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

by Michael Arntfield

  As Wagner that Wednesday walked the expansive property primed for development, he stumbled across what he initially thought to be a shop-window mannequin—like the mannequin Christine’s body was once mistaken for—lying amid a pile of brush. Anyone who has ever seen a corpse has usually done so under fairly manicured conditions, such as embalmed bodies in funeral parlors. To come across one in the open, much less a murdered and ravaged corpse, is the reason that the human brain so often seems to default to the most rational of explanations, the mind initially seeming to prevent the observer from acknowledging the obvious horror that lays before him or her. Most people in such circumstances know it’s a human form they’re looking at, but simply can’t resign themselves to the idea that a real body could or would be in the location where they first lay eyes on it. Within a matter of seconds, however, Wagner had come to terms with what he was looking at—the nude and battered body of a young woman, haphazardly concealed beneath some dirt and leaves—what’s known as a surface burial—her skull crushed in but devoid of blood and brain matter. She’d been killed elsewhere, once again at an unknown primary crime scene. It was another Jane Doe dump job—Debbie Bennett redux.

  For nearly two days the body remained unidentified. The attending coroner, once again Dr. Clyde Chamberlain, could only describe the victim as being eighteen to twenty-five years of age with long brown hair tinted with shades of red. The local sheriff’s department with jurisdiction over the Woodland Road property, comparing the biometric data—height, weight, and other characteristics—to about forty women listed as missing in the county, came up empty. A check of the victim’s fingerprints with the FBI also proved to be a strikeout. Finally, word of the grisly find hit the state newswire on Thursday the twenty-second, and by Friday evening—exactly one week after she was last seen eating her final meal at the Main King Tap—the body was officially ID’d as Julie Ann Hall. The cause of death was given as blunt-force trauma to the head, death almost instantaneously following a sexual assault. No suspects, no witnesses, no forensic evidence, and no known crime scene. No clue yet—again.

  As in the case of Debbie Bennett, the dump site selected by Julie Ann’s killer was and remains, in the absence of other investigative indicators, the best starting point with which to connect suspectology with victimology, doing so with a view to building a general offender profile. Certain deductions can immediately be made to narrow the field. It can be deduced, for instance, that the killer is a male with his own car or direct and consistent access to a reliable vehicle. It can be deduced that the motive was sexual and that the crime scene would be covered in copious blood in light of the severity of the head wound. Although this in all likelihood rules out a public place, it also means that the privacy or security of that place was both ephemeral and unpredictable, such as a shared home or other semiprivate space, requiring that there was some urgency to remove the body to the secondary scene almost immediately.

  The transportation of the body by vehicle—and subsequent carriage of the body to the burial site—suggests that the killer once again perceived these associated risks as being preferable to disposing the body in plain sight, such as by the roadside. Body transportation and concealment on land is also almost exclusively seen in younger white male offenders and female victims under the age of thirty. It is also exclusive to sexual homicides versus other motive types. This method is also strongly correlated with prior military service and minor criminal records, typically records for theft or misdemeanor property crimes. In nearly all cases, the offender, intimately familiar with one or both of the contact site or disposal site, has used some type of ruse to calmly lure the victim, frequently the offer of a ride. While much of this data was not available to law enforcement in 1977, even then it should have generally been known that in all likelihood police were dealing with a young white male. At the time it had been identified that sexual murderers—and by extension serial killers, even if not using that precise term—typically killed within their own ethnicity, seldom if ever jumping the racial boundary. With this knowledge and the obvious access to a motor vehicle, and with the Main King Tap venue as the probable contact point along with the specificity of the dump site as locations of obvious connection, this should have immediately pointed police to a workable short list of persons of interest. Once again, however, the killer knew how to lead the police into an administrative labyrinth and leave them there.

  Gag Order

  The Julie Ann Hall slaying was Debbie Bennett part two, though in all likelihood a different offender. They nonetheless shared more than a few points in common. Julie Ann’s killer had divided and conquered, taking the young woman from Madison, holding and killing her at a mystery location—statistically likely to be the offender’s own home or a semiprivate neutral space based on the MO—and then disposing of the body in another jurisdiction to delay both discovery and identification. In so doing, he would entangle the case in predictable police infighting. He knew, whether from experience or simply watching the local news, that the recipe for an instant unsolved and all-but-guaranteed cold case was to do as Debbie Bennett’s killer did. Although the additional desecration by fire, as in the Bennett case, might have been effective, it was overkill—and an unnecessary risk. In both cases, no evidence was found at the dump sites, in Debbie Bennett’s case because she and any of her combustible possessions were burned in the pit into which she was thrown, and in Julie Ann Hall’s case because the killer had kept them for himself, playing the odds that the police would never come looking for them. He was right. Although Julie Ann’s brother and her colleagues at UW were able to offer very clear descriptions of what she was wearing and also of the handbag she was carrying that fateful Friday, there is no evidence that police actively searched for the items at all. Curiously, there was also no press release ever drawn up to ask the public to keep an eye open for similar items turning up in the trash or elsewhere. Logical avenues of investigation were not traveled—opportunities were missed. The intrastate task force investigating Debbie Bennett’s death had already come up empty-handed, had packed up their tent, and gone home. Julie Ann Hall’s death didn’t have a task force at all. It had been all hands on deck two summers earlier, but now, even as talk of a serial killer had veteran cops nodding, the case was run by only a small handful of Madison’s major crime detectives juggling other files.

  The reality is that Julie Ann’s murder marked the start of a new beginning in the Mad City. The first of a now rapid succession of women to be murdered at or near UW, it was a storm that no one could imagine coming—a harbinger of what was to follow. But by 1978, as the early indicators of a public panic were starting to take hold, no one who should have been concerned seemed to give it much thought at all. Tone-deaf leaders abounded. If there was any vestige of concern, it was buried. A decade prior, Christine Rothschild’s murder had been a comparatively easy one to stickhandle by UW and city stakeholders after going through the usual public motions: a paltry reward for information was offered by UW president Fred Harrington, to be drawn from the university’s gift fund. Later, an anonymous benefactor added an extra thousand bucks to the pot. Later still, UWPD chief Ralph Hanson offered a paid month’s vacation to any detective who could solve it. Translation: find, interview, arrest, and return Jorgensen. On Hanson’s watch and after dodging the Bill 299 axe, a total of three thousand people eventually were interviewed and cleared for Christine’s murder by the time 1978 came around. But good intentions—however short-lived—don’t collar suspects. Not one of those three thousand interviewees would turn out to be Jorgensen.

  After the tip about his probable presence in Vegas and equally probable involvement in the Lass vanishing, Linda began a regular routine of updating the UWPD—especially during Hanson’s tenure as chief—on Jorgensen’s whereabouts, whether known or suspected. No one ever followed up; this, in spite of cops having tailed him to New York in the weeks after the murder. This, in spite of the fact that within a year of Jorgensen’s hightailin
g it out of the Big Apple, Sandy Mackman had also come forward to report the gun incident as having punctuated Jorgensen’s time at the hospital, even taking out a restraining order for fear that he might return one day to Madison. It was the same fear Linda had—the fear that kept her at UW when all signs indicated that Jorgensen would likely jump ship to another university. But at the end of the day, Christine Rothschild was an out-of-state student, her parents didn’t make a fuss or file suit as some rightfully expected, and her murder came and went at the tail end of the school year—the year 1968 no less, when the country was in crisis and the world itself already upside-down. Its timing left a whole summer for a whole lot of people to forget—to make themselves forget—what had happened amid the background noise of the era. The university’s stance was in a sense similar, or at least helped with the process of forgetting. It prohibited the placement of items at the crime scene to memorialize the tragedy, and it generally shooed away any remembrance activities organized by Linda off the campus proper. Christine’s story was later erased almost entirely by the Sterling Hall bombing and the continuing distraction of Vietnam activism and student radicalism on campus—and across America. But now, with the successive deaths of Bennett and Hall, matters were getting tougher to cover up—events in Madison harder to dismiss as one-offs.

  As speculation fanned the flames of the Capital City Killer mythos, it seems that city officials and senior cops were more concerned with censoring statements—acting as the Thought Police from Orwell’s dystopian super state—than they were actually working murder files. Suppressing the rumors through proscriptive gag orders imposed on Mad City officers and UW personnel alike—that they not mention a word of the ongoing investigations, that they neither confirm nor deny the possible existence of any serial killer—was the top priority among the powers that be. Whatever the motive, it almost seemed to be a public relations survival and local security strategy rolled into one, a necessary measure in order to keep the city running on the status quo and also to keep people coming to UW. In the end, however, information follows the same path as any commodity in a prohibited market—people will always find a way of getting it. As the narrative of what was happening to the Mad City and its young coeds was driven underground, a black market in gossip and conjecture sprung up. It was one that ultimately ensured the code of silence and myopic campaign of censorship imposed by the Madison chief of police, mayor, and UW chancellor. It also had the effect of creating a host of new problems. Big problems, in fact.

  With three unsolved campus and area murders in a decade, Madison and UW officials still had failed to learn from the mistakes of the past about containing the flow of disinformation—whether wrongly reported details or confusions of fact taken at face value, or false rumors regarding the more recent criminal investigations. By pussyfooting around the issue, they completely asphyxiated any and all talk of investigative progress—or more accurately the lack of progress—concerning the murders. They neither confirmed nor denied any connection between the cases, much less the existence of a Capital City Killer. The predicament Madison found itself in by the end of 1978 was not dissimilar to that of the 1947 case of Elizabeth Short in volatile postwar Los Angeles, better known as the Black Dahlia murder.

  Like the very real Whitechapel murders credited to a very fictional Jack the Ripper, the Dahlia slaying went on to create its own cottage industry in murder tourism. The Dahlia was Elizabeth Short, an enigmatic would-be Hollywood starlet both in life and in death. Who she really was, why she was killed, what the grotesque severance of her body and ghoulish “Glasgow Smile” carved into her face, ear to ear, were supposed to symbolize no one really ever knew for certain—but it consumed the public. Some people, mostly armchair sleuths, have at varying points also seemed desperate to link the Dahlia murder perpetrator to other murders—a sort of LA Ripper for America to call its own. Ridiculously, as some amateurs have posited—and various published screeds have even suggested in writing—the Dahlia killer and Jack the Ripper might have even been the same person. The reality is that the modern-day chaos and mishmash of theories about the murder serves more as an indicator that the LAPD immediately lost control of the dominant narrative of the case.

  It was a problem additionally compounded by the fact that they also lost control of the investigation by way of an official blackout on media updates leading to wildfire speculation. Having spent the previous seven years devoting resources to curtailing vice and rousting subversives—an “alien” squad to round up Japanese expats and even American citizens of Japanese ancestry for internment, and a second “red” squad to ferret out Commies—LA cops were completely unprepared to properly investigate the murder and to deal with the insatiable public interest that followed. Since they, for the most part, also didn’t have much experience with such complex and intricately paraphilic lust murders, nor did even some of the largest American police departments of the day, in time the investigation was a veritable mess.

  With the left and right hand within the department forever parted, many cops themselves came to rely on the newspapers for updates, following the leads of legitimate reporters and scandal-rag peddlers alike. Even the name by which history has come to call Short following the killing—the Black Dahlia—was a media invention after detailed victim information had been initially withheld by police and was instead cobbled together by enterprising reporters through interviews with sketchy associates. Inspired by the 1946 film noir crime thriller written by Raymond Chandler, The Blue Dahlia, the macabre pseudonym given to Short seemed in the public mind to capture her femme-fatale nature and strikingly dark features—also her even darker and tragic brief life. It satisfied a public appetite for lurid details otherwise black boxed by police.

  Today, the most cogent theory about Short’s killer’s true identity is offered by a retired LAPD detective who has implicated his own father, George Hill Hodel—Hollywood physician to the stars, psychopath, and inveterate sexual deviant—as the real killer. After fleeing to the Philippines in 1950 and later being linked to a similar 1967 murder there, unsealed LAPD wiretap transcripts confirm that not only was Dr. Hodel the prime suspect in 1947 but that he also made various statements that could be interpreted as roundabout confessions. As well, Hodel’s secretary, a material witness able to confirm that Short had been his patient and probable sexual partner, died under mysterious circumstances when the investigation was at its height—and immediately before Hodel fled the United States to a non-extradition treaty country. Possible linkages to Short by way of supporting documents and records, including that Short was Hodel’s patient, would later mysteriously disappear.

  Over the years, these details have been drowned out by a chorus of various theories running the gamut from the vaguely plausible to the ludicrous, another example of how the public expects reasonable police disclosure and frankness about investigative progress. In the absence of such details, people will invent—and will often later cling to—the myth instead of the truth. Fast-forward thirty years from 1947 to 1977 and the song remained the same. By year’s end, whether the Capital City Killer was fact or fiction no longer mattered. The tail was now wagging the dog.

  Boulder Creek

  As the calendar flipped over from 1977 to 1978, nearly a thousand miles away, back in Dallas, the erroneous link to the Zodiac Killer by virtue of the Christmas postcard had Linda scouring the microfiche archives at Texas Wesleyan U looking for any and all newspaper reports of other California murders with crime-scene behaviors that matched Christine’s. Where there was smoke, she thought, there would be the proverbial fire. Common denominators matching those within Jorgensen’s paraphilic wheelhouse—hospitals, college campuses, elaborate or torturous deaths, the posing of bodies, the collecting of souvenirs—would no doubt turn up cases in his home state of California. It was, after all, Linda had theorized, where he’d claimed his own brother as his first victim—where he no doubt claimed others. The question was how to separate Jorgensen’s crime-scene behavior
s from those other killers who also roamed the state.

  By the winter of ’78, drawing on her grad-school research acumen, Linda had discovered that any number of killings were being credited to the Zodiac Killer, whether a rational inference or not. They were being wrongly connected in much the same way that the Ripper and the Boston Strangler—like the Capital City Killer back in Madison—had themselves become convenient targets for false linkages. She knew that back in the Mad City, the damming of all information by PD brass had led to poetic license being taken by the press but that in California, the lessons learned from the past, including those from the Black Dahlia case, had engendered a system of transparency that meant details would still be made public, even if the cops had it wrong. Then Linda found something.

  Published April 10, 1966, in the San Francisco Examiner, Linda located the story of Judith Williamson, age eighteen and a freshman at UC Berkeley when she disappeared three years earlier, on October 29, 1963. Later identified by dental records, the skeletonized remains of the young coed from the nearby town of Albany were ultimately located in a ravine within the Santa Cruz Mountains. Discovered just north of a secluded spot on the map known as Boulder Creek, the remains had been found by a foursome of woodcarvers collecting redwood tree burls. Found on its back out in the open, the skeleton was missing its lower half, presumably hauled away by scavengers in the intervening years. The remaining torso, however, was found fully clothed along a debris-strewn ledge running parallel to a nearby rural route—to Waterman Gap Road.