Tag Archives: justice

“Brown County District Attorney John Zakowski, who prosecuted the original case, stands by the police work, the investigators’ theory and the convictions.” (Green Bay Press Gazette Article by Paul Srubus; Monfils case is impetus for group’s origin, Sunday, December 19, 2010). This stand by Zakowski says a lot. He stands by the investigators’ theory. Fifteen years after the convictions of six men – seventeen years after the death of Thomas Monfils – and this district attorney still cannot state that the mythical “bubbler confrontation” is a fact. Why? Because it was never proven. Why? Because it never happened and there wasn’t a single person at the mill who said that it did nor was there a single piece of evidence that pointed to such an event.

Officers of the court get away with statements like this on a regular basis only because we fail to question those statements. We fail to recognize the flaws, the lack of common sense, and the lack of validity in holding up a “theory” as reason enough to take away the lives of six men, turn the lives of their families upside down, and muddy the color of the law.

Let’s point out that, although this theory of a violent physical confrontation continues to be a flag waved by the prosecutor, the police investigation turned up absolutely nothing in the area immediately around or anywhere near the water fountain. Nothing was out of place. There was no blood or signs that there had been an attempt to clean blood up, and not one witness stating that any of these men looked out of breath or disheveled in any way. Not a single witness ever stated that all six men were absent in the same period of time that Monfils went missing. Six men missing from your area – at the same time – wouldn’t you notice? One man walking away…maybe not…but, in total, there would have been seven men missing all together. Common sense tells you, at least one person would have noticed that. And yet, not a single person ever made such a statement even though the police pushed, pressured, and threatened in near every manner possible and kept those tactics in play for nearly two years.

So, we are to believe that an investigation into a theory that provided not one piece of evidence that this theory was fact – we are to believe this gives validity to the six guilty verdicts. Common sense tells me, no. Furthermore, this theory was given life by a police department with an extreme conflict of interest – as one of the men that wears the scars from their bared teeth is Keith Kutska, the man who not only embarrassed them publicly, but put them in a world of legal and financial hurt for releasing the 911 tape of Tom Monfils call and placing it directly in Kutska’s hand (The widow of Tom Monfils received a very large settlement due to a lawsuit filed due to the tape being released).

And, let’s not forget that, after the investigation had stalled for a period of time, the FBI extended an offer to assist in the investigation. That assistance could have been crucial in realizing the truth about what actually happened to Tom Monfils, and it was, without a doubt, exciting news for most everyone. Most everyone, that is, except the GBPD. You see, as far as we were concerned, the FBI was a third party without conflict of interest in this investigation. We welcomed it. However, the GBPD publicly refused the offer to help. We were devastated by this news.

Here is a theory to chew on for a while. Five of the six men convicted went down solely because they are witnesses to the innocence of Keith Kutska in the death of Tom Monfils – each one having seen or been near Kutska at different times throughout the morning. No matter what was promised them, no matter what they were threatened with, they refused to lie about the whereabouts of Kutska those early hours of that fateful day. And Keith Kutska went down because the chief of the GBPD needed him to be guilty to deflect and redirect the public outrage that was brewing due to the negligent release of the anonymous 911 call. Give it some thought. This statement of theory, in the end, has just as much validity as the one presented by the opposition…which really amounts to a whole lot of nothing without proof.