Thin Air
Beginning sometime in the 1870s, in a cold and foreboding czarist Russia, there emerged a legend of a phantom traveler who, after obtaining passage from carriages traveling along country roads, would mysteriously vanish. Sometimes the driver would turn to find the passenger already gone, other times the mystery traveler was said to dissolve into thin air before the very eyes of the driver—and even other passengers. Those dabbling in the fledgling field of psychology at the time dismissed the sightings as hallucinations and the product of exhaustion, starvation, or simply the power of hypnotic suggestion following long and arduous days on the road—in effect a human mirage. During the 1940s, however, Midwest and Southern United States college students began experiencing a similar phenomenon, recycled for the modern age and blacktop highways. The difference this time was that the silent passenger was not some wandering soul in the frozen hinterland of Russia, but rather, a modern-day hitchhiker. Although the nomadic culture of improvised vehicular travel and a thumbed ride might have dated back to the affordability of Henry Ford’s Model T, the hitchhiker as a fixture on the lonely road only became even more so after World War II with the newly conceived interstate system—not to mention the American love affair with the automobile.
Whether as hitchhiker or driver, this mode of travel came into its own, emerging as a rite of passage for those seeking adventure, camaraderie, and a free lift from A to B. It was a travel system built upon the kindness of strangers, yet, like all things spawned from good intentions, before long hitchhiking became a fool’s errand. As the public service campaigns of the day would have one believe, it was a deadly game of chance in which your luck would eventually run dry—neither a hitchhiker nor sympathetic driver be. Hollywood soon followed suit, and, before long, a volley of films playing on the fears that drivers had of hitchers and hitchers had of drivers fanned the flames of paranoia, depicting the open road as a dangerous and wanton place. Between the Freeway Killer case—actually three separate serial killers sharing the same mantra who simultaneously targeted teenaged hitchhikers in California—and a host of other stories about murderous drifters ripped from the headlines, there was certainly enough lurid and real-life material for film producers to work with. Yet, amid the public blowback against this increasingly perilous pastime, the urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker—one who posed no harm but whose presence was uncanny, perhaps a harbinger of death—pervaded both campfire stories and textbooks on American folklore.
A public service announcment, signed by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, appeared on highway billboards from the late 1950s through the 1970s along various interstate routes across the United States. The message: never pick up hitchhikers, the latest murderous threat to American public safety. It was a safety campaign rooted in fearmongering that did little more than to create a new cultural fascination with the danger and intrigue of the open road, spawning a new era of urban legends about hitchhiking.
First thought to have been committed to writing and collected in South Carolina during the 1940s, by the 1960s and 1970s the story of the “vanishing hitchhiker,” a taciturn hitcher who disappears into thin air, only to be later seen silhouetted by headlights again and again during that same driver’s journey, had become one of America’s best known urban legends. A 1960 installment of Rod Serling’s iconic paranormal anthology series The Twilight Zone titled “The Hitch-Hiker” only added to the public’s fascination with the legend. The episode featured a diminutive hitcher whose continuous reappearances haunt the long journey of a woman driving alone from New York to Los Angeles. It’s later revealed that the hitcher is death incarnate and that the woman died in a car wreck at the outset of her journey, that she had been dead for the entire drive and just didn’t know it. Because the hitchhiker needs to be picked up in order to ferry the woman’s soul to the next life, her drive has been nothing more than a drifting between two worlds—a turnpike through purgatory. Then, in 1981, University of Utah folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand published an academic treatise titled The Vanishing Hitchhiker, which not only summarized variations of the same legend and its evolving cultural significance, but also aggregated all of the best-known hitchhiker folktales in American history and what they symbolized. All the while, the original story that started it all still has its most significant telling back in the Mad City. It’s one that remains more horrific than any commercially scripted spin-off—and it’s no legend.
The start of the ’78 school year at UW was one marked by a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of its own urban legend. It was at once the legend of the Capital City Killer, the Mad City Slayer, the Campus Ripper, and the handful of other names that were used to try to link a single mystery perp to all Madison murders going back to Christine Rothschild. But by that same fall season, the first name circulating through Madison for who the Capital City Killer might be was a local creep named William Zamastil. At first blush, he certainly seemed to fit the part.
Like Charles Manson and a number of other notable serial killers, Zamastil started out as a small time car thief but soon graduated to murder to satiate his need for thrills. He was arrested by Dane County Sherriff’s detectives in August of ’78 for the execution-style slaying of twenty-four-year-old Mary Johnson in nearby Sauk City. He’d shot the victim—due to be married in two days—at point-blank range in the head after kidnapping her from a Madison department store parking lot. It turned out to only be his latest murder. Earlier that same year, while living in California, he’d bludgeoned a teenaged brother and sister to death in the Mojave Desert after he found them hitchhiking near San Bernardino. Five years before that, he kidnapped an Arizona woman—the daughter of an FBI agent who was en route to the Tucson airport—and then raped and murdered her before burying her in a shallow grave and stealing her car. None of these earlier crimes, however, would be linked to Zamastil for another twenty years.
In the meantime, the fact that Zamastil hailed from the Mad City and had returned there at age twenty-six to carry on killing had people wondering if he might have been back and forth over the years. It all had Madisonians speculating what else he might have done. It didn’t matter that his MO didn’t match any of the Madison sex slayings or that he would have been barely eighteen at the time of the Christine Rothschild murder—a crime whose specificity and paraphilic complexity all but defied its being anything other than the work of an older more experienced sex killer. For the time being at least, Zamastil would be a plausible placeholder—a tentative stand-in—for the Capital City Killer.
The police being circumspect to a fault about all the unsolved cases certainly didn’t help. The blackout on providing timely updates only exacerbated matters; it kept the rumor mill running at full capacity. The various police forces involved failed to recognize that even the well-intentioned withholding of information could not excuse the need to protect and that they had the obligation to provide information that might prevent future victims. Two decades later, the Toronto Metropolitan Police Department, one of the largest police agencies in North America, was successfully sued by a rape victim used as bait for a serial attacker entering through apartment balconies. The police in that case had held off on issuing press releases or warning the public about the attacker’s MO and customary manner of entry until the theory about a lone suspect was firmed up, and probable future target locations were identified and staked out. Similarly, in Madison of 1979, not only was there no active official public dialogue about the successive murders of young women, but the rumor mill was already running full tilt. In short order, two concurrent urban legends, both fictitious and yet also dangerously real, would collide head-on as the lore of the Capital City Killer and the vanishing hitchhiker became entangled. With that, a new wave of violence would wash over the Mad City and its beloved campus.
But that same fall of ’78, at least on the surface, it seemed like business as usual at UW. There was a predictable new influx of moneyed east coasters, Greek-life “legacy” types, and the hodgepodge
of other students drawn to the university’s sanded-down version of activism from the decade prior. But beneath that veneer, there loomed the unanswered questions about the accumulating deaths—students, employees, and visitors at either UW or places nearby—one left posed gruesomely at the scene, others transported out to remote locations to be torched or otherwise defiled postmortem. While today a student gets mugged near a campus and warnings go out by e-mail or Twitter feed lickety-split, as 1978 became 1979, the rule of the day still was to maintain a posture of silence, in essence to bury the whole sordid affair—Plausible Deniability 101.
True to recent history, by the time twenty-year-old Julie Speerschneider landed her first waitressing gig at Tony’s Chop Suey Restaurant on S. Park Street—just under a mile due south from UW—she, like most other young women in the area, was oblivious to how perilous the outwardly bohemian area surrounding campus had become. Known to hitchhike in the area surrounding UW either to reach the restaurant from her second job at Red Caboose Day Care on Williamson Street—a little over a mile due east from the campus—or to return to her home on S. Dickinson Street just a little farther northeast, Julie relied on thumbing a ride anywhere she went that winter to abate her exposure to the cold. With one of the longest freezing spells in recent memory, that same Wisconsin winter had seen a number of people hitchhiking and, with that, trollers knowing where and how to find them. Around this same time, the Madison PD, the UW Five-O, and the Dane County Sheriff—a pared-down version, if you will, of the defunct Intra County Investigative Squad—were all spitballing and checking records from the past ten years for unchecked leads, anything—or anyone—they could hang the serial killer theory on. Meanwhile, another madman was already walking the streets of the Mad City, hiding—and driving—in plain sight.
Defiance
That same winter, February ’79, Linda made her way to Virginia and later to Michigan chasing Jorgensen’s ghost—the places where the barren threads of evidence suggested he might have been both before and after UW. Linda had fastened on to the Judith Williamson case in Berkeley—the presumed basis for The Love Pirate—the Lass disappearance in South Lake Tahoe, Jorgensen’s time supposedly dispensing “Māori justice” in South Africa, and his fake army backstory to possibly alibi himself for his real movements during the dying days of World War II. It mandated that she expand her timeline and list of locations where he’d been—where he’d likely be again. Her trek took her first to the city of Lynchburg where, on April 16, 1973, at the end of her freshman year and immediately before final exams, another freshman, Cynthia Hellman of Houston, had been found murdered on the campus of Randolph-Macon Women’s College. She’d been found posed beside the Martin Science Building, the small liberal arts college’s equivalent of Sterling Hall. Like Christine, she had also been killed in the morning while on a regular walking route. Her face had been left against a hot steam pipe—a torturous, elaborate, symbolic, and paraphilic gesture. No obvious sexual assault, both shoes taken by her killer.
It later turned out that one supplemental key detail never made its way to the microfiche records in Dallas-Fort Worth that might have been useful to know before Linda set out on her journey; in the end, the trip was a dead end. It turned out that local cops had actually made an arrest three weeks after the murder of Cynthia Hellman, picking up a local schizophrenic living near the Randolph-Macon campus who had gone on to attack another student. After receiving two hundred words as a blotter item squeezed between the obits and the open houses in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star on April 28, 1973, the story disappeared. Linda couldn’t find a cop, reporter, or anyone on campus by the winter of ’79 who remembered anything more—who knew anything of it for that matter. Like Christine, young Cynthia Hellman was from out of state, a transplant whose death didn’t set off any alarm bells or make any lasting impression. Another case of yesterday’s news. Undaunted by yet another dead end, Linda took a belt of coffee at a diner in Fairfax, flipped open a Rand McNally road atlas, and focused on her next stop—the dump sites of the Ypsilanti Ripper.
In the summer of ’69, a Canadian-born sexual sadist named John Norman Collins had been arrested for a series of murders in and around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor—most of the victims were young coeds at Eastern Michigan and University of Michigan. Although he had only been charged with one of the seven murders, the other six being “cleared” to him, Linda knew “cleared” was police code for the cops thinking that Collins was probably responsible for them despite never being indicted—a time-honored trick that allowed police departments to artificially ratchet up their statistical “solved” rate. The “probably responsible” caveat allowed cops to link the crimes on paper and then close the books—to “clear” rather than indict Collins and thus close the cases in the more traditional sense. It’s a seldom-discussed consolation prize that remains the lifeblood of many homicide divisions across the country, allowing open/unsolved files to be cleared off and a public left tenuously satisfied without the need for trials. But Linda didn’t buy it.
A couple of years after Linda’s dark odyssey took her to Michigan as the latest stopover, the Atlanta Child Murders, perhaps the most egregious example of questionable clearances—with all twenty-eight-plus slayings being linked en masse to a local pirate-radio disc jockey named Wayne Williams—once again raised issue with this same practice. Williams was a malignant narcissist and sexual deviant who unquestionably killed at least two young boys; however, as recently as 2015, various individuals and groups ranging from famed FBI profiler John Douglas to the US Department of Justice have been jackhammering the concrete around what was once taken for granted as rock-solid fact—that Williams had not only killed two boys but all of the thirty cases cleared to him.
But the Atlanta Child Murders weren’t yet a news item in the winter of ’79 when Linda banked on the Ypsilanti Ripper task force being eager to pin all of the open/unsolved Michigan sex killings on Collins, much the same way that Wisconsin lawmen would soon be looking for someone’s neck to hang the Capital City Killer sign on. With Jorgensen in the wind, they’d need to find a local patsy they could publicly and bombastically attach to every murder after Christine’s. In its zeal, the Michigan task force had even linked an eighth coed victim in California to their man Collins. But Linda would soon discover that the MO and victimology also matched both the Rothschild and Williamson slayings to a tee.
The one murder for which Collins had been charged and convicted of in August of ’70, the final one of the Michigan set, had been the July 23, 1969, murder of eighteen-year-old Eastern Michigan University student Karen Sue Beineman. Last seen on her way to a nearby wig shop, her ravaged body was found three days later dumped in a gulley near the Huron River. First sexually assaulted and stripped naked, a piece of clothing inserted inside her vagina, she had been tortured after being forced to drink an unknown corrosive chemical and then both strangled and bludgeoned to death. Curiously, the wanton and reckless brutality in this final murder seemed to differ from the specificity of the previous six slayings that had been cleared to Collins. In the other six, specifically the two slayings from the summers of ’67 and ’68—the victims spaced nearly a year apart—both young women had been stabbed in excess of twenty times in the torso while the murderer used improvised ligatures fastened from either their own clothing or electrical cords. The ligatures were then fastened around their throats with additional items inserted into the mouth—just like Christine. Linda was curious to know how and why these linkages to Collins had been made by police; both of the notable earlier cases also had been moved from storage locations, presumably at or near the primary crime scenes, to their final dump sites outdoors. After their deaths, these two victims, in classic necrophilic fashion, had also been kept partially preserved through refrigeration, either as lifeless sexual surrogates or for Polaroid snapping purposes—or both. Linda already knew from his erstwhile roommate that Jorgensen had come to Madison from New Jersey and Michigan in his convertible Benz, the reason f
or the convoluted routing never explained. It left a question mark seared into Linda’s mind. Irony abounded.
For Linda, the road from Fairfax to Ypsilanti that February to follow this lead was death on a stick—a snow-and-ice-laden gauntlet with not a plow to be seen. Factor in that Linda was also way out of practice with her winter driving since becoming an unlikely Texan. A jackknifed rig—an Exxon tanker—sideways across I-76W, plus a second truck deadheading bobtail, and a state trooper sedan, all in the ditch. The slalom of winter road spinouts soon forced her on to US Route 24, through Defiance, Ohio—at dusk. Desolate and perilous, what they call iceblink superimposed against an empty horizon quickly fading to black, the snow blowing lengthwise through the barn lights in the distance looking like stardust. Eyes heavy, a weary Malibu with even wearier, threadbare wipers—traction control and ABS both still science fiction—Linda’s car hit a patch of something unforgiving beneath some virgin snow and spun counterclockwise into a four-foot drift that was partially burying a Burger King signpost. Upon bouncing the rear fender off the signpost and getting the car back on to the road—the snout now facing westbound in the eastbound lane—it was then that Linda had something of an epiphany. It was the most significant moment of pause and introspection since that day at Picnic Point when she first made her promise to Christine, long since dead and buried in a grave she’d still been thwarted from visiting back in Chicago by virtue of her hunt—her promise. It occurred to her that her journey to find the elusive Dr. Jorgensen might be just a big one-way spindrift in its own right. It occurred to her that one of these times she might just end up running out of road and out of time—that she too might end up like Christine. Between the man she was chasing and the law of averages, she was playing with fire—and she knew it. But, there she sat, in an idle car in the black of night, like a painted ship on a painted ocean as the wind howled at over sixty miles per hour and the snow swirled. At the same time, back in Madison, an 8 mm film hissed and sprocket holes framed shaky newsreels as a ragtag assemblage of cops in the dark—both literally and figuratively—watched archived Mad City murder flicks. Those films included CinemaScope surveillance footage of the Debbie Bennett and Julie Ann Hall funerals as detectives scanned for exemplary oddballs lurking around, or anyone worthy of a roust as the cases went further into permafrost. They were grasping at straws, looking for a fall guy. Meanwhile, Linda was looking for trouble. She was prepared to take the risks the cops weren’t.
[2017] Mad City Page 18