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

by Michael Arntfield

  As December 1979 dissolved into January 1980, reporters at the Capital Times and even the Wisconsin State Journal surprisingly had no tough questions for local, county, and state police about the mounting number of open investigations and apparent lack of progress: Julie Speerschneider and Susan LeMahieu, both missing without a trace; Julie Ann Hall and Debbie Bennett also missing and later found dead, both girls having met with horrific endings to their brief lives. Christine Rothschild all but forgotten—yesteryear’s bad news. Questions for investigators, if any, at news briefings, if any, were lobbed in—underhand, no spin—and typically prefaced by some apologetic qualifier. The usual police platitudes about “ongoing investigations” and “every avenue” being vigorously explored were then lobbed back at the press and taken at face value. Madison was riding the jet stream at a comfortable cruising altitude. No one, it seemed, was as worried as they should have been. With the truth of what really happened to Susan LeMahieu waiting to be discovered, 1980 picked up speed—someone turned on the faucet.

  That year started with a shot. The new decade started with a leap year, one that this time would signal the start of a new era. It was a decade whose unrivaled blend of innovation and hedonism would trigger the highest violent crime rate across the United States in the history of the republic, with events in Madison being ahead of the national curve. Linda had missed Jorgensen by a matter of hours in Flagstaff the previous March; he’d left town at the same time Three Mile Island was melting down and when there were distractions galore. He had previously been known to fly by night but now, by the close of the 1970s—over a decade after Christine’s death—and age wearing on him, he was prepared to move in the light of day hiding in the long shadows of the American Southwest. Even with favors called in by Bill Share and the earnest tips of other nomads running from their own past lives—meaning those who met Jorgensen passing in the night—Linda had, by the spring of ’80, resigned herself to the fact that Jorgensen would always stay one step ahead of her. Her own private all-points want on his whereabouts would need to evolve; it would need to move from hunt and peck to something more nuanced, more insidious. In time, she would learn to use his own tactics against him. He was adept at running. He had been running in some fashion his whole life, ever since sending his own brother to a watery grave. That’s why, as she believed, The Love Pirate was penned as one part catharsis and one part treasure map.

  The book was mother Heidi’s profile of her own malevolent creation—an itinerary of Jorgensen’s life that came before and that would come later. Wherever he went and whatever he did—whatever identity he assumed and whomever he killed—he would always be the obsessive Dr. Francis Corcoran. To know Corcoran was to know Jorgensen. Linda wanted to get inside his head and torment him as he had tormented Christine and the other lives she believed he had laid to waste. If she couldn’t get to Jorgensen in the conventional sense, she would have to bring him to her—draw him out, provoke his compulsions. And so a new era of psychological warfare would begin.

  On January 2, 1980, just after 9:00 p.m., a warmer-than-average winter Wednesday in the Mad City, seventeen-year-old Shirley Stewart left her part-time job as a night maid at the Dean Clinic, a franchised family wellness center still in operation across Southern Wisconsin. But that 9:00 p.m. in the dead of winter in the Mad City might as well have been the small hours, the city streets largely devoid of traffic and potential witnesses as it sat eerily still and poised on the brink of what would be its most unsettling year to date. As young Shirley—a native of Nebraska, devout member of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in nearby Middleton, single mother to an infant daughter named Christina—ventured out into the streets of East Madison to walk home, she made a fateful foray into a mostly deserted streetscape—a barren and frozen landscape apparently devoid of witnesses. There was, however, one person watching—and waiting. As to precisely what happened next, no one can be sure. What is certain is that in the following days, Shirley was reported missing to police and the tragically predictable waiting game began once again. As in the case of Julie Speerschneider, the speed with which Shirley was reported missing immediately raised the otherwise flaccid antenna of local authorities. Like Speerschneider—the very real vanishing hitchhiker—the Stewart girl’s case was quickly updated to endangered missing. By the time the first news release hit the papers and local Mad City airwaves, all evidence pointed to the fact that she was already dead.

  The Lost City

  As the Madison city cops tossed around ideas about a search area when the start of the Wisconsin spring thaw would surely, or so they thought, reveal the body of Shirley Stewart, the Intra County Investigative Squad that had been assembled in the wake of the Debbie Bennett murder was about to have an improvised and unexpected reunion. The Madison PD, state police, Dane County Sheriff and, for the first time since the Rothschild murder—deus ex machina—the UWPD, were all to join forces after a group of morning joggers happened upon a discovery that would stir up ghosts of the past. It was a discovery that would confirm that, assuming the Capital City Killer or killers did in fact exist, he or they were still fixated on the UW campus proper. The killings would soon return to where they began with Christine Rothschild’s death twelve years earlier. Although Julie Ann Hall had worked on campus, and both Debbie Bennett and Julie Speerschneider had last been seen near campus, locations nibbling at the edges, the university proper would soon go from being a common denominator in the string of recent city slayings to ground zero for a recurring MO.

  In the spring of ’80, there existed—and still exists—an expanse of UW property officially constituting the university’s arboretum. An assortment of prairies, woodlands, and wetlands, the arboretum was developed principally as a place to protect the ecology of the “original Wisconsin”—a snapshot of a time and place untouched by humans where students and faculty scientists could study the countless number of trees covering the expansive 1,200-acre nature preserve south of University Avenue. But it wasn’t always so.

  In the 1920s, in a swampy and isolated portion of the preserve known as Gardner Marsh, a specific section of land was cleared to make way for a subdivision known as Lake Forest, a tony suburb thirty years ahead of its time, when the postwar boom led to flight from American urban centers and toward the perceived utopia of suburbia. The development, however, being too isolated—too radical in its concept—for its time in a then conservative Wisconsin capital, quickly floundered. In due course, bankrupt investors and builders abandoned the model homes that had dotted the site, the wood-frame structures reclaimed by nature—consumed by the same land cleared to accommodate the buildings years earlier. By the 1970s, the homes were rotted shanties mostly reduced to foundations hidden among the trees and other vegetation that had come to erase the past. The grim mosaic of homes sinking into the Wisconsin marshland was an elegiac panoramic of a place that soon came to be known as the Lost City Forest. It was the real-life Madison version of the legendary lost city of Atlantis that, like all isolated curiosities locked away in the woods, would inevitably attract the curiosity of enterprising youths and, not surprisingly, explorers of another kind.

  The doomed Gardner Marsh development had been known for much of the 1960s and ’70s among Madison and Dane County locals as a good place to “go park” as they say. The Lost City, with only two access points for visitors arriving by car, was just isolated enough to double as a lovers’ lane and was an ideal place for Mad City teens to bring their dates away from prying eyes. The problem is that, as we now know, once an isolated location is earmarked as a known make-out spot, it’s not only starry-eyed lovers who show up to use it. In criminal investigative analysis, these lovers’ lanes are today referred to as “known vice areas,” having been identified by the FBI and others as key locations for predators to develop their fantasies while spying on others. Peepers, prowlers, and other offenders with deep-seated imagistic regimes and twisted fantasies—what are known as scopophiliacs in the related forensic literature—often
cut their teeth in these locations before moving on to more serious crimes. They voyeurize those people using these locations engaged in everything from teenaged over-the-jeans heavy petting to reefer madness and more illicit acts by sex-trade workers and even trysts between secret lovers. They also learn how to best conceal themselves in such places and to pick up on social cues from those subjected to their bizarre surveillance activities.

  Because these same places, by virtue of being so-called “vice” areas, also attract johns with prostitutes on board, offenders may often try to experiment with bringing prostitutes to these locations for more nefarious purposes. They may engage in exhibitionist activities and other preparatory or rehearsal activities at these same sites before then returning with a targeted victim following complete psychological and emotional decomposition—after succumbing to their need and desire to indulge a related “attack” paraphilia, including sexual murder. As a staple of 1970s’ driving culture, killers like the Zodiac in California and David Berkowitz in New York—the self-proclaimed Son of Sam—would frequent these locations and attack victims, ambushing after first voyeuristically stalking them. It was also an MO used by the Texarkana Phantom of the 1940s and the Monster of Florence over a seventeen-year period from 1968 to 1985. Offenders who use lovers’ lanes to develop their fantasies and return there with their victims to act them out—or who simply attack victims they happen to find there—know full well that anyone else there, absent another voyeur, will be minding his or her own business. They know that anyone parked there will not be overly curious about who else is parked there, and that there’s usually not a cop to be seen. It’s for this reason that known vice areas are considered to be among the most telltale signs of the makeup of an offender’s background when a murder victim is found discarded at one of these places. To know of the existence of such a place and to be confident enough to travel there with a body on board—alive or dead—suggests that the killer in all likelihood will have been there before. However, as seen in most cases, he lacked the proper socialization to be there with a consenting partner. Typically, he will have been a regular, there as a deranged voyeur—a scopophiliac in the technical sense—in order to stoke existing and aberrant fantasies while watching others from afar. Simply put, the killer knows these same places only as either a hunting or dumping ground, but seldom, if ever, as a proverbial Don Juan with a willing participant.

  Lovers’ lanes in the light of day are often not, however, known vice areas, and can double as lawful spaces with lawful users. On the morning of April 17, 1980, a group of joggers, parking their cars in the same lot that doubled as something else under the cover of darkness, set out for a springtime group run around the perimeter of the Lost City. It was shortly after embarking on their usual fun run, just a hundred feet into those same dark woods that had swallowed up the model homes in what had once been planned as the Lake Forest community, that the group found the body of Susan LeMahieu. No one is quite sure when someone first noticed the body, or what led them that far into the forest and off the path to investigate. One thing for certain is that the group was so traumatized by what they found, as were some nearby bird-watchers who they alerted to the discovery, that it wasn’t until later that afternoon that someone summoned the courage to call police and escort officers back to the spot. Police noted that the civilians were simply “too frightened” and too taken off guard to mentally process the gravity of what they’d found, so the lost hours didn’t end up making much of a difference. Susan had been there, it was later estimated, before she had even been reported missing. With a delay of four days back in December of ’79 and a delay of nearly a full day in April of ’80, it seemed no one felt compelled to act as an advocate for Susan either in life or in death. No one in town, quite simply, could be bothered getting involved—again.

  Like Julie Ann Hall, Susan LeMahieu’s body had been stripped naked. Like Julie Ann, Susan had also been placed in a surface burial position, concealed from immediate view by decaying leaves, branches, and debris from the canopy of trees above. It was a manner of disposal, or what criminal profilers call a disposal “pathway,” that relied partly on the killer himself piling material pulled from the forest floor and partly on additional material that the changing seasons would cast loose from the trees of the living forest as the barely buried body began to decay. It was less a shallow grave than it was what’s known as a surface burial—the body secreted in a pile of readily available organic material and left exposed to the elements and the wildlife of the surrounding area.

  There are a number of reasons an offender might use this disposal method. The killer might lack the tools or strength to dig a proper grave that might prolong the time before discovery; he also might not want to. He may wish to conceal the body from immediate view of passers-by but still be able to find it when he returns back to check on it—to gaze upon it, snap exposures of it, and do whatever else he wants. There are, as horrific as it seems, several documented cases of this occurring among organized offenders operating within the necrophilic spectrum. But the concealment technique—whether instrumental and part of the MO or expressive and part of the signature—wasn’t the only item in common between the remains of Susan LeMahieu and those of Julie Ann Hall, who had been seen leaving the same bar where Susan was a “familiar figure.”

  Given the state of Susan’s body—much of the torso eviscerated by scavengers and her bones found scattered in a large perimeter surrounding where her skull was found—no precise cause of death could be established. An autopsy was, for this reason, deemed moot and was altogether avoided. Instead, what remained of Susan was expeditiously laid to rest in a private, quick-rigged service at the Schroeder Funeral Home on E. Washington Avenue—no visitation, no donations. The obituary in the Capital Times listed Cherry Street—with her mother—as her last address and not the home on Frances Street, where they should have been watching out for her welfare, though her disappearance was ignored for a total of four days and nights. As for UW, this new victim to end up on the campus was a problem cleaned up in record time. Like Christine Rothschild, Susan LeMahieu was an outsider; unlike Christine, there was no Linda to keep the memory of young Susan alive, the momentum going, and her killer looking over his shoulder. The four-agency task force, with the UW campus police at the center and declared to be “partially activated” on the morning of April 19—half measures once again being the order of the day—was little more than window dressing. In reality, the investigation fizzled by the summer solstice two months later. The predictable lack of progress in finding a solution to now several Madison murders was becoming a recurring theme. By the summer of ’80, people were scared as hell. If they weren’t already, they’d soon have reason to be.

  The Sweetheart Murders

  As plainclothesmen from Madison, Dane County, the UWPD, and both the Wisconsin State Police and Department of Justice (DOJ) scoured old tip sheets and carbons of original crime scene summaries looking for clues that would never materialize, history was about to get turned on its ear. Along with those few investigators looking for genuine clues, there were of course also those, subscribing in whole or part to the Capital City Killer theory, looking for someone on whom they could pin the tail on the donkey and be done with it all. While the official police decree was that none of the cases were connected, the public was bewildered by the spate of murders—not to mention the seemingly accelerating pace of the slayings. By the end of the summer of ’80, the police would get their first of two chances to try to assign a name to the Capital City Killer and make it all go away. That name was Edward Wayne Edwards.

  The straight life never really squared with Edwards, a small-time punk hailing from Akron, Ohio. Orphaned by his mother upon her unforeseen suicide, he bounced around various youth homes, boarding houses, and juvie lockups before enlisting with the marines and being dishonorably discharged in near-record time. He later wandered Ohio and Kentucky as a nomad, working briefly as a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman in Louisv
ille before ending up back in the slammer in his hometown for an assortment of petty crimes.

  Then, in 1955 at the age of twenty-two, he hit the big time. After escaping custody by pushing past an inept jail guard in the city of Akron, Edwards roamed the US, robbing gas stations in part for the money and in part for the fame. It worked. By 1961 Edwards, like the Sterling Hall bombers to follow, landed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List and eventually got scooped in Atlanta in January ’62. From there he was sent to the infamous United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, in Kansas where—as a model prisoner—he was paroled in 1967, going on to marry a local rube and become a motivational speaker. But it was all a ruse—a brief layover before he chose to reveal his true nature.

  By the mid-seventies, Edwards’s bizarre sexual fixations, sadistic impulses, and lust for fame had boiled over. Following two unremarkable game show appearances that he unsuccessfully tried to leverage into TV stardom, Edwards—much like “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala later did in between slayings—was soon consumed with a brand of sexual anger and malignant narcissism that caused him to place great erotic value on destructive and violent behaviors. Starting first as an orphaned petty burglar and later graduating to setting false fire alarms and committing check fraud—the type of criminal versatility common to both criminal psychopaths and serial killers alike—by 1977, and just five years after an appearance on the CBS panel show To Tell the Truth, Edwards would claim his first two murder victims back in Akron. By the summer of ’80, those crimes still unsolved, he had made his way northwest to the Badger State.

  On the night of August 9, 1980—a pristine Midwestern summer Saturday—high-school sweethearts Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both nineteen, left a wedding reception at the Concord House. The joint in question was at the time a dance hall located in Sullivan, a rural water-tower town about forty-five minutes east of the Mad City. Tim, a hard-working farmer who drove an old tractor he nicknamed “The Lonesome Loser,” and Kelly, a recent graduate of a local beauty school, were last seen walking hand in hand toward Tim’s car in the parking lot. The next morning, Tim’s car remained the only vehicle still parked in the Concord House lot; his wallet lay untouched inside. The couple had made it to the car, if only for a moment. What happened next would remain a mystery until five days later. Less than a week after the murder, Kelly’s clothing and undergarments, slashed to ribbons, were found three miles down the road from the parking lot. With no bodies or other evidence to go on, local cops started by questioning the guests at the reception and the hall’s staff. But that was just the start.