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

by Michael Arntfield

  Within a few months of the hidden pregnancy theory, the Portage County Sheriff received an anonymous letter, and suddenly the plot thickened. Just shy of the mystery’s thirty-year anniversary, it was 1984 all over again. Like the cause of death and condition of Janet’s body, with this latest development the police followed the lead of their compeers in the Mad City’s Major Case Unit and simply said nothing. All that was publicly stated by 2014 was that whoever wrote the letter should come forward—that cops were interested in talking to the author. No kidding. Whatever details were contained in the letter, it piqued investigators’ interest; it somehow suggested knowledge of some, if not all, of the holdback information on the case.

  But the problem with letters is that, hoaxes and sadistic quacks simply looking to sabotage cases aside, even well-intentioned letters can turn out to be red herrings when the police are desperate for morsels. It’s happened before and will no doubt happen again. Cops get an unsigned letter, some investigators dismiss it outright, and others think they’re sitting on a gold mine. Then, police brass kick it around for a few months and make a perfunctory plea for the author to offer himself or herself up. Later, a redacted version of the letter, or simply piecemeal excerpts, gets released to the media in a bid to solicit new tips or to simply ferret out the author through a system of dry snitching. Before long, the whole thing snowballs and becomes its own sideshow, with one red herring after another—anonymous letters inspiring more letters—and the cops chasing down bogus leads while the real truth drifts farther and farther away. The cases of Beverly Potts in Cleveland, the Grimes sisters in Chicago, Thomas Wales in Seattle, and Linda Shaw in Canada: these are but a few of the hundreds of murder investigations that, once cold, compel someone wracked by guilt to put pen to paper. Sometimes the information is sent straight to authorities, sometimes—like in the Potts disappearance in Cleveland—it’s a dead letter drop, the incriminating note in that case left beneath the wall-to-wall carpet in a home for the future owners to discover decades later. Either way, anonymous letters usually hurt more than they help. Nevertheless, in Janet’s case, it seems the local cops are still betting the farm on the cryptic note they received in 2013. Since then it’s been radio silence. The Janet Raasch murder remains the only cold case in Portage County history.

  Cooking the Books

  The final days of Janet Raasch’s life—in the offices of the DeBot Center, her suite at Watson Hall, and the classrooms of UW–Stevens Point—coincided with the final days of a remarkable shakedown in the state of Texas. It was a legendary roust courtesy of some Madison and area Major Case Unit cops looking to button up six nagging cold cases. A year earlier, Ranger Phil Ryan had busted Henry Lee Lucas and ran him in on a simple gun beef. Before long, the whole thing morphed into a veritable carnival of confessions—dubious admissions of Satanic ritual and interstate murder that brought cops from far and wide to go under the big top. Lucas was a strike-anywhere match who could be used to light up any dormant case, give it a named suspect, and allow the books to be cleared in record time. With the colossal tide of confessions already piling up and the certainty of guilty verdicts, a death sentence, and an expedited execution, there was no worry about ever having to pin the more questionable—if not logistically impossible—cases on Lucas heard before a court of law. There was not much point in even indicting him with the murders to which he confessed given the diminishing returns on prosecuting an already-condemned man. He was a dead man walking—or so they hoped.

  The whole matter soon became a runaway train where Lucas proved himself to be perhaps the most compliant, pliable, and convincing of suspects ever interviewed, for weeks and months accommodating a never-ending receiving line of homicide detectives from across America. Lucas not only admitted to any and all unsolved murders that the cops laid out in front of him, but also to files they hadn’t even brought with them. He was just vague enough on the locations, just close enough with respect to the MO, signature, and victim description, that his confessions couldn’t be disproven. He even confessed to murders for which the bodies of the victims hadn’t been found, in some sense future proofing investigations for years to come and allowing cops to clear murders to him perhaps even from beyond the grave. He provided general directions to where bodies were buried or dumped, or vague landmarks—tall trees, farmhouses, old wells—that could be found just about anywhere a body might turn up across the Lower 48. It was all a performance, but no one with the Lucas Task Force saw fit to stop him.

  Most of his murder confessions required no coaxing—Lucas would just start talking and detectives would start writing. Many, like Orange Socks, were also Jane Doe cases, suspected prostitutes or young girls disowned from their families and hitchhiking aimlessly across America—perfect victims for someone like Lucas and his purported Hand of Death mandate. It all seemed to make good sense. Lucas and the police investigators who came to see him were good for each other.

  Two of the victims Lucas confessed to killing, confessions that were taken at face value until only recently, included one Caledonia Jane Doe, found at the side of US Route 20 in New York in November of ’79. The girl had been shot in the back of the head and had tan lines and pollen on her clothes that indicated she’d recently come from a sunny vacation spot. None of this matched with Lucas’s MO or preferred victimology, but it was taken as fact for over thirty-five years. In 2015, Caledonia Jane Doe was identified as sixteen-year-old Tammy Alexander from Florida. Never reported missing by her family when she dropped off the radar in 1979, a high school friend unable to find her on social media in 2010 initiated her own freelance investigation and eventually pieced it all together with the help of modern-day police investigators. The ensuing timeline all but ruled out Lucas as possibly being the killer, notwithstanding the fact that Tammy was last seen with a clean-cut, bespectacled man driving a brown station wagon—details known in 1979 but later glossed over when Lucas confessed.

  The other Jane Doe that was erroneously pinned on Lucas with his okay also wasn’t positively identified until 2015. Known as the Bossier Doe for nearly thirty-five years, Carol Cole’s body was found in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, in the winter of ’81, stabbed to death and left in a stand of trees since likely the previous summer. Given how the details of the case failed to line up with earlier confessions by Lucas to other confirmed crimes committed in other states between 1980 and 1981, investigators knew that Lucas wasn’t really in Louisiana—much less in San Antonio, Texas, where Cole had been reported missing in the summer of ’80—and thus couldn’t have been her killer. He confessed anyway, and the confession was recorded, at least for the short term, as credible. The murder was cleared to Lucas’s name even though the cops knew it stunk. In the meantime, the real killers of these girls walked the streets and claimed who knows how many others. Lucas’s methods and his ability to hold court while languishing in prison and have decorated cops hanging on his every word also proved contagious once the term “serial killer” took on a certain cachet value in coming years. Before long, Lucas would inspire a contagion of false confession to serial murder.

  Embellished criminal exploits, spooky backstories about cults and conspiracies, and falsely confessing to the murders of innocents in a bid for tabloid fame became a cottage industry for the desperate and deranged the world over throughout the 1980s. Later, in the early 1990s, a Swedish man named Sture Bergwall, using the more media-friendly pseudonym Thomas Quick, was imprisoned for armed robbery and soon started confessing to various unsolved murders. In a country where one of the cold cases still on the books is the 1986 assassination of its own prime minister, Bergwall was a Scandinavian Henry Lee Lucas who investigators were more than happy to sit down with and let talk. By the time they were done, he had confessed to over thirty murders. The problem came when they went to verify his accounts. In addition to many of the confessions being immediately refutable, some of the people he confessed to killing were actually still alive and well. After more than a decade in a psychiatric f
acility, Bergwall, as of 2008, recanted all of his confessions, and the reality now appears to be that he never murdered anyone.

  However, for many years, Bergwall’s rants were taken at face value by giddy and opportunistic investigators for long enough that the real killers in those genuine unsolved cases to which Bergwall falsely confessed all walked free. Bergwall and the police alike unwittingly gave them the breathing room they needed to get away with their crimes, many of the files not only being “cleared” to Bergwall but also later expunged from police records altogether. Like wrongful convictions, few people consider the aftermath of false confessions for the victims, and how miscarriages of justice—whether in the courtroom or in the interview room of a jailhouse—once revealed for what they are, summarily turn falsely solved cases into instant cold cases with no prospect of closure.

  But in 1984, when Lucas had confessed to being the killer of Caledonia Jane Doe and his admissions were becoming increasingly erratic, the Major Case Unit’s interjurisdictional task force would be reactivated for the sole purpose of hitching its wagon to the Lucas Task Force before it was too late. Unlike some of the murders to which Lucas was now confessing—confessions that had even the most enthusiastically flexible of investigators scratching their heads and in an ethical conundrum—the Mad City murders all seemed to plausibly square with Lucas’s MO. In fact, they seemed to be a better fit with Lucas in terms of the sexual sadism, organization, and transportation seen in each case than they were with either William Zamastil or shoplifter-turned-child killer Robert Lange, by then serving time for the Paula McCormick slaying in March of ’82. It was out with the old and in with the new—Lucas could be the new poster boy for the Capital City Killer.

  The victims in Lucas’s admissions were also all young women, and there was a comparatively organized—psychopathic versus psychotic—element present in every slaying; the victims were transported over long distances before being dumped naked or almost naked in wooded areas off rural routes and county roads that Lucas had admitted he would frequent during the course of his murderous journeys. With that in mind, the cops figured the gory, fiery disposal of Debbie Bennett’s remains could also arguably be chalked up to something pseudo-Satanic or ritualistic in keeping with Lucas’s purported Hand of Death cult, and Madison’s central location within the United States—a jump-off point to so many routes to the southern states preferred by Lucas—might be why he kept intermittently returning there. Maybe, they pondered, Madison’s coed campus offered Lucas a steady supply of his preferred type of victim. The cops also knew that every Madison murder, other than perhaps Christine Rothschild, had relied on the use of a vehicle—an element central to Lucas’s mobile offending.

  The truth is that Christine Rothschild’s murder never made the short list of cases to be artificially cleared to Lucas. The fact that in 1968 Lucas was serving time for beating his mother to death ruled him out for the Rothschild murder, but everything from 1976 onward—once he was sprung from prison on the attempted abduction charges—was fair game. But to bring the open/unsolved cases bookended by Bennett and Mraz to the oracle, a total of six stranger murders that aligned with Lucas’s MO, a certain leap of faith first needed to be made. Someone had to officially acknowledge for the first time that all of these sex slayings in Madison were connected. Someone had to go on record to say that the Capital City Killer—a mythical local Ripper long since denied by authorities—was actually real. For Lucas to confess to the murders was to mean that one man was in fact responsible for all of them. For his confession to be taken as fact—even if it was little more than a spoon-fed lie—the murders would first need to be deemed connected in order for the ploy to work. As the books were set to be cooked and six murders “solved” with a single signature by Lucas, the local legend had to first and foremost be admitted as real. With his confessions, Lucas would become the Capital City Killer of past lore. It would amount to an official about-face that the police knew was guaranteed to have cascading legal, economic, and political ramifications for generations to come.

  Time and Punishment

  In the end, it simply wasn’t meant to be. It was too rich for their blood. The suggested last-ditch effort to cobble six murders together and acquiesce to the local legend of the Madison serial killer was flawed from the get-go—too little too late. Four of the cases—the binary Julie Murders, as well as the LeMahieu and Stewart homicides—should have been linked from day one, but the attempt to have them baked in with the Bennett and Mraz killings was doomed to fail, even by Lucas Task Force standards. By the summer of ’84, critics were already pulling on the barren threads of Lucas’s so-called “confessions,” and a new system of due diligence and fact-checking by the task force was in effect. The result was that his confessions were no longer being taken at face value, no longer could he be lobbed basic hints about open/unsolved murders and then led by the hand to fill in the blanks as detectives cued him on right and wrong answers. Cops in Madison and the surrounding area, including the four discrete agencies that comprised the Major Case Unit, and the even more flaccid Intra County Investigative Squad before it, had squandered years saving these cases for a rainy day. Ed Edwards had always been a long shot and a tough sell, but with Lucas, they figured their ship had come in. They guessed wrong; they had missed their window; they were back to square one—again.

  The other problem was that, although tarring Lucas as the Capital City Killer might have played well back in Wisconsin had he actually first been nabbed in the Dairy State rather than Texas, there were simply too many eyes on the matter by that point. As a result of efforts by the FBI, the national press, and victim and prisoners’ groups alike, Lucas’s specific whereabouts over the years, both independently and in concert with Toole, had been largely confirmed by the time the Major Case Unit was thinking of going to the table. His confessions were becoming more and more suspect. Not only had the window closed on any opportunity the Major Case Unit might have had, by 1985 many of Lucas’s self-proclaimed crimes were already back open as reactivated investigations, his list of three-thousand-plus killings now winnowed to about forty at most. There was simply no way in this climate of doubt that a few more murders were going to be credibly added to the tally. Mad City and Dane County authorities went back to the drawing board and the cases went back into the boxes—returned to languish in abeyance.

  But in the years following the murder of Janet Raasch, a sense of eerie quiet was slowly restored to the UW campus system and the Mad City. By the late 1980s, people, as they so often do, seemed to have moved on beyond what had happened and a tenuous equilibrium had been restored. Janet would be the last of the victims fitting a certain serial pattern for many years, indeed for over a generation. As the tide washed over Dane County, Portage County, and the whole of Wisconsin, the vector of the Capital City Killer story began to change course. As the 1990s brought with it primitive, first-generation Internet iterations of chat rooms and message boards, soon topics and threads relating to all things crime and punishment—cold cases, missing persons, and serial killers—became dominant mainstays of fledgling Web 1.0. From there, true crime became the new long-form narrative of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

  In time, as the story of the Mad City and UW murders made its way around the world, the tone actually became more rather than less moderate, a distinction that few unsolved crimes of the contemporary era can claim. In time, the Capital City Killer—singular proper noun—became more popularly known as the Capital City killings—pluralized common noun. In other words, an expanded dialogue and the revelation of the Lucas effect as the main determinant for the myth becoming reality led many to question the plausibility of a single offender being responsible for all of the murders—murders that began either with Christine Rothschild or Debbie Bennett. In time, the dialogue shifted from “Killer” to “killings,” and new questions began to emerge. One of those questions was: If the murders weren’t the work of a single offender, how could a total of up to
seven different sexual murderers—each claiming one victim at random—be walking the streets of Madison and its picturesque UW campuses at roughly the same time? Or at least in immediate succession? Worse yet, how could so many offenders be operating either concurrently or consecutively and all manage to elude capture? They were questions that deserved answers. They still do.

  The semantics of what happened once upon a time in Madison also began to change as the 1980s became the 1990s, and Linda knew that she too was running out of time—that she was now, more than ever, on a clock. Jorgensen’s put-upon mother and author of the now published The Love Pirate, Heidi, died the same month that Janet Raasch disappeared. Her scant obituary detailed an October 23, 1984, death from natural causes. Later, as his Sierra Singles consort Ezra Jameson peddled copies of Jorgensen’s late mother’s manuscript, which served as a carefully varnished recitation of some of the past, Jorgensen filled the void left by his mother’s death by clearing out her room and putting it up for rent. As Linda waited for Jorgensen’s next move via their proverbial long-distance chess match, she made one final road trip to LA to see what might become of the monster now that his mother—the penultimate of the surviving Jorgensen clan—was in the ground. Linda guessed it would be one of two extremes. One theory was that Jorgensen’s manic behavior might stabilize as he tried to blend into upper-middle-class California society and present himself as a self-made man, using his inherited estate as a cover story for the material and professional success that he never had. She well knew that façades and taking credit for the successes and possessions of others was the raison d’être of the psychopath. Alternatively, she feared, much like the similarly twisted love-hate obsession Norman Bates had with his mother in the film Psycho, Jorgensen might completely unravel—that he might decompensate to the point where he’d need to kill again. It was, not surprisingly, the latter.