Beloved Wisconsin pharmacist Kenneth “Ken” Juedes was discovered deceased in bed, unclothed, with two gunshot wounds to his chest. Next to the 58-year-old’s body, a menacing note was found pierced by a knife, bearing the word “bitch.”

“It was one of the most stunning clues I’ve ever witnessed,” Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning remarked in Dateline: Unforgettable. “It was clear that someone was sending a message.”

The murder investigation only grew stranger from that point, as an array of suspects — including a former television star — surfaced in a case that unfolded over more than a decade, culminating in the startling arrest of someone close to the pharmacist.

Learn more about case, which is featured in an episode of Dateline: Unforgettable titled “The Trouble on Dill Creek Farm.”

The night Ken Juedes died 

But Ken and Cindy’s life together came to a tragic end. In the early morning hours of August 30, 2006, Cindy placed a frantic call to 911 from her neighbor’s house, saying she’d discovered her husband’s bloody body laying in the couple’s bed.

“There’s blood all over my husband…,” Cindy sobbed to the 911 dispatcher in a recording played in the Dateline: Unforgettable episode. “He’s just there — laying there with all this blood.”

Cindy would later tell detectives that she had spent the night sleeping in an RV parked by their back deck because she’d been struggling for weeks with debilitating headaches that made it difficult for her to sleep. Ken’s job as a pharmacist meant that sometimes he’d get calls in the middle of the night and, according to her account, Ken suggested she sleep in the RV, tucking her in and reminding her to take her medication, which left her drowsy.

Cindy said that when she woke up the next morning, she went inside the home and went to the bathroom before discovering Ken lying naked, covered in blood, on the bed. 

“He was a very weird color. And I said, ‘Kenny.’ And then all’s I could hear is screaming,” Cindy told detectives of her own screams. “And I went to the phone by the bed… to dial 911, and the phone wouldn’t work.” 

Cindy rushed to a neighbor’s home where she made a frantic 911 call, then got into her car and drove to another neighbor’s house, where she called 911 again.

Ken Juedes shot twice, troubling note left behind

When detectives arrived later that morning, they found that Ken had suffered two shotgun wounds to the chest at close range. On the other side of the bed, there was a knife sticking through a pillow and a note that read “bitch.”

“It definitely got our attention,” recalled Sean McCarthy, who at the time was a detective with the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office. “Like, we hadn’t seen that before.”

After not finding any obvious signs of a break-in, detectives concluded that Ken was likely killed by someone he knew. 

Cindy told detectives that she and Ken sometimes took in at-risk foster children with troubled pasts, but the teens who were living at the house at the time had solid alibis that didn’t put them at the house that night.

She was also quick to point the finger at Ken’s biological children, who she had a strained relationship with. When detectives went to talk with her in a follow-up interview at the home, Cindy had already taken the photos of Ken’s children down and Ewer told detectives that Cindy had “spit on” the images.

Cindy told investigators that some of Ken’s children had referred to her as a “bitch” and that she believed that the note left on the bed may have been directed at her. But detectives were able to rule out both of Ken’s sons.

Authorities suspicious of Cindy Schulz-Juedes

From the beginning, however, there was another person who detectives were suspicious of in Ken’s death: his wife, Cindy. 

Shortly after his death, Cindy produced a will that listed her as Ken’s sole heir. His family suspected it may have been forged.

“The marriage was less than three years old and so for him to cut his own children out just… seemed inconceivable,” Ken’s brother Don Juedes said. 

Cindy also stood to collect on multiple life insurance policies, totaling nearly $1 million, taken out in his name.

That wasn’t the only thing to make her a focus of the investigation. Detectives also questioned Cindy’s story about spending the night in an RV without air conditioning on a hot August night. 

Det. Dennis Blaser of the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office, who later took over the case, also noted that on the night Ken was murdered, surveillance cameras on the property had been turned off, the doors were left unlocked, and the foster children who usually stayed there were out for the night. Those are things that Blaser believed only Cindy would have known.