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

by Michael Arntfield

  At the time of the bombing at Sterling Hall, only Fine and Burt were actually students at UW. Fine, born and raised as a Quaker, was still riding a near-perfect GPA from his freshman year and working for the school newspaper, The Daily Cardinal. Burt fancied himself something of an activist-journalist fixated on ’Nam, having become radicalized in his views on the war, the draft, and student politics—so his story went—after he took a police baton to the head while covering the Kent State protest and shootings earlier that same summer. It was that same incident in which four unarmed student protesters were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard, which had almost single-handedly galvanized the two UW students and the bomb-making Armstrong brothers, both Mad City locals. They would join forces to send a message that the US Army and its mathematics research project were entirely unwelcome in the Mad City, much less at left-leaning, Bohemian UW.

  Today, aside from the plaque on the wall of a restored Sterling Hall mentioning Robert Fassnacht as a tragic footnote to the whole affair, a historical marker on the same Bascom Hill where Linda last set eyes on Christine Rothschild cites the 1970 New Year’s Gang bombing as something that brought the campus’s long-running “period of protest to a tragic end.” Although Fassnacht’s death and the ensuing FBI manhunt put the New Year’s Gang out of business and perhaps served to neuter potential imitators, the bombing would set in motion a new era of violence that would pull the campus—and the entirety of Madison—even further down the rabbit hole.

  Folklore

  In the wake of the bombing and their landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, the New Year’s Gang headed due north to hole up in one of the Vietnam Era’s preferred dumping grounds for American draft dodgers, felons, fugitives, and general detritus: Toronto, Canada. From there, they split up and went their separate ways. Bomb-maker Karleton Armstrong was the first to get collared in 1972, while his brother—by then using the Zodiac Killer-esque pseudonym “Virgo”—later fled Toronto for San Francisco to hook up with the SLA at the height of the Patty Hearst affair; by that time, he apparently developed a taste for self-righteous violence in the name of peace.

  After later being cashiered by the militant group for reasons unknown, “Virgo” made his way back to Toronto where he was arrested in 1977, less than a year after David Fine was scooped by the cops back in Northern California. Today, no one has seen or heard from Leo Burt. He remains at large, walking the streets under an assumed name, likely still somewhere in Canada. Law enforcement’s appetite for chasing him down has no doubt waned as the years have gone by, especially given that the three other bombers were paroled in no time flat, released to the great adulation of disordered fans and like-minded Anarchist Cookbook types within the following decade.

  A remarkable beneficiary of revisionist history, Karleton Armstrong served just seven years and then managed to open a lemonade stand catering to students and situated near the gates of the same campus that had, upon initial importuning by Linda back in the summer of ’68, denied Christine Rothschild a memorial—whether permanent or makeshift—at the same building and on the same campus where Karleton had killed and maimed staff and students while causing tens of millions of dollars in damage. Later, he and his brother Dwight—paroled a second time for the production of crystal meth—acquired a sandwich shop aptly named Radical Rye on State Street near the library mall.

  But back in the early ’70s, when the New Year’s Gang save Burt was still locked up, other gangs of a similarly cross-border composition soon emerged, seemingly created in their likeness. Soon these same groups were no longer feigning any political or moral agenda, and were instead simply fighting “The Man” for the money. By the mid-1970s, with the FBI now investigating upward of one thousand bombings a year in the United States alone, the most notable of these syndicates was known as the Stopwatch Gang. Breaking away from the new ’70s tradition of bombings, skyjackings, and other forms of mayhem, the Stopwatch Gang was a Canuck trio and precision stick-up crew who—as the inverse of the New Year’s Gang—assembled first in Canada and then moved stateside. In time, they would go on to commit what would become some of the largest and most expertly executed bank jobs of all time. They also occasionally returned to Canada to take down additional scores. The name assigned to the group was actually coined not by the gang itself but by the FBI after investigation revealed that they could rob banks and airports of as much as $750,000 and be gone in under ninety seconds. Eyewitness accounts additionally confirmed that the leader in each robbery would actually be keeping time with a stopwatch, a theme later played on in countless caper films, with the Stopwatch Gang being fictionalized as the “Ex-Presidents” in the 1991 film Point Break, later remade—and made worse—in 2015.

  But the Stopwatch Gang as a bank-robbing iteration of the New Year’s Gang isn’t where the events of the summer of ’70 would come to an end. In fact, the reprise of Sterling Hall as a murder site—a place some would later describe as hexed, a place to forever serve as a lightning rod for violence and tragedy—connects the lore of Christine Rothschild’s murder with what current criminological data suggests about the importance and recurrence of specific places as magnets for crime. New areas of research known as microgeography and psychogeography actually suggest that certain locales are particularly susceptible, often for symbolic reasons, to being enshrined as places for criminal activities. This doesn’t mean sizeable and period-specific criminal hot spots—like Central Park in the 1980s, as the Big Apple rotted—so much as it refers to a phenomenon criminologists call place-specific crime.

  The term in criminology describes why otherwise unremarkable places such as the Big Otter Creek, located in a Canadian town of only a few thousand people about an hour from Toronto, has had a total of eight people either murdered there or killed elsewhere and dumped there over the last fifty years. The creek doesn’t offer an improved means of escape or disposal—it offers killers no instrumental or tactical advantage. In fact, on the contrary, all but one of the killers who have found themselves drawn to the creek either have been arrested or have committed suicide there. Yet there’s something about its location, its design, and its snowballing lore that consistently draws killers back there time and again, generation after generation. Ditto for a specific stretch of Gilgo Beach on Long Island, New York, and a drainage ditch off of Black Horse Pike in Atlantic City, both of which have proven to be instrumental and signature-related disposal locations for one or more serial killers who remain at large. In fact, the symbolic and fantasy significance of specific kill sites and body dumpsites—once again the specialization known as psychogeography—is only now gaining significant attention.

  But when Robert Fassnacht was killed at Sterling Hall within two years of Christine Rothschild’s murder, despite the term “psychogeography” not pinging on anyone’s radar, people were already talking about the academic building being precisely such a symbolic place—maybe even a hexed place. Within a day or two, the four members of the New Year’s Gang were all over every newspaper and television screen in the Midwest and on every screen in the nation within another week once the feds ratcheted up the pressure. There was no great mystery about who was responsible, who’d pilfered the van, loaded it with explosives, and left it to blow at the eastside of the structure—the spot where the blast would cause the greatest devastation.

  Yet, by the fall of ’70, as Linda made her way back to campus following a summer-long layover in Jorgensen’s native California in a bid to track his movements, there was already talk that a Capital City Killer was behind the now two deaths at Sterling Hall. It was the antecedent of a local boogeyman tale in the Mad City, one that made as little sense in 1970 as it would a decade later when even some cops were buying into the theory. After all, as is often said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

  That truth includes the fact that Niels Jorgensen had stalked and murdered Christine Rothschild back in May of ’68—her best friend Linda knew it and, by 1970, so did nearly everyone who’d
come to know him. The cops knew it too but were waylaid by a lack of resources and interest on one side, outmaneuvered by Jorgensen on the other. They had bigger fish to fry—or so they thought. These fish included four fugitive bombers who the student body at UW already and irrationally thought might have had at least some connection to Christine’s murder. It was in that symbolic link to Sterling Hall as the unlikeliest of common ground for two separate killings that the construct of a mythical Capital City Killer was hatched. The horrific mutilation murder of Christine—what’s known as an act of lust murder, where the sadistic and brutal nature of the crime serves a sexual purpose in the absence of an obvious rape—and the subsequent politically motivated bombing couldn’t have been more different, aside from the common location.

  And while no one for a minute suspected that the New Year’s Gang had actually killed Christine, the Capital City Killer mythos was initially less about a person than an idea—an unseen and intangible force. It was something in the ether that compelled people to come to UW, and more specifically, Sterling Hall, to murder. When people say the Devil comes to town, they don’t actually mean Satan incarnate, they’re talking about everything the Devil carries with him—something that ensures the town is soon consumed by something bigger and more sinister. Such was the case in the Mad City when the 1970s dawned. In later years, however, the myth of a nebulous and elusive force would take on a more tangible dimension, a more human form. Some came to believe that one man might very well be walking the streets of the Mad City, venturing on to its pristine college campus to claim young lives.

  Today, many still believe that myth. There will be no convincing them otherwise. With as many as 75 percent of Americans today believing that Lee Harvey Oswald was actually framed by the CIA, the FBI, or the Mob—and maybe all of them at once—and nearly that same number believing that Earth is currently under observation by extraterrestrial spacecraft, there is simply no disabusing people of a version of events they want to believe. There is no talking them out of a story they will forever cling to in spite of all cogent evidence to the contrary. Decades on, some even claimed to have seen the Capital City Killer—as though he were perhaps Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or some other fixture of cryptozoology—while others claimed to know his true identity. All the while, as the story gained momentum, it became little more than an impediment to catching Christine’s real killer—Jorgensen—and the killers, plural, who came to Madison afterward. As Linda continued her search for Jorgensen and bounced around from place to place in later years as part of an elusive and thankless pilgrimage for justice, the lore of the Capital City Killer was already destined to become fact for men who, like Jorgensen, would find their way to the Mad City to hunt—to emulate his methods. Indeed, if after the Sterling Hall bombing the Capital City Killer was still little more than supposition and a local spook story, there were those prepared to make it reality. Those ready to claim the title for themselves.

  Chapter 4

  POSTAGE PAID

  The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

  —G. K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross

  Book of Revelations

  In the summer of ’70, as the New Year’s Gang put the finishing touches on its sinister plot to level Sterling Hall, the American League expansion franchise known as the Seattle Pilots was transplanted to Linda’s hometown of Milwaukee and, with a turn of the screw, became the Brewers. For Linda, there was still precious time during those first few years of the search for Jorgensen to ponder what had happened and the turn life had taken—to contemplate what to do and where to go next. Some weekend afternoons when taking in a game at County Stadium on South 46th, she even pondered what might have been but never could be—what the future might have held had Christine made it out of the Mad City alive.

  But the real nagging question by that point was the story told by Jorgensen’s mother in the unedited mess of papers that was the unpublished manuscript titled The Love Pirate. That compendium of blemished old photostat pages, while seemingly pandering to Jorgensen’s ego, was also a carefully veiled hit piece on his manhood and mental stability—something that Linda recognized for what it was. She knew that there was, quite simply, more to the story. The text was in actuality a deceptively innocent and inviting veneer pulled tight across a darkened recess, the flimsy manuscript a map to a place no one was ever meant to venture. In reality, it was a coded message detailing what had actually happened in the Jorgensen family’s North Hollywood home some decades earlier, a four-bedroom on Toluca Estates Drive hand built by the old man, Dr. Niels Jorgensen Senior. It was a dressed-up confessional of what they had since realized their son was—what he had become. It was Heidi’s warning to the world about what the family had unleashed. Like Victor Frankenstein, she, at once obsessed by and terrified of her creation, chose to provide a written record of her observations.

  Some of the connections in the book were self-evident. Others were less so; the names had been changed to protect both the innocent and ignominious alike. Jorgensen had been remade as Dr. Corcoran—after the state prison of the same name, sometimes referred to as the COR and located just two hours north of the Jorgensen homestead in King’s County. A veritable gladiator school considered by watchdog journalists to be the most dangerous state prison in America, notable future inmates would include Charles Manson and Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. At the time Heidi penned her infantile confessional, Corcoran prison also housed any number of LA area sex creeps and coed killers, which made Dr. Corcoran—the eponymous “Love Pirate”—and his treatment of young Annabel in the story all the more unsettling. The story, written in the years before Christine’s murder, also begged the question of the identity of the purportedly fictional person whom Annabel was standing in for. Like Poe’s Annabel Lee, a beautiful woman condemned to death for reasons beyond her control, the Annabel described by Jorgensen’s mother might have been one woman or a surrogate for many. She might have been a young woman who had already met her death as a result of Jorgensen’s past misdeeds, or one in imminent danger because of what Heidi Jorgensen believed to be inevitable once her son made his way to any destination where women of such an appearance were plentiful—and vulnerable.

  To Linda, Heidi Jorgensen’s ostensible children’s book amounted to a series of cryptic clues daisy-chained together over the course of two hundred or so typed pages. Clues about the past. Clues about the present and future at once. Clues about what Niels had done and would do again—and again. One of those clues was what really happened to Niels’s brother, Søren. The grandiose yarn told by Jorgensen during his time at UW was that Søren—his younger brother—drowned at Midway at age twenty. He had been, just like Niels, a war hero bar none, but unlike Niels, he never had the good fortune to make it back to the States. Linda knew the arithmetic didn’t add up—the fib didn’t compute. If Niels was at the Bulge at age eighteen or nineteen, his younger brother couldn’t have been twenty a full two years earlier. Even if he had lied about his age to recruiters, he would have been only fifteen or sixteen when the draft age was reduced to age eighteen in November ’42. The detail about his brother drowning also bothered Linda upon reading and rereading The Love Pirate, in particular, the repeated mention of Dr. Corcoran as a “strong swimmer,” among other arcane nautical references. On the surface they read like non sequiturs, but beneath that surface something seemed to align at varying points with Jorgensen’s stories about his brother’s death at sea. She needed to find out more.

  As Jorgensen remained off the grid, Linda did some digging into a web of lies that she knew would provide a clue about Niels’s origins and why he’d come to UW of all places. It would offer a window into why he’d killed, why he’d chosen Christine, and where he’d be next. Linda’s time at the Sentinel had taught her a thing or two about muckraking—about turning over stones, beating the bushes, and just about every other nature metaphor that might fit in terms of uncovering a concealed truth. She knew exactly wh
ere to go next, and she would use The Love Pirate manuscript as her sextant. Although it was a ledger of carefully concealed names and dates, Linda had enough experience as a result of her now-burgeoning freelance investigation to fill in the blanks where the cops could not—or more accurately, perhaps, would not.

  Linda started with the Census Bureau. Then the American Medical Association. Then the obits and birth notices—glad tidings—published back in the Jorgensen family’s home state of California and which she could access through Associated Press records held in the archives back at the Sentinel. Even the expansive UW library with seemingly interminable repositories of microfilm and its redheaded stepchild—microfiche—came in handy as Linda, now a master’s student, began her research in earnest. She was to stay forever on campus, she vowed, keeping watch over the UW and the Mad City as a whole in case Jorgensen or his like showed up again. In case he showed up, as he had last time, when no one seemed to be watching. Linda also knew, as with all lies, that there had to be some verisimilitude to Jorgensen’s charade that had prefaced his slaughter of Christine and his present life on the lam. She knew that, beneath it all, there was some kernel of truth around which the more elaborate affectation was constructed. It turned out, using the book as a starting point for that truth, it was even worse than she thought.