Linda was completing her final background check forms for the Milwaukee PD when she learned of the Debbie Bennett murder. It then dawned on her that, whether killed on or off campus, whether hailing from the boondocks or big-city Chicago, or whether living between addresses and on the margins of society or in Ann Emery Hall and armed with a sterling-plated trust fund, class differences in Madison offered no protection from motivated killers—or police apathy at the time. The MOs between the Rothschild and Bennett murders couldn’t have been more disparate—chalk and cheese—but what took Linda back to the spring of ’68 when she heard of the ghastly discovery on Old Sauk Pass Road was the willingness of senior police brass to monitor the case, if only to call balls and strikes. The county task force that had been cobbled together was mostly sizzle and no real steak, but a mere eight years after Christine’s murder, Linda was surprised to see how criminal investigations appeared to be modernizing—how there was less of a cold war between police departments in terms of information sharing, at least in the early days of investigations. It both frustrated and inspired her, gave her pause to think just how random death, and more so its ensuing investigation in the case of murder, could be. As the current data compiled from cities such as Baltimore, actually a famed locale in the annals of television crime drama, and “Big Easy” New Orleans suggest—with their police departments’ clearance rates for murders hovering around 40 percent annually—it’s equally random whether a murder gets solved. In fact, it may simply be a matter of luck—whether good or bad.
The contrasts between the Christine Rothschild and Debbie Bennett murders that also stuck out in Linda’s mind weren’t only what a difference eight years made; nor was it limited to the expanse between an isolated makeshift grave and burn pit in rural Dane County and the hedgerow outside of Sterling Hall on a marquee college campus. Instead, Linda wondered how one victim being found on university property with countless prying eyes and the other on a remote private property where no one seemed to pay much attention ultimately altered the course of how the investigations were handled as discrete undertakings. Neither investigation, as was clear from the outset in both cases, at least after the New York snafu in Christine’s case, was going anywhere. Meanwhile, Linda wondered, What if?
What if Christine had been killed somewhere else—anywhere but the UW campus—and cops from outside UWPD, effectively lapdogs for the university’s senior administration, had been allowed to investigate? What then? This was of course years before similar questions would be raised not only with respect to how serious felonies on campus are either investigated or not investigated by university cops in the interest of publicity and reputation but also how campus police services are managed altogether. Most notable in recent times would be the 2011 attack on protesting students at the University of California at Davis—what’s become known as the UC Davis pepper-spray incident. As described, a group of otherwise passive students sitting passively—albeit disruptively—on the university grounds were pepper sprayed at close range with a tactical “Mark 9” canister, a weapon normally reserved for violent mobs. It was later revealed that the entire police operation was deployed—and was being controlled—not by an experienced police manager trained in crowd de-escalation, negotiation, and use of force, but by a civilian university paper pusher who had assumed executive power over the police and ordered the cops to move in. Whether in 1968 or today, the reality is that campus police work is closely and precariously tethered to corporate interests, with even senior officers from the chief on down having their strings pulled by puppeteers sitting safely up in the ivory tower.
As Linda ruminated the Debbie-Christine dichotomy, she completed the “Educational Background” component of the police department’s questionnaire, filling in “UW–Madison” under the header asking for the name of the institution from which her latest degree had been conferred. In this case, said degree was a master of arts in Spanish, a degree that she was already preparing herself to be questioned about by recruiters, academy instructors, and her field-training officers. She was certain she’d be asked why she went to grad school and what the degree meant—how that helped her in police work and what she would really “bring to the table” once through the academy.
But Linda knew the masters was a voucher that, in 1976, would help her make, at the very least, captain or lieutenant one day, still believing that police departments actually allowed the cream to rise. If nothing else, her background would all but ensure a fast track to detective, allow her to parlay her freelance investigation and research experience into something with bigger chops. She had made it this far on her instincts and her anger over what had happened to her freshman friend and confidante—what had happened and would happen to women all over the Mad City and every other city in America for that matter. But if she could pair that anger and those instincts with actual field training, backup, and PD resources, there would be no limit to how far she could pursue Jorgensen, to the good she might be able to do in other cases sitting idle in bankers’ boxes and growing colder by the day. If asked what she brought to the table by a cynical senior cop who didn’t like the cut of her jib, too bad for him. In other words, her response would speak for itself—she was the table.
Chapter 5
PERMAFROST
The larger crimes are more apt to be simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity”
Old Milwaukee
By the first Wisconsin snowfall of ’76, the dust had settled on the Debbie Bennett case for good—an open/unsolved to add to the growing pile of Madison mayhem. Meanwhile, about eighty miles east on I-94 in Linda’s hometown of Milwaukee, it was the second of two consecutive decades known as the Breier years. Chief Harold Breier was an old-school cop in the best and worst senses, a brass knuckles–tough Polish immigrant who had a twenty-year reign as the city’s top cop, a run largely unrivaled even among America’s other better-known police leaders, from August Vollmer to Raymond Kelly. Old Chief Breier swung a big enough stick, going back to his rise to power in ’64, that had Christine Rothschild been from the Brew City herself, it would have meant fingers on the throats of investigators, results demanded—the case put down lickety-split. It would have meant hell and high water being moved until the killer—Jorgensen as a few Madison PD cops knew by the end of ’68—was in cuffs. Either in cuffs, that is, or dead himself—eminent bullet bait for every cop under Breier’s thumb almost statewide.
But as a Windy City transplant, Christine might as well have been from Neptune. She was an out-of-towner—an interloper on Wisconsin soil and, moreover, squarely within the jurisdiction of a small police force with limited resources for an occurrence of such magnitude. Although a horrific case, it was also a case that would become a lingering nuisance without any vigorous pursuit of Jorgensen after the first year and that failed ground game in New York. As Christine’s case soon became colder, it also seemed to be enveloped in an incremental disinterest in trying to locate Jorgensen at all, even though still a prime suspect. As the case faded away into the distance, the Rothschild job ceased to be a news item as well—out of sight, out of mind. Bit by bit people would forget. But part of Linda’s promise to Christine was not only to make sure her killer got caught, but also that no one forgot. No one. Ever.
With Breier at the helm back in Milwaukee, Poles ruled. With a distinctly Polish accent that made his background obvious, Breier actively recruited Poles, and they eventually made up a large part of the police department—from rank and file to brass buttons. Linda, of Polish descent herself, had her application to the academy rubber-stamped and, her rock-solid credentials notwithstanding, a welcome mat was rolled out from day one. It was also clear that she would be an asset to the department as a polyglot, a multilingual woman with a master’s degree and an investigative intuition that eluded even some of Breier’s best case men. Given her newspaper background at the Sentinel, she might also be usef
ul in dealing with the press—one day. But that same background would additionally be useful to Linda in her personal quest, something she would leverage in later years to get Christine’s murder back on the front page—back above the fold. In an age when college grads and women represented a small sliver of city cops, Linda was a poster child for reform and progress. It wasn’t, of course, only the police work that appealed to Linda, at least not the type of police work that drew the other applicants. By ’76 she also knew that the UW campus cops—some well-intentioned, others dangerously inept—could never cultivate the underworld contacts necessary to keep tabs on Jorgensen as he trekked with impunity across the Lower 48 using various schemes and pseudonyms. Her status as a member of the police force, she thought, would provide access not only to a variety of records and resources but also contacts. Access to people no one else seemed to be mining, people who knew a thing or two about disappearing, and people who might find themselves crossing Jorgensen’s path. In the end, however, Linda would need to pass on committing herself to a cop’s life.
By early ’77 she also had a few sources passed to her through old crime-beat contacts at the Sentinel, contacts brokered by Bill Share, Linda’s beloved boss from the summer of ’68. From there she worked her way up—or perhaps down—the ladder of local ne’er-do-wells who claimed to have seen Jorgensen over the course of their travels. Linda knew that his malignant narcissism and need to spin tall tales would give him away every time—in every city he slipped in and out of—and that he no doubt would indiscriminately make himself known to anyone who would listen. He would impose on every social situation as a self-proclaimed cognoscente on every topic even when in theory he should have been lying low.
The best tip from Share’s contact list came from a disgraced day-drinking croupier from Binion’s Horseshoe on old Fremont in Vegas, a man who by the spring thaw of ’77 had moved to Milwaukee to open a bookie mill for the local sports scene. He soon also had to begin a new gig as a paid snitch for city cops and reporters after most of that same gambling scene he tried to get in on turned out to be already mobbed up, and he got muscled out before even starting. Desperate, the croupier took to diming out old clients, friends, and even family for the equivalent of chump change as a confidential informer, or “CI” in police circles, who unapologetically played both sides. After an initial intro, he offered a new lead to Linda on the cheap—information in exchange for a case of Linda’s parents’ homemade wine. After the deal was made and as shaky hands uncorked a bottle right there in Linda’s car, the snitch went on to describe a doctor, claiming to have worked ringside at Caesar’s Palace for the Foreman-Lyle bout in January of ’76, who seemed to fit the bill. The man went on to describe the doctor, coming into the Horseshoe the night after the bout, boozy breathed and with a sweet roll of hundreds burning a hole in his pocket. All the while, the doctor was rambling on about his time back in the Mad City—in Africa before that. The story had the ring of truth.
Linda knew, since she was dealing with a grifter and a boozer, that the info also could be pure bunk. Although she’d heard make-believe tips before and would again, she also knew that no one but a few, maybe only two, people had ever known of the Africa missions and Jorgensen’s so-called Māori justice pictorials. She knew of only two people—George Johnston and the campus hospital relief custodian—who had actually seen the Polaroids of the anonymous maimed family, butchered by a machete, for whose deaths Jorgensen had gleefully taken credit. He had killed his brother, after ensuring he would drown, by tampering with his diving belt—a textbook case of homicidal sibling rivalry, of set-and-run deadly sabotage. This next stage in his killing in Africa seemed to have been his experimental foray into what forensic psychologists call necromutilimania after he’d killed Søren with comparative cleanliness and a more personal motive. The unnamed African village had been the undocumented dress rehearsal for Christine and likely others before her—it was where lust murder became his oeuvre. Linda had to buy in to what she was being told by the tipster, had to take the info at face value. If Jorgensen was in fact in Vegas—Sin City, the perfect cover for his dark perversions and the ideal backdrop for his various bogus identities—he was potentially more dangerous than ever. If he’d come to Madison to up his game, he’d go to Vegas to turn pro. He’d kill again—and soon. It was time to make a U-turn.
Due South
It was Valentine’s Day ’77—a Monday—when Linda let the Milwaukee PD recruiters know that she’d need to take a pass on the new job, that some lesser qualified applicant would have to take her seat at the academy to hit a city beat for a little better than the state minimum wage. With the tip most recently received from the croupier, Linda’s personal investigation was taking her on the road. After years of starvation rations in terms of information and making progress at a snail’s pace in her bid to locate Jorgensen, it was the most timely and actionable of leads she’d come across in nearly a decade. That same road, however, led not immediately to Vegas but first to Dallas, the city she thought would be ideal as her base. It was to serve as a hub for any needed regional branching out that her pursuit of Jorgensen and the truth might later require—her new home and an ideal jump-off point to anywhere and everywhere, whether by plane, train, or automobile. If Jorgensen wasn’t still freelancing as a ringside physician at Caesar’s Palace—assuming he ever had been—then the strategically situated Dallas-Fort Worth area would make any next stop on the map easier to get to. The weather was also consistent—hot, dry, and seldom changing—which made for minimal disruptions to travel plans. More pragmatically, the city’s proximity to Mexico made it an ideal place for her to teach and translate Spanish while making use of her master’s from UW. If Jorgensen also happened to run out of places to hide stateside and make a run for the border she’d be there too—knowing the language, knowing the customs.
Linda arrived in Vegas via Dallas on March 3, 1977. She soon found that no one she talked to could corroborate the croupier’s story. The ringside docs at Caesar’s—several on staff at the time—were hand-picked men tapped specifically by the World Boxing Council or Nevada Athletic Commission for the job, not random walk-ins and residency washouts like Jorgensen. Linda knew that this in itself didn’t necessarily mean that Jorgensen wasn’t in Vegas that same winter, but more likely that his cover story for being there—as he spun yarns when playing the tables—was once again pure fiction. Yet the grandiosity and specificity of the story, just like his bravado back in Madison in ’67 to ’68, suggested that his presence in Nevada was more than an excursion of indulgence, not exactly a “what happens in Vegas” weekend. Jorgensen just wasn’t the type. Instead, he’d have more sinister intentions upon his arrival. Although he’d come to the city to hunt, something pushed him out—Linda wasn’t sure what. Or perhaps, she thought, something somewhere else pulled him in.
Linda scoured news reports. She later charmed a pair of over-the-hill sheriff’s deputies doing radio runs along the strip to make a quick check of open murders and reports of endangered missing women in the metro area. To do so, she posed as a girl dispatched to Sin City by her parents to look for her degenerate gambler runaway sister. The well-intentioned swindle worked but turned out to be for naught. Nothing since early ’76 in the police files and when Jorgensen was seen at the Horseshoe seemed to fit. If it was indeed Jorgensen the fink had spoken with at the Horseshoe the previous January, he hadn’t stayed, at least not long enough to find his next Annabel. He’d moved on to some other place by now.
With that, Linda returned to Dallas and placed a call to Bill Share back at the Sentinel. It was a Hail Mary throw, but Linda gambled that the casino-boxing-bout-doctor account had not been an entirely improvised ruse. Like all of Jorgensen’s past lies, there was no doubt some element of truth to this one too. One possibility, she thought, was that Jorgensen had prizefight or ringside doctor experience somewhere else before January ’76—or experience in the gambling world since disappearing from NYC back in the summer of ’68
and before landing in Vegas. Another possibility was that he had been planning to do something in that vein and also had a new murderous scheme in the offing. Either way, the lie had been rehearsed—vetted and tested. It was the yield of yet another depraved fantasy that he soon would act upon—if he had not already—with his usual deadly efficiency.
Casino. Doctor. Prizefight. Murder. Endangered. Missing. They were peculiar keywords as Bill Share searched for AP images filed by category back in Milwaukee. Unlike a laborious search of entire articles, Linda knew that the Sentinel’s image cataloguing system was brass-tacks efficient. It was an alphabetized system that allowed file photos to be located on the quick by relying on bursts of representative descriptors, images often recycled as stock photos for similarly themed pieces under insanely tight deadlines. So it came as little surprise when, within the hour, Linda received a call back from old Bill. Although it wasn’t exactly what she was looking for, it was close; it was a better chance than not of explaining what the possible Jorgensen sighting in Vegas meant. Filed under Casino/Nurse/Missing Persons/Nevada was the case of a Donna Ann Lass, a twenty-five-year-old infirmary nurse at the Sahara Hotel-Casino in South Lake Tahoe, California. Since Share didn’t have more to tell her without access to the article proper, within the hour Linda was on the phone to a retired Daily Tribune reporter who was still living in South Lake Tahoe—his number was quickly coughed up by directory assistance. He’d been one of the newsmen who covered the initial story and quickly helped fill in the blanks as best he could remember when Linda dredged up the town’s seldom talked-about past after calling him long-distance. It turned out that Lass, a registered nurse at the local casino—which had a small skeleton-crew medical staff running a first-aid station catering to the largely inebriated and geriatric clientele—had gone missing just before 2:00 a.m. on September 6, 1970. But that was only the beginning of the story.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 14
