On Good Friday, 2011, five years almost to the day after he’d mailed Linda a marked-up copy of The Case for Easter and a little over a month after he received the cold call from Jillian Clair, Jorgensen finally and belatedly took Linda up on the offer to chat about the old days at UW. It was the offer she’d made in writing when she mailed the first of twenty-five consecutive Valentine cards to him beginning a quarter-century earlier. No one knows what finally prompted him—what the timing of it all meant. Maybe it was the earlier call from Jillian and the vaguely exculpatory statements he’d made once caught off guard, statements he might have made that would have been useful four decades earlier had anyone bothered to officially follow up. Either way, he chose over the Easter weekend, perhaps as a corollary to his previous ramblings inscribed in The Case for Easter or maybe at random. Either the way, the call was a brief one.
Linda picked up the landline in the living room on the second ring that day. It was a little past 3:00 p.m. CT when she answered with the same customary “Hello?” she always did, doing so on the same landline she’d had for almost thirty years. But this time was different. On the other end was only breathing, at first. It was the same sound—the same ominous inhales and exhales—that Christine had listened to when the calls first started in room 119 of Ann Emery Hall back in April of ’68. It was the sleepwatcher modus operandi all over again. Linda sat and listened—patiently. She didn’t resort to a second and more panicked “hello?” She did nothing but waited—waited him out. Somehow she knew; she wasn’t sure how, but she knew it was him. And he knew that she knew. Decades upon decades on, the jig, it seemed, was finally up. Then, after close to a minute, a rickety, weathered voice came on the line to break the standoff of silence. “The Rothschild girl,” the voice said—the same depersonalizing epithet used in his call with Jillian Clair. “No one was smart enough to check the autoclaves. That day, no one looked at the autoclaves. Tell Josephson, tell him he wasn’t smart enough.” Click—dead air. End call. Endgame.
To this day, there is no way of verifying it was Jorgensen for certain who called Linda’s house in Texas that Good Friday. The references to the “Rothschild girl” and Detective Josephson by name—pairings going back to the original investigation of 1968 that few living people then or now would know of—and the unusual syntax corresponding to the call with Jillian just a month earlier is, however, glaring to say the least. Linda also used a directory callback feature with Ma Bell to confirm that—immediately after the hang-up—the call in question came from a landline in Marina del Rey, one that matched the listed address for the Jorgensen foundation.
Linda never called the number back. The utterance in itself was enough. An autoclave, she already knew from her interviews of hospital staff back in the fall of ’68 and onward while getting acquainted with surgical jargon, was a pressure chamber used to sterilize medical equipment—like scalpels, like the “medical utensil” once described as the murder weapon in Christine’s case. She knew that those same autoclaves were plentiful in both the surgery suites and nearby research labs at the same campus hospital where Christine was pronounced dead. The same hospital where Jorgensen worked and was seen proclaiming it was, after all, a nice day for a murder. She knew that autoclaves blasted bloodied surgical tools with saturated steam somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 degrees F for upward of fifteen minutes per cleaning cycle. It was more than enough time and heat to render those same implements safe for reuse in other surgeries. It was also more than enough time and heat—and interference—to make those same tools once co-opted as murder weapons essentially useless as evidence, both then and now. But especially then.
That’s how he did it, how he got away with it. Linda marveled at the evil genius of it: he hid in plain sight, he hid among the frenetic cops failing to see the forest through the trees, he carried the murder weapon to where death was pronounced and then returned it to its point of origin in pristine condition. It was a sterilized needle in a haystack, one he could never be connected to, even if it was ever found. She had been right all along about one thing in particular; it was one that Jorgensen himself confirmed verbatim—no one looked.
The interview with Jorgensen, its transcript and a full report on the case—in fact, all of the Madison cases—was sent to the UWPD by Jillian and her classmates in the summer of ’11. At last, it seemed, the case had been brought in from the cold. The interview had raised red flags that at least warranted the formality of a police interview—or more. The report and accompanying recording’s receipt was acknowledged with thanks and that was that, and there the case sat, again. As that package made its way from the Toronto area to Madison, another envelope made its way from Dallas to Marina del Rey. It was the 26th and final Valentine’s Day card Linda would send—one that referenced the call Jorgensen had finally made to her. By all estimates, it too—like the report to UWPD—went unread.
By February 16, 2013, it was officially over. That same day Jorgensen dropped dead. With a coroner’s certificate that listed cardiac failure as the official cause of death, the precise circumstances of his demise were destined to remain shrouded in mystery. With the help of Metro Cremation Service, Jorgensen kowtowed to his Scandinavian heritage and did the Viking thing—a funeral pyre lit on the quick. He was cremated almost immediately, his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean outside LA. All arrangements, likely previously discussed, were handled by Ezra Jameson of the Sierra Singles who had brought him the Argentinean and peddled the small run of copies of The Love Pirate for him. Ezra, his only loyal friend—Quong Sha in the flesh—reportedly later cleaned out the condo and very shortly after sold it. There would be no DNA to recover and nothing left to follow up on should a match ever be attempted. Jorgensen would leave this world without a trace. An obituary replete with lies—some of the same ones told upon his ’68 arrival in the Mad City plus some new ones, including that he was still a practicing physician and was divorced—would be the final and inaccurate reminder of the wound that Jorgensen’s existence left on the world. Or so, at least for a while, it seemed.
Cardsharps
It was 2013 before I actually met Linda for the first time. In the aftermath of Jorgensen’s death and receipt from Linda of his trumped-up obit, I found myself conflicted about the way it all ended. Linda was less ambivalent, saying such things as “and so the monster is dead” and “we stopped him.” We stopped him. She remains convinced that the cold-call interview was something of a Trojan horse that had foiled whatever it was Jorgensen was planning in the final year or two of his life. What caught him off guard as a random, though apparently innocuous, cold call no doubt became something that tormented him in later months, she believed, once it dawned on him that now, at long last, others knew—others were watching him. He would be aware that for the first time ever, there was an expanded audience, people monitoring his actions, who knew him for what he was. Linda’s chess game, as the two of them grew older and wearier, had transcended the virtual board that had become the distance between LA and Dallas. Linda, by enlisting the willing assistance of others—much as Jorgensen had conscripted Ezra to do his bidding—had changed the rules of the game.
After Jillian’s recorded telephone call, Linda and Jorgensen never had any further contact before his death. Whether the call fundamentally altered the course of events and did in fact interrupt whatever it was Jorgensen may have planned as his curtain call will never be known. Whether or not it had a bearing on his wish to be cremated out of fear that a possible exhumation of Christine Rothschild and other potential victims—the possible discovery of the bodies of Donna Ann Lass or the unnamed Argentinean—might yield new biological evidence will also never be known. But it prevails as being very curious.
The LAPD in retrospect probably found no real reason to approach Jorgensen and may have simply been placating Linda in their e-mail exchanges. Despite the red flags his telephone ramblings raised and their having the transcript, the UWPD never followed up on the information of the March 20
11 interview with a more formal one. They never followed up on the confirmed whereabouts of Jorgensen who, for over four decades, purportedly had a locate flag on him as a person of interest, which a UW cop had once stressed police were working “very hard” to find—working very hard to close the case. The cold-case civilian activism of Jillian Clair and her peers at the university, exploiting modern technological resources, was possible in large part because of the digital age in which we live. As a well-intentioned and useful effort to assist the police in a long-stalled investigation, no one was attempting to usurp the police function. All results were promptly turned over to them for follow-up on a suspect they claimed to be looking for in anything but a real-time investigation. Whether this is a harbinger for a new cultural phenomenon remains to be seen.
Innovative approaches and a fresh set of eyes, civilian or not, could well benefit other dormant investigations, including both unsolved murders and cases of known or suspected wrongful conviction. The latter always ensures the former since every founded wrongful conviction inevitably creates a new cold case. It’s the backstory to infamous American cases like those of Kirk Bloodsworth, the first American on death row spared in the nick of time after he was exonerated by DNA after serving eight years for a murder he didn’t commit, and, of course, the West Memphis Three—the eponymous trio of teens who served eighteen years for a triple murder they never committed in their home state of Arkansas. In addition to the injustice of innocent people being incarcerated for years or even executed, the real killer still roams free, able to kill again, and families of victims lose any sense of closure they once may have had.
By the time the procedural errors in such cases are revealed—and begrudgingly admitted by authorities—many of the original files and exhibits are purged, the derailed investigation too far gone to start over. The truth is that criminal investigation and public oversight and accountability are today light-years ahead of the circumstances found in the Mad City and its college campus beginning back in the spring of ’68. With that, police are able, when willing, to exercise a variety of new “stimulation” strategies to inspire public interest, renew a call for tips and other information, or to sweat the suspect by putting the case back in the public eye. In the 2000s, a changing of the guard in Madison led to a wholesale eradication of dead wood, from the basic incompetents to the criminal voyeurs who had been tasked with these investigations and, at last, there now seem to be some innovative new attempts to get right with the city’s dark past.
One initiative, believed to have been the first of what later became a series of similar campaigns across America, is premised on the idea that criminals, serial murderers included, either can’t or won’t keep their mouths shut. It’s also rooted in an understanding that the notion of honor among thieves—much less sexual murderers—is an entirely mistaken concept. Police informers for instance, arguably the lifeblood of criminal intelligence gathering and particularly in the areas of organized crime, fugitive recovery, and drug offenses, will often dime out their own mothers, brothers, and even their children in exchange for the few hundred dollars paid by a police handler. A further reality is that being a jailhouse snitch in high-profile cases is often a rewarding vocation for inmates looking to plea-bargain their charges. The cold-case playing card deck was a rather inspired idea that seeks to leverage these realities.
With Julie Speerschneider as the three of diamonds and Donna Mraz as the two of clubs, the hunt for the Mad City Killer or killers of old lives on through an innovative new cold-case program, now widely adopted across the United States, that integrates the faces and names of murder victims on playing cards distributed to penitentiary inmates.
With a deck of cards being one of the few legal mainstays of state and federal prison populations, someone somewhere—the confirmed first use is unclear and unclaimed—realized that the best method of cultivating intelligence on cold cases among existing offender populations was to put the facts of the case into the hands of other thieves, rapists, and killers—literally. Although themed decks of cards bearing all variety of images are nothing new, using prisons to circulate decks of cards featuring the faces, names, and details surrounding the deaths once attributed to the Capital City Killer was nothing if not innovative. It was rooted in the hope that inmates, when looking at the cards they’re dealt, will have their memory jogged by one or more of the details mentioned on the cards. Criminals, now a captive audience to the facts of these cases, might see an opportunity, it was hoped, to come forward with information of use to stalled investigations. Whether playing solitaire in solitary confinement or three-card draw in the prison yard, every card displays the face of a life extinguished too soon. An abridged version of the story that goes with it, complete with dates, is also provided.
Since card decks generally detail cold cases by state and are distributed within that same state, inmates in Wisconsin today may very well find themselves dealt a hand containing one or more cards bearing the face and name of a victim whose killer they know either on the outside or with whom they may be doing time—a killer with whom they may even be playing cards. Although in some cases the victim’s name might not ring a bell, the details and dates could, especially if the prisoner recognizes the general timeline as one corresponding with a crime an acquaintance or even a cellmate has previously bragged about getting away with. It’s a remarkably creative guerilla tactic that creates an underground economy of cold cases within the correctional system and which, strangely enough, unites citizens on the outside and crooks on the inside toward a common goal of cold-case closure—of resolution, of absolution.
The same set of Wisconsin cold-case playing cards distributed across the Midwest features Christine Rothschild as the nine of hearts—the oldest cold case of the fifty-two card set. It remains unclear how suits and ranks were assigned to cases and victims, and whether it is a reflection of either investigative vintage or priority of the cases. In truth, the assignments appear to be, like much of what happened in these investigations proper, entirely random.
Linda has a set of the cards she managed to obtain from the Madison PD some years back. Christine is the nine of hearts. Today her face turns up in pairs, flushes, and four-of-a-kind hands in places like Fox Lake, Black River, and Kettle Moraine—all of the thirty-plus adult prisons and correctional institutions scattered across Wisconsin. When an inmate ends up with that card in his hand today, he’s unlikely to know—like most others—that Christine’s case, while officially still unsolved, is nonetheless considered resolved by many. Those people include Linda and me. The other seven slayings once attributed whether in whole or in part to the Capital City Killer remain, however, both unsolved and entirely unresolved. They are cases, answers still outstanding, for which closure is needed. There’s little question that the Julie Murders are connected to the near-analogous slayings of LeMahieu and Stewart. That killer, unless dead, is no doubt still out there—whether in Dane County or elsewhere—roaming free. Because there will have been other victims in other cities either before or after the set in Madison, it can only be hoped that he’s been caught and incarcerated elsewhere for at least one of these crimes—somewhere where his crimes were taken seriously. It can only be hoped that he is perhaps looking into the eyes of one or more of his victims, their images emblazoned on the same playing cards he is using within the Dairy State penitentiary system or elsewhere in America. The other Madison murders—Bennett, Mraz, and Raasch—are also still solvable but for some reason languish as cold cases. Then again, much of what happened in the Mad City over that seldom talked about and willfully forgotten quarter-century period never ceases to surprise me or anyone else who learns of it.
It has been in part the purpose of this book to set the historical record straight about what happened once upon a time in the Mad City—to clear the air and offer a valediction to a period many would prefer to forget on one hand and open up a renewed discourse on the other. There is no shortage of theories about how or why this all hap
pened in an unlikely place like Madison in the first place, and why it kept on happening—and why it still does today. The cold-case playing cards have some new editions in recent years, the names of young UW coeds like Kelly Nolan and Brittany Zimmerman whose deaths, in spite of modern technologies, investigative methodologies, and improved police recruiting and training efforts, remain as cold and confounding as the spate of murders that began with Christine Rothschild on that drizzly Sunday morning in May of ’68. Those detectives working those cases today, the families still waiting for answers who, like the Rothschilds, sent their daughters to UW because it was a safe school, should know about what came before. And what no doubt will come again.
[2017] Mad City Page 34