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

by Michael Arntfield

  When this late disclosure came to Linda’s attention, she was left to wonder how Jorgensen, despite all his hubris and narcissistic grandiosity, his perversions and penchant for fibbing, could have been so overt that day—how he could have been so smug in leaving this same oral postscript to his crime. She wondered why he would make such a comment and tacitly reveal what any other killer would have inevitably kept concealed. She also questioned why he would make such a cryptically damning statement for a nurse to potentially report to others. The words uttered, however, spoke for themselves—there was simply no other interpretation to be made. Linda knew as well that the myth about killers, especially serial killers, secretly wanting to be caught was little more than nonsense. But she also knew that Jorgensen was a killer who broke the mold.

  In her subsequent interviews with George Johnston, Linda had learned that, because he and Jorgensen worked different shifts, they would often have limited contact with each other day in and day out. This was also the case immediately following Christine’s murder. After Jorgensen completed his shift on the evening of the twenty-sixth, it appears he returned to his shared apartment. He would be gone, however, very quickly, gone out of Madison for good by the end of that same week, possibly even as early as Tuesday the twenty-eighth. Although the precise date and time remain unclear, Johnston recalled returning from a night shift within that time to find the aftermath of a mad dash, the telltale signs of a man who left in a hurry with what he could throw into a go bag while his roommate was on shift.

  Between his antics at the hospital and his flight from the city, Jorgensen had already become a person of interest in the Rothschild job by the fall of ’68. Disturbingly, when later interviewed by police, however, Linda would learn that Johnston chose only to tell them that his roommate was something of a loner and a little on the strange side, leaving out the part about the voyeurism, the groping, and, of course, the .38 caliber Roscoe. Even though by that time Johnston himself apparently believed that Jorgensen had probably killed Christine, police learned nothing of the suspect’s prior activity in the days leading up to the murder, including the donning of army fatigues. It was all relevant and then some in terms of suspectology, directly probative to the investigation, and ought to have been provided as background information if nothing else. An eighteen-year-old had been brutally murdered at the hands of a sexual psychopath, but not only did Johnston as a key witness want nothing to do with his erstwhile roommate, he wanted nothing to do with his murder. Self-interest trumped all. For Linda, it was all becoming boringly repetitive—and infuriating.

  Linda had been diligent about sharing any information she uncovered with UWPD investigators as her freelance investigation progressed. Her first such tip was provided in the days immediately after the murder when she’d urged the detectives on the case to check with the UW med school about an over-the-hill surgical resident who’d been giving her the creeps and loitering around the Memorial reading room. Later, she would also share with them the disturbing revelations made by Johnston. Once again she had corroboration that Christine had been right all along in seeing Jorgensen for who and what he was—right in her suspicion to report him to UW officers Golemb and Frey.

  Armed with the latest information gleaned from Johnston, Linda soon placed a follow-up call to Dick Josephson, the lead detective on Christine’s case. Although she had not been kept in the loop, she would learn for the first time that the police, despite the significant early missteps, had actually followed up on that same tip, especially upon getting wind from others about what a lecher he was, and that he’d blown town within two days of the murder. Linda, by that time herself aware that Jorgensen was no longer on campus, nonetheless played dumb. She would soon discover even more from Josephson—she’d learn where to start looking next.

  After initially receiving the pat and sometimes necessary “the investigation is ongoing” platitudes from the circumspect plainclothesman, Josephson let something slip. The previous fall, it turned out, Josephson and Detective Charlie Lulling took a trip to New York City to interview Jorgensen, who was now living there following a brief stint in Detroit immediately after Christine’s murder. In addition to her own tip and the circumstances of Jorgensen’s sudden departure, police had also received information from a senior administrator and chief physician at the campus hospital, a Dr. Sandy Mackman. Jorgensen had been hired out of rotation by Mackman on a three-month probationary contract due to expire June 30, 1968.

  At some point in the week immediately preceding the murder at Sterling Hall, Jorgensen had been called in for a meeting at which Mackman had the unpleasant duty of telling him he had failed his probation period and was due to be fired. Jorgensen, perhaps having anticipated the purpose of the meeting, had come with a deadly offering. Armed with the same .38 caliber revolver he’d brandished in front of his roommate, concealed under his white coat, upon hearing the bad news, Jorgensen pointed the barrel of the weapon at Mackman’s face. Just as he had done with George weeks earlier, Jorgensen paused for a moment, looked around, and then simply retracted the weapon before quickly exiting the room. This, perhaps as early as three days before Christine’s murder, spoke to Jorgensen’s increasingly erratic downward spiral—a descent into madness reminiscent of a Gothic horror story. In terms of suspectology, few murder investigations offer behavior this telltale, this incriminating. The trouble is that no one was looking for it—the cops and hospital administration alike had been actually too busy not looking. It was more, it seems, than they wanted to know.

  Like George Johnston, Sandy Mackman reportedly sat on this information about Jorgensen, not coming forward to police until September 6, 1968, well over three months after the murder. When he finally piped up, however, it wasn’t to press charges or even offer Jorgensen as a suspect in the murder; he opted instead to file a restraining order—the justice system’s flimsiest of paper tigers. It was as if the entire medical community at UW campus hospital had been gripped by some paralytic fear about coming forward in a timely manner with information of obvious use to the police. To this day, no one knows why. Sadly, UW was, however, the rule and not the exception in such cases.

  The truth is that universities are notoriously effectual at burying problem issues and people along with them when it suits their agendas, seldom discriminating between offender, victim, or witness in terms of vigorously whitewashing potential bad press. Consider for one the remarkably still-unsolved murder of twenty-two-year-old Betsy Aardsma at Penn State in November of ’69. Like Christine Rothschild, she was a young coed also stalked at a campus library. She was later found stabbed to death in the stacks of that same library while it was packed with students and staff on a Friday afternoon—yet no one, it seems, saw anything. Quickly suppressed, the Aardsma case is today a matter of American esoterica and little else. Similarly, the home-invasion murders and Rothschild-like posing of four young women at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1990 by Danny Rolling is, these days, largely unheard of. These two cases, of course, only scratch the surface of campus murders across America that, it seems, are easier to tidy up when they go unsolved, and the tide washes over them after a few years as new cohorts come and go.

  But one might have expected better at UW. Given that Johnston and Mackman were both physicians—educated men whom one would expect to feel obligated to report such things—they might have at least tried to report Jorgensen and get the matter on official record sometime before Christine’s murder. To his credit, Mackman finally did come forward, as did Johnston—albeit belatedly. Others with material knowledge never did at all. Many had suspicions but these were left unvoiced. Distancing oneself from Jorgensen and anything remotely relevant to the murder was the unofficial order of the day—a groupthink consensus. The hospital, like the campus proper, was something of an echo chamber.

  Within two days of Christine’s murder, Jorgensen grabbed a bag from his apartment closet and disappeared with what he could carry in it. For all he knew, the police wer
e hot on his tail not only for the murder but also for the Mackman incident, an incident even Jorgensen himself assumed would have been reported with charges filed. In due course, once the cops received a hit on Jorgensen’s name when he tried to transfer to the hospital at Columbia University—the same New York university Christine had once hoped to attend—detectives Josephson and Lulling flew east and sought him out at his rented Harlem townhouse. They had dropped in for a surprise visit, showing up at his door after first notifying the local NYPD 28th Precinct that they’d need to borrow an interview room and a polygraph examiner for a few hours. They were getting their ducks in a row for an arrest.

  Jorgensen made Lulling and Josephson as cops through the spyhole of his front door as soon as they arrived. Creepy as ever and speaking with them through a narrow opening with the night chain strung across it, Jorgensen kept his cool and shot them his usual glib smile. He stickhandled their questions with precision, telling all kinds of fibs and fatiguing lies. He offered up potential alibis without committing to a single one, saying it was all still “a bit foggy.” Josephson and Lulling, suits wrinkled to the max from their express flight to LaGuardia, stood stone-faced at Jorgensen’s door while he talked himself in circles. On counterpoint, they offered him a chance to clear it all up—to clear the air—by coming with them to the local precinct and taking a polygraph, a quick drive there and back in the rental vehicle parked at the curb. They even managed to receive his preliminary agreement and talked him into their car when Jorgensen suddenly balked.

  Claiming that he wasn’t feeling well because of a dreadful summer cold, Jorgensen told the duo he was concerned that his fluctuating blood pressure would throw off the instrument’s readings. He was, after all, a doctor and knew about these things—or so he reminded them. It wasn’t hard for Jorgensen to bushwhack the cops with all sorts of anatomical and physiological mumbo jumbo. That was quite apart from the fact that Jorgensen was under no obligation to take the test, and the cops, though suspicious, had no probable cause to make an arrest—not yet anyway.

  It was accordingly agreed to postpone the polygraph examination until the next day after a good night’s rest. Jorgensen promised to attend the precinct at nine o’clock the next morning and then shut the door. The following morning came and went. Josephson and Lulling, flanked by an NYPD polygraph examiner and a uniformed lieutenant, waited in vain at the precinct as 9:00 a.m. became 10:30 a.m. and the doctor on the lam was a predictable no-show. No one had bothered to stake out his townhouse overnight, to keep him under surveillance in the event he blew town a second time. The lie detector test they hoped would allow them to lead Jorgensen by the hand into a full confession soon dissolved before their eyes. By 10:30 a.m., Josephson and Lulling were back in the rental vehicle heading to the tenement where they had located Jorgensen the previous day, only to find him gone again—another dash move to destinations unknown. The Harlem townhouse visit the day before would end up being the last time a law enforcement officer ever officially laid eyes on Christine’s killer—by then an already seasoned serial murderer.

  The Love Pirate

  Over nine hundred miles from the crime scene at Sterling Hall, Jorgensen’s decision to blow town a second time would have a future ripple effect on the Mad City. It was a decision that would set into motion new events, bring new victims and their killers together, and subsume the city in folklore for the foreseeable future. It was at that time and place, having been denied an opportunity to successfully interrogate and potentially collar the killer of Christine Rothschild, that the lore of the Capital City Killer was born. In hearing Josephson’s story about the one that got away, Linda’s instinct was that innocent men don’t skip out on lie detector tests—much less med school residencies—if test results might help clear their name. She also knew that the campus PD, not the Mad City PD, would maintain control of the case for the foreseeable future, part of the typical factionalism, turf guarding, and empire building that defined police work both then and now.

  In so doing, Linda also knew that the well would eventually run dry, that as long as Jorgensen kept on the move, the police would never have the money or resources to keep up with him. If they had the evidence to make an arrest, they would have already drawn up an arrest warrant, issued an all-points want, canceled his passport. With Jorgensen remaining a “person of interest,” forever languishing in the purgatory of being not quite an arrestable suspect, trying to persuade other law enforcement agencies to pitch in—when they had their own wanted suspects and persons of interest to track down—would be the epitome of a fool’s errand. Linda knew by the time she hung up the phone on Josephson that, after only a few months, the Christine Rothschild murder investigation was already played out.

  If Sandy Mackman, the old-school doctor who had stared down the barrel of Jorgensen’s .38, had been willing to press charges, the UWPD might very well have had a reason to arrest and hold Jorgensen with an “armed and dangerous” coast-to-coast felony arrest warrant. It would have been enough to ensure that Jorgensen’s movements could be tracked, that he’d be arrested in the next town he arrived in to complete his studies, and that he would be returned to Madison for arraignment while cops worked actively behind the scenes to finally solve Christine’s murder. Unfortunately, both then and now, some people just didn’t want to get involved in the judicial process. There are a variety of reasons why, an array of justifications for opting out of reporting matters to the police. These reasons are suspected to account for two-thirds of all actual felony events not being properly reported, documented, and followed through with police—what criminologists call the dark figure of crime.

  In this case, pressing charges for the gun incident would have meant that Mackman would be subpoenaed to testify for any required trial and that the incident would hit the papers and play badly for a campus already shrouded in macabre curiosity and lurid reportage since Christine’s grisly murder. Knowing that Jorgensen had left town and wasn’t coming back—that he was now somebody else’s problem—was good enough of an ending for Mackman and his cronies in the UW medical department. By not even bothering to alert the state regulator or the American Medical Association, this omission essentially gave Jorgensen carte blanche to start over again in the next town on the map. And that’s precisely what he did.

  As it turned out, however, it wasn’t what the fledgling general surgeon took with him as much as what he left behind that ultimately proved to be the most revealing—the most startling clue. In clearing out Jorgensen’s old room, George Johnston popped a dresser drawer and came across a curious and unsettling find. It wasn’t additional massacre Polaroids like the ones Jorgensen always proudly toted around, nor was it the souvenirs taken from Christine’s body that might have proven to be the smoking gun Linda and the cops had been looking for. Rather, it was something more elusive—but just as sinister. In an old, waterlogged cardboard box too big for Jorgensen to take with him in a rush, George stumbled across a cache of old books, all of them similar with one exception. At the bottom of the box was a loosely bound copy of a typewritten manuscript, roughly two hundred or so pages, double-sided. The title on the front page, all in block letters, read The Love Pirate, by Heidi B. Jorgensen. Neither George nor Linda knew at that time that Heidi was Jorgensen’s mother, and the unpublished manuscript Jorgensen had taken with him to Madison had been a map of his madness penned by her in an act of catharsis, a need to warn others about her son—a veiled literary depiction of the monster she’d unwittingly created.

  When George later turned over the newly discovered manuscript to Linda, she dug into the story and soon realized it was more cryptogram than it was a conventional book aimed, from what she could gather, at preteens—what her English prof might refer to as a “young reader” adventure novel. The plot itself was also strangely lurid for a story written for children, the moral of the story puzzling to say the least. Equally puzzling was why Jorgensen brought the story with him to Madison. Although Linda recognized it as a c
arefully disguised recitation of tragedies and evil deeds past, it seems that Jorgensen was also using it as a guidebook about where to go next, using it to make the more fictive elements of the story a reality. The novel was a window into the future as much as to the past—a portent of things yet to come. But now that it was in Linda’s hands, it would serve as the decoder ring that would allow her to understand the monster she was chasing as his own mother knew him.

  The protagonist of The Love Pirate, a Dr. Francis Corcoran, is in reality Dr. Niels Jorgensen, his “immaculate white coat” described in the book serving as his uniform whenever he is “going hunting.” In other words, it seems Heidi Jorgensen understood long before her son arrived in Madison that his profession as a doctor was little more than a façade used to hide his true self—an inveterate predator who in the book actually hunts his prey while dressed in his doctor’s coat. It was the character’s camouflage, just as it was for Jorgensen. The doctor in the book as the literary analog of Jorgensen has everything he desires, or so he thinks, until he meets a girl named Annabel. Soon he becomes obsessed and “must have her.” After being rebuffed, Dr. Corcoran kidnaps the girl and takes her to a remote cabin in the Pacific Northwest where he intends to “make” her love him. He sees the girl as “pitiful”; she sees only his “black eyes.”

  Though it was disguised as a children’s book, Linda recognized the story for what it was. It amounted to what’s known as a roman à clef, or a true biographical piece disguised as fiction. Most of the better known examples of the roman à clef written in English—Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—are thinly veiled works of fiction written by the authors about themselves as pseudo autobiographies penned with great creative license. Heidi Jorgensen’s The Love Pirate, however, was the story of her son, an unusual choice for any writer, and one that Linda knew had to symbolize something bigger. In analyzing the text page by page, dissecting it passage by passage and word for word, Linda would in time be able to reverse engineer Jorgensen’s psychopathology and the trail of destruction he’d left over the previous ten years. It would serve as a cipher for what he had done and what he might do next. His mother knew the things he’d done and soon so would Linda. But there were also new questions to emerge, the most salient of which was who was Annabel?