Before Christine’s body was moved a second time, this time to the morgue wagon in order to be ferried over to nearby St. Mary’s Hospital for a full autopsy, campus police sergeant Trimmer—on a short list of able and conscientious investigators at UW—arrived to snap exposures of the young girl’s body as it lay lifeless on a metal table in a private room at the campus hospital ER. If the evidence at the scene noted by the first responders—the posing on the windowsill and the man’s handkerchief—wasn’t odd enough, then the evidence gleaned at the hospital spelled overkill with a sadistic twist. While Christine had been severely beaten and stabbed fourteen times with a surgical scalpel—the ferocity of the stabs so frenetic, so teeming with both rage and excitement that four ribs were shattered in the process—the killer also went to some extra and unusual steps to ensure death. They were steps that prolonged the killer’s time spent at the scene and should have been interpreted for what they were at the time—sexually motivated peri-mortem and postmortem activities that were not instrumental to the crime, or part of the killer’s MO, as much as they were expressive acts of violence helping to verify the presence of a criminal signature. While MOs come and go and can prove highly variable from crime to crime, a signature on the other hand is difficult to fake and largely impossible for sexually motivated killers to refrain from acting out. Because it is in fact why they kill in the first place, it should be taken as among the best indicators that the murderer places great erotic value on destructive and sadistic behaviors. In other words, such a murderer would do it again—he would be compelled to.
This was all missed when an inventory of Christine’s possessions was completed and her body was given the once-over and photographed ahead of the official autopsy in the days to come. Although Christine’s murder predated the extensive body of knowledge that exists today concerning sexually motivated killers and their criminal signatures, other plain-as-day clues should have led to some obvious deductions. For instance, Christine’s prized Jane Fonda boots, devoid of mud or grass in spite of the soaked ground conditions, could only mean that she hadn’t been, as was the early working theory, dragged to where she was found; rather, she couldn’t have traveled any significant distance in the wet grass and certainly never kicked or dug in her heels as she would have if she thrashed and fought with her attacker. But that inference was never drawn. The logical yet elusive conclusion to be made was that Christine had taken a route similar to that of Phil Van Valkenberg, voluntarily going—most likely lured—to the concealed site by the window and behind the hedgerow before being attacked and killed there.
Also, no one at the scene or afterward managed to pick up on what are today recognized as telltale indicators—and signatures—of sexually motivated murderers. Christine’s boots had been removed by the killer and then placed back on the body after her textured panty hose were removed and taken as a souvenir. Beyond this, there had been no obvious touching below the waist and there was an absence of evidence of sexual penetration. Christine’s beige, quilted trench coat was still on her body with the interior lining torn out, to be used as a garrote after she was apparently already dead. In fastening the garrote around her throat and slowly tightening it to close off and eventually crush her windpipe, the killer, current training would tell us, was an obvious control freak and paraphiliac boasting numerous twisted fetishes. One of those paraphilias would seem to be necrophilia, which involves sexually motivated interference, posing, and ravaging of the body after death. One of the related “preparatory” paraphilias closely linked with necrophilia—a type of precursor or warm-up routine—is what’s known as somnophilia. In other words, sleepwatching.
The improvised garrote—a tourniquet with an elaborate knot made with cooled nerves and fine motor precision in the throes of a horrific murder—reflected not only a seasoned psychopath and killer, but also someone adept at fastening restraints and likely accustomed to working with his hands. The ligature was applied as part of a twisted choke job fantasy to act out on a defenseless but still-warm body, one half of an even more specific and paraphilic signature—one that cops of the day had no idea how to interpret. As Sergeant Trimmer methodically and meticulously photographed each step of his removal of the garrote, it became too much for one of the two uniforms serving as scribes and taking notes at his side. Suddenly reaching for a metal wastebasket stowed beneath a nearby desk, the officer watching the examination found himself projectile vomiting in, on, and over the opening at the top of the can. His reaction was visceral, instinctive. He had just seen, as had others in the room along with Trimmer as he continued photographing, exactly what the killer had done before he crushed the girl’s throat. In fact, the garrote might have been less about simulating strangulation—to keep air from getting in—than it was an attempt to ensure that something left for the authorities to find never got out.
Recovered from deep within Christine’s throat were her tan sheepskin Kerrybrooke dress gloves—both of them inserted postmortem. Rather than the killer making sure she was dead with the use of the improvised ligature, he was instead taking his time to create a very specific visual—something not only paraphilic but iconographic. He carefully carried out a process he’d been mentally rehearsing for weeks or months, the sadistic memory of which would fuel new delinquent fantasies for years to come. To help make sure of it, he took reminders—items that would allow him to rewind and replay the whole scene as a type of brain movie in the future, to relive the scene whenever he held or gazed upon the souvenirs of his work. That’s why he took her pantyhose. That’s why—as was later confirmed—he also took the blue Sunday ribbon from her hair and the brass lighter from the right pocket of her trench coat but left behind her money and the jewelry on her fingers—including the fateful opal ring her mother had gifted to her.
Souvenirs—unlike “trophies” taken by killers, which are typically living tissue such as locks of hair or actual body parts—have long shelf lives, and can be secreted in a variety of places or even carried out in the open without arousing suspicion. Although the bow and pantyhose would have been part of his private collection, the lighter could be hidden in plain sight, used in day-to-day functioning. Only he would know its sinister origins while reliving the excitement of the crime every time he pulled the lighter to use or show it. He might even go out of his way to use it—to have others use it—expressly for this purpose. All the while it would hold the added symbolic value of a memory about how he had first acquired his target, how he had begun to stalk his prey. After all, the whole thing started when he had asked her for a light. The Memorial Library reading room. The smoke pit. April of ’68.
Black Umbrella
With the preliminary processing of Christine’s ravaged corpse at the UW hospital taunting Sgt. Trimmer and the other officers present for the rest of their days, back at the crime scene one final and puzzling item was found left on display by the Sterling Hall window well where Christine’s body had been carefully posed by her killer. It was a calling card, either part of the larger necrophilic signature or a separate one altogether, part of a discrete deviant fantasy fueling her murderer and designed to upset investigators and the entire campus alike. It still does today. It’s a signature that has reappeared in at least one other murder in America—a campus murder no less.
Inserted into the grass immediately in front of Christine’s feet was her designer black umbrella, in itself innocuous given the rainy weather that day. Rather than taking the umbrella as a twisted keepsake as he did with the other items, or rather than merely discarding it, the killer took the time to elaborately set up something of a macabre diorama. It was one intended, it seems, to accompany the posing of the body—a paratext that told an expanded story, one that opened up a widened view into the killer’s mind. It’s also one that dramatically extended his time spent at the scene. Murdering and later posing a victim outdoors in broad daylight, at great risk of being seen immediately beside the body, makes an extraordinarily detailed statement about the mindset
and paraphilic drives of any murderer. In this case, however, the time spent setting up an umbrella is essentially as individuating as DNA evidence—a one-in-a-million outlier in terms of crime scene behavior.
A detail first eyeballed by the student who had stumbled across the murder scene, one missed by many of the first cops to arrive, was that Christine’s umbrella hadn’t just been speared tip-first into the rain-soaked ground like some type of javelin. It had also been inserted with precision at a ninety-degree angle with the handle pointed to the sky, the umbrella opened, and each of the metal stays, or stretchers as they’re sometimes called, either manually snapped or cut one at a time around the entire circumference of the canopy.
The umbrella itself was mutilated, just like Christine’s body, to suit a certain aesthetic scheme. The question was—and remains—what exactly that scheme was. Bearing in mind how little police agencies, much less campus law enforcement agencies, knew at the time about paraphilias, signatures, psychopathy, and serial indicators, it’s easy of course, using existing standards, to armchair quarterback about what was missed during those critical first few hours of the investigation. The fact is that the body of knowledge on these subjects was then limited and nowhere close to being as evolved as it is today. That said, there were still numerous glaring indicators that whoever killed Christine—someone with extraordinary visual fixation and focus on sadistic process and paraphilic specificity—would kill again or had done it before. Maybe both. These were indicators that, putting aside present knowledge and training, especially in the days immediately following the murder, should have immediately cast a net around one or two people. These included Niels Jorgensen if witnesses had been forthcoming about what they knew. Today, this same heuristic process is called suspectology, a term that applies to stalled investigations, particularly when investigators start scrutinizing the post-offense behavior of any and all people of interest with a view to creating a viable short list of suspects.
Suspectology, as known today, was initially depicted in a roundabout way in Charles Dickens’s Gothic novel Bleak House, first published in 1853. The book’s protagonist, Inspector Bucket of Scotland Yard, is generally accepted as the first fictional literary treatment of a police detective in a murder mystery written in English. Thus, while the term suspectology is on the newer side, the method is not. It certainly existed in 1968 and had for some time—over a century in both theory and in practice.
Suspectology is, in essence, both the art and the science of recognizing a suspect’s “tell.” It operates on the assumption that, just as when playing cards for cash or other stakes, the ability to convincingly bluff will only last for so long before natural instincts and autonomic responses begin to give a person away—begin to erode a carefully rehearsed façade. In some cases, this might mean changing one’s routine, quitting one’s job, spending or hoarding money—any number of actions that, depending on the subject’s relationship to the victim, can prove incredibly illuminating. One of the cornerstones of suspectology, actually first posited by Dickens, is for police to attend the victim’s funeral, wake, or memorial—not only to pay their respects but also to scope the crowd for giveaways. The thought is, an idea first conceived in fiction but later adopted by most large urban police forces by the mid-twentieth century, that discreet surveillance at these events can sometimes ultimately reveal leads that more conventional methods such as interviewing, interrogation, and even search warrants and wiretap affidavits cannot. In order, however, for suspectology to work in short-listing viable suspects, someone actually needs to be watching their movements. To this end, there is no evidence that anyone was watching Jorgensen, certainly not during the critical “first forty-eight” of the investigation anyway.
By the time the critical first two days of the investigation had wound down—the probability of any case being solved diminishing exponentially every day from that point forward—campus detective Charlie Lulling, the early lead investigator in Christine’s murder, publicly announced that the case was already “at a standstill.” This wasn’t rhetoric or part of some cloak-and-dagger investigative strategy the campus cops had cooked up. Rather, the UWPD actually had no clue where to begin—it was a Midwestern whodunit writ large. What the cops did manage to accomplish, however, was the inverse of suspectology—what’s known as victimology. Such an investigative analysis, an entire subfield of study and expertise within criminology, is focused on how and why a victim and his or her attacker came into contact. It also seeks to address how and why a particular victim was selected and what his or her relationship was, if any, to the attacker. A canvass run of the campus, including the occupants of Ann Emery Hall, regulars at the Memorial Library, and, of course, the overdue conversation with Linda, all kicked loose some key details that slowly got the victimology ball rolling—albeit too late.
The Final Forty-Eight
Since the first forty-eight hours of a murder investigation are key in terms of maintaining momentum with boots-on-the-ground collection of evidence, corralling of witnesses, short-listing and interviewing of suspects, and leveraging departmental resources to the hilt, cases that stay open beyond that period frequently have bleak futures in terms of solvability. There is, however, another component to an investigation, this one moving backward in time. Although victimology describes digging into how and why a victim and a killer came to meet, which sliding doors were set in motion and by what forces, there is also a process now known as a psychological autopsy, which often accompanies the physical autopsy carried out by a medical examiner or forensic pathologist. A psychological autopsy is often just as disturbing—sometimes more. While much of a murder investigation takes place in real time during the critical first forty-eight hours, the psychological autopsy instead looks at the final forty-eight—the last two days of the victim’s life and what that person did, who they met, where they went and, perhaps most importantly, what their frame of mind happened to be. It’s a retroactively assembled chronology, whether through witnesses or supposition, of every decision made right up to the time of death, including how the victim reacted to a particular attacker. In Christine’s case, the final forty-eight turned up a biography of what should have been the lowest-risk victim in the Mad City save one fact—she had met the sleepwatcher.
Christine had told Linda about her stalker, including her theory it was Jorgensen, the unmistakable forty-something medical resident whom she’d noticed tailing her since their smoking encounter at the Memorial Library. Christine had also confided in the campus police but had received an implicit “we’ve got better things to do” brush-off. Christine had additionally shared with Linda the precautions she had taken to make sure she wasn’t in compromising situations or didn’t find herself in circumstances that were “dangerous” in the conventional sense. These precautions are what are known as avoidant behavior strategies taken by people who often feel powerless to prevent imminent victimization. She avoided going out at night, at least alone; she kept her doors and windows at Ann Emery locked; she had even started looking into getting her name removed from the directory in the lobby. But Jorgensen had already killed before—at least twice. In so doing, he had learned to wait out his victims and to strike when the situation was not perceptively dangerous. He waited until his targets would be doing something they did all the time—when their guard would be down, the structure of the routine dulling their instincts, their radars down.
Niels Jorgensen, a high-functioning psychopath, sexual sadist, and sleepwatcher, also fit yet another category. A decade after Jorgensen dropped anchor at UW, a pair of innovative criminologists named Marcus Cohen and Lawrence Felson would go on to develop what they called routine activities theory. Jorgensen, as it turns out, was the unofficial poster boy when it came to an offender fitting this theory about how predators find their targets, even before it was developed. The theory is premised on the notion that, when a motivated offender and a suitable victim converge in a space and time, a crime will inevitably occur in the
absence of an obvious deterrent, or what Cohen and Felson called a “suitable guardian.” Sometimes these crimes are opportunistic and reflect locations where attackers know people’s routines will bring them, and where an offender will then simply lie in wait. Examples would be a park path known to be frequented on summer evenings by young women jogging or an underground parking garage known to be used by office workers commuting in expensive cars at the start or end of a scheduled workday. Other times these crimes are contoured to the specific routines of individual victims known as targeted strangers—a type of victim within the parlance of both criminology and victimology. These are people who don’t know their attackers, but who, in many cases, have been specifically selected for attack; they have been obsessively stalked and their routines tracked—their usual hangouts and routes were eyeballed during reconnaissance missions for the purposes of identifying an ideal time and place to strike.
Jorgensen, as a sleepwatching somnophiliac and inveterate peeper, was inherently voyeuristic, his penchant for twisted surveillance activities forming part of a larger set of psychosexual dysfunction known as a courtship disorder. The average, psychologically well-adjusted male who has identified someone to whom he is attracted, and who may be a suitable intimate partner, will proceed through a series of socially acceptable steps of courtship to meet them, gain their attention, and increasingly progress toward dating or sexual activity. The courtship-disordered male such as Jorgensen, however, will instead use a supposedly random meeting of the type he had with Christine in the Memorial Library to fuel incipient or escalating sexual deviations. In some instances, the stranger is also stalked and, once the initial fantasy is played out, that person becomes the target of more specific and violent paraphilic acts. As a courtship-disordered necrophile, Jorgensen was a virtual smorgasbord of violent sexual depravity and had at least two successful kills—murders he’d managed to skate on—already under his belt when he landed at UW in April of ’68. Forecasting routines and tracking his prey was the secret of that success. By the next month, he had Christine’s Sunday ritual down pat.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 6