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

by Michael Arntfield

  As July became August, a task force consisting of some thirty full-time detectives known as the Intra County Investigative Squad combined the resources of Madison PD and the Dane County Sheriff’s Office in a bid to crack the Mad City’s latest whodunit. Much to the surprise of many, given that victims on the margins didn’t typically garner such massive investigative resources, the team even enlisted outside experts—including the anthropology department at UW—as they dug into the case for answers about the wayward farm girl’s final days and hours. For a couple of months at least, the multijurisdictional and unequivocally brutal nature of the murder earned a greater commitment from police brass trying to solve the case than was ever afforded to Christine Rothschild—killed solely within campus police jurisdiction. But in spite of their best efforts, the task force quickly came up empty. There was no verifiable timeline, no witnesses, and no cause of death established given the state of the body. Although Debbie had been identified by way of a missing lower molar and previously fractured collarbone after investigators compared X-rays and dental charts, absent those individuating details the charred corpse might well have stayed a Jane Doe forever.

  Whoever brought Debbie, likely already dead, to that fateful spot on Sauk Pass knew the ditch where she was set ablaze and knew it well. A grave about three feet deep and nearly thirty feet off the road, the killer knew it would provide the isolation needed to set a fire without attracting attention. So intense were the flames of that same fire, in fact, created with the use of an unknown accelerant, that they scorched the branches of trees hanging up to twenty-five feet above where the body was immolated. While investigators were never able to verify the fuel source used, few widely available accelerants other than gasoline allow for such rapid and intense combustion. That would mean that the Sauk Pass location was in all likelihood what’s known as the secondary crime scene, strategically selected by the killer as an ideal location for disposing of—and destroying—the victim’s body. Debbie’s murderer knew this because he’d been to that same spot before. Killers, even the most reckless and confident of killers, don’t simply load a body into a car and hit the road at night without some semblance of a plan. A mobile killer with access to a car is required to make a series of calculated decisions regarding locations, routes, and post-offense behavior under intense pressure and with a victim on board. Such decisions are thus among some of the best indicators as to whom the police should be looking for—a means of vetting what in Debbie’s case was a seemingly endless list of potential suspects. Notwithstanding that the primary crime scene, wherever it was that Debbie was actually held and killed, could never be determined, the postmortem activity with her body, based on what we know today about offender behavior, speaks volumes about the murderer—who today is likely still at large.

  Anytime a killer elects to transport a body and create a secondary crime scene—a significant behavioral marker in its own right—no decision with respect to location is ever arbitrary. The decision to move a body and conceal it, in this case by removing it from public view and destroying the remains, would require extraordinary risk on behalf of the killer, both prolonging his time with the body and also running the risk of being seen or caught in the act at either the secondary crime scene or in its vicinity. The decision to select the Old Sauk Pass Road dump site indicates that the killer had been to that location and knew it well enough to realize that, at night and under cover of absolute rural darkness, the likelihood of his being interrupted or seen, even after starting a raging fire, was slim to none. What risk it did pose would have been rationalized on the basis that it was still less risky than if the body were to be found quickly and identified as Debbie Bennett equally quickly. Her killer felt compelled to drive the county roads surrounding Madison’s bedroom village of Cross Plains—a dead body on board and a jerry can of gasoline at the ready—because, had Debbie been left at the primary scene or merely transported and dumped to be found and identified within a day or two, his sense was that this would have led the police straight to him. The killer presumed, rightly or wrongly, that city cops would immediately find some obvious connection between Debbie, the crime scene, or the cause of death—or all three—to do some basic arithmetic and link her murder to him. The decision to transport and conceal the body, the decision to essentially make Debbie disappear, was therefore a strategy to place time and distance between the killer and the eventual discovery and identification of the body. By the time the charred remains were positively identified as Debbie Bennett, a mere two weeks it seems provided more than enough time.

  Today the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime actively monitors trends with respect to this very specific—and risky—post-offense behavior among offenders, what the Bureau calls Disposal Pathway #1, and has found overwhelming commonalities that might have been useful in the early days of the Bennett investigation to help cops narrow their focus. In just under half of such documented cases in the United States involving this disposal pathway, the victim is known to the killer, the primary crime scene is the killer’s own home, and the most common cause of death is strangulation. These figures tend to align with the autopsy of Debbie’s burned body, which, while inconclusive, suggested she was neither stabbed nor shot when killed roughly ten days earlier. In nearly all similar cases, the killer is also employed full-time and owns the car used to transport the body. In all solved cases where this same disposal method is used, the motive for the murder is also paraphilic in nature—a sexual homicide. That would no doubt also account for the fact that, in nearly 80 percent of these occurrences, the killer kills again, in most cases two to four additional victims. It means that in eight of every ten such cases involving this same disposal pathway, once a killer does this successfully, he gets a taste for it. He goes serial.

  Fan Fiction

  While the Bennett task force had an army of thirty plainclothes cops chasing a budding or perhaps an existing serial killer without so much as a clue to work with, Linda was single-handedly chasing another. By the end of the summer of ’76, she was confident, based on the available evidence and his own statements recounted by witnesses, that Jorgensen had started his homicidal career by murdering his own brother before moving on to kill one or more families in Africa and then finally coming to Madison where he murdered Christine. In between these events, she was also satisfied—and no doubt correct—that there had to be more in the intervening years. By the time he arrived at UW, Jorgensen’s growing sadistic and necrophilic impulses were impossible to contain. He’d been at it and escalating for more than a while. Maybe his transformation to homicidal necrophile and sexual murderer began back in Africa, she thought, but the attack on Christine was too specific for it to have been his first of its kind. It once again took her back to The Love Pirate as Jorgensen’s disguised biography—his roman à clef. It took her back to the same nagging question: Who is Annabel?

  Soon, as two investigations, one official, one unofficial, moved in opposite directions in pursuit of two different killers, one unknown and the other one known—at least to Linda and a small handful of cops—the cases of Debbie Bennett and Christine Rothschild managed to start blending together in the local rumor mill. Given that both women were so brutalized postmortem and that, more notably, both cases had a tangential connection to UW—Christine murdered while renting a room on campus and Debbie while renting a room near the campus—people started speculating that the slayings were the work of a common offender.

  Talk of the Capital City Killer escalating his behavior made its way through the streets of Madison along with the parallel rumor that he was becoming increasingly fixated on toying with local law enforcement. The Bennett job, people speculated, was an indication that the killer was miring the murders in predictable police bureaucracy and factionalism by involving as many different agencies as possible—that he was standing back and watching the mayhem of his work carry on for months and years later, always enjoying the fact that muddled and multijurisdictiona
l investigations were going nowhere. All the while, the Rothschild case remained the closely guarded property of the campus police—the tiny UWPD—and not the Madison city cops. The MO in the Bennett murder had taken what should have been one case and divided it into two, a city case on one hand and a county case on another. He was dividing and conquering. He knew the task force was a perishable veneer—a PR smoke screen. Although police politicians were masters at maintaining appearances, interagency cooperation, he knew, would be short-lived and soon fizzle, each agency predictably hoarding its own information and leaving the sandbox.

  The Capital City Killer, though a figment of the collective local imagination, provided for many an effective explanation as to why a second murder had now summarily gone cold in what seemed like record time, even by Mad City standards. Someone, it was thought, had to be masterminding the whole affair and outsmarting the police in Professor Moriarty-like fashion. As terrifying a prospect as it was, Madisonians wanted to believe in the Capital City Killer. They wanted to believe that he was the new “Napoleon of crime,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s one-time description of Moriarty and Scotland Yard’s characterization of master criminal Adam Worth, the real-life inspiration for Doyle’s villain. The idea of a single and comparatively ingenious Capital City Killer was, for many, a notably less terrifying prospect than the idea of the Rothschild and Bennett murders being separate random events—less terrifying than the thought that three different police forces were now simultaneously out of their depths and two separate sexual murderers still on the loose. The machinations of a single calculating master criminal being behind it all—that there was only one killer to be caught—for whatever reason, allowed people to sleep a little easier.

  By the fall of ’76, anything in the Mad City, it seemed, was possible. That same year, Wisconsin body snatcher and necrophilic serial killer Ed Gein was still languishing in a Madison insane asylum. Known as the “Plainfield Ghoul” among other monstrous pseudonyms, Gein murdered two people in Waushara County, an hour north of the Mad City in the 1950s following a decade of trolling rural cemeteries and robbing graves of body parts he later fashioned into decorative items and clothing. When the police searched his dilapidated Waushara County shanty after arresting him for the 1957 murder of a local hardware store owner, they found a veritable house of horrors that shocked the world. Among other items, sheriff’s deputies discovered masks and lamp shades made from human skin, bowls made from human skulls, and even a corset crudely fabbed from a dismembered, decaying torso.

  Gein was later charged with the shopkeeper’s murder and declared criminally insane, spending the rest of his life in the Central State Hospital in Madison where he died in the summer of ’84. The car Gein used to haul the disinterred corpses was then sold at auction to a sleazy traveling carnival showman who charged admission for a quick gander inside and out, an early example of a murderabilia item that would later spawn an industry sustained both by and for the sad and disordered. Although Gein was safely locked away in the summer of ’76, the Capital City Killer soon emerged as the state’s next conceptual public enemy and necrophilic supervillain—the Plainfield Ghoul’s heir apparent—but in a more cunning and intelligent form. Soon, with Gein still recent history and by then the subject of Hollywood movie magic, the existence of a Capital City Killer emerged as an entirely plausible theory that even some in law enforcement were prepared to buy in to. What had happened in the Bennett case therefore seemed to lend credence for many to the idea that the killer was himself some kind of twisted theater impresario. Like the debased roadside promoter now selling tickets to Gein’s deathmobile, the killer was himself putting on a show while he terrorized the Mad City and mocked its law enforcement officials.

  As leads dwindled and rumors swelled, on the morning of August 12, 1976—a muggy Thursday in the Mad City—members of the emaciating Intra County Investigative Squad watched graphic Debbie Bennett crime-scene and autopsy slides on a pull screen in a darkened boardroom. They sipped soluble coffee out of Styrofoam and kicked around some suspect names, most of which had been coughed up by their various stoolies and jailhouse snitches. The names were all reruns from earlier briefings, all since cleared and alibied. Less than a month in and the investigation was already running on fumes—gridlocked for the foreseeable future. At that same time, Cardinal manager and barkeep Luther Getty was back on East Wilson Street taking delivery of the day’s mail when he made a chilling discovery.

  Checkout

  Amid the various letters and parcels that made their way to Cardinal that day, including the usual bills from Ma Bell, mailers from liquor purveyors, and Dear Johns sent to upstairs tenants both past and present, was something entirely unexpected. A single room key affixed to a plastic Cardinal Hotel tag lay loose among the items dropped on the bar by the mail carrier, a “Please Return to 418 E. Wilson” request, along with a “Postage Paid” guarantee, etched on the back. Confounded, Getty, studying the key and checking the registry, suddenly realized that it was the key—Debbie Bennett’s room key. It was the key she’d taken after checking in and making a small deposit back on July 8. It was the key to the room she’d never slept in, never so much as entered, before vanishing. It was the key to a room she’d never checked out of—until now.

  As investigators headed down to the Cardinal yet again, they contemplated the meaning of Debbie’s room key having been returned through the mail. True, some Good Samaritan may have stumbled across the key discarded in the street and done the right thing by dropping it in the next mailbox he or she saw and ensuring it made its way back to its rightful owner. Then again, the key might also have been taken by the killer as a sadistic keepsake—just like the many souvenirs stripped from Christine Rothschild’s corpse by Jorgensen—before being dropped in the mail to taunt police, to keep the case above the fold in the area papers, and to stoke the flames of the Capital City Killer lore. To go public with this latest development in the case might very well bring forward that Good Samaritan to reveal where the key was found. It might allow cops to glean the precise spot on the map where it was dropped, the site, perhaps, where Debbie was snatched by her killer—maybe at or near the still-unknown primary crime scene. It might also very well bring the false confessors, kooks, and agitators out of the woodwork. On the other hand, if the sender was in fact the killer, it might empower him further, leading to additional attempts to upstage the task force by mailing more items or even providing him with inspiration to kill again and collect additional souvenirs, the mementos of his work. It was a catch-22—damned either way.

  Knowing in part that Getty at the Cardinal would likely not be able to keep this latest development quiet, the decision was made the next morning to go public rather than deep-six the key as holdback evidence and lose control of the narrative once again. In short order, Madison PD detective Ted Mell, the latest in a series of local spokescops straight out of central casting and the task force’s new mouthpiece, made a public plea in the Capital Times. He implored the finder of the key to contact police, stressing that the person might be unknowingly holding an additional key—one that might very well unlock the mystery of Debbie Bennett’s murder. Other area papers picked up and ran the story for a few days, making hay of the mysteriously returned room key and speculating as to its meaning. The same appeal also received regular top-of-the-hour play on most AM radio stations, including in nearby Milwaukee where conservative talk radio dominated. Yet nothing materialized. The call never came. Not even from the kooks.

  Before long, time got away from Madison. Soon August became September and, with that, the students trickled back into town—back to UW. Their return brought an eerie anticipation of what might come next as the autumn air and unanswered questions both hung heavy in the Mad City. Two of the four Sterling Hall bombers were still on the lam, and the murderers of Christine Rothschild and Debbie Bennett were now both also at large. The Capital City Killer theorists of course preferred to think the latter two were in fact the same person—a s
ingle and increasingly emboldened sex slayer. In the following years, as the body count on or near the campus climbed, more and more Madisonians started to cling to that same idea. Single serial killer or not, by the end of 1976 it was evident that the identity of the person who found and returned the Cardinal Hotel room key last in Debbie Bennett’s possession—in her possession at or just before the time she was murdered, driven to Cross Plains, and then set on fire—was bound to remain unanswered. There might well have been many reasons, whether rational or irrational, why whoever found the key might not have read or heard the appeal to come forward, even why that person might have chosen not to come forward if aware of the appeal. The chilling possibility also remained that the key might have been thrown in the mail by the murderer himself.

  The brown purse Debbie was sporting when she was last seen alive was not with the charred clothing debris found with her body and has never been found. Had the key been in her purse as one might expect, it would have still been there once she met her killer. If it was the killer who had mailed the key back to the hotel, the question remains why. Returning it to the hotel to play cat and mouse and assert his self-perceived power is one possibility. Another possibility, given that he could have simply tossed it in the trash, is that he wanted to be rid of it—that any sadistically erotic souvenir value it offered was outweighed by its identifiable and incriminating nature, its ability to link him to Debbie. By the time the key had been through the rigmarole of US Postal Service sorting, had made its way to the carrier’s bag, and had been retrieved by Luther Getty, the shiny plastic key tag—a smooth surface normally ideal for yielding fingerprints—bore only an array of indiscernible smudges, none of which could be used to identify either the killer or the finder. Whether to stick his thumb in the eye of the local cops or simply divest himself of any remaining physical evidence, if the killer was indeed the one who sent the key back to the Cardinal on the hotel’s dime, he’d won.