Flashback—fourteen years back—to the drizzly morning of Christine’s murder and the men’s hanky left beneath her ravaged head as she lay in the grass outside Sterling Hall. Jorgensen had used it to send a message—his signature. Now, Linda thought, the same signature was reappearing with a body posed in plain view in the desert—once again accompanied by a white men’s handkerchief. Although a slightly varied MO as part of this latest decompensation and the ensuing compulsion to kill—in essence the end of a serial killer’s refractory, or cooling-off, period between his crimes—it fit the same general visual scheme. It fit the same narrative.
Valentine Sally, someone who unlike the others wouldn’t immediately be missed, also represented a subtle shift in victimology as compared to Christine and any other earlier victims, including Lass and Williamson, with even the victim’s dental record checks having come back with negative results. One possible dental lead, however, was that the victim had recently been prepped for root canal work, a procedure that never ended up happening. Even with this detail made public, no one came forward to ID the body—no family, no dentist, no friends or coworkers. Valentine Sally was the quintessence of the missing missing and now the unknown dead. If her murder out on the desert was indeed once again the work of Jorgensen, Linda sensed he was getting more brazen, now going after perfect strangers rather than targeted strangers, acquaintances, or family. He was settling on whomever he could find. So long as no one found the bodies or knew the victims, he’d remain untouchable. The clock was ticking, and there was now no waiting for the police. Linda, to know for sure, would have to take a risk, to poke around in an attempt to get inside his head. She would have to stick her neck out to draw him from the shadows, provoke him out from under his rock. Valentine Sally became the excuse Linda needed to begin a new tradition, one she’d start belatedly in the winter of ’82. When she got home that same afternoon in late February, she mailed Jorgensen a cryptic and belated Valentine card to his Washington Boulevard address in Marina del Rey. She dug up the past. She made a jab. She chose to reveal herself and her mission at once. She upped the ante.
Greetings from Texas,
Remember when you worked at UW–Madison in 1968? I’m sure you recall that Chief Hanson sent two detectives to speak with you after you fled Madison.
If you ever want to chat about the good ol’ Badger days, please call collect at 817-294-XXXX.
Would be interesting to reminisce since we have a friend in common.
Happy Valentine’s Day,
Linda
Knowing the danger she might be placing herself in but also knowing the time for half measures was long since gone—that it never really existed—she even included her full name and return address on the envelope. Then the waiting game began. It was a wait, taking decades, that would begin a new chapter in her hunt, one more subtle and telegraphic than before but no less tactical. As they both advanced in age and Christine stayed forever frozen at eighteen, Linda’s tactics, now taking on a more nuanced dimension, would also leave her open to a possible counterattack for the first time. What ensued was a chess match that Linda now controlled, at least in the early days. It was a match played over a fifteen-hundred-mile distance but one with life-and-death stakes. It was a match in which she’d chosen to make a dangerously aggressive opening move—what chess players call the Halloween Gambit—an early sacrifice for a tactical upper hand and a psychologically elevated position. Valentine Sally, the Halloween Gambit—both references to secular observances; however, the next ominous event of consequence back in Madison would be linked to yet another and, for the moment, deadly observance: Independence Day. But in the meantime, a bizarre development that brought forth the first plausible suspect—or more accurately a patsy—for a good chunk of the unsolved Mad City murders to date. Maybe even all of them.
On the afternoon of March 1, 1982, Lincoln Elementary in Madison let out early to allow teachers to prepare for a PTA meeting and parent-faculty interviews. A third grader named Paula McCormick attended the school and set out to walk home alone when she was approached by a sex offender on probation living near the school and offered one dollar to babysit for him for a mere five minutes. The trusting girl followed a twenty-seven-year-old pedophile, petty shoplifter, and daytime B&E loser named Roger Lange into his apartment on Cypress Way where she was quickly overpowered, bound, gagged, sexually assaulted, and murdered—the precise order of the rape and murder not being clear. The girl’s body was then placed in a garbage bag and again into an empty television box before being taken to a mini-storage warehouse on Copps Avenue across the lake in the town of Monona, where Lange had rented a drive-in unit to hide the girl’s corpse. After the girl was reported missing, Madison PD didn’t know where to start and it might have stayed that way if Lange, citing news reports of the girl’s disappearance, hadn’t offered them his services as a “psychic.”
Claiming he was a psychic and was having “visions” that could help lead authorities to the missing child’s whereabouts, on the evening of March 3, Lange quite incredibly brought the police to his own storage unit where the lead detective would claim that it became clear Lange had a personal connection to the disappearance—that his clairvoyant routine was disingenuous at best. In the unit, the police of course found the body of young Paula McCormick stuffed in a garbage bag, and Lange was immediately placed under arrest, much to his protest that he was only following his visions. Not surprisingly, he would later plead insanity while his lawyers argued with gusto that the pedo-necro sex creep should go to the state forensic mental health hospital—the same “puzzle factory” where grave robber Ed Gein was still locked up—rather than to the big house. But the jury didn’t buy it. It was one of Madison’s worst sex murders amid a torrent of killings blamed on some specter known as the Capital City Killer. Now, at last, the public had a name and a face they could assign to at least one of the murders, and they’d take it. Lange was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and a host of other felonies—convictions later upheld on appeal in 1989.
In the meantime, by the spring of ’82, the police were publicly naming Lange as the replacement for William Zamastil as a possible suspect in other unsolved Mad City sex murders—in fact, in all of them. The city’s newspapers of record—the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal—were even citing police sources that Lange was now the prime—and only—suspect. This, in spite of remarkable differences in MO, signature, victimology, organization, disposal pathway, paraphilia, and weapon focus, in the murders of Debbie Bennett, Julie Ann Hall, Julie Speerschneider, and Susan LeMahieu. All the cops needed was for the deluge of random stranger-on-stranger murders in the Mad City to stop—at least for the short term—in order to keep Lange in play as “their man” for nearly every unsolved murder after Christine Rothschild. But then someone threw a wrench in their plan.
The Long Walk
July 2, 1982, fell on a Friday. It was also the last working day before the Fourth of July weekend—one of those rare occasions when it’s actually on a weekend. With the usual Madison Independence Day parade in the offing, a mile-long asphalt flotilla lay waiting to set sail: marching bands, pom-poms, and pickups laden with festooned amplifiers all locked and loaded. It had been just before midnight on July 1 when twenty-three-year-old Donna Mraz finished her shift at a restaurant known as Bittersweet. Located just beyond the Capitol Square at 117 State Street—near the historical society in the 800 block of that same street where Julie Ann Hall once briefly worked—Donna had been waitressing there for nearly three years while balancing her studies at UW. It was her nature to keep active and lead a purpose-driven, hardworking life, a routine that earned her the nickname “buzzy”—as in a busy bee—among her family and closest friends. While preparing to embark on her senior year, Donna had even become a regular name on the Dean’s Honor list. It was a mild early summer night when, directly in front of the restaurant, she managed to catch the last bus and set out for her campus-area rental home on Van
Hise Avenue. It would be her last last bus.
While she had some distance to travel that night compared to the brief routes taken by other young Mad City women and teens before they had previously vanished, it was one that young Donna, with her board-straight brown hair and mile-high cheekbones, had been accustomed to taking since the spring of ’79 when she first started working at Bittersweet. The route would have taken her, in a roundabout way, as it always did, through UW and past the general vicinity of Sterling Hall. It would also have taken her directly past Camp Randall Stadium where the university’s NCAA Division I Badgers still play and where she was to be let off, a mere two blocks from her home where she lived with her two roommates. The unanswered question that endures is why whoever was waiting outside the stadium when she arrived was also on the UW campus that night. Why was he drawn back to the same vicinity that had been the epicenter for Madison’s nearly fifteen-year reign in blood?
It was a bygone age before smartphones allowed people to remove themselves from the reality of their surroundings and instead actually look ahead to what lay in front of them—who was behind them. It was a time when journeys on foot or by bus, like the one Donna undertook that fateful night, were single-task undertakings that required engagement with the real world and not opiating oneself with scrollable social media pages or Pokémon GO. The result was that people actually paid attention—to be vigilant about who might be shadowing them—and were generally expected to have their wits about them. Thus, the fact that Donna made it three-quarters of the way through her journey without incident suggests that she hadn’t been followed. That is not, however, to rule out that she wasn’t specifically targeted; yet, as her friends, family, and coworkers back at the restaurant would later tell police, Donna was also smart enough to always vary her route. Over a decade before, people—especially young women like Donna—were urged to regularly change up their routines and paths to and from their usual haunts, and she practiced that good habit. Without necessarily knowing what it was called, Donna understood what criminologists just a few years earlier had begun to refer to as the routine activities theory of crime and victimization.
The truth is that, man or woman, young or old, we all follow routines. The structure of modern society is such that we also seldom deviate from them. Suburban family homes are targeted for daytime break-ins because thieves know that the weekday routines of people who own those homes is one that puts the occupants at work, at school, or out running errands during that same time. The result is a predictive soft target that can be identified based solely on the routine of the owners. But the routine activities theory of crime suggests that this same model can be applied to nearly all types of offenses, not just burglaries. The nuts and bolts of the theory states that where a motivated offender and a vulnerable victim meet at a particular time and place in the absence of a “suitable guardian”—police, eyewitnesses, video surveillance, and so on—a crime is more likely than not to occur.
In the crime-plagued New York City of that same year, 1982, unforgiving places like Battery Park and the 191st Street Station—the reputed “Tunnel of Doom”—were living laboratories that quickly proved the soundness of the theory. Jogging paths frequented by young women and concealed by hedgerows, staircases to the subway, they were all easy targets for the various forms of societal flotsam that laid claim to the city once the sun set. They knew who would likely be in those places and when. Much like taking down a stagecoach at the pass, all they had to do was wait. Within twenty-four months, the city reached a breaking point after crack hit the streets and changed all the rules. Later, Bernie Goetz went Death Wish on four black kids on a subway car in Manhattan with an unregistered .38, and by the end of ’84, America suddenly awoke to the dimensions of the new decade—the realities of what was yet to come. One didn’t need to live in New York City to know it. Back in the Mad City, Donna already knew it. She knew where the world had gone and was going and always played it safe. She paid attention—always. That’s why what happened when she got to Camp Randall Stadium that night, just after midnight on July 3, is all the more puzzling. What was even more puzzling is where it happened.
As her boss and longtime owner of the Bittersweet, Gene Konitzer, would later tell reporters with the Capital Times, Donna was “unafraid,” which is not to say she was fearless. She was too smart to be fearless. Even in her placid west-end suburb with its coach lights and welcome mats, she knew the world was a dangerous place. She also knew how to protect herself from the evil that men do. In fact, until the small hours of July 3, she also seemed to have done everything right. Donna was an accomplished varsity basketball athlete, National Honor Society member, and state scholarship winner. She wasn’t helpless or clueless; in fact, she was as physically agile as she was smart. There could and would never be any “double-gray” area with respect to Donna’s brief, bright life in the way that Julie Speerschneider’s existence had been so readily dismissed. Tragically, it was still no assurance that Donna too wouldn’t fall between the cracks—wouldn’t be yet another byproduct of a local and regional system that, with industrialized efficiency, churned out unsolved murders in assembly-line fashion. By the time the national crime rate tore through the stratosphere, Madison had already become something of a cold-case foundry—a place whose chief products were little more than human tragedy and misery.
Shortly after midnight on July 2, after Donna disembarked from the Madison Metro Transit bus that picked her up outside the Bittersweet, residents of the nearby Breese Terrace Apartments, a network of walk-up multidwelling units within view and earshot of Camp Randall Stadium, heard a blood-curdling scream. Most of the occupants who were still awake dismissed the noise as an early start to Fourth of July revelry, part of the usual weekend benders that descended on the neighborhood once the summertime subtenants moved in.
But there was at least one tenant, a twenty-two-year-old UW male student from nearby Milwaukee, still holed up in his student apartment well into the summer, who thought differently. He was sufficiently jarred by the unsettling pitch of the scream that he looked out his second-story window to see a woman running from the vicinity of the stadium’s gate 4 before collapsing on the concrete walkway leading from the stadium to a series of small apartment structures, the Bresse Terrace buildings included. Momentarily darting his eyes away from the woman on the ground to the dim amber glow thrown onto the stadium’s student entrance, labeled as gate 4 (what is today gate 5) by the metal-halide street lamps nearby, the same witness saw an amorphous silhouette—some kind of shape in the night—running in the opposite direction to the east. Although he was the closest thing to an independent eyewitness to a Madison murder in nearly two decades, in the end, the details of what he saw wouldn’t end up mattering. What the student in the window didn’t yet know was that the woman lying prone on the walkway was Donna Mraz and the shape in the night was her killer. What he also didn’t know—and Donna couldn’t have known—is how long that same mysterious figure had lain in wait in the shadows of Camp Randall Stadium for this very moment. What no one will ever know is whether Donna was a previously targeted victim or someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like so many of Madison’s other girls.
Hypnosis
Upon seeing that Donna—he wouldn’t know her name until after it was all over—was no longer moving, the student, now a key witness, ran down to the walkway to find her unconscious, her arm slashed, and her chest spritzing blood in sync with her elevated pulse as she went into shock. All the while, Donna’s purse remained untouched, her clothing unmolested. In the dark of night and concealed by the long shadows of the stadium, her attacker had emerged from the black and plunged the knife with surgical precision through Donna’s heart. The slash to the arm, running shoulder to elbow and cutting down to the bone, revealed an initial plunge of the knife that Donna deflected by trying to shield her face, and which in process managed to inflict a deep glancing slash. Even to the untrained eye of the Good Samaritan, the evidence spelled
an attack from close quarters—from ambush—with the blade having been directed down from overhead. It had been plunged from above with tremendous force and purpose, the intent from the outset to deliver a horrific and inevitably fatal blow. Panicked, the witness managed to maintain the presence of mind to run back inside and call an ambulance from his apartment before then grabbing a blanket off his own bed to bring down to Donna. By the time he got back to her—maybe a minute, maybe two—there was a second man present tending to her as well. No one knew where he came from. No one ever even got his name.
Within three minutes of the initial 911 call, fire department EMTs converged on the scene, followed soon after by both UW and Madison PD uniform officers who strung up yellow tape and built perimeters. Paramedics worked on Donna at the scene for a total of twenty minutes—too long—before transporting her to the campus hospital, wheeling the ambulance into the same ER receiving bay across from Sterling Hall used for Christine Rothschild, effectively retracing the steps of May of ’68. Different faces and names, the same dark history on autorepeat. In the meantime, police scanners went berserk at all the local affiliates—NBC, CBS, ABC—with news crews scrambling to the scene to roll electronic news gathering, or ENG, videotape. Within two hours, Donna Mraz was pronounced dead. She’d made it thirty feet from where her attacker emerged from the blind spot by Camp Randall Stadium’s gate 4 before collapsing from shock and blood loss. She never regained consciousness. She never got to ask, Why?
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 25
