Christmas Past
Donna Ann Lass had worked as a nurse in South Lake but lived out of state—in neighboring Nevada. Her apartment was located in the town of Stateline, southwest of Carson City, and only a day’s drive from Vegas. Following a September 8 search of her apartment by local cops within forty-eight hours of when she was reported missing, the interior of the modest dwelling suggested that she’d never made it home from work in the wee hours of Sunday the sixth. Linda also learned that on the morning of the seventh, a mystery male caller had rung the manager’s office back at the Sahara. The call was placed in order to apparently alert Donna Ann’s boss that, due to an unspecified family emergency, she’d have to miss her scheduled 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. shift that day. It was the same shift she’d worked the night before and a fact mentioned by the caller who clearly knew her schedule. But the call turned out to be a ruse, a delay tactic used to buy time for whoever had taken and was holding—or had already killed—Donna Ann, to give him precious hours to extend the distance between her last known whereabouts and where he was going to hide her, or bury her. Although the caller was never identified, it wasn’t the last time he’d surface. He would reappear as part of a cruel and twisted ploy to taunt Donna Ann’s family four years later.
A little over four years later, in December of ’74, a macabre Christmas card landed in the mailbox of Mary Pilker, Donna Ann’s sister. The card, not to mention its timing and message, clearly reveals a person with a peculiar fixation on writing to his victims’ families. It was highly individuating post-offense behavior and an accompanying set of high-risk actions eerily reminiscent of the behavior of infamous child killer Albert Fish, the so-called “Brooklyn Vampire.”
Fish was a geriatric serial murderer and cannibal who rode the lightning at Sing Sing in the winter of ’36 at age sixty-five—he was one of the most senior men ever put to death in America, and the oldest to get strapped into the electric chair. A set of autopsy X-rays later confirmed that he had, presumably between his grotesque and unspeakable crimes, inserted at least twenty-nine rusty needles into his own scrotum as part of his ongoing self-mutilation. His masochism aside, Fish endures today principally as a foundational case study in what’s known as coprographia, or an erotic fixation on the often repetitive creation of obscene or offensive writings intended to shock or frighten. It’s among the rarest and least studied of psychosexual disorders—paraphilias—and is linked with any number of violent behaviors, typically also sexual in nature. It is theoretically also a root cause of a great deal of online harassment and cyberbullying content authored today. While the writing medium has modernized, the underlying paraphilia remains largely unchanged. However, the fact that Fish limited his crass handwritten correspondences to the families of his victims, as well as a final statement intended to be read aloud following his death in the electric chair, is additionally unusual, even for an already unusual and rare disorder. The reappearance of interpersonal correspondence sent from the killer of Donna Ann Lass to her kin is equally unusual—perhaps more so.
No one who didn’t know or work with Donna would have known that Mary—with a different surname and in irregular contact with the victim—was her sister. Featured on the front, the unsettling card received by Mary in December of ’74, her sister still missing and by then presumed dead, was a starving-artist vista of some snow-covered pine trees; the image was actually an advertisement for the Forest Pines condominiums in Lake Tahoe. On the backside, a generic preprinted caption in cursive title case read, “Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Happy New Year.” Beneath it, in ballpoint scratch, a more ominous handwritten inscription: “Best Wishes, St. Donna & Guardian of the Pines.” The officially unidentified Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area between 1968 and 1969, killing five and claiming to have slain nearly forty, would actually later try to take responsibility for the Lass murder and this subsequent communiqué to her sister. A print advertisement for the Forest Pines condominium development was also sent four hours away to the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the past recipients of the Zodiac Killer’s missives. Although the communiqué to Mary brought back memories of the taunting cryptograms sent by the real Zodiac Killer five years prior, that was all. In fact, neither the penmanship nor the MO matched the Zodiac’s handwriting exemplars already on file with police. Both sets of mailings had also been posted in Nevada, not California.
By late ’74, the Zodiac Killer was thought by many to, in all likelihood, be a low-functioning creep named Arthur Leigh Allen, who later died in 1992. Since then, conjecture and half-baked theories have yielded as many suspects as Jack the Ripper and more potential scenarios than the JFK assassination. He’s also seen countless imitators intent on emulating his theatrics, including a New York version named Eddie Seda and copycat letters still being received by the San Francisco press as recently as 2007.
Imitations aside, Donna Ann’s disappearance spelled an organized stalker relying on—much as had happened in Madison—the cops making false linkages to the earlier Bay Area slayings on the strength of the postcard alone, and despite the fact that the crime had no apparent connection to the area. The disappearance clearly had a Nevada connection: Donna Ann’s abandoned car was reportedly found near but not at her apartment in the town of Stateline, though versions vary in part due to a baffling lack of police cooperation with the press on the matter. In learning all of this, Linda wondered about the symbolism of the message sent to Mary Pilker as the sister of the victim and what the “Saint” prefacing Donna might mean. While it might have represented innocence and altruism, it might also have represented sainthood in the more literal sense, perhaps even horrific death as a martyr. The theme of innocence, as Linda already knew, is found on page 11 of The Love Pirate when Annabel is described by Dr. Corcoran as “chaste” and “virtuous.” It is in part for that reason that she is considered to be the right choice as his captive in Paradise Valley. It is a place where no one will find her, a place where the gentle serene setting will inspire her—where it will make her love him.
As a nurse, Donna Ann Lass was in a vocation now recognized in the field of victimology as one of the top three at-risk occupations for targeted stranger attacks. Today, the body or remains of Donna Ann Lass have never been found; the case remains open, unsolved, and predictably inactive, yet there has been no additional correspondence and no suspect has ever been identified. And while what exactly happened to Donna Ann and where it happened remains unknown, there was something about the inscription on the postcard that took Linda back to The Love Pirate as the codex of what Jorgensen had done and would do again. Signing the card “St. Donna” and “The Guardian of the Pines” was effectively a message sent by two different personalities occupying a single disordered mind. While the reference to “the Pines” might have been a convenient image borrowed from the tacky corporate postcard, little more than subterfuge, she pondered the significance of the “guardian” reference. She’d seen it before in Heidi Jorgensen’s ominous manuscript where Dr. Corcoran is described as both guardian and protector of Paradise Valley and Annabel alike. It’s also while reading the San Francisco Examiner that Annabel first begs Dr. Corcoran, her guardian—and captor—to take her home. Forest Pines and Paradise Valley; the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner; Saint Donna and the equally righteous—and virginal—young Annabel. It was an unsettling interplay; it was a nexus in wordings and setting between the postcard and The Love Pirate. It was also a coincidence that Linda simply couldn’t reconcile.
After hanging up the phone with the old reporter in Nevada, Linda knew, even if she could never prove it, that Jorgensen’s reported mysterious presence in that state in January of ’76 was key. His claim of being a casino prizefight doctor and the disappearance of a casino nurse during that blackout period after NYC—after dodging Detectives Lulling and Josephson, subsequent whereabouts unknown—all had to be connected. Donna Ann had vanished from Jorgensen’s home state of California while he
r car had been found in Nevada, the same state where Jorgensen later turned up with his polished cover story suggesting that he’d been working as a casino doc in the intervening years. The taunting and twisted content of the Christmas card sent to Lass’s sister over four years later evinced a level of fantasy role-playing that also fit Jorgensen’s psychopathology and his compulsive need to get paraphilic mileage out of souvenirs from his crime scenes. It fit his penchant for narcissistic grandiosity, his need to have some kind of physical or imagistic record of his work and to boast of it. Of greatest significance was likely that the penmanship on the postcard matched, at many points, the handwriting Linda subsequently managed to get from Jorgensen as she refined her tactics in later years—as she began to dupe him just as he duped his victims.
By 1977, it was all starting to add up; however, as usual, it seemed that Linda was the only one doing the arithmetic. To put two and two together would mean that cops back east would need to get on the same page and share their findings with cops out west. Aside from the Zodiac Killer being falsely credited for the Lass disappearance, his earlier crimes had managed to expose the fact that cops even in the same state and separated by only a hundred miles wouldn’t cooperate on cases, much less when the crime scenes are thousands of miles apart. Without the FBI’s involvement, there would be no one else to follow Jorgensen’s trail—the trail of dubious sightings and potentially related killings. But without someone else in law enforcement making and reporting on those links, the FBI could and would never get involved and invoke its mandate. It was an obstacle that left Linda no way out, nowhere to go—nothing to do but to chase ghosts.
Winning Numbers
The remainder of 1977 saw Linda largely marooned back in Dallas, using the monies obtained through teaching and tutoring Spanish part-time to fund her ongoing and increasingly risky freelance investigation and skip trace of Jorgensen. But with no new leads and no other potential matches to Jorgensen as best as she could determine from press clippings and news reports, back in Madison, the balmy autumn of that same year, another young woman destined for UW—exactly a decade after Christine Rothschild arrived in town—was, it seems, just as quickly marked for death. Like Christine, Julie Ann Hall was only eighteen when she completed an application for a state-sponsored job at the UW Historical Society. Unlike Christine who’d been sent there against her will to a safe campus—or so her parents believed—Julie Ann proactively and quite enthusiastically seized the internship position offered as a way of tunneling out of an idle life in the small village of North Freedom located in Sauk County. Like Debbie Bennett’s arrival in Madison in the summer of ’75, Julie Ann also hailed from a large family with seven other siblings. For as long as she could remember, she forever pined to make her way in the big city—the Capital City.
Since ten years had passed, Julie Ann, like most other eighteen-year-olds destined for Madison that year, likely never knew the story of Christine Rothschild. The turmoil of the war in Vietnam and the accompanying destruction of Sterling Hall in the intervening decade, not to mention the more recent Debbie Bennett slaying, ensured that the tide had washed over the shock of the Rothschild case that at one time had seized both city and state. In 1968, university administrators had even discussed disbanding the UWPD as part of what became known as Bill 299. They thought that Madison police could just as easily deploy from a satellite station on campus for major crimes, with day-to-day gofer work being delegated to rent-a-cops. But by 1977, with Sterling Hall rebuilt and Christine’s case in cold storage, that plan had been abandoned. The campus police had been given an indefinite stay of execution. The 1976 off-campus murder of Debbie Bennett had no doubt also led some to believe that the campus was likely the safest place to be after dark in the Mad City. Memories, like the hemlines on campus, were growing shorter; only ten years on and it was already Christine who? What happened a decade prior was, however, destined to repeat itself. The close of the school year brought events that would change everything—a second time.
By the end of ’78 spring exams at UW, Julie Ann had filed the paperwork for the entry-level job she hoped would open up a world of options for her. That paperwork, having made its way through the bureaucracy of the state’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program for women, allowed Julie Ann to pack her bags for the Mad City. It had been a competitive placement to land what was supposed to be a built-to-suit sinecure created with state dollars. A Joe job created to supposedly help women transition to the professional workforce, in the end the position offered little in the way of professional development and transferable skills—even less in terms of real responsibilities for the money. In other words, a plum gig. It wasn’t the first time the Hall family rolled the dice only to have the Fates look kindly upon them, not the first time the gods of state-level administration threw them a bone. In March of ’75, Julie Ann’s parents Donne and Betty Hall struck it rich when their regular numbers won them a $300,000 jackpot—nearly $1.5 million in present dollars—from the Illinois State Lottery. But the windfall, like many lottery prize purses, did little other than to send the overgrown family with improvident parents careening over the edge.
The Halls, like many lotto jackpot winners, were right back where they started within a matter of years. After the mandatory IRS skim off, they were then fleeced by an assortment of characters ranging from long-lost acquisitive cousins to fair-weather friends who ultimately helped contribute to their decadence and overspending. By the fall of ’77, before filing for bankruptcy, the couple first filed for divorce, Donne moving to the town of Fennimore in Grant County while Betty was relegated to moving with a handful of the kids to a trailer park on state Highway 12. The park was located outside the town of Baraboo and just a short drive from where the desecrated body of Debbie Bennett was set ablaze a year prior. It was, in fact, while sequestered in her mother’s Sauk County double-wide trailer that Julie Ann instinctively penned a letter to CETA and sought a way out via the Mad City. By then, a series of events had been placed in motion, events that seemed to foretell what happened next. Julie Ann Hall would in a sense cross paths with Debbie Bennett as two young women with Madison in their sights and condemned to take a one-way trip there.
By May of ’78, when Julie Ann started her first day at UW as a “file clerk” at the old UW Historical Society, things were starting to look up. In short order, she had found herself a modest apartment on Woodview Court by subletting a couch off the books from an older brother who had arrived in Madison ahead of her, and who’d landed the place with a one-year lease. Despite the pastoral name, the location was and remains a transitional neighborhood pervaded by flaking paint and security glass. Perched near the infamous South Transfer Point, one of Madison’s dodgier metro stations, the area was also relied on by newcomers to the city as they went to and fro while trying to scratch out an honest living. Julie Ann was one such newcomer. The Park Village Apartments she called home were the conceptual and aesthetic opposite of her new job at UW; the historical society was also a world away from the trailer park back near Baraboo. Julie Ann had landed a cushy, state-subsidized gig in a palatial building constructed in the Greek Doric style on the Library Mall, so named for the same Memorial Library where Jorgensen first set eyes on Christine—where he first set his devious plan into motion. As Julie Ann stared out at that same library day after day—still never knowing the story of Christine Rothschild—she soon found the job was easy, the setting regal, and for a while it seemed as though, like her parents before her, she’d won the lottery.
Happy Hour
By the end of work on Friday, June 16, Julie Ann Hall had been exactly six weeks into that new life. It was also payday. With a little prompting, she chose to join her brother and some friends at the Main King Tap—since rebranded—just east of the city’s Capitol Square, and generally beyond the inner sanctum of UW hangouts. It was happy hour in both the literal and figurative senses. But as the festivities carried on into the evening and the sun set on Madi
son, Julie Ann’s brother left the bar as the country-girl transplant hung around to finish dinner with some other newfound acquaintances. Unfortunately, she was completely oblivious to just how dangerous the city had become by that time for young women. Julie Ann Hall was never seen alive again.
The following Monday when Julie Ann didn’t turn up for work at the historical society, no one thought much of it. The job was, after all, an invented and largely extraneous position, meaning that no one was really affected by her absence. The system for documenting absences also wasn’t clear. Although Julie Ann was working at UW, she wasn’t technically a university employee, but rather one of several CETA placements sprinkled throughout the state. When she didn’t show up Tuesday or again on Wednesday, people probably thought that she had simply been transferred or the position had been rescinded. That no one thought it odd enough to report her missing or call home to her brother is therefore to some limited extent understandable. What is less understandable is that her same brother never reported his sister missing to police—the sister he was living with at the time and had left at a watering hole just this side of respectable. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he figured that she’d met someone at the bar and gone home with that person. In a roundabout sense he was right. It seems that Julie Ann most certainly left the Main King with the wrong man that Friday, as was later confirmed by Madison area contractor John Wagner. It was he who, while clearing a vacant lot on Woodland Road in the neighboring town of Waunakee on the afternoon of June 21, made a gruesome discovery. It was a place eerily reminiscent of where Debbie Bennett was discovered and almost precisely the same distance out of town in the other direction.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 15
