Today, however, Madison has a number of well-earned bragging rights that might surprise some people. The Mad City actually rivals comparatively better-known locales such as San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Nashville as a center of creative, intellectual, and political action—officially eclipsing cities in terms of intellect and livability that have celebrated histories in the American imagination and tend to be seen as destinations in and of themselves. Wisconsin, however, doesn’t usually make people’s bucket lists—not the short list anyway. Ditto with Madison as its capital. It’s not the type of place people stereotypically earmark to go and “find” themselves, whatever that means. But for many years it was, in fact, just such a place. In many respects, it still is. With currently just over half a million people in its metro area, and having been variously and previously saluted as the best metro area to live in America, the most educated city in America, and the healthiest city in America, it might be said that Madison is a book of well-kept secrets. Of course it’s always the best-kept secrets that also conceal the most unsettling truths.
Beyond Madison as its capital, the State of Wisconsin has a lesser-known but inarguably sordid criminal past, one many have tried to forget. Peter Kürten, the first serial killer for whom the term “serial killer” was actually coined and also known as the “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” actually has a strange Wisconsin connection—in spite of being German born and committing his murders in that country’s Rhine Province. His aberrant acts of sexual violence claimed at least nine confirmed victims and as many as thirty suspected victims in the late 1920s; they were described by the police at the time as heinous acts of serienmörder (serial murder). Kürten was eventually caught and guillotined in the city of Cologne on July 2, 1931. His severed head was later preserved and his brain studied by scientists in an attempt to better understand what made Kürten tick; they sought to identify and document any physiological abnormalities that might explain his years of horrific offenses culminating in the murders of several schoolchildren in 1929. As luck would have it, that same specimen was later stolen by a unit of American GIs invading Germany in the final days of World War II and made its way back to the United States as a morbid spoil of war. Today, Kürten’s mummified head remains a roadside attraction at a museum in the small theme-park city of Wisconsin Dells—the first documented serial killer in the world now calling the Dairy State “home.” Or, at the very least, his new home. Like other serial killers to follow in his footsteps, the Dairy State is where, for one way or another, he would eventually end up.
Two hundred miles north of Wisconsin Dells where the Vampire’s gruesome decapitated head remains on display under glass, in the similarly unheard-of Vilas County, the area’s iconic Little Bohemia Lodge once served as a clandestine hideout for the infamous Dillinger Gang during America’s bloody “Public Enemy” era. In April of ’34, the place looked like the Alamo when the then Bureau of Investigation surprised Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and other Chicago gangsters and, in a frenzied firefight, revealed to the world for the first time how the seemingly benign Wisconsin hinterland had actually become the criminal underworld’s preferred spot to sojourn. Later, the state became home to “Plainfield Ghoul” Ed Gein, a serial killer and body snatcher whose crimes inspired the Robert Bloch novel and subsequent Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho, as well as the comparatively down-market Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise that followed. Gein, who died in Madison in 1984, endures as of one of the state’s more noteworthy former residents, as he fashioned sex dolls and even living room furniture out of the bodies of his victims.
Thirty years later, “Milwaukee Cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer horrified the world with his own similarly ghoulish crimes that involved serial murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, and—in retreading Gein’s fetishes—the use of body parts as decorative items and novelties in his squalid lodgings. Contemporaneous with Dahmer, “North Side Strangler” Walter Ellis also stalked the streets of the same Wisconsin city, Milwaukee, claiming the lives of at least seven prostitutes between 1986 and 2007. In the meantime, not one but three other innocent men were charged with the Strangler’s murders and two of them were wrongfully convicted at trial, serving between six and twelve years in prison while Ellis continued to kill with impunity. These same local patsies were later cleared on DNA evidence once Ellis was finally arrested. As the city cut checks for a few million dollars in hush money and scrambled to settle lawsuits and sweep up the mess, Ellis died in a Sioux Falls hospital after serving only two years for the string of sex slayings. More recently, the 2005 murder and mutilation of Teresa Halbach, the crime at the center of the controversial yet epochal 2015 Netflix docuseries Making a Murderer, brought renewed attention to what really goes on in a state many would consider to be the epitome of sedate. It is, after all, the same state where, in the township of Waukesha in the spring of 2014, two twelve-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods to sacrifice her to the Internet meme known as “Slender Man.” So infatuated were the two demented grade-schoolers by the faceless online concoction—the Internet’s first boogeyman—that they genuinely believed that they could summon him forth from cyberspace by murdering their classmate to win his affection and murderous approval. While the victim managed to narrowly escape being the first human sacrifice to a purely digital entity, the incident would punctuate what had been a protracted dark age in Wisconsin—one that few are willing to talk about. It’s a history that today reminds us that the state’s pastoral and peaceful veneer hides a sinister and largely forgotten history. But that’s only the beginning.
One of countless online and typically anonymous renderings of the macabre Internet meme known only as Slender Man. In May 2014, two Wisconsin schoolgirls obsessed with the faceless ghoul tried to sacrifice their classmate and friend to him in the woods outside Milwaukee in order to conjure a real-world, off-line version of the creature.
From the scenic shores of Madison’s postcard-worthy Picnic Point, an iconic mile-long peninsula along the south shore of Lake Mendota—one of the four lakes circumscribing the city’s signature isthmus—one might be inclined to forget that same forgotten and irreparably blighted history. Within that same vista, the Mad City cleans up especially nice, as most cities do, from an untroubled distance. It’s a distance from which the skeletons long since buried are no longer visible through the kaleidoscope of the naked and optimistic eye, none of the pain and trauma wrought upon the city visible from the proverbial nosebleeds of Madison’s outer limits. Like every postcard snapshot ever bought and sold, it’s a panorama that serves as a window into what was and what could be—what residents and visitors alike think it is now or otherwise hope it might be again. It is, if nothing else, a compelling and emotive sight that’s drawn countless locals and tourists alike, all of whom flock there in the summer months to glom on to one of the best views in all of the flyover states.
A view of Madison’s iconically serene Picnic Point on Lake Mendota in the early morning twilight, a halcyon reminder of the city’s perceptively peaceful past. Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society.
The truth is, that same view—a snow-globe menagerie depicting life in the state capital, known almost as much as the Mad City as the Capital City—is also part of a much bigger story. This is that story. It is perhaps the greatest story never told in American history, at least the history of American crime. Moreover, even bigger than the Mad City itself, it’s a story that begins and ends with two girls, each from seemingly faraway worlds, but whose lives collided right there in Madison as perhaps the unlikeliest of places. Two girls whose lives became soldered together in a chance meeting on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in the dying days of the legendary summer of ’67. It’s also the story of what happened next—the travelogue of a thousand dominos toppling with tragic consequence. It’s the story of sliding doors set in motion as the lives of dozens of others were to soon become mired in the same tragedy without end. It’s the story of ineffective leaders who betrayed the people and the publi
c trust alike. It’s the allegory of ineffectual cops everywhere—well-intentioned in some cases, but ineffectual nonetheless—chasing a serial killer who never existed while ignoring the real killers in their midst. At the same time, it’s a tale of bravery incarnate, a tale about how one city changed the course of events for so many and—ultimately—the definition of American justice.
The story begins and ends in the same place, the campus of the University of Wisconsin (UW) at Madison. Simply put, every state university system is “at” somewhere—it has to be. Whenever a state establishes a network of public universities, the city is a suffix that brands that campus as its own animal. Eventually, the U-and-whatever state abbreviation gets dropped and only the city remains, as though the campus were a stand-alone entity. Once upon a time, UC Davis simply became Davis. Ditto for UC Berkeley, UNC–Chapel Hill, and UVA Charlottesville—truncated to become Berkeley, Chapel Hill, and Charlottesville respectively. UW–Madison is the inverse, another proverbially quirky Mad City outlier. As the flagship campus of the UW system, consistently lauded as one of the top public research universities in America and what’s known as a “Public Ivy,” it was and remains simply known as UW. Any reference to UW is to refer to UW–Madison by default. The city where the campus is situated therefore only ever needs to be mentioned in cases when it’s not Madison. But in this case, it is. It first began back in the summer of ’67 when everything started coming up Madison.
Young Americans
One can, not surprisingly, see the prized UW campus from Picnic Point, the university campus, like in many cities, having been gobbled up as the most prime and picturesque real estate during Madison’s earliest days. On a spring evening sometime around the equinox of ’65, one sixteen-year-old Linda Tomaszewski—third generation American, descended from Polish immigrants, tough as nails—took in that view and smelled the air and, before long, carved out a plan. It was just over sixty miles door-to-door—about seventy-four minutes in daytime traffic—from Linda’s two-story prewar home on South 39th Street in Milwaukee to the gates of UW. By the standards of blue-collar, God-fearing Catholic Southside Milwaukee, it was also worlds away—two destinations poles apart. In the spring of ’65, Linda was only a sophomore at nearby St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school split eighty-twenty between Poles and Italians, run by some of the most notoriously ascetic nuns in all the Midwest. But it was there and then that it first dawned on the feisty redhead that UW was, like the moon landing already in the works, out of this world yet still within grasp. It was just far enough to get away and cut the cord to her old neighborhood but not too far to draw the ire of her Old World parents or the stringent St. Mary’s nuns. As the first of her family set to go to college, the UW campus would still be within range of her fireman father’s protective reach—a proverbial force field that extended to Madison but no farther—and also close enough to abate the worry of her doting grandparents who rented out the second-story granny suite of the family home. But it was also distant enough to allow young Linda, at long last, to come up for air. In time, however, in her search for freedom, she’d get more than she bargained for.
Unlike most other St. Mary’s girls, Linda knew by her senior year that she needed to parlay her gold-plated GPA into a one-way ticket out of working-class tedium in Southside Milwaukee. It was an escape hatch from either one of the two lives to which most of her classmates had resigned themselves to inheriting: life as a homemaker like their mothers and mothers’ mothers or, like their neighbors with a color Zenith and maybe a second car, life in the typing pool at the Allen-Bradley Company headquarters. It was a local calling that, like a coal mine in a northern town, or the docks in a coastal community, was often seen as the only option for young Milwaukee women at the time. If one were to get really lucky, a Southside career woman of that era might even land a gig as a “senior” secretary and get a reserved parking space—a brass nameplate on the desk to boot. But young Linda always made her own luck. By August of ’67 that meant hitting the road to UW and never looking back. By then, she had, of course, absolutely no idea what forces had already been set in motion—what fate had in store for her. By the next time she made it to Picnic Point to take in that same panorama that had once inspired her to pull up roots from Southside Milwaukee, she’d end up longing for the simple life as an Allen-Bradley typist—for a life doing anything other than what the universe had thrown at her. But a little over halfway through her freshman year, someone burned down Linda’s world. In so doing, they awoke a sleeping giant.
Fast-forward to a decade later and across America, the summer of ’77 would become infamously known as the Summer of Sam. Amid a suffocating heat wave, a psychotic creep named David Berkowitz toting a .44 caliber revolver kept New York City, and by extension much of the country, under siege. Citizens locked themselves in behind latched doors and tightly fastened windows, without air conditioning, in most cases. All the while the killer reveled in the mass panic, ginning up further fear by sending taunting communiqués to the local police and newspapers. He called himself the Son of Sam, claiming to be controlled during his murderous deeds by a demonic force channeled through, of all things, his neighbor’s dog. What a difference a decade makes. Precisely ten years earlier was the endless summer of ’67—what became known as the Summer of Love. With San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district as its epicenter, the Summer of Love was also a distinctly national phenomenon that transcended the celebrated Bay Area, sending out a seismic wave of psychedelic drug use, sexual experimentation, and self-righteous dissolution that made its way east across America, swallowing up unsuspecting cities like Madison in an unwashed wave of hippie zealotry. It was the Pandora’s box that kicked off a larger cultural paradigm that—presto change-o—soon became known as the Age of Aquarius.
The Summer of Love never made it to Linda Tomaszewski’s neighborhood in Southside Milwaukee. By the fall of ’67, however, the Age of Aquarius would run roughshod over the Mad City—the new place she called home. At UW, Linda arrived as a bright-eyed if not overwhelmed freshman to find a counterculture agitator’s delight. The pep rallies and Sadie Hawkins dances she’d expected, and which the UW recruiters visiting St. Mary’s had extolled to her guidance counselors and senior administrators, had by then been summarily cannibalized by student protests and rowdy sit-ins. The time-honored homecoming parade came to feature draft card burnings as a requisite sideshow, one that diverted attention from the hundred-year mainstay of ticker-tape beauty queens marching in soldier formation down State Street. Fraternities and sororities saw their rush-week pledges rivaled by fringe activist groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society, otherwise abbreviated as SDS, while the more violent Weather Underground recruited some pledges of their own. One of the infamous Chicago Seven—a faction of malcontents charged with inciting a riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago the following year—had matriculated at UW and was already stirring the pot in Madison that same autumn. Students in bell-bottoms and profs in houndstooth jackets talked about Grace Slick as the new Plato and actually meant it. A pedantic English TA recited Chaucer by day and pushed H by night. Any sloganeering down-and-outer with a six-string or tambourine was the proverbial big man on campus. Anything ’Nam was fair game for attack—a good reason to get stoned and chew the rag. By September of ’67, someone had turned on the faucet. Free love was little more than a euphemism for powder keg—and the wick was lit.
Just shy of its 120th anniversary, the UW campus had, to some extent, also become a microcosm of Madison proper—or at least what people thought it was. It was hoped that the crowning intellectual achievement of a state whose motto (“Forward”) might appropriately capture Wisconsin’s thirst for progress, innovation, and expansion, UW was a tolerant, creative, and most importantly a decent place in the late ’60s. That’s why, after all, aside from the short drive, Linda’s parents let her abscond from church life and daily chores to study there. The truth is that the campus, though fitting all of these descr
iptions and embodying all of these features, actually couldn’t have been more of a blank slate—a place untested once in the throes of social upheaval and thus primed for a new radicalism once the Age of Aquarius dawned. For a city like Madison—the capital of America’s dairy land and a quintessentially Midwestern locale—it was the equivalent of throwing kerosene on a smoldering fire clamoring for oxygen. The city or, more accurately perhaps, the new generation at UW, was a kinetic force desperate to grow and expand. And it did.
When Linda first set foot in the Mad City as a UW freshman, the campus had become an event horizon for a counterculture she never really knew. But amid the incipient mayhem, a buttoned-down Polish Catholic girl with one-inch spectacles from Southside Milwaukee, completely out of her element and subsumed by almost everything the sisters at St. Mary’s had warned her about, found the most unlikely of allies. The girl she met turned out to be her new best friend, in fact. Her new crony and confidante was studious, just like Linda was. She was also modest and personified kindness when she didn’t have to. She was dedicated to family, friends, and faith—without exception. She loved origami, art, and poetry. She loved the outdoors, animals, and, most of all, her Motown records. Her name was Christine Rothschild. In time, Linda would learn to call her Chris. In time, the Mad City newspapermen called her something else—the first victim.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 2