That staff included the facility’s new handyman, Ed Edwards, who had dried blood—his own—caked around his nose from a recent impact injury when investigators showed up. He explained the bloody nose away as an accident sustained while deer hunting in the nearby woods. It was an obvious deception and a glaring clue that should have been picked up on but wasn’t. Within two weeks, Edwards had quit the job and fled back to Louisville. Two months later, now October, the bodies of Tim and Kelly were found in the woods about five miles from the clothing pile and a total of eight miles from the hall—one straight line.
The scene of the murder, puzzling given the distance covered from the hall, suggested that the two teen lovebirds, initially unharmed, might have gone willingly—or under duress—into a deathtrap in the woods. Once there, it appeared that Tim was quickly stabbed to death while Kelly was tied up, raped, and then strangled. Given the use of restraints and control of the scene by the killer, the cuts to the clothing were likely carried out postmortem—expressive violence not committed against the body itself but to the temporary keepsakes to be taken from it and gazed upon later. The finding of some clothing remnants discarded on the way back to the abduction site, the Concord House, and not on the way to the kill site, meant the killer was retracing his steps. The presence of DNA on various bits of Kelly’s clothing—matched to Edwards almost thirty years later—verified this horrific but somewhat predictable order of events.
Even without the DNA match at the time of the initial investigation, the apparent itinerary quickly puzzled investigators. He had to go back to the scene, they thought, but why? He had to be back at the party, maybe back working at the party, the cops thought. They thought right, and they soon followed Edwards to Louisville to question him a second time about his movements that night. He played them. In his twisted mind, he was a Midwestern sex creep Hall of Famer, the paragon of a smooth criminal and the consummate serial killer; they were small-town, small-time cops out of their jurisdiction and out of time—with scattershot hunches and a one-night’s hotel budget.
What the cops certainly didn’t know is that Edwards’s first double murder, another young couple snatched right out of the man’s car in a parking lot back in Akron, was near identical in MO and victimology. They also didn’t know that while they waited him out—and waited some more—that same MO would change. Once the heat was off, Edwards would bring his next victim to him, adopting a young orphan boy who he’d later murder in 1996 for the insurance money. Confessing and pleading guilty in Ohio to both the Sullivan double murder and the earlier Akron double murder, he was sentenced to life in prison. His confession and guilty plea to his adopted son’s murder would land him on death row. Unlike many craven killers who, once caught, hide behind the bureaucracy of the system, Edwards said he would not appeal the decision and wanted to die by lethal injection. Only one month later, he was granted his wish but not as he had hoped. Before having to take the needle, he died of natural causes.
With Wisconsin media’s attention diverted from the summer happenings in big, bad Madison to what they were now calling the “Sweetheart Murders” in sedate, leave-your-doors-unlocked Sullivan, a small scrum of detectives with the multiagency Mad City task force had a light-bulb moment. Edwards was already by then a known person of interest in the Hack-Drew double murder in state police circles. There were also some elements of that case that were close enough to a number of the Madison murders to make the short list of potential connections.
The forest—check; access to a car—check; notable distance traveled—check; removal of all female clothing—check; the use of a knife and strangulation matching two of the Madison victims—check. What no one bothered to determine was that Edwards hadn’t even arrived in Wisconsin until approximately the fall of ’79 at the earliest, well after the first barrage of murders in the Mad City. Besides the erroneous timeline, the flimsy connections—over 48 percent of serial murders committed in the United States since 1800 and almost 90 percent of sexual murders on record involve at least some degree of strangulation—and at the same time the abduction-murder of couples being among the rarest of MOs, the crime-scene behaviors were in the ballpark purely by default based on the odds. As police in Sullivan pondered their next move, back in Madison, with a quick stroke of the pen the Capital City Killer at least had a placeholder name to be pocketed for a rainy day: Ed Edwards. But before long, he’d be bumped from the list for a better contender as the police spent the next few years shuffling the deck chairs and reverse engineering a plausible narrative—rigging the evidence to serve the existing myth of a local boogeyman. It was a new strategy and one that would allow history to be more favorable to them and replace Edwards with a more believable stand-in. As the next wave of murders was set to hit, they’d soon have their replacement killer.
Chapter 7
DEADFALL
I detest all men; some because they are wicked and do evil, others because they tolerate the wicked.
—Molière, The Misanthrope
Tutelage
By the winter of ’81, no one is sure exactly when, Jorgensen had joined an outfit known as the Sierra Singles, a ragtag and mixed-age California social group that used hiking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—about an hour from where Donna Ann Lass’s car was found abandoned at the California-Nevada border—as an icebreaker for mingling and hookups. That same organization, not unlike many singles services of the day, ended up being little more than awkward humdrum, a deflator of expectations. Jorgensen used the yawning chasm that was the distance between those lofty expectations of the members and the more banal realities of real life to assert himself as their de facto leader in no time flat. In an age defined by self-styled pseudocelebrities and avaricious larger-than-life psychopaths who seized the public eye—televangelists, stock swindlers, corporate raiders, bombastic hoteliers—Jorgensen was finally in his element. A man for all seasons. Like any intuitive cult leader and faith healer of the era, Jorgensen talked in clichés and oozed grandiosity as he sought to dominate—as he looked for his next unsuspecting target either within the group or as part of its many excursions. It was the Memorial Library in the spring of ’68 all over again, but with even easier targets. Easier, it seems, than Christine turned out to be.
Donning his army-issue jacket, perhaps for the first time since that fateful Sunday at UW, Jorgensen sought to make it clear to the members of the Sierra Singles that he knew the terrain; he was their leader and that was that. It wasn’t difficult for him to assert himself with what amounted to a remarkably pedestrian group of people who took to nature hikes and other wholesome activities while their colleagues surfed, played the stock market, and immersed themselves in the yuppie consumer culture of early-1980s Southern California. The Sierra Singles were also a captive audience to Jorgensen’s twisted stream of consciousness—his largest audience yet. Sometimes his stories made sense, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were pure fiction and sometimes—as Linda later pieced together—they amounted once again to cryptic confessions of one type or another. Confessions about what he had done and would do again. With his outlandish claims about World War II and his intuitively braggart nature, Jorgensen attracted less the attention of the women in the group as much as one young man named Ezra Jameson. Like Jorgensen, Jameson had a different axial tilt than most Californians of the day—a type of synchronous yet retrograde orbit with the world—that made Jorgensen the ideal mentor. Quid pro quo, Jorgensen, like all malignant narcissists, of course wanted—and needed—a young protégé. Before long they were hand in glove—the minion and the master alike. Jameson was unwittingly to become a real-life manifestation of Quong Sha in The Love Pirate, an irrationally devoted and brainwashed servant who is a “sane and sober influence” on Dr. Corcoran’s actions, and who serves as a foil for the police once the fictive Inspector Dowling and Sergeant Mentzer, the fictional equivalents of men who would later become Detectives Josephson and Lulling, track the missing Annabel to Paradise Valley. But what neither
Jorgensen nor Ezra Jameson knew in the summer of ’81 was that their unlikely friendship would also trigger the indirect involvement of a neutral third party in nearby LA. Their partnership put Jorgensen two degrees of separation away from a woman who, unbeknownst to either of them, had been cultivated as a confidential source by Linda after decrypting the turgid middle chapters of The Love Pirate beginning on page 103:
“A woman was hanging up a few clothes to dry in the yard [and] seemed surprised at the sight of the girl. ‘This is Annabel. Miss Jane Brown,’ he presented them. ‘Annabel’s just—er—my niece.’ Jane Brown put a little tousled jet black toy into Annabel’s hand.”
Jane Brown, Dr. Corcoran’s neighbor in Paradise Valley, aware of the captivity but believing the cover story, unsuspiciously believes that Dr. Corcoran is a “missionary” and can do no wrong when she first appears in The Love Pirate. She even makes Annabel’s confinement more tolerable, unknowingly and unintentionally assisting the doctor in his scheme. Linda believed that Jane Brown’s real name outside the diegesis of the novel was Rita Baron, a name Linda had found in Jorgensen’s high school yearbook at North Hollywood High. She’d been a family friend from day one. As expansive as the continental trek of America had been—as far and wide as the game of cat and mouse she and Jorgensen had been playing for over a decade—by April of ’81, when Linda let off the gas and gave Jorgensen some breathing room, he proved to be as predictable as his ghastly crimes and brought Linda right to him. Linda actually had no idea that Jorgensen had joined the Sierra Singles until she reached out to Rita as part of an ingeniously deceptive ploy to coax details from her on what Jorgensen’s activities had been—what his future plans might hold.
Posing as an NBC researcher doing preliminary background checks on potential candidates for a rebooting of the Ralph Edwards bio program This Is Your Life—arguably America’s first genuine foray into reality television—Linda contacted Rita by telephone. It was under the pretense that Jorgensen’s name had been put forward as an ordinary yet extraordinary American whose story would be told in the pilot episode of a thirtieth-anniversary network reboot studio execs were considering in development meetings. As with every episode in the show’s original run from 1952 to 1961, the research would need to be conducted in absolute secrecy to surprise the guest on the air in front of a studio audience to elicit genuine emotion that his life was about to be profiled. In other words, Rita could not tell Jorgensen of their conversation—nor the conversations to come. Linda even made the call from a pay phone in Burbank just in case Rita got hinky and rang the operator for the outgoing exchange. It was clockwork cloak-and-dagger.
Sure enough, Rita bought into the ruse and gave up Ezra Jameson’s name, told her that she hadn’t seen Jorgensen in person since ’67 when he left for summer “hunting” in Michigan before heading to Madison to finish his residency. Said she’d been to his father’s funeral in ’74 and was shocked to find Jorgensen pulled a no-show—that he’d been told by his mother Heidi not to come. Rita also went on a bit about “poor Søren” and a family splintered, how it was good that Jorgensen recently put his practice on hold in either Arizona or Nevada to come back and look after his mother. “She isn’t well, you know . . .” Rita stressed with an odd and curious inflection. She told Linda about Ezra Jameson, described as a “loner” who looked up to Jorgensen. It wasn’t immediately clear how Rita knew Ezra but it was a lucky connection that Linda played out for all it was worth—near real-time intelligence for the first time in over a decade. While Rita hadn’t seen Jorgensen since the summer of ’67, it seemed Rita saw Ezra weekly, and he reported back to her about their mutual friend. Good ol’ Dr. Jorgensen, Sierra Singles pedagogue—what a guy.
Even in her first phony phone interview, the details gleaned from a clueless Rita were jarring and struck like a cleaver. Ezra, it seemed, was especially impressed how Jorgensen could trap and skin a rabbit with a penknife while the rabbit was still alive. Linda’s blood curdled; he’d not aged out of his sadism. He wasn’t through with his depraved proclivities—and they weren’t through with him. Over thirty years before the FBI finally started tracking and cross-referencing cruelty-to-animal cases against unsolved murder sites—with zoosadism, or sexual excitement through animal torture and mutilation being a known precursor to attacks on humans—Linda instinctively felt that Jorgensen was rehearsing his next crime under the auspices of being a small-game hunter. Ezra didn’t know the difference; he seemed to believe whatever Jorgensen would tell him—did whatever he told him. The next part was predictable save one additional detail. As Rita gushed about Jorgensen’s “heroism at the Bulge,” she also divulged one item that even Ezra had found odd, notably the state of the army jacket that served as the sole material evidence of Jorgensen’s fabricated exploits. Despite allegedly being to the Western Front and back, narrowly escaping with his life and injured leg intact, it seems that Ezra questioned the appearance of recent tattering and fading on what should have been a well-preserved memento of his time in battle—a reminder of fallen friends who never made it home. Knowing full well the whole story was a con, Jorgensen being one of countless frauds to later lay claim to military service, Linda pulled an old trick taught to her by Bill Share back at the Sentinel and feigned genuine ignorance—as though she were hearing of the jacket for the first time—and pined for further details. She empowered Rita as narrator. “Well, you see he had to wash a lot of blood off of it,” Rita volleyed back.
“Whose blood,” Linda countered. Rita didn’t know because Ezra hadn’t asked; all he knew was that it was blood spilled after the war.
“I didn’t think rabbits would shed that much blood,” Rita quipped. Linda considered a response she kept to herself. They don’t.
The Julie Murders
Back in Madison that same April, the history of things past would also reveal itself with an early spring thaw. Just over two years to the day after she was last seen walking along Johnson Street in East Madison, the question of where Julie Speerschneider went after vanishing into the black of that cold March night was answered by a teenaged boy named Charles Byrd. While hiking through the brush along the banks of the Yahara River in the nearby township of Dunn, a river that forms part of the majestic Mississippi’s expansive watershed, Byrd happened upon a skeleton concealed beneath some decaying leaves and brush. It was becoming a tragically familiar tale in rural Wisconsin going back to the Debbie Bennett case. Someone minding his own business soon found himself hurled headlong into the inner workings of yet-another murder mystery, the unwitting discoverer and unlikely witness to a ghastly and enduring scene. By sundown on April 18, 1981, as Dane County Sheriff’s deputies arrived to tape off and guard the scene until first light the following morning, the question of what had happened to Julie Speerschneider was finally answered, and the lore of the Capital City Killer took on a new dimension. Within hours, the existing narrative was already being supplemented by a new sound bite—what the cops themselves were already calling the “Julie Murders.”
The murders were conjoined by a common name and victimology, as well as a number of similarities with respect to MO, including being driven and dumped just under thirty minutes from Madison but both still in Dane County—Hall to the north in Vienna Township, Speerschneider to the south in Dunn Township. The deaths of the two Julies, as the latest succession of Mad City sex slayings, made it clear that, whether or not a single serial killer dating back to the spring of ’68 was fact or fiction, the city was in the throes of a gathering storm. Most drew the conclusion that the latest victim at the very least suggested that the last two cases, the Julie Murders, were the work of a single culprit—a mobile and motivated killer relying on a very specific body disposal pathway. Found by Byrd positioned in a prone, or facedown, position the body was devoid of clothing, jewelry, or any other belongings save an elastic band found entangled in what remained of the hair that was still intact on the skull. Presumed to have been dead for the full two years since her disappearance, the
timeline was in part established through the presence of adipocere on the skeleton. A grayish and gruesome waxlike coating, adipocere can be used to help forensically determine the season in which the decaying process began, with cool and damp conditions at the time of disposal typically leading to the presence of adipocere and some living tissue remaining intact—including scalp hair. Beyond this one item overlooked by the killer, the postmortem movement of the body not only mirrored the circumstances of Julie Ann Hall’s murder, but more specifically a specific breed of organized offender.
An organized offender—versus a disorganized offender—is one who puts tremendous planning into his crimes and has access to resources that often elude the disorganized offender. Both of the Julie murders reflected sexual motivations and, despite the absence of a cause of death or a confirmed sexual assault, disposal of a naked corpse is by definition a sexual homicide, especially since the kidnapping, murder, and concealment of a young female stranger or acquaintance in such circumstances has no other cogent motive. Another one of the principal differences between organized and disorganized killers is that the former owns or has access to a vehicle, a fundamental game changer that opens a realm of possibilities in terms of crime-scene behavior and transportation of a victim, whether dead or alive. No place to where a body is moved is therefore ever random, as traveling with a victim onboard a vehicle, dead or alive, is a rare and risky enough behavior in its own right.
[2017] Mad City Page 21
