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

by Michael Arntfield

  Some of the cases assigned for the class were obscure and others were better known, but all were serial cases—either known or suspected. The objective behind the serial classification was to teach students distinctions to be made between an MO and a signature, and the way to vet the accuracy of purported linkages based on the context, vintage, and quality of the criminal investigative analysis at the time the murders occurred. Because of the evolving body of knowledge some decades later, the training amounted to more than anyone in the Major Case Unit or any of the departments surrounding Madison ever would have received or had at their disposal. The same would hold true for most police forces across America investigating cases where bodies fitting Jorgensen’s MO might have turned up over the previous forty years. The cases analyzed included grisly whodunits such as the Alphabet Murders, a series of child slayings in 1970s Rochester, New York, where victims were apparently selected because their first and last names began with the same consonant. As a case badly bungled from the outset, the investigation was now in deep freeze with families of victims still waiting for answers. Other older cases included the crimes of the so-called “Mad Butcher” of Kingsbury Run, otherwise known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer, who dismembered at least twelve and as many as twenty or more victims between 1935 and 1938 in the so-called Sleepy City. It had been a foundational case in geographic profiling and what’s known as criminal propinquity—the spatial affiliation of crime scenes, victims, and evidence recovery locations. The class delved into some of the quack theories as to the killer’s identity while at the same time winnowing canonical victims from probable copycat victims. There was one case, however, that really stumped students, a case they had never heard of prior to that same autumn—the Capital City Killer.

  The first time the course was offered, the students didn’t fare so well. Cases that should have been linked were not and other cases that shouldn’t have been linked were wrongly connected. It was, in fact, symptomatic of the same predictable linkage blindness that has felled many an official police task force, including the one formed back in the Mad City in the wake of the Bennett murder and burn job. Over the next two years, as word of the course spread and it filled up more and more quickly, students came more and more prepared—and from more varied backgrounds and disciplines. Although cold cases earmarked for class analysis were rotated in and out, the eight Madison murders beginning with Christine Rothschild endured as a constant that nagged at me and everyone who ever tackled them. Just as it seemed that each new cohort managed to get a bit closer when an old reporter or retired cop could be coaxed to talk to them as part of their research, any hope for leads would later dry up, people would die off, and e-mail and forwarding addresses would no longer be available. All the while, the LAPD was, if taken at its word, still looking into an entirely separate set of nurse and nursing student murders in LA County, which had seemed to spike with Jorgensen’s return to the area. At the same time, Linda, waiting for a report on any progress, fully hoped that this time the cops were doing their job and might even put Jorgensen under surveillance. With the advent of DNA evidence, she even imagined the possibility of DNA in a previous case being eventually matched with a Jorgensen public discard and then surreptitiously seized by police. Maybe it would all soon be wrapped up once and for all, or so she still hoped. By January of 2011, when the Western course began its third full-time offering, I had no idea who Linda was. The identity of Jorgensen and his past misdeeds, both known and suspected, were equally unknown. I knew nothing about The Love Pirate or the Sierra Singles, Valentine Sally, Donna Ann Lass, or Māori justice. Then, only a month in, a switch was thrown.

  Cold Call

  It was February 2011 when the past caught up to the present in double time. It was then that a course student, twenty-one-year-old Jillian Clair, met Linda on social media. Although a previous cohort in the class had managed to unearth Linda’s name from a microfiche cache of Associated Press and State Journal articles referencing Christine’s thwarted memorial service back in ’68, an Internet search at that time was a dead end. By that winter, however, Linda had decided to create a Facebook profile and she was located. It was good timing, maybe beginner’s luck for young Jillian. Either way, it was pay dirt.

  After e-mail exchanges were volleyed back and forth without my knowledge, a plan was subsequently devised. From toiling in the art room of the Sentinel after hours to the lonely road treks in the early days to the now instant access offered by the Internet, Linda saw a yawning chasm in time and space closing and an opportunity—maybe the final one to ever avail itself—to perhaps at last change the sluggish course of events with the help of Jillian and her group. With the end of the term drawing near, there was little time left to act. Linda, however, didn’t need any convincing. After giving Linda the brief backstory of what the class was doing and why, Jillian and her crew were armed with the same information that every police department in Madison and area had been provided over a decade prior concerning Jorgensen’s precise whereabouts and activities—what he had done and what he might still be capable of doing. It was the same information the LAPD had also been given and, by that time, had been noodling for a little over two years. A road trip was out of the question—and too dangerous—not to mention that if I knew about it, I would by policy have to put the kibosh on any direct contact. Among the students a consensus was reached to go dark—to go rogue.

  The next best thing to actually going to see Jorgensen would be to call him. Better yet, Jillian and the students knew that because they were not the police, certain rules of engagement didn’t apply to them. Namely, they could covertly record the conversation without notifying Jorgensen, what’s known as a one-party consent recording, which is a recording that, when obtained in secret by a civilian, is not only legal but also very much admissible in court. Reporters do it all the time, that’s why when speaking with the press, it’s actually best to assume one is always being recorded and that there is often no such thing as off the record, unless the reporter agrees. Some reporters will extend the courtesy of asking if they can record but what they’re really doing is telling you they are—providing advanced warning. In Jorgensen’s case, no such warning was needed.

  The reason for the call would be made clear to Jorgensen—Jillian would be doing the talking and using a pseudonym for her own protection, on Linda’s advice. There was no need to disguise the reason or nature of the call, the students had received a crash course in Jorgensen’s malignant narcissism and psychopathy from Linda in the early days of exchanging Facebook messages, and later more detailed e-mails and phone calls of their own. If Jillian could get Jorgensen talking, she was told, conflicting and coded versions of events would soon follow, and he would, in a fashion, inculpate himself. It would be the polygraph interview of forty-three years earlier that never happened. The difference was that reliance was no longer to be placed on a lie detector, an inadmissible and gimmicky prop easily defeated by psychopaths who generally lack deception stress responses. This time it would be the disembodied voice of a coed who would bring Jorgensen back almost forty-three years to a murder in the spring of ’68 at UW—the ghost of Christine Rothschild.

  On the afternoon of March 15, 2011—a Tuesday—the cold call was placed to the number for the landline at Jorgensen’s Marina del Rey condo. It was the same number listed for the dubious Søren B. Jorgensen Foundation. A male voice answered on the third ring. While Jillian was clearly startled and perhaps even a bit rattled, she kept it together and played it cool. It’s not every day that an undergrad ends up in direct conversation with a serial killer in a skip tracer role—the unofficial representative of nearly half a dozen police departments. The call lasted a total of fifty-four minutes. It was the first time since 1968 that anyone had asked Jorgensen about what happened the day of Christine’s murder. What follows are some of the more noteworthy exchanges:

  JC: I am doing a project on the Capital City Murders and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind answering a co
uple questions for me, to help me with my project?

  NJ: Capital—Capital City Murders? Is this someone shooting students from a tower, or something, or what? (laughs)

  JC: Umm . . . well, the Capital City Murders were a series of deaths which occurred at the University of Wisconsin at Madison between, I think it was like, 1965 to like, 1987? Something like that? (feigning ignorance)

  NJ: I was there briefly to get a chance to be chief survey resident but I left because the politics at that school were so rotten that I left and got my chief residency somewhere else.

  JC: Oh, okay I completely underst—(interrupted)

  NJ: I didn’t get to socialize much. I was very busy and I had some really, really big personal problems among the big professors . . . well, I’m not sure. I really didn’t get to know the students. The people I got to know were graduate students and that’s about it.

  JC: Uhh . . . well, Mr. Jorgenson, I understand that at one point you were suspect in one of these mur—(interrupted)

  NJ: That’s because of a jealous . . . well not jealous, I’ll say invective surgery chief who I exposed to be negligent in his duties. I had a patient which I was watching with the chief surgery—chest surgery chiefs—and I called him to let him know that the patient’s pressure—blood pressure was dropping and his systolic pressure was falling below numerically that’s the pulse rate. It’s the Oxford rule of shock, ma’am, I was an intern at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans. I notified this guy and he was miffed that I bothered him at a party.

  JC: Oh my!

  NJ: And I embarrassed that son of a bitch—smart aleck—and he took [it] upon himself, who didn’t know anything about student affairs, even less than I, and dropped my name as a suspect. And that was just particularly vindictive as I exposed him as an arrogant son of a bitch who—I exposed him for what he was where as I did my duty and informed him.

  JC: How come you’ve never cleared your name then?

  NJ: I didn’t have to clear my name! I did have an FBI clearance because I have certain connections when I was sergeant major of Air Force headquarters.

  JC: Right.

  NJ: That’s how I cleared my name because I was actually with a couple of students—student nurses who came over to see me and took me back to their abode. So, this is a matter that I embarrassed the idiots of the socialist and the socialist mind on campus who seemed to think that Christians, Christian missionaries, were like Elmer Gantry: hypocrites. Whereas the hypocrites are the socialist student bodies which have taken over some of our best colleges in the country. Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and Stanford and Berkeley.

  JC: Were you familiar with Christine Rothschild at all? Did you have any relationship with her?

  NJ: I never met her; I might have seen her; she might have made a spectacle of herself at the restaurant across the street from the university—we heard about her. I didn’t even know her name until some years later. One of my track associates introduced me to his cousin, Amelia, in San Fernando who was nineteen years of age. I was only fifteen, shot up tall for a fifteen-year-old—she was such a wonderful girl that a lot of the girls who wanted to date me too. I said “I’m sorry I’ve got somebody else.” So I never even dated any high school girls because I found older women, and I found them much more valuable. They were (laughs) so the thought that I would even date these teenagers—which I’ve never done—that’s ridiculous. They would bore the hell outta me.

  MS: Okay.

  NJ: And—MRCS, military royal college surgeons I had an associate in Zululand, Dr. Anthony Barker, really a wonderful man and I was going to come back to the mission field in Africa but I got distracted by the mission field in the ghetto in Brooklyn. I didn’t even know who this Christine Rothschild was, but I did know some of the Rothschild family in Berkeley in the University of California. We used to go flying with Bertram Rothschild of the Rothschild family branched in South Africa, in fact his father had proceeded the stock exchange in Johannesburg.

  JC: I see, and—(interrupted)

  NJ: And when I was in Africa, I was with him. I was a guest at his home in Pretoria. I don’t know if they knew the branches of the family, if this was even the same family if this, what do you call her? Christine Rothschild?

  JC: That’s right.

  NJ: They talk about several victims but I only heard about this one person who was a similar name to the, my friend from Berkeley, the real Rothschild family.

  JC: Now, Christine Rothschild was stabbed fourteen times. Do you have any idea what would compel a person to stab a person fourteen times?

  NJ: Well maybe she refused some boy or something and he took it out on her. Sounds like that’s an act of rage. You would really have had to have some personal relations to make one or two stabs but fourteen! That’s an act of rage, wouldn’t you say? (laughs)

  JC: I—(interrupted)

  NJ: You don’t have to have a PhD in psychology to figure that one.

  JC: She also had her gloves shoved down her throat.

  NJ: Her what?

  JC: Her gloves shoved down her throat. I was wondering if you had any opinions about that.

  NJ: Her gloves!?

  JC: That’s right.

  NJ: Hand gloves?

  JC: Yes.

  NJ: That’s bizarre. What is that supposed to mean, that she talks too much or tells people the wrong thing or exposed him? You could run wild with your imagination on that one. That’s pretty wild. (laughs)

  JC: Okay, so do you believe these Capital City Murders were connected?

  NJ: I don’t know this local stuff. I had no interest in Wisconsin. I was just interested in getting my chief surgery residency, and I got overwhelmed by the local hassles there, and I left.

  JC: Okay . . .

  NJ: And good riddance! All your . . . backbiting little hassles going on and your incompetent handling of a serial killer and God knows what else. You should have taken some officer from New Orleans or New York or San Francisco or something where they handle real crime instead of this whatever you call it police in Madison trying to handle it.

  JC: Okay. Well, I really appreciate your time today and I have one last question for you—did you murder Christine Rothschild?

  NJ: I never even knew her. I have no reason to kill her or any other teenager. I had no interest. One good thrust would do the job if you had the knowledge of anatomy to do it anyways, you know? It doesn’t take that much knowledge. Any good swordsman knows where to find a place.

  JC: She was stabbed with a medical tool and that just makes me curious if maybe you have some suspicions as to who it might have been?

  NJ: Medical tool? You mean like a Humvee knife or something?

  JC: Like a scalpel.

  NJ: An amputation knife? . . . my own attitude was to try and avoid using an amputation knife. This I learned from being stabbed during combat during the European, central European campaign. Battle of the Bulge, you know they call it.

  JC: Anyways, I—(interrupted)

  NJ: They can’t quite solve it, she may have contributed to . . . the failure to solve it. The justice on the case of this sixteen-year-old or whatever girl who was probably a pretty bright girl. But, she may have crossed somebody in the wrong way. And these things happen. (laughs)

  JC: Alright then. Well, have a great afternoon. And thank you again for your time.

  NJ: Alright.

  The recorded call is as revelatory as it is chilling. As research into the intricacies of the psychopathic mind tells us, it is a continuance commitment to a certain contrived narrative—and web of lies—even well into old age. Firstly, Jorgensen provides a hypothetical motive for Christine’s murder in spite of his insistence that he never met her. He later revises this when he confirms that he did in fact know of her, and that she had made a spectacle of herself (an oddly specific visual term for a Peeping Tom and somnophiliac) at a nearby restaurant. This confirms, as Christine had dreaded and shared with Linda—and the UW police—that she was being stalked in her daily
routine, the “restaurant” in this case undoubtedly being Rennebohm’s where she was a regular. Jorgensen, offering an oddly specific explanation for the symbolism of the gloves being inserted in her throat, also suggests that he knew that Christine had mentioned his name to others as her stalker. Secondly, aside from sticking to his absurd and disproven backstory of having been a sergeant at the Battle of the Bulge, he seems to genuinely believe it was Sandy Mackman who alerted authorities that Jorgensen might well be a suspect in Christine’s murder. While incorrect, the assumption seems to have been logically drawn from Jorgensen’s recollection of a confrontation in which Mackman was embarrassed, by inference, the gun-pointing incident when Jorgensen’s behavior unraveled in the aftermath of the murder. He also retreads the importance of his missionary work in Africa, referencing South Africa in particular and links to the Rothschild name most notably in both Berkeley and Africa, two locations where he admitted or is otherwise suspected of killing before. This is a not-uncommon psychological process in which offenders, particularly serial offenders, may transpose and commingle dates, faces, names, and places not as a matter of confusion but as part of a preferred internal narrative. These, however, aren’t the most telling take-away points of the interview.