While no definitive cause of death could be confirmed, given the advanced decomposition and missing lower half of the skeleton, the local sheriff confirmed that the breastbone had been pierced with what the attending forensic pathologist could only describe as an unusually “narrow-bladed instrument.” The same weapon was believed responsible for another fifteen “rents” from a finely edged instrument that had left discernible holes in the girl’s black cardigan sweater and also chipped her ribs. While the sweater remained intact on the skeleton, Judith’s bra was found to have been removed and was never recovered. It was apparently taken as a souvenir after she was either already dead, or before she was re-dressed following some sexual assault—bodies disposed of in undressed, semidressed, or re-dressed states constituting sexual homicides by definition, especially when souvenirs are taken. The details jarred Linda as she read them, particularly the specificity of the weapon, the posing of the body, and the apparent souvenir collection. The weapon hadn’t been a regular knife but something more precise like a scalpel used to make the frenzied stab wounds—a total of sixteen punctures to the chest. Christine had suffered fourteen such wounds to the same area with a similar weapon. But the similarities didn’t end there.
In reading on about the Williamson slaying, Linda found the usual array of absurd links made by many, yet again, to the Zodiac Killer in later years simply because it was a California murder. Such connections may have been made inferentially in many cases given that the Berkeley coed’s murder was also regularly written about by Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery, the same newsman who later played a key role in the Zodiac investigation. But amid the reportage on public speculation, Linda stumbled upon what was likely the most startling and verifiable similarity to Christine.
When Judith was last seen alive, she was carrying a white umbrella—one not recovered with the body, one apparently kept by the killer, at least for a while. Within two weeks, on the afternoon of November 12, that same white umbrella—the handle broken and the stretchers snapped in a manner that eerily recalled the damage to Christine’s black umbrella—turned up in a trash can in El Cerrito Plaza, a shopping mall only a mile from Judith’s family home back in Albany. The killer knew where she lived. The umbrella was deposited there, nearly two hours from the crime scene, to prove it—to showcase this knowledge to others. Well after the murder at a time when the killer should have crawled back into his hole, he was still getting paraphilic mileage out of the souvenir umbrella he’d taken, toying with authorities and the girl’s grieving family alike. The next day, November 13, Judith’s blood-smeared textbooks were found in a trash can on the UC Berkley campus—again, two hours from the crime scene and dumped only after the body had been discovered and the investigation was running full tilt. The killer knew the campus.
Left: A path carved into the landscape of the Santz Cruz Mountains leads to the clearing where the bisected skeleton of Judith Williamson was discovered in the spring of ’66. Right: A composite sketch of the Zodiac Killer created with the assistance of a survivor of a subsequent knife attack at nearby Lake Berryessa in autumn of ’69. Given the bucolic setting in both Northern California cases, many would later surmise that the Williamson slaying was also the work of the Zodiac.
By the winter of ’66, three years later, police, having interviewed and cleared nearly four hundred UC Berkeley students, had discovered what they thought was the probable primary crime scene. A massive pool of dried blood had been discovered in a campus parking garage that Judith would often cut through when traveling to and from class. The killer knew her routine. The cops had also managed to locate a couple of reluctant witnesses who reported seeing a man in a convertible sports car—make and model unknown, color likely white, plate number and state unknown—driving suspiciously in the area of the parking structure on the night Judith vanished.
Some would-be witnesses reported a nondescript lone male driver possibly even coaxing Judith into the car that same morning she disappeared—a classic homicidal ruse. The lead on the car also prompted police to reveal that they had not one but four suspects in mind, all of whom had by then been questioned and intermittently rousted by detectives to no avail. The police even played with the theory that there were two killers working in tandem, investigative and analytical techniques at the time not having the benefit of today’s evolved knowledge in this area of team killers. Organized lust murders involving long-distance transportation and the collection of souvenirs—a full inventory of items had determined that Judith’s brassiere, shoes, and pantyhose had all been taken—reflect the work of someone whose highly nuanced paraphilias and twisted fixation almost always necessitate that he act alone, not with an accomplice.
The police in California, despite a valiant effort and working the case hard, didn’t seem to recognize that the killing had all the telltale indicators of a serial offender honing his craft, a midcareer murder committed by an offender with psychopathic proclivities and a penchant for theatrics. He was a needs-driven but high-functioning offender with a bizarre fixation on specific objects—clothing items, an umbrella—and an offender defined by expressive violence, or acts that went well beyond what was necessary to simply dispatch and dispose of the victim. It wasn’t his first murder and certainly wouldn’t be his last. It certainly wasn’t the work of an erratically behaved acquaintance whose sexual advances went awry in a public parking garage as the early theory suggested. Nonetheless, that’s the theory they ended up following. It’s the theory they would make into reality years later when opportunity knocked, as Linda ultimately discovered in perusing the most recent stories on the murder—the latest developments having occurred only a couple of months earlier.
In November ’77, as first reported in the Oakland Tribune, Linda learned that a former classmate of Williamson at UC Berkeley named Joseph Otto Eggenberger Jr. had “confessed” to Judith’s murder after walking into the office of the Alameda County district attorney following the fourteen-year anniversary of the brutal crime and spilling his guts. Showing up to see the DA on the morning of November 30, 1977, without a lawyer, Eggenberger explained that his recently excavated suppressed memories indicated that it was he who killed Williamson after she’d rejected his repeated advances during their time at UC Berkeley.
As the former chief in Oakland would later admit, he had “always suspected” Eggenberger—the son of the former Albany mayor—who had also gone to high school with Williamson and who had been pulled over for speeding, in a white convertible, by the California Highway Patrol one afternoon in the immediate aftermath of her disappearance. Described as being in a state of emotional distress and possibly even under the influence of an unknown narcotic, Eggenberger’s behavior in the aftermath of the murder tweaked the instincts of investigators, but they never followed up. A search of that same convertible, the one later thought to have been used in the murder, ultimately yielded evidence of stains on and in the trunk, but none could be positively identified as blood so many years later. Also, none of the items taken from the body were ever recovered and, in fact, there was no physical evidence at all to support Eggenberger’s confession. That may be why he later changed his mind. Pleading not guilty at a subsequent trial and recanting the earlier confession, the prosecution forged ahead on the flimsiest of evidence and in spite of Eggenberger’s mental state—one that seemed to have only worsened and become more erratic since police first took note of his acting strangely back in 1963.
Following the Williamson murder, Eggenberger dropped out of UC Berkeley on the heels of a mental breakdown that had actually started months prior to the murder, one that seemed to have had little to nothing to do with Judith. He later drifted around the San Francisco-Oakland area for the next few years, working odd jobs before returning to school at a community college and obtaining a diploma in computer programming. He subsequently relocated to Chicago and, after attending a self-improvement seminar, a seed seems to have been planted. He eventually went to see a psychiatrist about a sense
of guilt he was feeling about the murder and was convinced by the shrink that, if he believed the memories to be accurate, he should just turn himself in and confess. He then quit his job as a data analyst with US Steel and returned to the Bay Area to surrender to authorities. The reason he surrendered to police in November of ’77 was and remained for several years a point of legal and psychological debate; it was seen as a key case study in recovered memories and questionable confessions for years to come. It would eventually become little more than an obscure footnote in the history of California crime.
The problem was, as Linda saw it and as a California judge also later seemed to, that the stated motive for the murder didn’t square with the paraphilic specificity and expressive acts of violence committed against Judith during and after the slaying. Crimes of passion, whether the result of jealous rage or some kind of mental break—as Eggenberger claimed to have had—typically lead to murders where the body is either left at the scene “as is” or is instead transported and concealed with the hope that it is never located, such as through burying or burning. This is because the nature of the murder, even if rooted in a real, perceived, or intended romantic affiliation, is personal rather than sexual in nature. Personal-cause homicides thus cannot, by definition, involve the erotic removal and collection of souvenirs from the body, much less the surface disposal and posing of a body to suit some existing fantasy. Personal-cause killers are purely instrumental in their use of violence, just as they are instrumental and pragmatic in what they do next. They don’t leave morbid trails of clues like umbrellas and bloody textbooks to be found later—they don’t hang on to items that can link them to the crime, and they don’t revel in the prolonged media attention and public fear that these actions stir up. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid it all.
The actions taken in Judith’s case are instead indicative of post-offense behaviors of a much different breed of killer—one who is organized and psychopathic, and who will not be dogged by guilt after having gotten away with it. It’s certainly not someone who would be prepared to forfeit his life and career over a decade later as part of some moral or spiritual obligation to “make things right.” On the contrary, the actions suggest—if not demand—that he continue killing. Such glaring contradictions might also explain why, after later being found guilty of second-degree murder in April of ’78, a judge sentenced Eggenberger to serve a mere five years in prison for the murder of Judith Williamson. At the time, the paltry sentence not surprisingly caused outrage, but, in retrospect, it reflects the equally paltry nature of the case against Eggenberger. It’s unclear exactly how much time he did end up serving before being later released and disappearing once more into the breach. It’s also unclear why he chose to confess before later reneging—whether the confession was genuine at all or the result of other underlying emotional or psychological issues. Either Eggenberger is the most notable exception to every rule of sexual homicide documented over the course of the last century—findings that in both clinical and forensic settings are informed by interviews and analyses of literally thousands of murderers—or, as is statistically more likely, he falsely confessed.
A voluntary false confession, more rare and less understood than a compliant false confession resulting from police interrogation or coercion, describes a set of circumstances in which a person comes forward to confess to a crime without police prompting or external pressure, and is thought to have a variety of causes. Many of these causes relate to a combination of diminished mental capacity and what’s known as confirmation bias, meaning that a person may believe or be led to believe a certain set of events occurred and will then look for evidence to support that conclusion—to confirm what he or she believes, whether it’s accurate or not. In the United States, a consistent average of about fifty people come forward to confess to each high-profile murder case. They are later ruled out once their confessions are revealed to be filled with factual errors relating to the signature or other holdback evidence that would only be known by the killer and a handful of cops. Over two hundred false confessors came forward in the “crime of the century” kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby in 1932.
In Judith’s case, in the fourteen years between the murder and when Eggenberger ultimately fell on the sword for it, most or all of the holdback information had been made public—whether leaked or intentionally released with the passage of time to help generate tips. Everything else Eggenberger shared as part of his confession could be neither proven nor disproven—an account of events that had no other witnesses or physical evidence.
In the winter of ’77, while Linda didn’t know that Eggenberger would later recant his confession, she certainly knew the latter-day solving of the Williamson slaying seemed a little too convenient. The umbrella, the unusual murder weapon, the souvenir taking, the early-morning ambush, the fact that Jorgensen was a Berkeley alumnus and had been to the campus for homecoming just a month prior to the murder—it simply doesn’t compute, either then or now, that whoever did these things could later be turned inside out by guilt and remorse. Linda later realized she had just one item to double-check as part of her theory—the car that Jorgensen had driven to the Mad City the year after the murder. With a single call to George Johnston, Jorgensen’s one-time Madison roomie, Linda had her answer. True, Eggenberger might have owned a convertible while in the Bay Area in the fall of ’63. But so did Jorgensen.
George Johnston recalled that Jorgensen had arrived at UW and moved into their shared apartment after unloading a couple of bags from the trunk of a two-door drop-top. Although George couldn’t recall the make, model, or color, he knew it had been a car previously kept in the family’s garage back in California. The car stayed parked outside their walk-up building until Jorgensen blew town and drove to NYC and onward from there after absconding from his date with the polygraph. Linda reasoned that he would have driven the convertible back west, eventually turning up in Vegas. If she could only find Jorgensen, she knew she might find the car—the car that might help confirm what he had been up to both before and after UW. In the meantime, the similarities between Judith Williamson and Linda’s friend Christine haunted her. Both were freshmen attacked on relatively peaceful university campuses after first having been stalked, their habitual movements memorized. Both were attacked in public campus locations; both were stabbed over a dozen times in the chest with particular—and atypical—attention paid to avoiding the face and throat; both were stabbed with an equally atypical-edged weapon rather than a conventional knife such as is used in over 90 percent of other fatal stabbings; both had garments taken as souvenirs; both had their umbrellas taken, bent, and deposited in either a symbolic position or at a symbolic location. The victimology, MO, and even the signature were all nearly identical. With this information, Linda considered it likely that the antecedents of what was done to Christine started much earlier, years before Jorgensen came to UW. By the spring of ’68 when Jorgensen arrived at UW, his methods had been tried and tested. Christine never had a chance.
But the enduring question, assuming Judith Williamson was indeed an early prototype of Jorgensen’s MO and a pattern-setting crime that would establish his preferred victim type moving forward: What was he doing as far north as Berkeley while still living in LA’s Toluca Estates with his parents—his brother Søren dead, his mother in self-exile and locked in her bedroom typing The Love Pirate? Linda then checked her notes. Jorgensen graduated from UC Berkeley in June of ’50. He knew the campus. After calling the toll-free number for the alumni association, she learned that the homecoming weekend for former grads, including the class of 1950, was September 27 through 29, a month to the day before Judith’s abduction. Linda wondered if Jorgensen attended—if he was there that weekend and had honed in on Judith at his alma mater just as he later did Christine at UW. She didn’t know it at the time, but Jorgensen would return there again forty years later to the day—in 2003—for yet another “reunion” of sorts, his staying in the same Interna
tional House dormitory where he’d lived from ’46 to ’50. It was strangely close to the same spot and on the same campus where Judith’s bloodied books were dumped in November ’66.
Judith Williamson and Christine Rothschild were two young women—naïve, headstrong, good-looking—whose paths in death would refuse to diverge. Two names, forever soldered together by linkages no one else would ever make, forever together in a state of mutual permafrost—cold cases that could and would never be fully thawed. In The Love Pirate manuscript, Linda could now finally make the connections. Annabel had been crafted as a literary archetype of Jorgensen’s preferred victim type, the book created in the aftermath of the Williamson murder and with Judith as the muse. It explained the San Francisco connection in the book—UC Berkeley—and the Crater Lake creek in the fictive Paradise Valley where Annabel is taken—Boulder Creek. The spurned advances, the obsessive stalking by Dr. Corcoran, it was all real. The Love Pirate was at once untold history and a window into the future. Annabel was at once Judith Williamson and Christine Rothschild. She was every woman—past, present, and future—who might find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time once Jorgensen took notice and formulated his plans. Heidi knew of the past murders. She knew of Judith Williamson, she knew of the murders yet to come—that there would be a familiar refrain to them all. She knew her son.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 17
