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

by Michael Arntfield

  While it was evident that Dr. Corcoran was Jorgensen, a duplicitous man of “violent tenderness,” the specificity of his chance meeting—and subsequent abduction—of Annabel in the unpublished novel suggested it was an exposition of a confirmed past and not a speculative future. The beautiful Annabel—same spelling and general description as the equally doomed Annabel Lee of Edgar Allan Poe’s last complete poem published in 1849—is found by Dr. Corcoran in San Francisco. Why San Francisco? Linda pondered the significance of the locale, the connection between the book and real life, and whether San Francisco was actually San Francisco or whether it was yet another fictionalized stand-in for somewhere or something else. Annabel is later taken against her will by Dr. Corcoran to a place—a secondary crime scene—known as Paradise Valley. Where was the real Paradise Valley? Linda read on. She found repeated mention of another remote hiding place within a hiding place—of water, a boat landing, of secret “experiments” being conducted in a “laboratory”—and of a servile assistant named Quong Sha who serves the doctor and does his bidding. She found references to the doctor’s unlikely ownership of a revolver just like the one Jorgensen brought to UW and pointed at doctors Johnston and Mackman. Linda noodled the meaning of it all, what the places and names really signified—which references were literal and which ones were metaphorical.

  What was clear was that Annabel, for reasons beyond her control, was doomed to belong to the doctor one way or another. It was also clear that, in spite of his being depicted as “superior,” Dr. Corcoran was actually a monster in disguise. As the manuscript was to become increasingly dark and lurid while encompassing obviously adult themes, Linda also wondered who the intended readership of the story might be. Or if it was ever meant to be read at all. As she began her second pass of the story, it dawned on her that The Love Pirate might be less a novel than it was a confession—an admission, committed to writing, by Jorgensen’s mother as to what she knew, the things she’d seen and heard and failed to stop. As Linda later realized upon finding references to Dr. Corcoran’s mysterious family background in the story, it might also have been Heidi Jorgensen’s insurance policy on her own life. As Linda would discover in the coming months, Heidi had reason to fear her own son as much as any other woman did.

  Now armed with the unsettling manuscript, Linda’s new priority was to uncover where Jorgensen had fled to after bailing on the NYPD polygraph and leaving Lulling and Josephson twisting in the wind. She also needed to figure out what else he might have been up to before fleeing from the Mad City shortly after Christine’s murder. Her search led her back to the campus hospital, back to the same ER department where the deviant doctor had stuck a snub-nosed revolver in the face of his boss, his last known activity before fleeing east to the Big Apple. Maybe he was on edge and feeling the cops ratcheting up the pressure; maybe he had started to snap. If so, he need not have worried. Jorgensen, although on the police radar as a person of interest, did not appear, at least to Linda, to be a subject of any urgent pursuit—of any real efforts by police to corral him. For months on from the New York visit, it was a matter of file number 68-78994 officially still being a who- and why-dunit for the UWPD. Unofficially, however, Linda’s own freelance parallel investigation was picking up speed, soon to take her due west.

  Boiling Point

  Tracking down, interviewing, and debriefing George Johnston, and digesting the enormity of the clues and ciphers left by Jorgensen’s mother in the puerile prose of The Love Pirate, took the better part of Linda’s sophomore and even her junior year at UW. All the while, she would venture back to that same fateful spot at the foot of the Sterling Hall hedgerow to mark anniversaries that ranged from respectfully somber to outright macabre. Each new lead—each new window into Jorgensen’s grotesque predilections and the extent to which he terrified his own mother—brought Linda back to the scene of the crime to look for what else might have been missed. In time, she was the only one who showed any lasting interest in the symbolic significance of Sterling Hall. But that was all about to change.

  Unlike the fall term of ’68, by the summer of ’70 as Linda prepared for her senior year and put the finishing touches on her grad school application, forever determined to remain at UW until Christine’s case was solved—and also to be on the watch for Jorgensen possibly resurfacing there—the murder at Sterling Hall had become yesterday’s news. It had the ring of an Agatha Christie cozy mystery to it, but was forgotten nonetheless. Christine’s slaying had thrust both UW and Sterling Hall under an unwanted microscope and, within two years, previously simmering issues had taken over and come to a rolling boil. As people began to wonder what else was going on at Sterling Hall, before long there were new topics to enrage UW students who were otherwise running out of things to rebel against, matters that had nothing to do with Christine Rothschild. By 1970, protesters were descending on the building en masse once it was revealed that it was essentially a war laboratory. As the Midwestern headquarters for US Army mathematics and physics research, the hall was a place some saw as a facility to reconfigure genius math minds to help Uncle Sam build a better bomb—how to more efficiently napalm the Vietcong and Agent Orange the jungles of Southeast Asia. On a campus replete with conscientious objectors who saw disavowal of the war in ’Nam as their raison d’être, this latest revelation was a new disaster in waiting, one that the university administration should have seen coming but didn’t. Before long, campus cops stood in formation with batons at port arms—zero training, zero clue, zero tolerance—to hold back and as necessary beat down protesters caught between acid trips and high ideals. Soon those students were joined by profs from the lunatic left, self-proclaimed “student combatants,” and garden-variety agitators, all of whom were held back by johnny law to clear the way for military brass and brainiacs threading their way through the police cordon. It was a campus dancing on a precipice. Things were getting ready to boil over. To scald. To scar.

  UW campus police in paltry riot gear hold back an angry student mob outside of Sterling Hall in the spring of 1970, the crowd gathering to protest the secret use of the building for US Army research related to the war in Vietnam. Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society.

  Linda made her final trip to Sterling Hall as she remembered it to hold a vigil upon returning from Milwaukee in August of 1970, just prior to fall classes starting for her penultimate semester as an undergrad. A little over two days following Linda’s final visit to the spot, and just under twenty months to the day after the atrocities committed upon Christine’s body there, Sterling Hall would claim its next innocent victim before the campus had time to catch its breath. It didn’t matter that Jorgensen was some fifteen hundred miles away at the time, the first unofficial reports in the press and the equally official word on campus was that the killer had returned after a two-year respite—that he’d come back to UW for revenge. Revenge for what exactly no one dared to ask, but in the years before splatter films like the Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises popularized the idea of serial killers hell-bent on revenge and punishing the inhabitants of cursed places, the concept of a campus killer playing the long game—the Capital City Killer—already had a certain cultural currency in Madison and its surrounding regions.

  Of course, those who started and later propagated such rumors didn’t know what Linda already knew about who had actually killed Christine Rothschild—much less why. What they also didn’t know was that the next Sterling Hall victim wasn’t intentional. He was a civilian casualty in a war that had come to the Mad City and would soon attract other wartime criminals. Like British serial killer Gordon Cummings, better known as the “Blackout Ripper” who used the chaos of the German Luftwaffe’s relentless bombing raids on London in 1942 to kill at least four women while disguised in a gas mask, the wartime chaos and social upheaval on campus and across the whole of Madison would provide the perfect distracting backdrop for the killers who would later follow in Jorgensen’s footsteps. As Cummings’s
crimes revealed in England nearly three decades earlier, the existing social disorganization along with the panicked and primal nature of the wartime environment provide easy access to victims and permit horrific crimes to otherwise go unnoticed, or at least not get properly investigated. In some cases, killers won’t bother to wait for chaos to come to them as Cummings did, they’ll seek it out themselves. They will pursue occupations and opportunities that allow them to find those same target-rich environments on their own terms.

  Consider, for instance, serial killer, peeper, and underwear pilferer “Killer Colonel” Russell Williams murdered two women—including an armed forces colleague—while stationed in a small Canadian town in 2009. While Williams’s regimental records are clear and his whereabouts known while stationed in Canada, he also served in a peacekeeping capacity in war-torn regions—including the Balkans in the 1990s—with essentially zero supervision and no standing law enforcement or record keeping. One can only wonder if the specificity of his sexual murders committed upon his return to Canada in the following years is not perhaps the predictable aftermath of rehearsal crimes never reported, much less ever investigated in the war-torn former Yugoslavia—Williams’s own version of Jorgensen’s Māori justice. The truth is that certain people and circumstances will always attract sexual predators, while certain occupations also tend to attract psychopaths. Sometimes they’re mutually inclusive, sometimes not. Civil service military occupations like Williams’s are actually the tenth most common among psychopaths, statistically speaking. Surgeons like Jorgensen the third most common. Go figure.

  The New Year’s Gang

  It was August 24, 1970, shortly after 3:00 a.m. when a foursome of disaffected reprobates wheeled a stolen Ford Econoline toward the east wing of Sterling Hall. With the keys for the van somehow lifted from an absent-minded chemistry professor the previous day, during the intervening hours the modest vehicle had been transformed by the group into a Trojan horse set to change history—set to put the Mad City on the front page of every Midwestern newspaper and the four young men responsible on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Their actions that day would also ensure that Christine’s case went to the back burner indefinitely. As if by eerie coincidence, of all the places to ditch the vehicle, it was precisely ten paces between where the van was curbed—from where the Ford’s transmission was left in “P”—and where Christine’s black umbrella was found just over two years earlier. It was just a five-second jaunt from where the four mooks hopped out with the van rigged to blow and where Christine had been posed by Jorgensen nearly two years earlier. For all intents and purposes, it was the same spot. Within an hour, Sterling Hall would go down in the archives as the only known campus building in America to claim not one but two victims of murder in separate incidents. It’s a piece of macabre trivia not found in any campus literature or in any daily double question. It is, however, a dark reminder of things past—a reminder of the contagious and mimetic nature of criminal violence both then and now.

  It was exactly 3:42 a.m. when the fuse burned to its terminus and detonated a cobbled array of primary and secondary explosives which, given the soft-target nature of Sterling Hall, bordered on overkill to the point of the absurd: a dozen sticks of TNT, a hundred gallons of fuel oil, and 1,700 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer as the coup de grâce. When it blew, the bombers—David Fine, Leo Burt, and brothers Dwight and Karleton Armstrong—were long gone, not present to see a molten and seismic BLEVE swallow the classrooms, offices, and laboratories of Sterling Hall whole. It was while celebrating the “success” of that message to Uncle Sam, while tailgating to the sounds of a local AM station at a shuttered gas station just beyond the city limits, that the four first learned from an overnight DJ that they were murderers.

  Left: Parked cars located hundreds of feet from Sterling Hall still managed to fall within the blast radius and sustain heavy damage once the time-delay bomb left by a foursome of radicals calling themselves the “the New Year’s Gang” was detonated. Right: A police officer stands guard over the most badly damaged section of Sterling Hall where a university physics researcher was killed by the blast. Courtesy: UW–Madison Archives & Wisconsin Historical Society.

  Prior to cutting the engine, lighting the wick, and running for it—their getaway car left near the campus hospital Jorgensen had only recently called home—the four bombers had made a quick, cursory survey through the windows to make sure no one was inside Sterling Hall. Or so they claimed. They would later insist that it was never their intention to hurt anyone, only to cause property damage and obliterate the army assets inside what had become a predominantly military think tank. They would cite the timing of the attack as proof positive of this. It had been just before 4:00 a.m. at the tail end of a weekend and before classes were set to begin for the year. It was a day and time when they guessed that neither faculty nor students should have been on campus, when no researchers—army or otherwise—should have been inside Sterling Hall. Just like the mistaken quantities used in their recipe for the fertilizer bomb, they guessed wrong.

  As it turned out, there were, in fact, four people inside the building at the time. These four included three researchers burning the midnight oil and the building’s hapless security guard pulling the graveyard shift. The three occupants, horribly injured, included an international student from South Africa who was permanently deafened by the blast and left for dead in the rubble before being discovered by city firefighters hours later. Then there was Robert Fassnacht. The thirty-three-year-old physicist, finishing some postdoctoral research on superconductivity, had been working alone in the physics laboratory. He had been observing the final stages of an experiment in the wee hours of the morning so that he could take his three children on a family vacation to California before the fall term kicked off. The physics department where he was based at the time was never the intended target of the group but the myopic overzealousness with which the bomb was crafted ensured that the scale of the explosion was guaranteed to cause damage of a collateral nature—that the bomb would destroy not only the building’s Army Mathematics Research Center but the whole building. In addition to the three others injured, Robert Fassnacht—found facedown in a foot of water after having his internal organs liquefied by the sheer force of the explosion—was a senseless casualty of an act that was itself senseless from start to finish. As an innocent victim unrelated to anything the bombers hoped to achieve, he paid with his life for their act of “resistance.”

  After upping the ante following at least three earlier gaffes, the Sterling Hall bombing as a purported act of righteous revolution was in reality little more than an act of domestic terrorism—murder and mayhem under a false flag. Despite having been consistently looked upon with comparative forgiveness by popular history, the bombing was also strangely similar in MO and bomb construction to both the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and, later, Timothy McVeigh’s use of a rented Ryder cargo van to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April ’95. Like in the destruction of Sterling Hall, the Oklahoma City bomb also consisted primarily of an ammonium-nitrate/fuel-oil mix, an inevitably catastrophic recipe that ATF agents and other explosives experts call an ANFO bomb for short. McVeigh’s barbarism killed a total of 168 people and earned him a much-lauded rig in the arm—execution by lethal injection—in Terre Haute in 2001. This was, of course, after first spending a few years, along with his chief coconspirator Terry Nichols, in the so-called “Bomber’s Row” of the infamous and impenetrable ADX Florence supermax prison in the Colorado Rockies. Nichols is still there while McVeigh has gone on to become a leading case study in what are known as set-and-run killers, mass murderers who—through time-delay explosives, product tampering, or other acts of deadly sabotage—put time and distance between their depraved handiwork and their subsequent hideouts. In the summer of ’70, no one knew the term “set-and-run” or even really considered the concept of domestic terrorism, much less that it might have come to UW. It w
ould be another twelve years before the Chicago Tylenol mass poisonings put the reality of set-and-run killers as a new breed of domestic terrorist on the national radar. In fact, not since the work of anarchist carriage bombings in New York—most notably the Wall Street bombing of 1920—had Americans conceived of specific buildings and locales as political targets by other Americans. But at UW in the late ’60s and now on into the ’70s, anarchism, like that at Sterling Hall, had been repurposed against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. These new radicals called themselves “the New Year’s Gang.”

  The New Year’s Gang, as with many self-styled revolutionary groups to emerge at the tail end of the turbulent ’60s, both foreign and domestic, from SLA to IRA, Black Panthers to Black September, was a mash up of ideological agendas and personalities commingled for the purpose of starting trouble. Having begun their destructive high jinks in earnest on the previous December 31—hence the name—the group of student combatants started by stealing a prop plane from the nearby Middleton Municipal Airport. Once airborne, the bomb-making Armstrong brothers, Dwight and Karleton, dropped homemade grenades and other improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, onto the roof of the Badger Army Ammunition Plant located in the neighboring town of Baraboo and closed for the New Year holiday. During the Second World War, the plant had been the largest arms manufacturing facility in the world and was the epitome of the American industrial might that helped cripple the Nazi war machine. It was a distinction which, during less popular wars like Vietnam, also made the facility a prime target for leftist militants looking to make a name for themselves. The problem was that the New Year’s Eve bombs didn’t detonate on impact, leaving the group to plot additional attacks on any installation in the area deemed to be military in nature, even if only in the academic sense. These follow-up offensives included the firebombing of the so-called Red Gym, a nineteenth-century armory-turned-gymnasium on the UW campus. Once again, the attack missed its mark, as did Karleton Armstrong’s private attack against the Badger Plant, his attempt to bomb the electrical substation having been thwarted by the overnight caretaker. Very quickly, it seemed, the New Year’s Gang’s tactics weren’t measuring up to its bravado. That was when the decision was made to escalate—to hit a target with great symbolic value. Sterling Hall was moved to the top of the list.