The first few times Linda made her way to the smoke pit and feigned being one of them, she tried her best to pretend inhaling so she didn’t appear to be a complete imposter. She’d picked up a few tricks from watching Christine, who, she figured, not only smoked herself thin but also needed to keep her hands busy without actually drawing smoke down all the way. She later learned this was easier if she did as Christine did—rolled her own and cut the tobacco with shredded lettuce. It was a trick she’d never seen before or since, one Christine apparently picked up from some other teen models back on the Chicago Loop. Her next best option was to buy a pack of Virginia Slims. New to market by the fall of ’68, a whole pack could be picked up, in some cases, for less than the cost of the lettuce and raw tobacco. By sometime in October, however, she’d abandoned the ruse altogether. The people at the hospital by that time knew who she was and what she was about. Linda in turn knew she’d likely have limited time before word of her freelance note-taking investigation got to the higher-ups and eventually over to UWPD. While at the Sentinel, she’d learned that two lead investigators, detectives Josephson and Lulling—the latter notorious for never taking notes—were now officially running with Christine’s case. She fully expected to be sandbagged by them or to be put on official notice by Dean Ruedisili—who was notorious for always taking notes. In the meantime, Linda just had one more group of employees she’d not yet hit—the weekend swing shift.
Not every hospital has a swing shift; there were few then and certainly even fewer today. Often referred to as the “third watch” by those police departments still using a fixed eight-hour shift plan—an NBC crime melodrama of the same name set in New York City ran from 1999–2005 about it—the term describes that precarious time slot, between the early afternoon and the late evening shifts, that bridges the day and night shifts, often to cover lunch breaks or unexpected days off. From her time at the newspaper and from her father’s job at the firehouse, Linda soon figured out that weekends at the hospital would often be staffed by junior people, many of them not yet full-time, covering areas such as housekeeping, maintenance, and even the morgue. It’s frequently these same people who also see and hear everything, what late French philosopher Michel Foucault once referred to as the capillary level of power held by fundamental frontline workers as the eyes and ears of everything. Unlike higher-ups, holding symbolic power but often lacking awareness and intuition, the frontline workers possess an intimate knowledge of the bigger picture. In other words, sometimes you’re better off knowing a garbage man than the mayor. In fact, you’re always better off. It was on an otherwise unremarkable Sunday evening in mid-October when Linda met a man wielding that same type of capillary power—untapped knowledge which, for Linda at least, would blow the case—the so-called “Rothschild job”—wide open.
Happening upon a mild-mannered hospital custodian on his dinner smoke break, the worker had no sooner flicked open his Zippo lighter when Linda engaged him in small talk as an inroad to her real reason for talking to him—a trick she’d picked up back at the Sentinel. Sure enough, he soon cut to the chase as though he’d been waiting for the chance—chomping at the bit to spill the beans. The janitor spoke of Jorgensen taking an unusual interest in his access to the bowels of the building—the morgue in particular. Their initially idle chatter, which began as passing exchanges in the corridors, later progressed outside where Jorgensen, a nonsmoker, apparently spent his spare time in the hospital common smoking area, a favorite trolling spot of his. His spare time when off shift was of course devoted to the Memorial Library where he chose to target Christine. But smoke-pit chats weren’t the only reason the janitor knew of Jorgensen, not the only reason why he stood out.
One evening, shortly after starting his residency at the hospital and arriving early for a night shift, Jorgensen lured the custodian into an empty wardroom under the auspices of showing him something. Like a giddy schoolchild eager to reveal a secret, Jorgensen apparently saw something in this regular middle-aged man that he trusted. Whether he thought he was a kindred spirit of sorts, or whether he simply couldn’t stop himself from boasting in keeping with his narcissistic nature will never be known.
For whatever reason, Jorgensen at that particular time and place pulled from his white coat a pair of old Polaroids—images depicting two grotesque black-and-white scenes snapped and printed on location. Each photo revealed a pile of mutilated bodies composed of a man, a woman, and three children. The woman and kids—dark complexions, genders unknown—were too horribly hacked up to discern any identifying features. The man in the images had been dismembered and eviscerated, his eyes still intact and wide open. In furnishing the appalling images, Jorgensen boasted that the gore depicted therein was his handiwork, that he’d sedated the family for extermination and then cut them to pieces while serving—or more accurately posing—as a mission doctor. He confided that he had more snaps back at his place if his new mop-wielding confidante was interested. He explained that, since they were taken in South Africa ten years earlier, the decennial anniversary of the massacre was fast approaching and would require celebrating.
Linda would indeed later discover that Jorgensen had been, a decade earlier, a recently graduated GP without a designated medical specialty. While floating aimlessly around the United States, he’d ultimately been snatched up by a Christian mission and sent to the remote regions of the, at that time, segregated nation of South Africa. The family in the photographs had been one of an anonymous series of victims Jorgensen had in turn butchered with his issued surgical field instruments and a machete while also honing his killing skills during his time spent abroad, cloaked in anonymity and exploiting American white privilege. He later posed the bodies of his murdered victims in such a fashion that everyone would blame the local tribal factions if and when the victims were ever discovered—should the deaths end up even being properly investigated. If the crimes had, in fact, been investigated, the national police service would have no doubt chalked them up to cases of what he explained was muti-murder, the slaying and mutilation of victims to obtain body parts and organs for folk medicine rituals—still such an occurrence in South Africa that it has its own area of investigative and forensic expertise today.
Later, the story changed when Jorgensen, endlessly eager, it seemed, for the custodian’s approval of the horrific images, would follow up with other versions. To pique the man’s curiosity further, Jorgensen would then refer to the images as “Māori justice,” a curious reference to New Zealand and not South Africa. Later, he claimed the victims were massacred members of the Zulu tribe, again setting the location back in South Africa. Amid the fluctuating accounts and Jorgensen’s obsession with the gore of the photos, the custodian figured the doctor was just another garden-variety Mad City nutcase, a guy who, given the significant age difference between him and other residents, had taken a few too many acid trips back in his day and was trying to play grown-up while still clinging to some fictive past—an attention seeker who, like most attention seekers, could never seem to keep his version of events straight. After several weeks of back and forth, the custodian never took Jorgensen up on the offer to view more of the grotesque Polaroids that he later came to convince himself, perhaps as a coping mechanism, were fakes. He did, however, remember where Jorgensen told the man to find him if he ever changed his mind—the nearby medical resident housing where Jorgensen lived with a roommate named George.
At last Linda had more than conjecture. At last she had more to follow up on than mere anecdotal confirmation. She had what appeared to be corroboration of the fact that Christine’s instincts were right, that Jorgensen was some kind of dangerous sexual psychopath using the campus as his proverbial candy store. She now had a general hit on a last-known Madison address for him, the first name of a roommate. She also had a sketchy story of a murderous holiday on the Catholic Church’s dime a decade earlier during which time Jorgensen, such was his psychopathic taste for murder, chose to stage scenes to read like tribal g
enocides and muti-murders. Although the hospital custodian instinctively felt he had good reason to doubt the veracity of the images and Jorgensen’s stories, he still should have known, false images or not, that they meant trouble—big trouble. Big trouble, especially in the hands of a doctor with an apparent erotic fixation on the subject of murder. Sure enough, fifteen years later, the nexus between mutilation photographs and necrophilic sexual homicide would be cemented in a case that began in eerily similar fashion to Jorgensen’s misdeeds at UW.
In the early 1980s, a malnourished and strung-out sexual sadist and avowed Satanist named Richard Ramirez went from being a nocturnal burglar and sleepwatcher while working as a Holiday Inn night clerk to a terrorizing predator in greater Los Angeles. Earning the lurid moniker the “Night Stalker,” Ramirez went on to murder fourteen victims between 1984 and 1985 after first having been groomed with similar atrocity photos. Ramirez’s down-and-out cousin had been a decorated Green Beret in the same Vietnam War that, by the time of Christine’s murder, was already the epicenter of daily life at UW. Soon after his return from combat, “Cousin Mike,” by sharing his Polaroids with a teenaged Ramirez, showed how he had mutilated the “enemy”—mostly female civilians in villages his rogue unit had overrun. These included pictures of severed heads and flayed corpses of the women he had raped before killing—sometimes after. Before long, Ramirez, so engrossed by these images, was a budding necrophile, sleeping in cemeteries and experimenting with a hodgepodge of drugs. He would later claim a nine-year-old girl as his first victim during nearly a yearlong string of home invasion sexual murders that horrified the world and essentially held America’s second largest city under house arrest. The difference between Ramirez and Jorgensen, however, was that the latter-day doctor was a remarkable multitasker. He was not only a murderer, but apparently also a photographer, raconteur, and sleepwatcher all in one. Again, no one sounded the alarm. Surely a trained physician, the custodian had reasoned, undoubtedly a bizarre boaster and teller of tall tales, would not also be a killer himself.
“Nice Day for a Murder”
It took Linda until the winter of ’69 to track down “George” and put a face to the name—it had taken the entire preceding autumn to even locate the specific university apartment where Jorgensen had lived during his murder holiday in Madison. It turned out that George was a senior medical resident named Dr. George Johnston who, like everyone else at UW, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when Jorgensen came to town. Before long, Johnston, like Linda, would be the real-life iteration of the cursed seaman depicted in Samuel Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In this eerie eighteenth-century poem, the mariner, forever condemned to retell the same story time and again, is forced to wander the earth for eternity as the lone survivor of his encounter with the emissary of death. All the while, he is haunted by what he has seen—by what he now knows about the cruelty of the world. George and Linda, shortchanged of what should have been happier times in Madison and beyond, ended up inheriting a one-way ticket to that same nightmare. Soon, they would together become the mariner, the emissary of death being Jorgensen himself.
For their brief time as impromptu roomies, Jorgensen and Johnston couldn’t have been more dissimilar, the veritable odd couple in the Felix and Oscar sense. The two fledgling doctors had been paired ad hoc by the university hospital’s administration and shoehorned into a walk-up garden apartment on the campus earmarked for medical residents. Nearly twenty years his junior, Johnston had already been living in the spartan efficiency style two-bedroom unit for several months and enjoying his privacy when Jorgensen showed up. He told George he’d come from Carson City via Las Vegas and that he had completed his MD back home in California—where and when unstated. Particulars of his first two years of medical residency were equally—and suspiciously—vague. Jorgensen also recounted the usual war stories from the Battle of the Bulge, the fact that he was a certified blue-ribbon Nazi slayer on one hand and a medical humanitarian and mission doctor on the other. Referring to work abroad, he would cite his countless field hospital and missionary roles in Africa—tall tales of his genius and heroism never in short supply. But supporting evidence was always scant at best.
Jorgensen later told George that he’d gone to med school on the GI bill in the fall of ’45, enrolling within a week of V-J Day and the emperor throwing in the towel on September 2, 1945. He also claimed that his kid brother hadn’t been so lucky—KIA at the Battle of Midway, June 7, 1942, after going down with the Yorktown. An ocean away, his war bride to be was dead in Cherbourg—last seen pinned under a collapsed tenement following a Luftwaffe blitzkrieg. With nothing left, Jorgensen wandered the earth with MD degree in hand in search of adventure, or so the story went. True to form, George had also been shown the Polaroids of Māori justice and a few other items he would come to wish he hadn’t seen—all of it an insight into what “adventure” apparently meant for Jorgensen. His roommate also told George that he would go to the library reading rooms to check out undergraduate females, particularly the blonde, pretty, preppy-looking ones. Once again no official alarm was sounded. By the spring of ’69, however, George, as did Linda, had Jorgensen permanently rattling around inside his head, forever wondering where and when he’d surface again—forever haunting him. The mariner’s lot.
George’s time with Jorgensen as a roommate went beyond just an assemblage of disquieting stories. One night George also found himself staring down the barrel of Jorgensen’s snub-nosed .38—an old-school revolver of the Sam Spade flavor apparently brought by Jorgensen to UW. The gun had been displayed and pointed on a single occasion when George let his girlfriend sleep over. As Jorgensen—ever the sleepwatcher—hid in the shadows of the room to spy on them, George apparently woke up earlier than expected to find Jorgensen reaching in to cop a feel. Following a verbal confrontation, Jorgensen, obsessively needing to assert his dominance, left and returned with the handgun, pointing it, and then leaving again. Occurring only a week before Christine’s murder, it was obvious that Jorgensen’s fixations and level of risk tolerance were both by that time quickly escalating—his ten-year celebration of Māori justice fast approaching. For the next six days, George quite literally slept with one eye open while keeping another eye on Jorgensen’s activities at the hospital during any shift they shared, remaining vigilant to observe his interaction with patients.
On the other hand, George was equally concerned that complaining about Jorgensen’s nocturnal prowling and unstable behavior in the apartment might be dismissed as a personality conflict, that it might cause damage of a collateral nature and possibly even jeopardize his own employment at the hospital. Before long, George occupied that precarious place in a “don’t rock the boat” status-quo university hospital world where rational self-interest reigned supreme. It was a world where it might be easier to simply watch Jorgensen crash and burn—to initiate his own self-destruct sequence—rather than to be the instigator of his demise and become some kind of martyr in the process. Unfortunately, damage of a collateral nature was already inevitable.
On Sunday, May 26, early on the morning of Christine’s murder, Johnston would later tell Linda that he recalled seeing Jorgensen leave the apartment dressed in army fatigues. He described it as a US Army Rangers’ jacket—khaki, weathered, and emblazoned with chevrons and regimental patches. This was the first time Johnston had ever seen him in such clothing, the outfit that apparently went with Jorgensen’s story of seeing combat in the European Theater in World War II. While on the one hand it might have been the first tangible evidence of Jorgensen’s purported time at Battle of the Bulge at age eighteen, George also knew that such jackets were highly coveted and comparatively easy to come by both as keepsakes for collectors and as props for posers. Although the location and time of day, George thought, were both curious, he also well knew he had been saddled with a very strange roommate in Jorgensen. Whatever the reason for the chosen apparel that morning, Johnston—in part due to their op
posite rotation schedules, and in part because of what would happen next—never laid eyes on Jorgensen again after he walked out into the rain and vanished amid the morning fog. His military attire also blended in among the other uniforms coming and going from Sterling Hall, state headquarters for the US Army Mathematics Research Center. It was there and then that Johnston last saw his soon-to-be ex-roommate, and where a new mystery began.
Jorgensen coolly kept his commitment to work his shift in surgery that day despite having just killed Christine some time before—in fact, it would turn out to be part of the larger MO. On one occasion during that same shift, according to both George and a nurse at the UW hospital whose name George had reluctantly provided to Linda for corroboration, while passing the nurse’s triage station just beyond the public area, Jorgensen—now in his regular hospital attire, the clothes from the murder secreted somewhere in the hospital—looked out on the gray and drizzly spring morning with an oddly gleeful demeanor. Then, knowingly within earshot of a nearby nurse, he casually remarked, “It’s a nice day for a murder.” Perhaps dismissing the utterance as yet another one of Jorgensen’s macabre and eccentric quips for which the strange new surgical resident was known, the young nurse apparently offered no comeback. Although never interviewed by the police, more inexplicable is that she did not voluntarily come forward with this valuable information after Christine’s death. It was only years after the murder that she provided these jarring details, still not to the police, but to Linda.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 8
