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

by Michael Arntfield

  By then, Jorgensen had been to the reading room enough to know when Christine came and when she left—and most importantly where she went after she left. Christine had led him right back to Ann Emery—right to her ground-floor room. He soon began watching her there from a distance, a sinister foot surveillance conducted by hiding in plain sight amid the daily cabaret that was the disjointed herd of eclectic characters roaming the campus. It was the perfect place to blend in, to watch from afar, and to get Christine’s routine down pat. Somehow he obtained her first name and then later her last name, perhaps from the Ann Emery lobby directory, perhaps by just asking around. We will likely never know. He then might have even obtained more personal particulars from her medical records, to which he would have had access at the UW campus hospital where Christine twice the previous fall had received treatment for her bulimia. It was the same MO that had worked so well before—he’d been there and done that. However he went about it, in a matter of days, Christine moved from being Jorgensen’s pet project to a point of fixation, what we classify today as stranger-sexual predator stalking. Unlike other forms of stalking behavior, such as stranger-obsessional or domestic-anger stalking, which are associated with either some type of personality disorder or severe mental illness, the stranger-sexual predator knows precisely what he is doing and how it will end. It is also, not unsurprisingly, the stalker typology most commonly correlated with serial rape and serial murder.

  Through the looking glass: This shows one of the countless windows, some facing outdoors and some facing into the library proper, that encircled the Memorial reading room. Students seeking solace there soon found themselves continuously on display. It was here that Jorgensen first set eyes on Christine and set his sinister plan into action. Courtesy: UW–Madison Archives Collection.

  Night Swim

  On the morning of May 24, 1968—a Friday—Linda made her usual trek from Witte Hall to Ann Emery to call on Christine. In fact, not so much to call on her but to let her know that their usual Saturday night routine of watching the swim team meet at the campus natatorium—the UW “Nat” on Observatory Drive—had to be kiboshed at the last minute. Thrown under the bus simultaneously by her English lit, geology, and philosophy profs, and drowning in term-paper assignments, Linda would have to abandon the campus for the weekend to pull consecutive all-nighters back home in Milwaukee. Trying to pull all-nighters at UW, especially at Witte Hall where everyone had spring fever—and on a weekend no less—was little more than a recipe for aggravation and wasted time. Linda knew it to be true, even with the advertised but unenforced “quiet hours” and a nightly curfew imposed to buoy good study habits before term finals. So she booked herself a one-way ticket on the Badger Bus to get back to her folks’ place in Milwaukee. Her father would be working at the firehouse and her mother, a freelance waitress and catering maven, would be, no doubt, serving highballs at a swanky downtown hotel—like the Astor, the Pfister, or the Knickerbocker—at yet another banquet or wedding. Their mutual absences would therefore leave Linda with the main floor of the home to herself for the better part of two days and nights. Silence and solitude were great gifts for the studious and cerebral Linda after a year living in a dormitory at UW, always well worth the road trip back to the old neighborhood.

  The Badger Bus, a campus “shuttle” in the form of a chartered chrome-yellow school bus ferrying students from campus to outlying cities on weekends for a mere buck or two, would get her home, with stops, in just under two hours. Before boarding, Linda made what would be the final trek to Ann Emery to see Christine and relay a message. But Christine wasn’t there. She was back at the Memorial reading room—the fishbowl—where Jorgensen was putting his final plan in motion. Although Linda didn’t know it then, the last time she would ever see Christine alive had already come and gone. It was two days earlier almost to the hour—Wednesday, May 22.

  On that morning, just after 11:00 a.m., Linda, while waiting at the crosswalk outside South Hall, saw Christine hiking up Bascom Hill on campus. Linda recognized her new pair of black thigh-high boots, or Jane Fonda boots as they were known by the spring of ’68 following their prominence in the campy sci-fi film Barbarella. She also recognized the art attaché that Christine was toting and was never seen without. At the time, Christine was making a beeline with that same signature art case straight toward two campus cops on foot patrol. Linda squinted to make out their faces, ones she’d later never forget. On the right was Officer Roger Golemb, green and straight out of the academy—apparently declared “police essential” and sent to cop school instead of being drafted to Vietnam. On the left was Reinhold “Tiny” Frey—called “tiny” because, of course, he wasn’t. Christine caught a glimpse of Linda and waved while yelling, “See you for the swim meet Saturday night.” Linda nodded and gave a flick of her right-hand fingers as if to convey, that’s right.

  Linda had just remembered that gesture, the subtle see you then pantomime, as she knocked on Christine’s door at Ann Emery Hall after rushing there on Friday to let her know that she couldn’t meet up with her after all. But with no answer at room 119 and the Badger Bus warming up and the seats quickly filling—first come first served—Linda pulled a scrap of lecture-hall paper from her tote bag and scratched a quick letter to be wedged in the doorjamb:

  Chris,

  Headed home for weekend . . . getting papers done. Sorry I have to miss the swim tomorrow night. Call me at my parents’ number if you like. Probably staying until Monday. Will come by again Tuesday if I don’t hear from you.

  Linda

  Without much of a second thought, Linda folded the note lengthwise and shimmed it in the door frame before heading back to the bus and splitting for three days—a seventy-two-hour pass from UW, from Witte Hall, from the unforeseen things yet to come. What Linda didn’t know when she’d passed Christine was that she had been talking to campus cops about Jorgensen. Christine had put two and two together and figured out that he, the older creepy medical resident who introduced himself in the smoke pit, was in all likelihood her nocturnal stalker, the Peeping Tom, and the sleepwatcher whom she knew paid a visit to her window and lurked in the bushes outside night after night. Ever since she had blown him off in the Memorial Library smoke pit, his presence in the reading room had remained constant and unflinching. A presence, however, that had also become more intense—more ominous by the day. By May 22, she was also certain that he was following her every move since she regularly caught glimpses of him between classes in the corridors, his face mostly concealed by a newspaper or an umbrella at Rennebohm’s and most of her other usual hangouts. Once armed with this same information on Bascom Hill, the sage advice offered by Officers Frey and Golemb amounted to precious nothing. They assured her that it was likely all in her mind. If not, she should do what many girls did for peace of mind and to guard against trouble should it ever happen—buy a rape whistle. It wasn’t until after it was all over—said and done, dead and buried—that Linda discovered all of this. But it wasn’t gleaned from any official reports, because there were none, but instead from Golemb himself—one of countless interviews Linda later took on all alone. It turned out that this was neither the first nor the last time in life, and later in death, that Christine would be failed by those she was taught to trust.

  Back in Milwaukee, in the wee hours of what was by now Monday morning, the twenty-seventh—Linda, still up and writing a biographical essay on Lord Byron for her English lit class—the rotary dial phone on the kitchen wall rang. She snagged it off the receiver by the end of the first ring for fear it would wake her grandparents two floors up or her mother on her lone night off. A gruff voice on the other end quickly kicked in. Identifying himself only as “Officer Hendrickson, UW Campus PD,” the caller asked Linda to confirm her name. She did—hesitantly. “What’s this about, officer?” she offered as a rejoinder, hardly believing that a campus cop would be so cavalier as to call her at her parents’ home at such an hour—the clock stove reading 2:17 a.m.—much l
ess that he had any important reason to do so.

  “Do you know Christine Rothschild?” he added, doing so with a wary tone. Given the hour and her time-honored sense of teenaged invincibility, Linda failed to recognize the call for what it was at the time—a real cop, and a very real problem. The cop then did what cops do and followed up with an immediate second question: “When’s the last time you saw her?” Linda, doing what perceptively invincible young people do when they’re caught off guard and fail to see the truth of what’s unfolding in front of them, then flippantly answered that question with a tongue-in-cheek question of her own. “What, did someone spike her fruit punch at the First Church?”

  Click. The line then went dead—the man calling himself Officer Hendrickson had hung up, apparently receiving all the information he needed. But Linda still resigned herself to the belief that it must have been a crank call. If not, then at most it had to be a young campus patrolman—someone crushing on Christine and overstepping his authority to play good cop a little too earnestly—calling some known associates at an inappropriate hour as part of some half-assed courtship scheme. What Linda didn’t know is that she wasn’t a known associate. Christine Rothschild didn’t have “known associates,” not at UW—not anywhere. The police had obtained Linda’s name from the note left back at room 119 at Ann Emery Hall. The cops had been to the room. They had been in the room.

  Later that same morning following her tortuous all-nighter, Linda, somewhere between half awake, half asleep, and a state of caffeine intoxication—shakes and nausea galore—sat down with the local yellow pages to call and confirm the time the next Badger Bus left for campus. At the same time, her father, just home himself from the firehouse and comparatively well rested after a quiet night, flipped on the Zenith stereophonic console tuner to catch the late-morning news flash on local MTMJ, 620 AM. To Linda, who by that time had been at UW for nine months and had seen the latest array of newfangled gadgets the moneyed New Englanders had—the nine-track cassette, the Lear Jet Stereo 8—her parents’ hulking mahogany-encased hi-fi looked more like the type of sarcophagus Howard Carter might have dragged out of King Tut’s tomb back in November of ’22 than what most people of the day would call a radio. But from the depths of that dark wooden chest bought on layaway two decades prior, the disembodied voice of a Midwestern newsman strung together a series of words he called the local top story: “Eighteen-year-old coed found murdered yesterday has now been identified as Christine Rothschild, a native of Chicago.” It was an announcement that would alter Linda’s life course—a story that would change the criminal complexion of the Mad City forever.

  Dew Point

  A day earlier, just after noon on the twenty-sixth, three days before the end of term and the campus eerily quiet, a family from the nearby town of Waukesha—later made infamous in the Slender Man stabbing case of 2014—pulled its station wagon onto the private, winding roads of the UW property as part of a usual Sunday drive. In the late 1960s, it was apparently something of a Wisconsin state pastime to load the family into the car on rainy spring Sundays to tour the local UW campuses—La Crosse, Whitewater, and of course Madison—in order to take in the architecture and landscaping. It was a weekly sightseeing indulgence, an opportunity to unapologetically people watch.

  Overnight on May 25 and into the following morning, the local temperature had dropped to the dew point in the Mad City. The moisture that had been held in the air for nearly a week was unleashed shortly after 8:00 a.m., leaving those locals who found themselves rained out of Little League games and spring picnics to take to the campuses and go driving—to aimlessly burn leaded fuel. As this particular Waukesha family’s car, having traveled from over an hour away, pulled onto UW’s flagship campus in the Mad City and then drifted past the gargantuan physics building known as Sterling Hall, the small boy in the backseat made a passing comment about a mannequin discarded in the grass near a hedgerow. Through the fogged-up rear window, as raindrops beaded down and broke up the clouded film that covered the glass, the small boy managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of what two earlier security perimeter patrols had apparently managed to miss. The boy’s parents didn’t make much of the utterance, dismissing it as either their child’s imagination or some remnant of the generally unremarkable year-end high jinks of UW physics students. Had they stopped to look closer, they might have altered the course of events to come. But they didn’t.

  Four hours or so later, that same family was back home in Waukesha when Phil Van Valkenberg, senior science student and part-time lab assistant at Sterling Hall, popped in behind a hedgerow off the building’s main front staircase. It was a location that one wouldn’t know without either visiting or scoping out the building regularly. Indeed, Phil knew from experience it was a shortcut to a lower block of basement windows. It led to the lower lab rooms where he’d been working along with a weekend peer group, including a buddy of his who’d pulled the weekend detail cleaning and organizing the place. Phil, deciding to call on his friend just before 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, would normally have made his way through the main doors and then navigated the labyrinthine building down to the basement. On this occasion, he instead chose to turn right at the first landing on the steps where the hedgerow met the railing. He then jumped down behind the foliage and staircase landing to rap on the first visible window he found. It was the usual routine to get his friend’s attention to come out for a smoke or a quick bite—a sort of impromptu dinner-bell system. But when Phil vaulted down onto the wet grass this time, he lost his footing, the still-spitting rain having soaked the earth following a day’s worth of showers. After slipping forward slightly and landing in a frontward crouch, he laid eyes on, just inches from his face, what the family of four had dismissed as a mannequin just a few hours earlier. Said mannequin was actually Christine Rothschild—or what remained of her.

  Left: The main staircase to Sterling Hall, including the half wall that Phil Van Valkenberg jumped from to discover the partially concealed body of Christine Rothschild on the fateful afternoon of May 26, 1968. Right: Christine Rothchild as she appeared immediately before her death and as she is still remembered today. Courtesy: UW–Madison Archives Collection & Linda Schulko.

  Phil Van Valkenberg had unknowingly fallen forward into a grotesque tableau that had been carefully arranged to provide a very specific message once found. Christine, her body left there since the early morning and exposed to a day of rain, had been intricately posed on her back with her head resting on the cement ledge of the foundation window on which Phil had been intending to knock. Beneath her bloodied head was a calling card, a man’s cotton handkerchief—big-city expensive, something sold nowhere in Madison. Its purpose there was puzzling, one part taunting clue and one part the killer’s twisted fantasy as he engineered a very specific image for both himself and for whoever found his victim. Christine’s head with the hanky underneath had been turned to the side and ravaged, both sides of her jaw shattered and her face pulverized. The first blow from whatever blunt object was used on her would have incapacitated her and knocked her out cold; she probably didn’t feel anything that came after. Gruesome as it was, what particularly caught Phil’s attention made him freeze with horror. Christine’s blue shift dress was matted with red crimson and gore; it was later confirmed that her torso had been stabbed a total of fourteen times with some comparatively obscure type of finely sharpened weapon the cops would later describe as “some type of medical utensil.” Translation: a surgical scalpel.

  Pulling it together and with a massive dump of adrenaline, Phil retraced his route around the hedges that had kept the body hidden all day and made his way back to the front steps. He sprinted through the front doors of the hall, nearly putting his arm through the glass after pushing when he should have been pulling. He ran to the first open office he could find on the main floor and called the police—all lines on campus ringing directly into the campus PD headquarters rather than the Madison city switchboard. As luck would have it, there
were two campus cops right around the corner—ETA less than a minute. Those two cops—Roger Golemb and Tiny Frey—were the same ones Christine had sought out for help just four days earlier. They arrived to find, and later reap, what their earlier indifference had sown. But as it turned out, they still weren’t finished doing wrong by Christine.

  Trampling the scene and destroying evidence, no doubt unwittingly due to a lack of training in major crime-scene management, the first officers on scene also did precious little to contain what was by then a gaggle of gathering students ranging from concerned coeds to morbid curiosity seekers. When the ambulance arrived about a minute later, just three minutes after Phil Van Valkenberg’s call to police, the medics realized that rigor mortis still hadn’t set in. In spite of the gore and obvious signs of biological death, the medics ensured one final indignity to the girl who was once the go-to talent and cover girl for Chicago’s Teen Fashion News Sheet. The UW cops, again with zero semblance of training in crime-scene control, gave the medics free rein. Grabbing Christine’s mutilated body by the hands and feet and using a quick-rigged hammock carry, they rushed her down the slippery embankment to the road before flinging her—no gurney, no blanket, no nothing—into the back of the ambulance where she landed in a heap. Any lasting evidence on the body was at that very moment severely cross-contaminated with the vehicle interior and summarily destroyed. The medics then transported her the roughly 150 feet across the street to the UW campus hospital where death was immediately pronounced after missed evidentiary opportunities due to crime-scene blunders—blunders that were by that time still carrying on unabated back at Sterling Hall.