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

by Michael Arntfield

  A circle delineates the area outside Randall Stadium’s infamous gate 4 (today gate 5) where Donna Mraz’s body was found in a pool of her own blood. UWPD officer Rexann Lemke stands guard at the outer cordon of the crime scene, one surrounded by student houses left abandoned for the Independence Day holiday weekend. Courtesy: Wisconsin State Journal.

  Donna’s murder came at the tail end of a week that, even for Madison and 1980s Middle America, saw a remarkable torrent of violence. The previous Sunday, June 27, a young woman walking along Regent Street near Monroe Street, just south of the campus and less than half a mile from Camp Randall Stadium, had been slashed across the back of the leg in an apparent random attack. A basic description was obtained in what was thought to be a mugging gone bad, the case written off with no composite drawing and no public plea for tips. There was also no canvass run of the street made famous for its slanting homes—the leaning houses of Regent.

  On the night of Donna Mraz’s murder, there had also been two stranger-on-stranger sex attacks across the city. The first incident occurred immediately before the attack on Donna—a mere matter of minutes before—at the rear of a dive bar called the Shuffle Inn on West Beltline and just five miles from the UW campus. In that incident, a woman walking through the bar’s small parking lot was attacked when a man jumped out from in between two parked cars, dragged her to a nearby embankment, and severely beat her face while raping her. No usable description of the attacker was obtained. In a strange twist of fate, the Shuffle Inn would burn to the ground six years later when Mad City serial arsonist Fred Long—a depraved pyrophiliac with a penchant for setting nightclub fires—landed a job there as the night janitor and later set the place ablaze. It was the last of his three intentionally set Madison nightclub fires, one claiming a life, that had reduced three buildings to rubble. At the time of Mraz’s murder and the contemporaneous attack at the Shuffle Inn, Long would have been seventeen years old. Although perhaps a long shot, as a serial pyrophiliac with abnormal sexual desires, he probably should have also been considered—or the very least cleared—as a “possible” for the three knife attacks in the summer of ’82. He wasn’t.

  The second of the two stranger-on-stranger sex attacks to occur during the Devil’s hours on July 3, this one occurring immediately after Donna was stabbed to death, was even more notable. A little over an hour after Donna was pronounced dead at UW hospital, a single thirty-one-year-old woman was asleep in the bed of her apartment on Fiedler Lane, located just south of the UW arboretum. About 4:00 a.m., rolling around in the midst of a deep sleep, something jarred her awake. It was then that she too would take note of an indiscernible figure—one in this case standing immediately above her bed. The nocturnal intruder, apparently having cut electrical service to the apartment to prevent lights from being turned on, had some time earlier managed with some deftness to enter the apartment in what can only be surmised to be a targeted stranger attack. When the ambient light outside came through her bedroom window to reveal the brief glint of a blade surface, the victim attempted to instinctively shield her face, as Donna did, while the intruder slashed her and severed the tendons of her right hand. The attacker then held the knife to her throat and proceeded to sexually assault her before slipping out into the predawn twilight and leaving her bleeding in bed. Somehow, she survived.

  Although no description or DNA profile of the bedroom intruder was ever obtained, Madison PD later assured the public they were “closely examining” whether the attack on Fiedler Lane was related to the murder of Mraz, as well as the knife attack on Regent Street the week prior. For the cases not to have been related would mean that three knife-wielding suspects were walking the streets contemporaneously, attacking female strangers independently of one another over the course of the same week—and all in the same general area of Madison. Not surprisingly, this was somewhat consistent with the approach taken with the previous four murders and the reluctance to seriously entertain the possibility of any linkage in those cases, particularly the last two murders of Susan LeMahieu and Shirley Stewart. Another area of consistency with the Mraz murder was to reunite the custom-built Intra County Investigative Squad of days gone by, once again cobbling together an assortment of city, county, state, and campus cops but with one key difference—this time the campus police were in charge. Just as they had been responsible for the Christine Rothschild investigation back in May of ’68, so too would a member of the UW Five-O be tasked with heading up the investigation into Donna Mraz’s murder. The new boss there was a Lieutenant Gary Moore, a man who, before long, realized that being a campus cop in charge of a major case task force was a real gas. It was regular detective work à la mode—a little more sweet, a little more self-indulgent—in that investigative decision-making was all his, even if it involved an unorthodox method or two. In fact, the sky was the limit in terms of harebrained ideas. He was, after all, a man playing with house money.

  It would be tough to beat the mishandling of the earlier Mad City murders, especially given that Donna was a homegrown all-star with wall-to-wall friends and family. Somehow the task force would manage to outdo itself. Within only hours of the girl’s death, Lieutenant Moore didn’t assign his detectives to focus on the potential linkages to the other stabbings, or even re-interview the other potentially related victims. Nor did he apparently have them corralling other possible—and previously unidentified—witnesses by doing a thorough canvass run of all nearby residences, maybe even a proper grid search or, more appropriately, what’s known as a fingertip search of the stadium and surrounding area for trace evidence. Rather than ordering all hands on deck to search for blood droplets, cigarette discards, footwear impressions, or other trace evidence, the investigation was taken in another direction—and into a black hole. Instead, within the first forty-eight hours—that critical first two-day window following the murder—the task force under Moore’s leadership quite incredibly, and incredulously, put its faith in the power of hypnosis. It soon became the first major step taken in the investigation.

  It was tragicomic; it was pure lunacy; it should have led to the disbandment of the Intra County Investigative Squad and intervention of the US Justice Department for egregious violations of basic investigative adequacy standards. The Justice Department has certainly intervened and solicited consent decrees from other police departments for less. But no one in the Mad City, it seemed, knew any better. Amid some questions of optics and subtle shoulder shrugging by the local press—the Capital Times, the Wisconsin State Journal, and even the Sentinel from where Linda’s confidante and man on the inside, Bill Share, had just retired—the papers reported that arrangements were made to have the unnamed eyewitness who first called 911 meet with a hypnotist. It was being brokered on the quick in a bid to have any missing details extracted about what he saw that night—the previous night. Ostensibly, it was to be used to help retrieve forgotten details of the mysterious shadowy figure seen near gate 4 brought to the surface, but it more explicitly served as a portent of things to come: hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo, a fire sale on common sense. It was the Independence Day weekend of 1982. It might as well have been 1892—back when H. H. Holmes was building his Murder Castle and the Pinkertons collared killers.

  Notwithstanding that hypnosis is now and was then regarded by the courts as junk science, it has been occasionally used in a last-ditch effort to recover the “repressed” memories of victims—not witnesses—about events long since passed. This controversial technique has also been linked to instances where it has managed to fundamentally twist and override existing accurate memories. The subject under hypnosis also needs to be willing to undergo the often-awkward ordeal, or at least to play along with the game. The student witness from the window was having none of it. After hearing what was planned, he skipped town and headed home to Milwaukee. His roommates later told the papers as much, saying that he was “spooked” by the whole affair and how it was being handled. The cops never got a forwarding address or alternate number.
In fact, they didn’t get anyone’s information—possible witnesses, persons of interest, even viable suspects—or where they might be spending that holiday weekend. Police, when later embarking upon a delayed canvass, complained that most of the names on mailboxes of surrounding houses or on the buzz boards—building intercom systems—of nearby apartments, such as those on Breese Terrace, had six or seven entries apiece. Markers on masking tape over other masking tape contained the names of student tenants and their sublets—couch surfers and summer flings all staying off lease. It was an absolute mess. The investigation seemed to be over before it started—again.

  As Lieutenant Moore later lamented to police, the holiday was “hampering” police ability to flush out either witnesses or the “hard clues” they so desperately needed. He tried to lighten the mood by later suggesting to State Journal reporter Marvin Balousek that he and his team were using the down time, as the case went cold before their eyes, to “catch up on [their] reading,” an offhand reference to the file itself. That “reading,” of course, was the Mraz murder book, including coroner’s reports on the brutality that had been wrought upon the body of an innocent girl just trying to make her way home that night, the witness statements of the Good Samaritan, the EMTs who had tended to her, and the handful of local residents who confirmed hearing the screams—Donna’s final horrific moments. All bumbling and ill-timed jocularity aside, the newsman responded by asking what leads the crackerjack task force had mined with respect to potential suspects, and the lieutenant was more candid. “Absolutely nothing,” he admitted. That was just thirty-six hours in. With the half-baked hypnotist idea kiboshed, the task force was already bleeding out on the mat and Moore had thrown in the towel and was publicly prepared to announce as much. Unlike his circumspect predecessors during the Major Case Unit’s earlier iterations, it seems he was at least prepared to fall on the sword—on the front page of three newspapers, no less.

  Publish or Perish

  After the fireworks had all burned out and the miniature star-spangled banners were tucked away under Madison staircases alongside Christmas ornaments for yet another year, it was back to business on Tuesday, July 6. It was also the day Donna Mraz was laid to rest during a private service at Roselawn Memory Gardens in the nearby town of Monona. Two days prior, the actual Fourth of July, a visitation had been held at the Betzer Funeral Home in Delevan, about an hour’s drive from the Mad City. Despite the distance and the competing holiday festivities, a sea of mourners—friends, family, UW classmates and professors, coworkers and customers from the Bittersweet, first responders to the crime scene—arrived in a continuous stream for upward of five hours to pay their respects to Donna, her parents, and her brother Mickey. Most of the Major Case Unit sleuths were no-shows.

  Back in Dallas, Linda knew of the latest Madison murder, knew that UWPD was at the helm, and knew they would likely muddy the waters until no one could see the bottom. She also knew of the plan to hypnotize the lone eyewitness who had been scared away by the fact that other potential witnesses had never been identified or short-listed for proper follow-up. But she’d been to this dance before. She also knew of the holiday visitation and Tuesday morning burial, and that the Mraz girl wouldn’t rest in peace. As the coming months would prove, she was right in the most literal sense. But Donna’s murder had also brought back a wave of saturnine feelings that even the latest torrent of killings hadn’t. She couldn’t shake the similarities between Donna and Christine as victims—she wasn’t sure why. The murder rekindled nightmares that she had otherwise put up on the shelf while trying to keep her eye on the ball, her focus trained on Jorgensen and her attempt to stop him from killing again. She feared she’d already failed at least twice after Christine while Jorgensen was off the grid and out of reach—Donna Ann Lass was a good bet and Valentine Sally a solid maybe—and there would no doubt be more to follow. As the Major Case Unit would soon begin to create the Capital City Killer in effigy and turn it over to the feds to get themselves out of the corner, Linda was chasing the only verifiable serial killer—name, address, Social Security number all confirmed—to have lived and killed in Madison. By the summer of ’82, she had stopped calling the cops with updates.

  That same week, Linda did, however, make a call that would chart a new course—the next move on the chessboard that spanned the distance from Dallas to Marina del Rey. Again assuming the role of a studio executive doing research for the now-imminent anniversary reprise of This Is Your Life, she called Rita Baron asking for any updates on Jorgensen’s life—anything that might help ensure he was chosen as the feature persona of the show’s supposed network return. Indeed there was an update.

  “Well, you heard that as his mother’s dying wish, he finally helped her get her book published? Niels would do anything for his mother, you know.”

  Linda tried to compute these latest details, facts much more quantitative—and ominous—than her contact’s earlier nondescript and sycophantic riffs from the last phone call. Dying? Published? Linda zeroed in on these two tidbits, now legitimately curious beyond the purview of the research cover story. “Poor Heidi hasn’t got much longer they say. She never leaves the house. Niels got her old manuscript published as a book as a final gift; Ezra is selling them on consignment in LA for him.”

  Linda bristled. “What book?”

  With a slight pause, Baron came back with the title as though Linda should already have known, as though it was common sense. “Well, The Love Pirate of course. It was the children’s book she wrote over ten years ago. Such a wonderful story.”

  Linda was flummoxed but quickly put it all together—her cryptic Valentine card with its tacit reference to Valentine Sally and its jab about Jorgensen’s running from the Mad City back in ’68. She had expected to provoke him and had also anticipated a knee-jerk response. She had even considered it possible that he might have concluded that the woman who sent the taunting Valentine card might have read and decrypted the abandoned Madison copy of The Love Pirate. In this new level of psychological warfare and proverbial chess game that Linda was orchestrating, Jorgensen had made his own unanticipated strategic move. He had met Linda’s Halloween Gambit with an opening “sacrifice” of his own in the form of full disclosure, a move Linda hadn’t been expecting. He had chosen in a way to reveal himself by tauntingly putting the coded book into the hands of American readers—indirectly revealing his proclivities in black and white for unknowing readers. He’d gone public.

  A single, meager print run with now-defunct Vantage Press—a New York–based vanity publisher—spit out a total of fifty prepaid hardcover editions of the book, all destined for Southern California where Jorgensen would have Ezra Jameson—a true-life version of Quong Sha from The Love Pirate—sell them out of the trunk of his car or even give them away to members of the Sierra Singles. Although publishing the book with its veiled references had in theory left Jorgensen exposed, he knew that no one would make the connections that Linda had. Moreover, now that the book was in print, Jorgensen knew that any linkages that Linda might now try to draw from it—or at least speak publicly about to the police or others—would only make her appear obsessed. He no doubt thought that Linda’s valid connections, referencing what was once a memoir, private cipher, and roman à clef but now a public document, would likely have her written off by cops and reporters who’d recently seen such linkages—incidents still very much in the news in 1982.

  Like Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and the countless others drawn to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon revealed his possession of the novel when arrested; the book was also recovered from Hinckley’s hotel room in March ’81 following his attempted assassination of President Reagan—publishing the book was principally a strategic move. He no doubt banked that the police and whoever else might listen would summarily paint her as a woman who never got over May of ’68, a woman tilting at windmills and mistakenly interpreting the book for something it was not. As He
idi waited out death in the condo she shared under the domineering control of her son, the book, now published, was her mea culpa about the monster she had unwittingly created. Jorgensen had, however, turned it into an insurance policy against Linda. Beyond that, he also would relish in the double entendre and hidden meaning of every page—that he was in fact the devious Dr. Corcoran. As a malignant narcissist in the psychopathic spectrum, he may have thought that people might come to understand and even admire him.

  Linda, still on the phone, in processing these short- and long-term implications and realizing what her incendiary Valentine card had touched off, asked Rita how she might go about getting a copy. “The network studio would love a copy to review ahead of final selections,” she qualified. Although she wasn’t certain the industry jargon she was throwing around made sense—that the nomenclature rang true—it was enough to pull a final one over on the naïve Rita.

  “I’ll get two from Ez when I see him this week. I’ll tell him the second one is for the beauty salon. Will they show the book on TV?”

  Linda replied with a confident “no question about it” before then providing the KVTV address. “Come to think of it, send it COD to my professional PO box.” Knowing not only that she could never in a million years manage a parcel intercept at the CBS affiliate office, she also knew she didn’t have a PO box. As another ruse, she provided Rita with her actual home address and prefaced it with a bogus PO number. It was an address that by then she knew Jorgensen already had by virtue of the earlier Valentine card, so if he found out, she would be in no greater danger than she was already. Linda could hear Rita was distracted, jotting down digits and not caring one way or another about where the book was headed or why. For a brief moment Linda even felt badly about falsely lifting the kind woman’s spirits and suggesting that a book written by Jorgensen’s mother might in some way help in his selection for a television show. Rita, she realized, having fallen under Jorgensen’s psychopathic spell, had believed his stories and believed he was special. Although Linda’s playacting with this trusting and pleasant woman had been nothing personal, Baron unfortunately had to be used as a pawn in the ongoing chess game. This conversation would mark the last time they ever spoke. Linda officially retired her ruse exactly eight business days later when the package from California arrived.