Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot

by Michael Arntfield

  Soft Target

  Christine’s background in the Edgewater section of Chicago was the antithesis of Linda’s upbringing in Milwaukee. Maybe that’s why they gelled. Linda’s working-class origins were at once a badge she’d wear close to her heart and also a blight she’d keep concealed from the blue-blooded and boringly repetitive New Englanders with whom she shared lecture halls and dorm bathrooms at UW in the fall of ’67. Many were predictably messed-up trust-fund punks from NYC and metro Boston who couldn’t cut the Ivy League and whose folks had sent them to UW to play grown-up for a few years, flunk out, and then come home humbled and supplicating—with hat in hand. But Christine was different; from day one Linda knew that she was a notable exception. She was a genuine outlier whom Linda read like an open book: old money, cerebral, yet humble—even vulnerable. Hailing from a five-star family in a manicured north-end neighborhood in lakefront Chicago, Christine’s father was a wealthy industrialist who, among other things, reportedly held the first patent on what would later become the automated parking garage boom gate. Christine grew up in a three-story, quintessentially Federal-style home on Kenmore Street, just minutes from Wrigley Field, and was an honors graduate of the tony Senn Secondary on nearby Glenwood Avenue. There she had managed to graduate fourth in her class of five hundred while also serving as all-school class president, a member of the French club, and both writer and editor for the school newspaper. But despite her privileged upbringing and modeling gigs—a regular for Teen Fashion News Sheet and other look books for Magnificent Mile clothiers—Christine epitomized modesty. Not only modesty, in fact, but thoughtfulness. She wore no jewelry, only donned flat shoes, and sported little if any makeup. Unlike her friends back home in the Windy City, Christine cared more about the UNICEF initiatives in Africa than who wore what at the Academy Awards. Then there was her mother.

  A well-heeled woman and well-intentioned dilettante, Christine’s mother, Patria, had by the summer of ’67 when Christine matriculated at UW, already buried two sons, dead in separate tragedies. By that same fall, she had also taken to toiling in hobbies in which women like her always seemed to excel—buying and collecting things that weren’t for sale. She could be found setting out doilies one day and hanging a Picasso—a real Picasso—on the dining room wall the next. She was an immaculate hostess and an inveterate aesthete, a big-city socialite if there ever was one. But ahead of Christine’s departure for UW that same August, her mother bought her something that actually was for sale—an opal ring purchased on first sight from a glass case at Bloomingdale’s on the city’s famed Magnificent Mile. It was one of the few pieces of jewelry that Christine ever wore outside of a Chicago-area catalogue—the only one she wore to UW. Christine’s mother would later go to her grave believing unequivocally that that same ring, like the Hope Diamond before it, was hexed. That it was an augury of evil—a harbinger of pain.

  By the time Christine arrived at UW, she, like Linda, was keenly aware that—despite her parents’ best intentions—she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d always wanted to attend an East Coast college, maybe the same Ivy League campuses that the moneyed detritus of UW, now her peers and classmates, never got into. Maybe a university in Canada or Scandinavia. Her parents had flat-out forbidden it. Maybe Columbia and then go on to become a journalist for a major NYC daily, she once thought; maybe Princeton and, from there, a political columnist—a witty pundit and satirist. Maybe Smith in Northampton, maybe Vassar in Poughkeepsie. Although Christine loved to read and to write—and loved to travel even more—the schools that really jazzed her and opened up the world for her were summarily deemed off-limits by her Christian Scientist family. New England, and especially New York, were out of bounds—full stop. Christine needed to be closer to home, her parents asserted, forever within reach—always on a short leash. Of those colleges within the perimeter of that leash, her parents thought the safest campus for their little girl was UW. Her parents thought wrong.

  Left: A key turning point in the history of the Mad City. As a crowd of gawkers looks on, the very public 1954 Russ family murder-suicide marked a rude awakening for many about the violent underbelly of Madison that would reach critical mass just over a decade later. Right: By the late 1960s, arrests along Main Street and near the UW campus, the perceived sanctuary of the city, were increasingly common. In this case, a Madison police officer pursues a cavalier suspect who saunters away from the scene of a theft. Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society.

  In reality, the protective cocoon her parents were weaving for Christine was a mechanism that kept her from escaping as much as it was one that prevented danger from getting in—a double dead bolt on the only exit in a burning building. By the time she first arrived at UW, Christine was also severely bulimic, depressed, and had left her Mag Mile high-end Chicago threads back home. She had by that fall taken to wearing garments—mostly shifts—sewn by her sister, Roxanne, which were typically a couple of sizes too large. The clothes also managed to serve the secondary purpose of masking just how ravaged her body had become by the fall of ’67; the Christian Scientists had told her that disorders of the body and the mind alike were mere illusions and forbade her from seeking medical attention or intervention—period. In reality, life behind closed doors on uptown Kenmore Street wasn’t as perfect as it seemed, or as it ever appears to be anywhere. Subsisting on Folgers and garden salad—the consistently banal binge that prefaced each and every purge—years of catalogue modeling in Chicago for stores such as Marshall Field’s, Saks, and the litany of high-end boutiques and clothiers along the downtown “Loop” had sanded down Christine’s identity as much as it had her bodily frame. It had whittled her down to being little more—in her mind at least—than a sentient shop-window mannequin first, Christine Rothschild as a person second. But when Christine and Linda first met by happenstance, sharing a laugh when some generic UW stoner of the day tripped over a brochure rack and fell ass over teakettle onto the floor of Dean Ruedisili’s waiting room in South Hall in late August ’67, the ice was summarily broken. It was there and then—the only two students in the waiting room that day—that Linda saw the real Christine for who she was and in the flesh. Christine saw Linda back. She saw herself back—her reflection smiling for the first time in years in Linda’s eyes. Soon, they were kindred spirits. It was a chance meeting that would change their lives. It was a chance meeting that would change a city and state’s criminal history at once. It’s a history that, until now, it seems few have ever known about.

  During that late summer and into the balmy autumn of ’67, following their separate arrivals at UW, Linda and Christine weren’t the only strangers in a strange land. By September of that year, Madison was a place that, in good faith it seems, lowered the drawbridge and invited in trouble. It had unwittingly become a veritable helipad for psychopaths landing there from all over the Midwest and beyond. If conventional criminology prior to the 1960s taught us anything useful, it’s that amid this same type of cultural upheaval and social disorganization, much like the metaphysical curtain that the Celts thought was pulled back every Halloween night, such pickings are prime targets for predators looking to walk into—and destroy—the lives of innocents when they aren’t looking. Cities such as Madison and places such as UW were to become the proverbial soft targets that many larger and even stereotypically more “dangerous cities” could never offer up so easily. Before the clinical and forensic literature on psychopaths, which was to later come and ultimately verify what the annals of crime had already shown, a more anecdotal history confirmed that perceptively safe cities caught up in great migrations and celebrations tend to simultaneously invite in and ignore homicidal threats at a rate rarely seen in more perceptively perilous locales. Consider, by way of comparison, the World’s Fair of 1893 in Christine Rothschild’s hometown of Chicago. It was, ostensibly, a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus discovering America. It also ended up being what likely remains the single greatest protracted bloodb
ath on American soil at the hands of an American citizen.

  Known at the time as the Columbian National Exposition, the 1893 iteration of the now iconic World’s Fair was hosted in Chicago between May and October of that year, seeing millions of international tourists descend on the city without much of a plan—much less a care. Their objectives were little more than to take in some sights, soak up the town, and find a place to bed down for a few weeks. Many of the exhibitors, promoters, and performers would, of course, be staying for several months—for the entirety of the event—as would the service-class workers who sought out Chicago as something of an Industrial Era oasis with tourists inevitably paying and tipping in cash. Beyond that, no one knew where their friends, coworkers, or loved ones would be at any given time or would be staying for any prolonged period, much less when they arrived in Chicago or when they planned to leave. It was a psychopath’s delight and, all the while, one man lay in wait—Herman Mudgett, aka H. H. Holmes.

  At the corner of 63rd and South Wallace in South Chicago, Holmes by 1893 had built an ostentatious structure the locals ominously coined “the Castle.” Well ahead of the World’s Fair but predicting the opportunities it would provide in terms of a stocked pond of easy victims—soft targets—Holmes began bankrolling construction of the fortified building with blood money. His first step was to murder his employer at the pharmacy across the street from the building site and then to remortgage the store’s assets to first get shovels in the ground. The Castle that was later built, and on initial appearance, was deemed to be a stately hotel catering to visitors to the Windy City and, more specifically, the upcoming World’s Fair. In reality, it was a built-to-suit deathtrap designed so that guests would check in and never check out—literally. There were suite doors with no interior handles and lace curtains drawn across false, bricked-up windows—all to prevent escape following check-in. Some rooms were disguised gas chambers and others torture chambers. The basement boiler room was a proverbial hell on Earth where the victims—guests, visitors, employees, deliverymen—were stripped of flesh and their bones reassembled for sale to medical schools as articulated skeletons for study by students unaware of the ghastly origins of the specimens used by their professors. By the time of his arrest by Pinkerton agents in November of 1894 after fleeing north to Canada and hiding out—and killing—in the city of Toronto, Holmes’s imposing edifice back in Chicago had become the awe of Southside schoolchildren. They assigned it a new name that the press would ensure to make headlines worldwide—the “Murder Castle.” The new moniker was beyond well deserved. Holmes is thought to have lured up to two hundred people to their deaths and subsequent acid baths over the course of the World’s Fair, including migrant service staff who were hired off the books in many cases and never seen or heard from again. Yet, despite the magnitude of his crimes, Holmes remains simultaneously the least understood and most understudied serial killer in American history, in large part due to the vintage of his crimes and the deplorable state of police record keeping at the time. What we do know, however, as author Erik Larson theorizes in the book The Devil in the White City, is that Holmes was America’s first verifiable serial killer by modern definition, and, potentially, to this day its worst. More importantly, he was the first known serial or mass murderer to settle in a city and premeditate his crimes based on the specific social ecology of that same city. In some sense, Holmes profiled Chicago as his hunting ground based on its dynamism and disorganization—the fact that people would arrive there while swept up in something bigger than they were and inevitably let their guard down. With the Chicago fair of 1893, the malevolent psychopath was born and, with it, the great American city became a dangerous place. A hunting ground writ large.

  True to form, H. H. Holmes was a criminal psychopath—that fraction of the roughly 1 percent of the population who are existing psychopaths—those with the power to change history, destroy lives on a grand scale, and change the social complexion of entire cities forever. Although only a small number of that same 1 percent of psychopaths actually amount to violent sexual predators in the vein of H. H. Holmes, sadly, they’re also what might be called the “vocal minority,” the most motivated and prominent of psychopaths. Cities such as Madison in ’67 amid the Age of Aquarius would have been, as was fin de siècle Chicago for H. H. Holmes, noteworthy places for earmarking by men of a similar mindset—destinations on their radar from the get-go. The Mad City was by the Summer of Love a proverbial chessboard where there were pawns to be summarily scarified and more coveted prizes to be had. In search of such spoils, men such as Holmes would be drawn there. In Madison, some of these same types of men would also be drawn there; some would stay, and at least one would come and later go. After he did so, Linda would follow him from the city and stay on his tail—forever shadowing him to make sure he never struck again. She would ensure that he never settled in another soft target city to pick up where he left off, as he did in Madison. She would ensure it never happened again.

  Penny Dreadful

  The fact that no one can estimate with any certainty just how many victims were lured to their death in the Chicago hotel of horrors constructed by Holmes reflects the stark reality that a great deal of murder investigation was—and still is—pure guesswork. In fact, today there are no fewer than twenty of the largest American cities where, if you’re murdered right now while reading this book, the chances of your killer being apprehended are no better than 15 percent. The odds are even worse if you’re killed at random, which in some cities accounts for over 90 percent of unsolved homicides. The numeracy is both unassailable and inscrutable—not to mention terrifying. It also reflects the fact that denial for many otherwise intelligent people is a necessary survival skill. It confirms that we all prefer stories, whether fact or fiction, that have a discernible villain, as evidenced by Holmes’s tell-all for the Hearst newspaper empire printed immediately prior to his execution—he thus became the first of countless cases of serial killers to be anointed as a celebrity by the commercial media of their day. In the end, it’s easier to process the idea of a single criminal psychopath being the sole cause of so much mayhem rather than to spread responsibility among many—to acquiesce to the stark reality that a greater number of murders than previously thought might actually be separate, random events.

  The uncomfortable alternative would be to believe that, as far back as 1893, Holmes may have killed as few as two hundred people while another eighteen hundred or so of the suspected two thousand murders that occurred in Chicago and the surrounding area during this period might have been the product of multiple offenders, each with varying methods and motives. The idea that Holmes single-handedly killed all of them is, not surprisingly, more palatable than the thought that these tourists and wage laborers might have been dispatched in an assortment of random incidents by an equally random assortment of discrete offenders. Psychologically, humans as a species need answers—a face, a name, a reason. We don’t want to believe, even in a city like Chicago that’s been racked by violence since its founding, that a monster like Holmes could exist alongside other killers—murderers who were themselves never caught. We need to make Holmes the beginning—and end—of it all. But it’s when there is no face and no name to assign blame to—no villain to simultaneously titillate and terrify—that things really unravel and history gets it wrong. Of course, five years before H. H. Holmes began murdering in earnest, Jack the Ripper had become a household name not only in London, England, but also across Europe and the Americas. And while there is no question that women in the East London slum of Whitechapel were being slaughtered during this same period, the explanation for these deaths would go on to become pure fiction.

  A September 1888 headline in the British “penny dreadful” Illustrated Police News marked the beginning of the mass hysteria that came to define the Whitechapel murders still credited to the mysterious Jack the Ripper. In reality, the total of eleven murders committed in East London between 1888 and 1891 are the work of mult
iple killers, the Ripper having become the criminological equivalent of Bigfoot and other modern-day legends and hoaxes.

  The truth is that fiction disguised as history and legitimized by people who ought to know better is still fiction. The multimillion-dollar murderabilia and dark tourism industry spawned by those same Whitechapel murders initially began with the penny papers of the era, or “penny dreadfuls” as they were known—cheap, lurid, and exploitative, somewhere between comic book and tabloid—and went from bad to worse from there, setting the stage for twentieth-century disinformation tactics by the media to increase circulation. The fact is that the Ripper legend is little more than just that—legend. His existence in nineteenth-century London marked the predictable creation of a character to whom the police and the public alike could attribute blame and work into a believable narrative, the Ripper simply being alchemized into existence through a complicated yet cumulative threefold phenomenon. This included: firstly, overzealous reportage by an often unscrupulous news media; secondly, a public with a penchant for legend and superstition at the expense of fact; and, lastly, the ease with which what are known as false linkages can be made, especially when police are in over their heads—not to mention desperate for a patsy. If this sounds familiar it’s because it would happen again. And again.

  Before long, the Ripper becomes the Strangler in Boston in 1963, once again through false linkages and media meddling. He later transmutes into the Freeway Killer in 1970s California, which was three separate serial killers, all later caught, their discrete victims’ deaths for years having been wrongly connected to a single sex slayer. Later, he’s the North Side Strangler, already mentioned, in Milwaukee where three men get erroneously linked to and blamed for one’s man’s reign in murder. Between erroneously inflating and deflating the number of suspects for whom the police should be looking, the annals of history are sadly chalk full of such errors of homicidal arithmetic. In the meantime, in the Mad City—1968 through 1984—the Ripper reemerges, this time as the so-called Capital City Killer. Same myth, different city. Different moniker, same incompetence.