Open Water
As 1971 became 1972, the hits kept on coming, information rolling in as “official copies” from various government agencies and medical regulators, or as seen by Linda through the looking glass of a microfiche reader at various libraries. Niels Bjorn Jorgensen, born August 28, 1925. Graduated UC Berkeley with a BS in zoology on June 16, 1950. Graduated Loma Linda Med School sometime in ’55—the same medical school, conveniently enough, where his father taught at the time, specializing foremost in conscious sedation in dental procedures. Following his father’s death from natural causes in August of ’74, the family name was bestowed on the med school library, now the Jorgensen Memorial Library. In contradiction, Niels Jr. had grown up as a low roller—a theta male in a family of alphas. His medical career, if one could even call it that, wasn’t as stalwart as that of Niels Sr. It never could be, not so long as his younger brother Søren, a preeminent scientist in the tradition of his father, stayed in the picture. Not so long as he remained the heir apparent and Niels little more than the mimic—the renowned surgeon manqué. When his father died, his mother, Heidi, told him not to bother coming to the funeral. Jorgensen took the advice—he figured the cops would have staked it out and would be waiting for him anyway. He gave them too much credit. They didn’t even know the old man was dead.
Although Linda turned Jorgensen’s medical licensing history upside down to see what might fall out, she was still left with more questions and fewer answers—questions that would only lead her farther into darkness. It turned out that Jorgensen was originally issued medical license number A17049 on July 2, 1956—more than twelve years before landing at UW hospital as a fortysomething resident making his third kick at the can in completing his required residency. For a number of years, his license history actually showed him as being inactive, totally off the grid, with dues to the AMA never paid over 1955 through 1958, ’60 and ’61, and ’63 through ’67. Where was he? What was he doing? Why didn’t he surface? Linda was troubled by these questions that no one else had, it seems, ever bothered to ask. His mother, Heidi—Danish-born Harriett Warberg—had married Niels Sr. in Copenhagen in 1919. They had moved to the United States in 1923, settling in Los Angeles at the height of the silent film era when land magnates and news barons like Harry Chandler ruled the day—just after the ribbon was cut on the Hollywood Bowl and just before the HOLLYWOODLAND sign rose from the hills. First born was Niels Jr., followed by his brother Søren, when Niels Jr. was four and whatever was wrong with him was already beginning to take hold—the plaster starting to set. Søren was born April 23, 1929, and would have a short life; he died September 6, 1949, barely over the age of twenty, seven years after the Battle of Midway where Niels later told people his brother had been killed. Then there was the kicker. Cause of death on the coroner’s certificate for a Robin Claude Søren Bjorn Jorgensen—his full birth name—was officially listed as drowning, but not at Midway due to the actions of a kamikaze pilot or Imperial Japanese U-boat commander as the tale had been. The real story was far more sinister. By the fall of ’72, Linda at last had confirmation who it was she was chasing and what he was capable of.
An obituary entry later pulled from the Los Angeles Times on September 7, 1949, and found on microfiche at UW revealed that a memorial service for Søren was to be held at Steen’s Chapel in North Hollywood on Friday, September 7. The obituary, as sometimes was the case, had not provided any circumstances of death. An afternoon edition of the Examiner that same day did, however, have a blotter item—an accompanying eyewitness account—from which she could glean some details of Søren’s mysterious drowning. The headline, “Abalone Diver Dies in Sea,” told, however, only part of the story. Søren, only age twenty but a natural outdoorsman with nearly a decade of abalone diving experience, had been in only fifty feet of water in Little Harbor on the west side of Santa Catalina Island, part of a larger archipelago of nearby small islands within the jurisdiction of LA County, when things suddenly went bad. It was in an area not known to be especially rough or perilous, even for beginners—something Søren most certainly wasn’t. He had even taken steps to have a spotter before he headed out—what’s known as a line tender—a man named Jim Luntzel, also twenty years old. As Luntzel later told the press and police, Søren had just started to scour for mollusks when, as the paper quoted it, his forty-pound lead diving belt had somehow become “fouled” and he was unable to loosen it. A horrific death at the bottom of the bay soon followed. The article went on to hail Luntzel’s heroic efforts to save his friend as being “futile.” The circumstances had from the beginning ensured the defect was fatal.
The brevity of the piece, not hinting at the involvement of any police or regulatory investigation, all pointed to a death that would likely end up in the dustbin of LA history. In a city consumed by systemic corruption and a torrent of violent crime at the time—the Black Dahlia torture murder, the Sleepy Lagoon slayings, the Bloody Christmas affair, the Chief Clemence Horrall and Brenda Allen sex scandal—the greater Los Angeles area was in investigative disarray that same autumn. Given that diving accidents, even today, don’t follow any standardized scientific investigative protocol at either the local or state level in California, someone with a motive had an ideal constellation of circumstances—legal loopholes and institutional indifference mostly—with which to work in sabotaging the otherwise carefully maintained diving belt. When Søren ventured out into open water that morning, he had been the Jorgensen family golden boy. But he soon would forfeit his life and that status, his diving belt sabotaged to the point that his death was certain in spite of Luntzel’s efforts to save him. Linda pondered the significance. Although he was an experienced diver with proper safety measures in place, Søren’s skill set was no match for his older brother’s avarice—his psychopathic bent and malignant narcissism. Between the clues left in The Love Pirate by a bereaved Heidi Jorgensen, the phony stories of Midway told by Niels to conceal the truth, and the fact that only members of the Jorgensen family had access to Søren’s diving belt, the circumstantial case was just that—circumstantial—but it was significant. It brought Linda to the same conclusion it seemed that Heidi did in burying her youngest son. “Fouled” in this case could only mean sabotage and murder—fratricide no less—by design.
The Jorgensen family in an undated photograph, from left to right: Niels Sr., Heidi, and Niels Jr. A young Søren stands behind his parents and brother in happier times, entirely unaware of the tragic scheme that awaits him. Courtesy: Linda Schulko.
By the summer of ’76, it was becoming increasingly obvious to Linda that Jorgensen’s first victim was likely his own brother Søren, his inaugural murder having been committed as far back as the autumn of ’49. While the precise motive wasn’t yet entirely clear, Jorgensen was not unlike many other notorious serial killers, also often documented necrophiles, who first begin with the murder of a blood relative. As a true psychopath prepared to claim an array of victims for an equally wide range of reasons as his delinquent career evolved, it seemed that Jorgensen’s first kill amounted to what the FBI classify as a personal cause homicide. Later, perhaps during those years for which he was MIA overseas, he began to cultivate aberrant libidinous impulses and an erotic fascination with death, experimenting with a variety of criminal paraphilias that ensured his subsequent murders were sexual homicides by definition.
It was an evolution that would allow Jorgensen’s willingness to kill for what he saw as a matter of rational self-interest to progress into an actual desire to kill for very different reasons. Linda was now satisfied that by the time he had arrived in the Mad City, having claimed even more victims, Jorgensen’s constitution had changed into something his own mother felt compelled to fictionalize. Either way, there was no turning back. Heidi Jorgensen knew it then and Linda knew it too by the time she graduated from UW with her master’s degree in the summer of ’72. Linda remained on campus an extra two and a half years to audit courses into the winter of ’75 and to get to the bottom o
f the true identity of Annabel in The Love Pirate—likely one of Jorgensen’s victims after Søren. Alternatively, Annabel may have been a composite of several women—what is known among serial killers as a preferred victim type and the exemplar of their twisted fantasies. By late ’75, however, Linda knew she couldn’t continue to be a professional student languishing at UW, guarding it, in her mind at least, against the return of Jorgensen, or others like him, for years on end. It would instead require going at it full-time—full bore. Within the next six months, by June of ’76, she’d left Madison and signed up to join the Milwaukee PD—the fall academy class. She’d caught the cop bug.
High Wire
Back in the Mad City, in the wake of Linda’s departure for Milwaukee and just after the fanfare of the Independence Day holiday had subsided, a woman named Debra “Debbie” Bennett, age twenty, walked into the old Cardinal Hotel on East Wilson Street. The Cardinal at the time was a four-story throwback to when the Madison downtown was a true drifter’s delight, at once a port city, railway city, and military community. Perched just outside the UW campus bubble in terms of surrounding geography, the old-style hotel was worlds away in terms of demography. It was a place steeped in history and human tragedy, for many the end of the line where rooms were let mostly to down-and-outers, parole absconders, and others who didn’t want to—or more accurately couldn’t—rent at places such as the Edgewater, the Hill Inn, or even the Ruby Marie right down the street. Following its brief golden era as a Mad City hot spot, like many downtown businesses in Great Lakes industrial cities, the Cardinal as a period hotel was also one of Madison’s first casualties of twentieth-century mass suburbanization.
Once a legitimate destination for businessmen and tourists alike, the Cardinal had, by the mid-1970s, devolved into a “weekly rates” firetrap that also sported an old-school roughneck kick-n-stab saloon on the main floor. By the time Debbie Bennett checked in, the bar proper—one that was shuttered for nearly fifteen years during Prohibition—had begun playing host to a motley array of both daytime and nighttime regulars. During the workweek, these regulars included mostly local teamsters on their lunch breaks and sometimes Oscar Mayer factory workers needing a belt of something after punching out early. As daylight died, the occasional Mad City greaser or UW hippie hailing from one of the student ghettos in the 500 blocks of Mifflin, Dayton, or West Washington might stop by to score Mary Jane or angel dust. Juvie punks would come there to meet their fences and those who peddled goods stolen from daytime residential burglaries. The occasional prostitute might even show up to meet a trick. Two years earlier, the place had received a roughshod makeover, the original dining room dating to the building’s 1908 construction renovated to become the Mad City’s inaugural discotheque. In time, as the area gentrified on through the 1990s, the Cardinal dropped the “hotel” and, as the Cardinal Café & Bar, went on to become a destination for a more eclectic and multicultural clientele. The place evolved to epitomize Mark Twain’s adage that with age even politicians and old tawdry buildings can become respectable. But in the summer of ’76, the Cardinal was still a hotel and was still rough trade—not a venue for the light drinker or the faint of heart. It was also about to become the next morbid curiosity in the city’s expanding reign in murder.
The evening of Thursday, July 8, 1976, marked the official countdown to the summertime blues in the Mad City—the start of the summer blockbusters being screened beneath the twilight at Madison’s iconic Big Sky Drive-In—when young Debbie showed up at the Cardinal out of luck and out of money. Originally hailing from the village of Ridgeway about an hour to the west, whatever had led Debbie to the Cardinal as a last resort for weekly lodging and devoid of belongings spoke to a narrowing world that had been shaped by pain and despair—a pain that was about to get worse. As one of five children in a tight-knit cheese-making and farming community, Debbie’s biographical details chillingly reflect what research in victimology has already confirmed with respect to the correlation between family size, birth order, childhood geography, and the risk of victimization. With Debbie’s small-town life seemingly played out back at home, she relocated from Ridgeway with a friend shortly after graduating high school about a year earlier. An all-too-familiar tale, she’d longed to live the big-city life while completely unprepared for the world into which she soon found herself being hurled headlong.
By the time Debbie landed in the Mad City in the fall of ’75, her life was already something of a contradiction. Her family would later describe her as someone who was naïve and overly trusting while at the same time irrationally and unremittingly paranoid about death. Debbie was so afraid of dying that she avoided any activity that offered any hint of danger—direct or indirect. Risk averse to the max, she even forewent getting a driver’s license for fear that it might increase her chances of dying in a car wreck one day. Perhaps paradoxically, she also believed in the kindness of strangers—certainly more than she should have. She also, mixing with the wrong crowd in Madison, became hooked on one or more of the many drugs that were in generous supply at the time. It was that element of her life that seemed to lead her, time and again, into the clutches of one of those countless opportunistic strangers who—as Jorgensen had—knew that Madison was a target-rich environment.
In the week or so before turning up at the Cardinal, Debbie, for reasons unknown, had been summarily evicted from her low-rent apartment on Loftsgordon Avenue in the city’s east end. Having only been in Madison for a short while, Debbie’s life had quickly turned into a high-wire act without a safety net. Popped for felony breaking and entering by Madison cops back in June, she was keeping company with an undesirable assortment of dope fiends and petty crooks while largely estranged from her father Bill, by that time in palliative care back in Ridgeway in the final stages of terminal cancer. Debbie, on the street without money, had nonetheless somehow—perhaps through the kindness of strangers upon which she had come to depend, perhaps by some other more nefarious means that would foretell what came next—managed to scrounge enough cash to secure a room for a week’s stay at the Cardinal.
Debbie’s meager possessions still locked inside her apartment back on Loftsgordon, she took the room key from the hotel manager and barkeep, a man named Luther Getty, and was gone again that same afternoon—July 8. Although she had checked into the Cardinal as her next stop in an apparent downward spiral, Debbie would actually never spend a single night there. It was the first of a series of mysteries to dog a case that would never get past square one. If closing the lust murder of a Sunday School–going Chicago socialite like Christine Rothschild proved to be too much wood to chop for local law enforcement eight years earlier, the case of Debbie Bennett—a troubled young woman who other than her immediate family had few advocates in either life or death—was effectively relegated to the unsolved column before it even happened.
One of the chief problems in what would become known as the Bennett “big sea” case—a nautical reference later made by a quick-rigged task-force detective that suggested, presumably, that the investigation was either underwater or listlessly adrift—was that, all preconceived notions about Debbie’s lifestyle and habits aside, piecing together her final movements proved even trickier than one would expect. While the psychological autopsy in Christine Rothschild’s murder was comparatively well established, albeit with some pieces of the timeline missing, Debbie’s final forty-eight hours were a matter of pure guesswork—a combination of several delays and missteps in the investigation based on wrong assumptions. Her last verified whereabouts weren’t in fact at the Cardinal as some first speculated or as the Capital Times erroneously first reported. Rather, the place Debbie was last seen was back on Loftsgordon Avenue, in the 1400 block. As was later confirmed by an eight-year-old child who had been playing in the street at the time, Debbie was last seen walking barefoot down a sun-parched sidewalk away from her old apartment, looking dazed and slinging a brown purse. That was the afternoon of July 10—a Saturday—and a full two day
s after renting a room at the Cardinal from Luther Getty. Debbie Bennett was never seen alive again. From then on, exactly how, where, and when she fell off her precarious high wire remained a mystery. That is, until the afternoon of July 21, nearly two weeks later, when the horror of her brief life’s end was unveiled.
“Beyond Recognition”
On that afternoon of Wednesday the twenty-first, two Dane County land surveyors walking along Old Sauk Pass Road, about twenty miles from where Debbie was last seen alive, happened upon a grisly discovery in a culvert near the former Wilkie Farm—today a protected Ice Age scientific reserve. Initially unsure of what they were looking at, the indiscernible mass in the gulley soon revealed itself to be a human form, twisted and charred as black as the rural Wisconsin soil that surrounded it. The Dane County Sheriff’s Office and local coroner, Dr. Clyde Chamberlain, soon arrived and estimated the remains to be those of a woman in her twenties and the body, “burned beyond recognition” as was later publicly stated, to have been there for at most two weeks. No one in Dane County—where Madison serves as the county seat—knew Debbie Bennett, and would have had any reason to assume that she was the Jane Doe in the ditch. Further, no one back in Madison or elsewhere even considered that Debbie was missing. In the intervening two weeks since she was last seen walking alone down the street, no one was even looking for her save a couple of social workers stopping into the Cardinal hoping to find her and persuade her to return to Ridgeway where her father lay on his deathbed. Cardinal manager Luther Getty later confirmed to Capital Times reporters that Debbie never spent a single night at the Cardinal in spite of checking in two days before her disappearance. She also “never even checked out” he told reporters once it was revealed, nearly a week later through dental records, that the scorched body found out in Dane County was in fact Debbie. Two days after that revelation, Debbie’s father died. A joint funeral was held for the two—father and daughter—in the nearby town of Dodgeville.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 12