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

by Michael Arntfield

  It was also the predictability of that Sunday morning routine that explained why the psychological autopsy of Christine’s final forty-eight didn’t turn up anything immediately unusual. It seemed to be the same as every other weekend she’d spent since matriculating at UW and moving from Chicago to Madison. It was precisely because of this normality that investigators should have seen the murder for what it was. But no one got a clue until it was too late. What the cops did know, however, is that Christine had received the note wedged in her ground-floor dormitory door on the afternoon of Friday, May 24. The note, later found on her dressing table, was where UW officer Hendrickson first obtained Linda’s first name; he then later searched registration records to obtain complete particulars, including her home telephone number in Milwaukee. Beyond that, Christine’s Saturday night, including whether she perhaps attended the swim meet alone, has never been accounted for. Nearly a full twenty-four hours of her last forty-eight hours alive were left in the dark, and that should have been all the more reason to move as quickly as possible on any leads, including Jorgensen’s name being given to detectives by Linda though a series of frantic phone messages left impaled and piling up on a memo spike in the UWPD squad room. Christine’s Sunday—her final few hours alive—were, despite the gaps with Saturday, a bit clearer, some events easier to nail down.

  On that morning, the twenty-sixth, investigators confirmed that Christine was awake by 5:00 a.m. when she was seen walking into a bathroom at Ann Emery by the assigned housemother, a doting old woman named Gertrude Armstrong—a widowed and senior campus mentor of a bygone era. Christine’s murder marked Gertrude’s last day at Ann Emery as well as the final weekend for many of the Hall’s young girls. Once the news of the murder broke, one of Christine’s fellow Ann Emery residents dropped out and never reenrolled—anywhere. Another was sent a can of Mace via Western Union from her parents back home in Lexington. She transferred to the University of Missouri the next year and spent the rest of her days afraid of the dark. She still is. Another girl’s parents did one better and couriered her a can of antiquated army-issue CS gas, fallen off the back of a truck—as they say—somewhere back at Fort Dix. The girl had no clue what to do with it; she didn’t need to. The mass exodus from the campus had already begun.

  When Christine left Ann Emery just before 6:00 a.m., she had unwittingly already predetermined the course of things to come. In her mind, she was headed to the same place she went every Sunday—a routine that anyone who knew or even knew of Christine would also know. Every Sunday at 10:00 a.m., Christine would be at the sermon and Sunday-school lecture at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, at 315 Wisconsin Avenue, just a few blocks from campus. Built in the same neoclassical style as many of the Mad City’s more formidable and official structures, it was where Christine went each and every Sunday to carry on the family tradition of Christian Science, her father having renounced Judaism within days of his own bar mitzvah as he headed down a new road.

  Christine never made it to the First Church on Wisconsin that morning. Between 6:00 a.m. and 9:45 a.m., the hour she would normally be due to arrive at the church, her precise movements are unaccounted for. Speculative theories remain just that: speculative. What is known for certain is that both she and Jorgensen were out early that day. What’s also known is that Christine’s routine before church would have taken her directly past the steps of Sterling Hall across from Jorgensen’s workplace—the hospital where that same Sunday he was due to work the day shift. But when and why Christine ended up in the somewhat secluded Sterling Hall location where she was later found remain the enduring questions—the still unsolved mystery. One way or another, this was the day Jorgensen had chosen to kill her. He knew her routine. He knew she would be passing Sterling Hall. That Jorgensen killed Christine is a given; the specifics of the murder are clear. The specifics of the time leading up to the murder are not.

  Sterling Hall would have been deserted on that fateful Sunday morning, the hedgerow beside the main staircase devoid of prying eyes. But there was also one additional benefit to Jorgensen’s plan. Not only was Sterling Hall within easy reach of UW hospital, it also housed the US Army Mathematics Research Center. On top of providing an ideal scenario for a supposedly coincidental meeting, it had to be the mother lode of locations for a necrophile toting a purloined scalpel and a phony military uniform. As fated, Sterling Hall was where it would all come together for Jorgensen—charlatan doctor, fraud GI medic, army imposter. A serial killer hiding in plain sight.

  Sentinel

  Within a week of Christine’s murder, the spring term—and school year—at UW was over. People left the campus, many for good, and went back to their lives in homes scattered across the nation. After the murder hit the national newswire, UW could no longer duck and cover. The genie was out of the bottle and couldn’t be put back in. Most exams were canceled and final grades estimated. Those few people who still lingered in what had by then become a ghost town of a campus turned the murder scene at Sterling Hall into something of a makeshift memorial, or at least they tried. Any flowers, candles, and other goods that were left were collected and summarily turfed by campus administrators. So instead, the eerily vacant scene devolved into a macabre curiosity and attraction. People from all over Dane County—from all over the state of Wisconsin—had already made a point of driving to UW on the weekend to sightsee. But now the destination provided something of a morbid attraction to visit in its own right—the place where it all went wrong and the Mad City got its wake-up call. Only it didn’t. Christine’s parents had sent her to the Mad City because they thought it was a decent place, a safe campus. The truth is that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—as were over ten thousand other girls, any one of whom could just as easily have been Jorgensen’s victim that spring. Sadly, some of them would in fact later be victims themselves at the hands of other killers who sought to emulate him—once the copycats moved in.

  By the summer of ’68—already the most socially and politically volatile year in American history since the Civil War—Linda had resigned herself to the inevitability that, as long as Jorgensen was on campus amid the upheaval and avoiding police radar, he would soon be looking for his next kill. The same pattern, she knew, would carry on in perpetuity for years upon years, from campus to campus, city to city. It was with this uncanny prescience by late June of that year that Linda pivoted in a new direction. Christine had been forced to check out early—a victim of what the Mad City’s social upheaval and endless distraction had managed to invite in. It was then that Linda realized that, at least for the foreseeable future, she could never leave UW—at least not as long as Jorgensen was still there or able to return. An honors degree in lieu of a bachelor’s, she thought to herself, just to stay that extra year. Then, maybe a master’s, maybe a doctorate, maybe a postdoc—professional student par excellence. Maybe she’d end up on the faculty one day, maybe on staff—maybe even on the campus PD. In the meantime, using Madison as her base, she’d follow him when she could—track and stalk Jorgensen just as he had stalked Christine. Although the shoe was now on the other foot, she’d first have to cut her teeth as a skip tracer and amateur detective. Next stop would be a Milwaukee newsroom. It was the truth foundry where she’d simultaneously unearth the past and mold the future, plan the route—what would turn out to be the next forty years of her life. The road would end only once one of them, either she or Jorgensen, was dead. Maybe both.

  Beginning as a summer intern at the Milwaukee Sentinel back home that same June, Linda collected a meager paycheck every second Thursday as she toiled amid secondhand smoke in the newspaper’s art department, tasked with fetching black-and-white stock images as well as clipping and cropping ad nauseam. Her boss was a salt-of-the-earth man and old-school editor named Bill Share, a working-class Brew City local like her and a living embodiment and doppelganger of television’s famed fictional newsman Lou Grant. In time, Share would eventually rise to become the newspaper’s pres
ident, perhaps its most respected ever. His hours on-site that summer of ’68 were spent mostly fact-checking stories on the one hand and chasing down the whereabouts of his own reporters—some with bottles in their desks, others MIA by noon daily—on the other. His recurring distractions left Linda plenty of wiggle room to get her own system down pat. Finishing her own work by lunch, she’d then make herself busy by researching Christine’s murder on the sly, sometimes on the clock, sometimes after hours. For her, time was immaterial; it stopped just before 10:00 a.m. on May 26 without ever starting again. In an age when people measure their self-esteem by digital “likes,” being helicopter parented and mollycoddled into social and intellectual paralysis by the time of their freshman years, Linda provides a stark contrast that stands the test of time. Though her world had just been turned upside down, her best friend murdered, and her sense of good irreparably shattered, the resolve, tenacity, and foresight that she possessed as a nineteen-year-old was and remains in a class all its own. Unbeknownst to her, it was also about to get a lot more dangerous.

  Any number of proverbs, motivational sound bites, and recycled memes talk about finding light in darkness, using a low as a springboard, and finding an open window in a locked room. They rank among the countless hollow platitudes that extol the virtue of finding oneself at a low point. But long before writers were paid to put these taglines on Hallmark cards and motivational office posters, Linda lived those same parables. She not only found light in the darkness but also became darkness when needed. In short order, she would use Jorgensen’s own tactics against him—she would become him in order to catch him. She would bird-dog him for as long as it took. In due course, it would have to be her, and her alone, when no one else seemed to be looking—when no one else seemed to care. No one knew which way was up, least of all, with some exceptions, the campus police who, well in over their heads, somehow managed to maintain carriage of Christine’s case long after the first forty-eight had come and gone—long after the case went cold.

  While everyone else in Milwaukee was taking in the first-ever lakefront Summerfest—the Brew City’s emulation of Oktoberfest and today a venerable yearly city institution—Linda was playing the long game, battening down the hatches. Whether under a desk lamp at the Sentinel or under the lamp in the kitchen in her parents’ home, she persevered. After discreetly purloining—and later dutifully returning—art department negatives of the Sterling Hall murder scene, early drafts of the headline stories, and the names and numbers of potential witnesses, she carved a path forward with her own investigation into not just Christine’s murder, but a trail of mayhem left by Jorgensen across Middle America.

  As the summer of ’68 was winding down and people began tiptoeing their way back to UW, hoping the coast was clear, Linda was still back in Milwaukee thumbing through images and scouring them for possibly missed clues when something new caught her eye. About a month after Christine’s murder, a stringer with the Associated Press had reported that Madison city cops had located a blood-soaked set of dungarees in a dumpster behind a commercial plaza located just a short drive from the campus square. Linda knew that the campus square was a Seussian Whoville where the UW students did everything, seldom venturing out too far from there. Even fewer owned cars to travel the short distance to the plaza; fewer still would probably know that the plaza existed in the first place. If the denim overalls, owner unknown, were in fact connected to the campus murder, few undergraduate students would be inclined or have the means to travel that far to dispose of the evidence. A short time later, Linda found the follow-up piece—buried in the newspaper’s police blotter, no byline—confirming that police had already ruled out the dumpster find as evidence in Christine’s murder.

  Linda’s mind then went down a different path. What choices were available if the killer did need to dispose of his clothing on the quick? The murder scene suggested that the killer, possibly covered in Christine’s blood, would have few places to do so other than the campus hospital—right across the street no less. It occurred to her that the killer could even have been inside the hospital at the time Christine was being pronounced dead and the photos of her mutilated body were being snapped. With cops crawling all over the corridors, the killer, she speculated, could have walked among them, hiding once again in plain sight. The bloodied clothing, the murder weapon, all of it might still be at the hospital. She wasn’t ruling out anything.

  As Linda clocked out on her last day at the Sentinel and made her way home to pack for year two at UW—returning as a sophomore to the campus where her friend had died—she was on a short list of people who would need to keep the momentum of Christine’s investigation going, her memory alive. She had already come this far working in a newspaper art department and piecing together her own leads. From that day forward, Linda would make sure she had her own all-points want on Jorgensen. From the UW campus and later from the road, she vowed to herself that she would keep tabs on him, sweat him wherever he decided to hole up next, and the time after that—and the time after that. If he knew he was being watched, she reasoned, he might not hurt anyone else. In reality, Linda had no idea whom she was dealing with or what she was getting into, what else Jorgensen had already done and what he was prepared to do again. She also had no idea that Christine’s murder had been the tipping point—a foray into a new era for the city of Madison and its beloved UW campus. With Christine’s murder, someone had pulled his or her finger out of the proverbial dike, and soon a slow leak became a deluge that would ultimately consume the city. As file number 68-78994—what the local cops called the “Rothschild job”—went from cold to colder, new women were already in danger. It was now the fall of ’68, and the other shoe had just dropped.

  Chapter 3

  STERLING HALL

  It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

  —P. G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

  Swing Shift

  After 1968, summers were no longer endless. As August became September that year, before the official onslaught of her fall school assignments, Linda already had some other significant homework nagging her. Jorgensen, even at an eclectic campus such as UW, had been the proverbial fish out of water. The one thing Linda believed she knew about Jorgensen was that he trolled campus smoke pits, using various sinister pretexts to identify the habits of unsuspecting young women, parlaying their naïveté into dark and destructive necrophilic fantasies. The end result was that she worked what would be the first of countless undercover details—all self-assigned and self-taught—over the coming years and decades. The Sentinel had simply been spring training.

  By that fall term and beyond, Linda, immersed in something of a pennant race with mile-high stakes, would be forced out of her comfort zone. She’d pose as a smoker, a lost freshman, a loner oblivious of her surroundings—a quintessential soft target like her surrogate sister Christine before her—anything that might allow her to ingratiate herself in any environment, to break the ice and elicit a statement from a reluctant witness, even to serve as a decoy for another Jorgensen. She knew that with the real Jorgensen now in the wind, there would soon be others to follow his work. It was a case of doing almost anything that might enable her to get the scoop on a new angle, or, by sticking out her own neck, to expose those like Jorgensen who might also still be in hiding at UW.

  It was in that same fall of ’68 when Linda caught her first break doing as Christine had once done. Linda soon learned that “smoke breaks” were not only taken at the Memorial Library smoke pit but also at the campus hospital in a common area, itself a smoke pit by default, near the rear employee entrance. Making her way there for the first time that September, Linda found no shortage of hospital staff and med students willing to talk about Jorgensen almost before she could even finish getting out all three syllables of his surname. Not surprisingly to Linda, most of them had never been ID’d or interviewed as potential witnesses by police, their wards and floors never canvassed. Just as Christine had told Linda shortly
before her death, the predominant descriptors related to the unsettling je ne sais quoi about his odd demeanor.

  Although somewhat elusive in terms of its specific delinquency, that demeanor was sufficiently menacing—unquestionably unsettling—enough to raise the antennae of most of the female employees on the wards where Dr. Jorgensen had made his rounds. Other adjectives got thrown around too, some profane and others more akin to what Linda would expect from bookish people like herself working at the campus hospital. They called him prurient, maladjusted, and malevolent. Others labeled him as disaffected and disordered, even sociopathic: the now largely outmoded term still in vogue at the time—one used, with a certain scientific affect, to describe any dislikable person. None actually proffered the more accurate “psychopath” designation, that term still barely a decade old since being popularized by pioneering American psychologist Hervey Cleckley, and still poorly understood and inconsistently applied at the time. All the while, Linda made extensive notes. It was good for a first canvass run, her premiere assignment completed that fall. Three days later she was back at the hospital again, a new rotation of staff—doctors, nurses, residents, interns, clerks—on the day shift. Two days later, the night shift. And so it went for her first week back at UW. In time, Linda came to know the rotations of the various units—who was on shift and who was off shift, who was on call and who was on overtime—until she had spoken to nearly everyone who might have simply met Jorgensen in passing or have been exposed to his chilling presence during those fateful two months he’d spent at UW.