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

by Michael Arntfield

  An organized offender, before doing this, will typically know precisely where he is going before the journey begins, the killer having visited the dump site location on more than a few occasions. He will know it and know it well. That includes knowledge that the likelihood of being interrupted in the middle of the night while carrying, dragging, posing, and otherwise concealing a body there is remote. The killer will also have an excuse at the ready for being at the site on the off chance someone may be a witness prior to disposing of the body, or being stopped and questioned by police en route. That ready excuse will come easily because of some prior lawful use of the property, and it will provide a feigned purpose for returning there once again. It’s but one of countless well-rehearsed cover stories organized sexual murderers are accustomed to telling. The place ultimately chosen to dispose of the victim inevitably is somewhere previously visited while wearing the mask of normalcy between crimes.

  Organized sexual murderers who go to the trouble of stripping a body of clothing, jewelry, and all personal effects are also not doing so strictly to interfere with the identification of the body. If that were the sole intention, then it should follow that these offenders would also remove the teeth to prevent dental identification or the hands to prevent fingerprint identification in the event the body was found before fully decomposing. Instead, rendering the body naked, whether during or after the murder, is more expressive than it is instrumental; it is an expression of the same abhorrent and violent sexual fantasies—attack paraphilias—that fueled the offender’s actions in the first place. The removal of earrings and other discrete personal items is similarly paraphilic. It is a reflection of a bizarre and often violent erotic attachment to unusual objects or scenarios that prompts an offender to keep souvenirs of his crimes.

  The collection of homicidal keepsakes, for instance, just like the sexually degrading disposal of the body itself, satisfies the offender’s disordered visual compulsions, the disposal site itself often having some fantasy-driven purpose in a larger narrative the killer may have envisioned. In fact, an emerging area of study that sits at the crossroads of criminology and forensic psychology is what’s known as the narrative theory of offending. Based on a long-term analysis of the transcripts and hand-drawn maps or other sketches created by violent offenders as they mentally re-create and then retell their crimes suggests that all violent criminals—including sexual murderers—are actually reducible to four distinct storytelling and artistic typologies.

  These same typologies reflect the very specific ways these offenders see their victims as characters in an ongoing life story—their crimes the action of that story. This narrative impulse among criminals includes the “revenger” type, an offender who sees his or her crimes as striking back at an unjust society; the “professional” type, an offender who sees his or her crimes as part of a larger vocation and a calling; and, the “tragedian” type, a self-aware antihero—like Othello or Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedies—who sees future events, including his eventual downfall, as preordained, and who in the meantime is compelled to make the world burn. By contrast, the fourth type, the “hero,” sees his crimes, however brutal, as an adventure and rationalizes their actions as part of a righteous journey—a cowboy’s ride into indulgence. For the hero in particular, locations aren’t therefore just spots on a map. They are stages for action and mechanisms for theatricality, for self-aggrandizement—pure show business. And like all such locations, they are first scouted.

  These locations also often have some other intrinsic—and often historical or symbolic—value for the killer. Sometimes it’s a mix of both. As an example, Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River Killer already mentioned, chose disposal sites for the naked corpses of his victims, both secluded and also accessible to him. These sites would be near landmarks that, on foot and with a flashlight, his car parked nearby, he could return to in order to gaze upon the decaying remains of his innocent victims. At times, retracing his steps and returning to these same spots to admire his work led to such intense excitement and arousal he would actually fornicate with and further sexually defile the corpses where they lay in the woods. On at least one occasion, this occurred while Ridgway’s children waited back in the family car idling on a county road. Just as organized offenders have a believable story when either driving to or stopped at the disposal site—a story that, among serial killers in particular, itself forms part of the larger “hero” narrative—Ridgway had a similar believable cover story to explain to his children why he was stopping, why he was venturing into the woods by himself.

  Synchronicity

  The Julie Speerschneider dump site matched the Julie Ann Hall murder in more than a few ways. The subsequent homicide investigation that finally lurched to a start also had many of the same cast of characters, including Dane County Coroner Clyde Chamberlain, now known as “Bud” Chamberlain in the press as his media profile continued to grow. It also featured some newcomers and other bit players to add to the ballooning cast of police detectives who, in the ever-expanding rotation of city, county, and state investigators being yo-yoed ad hoc in and out of the investigations, came to symbolize what psychologists call the diffusion of responsibility. At its simplest, the diffusion of responsibility describes how too many cooks in the kitchen not only translate into predictable redundancy, but also a natural unwillingness to take personal responsibility for actions and their consequences when there are others present to hide behind—others to whom blame can be deflected.

  Sometimes taking the form of what’s known as the bystander effect, the phenomenon of diffused responsibility remains most infamously illustrated with the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City woman attacked and murdered outside her Queens apartment by a sexual sadist and necrophile named Winston Moseley in March of ’64. While being chased down in the street like an animal and stabbed to death at random, Genovese cried out for help in a densely packed neighborhood where it’s estimated that thirty-seven of the thirty-eight witnesses sat and watched without intervening or calling police—each one of them expecting, and wrongfully assuming, that someone else would. In the meantime, her attacker returned and finished her off while neighbors are reported to have simply stood and watched like an assembly of slack-jawed gawkers.

  While today some researchers, contesting the actual number of bystanders who failed to act, have suggested that newspapers of the day may have overestimated—or outright exaggerated—the total number of witnesses, Genovese’s murder endures as a criminological parable that strength in numbers, rather than producing responsible action, often results in the opposite—inaction characterized by an assumption that someone else will take care of it. The consortium of the Madison area police agencies once again drawn into an inconvenient alliance by virtue of the multijurisdictional nature of this latest murder opted to take a different approach. Inaction was replaced by blaming the victim.

  Speerschneider had been holding down two jobs, paid her apartment rent on time, and was generally described as a “really nice person” according to the newspapers of the day. But the police spin on the Speerschneider killing was one that framed it as a one-off slaying in spite of the specificity of the offender’s behavior and disposal pathway matching the murder of Julie Ann Hall. The official version was that it was personally rather than sexually motivated, not random as the previous Julie murder had been. Although there was no evidence to support the hypothesis, and Speerschneider had no criminal record—she was, after all, cleared to work as a day-care attendant—the police reverse engineered a drug-world narrative to contextualize the whole affair. In an interview later granted to reporter George Hesselberg with the Wisconsin State Journal, the latest “lead investigator” and public face of the most recent Madison murder, Dane County Sheriff’s Investigator Steve Urso, would only describe the case as the antithesis of black and white. It was a cipher intended to suggest that Speerschneider somehow had a role to play in her own death, the operating theory being that drugs were someho
w involved. Contrary to outward appearances, because Julie Speerschneider, it was hinted, was somehow embedded in the Madison criminal subculture, there was “a lot of gray” coming up in the investigation. Carrying on, he clarified that when “you get into the drug area, it turns into double-gray.” Urso never properly explained these tortured metaphors, including why the case was shaded in “double-gray,” whatever that meant.

  The “double-gray” declaration in the press was, however, used to bend the narrative, used to militate against any further talk of the Speerschneider murder being another slaying attributable to the Capital City Killer. Regular Madisonians need not worry, so it was inferred, because the case, rather than being random, was the inevitable result of what happens when one gets into bed—either literally or figuratively—with the wrong people. With the police grasping at straws, the statement was little more than propaganda, what’s known as the propaganda of integration—versus agitation—and where the objective is to restore social harmony and blind faith in the status quo. The Julie Speerschneider case was used as a Mad City moral lesson about not only the dangers of hitchhiking but also a “this is your brain on drugs” allegory years before the same antinarcotic PSA became what was arguably America’s original meme. Since one cannot libel a dead person, Dane County cops effectively had carte blanche in terms of proffering theories and pontificating at length, of dispensing guesses about the hows and whys of Julie meeting her killer—how she may have somehow even invited it. This was, sadly enough, a strategy for shifting blame in a number of stalled sex crime and homicide investigations involving female victims of the day. But, just in case readers didn’t buy the unfounded and accusatory explanation as to why the police were awash in a field of gray, the investigation cold before it started, there was backup Plan B locked and loaded—maybe the Speerschneider girl wasn’t murdered at all.

  In the same interview with the Journal, Urso—despite having lamented about investigators being mired in “double-gray”—also saw fit to challenge the official findings of the senior and widely respected pathologist who oversaw the autopsy, a Dr. Billy Bauman, who officially reported that Speerschneider’s death evinced “high suspicions of homicide.” Despite the fact that he was unable to say with certainty how exactly she died—manual strangulation being a contributing cause of death in over 90 percent of sexual homicides typically not leaving obvious evidence on skeletal remains—Dr. Bauman’s findings were based as much on common sense as forensic medicine.

  Julie’s body had been found naked, stripped of all personal effects, and buried beneath dead foliage along a riverbank some fourteen miles from the Madison city limits. Julie, who didn’t own a car, had for all intents and purposes never been to the site as best anyone who knew her could estimate. Since she had last been seen with a still-unidentified male only a hundred paces from her intended destination, other than homicide, there was simply no other logical inference to draw. As the newspaper reported, Urso, so incensed by this expert conclusion that managed to pull on the threads of the tattered story the police were spinning, smashed his fist into a pile of typewritten statements and carbons relating to the case while exclaiming “they can’t say that” to the bemused newspaper reporter running the interview. The “they” in this case was, of course, the senior pathologist at the state crime lab whom the police relied on every day. While some were pairing the Hall-Speerschneider slayings and calling them the Julie Murders, others, it seemed, were prepared to pretend at least one of them never happened. In short order, it already seemed to be “Julie who?” within the ranks of the city and state homicide units.

  Sadly, Julie Speerschneider, her slaying little more than a pawn for police politicos and her death manipulated to suit a certain city agenda and contain a burgeoning multiple murder panic, was neither the first nor the last time a victim—usually a woman—has been inferentially held to account for her own murder. Known as victim facilitation, it’s a concept attributed to Yale victimologist Hans von Hentig and his foundational 1948 treatise The Criminal and His Victim. The book built upon Hentig’s research in Weimar, Germany, where, prior to the rise of the Nazi party, collaboration between police agencies and the intelligentsia—academic experts specializing in the evolving field of criminal psychology—was in its heyday. In his monograph, Hentig devised a comprehensive taxonomy of thirteen common victim types that he felt reflected biological, socioeconomic, and psychological circumstances contributing to victim facilitation, and the degree to which a victim’s own actions might contribute to his or her victimization being measured as either low, medium, or high in nature. A few of these categories, such as “The Wanton” (someone often involved in criminal activity and an inveterate stimulation seeker and risk taker) and “The Tormentor” (someone who seeks out conflict and ends up going from would-be victimizer to victim) fit within what we might consider as being the realm of high facilitation.

  Hentig’s purpose in designing this table was not to indulge in victim blaming but to instead account for offender motivations in targeting specific typologies of victims. Over the years, however, a trend has emerged—one spearheaded and perpetuated largely by people who have never heard of, much less read, Hentig’s work—to equate certain victims or categories of victims with high facilitation as a matter of course. In certain communities in America, simply suggesting that a victim might have dabbled in recreational drugs is enough to move them from one category (such as Hentig’s “Woman” category) to a typology such as “The Wanton,” often triggering a reduced inclination to work the case. The tacit implication that the victim is somehow less worthy of an all-out effort compared to other more conventionally “innocent” victims soon seeps into collective thinking and takes on a level of official acceptance. Even today, depending on which zip code a genuine, low-facilitation murder victim finds himself or herself in, this trend remains disturbingly prevalent.

  The X-Factor

  By the time Julie Speerschneider’s skeletal remains were discovered along the banks of the Yahara River—coated in adipocere, an impromptu surface burial—Wisconsin police were fresh out of options. The decision to throw the young day-care worker’s memory under the bus and brand her as a druggie and down-and-outer whose luck with shady men and hitchhiking had predictably run out was nothing if not shortsighted. It may also be a reflection of just how desperate the cops had become. Intuitively knowing there would be more victims to follow, it seems that police had launched a spring counteroffensive with casualties unfortunately needing to be the victims themselves—those victims followed in short order by the truth as yet another casualty. It’s an understudied variable in homicide investigations that might be called the X-Factor—that human factor that can override the best intentions, investigative techniques, and forensic technologies. Not so much human error, in fact, as much as human meddling and malevolence—self-serving sabotage.

  The last few years had seen a spate of disappearances later determined to be homicides after remains were located. Following the discovery of Julie Speerschneider’s remains in 1981, there were still more abduction murders to come as Madison continued to face a tidal wave of violence. Worse still, the consortium of police agencies loosely joined together had nothing in the way of leads. The Debbie Bennett Intra County Investigative Squad was played out and the Julie Ann Hall investigation, if one could call it that, had ground to a halt. Then of course there was the subtext of a Mad City ripper making a mockery of local law enforcement by snatching girls in the city and dumping them out in the counties to buy time and space. Incredibly, at least by today’s standards, the police got off easy in terms of public pressure until the Speerschneider discovery—the initial revelation of the so-called Julie murders.

  What no one bothered to examine amid the rewriting of Speerschneider’s biography, and then later branding her as a drug player, was the number of salient linkages in terms of MO and even signature between the Julie murders. The contrast between the slaying and disposal of Debbie Bennett, quite clearl
y immersed in the Madison drug culture, managing to garner a full-blown task force, and the Julie Speerschneider murder, relegated to a listless and perfunctory investigation, spoke to a certain fatigue that consumed the same triad of agencies which, since Christine Rothschild, had inherited Madison’s unsolved homicides whether in whole or in part. It also spoke to the arbitrariness with which murders are investigated, including by whom and for how long, based on variables ranging from internal promotions and transfer needs within a police agency to factors as academic as to when a murder occurs within a department’s fiscal cycle.

  The truth is that if the general public knew just how many murders are solved due to luck or silly mistakes and oversights made by offenders with respect to leaving physical evidence or not keeping their mouths shut—versus crackerjack sleuthing the way it’s done on TV—people generally would be horrified and never leave their homes. Here’s a hint: in some of the largest US cities, the homicide clearance rate hovers under 40 percent—even lower in the case of random murders, closer to 20 percent, or one in five. Some notable outliers, as confirmed by the Murder Accountability Project, are even lower than 10 percent. In fact, there have been more Americans killed in still-unsolved murders in the last thirty years than the combined total of all US military personnel killed in all global armed conflicts since World War II.

  Curiously there are also fewer murders solved per capita in America today than there were in 1965, an era before DNA, before sophisticated ballistics and blood-spatter testing, before sex-offender registries, monitoring bracelets, and watch lists, before other investigative advantages that detectives have today. Equally, although there are fewer murders across America today than in previous generations, fewer of these fewer cases are being solved, thus leaving more killers than ever to remain at large. The question is why. One theory is that the conveniences enjoyed by police today have dulled investigative intuition and old-school instincts upon which cops once relied. It has been suggested that, when a case yields no DNA evidence or other offender clues to be plugged into databases or submitted for standardized testing, modern police are often quickly out of their depth.