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

by Michael Arntfield

  But before Ramirez was even on the radar, before he had even started simultaneously burglarizing and killing in California, cops in Madison had, to their credit, realized that the break-in on Randall Street was likely just the tip of the iceberg and the key to other unsolved crimes. Once in custody, Taylor was found to have a dated injury to his arm, right or left was never clarified, which still hadn’t healed. Upon closer inspection, investigators were able to discern a pattern to the wound, one consistent with human teeth marks. Someone in recent weeks had clearly bitten the young man, but the question remained who, since Taylor wasn’t talking. The woman attacked in her apartment within hours of Donna Mraz’s murder hadn’t bitten her intruder; Donna, on the other hand, was the type of girl who might have. Headstrong and assertive, an accomplished athlete and leader, she wouldn’t have gone down without a fight—as best she could have. The problem was that the two sexual assaults that bookended Donna’s murder aside, there were eight other stranger attacks followed by rapes in Madison that same week alone. It also might not have been a female bite mark, perhaps the result of another unreported scuffle that Taylor had gotten into during his various criminal exploits. No one is sure who made the final snap judgment—who swore out the affidavit for exhumation—but the Major Case Unit would go for a Hail Mary win and bank on the bite mark matching with Donna’s teeth. If they lined up, it would put Taylor at the scene. He would be confirmed as Donna’s killer and could even inherit the Capital City Killer title as an addendum if he was willing to cop to it. Explaining how the previous victims were taken so far by bicycle before being dumped and posed might be a problem, as would trying to convince the public that the serial killer terrorizing the city started when he was just twelve years old and burned the remains of Debbie Bennett, but they’d cross that bridge if and when it came. It didn’t.

  After the body of young Donna Mraz was pulled from the earth—her family having no say in the matter and never even being told why, or what the police were looking for—a forensic odontologist at the state crime lab compared her plaster teeth impressions to the pattern on Taylor’s arm. Rather than simply trying to rely on a dental X-ray, the extraordinary step of exhuming the girl’s body was no doubt in part due to recent well-publicized success in this fledgling area of forensic science. As a comparison examination technique used only sporadically in the past, it had generally been considered a controversial methodology since bite wounds are continuously changing in their form. The technique came of age, however, three years prior during the 1979 trial of Ted Bundy for the Chi Omega sorority house massacre in 1978 when four women were viciously attacked, two of them murdered. Bundy had bitten one of his victims deeply in one of her buttocks during the attack, and two leading forensic dentists, Richard Souviron and Lowell Levine, were able to conclusively match castings of Bundy’s teeth to the wound. It turned out to be key evidence in the case and looking for bite-mark evidence became an increasingly acceptable investigative technique into the 1980s. In most cases, however, the technique was and still is used, almost without exception, to match a killer’s teeth to wounds on a victim’s skin, not the reverse. That meant that, in the end, the exhumation of Donna’s body turned out to be a long shot that missed the mark since experts were unable to confirm that the bite marks on Taylor matched Donna’s teeth. That is not to say that they weren’t from her, only that four months later a conclusive match that would hold up in a Wisconsin court couldn’t be made.

  As Donna was reinterred at the Roselawn cemetery, Lonnie Taylor was free to go. He was never convicted of the B&E on Randall Street but, as if by odd coincidence, the end of November saw the string of slashings, sex assaults, and break-ins in Madison subside as quickly as they began. The university, however, was another story.

  Chapter 9

  RURAL ROUTE

  Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

  —Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters

  As Seen on TV

  There’s a widely known saying, unknown in origin, that simply states: “May you live in interesting times.” It’s intended not as a blessing, wishing well for the future, but rather as an ironic curse, generally wishing one times of turmoil, uncertainty, and disorder—in essence a foreboding wish for troubled times to come. Once known as the “Chinese curse,” no confirmed origin of the statement can, however, be found in Dynastic Chinese writings, with its earliest known English reference dating only to the twentieth century. In fact, despite the negative connotation given to it today, the saying seems more apropos of something one might find in a Chinese fortune cookie—itself an American invention first popularized in California—than anything with its dubious and disputed roots of Eastern origin. What is clear is that the statement and the corresponding idea are generally associated with bad luck. Bobby Kennedy even referenced the saying in a famous speech before a group of university students in Cape Town with a more positive spin, suggesting that interesting times can also be creative times. That June ’66 speech in South Africa was not long after Jorgensen claimed to have completed his final mission there. Two years later nearly to the day, as Jorgensen fled to NYC, Bobby was assassinated in downtown LA by a stable worker named Sirhan Sirhan, the latest casualty of violence associated with the so-called Kennedy curse.

  The year 1984 certainly signaled the start of interesting times, both in Madison and across the whole of America. It was the same year that the FBI petitioned the US Congress for the money needed to fight the new scourge of the serial killer and when, as some criminologists have suggested, coverage of the FBI’s clarion call to Congress in the New York Times served to create the first social panic about serial murder in America. Two years earlier, President Ronald Reagan had declared the War on Drugs but now the bureau, citing an estimated ten thousand victims of serial murder a year in America alone, had a new offensive to mount. Names like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, and Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi—the Hillside Stranglers—all still resonated with the American public. In truth, they scared the hell out of them, and the feds knew it. A sea change was underway in relation to how many murders were committed and the way in which they needed to be investigated. Until it knew exactly what they were dealing with, the FBI needed a proverbial blank check to bankroll new initiatives. These initiatives included its new Behavioral Sciences Unit, now the Behavioral Analysis Units—actually five in total—all attached to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. By 1983, the “Mind Hunter” program, as it was colloquially known, was still putting the finishing touches on what would ultimately become the genesis of offender profiling as we know it today.

  Profiling, or criminal investigative analysis as it’s more commonly cited, is never conducted as seen on TV. Contrary to what is portrayed on nonsensical series such as Criminal Minds, profiling is only used during the third wave of an investigation after all conventional methods have been all but exhausted. Unlike serialized television, those conducting the analysis also don’t fly between cities on private charters to take over investigations from local law enforcement or make arrests and indulge in shootouts. The fictional investigative fantasia depicted in network prime time simply doesn’t exist. The truth is that there are actually a large number of accredited experts—including clinical and forensic psychologists, psychiatrists, and noted criminologists—who are the real-world analysts properly trained in this area. Some of these same authorities on the subject have delved into this issue and suggest that, with the actuarial method having a success rate of roughly 5 percent, about the same as any random outcome involving pure luck, law enforcement should get out of the profiling business altogether and leave investigative applications of psychology to the properly lettered, published, and peer-reviewed authorities on the subject.

  The first case to receive the benefit of an outside, expert perspective—specifically in the field of forensic psychiatry—was the lesser-known “Babes of Inglewood Murders” of 1937. The profile dre
w on the perceived success of Dr. Thomas Bond’s Whitechapel suspect mock-up and sought to narrow a field of persons potentially responsible for the murders of three little girls aged six to nine. It eventually identified a local school-crossing guard named Albert Dyer who had used the position to lure unsuspecting grade-schoolers to their deaths. Later, in the mid-1950s, public pressure led to an outside expert being similarly recruited by the NYPD to prepare a psychiatric profile of the then unidentified “Mad Bomber” of New York City. As a lone-wolf domestic terrorist, he targeted, seemingly at random, public buildings by hiding explosives indiscriminately while trying to kill civilians and to generally wreak havoc, all the while sending bizarre Ripper-like ramblings to the local press.

  Between 1940 and 1956, a total of thirty-three of his homemade explosives were planted in crowded public places, usually hidden from view—in a locker at Penn Station, underneath a seat cushion at Radio City Music Hall—collectively resulting in twenty-two explosions that injured a total of fifteen people. Miraculously, despite injuries, no one was ever killed. In an era before the post-9/11 omnipresent security of today, it had not been a challenge for the brazen bomber to smuggle in and secrete explosives in these places. Recognizing that the bomber wouldn’t stop until he was caught, and that fatalities were both likely inevitable and imminent given the frequency of incidents, detectives enlisted the assistance of prominent Manhattan forensic psychiatrist Dr. James Brussel. Like all psychiatrists, unlike psychologists, Brussel was first and foremost a medical doctor. In addition to being a physician by training, he also had a significant personal and professional interest in the criminal mind and specialized in the pharmacological treatment of criminal offenders. By the time the NYPD asked him to develop an offender profile on the bomber, Brussel already had a significant number of patients he could use in what is now called a typological approach to assist him in developing a list of probable personality traits—to help him pin down the psychological characteristics of the suspect.

  In examining all of the elements of each crime scene as well as the post-offense behavior—in essence suspectology—which included the taunting letters sent to the newspapers, Brussel theorized that the bomber likely had a background in mechanical work (given the complexity of the bombs), that he likely lived alone and was unmarried (given that his activities in bomb making would be noticed), and, that he was likely a middle-aged man with a specific grudge against Consolidated Edison, New York City’s main power company at the time (given that the company was named in at least one letter). Brussel also theorized that the bomber had no specific political objectives and that the attacks were likely carried out as a result of some misplaced anger or desire for revenge.

  While these conclusions seemed overly specific to many at the time, and while Brussel also made a number of other recommendations that proved to be inaccurate, many of the key details proved to be accurate once a former Consolidated Edison employee named George Metesky was arrested in 1957 and admitted to being the elusive Mad Bomber. Police were tipped off to Metesky by a human resource administrator at Consolidated Edison who knew him to be a problematic former employee, injured on the job, and displeased with the compensation he’d received. He had been sending the company threatening letters for several years, including some that were found to contain a number of the same terms used in the anonymous letters sent to the media. Just as Brussel theorized, Metesky had been a mechanical worker with the company, was middle-aged and unmarried, and was angry at the world about his predicament. He was also legally insane, and was subsequently sent to a mental-health facility rather than doing his time at Sing Sing.

  Just over fifteen years later and over two thousand miles away during the early morning hours of June 25, 1973, seven-year-old Suzie Jaeger—innocent, helpless, fast asleep—was snatched from her sealed tent while camping with her family at a campsite in Montana. The girl had been overpowered and subdued in her sleep before she could scream and alert her parents and siblings asleep in their own tents just a few feet away on the small site near other populated sites. No ransom note had been left or was ever received. After the Jaeger case had been subsequently referred to the FBI by local law enforcement, agent Howard Teten—inquisitive, innovative, a UC Berkeley psych grad—became involved and quickly knew the evidence at the campsite spelled abduction by an experienced peeper-prowler. He theorized that the offender would almost certainly be acting out on a number of paraphilias, including Peeping Tom and sleep-watching activities, precursors to more serious crimes and behaviors ignored five years earlier in the days leading to the murder of Christine Rothschild.

  Using simple deductive reasoning, the hallmark of Sherlock Holmes with whom the term is generally associated, Teten was able to draw specific conclusions based on certain generalities. Relying on a combination of experience and common sense, what Holmes would call “elementary” observation, Teten knew that someone unaccustomed to stealthily prowling on private property at night would not likely be so brazen as to enter a tent with several witnesses within immediate earshot. Theorizing that the offender had likely killed Suzie Jaeger and would kill again—that the motive was sexual and that the offender would be sure to never allow the child to identify him or testify—he additionally postulated that the perpetrator would also likely have kept clothing items as souvenirs to visually re-create the crime as part of an elaborate fantasy related to his paraphilias. Because peepers and prowlers are highly visual offenders, he concluded that this visual regime was necessary to prolong the fantasy well beyond the completion of the act of murder. Teten also theorized that the severity of the offender’s paraphilic impulses were such that they had likely previously landed him in trouble with the law and that he was already in the system—on file or in police records somewhere.

  The very next year, in September 1974, a twenty-three-year-old drifter named David Meirhofer was arrested in the nearby town of Manhattan, Montana, where he had, it was later determined, hidden souvenirs from his various crimes in the walls of his apartment as Teten had suspected. Although he only had a minor criminal record, in an interview with the police, in addition to confessing to the abduction and murder of Suzie Jaeger, he admitted that he had also killed three other people in Montana between 1967 and 1974; he’d also kidnapped one of those victims while she was sleeping. After his arrest and subsequent confession, Meirhofer later hanged himself in his jail cell. Glad tidings. Good riddance.

  Orange Socks

  By mid-1983, with the profiling methods professionalized and standardized by Howard Teten—a system now generally referred to as the “Teten technique”—at the core of its fledgling offender profiling system, the FBI was mobilizing agents all over the country to combat the new national scourge of the serial sexual murderer. Yet, despite apparently having resurrected the idea of the existence of a single Capital City Killer—a Ripper by any other name—responsible for some or most of the Mad City campus-related murders, no one in Madison or elsewhere in Dane County saw fit to ask for the bureau’s help. This, despite a previous working relationship with the feds and their many agents who were on the ground in the aftermath of the Sterling Hall bombing in the fall of ’70. Then, in the summer of ’83, it seemed that a break finally came. Wisconsin police eyes soon turned to an Okie drifter who’d been collared in June of that year in Texas for felony possession of an unregistered firearm. The Texas Ranger who made the bust, a cop named Phil Ryan, later went on to television fame after cruising on the notoriety of that same arrest, becoming the technical consultant for the camp ’90s CBS action-drama Walker, Texas Ranger, starring Chuck Norris. The itinerant man he busted, however, went on to even bigger things himself, demonstrating his even more fervent flair for the love of drama.

  Henry Lee Lucas, the man stopped by Ranger Ryan that day, was a scraggly and soulless drifter who’d done horrific things he couldn’t wait to boast about. Lucas’s past was a story of veritable mistreatment and depravity, both as victim and victimizer. A shiv job from his own broth
er at the age of ten took his left eye and left him with a shoddy glass replacement. His prostitute mother forced him to wear women’s clothes and watch her fornicate with violent johns in their squalid Blacksburg, Virginia, home, wanton abuse that later turned him into a sadistic paraphiliac beyond rehabilitation. His mother was thought to be his first victim; that is until, as has been recently revealed, he killed a girl when he was fourteen in order to conceal having committed sex crimes against the victim, also age fourteen. After being in and out of juvie facilities and state care, a twenty-three-year-old Henry Lee beat his mother Viola Lucas to within an inch of her life in January ’60, leaving her in a pool of blood where she eventually died of a heart attack triggered by the trauma of the assault. The cops later picked him up in Ohio while on the run but, by 1970, he was already kicked loose from the big house while serving a twenty-year bit, ostensibly due to prison overcrowding and the assessment that he was at low risk for committing additional offenses. He was back in custody within the year after trying to lure three schoolgirls into his car. He was out again by 1975, and within the year had settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where he met Ottis Toole, a panhandler, pyrophiliac, and inveterate fire starter in a local soup kitchen. Then things took a turn for the worse.

  A native Floridian, Toole had an IQ somewhere near room temperature and, like Lucas, had been tormented by his alcoholic mother to no end. He too, by strange coincidence, had been forced to wear girls’ dresses and acquiesce to horrific emotional and physical abuse, including incestuous sexual assaults by relatives, both male and female. His chance meeting with Lucas was, like the beginning of all team killer partnerships, something that would confound cops and criminologists alike for decades. It still does. It would leave them to wonder what the odds were that two forces of such depravity—like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in England and their heinous “Murders on the Moor,” Leonard Lake and Charles Ng in California and their want-ad murders of young couples along with video-recorded torture rituals, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka and their “Schoolgirl Murders” in Canada—ever finding each other could have been, and how history might have been different if they hadn’t. How many lives would have been saved if they’d never crossed paths?