and admissibility of that evidence and stressed that officials examining the scene in 1984 had concluded Pamela's death was a suicide. Joseph did not testify in his own defense.
On February 26, 2016, after approximately four hours of deliberations, the jury found Joseph Reinwand guilty of first-degree murder in Pamela's death. The verdict represented a complete reversal of the conclusion reached shortly after the shooting: what had officially been regarded as a suicide for roughly three decades was now determined by a jury to have been a murder committed by her husband.
Joseph was sentenced on April 22, 2016, to life imprisonment for Pamela's murder. The sentence was ordered to run consecutively to the life sentence he was already serving for killing Dale Meister, giving him a second life term. Joseph later appealed his conviction, challenging in part the admission of Meister's statements through other witnesses. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed the first-degree murder conviction in 2018. The appellate court did identify a clerical mistake in the written judgment, which incorrectly referred to "lifetime supervision"; the case was sent back solely so the judgment could accurately state that Joseph had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
