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

by Michael Arntfield

  In the case of the Julie murders plus LeMahieu and Stewart as part of an apparent set of four linked sexual murders in the Mad City, applying Rossmo’s geoprofiling formula to the total of eight confirmed locations reflecting known or suspected contact points and disposal sites, a clear picture of the killer’s probable home base—the so-called “hot zone”—comes into focus for the first time in decades.

  Beyond the retroactive use of geographic profiling, however, the reality is that the way these crime scenes can today be digitally plotted on a map—antiseptically clean, precise, conscientious—doesn’t reflect the reality of how they were found or processed. Between the mishandling of evidence and the fact that the killer took all of these girls’ immediate possessions before dumping them in the wilderness—items that today might hold valuable and perishable DNA evidence—there is little else to work with. Years ahead of the Human Genome Project that ultimately led to the establishment of databases such as the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) and allowed for offender-crime scene cross-referencing, the killer who operated in Madison between the spring of ’78 and early winter of ’80 had dotted his Is and crossed his Ts. He put enough time and distance between himself and his victims to ensure, by the time they revealed themselves to shocked passers-by, that there would no trace of him or what he had done to his victims. In the unlikely event that he might have missed something, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office or UWPD might have helped him out.

  Eventually, the key exhibits from these cases: the umbrella and handkerchief in Christine Rothschild’s murder, the hair elastic in the Speerschneider murder, the ring mysteriously left on LeMahieu’s body, the watch at the Stewart scene at Camp Indianola—any and all related documents and photographs—were either lost or, more likely, destroyed. Although the sheriff and the campus cops blamed each other, it was all just a grand punctuation mark in a game of duck and run. Indeed, by the time Shirley Stewart’s skeleton turned up in the summer camp forest near Westport and a fourth victim now matched the victimology, MO, disposal pathway, and the specific signature of the last three women—the full disrobing of the corpse and collecting of jewelry, watches, and other items as souvenirs—the police had a new slant. An unnamed police source sought to distinguish the Stewart case from the others because she had no association with downtown Madison. Seemingly no longer speaking directly to the media for attribution purposes, a colossal failure of leadership in its own right, the four police agencies involved instead deferred to the Dane County deputy coroner, a man who, unlike Bud Chamberlain, Phil Little, or other senior medical experts they couldn’t control, seemed prepared to read lines. The spin, it turns out, was no spin. And so entered Don Scullion, a knuckleballer pulled up from the minors and used as a closer for the county, state, and both city and university police departments. He’d been tested with the earlier discovery of Susan LeMahieu when he pussyfooted around the whole find, coyly stating that they would “rule out” its possibly being a murder. They would rule out a delayed twenty-four-year-old who’d never left the city by herself to have ended up naked in the dense underbrush of an abandoned forest subdivision half an hour from town, in the dead of winter, as being suspicious. True to form, amid an ongoing police blackout, the press kowtowed for the scraps they were tossed—wartime rations.

  In light of recent events, including Urso’s official take on Speerschneider’s case, the discovery of Shirley Stewart’s remains under similar circumstances indeed meant that the whole “double-gray” nonsense failed the smell test once and for all. No police investigator was at that point prepared to stand in front of a bank of news mics or even meet with a reporter on the QT to float theories until the task force had some better idea of who or what they were dealing with. Scullion, with no specific police or investigative qualifications, seemed to be providing his own guesswork, suggesting a lack of linkage because Shirley Stewart was neither kidnapped from, nor known to hang out near, either downtown Madison or the UW campus. With that, the state of Wisconsin officially stepped back in time almost fifty years in terms of understanding victimology. As Hans von Hentig spun in his grave like a lathe, once that same theory made it above the fold in the July 18, 1981, edition of the Journal, the killer of those four young girls officially got away with it—with all of it.

  By the end of 1981, the Madison PD and their consorts with county, state, and UW campus, having been variously involved in all of the murders going back to Rothschild, had a conflicted relationship with the idea of a serial killer being good for all of the Mad City’s mayhem—being single-handedly responsible for now six unsolved sex murders in just thirteen years. The fear and loathing in the city, in Dane County, and outward across the expanses of the whole state of Wisconsin posed both a problem and solution. Police leaders, normally gluttons for face time on the evening news, were indefinitely avoiding the press like the plague. To admit that the cases were connected would likely have left an already-concerned public outraged. Such a tacit admission of colossal failure, even by the amateur standards of the early ’80s, would help sow the seeds for internal investigations, public inquiries, and possibly firings—lawsuits galore.

  At the same time, to acknowledge that in at least the last four cases, the lore of the Capital City Killer might actually have some merit also meant, whether fact or fiction, that someone might one day be caught and all those cases solved in one fell swoop. It was a long shot that would first require backtracking on previous conjecture—the need to come to terms with the fact that police quite simply didn’t understand victim patterns in the manner we do today. Although it wasn’t necessarily their fault, while they were too busy not looking for clues, the killer of Hall, Speerschneider, LeMahieu, and Stewart seems to have moved on. But he wouldn’t just stop. Like Jorgensen, he simply couldn’t. What he more likely did was to pack up and move on. One possibility was that he was in prison on other unrelated charges. The more likely possibility was that he was in another city and county where he picked up where he had left off—perhaps even with a change of MO just subtle enough to ensure that the cases never became linked. Ahead of what the FBI, in later petitioning Congress in 1984, would describe as an “epidemic” of serial murder in the United States born of the larger rise in violent crime, whoever briefly and anonymously took ownership of the Capital City Killer title in Madison knew what police didn’t about murder victims and MO.

  Unlike signatures, which remain stable across crime scenes and reflect deranged visual schemes generally understood as originating with a certain form of childhood trauma known as the “vandalized love map,” MOs can change as often as the weather. Every criminal offender has an MO, and it simply means that they have a customary or preferred method of carrying out their crimes. The difference between MOs and signatures was actually first noted in a serial robbery investigation—all bank jobs—back in the 1970s. Once the FBI finally took over the cases, it found that the bandit’s MO changed with every crime. In some cases, he’d hit the vault at opening, other times the registers at closing. Sometimes he’d vault the counter; other times he’d also rob the other customers of their valuables. In one case, he’d produce a weapon, and in the other, a note. The differences were salient enough to ensure “linkage blindness” among the different police agencies that failed to recognize a common signature until the feds got involved and looked at the big picture nationally. In every case, regardless of MO, there was a common signature: the female tellers had to undress before he left the bank. The truth is that the robberies were never about the money. They were part of an elaborate and violent sexual fixation.

  These same findings with respect to distinguishing MOs from signatures were later supported through interviews with Edmund Kemper, also known as the “Co-Ed Killer,” a wannabe cop who picked up, murdered, and frequently decapitated hitchhiking college girls in northern California between 1972 and 1973. These crimes supplemented the murder of his mother and both grandparents in separate incidents, beginning as far back as 1964. He had managed to
get away with his crimes for so long in part because his MO varied so widely, thus ensuring the same linkage blindness later seen in the Mad City. A process-focused (sadistic) killer at heart, Kemper preferred to strangle his victims if possible and prolong the rush of the kill while maximizing their pain and terror. If, however, things didn’t go as planned and spiraled out of control when victims resisted, Kemper would then stab them as a matter of convenience, taking on a more act-focused (efficiency-based) method of operation. All the while, his necrophilic signature common to all of the murders—including taking body parts up to and including victims’ heads he would later adorn with makeup—consistently went overlooked.

  But in Madison, it seems that no one got that memo and no one thought to ask for the FBI’s help. While Debbie Bennett’s risk factors and violent fiery disposal pathway strongly suggest it was indeed a standalone event, the quick succession of events that included the bludgeoning of Julie Ann Hall, the strangulation of Julie Speerschneider, the suspected stabbing of Susan LeMahieu, and the apparent second strangulation of Shirley Stewart all showed minor changes in MO while having a common signature—the naked surface disposal at select or symbolic wooded locations and the accompanying collection of souvenirs. As these are among the rarest of accompanying actions seen in sexual murders in America, the evidence at the time should have screamed “serial” even to the untrained eye. The additional fluctuations in victim type—three victims from the downtown, one from the east side—that led the cops to kibosh the idea of a serial murder is in fact less of a distinction than is the fact that the girls had a relatively varied age range and drastic differences in appearance and lifestyle.

  Despite that, just like a changing MO, subtle changes in victim type are equally par for the course. As Kemper and plenty of other serial offenders have demonstrated, every sexually motivated killer—especially an organized killer with a car with a near-endless number of spots to troll and later dispose of victims—has a preferred victim, or an archetype who fits an existing or developing fantasy image that has been festering for weeks, months, or even years. When, however, that same archetype—blonde or brunette, child or adult, male or female—can’t be found or accessed, the need-motivated killer will move on to the next closest match. In Jorgensen’s case, Annabel was the literary template for his preferred victim—a type of woman, Christine Rothschild included, who, it seemed, turned up dead or vanished any time Jorgensen passed through town during his dark wanders of America. However, a rare minority of particularly sadistic serial sex killers fit the bill of being what’s known as polymorphistic in their victim selection, meaning that any gender, age, or body type will do in a pinch—typically for domination and torture. Like any person seeking a partner, they are quite simply prepared to settle on the closest reasonable facsimile to their “type.” Everyone’s settled at some point—or will. One would be a fool to think that sexual murderers aren’t equally as flexible.

  Looking back at the Mad City between 1977 and the start of 1980, it’s still unclear which of the four girls most closely fit the killer’s template as the preferred victim and which ones were deemed sufficient replacements. Replacements who, on a cold winter’s night, were deemed “good enough” once his options were limited and the ability to control his impulses exhausted—the compensatory cooling-off period at a breaking point. The fact that three of the four victims were taken or first targeted in Madison’s core and Shirley Stewart, unlike the others, was well outside the downtown area is purely academic. That’s also maybe why no cop ever put his name to the theory that Shirley Stewart’s murder and disposal at the ghost camp of Indianola was unrelated. The idea that her murder didn’t fit with the others was a stretch—even then. It was ulterior motivated; it defied common sense; it stunk to high heaven. But as it turned out, nobody ever really questioned it. Policing in Madison and Dane County at the time was the new Flat Earth Society—the dark age of reason. Before long, that darkness would call to others. To the imitators.

  Chapter 8

  GATE 4

  History, with her volumes vast, hath but one page.

  —Lord George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  Valentine Sally

  It was February of ’82 when Linda made her eighth full read of The Love Pirate from start to finish. It was onerous, the prose was tedious and boringly repetitive, but each new reading offered new and revelatory insights as she simultaneously cross-referenced events of the past against Jorgensen’s suspected movements. The original manuscript—copy one of two—had been left abandoned on the fly back in Jorgensen’s Madison apartment and recovered thanks to George Johnston in what already felt like a lifetime ago. In so doing, a number of entries returned Linda to the case of Donna Ann Lass, the Tahoe casino nurse whose body was never found. It seemed as if the tenuous connections made by Linda might actually have been intended by the story’s author, Heidi Jorgensen. They amounted to low-hanging fruit that anyone who knew the details of Jorgensen’s life and crimes could easily pluck from the vine. When Dr. Corcoran warns young Annabel that “any kind of intimacy with people arouses me in a nearly nauseated aversion,” Heidi, it seems, was speaking to those who, like her as Jorgensen’s mother, knew of the driving force behind her son’s psychopathic disposition—his malignant narcissism and his apparent preference for the company of the dead. Like Dr. Corcoran, it was evident to the two women who knew Jorgensen and lived to tell about it—Linda and his mother Heidi—that only intimacy with the living led to this aversion. Jorgensen’s bizarre fantasies were better met in the company of the dead and the collection of their modest belongings.

  As Jorgensen regaled the Sierra Singles with his knowledge of the California-Nevada countryside nearby and impressed his friend and doting admirer Ezra Jameson with the adept swiftness and cruelty with which he killed small game not for food but for mischievous fun, Linda paused to ponder new themes. She ran scenarios; she had new questions; intrusive thoughts intruded; she had even more questions—she drove herself nearly mad. Why wasn’t the body of the Lass girl ever found? How far could it have been driven before being buried or burned, maybe both? Who would actually try to bury a body in the desert by themselves? Could it be that Donna Ann Lass was actually left in plain sight still waiting to be discovered, having perhaps been seen but dismissed as a mannequin by anyone driving by and only half paying attention, just as Christine had been? If Jorgensen was good for the Lass murder, as Linda believed, why did both the MO and signature vary so greatly from Christine’s murder and what she thought was also the connected slaying of Judith Williamson, herself abducted, murdered, and stripped of belongings at Jorgensen’s alma matter after homecoming ’63? Soon enough, Linda was back to the library microfiche and immersed in a periscope view of the murder and mayhem being wrought during the 1980s across the United States. All the while, she scanned for common denominators no one else considered. She scanned for clues plain and simple—clues and connections everyone else, it seemed, was too busy not looking for.

  Scanning the fiche for open/unsolved cases—missing and murdered women and teens in particular—Linda expanded her search across the whole of California and the American Southwest dating from the time she knew Jorgensen had returned to California to live with his aging and frightened mother. Idle hands—the Devil’s workshop—and his knowledge of the area made him especially dangerous, she believed, even more so than in his younger years. She considered him even more dangerous in light of what she had learned regarding Jorgensen’s recent activities within the singles’ club and the new protégé he was grooming. Grooming for what, Linda wasn’t sure yet, although she believed that there would be other victims if she didn’t stop him. She, by then, also knew that there already might have been other victims despite her best past efforts—the years immediately after New York when he became the one that got away for Wisconsin police, with an insurmountable head start. Beginning in reverse chronological order, it took Linda under an hour to find what she thought might be
yet another linkage missed—an errant piece pulled off of the floor but still fitting into an expanding puzzle that she alone was assembling. At first blush, the possible linkage seemed too close a fit and the timing too opportune not to at least merit a second look. Moreover, it was recent—well within the window of Jorgensen’s Sierra Singles interests and within reach of his recent desert and mountain expeditions. They called her Valentine Sally.

  Left: An artist’s rendering, created in 1982, of how the Jane Doe murder victim known as Valentine Sally is likely to have appeared while alive. Right: An improved twenty-first-century digital rendering of Valentine Sally based on 3D imaging of her skull, released over thirty years later in hopes of finally identifying the young woman—and by extension her killer.

  A Jane Doe, an unidentified female with no known name or next of kin, had been found by pure fluke only a month earlier by a highway patrolman prowling a desolate stretch of I-40, about eleven miles west of the town of Williams, Arizona. Discovered lying beneath a cedar tree on the afternoon of February 14, 1982—Valentine’s Day—the body, affectionately named “Sally” by cops and morgue staff, had been positioned just twenty-five feet off the highway where it had sat undiscovered for at least ten days, certainly long enough to mummify in the desert heat and be otherwise decomposed beyond immediate recognition. Estimated to be between sixteen and twenty-one years of age, Valentine Sally appeared to have been either strangled or suffocated, likely sometime on February 4 when a girl of similar description had been seen at the Monte Carlo Truck Stop in nearby Ashfork. Although no precise cause or date of death could be verified given the state of the body, all indications were that she was not sexually assaulted and that her clothes were left untouched by her attacker. Linda knew that the choice not to take trophy souvenirs would set the murder apart from Christine’s case and others. One other piece of startling evidence, however, did not. A high-end handkerchief had been found with the corpse.