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

by Michael Arntfield

  The truth is that there wasn’t a single Jack the Ripper—there were several. He didn’t write letters to the newspapers. Two of the three key documents were confirmed as forgeries created by an unscrupulous newsman named Thomas Bulling. Nor did he conform to the profile cooked up by Dr. Thomas Bond—the forensic pathologist overseeing some of the autopsies, and who later threw himself out a window—who suggested the killer was a society man wandering through the London fog in a black cape and top hat. The killers didn’t include Lewis Carroll or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or the physician to the British royal family as some have ridiculously speculated. The purported Whitechapel Ripper certainly wasn’t some globe-trotting maniac who moved from America where he had reportedly been the Servant Girl Annihilator of Austin, Texas—only to later decide to move to America to become the Axeman of New Orleans as many self-avowed “Ripperologists” have often argued. In fact, given the criminal ecology of London’s Whitechapel district at the time, the murders are just as likely to be message killings between the rival gangs who ran prostitution rings and street-level opium dealing in East London as much as they are the work of one or even two or more serial killers. In truth, the Ripper theory is just as likely a nineteenth-century version of the femicide later seen in Juárez, Mexico, where hundreds of young women, working mostly in the maquiladoras and other sweatshops, have been murdered over the last two decades. With varying motives and MOs, about a third of the tragic Juárez slayings involve sexual assault, and others robbery or extortion. Some are dispatched quickly while others are mutilated in the same fashion as the Whitechapel victims. The circumstances and victim profiles are actually quite similar with one difference—no one is claiming there is a single Juárez Ripper or offering spooky walking tours of the murder scenes. There is no money to be made off of the Mexican femicide, no kitsch industry of novelty mugs, ten-cent tours, or T-shirts. From Whitechapel to Juárez, Madison—it turns out—is the proverbial Rosetta stone. The Mad City is the missing link in explaining how and why cities make murderers.

  Room 119

  The Mad City was, for a time, a Whitechapel in silk stockings. While the houses were nicer and the air cleaner—no London fog, no slanty shanties—the antecedents were in place to recreate the same conditions that allowed the Ripper myth to be borne out of the violence that once deluged East London. In the end, however, Madison didn’t have a “canonical” five victims as the traditional Ripper legend holds. It had a canonical seven. All told, seven victims would be slain at the hands of an equally fictional Capital City Killer—a mythical Wisconsin Ripper. Like Whitechapel before it, some of these city murders were connected to each other and a common offender, and some weren’t. Like the Boston Strangler, the Freeway Killer, and other more recent American serial killer cases mired in false linkages, Madison would soon have its own Ripper myth courtesy of snap judgments and overblown egos. In time, they’d call him the Capital City Killer—a Midwestern Ripper. A man for all seasons.

  As with the equally fictive Ripper before him, the crimes attributed to the Capital City Killer actually happened—there is no arguing that. There is also no arguing that they were nothing short of horrific. The trouble is that, just like the Whitechapel murders, nearly a century before the slayings started in Madison, the myth quickly took over and subsumed any remnant of objectivity. Reality was soon something of an obscure and less interesting footnote to the main story—the preferred folktale—that few ever bothered to fact-check. Like the Age of Aquarius before it, the lore of the Capital City Killer at once swallowed the Mad City and its ragtag assemblage of police departments. These included the city cops—the Madison PD—as well as the Wisconsin State Police, the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, and—last but certainly the worst hit—the UW campus police. Before long, hack reporters fanned flames while campus scuttlebutt trumped official press releases from the authorities. Eventually the press releases stopped and only urban legend prevailed—the same legends that clouded the facts and enabled false linkages in a series of killings that would cast a twenty-year shadow over UW, Madison, and even the entire Midwest. From Jack the Ripper to the Capital City Killer, it seems that history and myth can make strange bedfellows. Sometimes, it might even suit the interests of those in charge.

  Initially a theory rejected wholesale by police, the legend of a single serial killer stalking the campus and area surrounding UW ultimately evolved into a war of attrition and took on a life of its own. Before long, it was Capital City Killer here, Capital City Killer there. He was everywhere, wanted and on the lam for every crime—ever. If the dates might have realistically lined up, local cops, politicos, and the opportunists newly freed from the Wisconsin woodwork would have put him on the grassy knoll for the JFK snuff in ’63, on a ladder outside the Lindbergh home in ’32, and at Calvary for the crucifixion.

  But Linda Tomaszewski knew better. She knew by the summer of ’68 that whoever killed her new best friend, Christine, didn’t stay in the Mad City. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He would keep moving as he had before—as he always would. He would be forever walking into the lives of vulnerable young women when he knew they weren’t looking. He had an eye for them, for young girls like Christine—trusting, naïve, pure. Sometimes, he’d strike closer to home—against those who trusted him most. But while the cops chased mirages for years on end and the Capital City Killer became the proverbial boogeyman of Madison—especially in the hallowed halls of UW—Linda was chasing a real serial killer.

  A tale of two dorms. Left: Two female UW students are squired by a young man to the front doors of the monolithic Witte Hall, built in the Brutalist style and designed to maximize occupancy. Right: The more traditional and quiet—and isolated—Ann Emery Hall, where Christine Rothschild lived in room 119 for the final months of her life while attending UW. Courtesy: UW–Madison Archives Collection & Wisconsin Historical Society.

  Linda’s freshman year at UW was spent living, as many young women at UW did, within the confines of the dormitory known as Witte Hall. In the fall of ’67, the building looked more like the YWCA than it did a traditional dorm. It still does. Ten stories spread across two towers—a concreted-poured exterior, punch-hole windows—bisected by a central common, the place is a perfectly uninspired cube of conformity. Once upon a time, it also packed in thousands of students at two to a room, all females. Against a more traditional collegiate Gothic backdrop, the monolith of Witte Hall was quite clearly the unwanted stepchild of campus buildings, one built in the raw, fortress-like Brutalism that defined much of the new construction of the 1950s and ’60s. But, with history at UW soon set to change, it was also a place that offered safety in numbers.

  Christine, on the other hand, lived at the much more private and reclusive Ann Emery Hall during her freshman year, less a dormitory itself as much as it was a traditional boarding house. It was intended by her father to serve as a not-so-secret prelude to the type of exclusive living Christine’s life might allow if she didn’t stray too far from the nest—if she exorcised what she had to at UW and came home as expected.

  Between Linda and Christine, the dichotomy of Witte Hall and Ann Emery came to underscore their odd-couple pasts as much as it did their present circumstances—and their tragic shared future. An old and stately looking Tudor Revival–style structure, Ann Emery Hall had an assortment of aged housemistresses who kept eyes on the first-year girls who lived there. They were girls who came and went through a dated yet opulently furnished front parlor—luxurious English country pieces, richly polished Comtoise clocks—all of which could easily be mistaken for the velvet-pillowed lobby ornaments of the old-money Ridgemoor Club back in Christine’s native Chicago. It was also a space unspoiled by modern conveniences and security mechanisms. There was no controlled entry, no intercom, no cameras or convex mirrors, and no sign-in book. For a motivated predator, Ann Emery Hall would prove to be the perfect soft target.

  On a typical day after class, Christine would head back to room 119 at Ann Emery Hall—singl
e bed, single occupancy, no visitors—without a care in the world, and throw an Aretha Franklin album on her turntable before flipping open something by Yeats or Keats. Sometimes she would take pen to paper and write her own prose and poetry, much of it dark and solemn. One such poem, written in free verse, she titled “You’re a Sad Campus, Wisconsin,” digging into what she saw as the counterculture facades that many students and faculty, otherwise scared half to death of the real world, adopted as a pretense in and out of the classroom.

  By spring thaw, it had been a long and sad winter for Christine while living at Ann Emery Hall and at UW generally. The shorter days also meant longer nights—endless nights it seemed for “Chris,” as Linda called her, who, by the spring of ’68, also knew that she had an unwanted nightly caller outside her ground-floor window. There was someone, some invisible but sentient force, lurking in the seemingly interminable darkness of an endless Wisconsin winter behind the threadbare curtains of her dorm room. Someone was stalking her—a peeper, prowler, some kind of twisted sleepwatcher, she wasn’t sure. By the time April came around, he had also started calling her room. It began with the typical heavy breathing and guttural groaning, or what psychology textbooks call telephone scatologia—someone who obtains sexual arousal and power from the fear elicited through making, typically repeated, anonymous and menacing calls. In time, he began to do more than just breathe and make bizarre noises. In time, he came to speak. With an intentionally demonic sounding and dramatized tenor, the caller would tell Christine what she was wearing, what time she got home, what time she turned out the lights—even how her body looked when she was asleep. He could see her through the translucent curtains. He could see everything. Well before the clinical and forensic literature had assigned the name somnophilia to describe this bizarre and dangerous fixation on sleeping and helpless people—typically women—a particular brand of peeping linked with all sorts of other disorders, including necrophilia, the caller made it clear that he wasn’t going away anytime soon. On the contrary, he was escalating—and quickly.

  Unfortunately, at age eighteen and feeling invincible as any eighteen-year-old does, Christine still had no idea by late April of ’68 just how much danger she was actually in. She had no concept of the events that had already been set in motion—the laws of inertia at work behind the curtain, both literally and figuratively, and the finality that had already been wrought. She would bring up the unsettling calls in passing to Linda when they’d meet for their daily coffee outside Bascom Hall, a bench situated in the shadow of President Lincoln’s statue at their usual meeting spot. Other times, it might be at Rennebohm’s, the most popular milkshake and short-order joint among students at UW. As she explained to Linda, Christine wasn’t sure if the figure she could discern through the cheesecloth curtains of room 119 was real or illusory—if the calls were real or part of the spate of nightmares she’d been having about someone following her. She was too afraid to pull back the curtain to make sure—too paralyzed by fear to call the phone company to check, much less call the police. She thought, and perhaps even hoped, that her mind might have been playing tricks on her, her starvation diet and a bout of Wisconsin cabin fever having ravaged her cognition to the point of imagining it all.

  One thing for certain was that, if the calls were real, they were getting more frequent, more intense, more foreboding. Linda implored Christine to report the nighttime calls to the cops of jurisdiction, the UW Five-O, just to be sure. Linda also asked her to think about who might be behind the calls, who exactly the self-admitted sleepwatcher and night stalker could be. Perhaps it was someone from class or perhaps an overzealous member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist she attended while in Madison at the insistence of her loving but inevitably domineering parents. As Linda already knew from Christine’s other weekly tales, there was no shortage of courtiers and creeps at both locales to populate a list of likely suspects. The truth was, however, that, by the time she let Linda in on the dark secret of the man haunting her room at Ann Emery through the curtains and by telephone, Christine had already figured out exactly who it was. She also knew—tragically—that there was no stopping him.

  Chapter 2

  THE SLEEPWATCHER

  It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  April Fool

  In March of ’68, roughly a month before the night stalking, sleepwatching, and twisted phone calls started in earnest, Christine had taken to sequestering herself in UW’s Memorial Library reading room between classes and even on weekends. It was perhaps the last vestige of solitude amid the social turbulence of a rowdy campus where she could find some alone time and marshal her thoughts. The place was something of a cozy hideaway within the hub of the library proper, drawing in that special type of bookworm seeking a respite from the vexing rowdiness that pervaded the rest of the building. It was quieter, less crowded, and more intimate. The downside was that the room was also a veritable fishbowl where everyone inside was backlit and on display—cluelessly voyeurized—within a self-contained glass terrarium. It was the perfect place to sit and watch, to sit and wait. It was the perfect locale to beset a coveted prize from a distance. It was the perfect spot to spring a trap.

  Enter Niels Bjorn Jorgensen, MD. Forty-two years old, a lecherous, unrelenting narcissist, and a pathological liar to beat the band. Standing a lanky six feet on the dot, thinning blond hair with steely blue eyes that looked reptilian black in the right light. He was nothing if not an unsettling presence when he officially arrived on campus on April Fools’ Day ’68—a natural-born bedlamite. As a self-proclaimed veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, he said he was a field medic sergeant assigned to the 117th—said he took shrapnel in the leg while crossing the Ardennes on Christmas Eve ’44. Now, out of thin air, it seemed, he’d materialized in Madison. He arrived in the Mad City, he said, to button up his medical residency, drawn there from Michigan via California, from as far away as South Africa before that. He hailed from nowhere in particular and yet everywhere, it seemed—a veritable nomad—and had come to UW to begin his third year med school residency in general surgery. Apparently he was completing his residency on some sort of odd piecemeal installment plan at universities that would take him here and there. In the spring of ’68 the “here” was, for reasons that no one ever really knew, the city of Madison—the UW campus hospital, a teaching hospital, as his home base. It didn’t take long before Jorgensen started giving coworkers there—doctors, nurses, even the orderlies—the heebie-jeebies. Cold and arrogant with a shallow affect, he would soon also prove to be a convincing social chameleon when it suited him. A textbook psychopath, Jorgensen appeared in town like an apparition, touting faraway credentials and reveling in what he called the “opportunities” a place like the Mad City offered him. No one was ever really sure what that meant, what he was really about, or where he came from. He simply showed up one day and that was that.

  Niels Jorgensen arrived at UW to begin his latest medical school residency in general surgery at the campus hospital in April of 1968. At age forty-five, Jorgensen was roughly twenty years older than his peers and had a strangely suspicious résumé that seemed to go unverified. Soon enough, his true colors would come to the fore.

  Jorgensen’s backstory before getting into medicine as a midlife career was a mystery long before anyone started to look into it. It was an ever-changing series of yarns, all of which were really never anything less than arcane. What was clear was that his spare time, as best anyone could tell, was spent aimlessly prowling the campus or sitting for hours on end in the Memorial reading room—usually when Christine was there. Later, it was only when Christine was there. The problem was that he never checked out any books. Nor was he known to ever talk about books, save one—something called The Love Pirate that would soon be published. Had anyone gone looking, they’d have known the pages of that manuscript were a codex of Jorgensen’s real past deeds—the book provided th
e elusive answers to who and what Jorgensen really was by the time he arrived in Madison; the book was the dark backstory of where he was and what he had done before he mysteriously matriculated at UW. It was also a window into an even darker future.

  But by the end of that same April, Christine knew exactly who Jorgensen was—what he really was about. After targeting her for most of that month, shadowing her in the library and peering at her from between the shelves, prowling around outside her bedroom window at Ann Emery and calling her room, he escalated to the point of following her out to the library smoke pit as she indulged in her hourly compulsion. It was there that he made his first real approach. But Christine instantly made the connection. True to form, she was weirded out and summarily rebuffed him, crushing out a newly lit cigarette and heading back inside. She had immediately recognized his game, and her instincts spelled “trouble” in living Technicolor. Humans, Christine knew, were the only species on the planet to have socialized themselves out of the evolutionary survival instincts. She knew that girls would get in cars, talk to strange men, or even reveal their names and addresses when asked, afraid of looking rude or ungracious even when their primordial gut instincts told them it was dangerous—even when their gut instincts told them that there was really nothing random about random chance encounters. Women, she knew, had in some sense come to place outward appearances and ladylike decorum ahead of listening to those same instincts. Predators knew it. That’s how, after all, girls got talked into cars, why they never ran for help when they thought they were being followed. But Christine trusted her gut instinct, a female intuition refined over tens of thousands of years of evolution and shaped by her life back east in the big city. So when the good doctor feigned being in need of a light for a battered old cigarette, Christine recognized it as a textbook prop and called him out on it—told him to take a hike and made her way back into the library on the double to find safety in numbers. But it was all of little help in preventing the inevitable. At that time and place, for reasons beyond Christine’s control, the die was cast. The plaster had set.