The dust jacket cover of The Love Pirate following its lone print run after being self-published by Jorgensen through Vantage Books, the now-defunct vanity press.
In peeling open the red, white, and blue box with the USPS logo, Linda dumped out the lone item onto her kitchen table where it spun slightly clockwise, the dust jacket facedown to reveal a blank rear side. Linda turned it over to see the front cover. The dust jacket design, a weird cottage country motif created by some anonymous hack, didn’t square with the images conjured in Linda’s mind by the original unvarnished manuscript she’d pored over so many times, the passages she’d decrypted and digested. She had envisaged something more literal and in keeping with the title—the taking of Jorgensen’s twisted definition of love by violence, by ruthless piracy—as opposed to the infantile and benign image ultimately chosen. On the front of the matte dust jacket, a pontoon plane vectors left toward a small lake circumscribed by pine trees and low-rise mountains—an interpretation of the volcanic lake from the story where he hides his captive—as a full moon and starry night illuminate a makeshift runway along with a glass-like surface of the still water. In the bottom foreground, the silhouette of a crudely sketched timber-frame cabin, its first- and second-story windows illuminated from inside, its dock extending well out into the lake. And there it was, The Love Pirate in published form, Jorgensen mocking Linda, Judith, Christine, and his other victims past and future—mocking his own mother as its author—all at once. The specs: a 6" x 9" hardback, 239 pages, ISBN 533-04835-4. Suggested retail price: $10.95 USD, copyright Heidi B. Jorgensen. Inside the dust jacket, the front flap, the book’s description for a commercial market, a two-hundred-word summary written on the quick by a marketer back in New York who never knew the real meaning of the book, who had no idea that he or she was drafting a précis of Jorgensen’s murderous career. Nonetheless, the “hook” for potential future readers—whoever they might be—as composed by an impartial third party boiled down with disturbing accuracy to a semifictionalized psychological assessment of the real Dr. Corcoran, the novel’s bizarre antihero—real name: Niels Bjorn Jorgensen.
Dr. Francis Corcoran [. . .] gets what he wants [. . .] then he meets Annabel in San Francisco [. . .] he must have her! She resists, he lures her into his car [. . .] he assures her that, after a time, he will return her to society unharmed [. . .] does he sacrifice all and become persecuted as a kidnapper? Read The Love Pirate and see!
Linda fixated on a single word in the cover description that hadn’t appeared in the original unedited manuscript: persecuted. In Heidi’s outré narrative, Corcoran is a sexual psychopath, inveterate predator, and kidnapper whose actions are sanded down to the puerile and purely silly to conceal their truly aberrant nature. The term “persecuted” thus never appeared, it couldn’t have—the story was an R-rated horror drive-in movie transformed into a G-rated after-school special for those who bothered to notice the veiled warnings embedded in the text. The moral couldn’t be spoon-fed; the vernacular couldn’t be proscriptive; the antihero’s actions could never be mitigated. Heidi knew it like Walt Disney knew it; she simply followed suit. Old Walt had by then already sanitized countless folktales borne out of medieval sexual depravity, and done so with great success. His 1950 film Cinderella and every version that’s followed is little more than a family-friendly reinterpretation of a darker folktale that appears across multiple languages in the Middle Ages known as both “The Persecuted Heroine” and “Cruel Relatives in Law.” Similarly, the 1937 classic Snow White is distilled from numerous folktales collected over the years by anthropologists and consolidated in the Grimm Brothers’ macabre story “The Glass Coffin,” first published in the nineteenth century and derived from the German folktale “The Sleeping Beauty” (also the basis for the 1959 Disney film, Sleeping Beauty) and the Italian legend known as “The Young Slave,” both of which have much less happy endings—ones that annual visitors to the Magic Kingdom are likely unaware of. To therefore suggest that Dr. Corcoran as the metaphorical Dr. Niels Jorgensen would not be rightfully prosecuted, but would instead be persecuted—most readers not distinguishing, much less appreciating, the difference between the two—was a bottom-of-the-ninth edit by Jorgensen himself. He had made himself the hero, all those who opposed him the villains. He was rewriting history on a single print-on-demand run.
But the shrewd substitution was also an editorial decision made and an Easter egg inserted on Jorgensen’s orders to the publisher, no question about it. In his mind, he was and always had been taking what he was owed in life; to deny him was merely to provoke him. It was not his fault that, in his twisted mind, his superiority was his curse. To hold him accountable for what nature made him was to wrongfully and hypocritically condemn him. Like those persecuted before him, he saw himself as the real victim, a righteous man whose punishment and ill-treatment was more political than it was moral or legal. Niels knew that Linda would eventually find her way to the book and this one word—his sole editorial contribution to the book based on his deeds, his book of secrets—and it was his countermove to Linda’s opener in their expanding match. Rook takes knight pawn.
Machinations
As Linda thought carefully about her next move, the Major Case Unit in the Mad City was contemplating one of its own. It was a new strategy, a latter-day whisper campaign to introduce a reinvented iteration of the Capital City Killer as the prime suspect, not just for Donna Mraz’s murder, but for every murder. It was a theory developed in a darkroom—the camera obscura—that held that a single killer, should a suitable one be found, might indeed be deemed responsible for everything that had ever happened in recent memory. There were and are still conflicting reports about who was by this time actually pulling the strings—who the master puppeteer controlling the money and the narrative of the investigation actually was. Come the fall of ’82, things were set to change. In a big way.
Although there had previously been a denial by police in front of cameras that the Mad City murders were connected, the Mraz murder was the proverbial fly in the ointment. Not since Christine Rothschild had a victim so galvanized the city and its single largest employer, the UW campus. Not since Christine had a victim been killed and left directly on the campus as a single homicidal event. The thought of one killer terrorizing the state capital and claiming its young at random was terrifying enough given the size of the city at the time. The idea that one, two, as many as five or six killers were walking the streets at any given time in Madison—and were equally fixated on either the campus or any girl even loosely affiliated with it or in its vicinity—was a poison pill no right-minded Madisonian would swallow.
Avoidance and incompetence gave way to denial and eventually to deceit. Madison wasn’t the first city to go through such a crisis, nor will it be the last. Yet, eventually, after a few years—though it varies by city—that same scheme comes to work against every lawman who, whether officially on camera before the state and now national media, or behind home plate at little league games, needed to come up with a way to placate those who actually lived the reality of the era. A year earlier—only a month earlier for that matter—none of the killings on the books were related. That was the official credo. But after Donna Mraz, things changed. Those same books could be cooked. No one would ever know. The machinations of a Middle America scheme no one ever knew existed soon took shape. All the Mad City needed was a name.
The stark reality is that there is never any shortage of people ready and willing to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, especially if it comes with the cachet of being a serial killer. The motives for this run the gamut; however, disturbed people whose precise whereabouts can’t be verified—or won’t be verified by authorities for fear of letting the truth get in the way of a good story—have often inherited serial killer titles as part of some mutually beneficial agreement even when not already facing a murder charge. Their confessions aren’t part of some plea bargain or defense strategy, but for some other intrinsic reason most
of us will never understand. The looser the linkages between cases, the more difficult it is. Like in the case of Whitechapel murders attributed in whole to Jack the Ripper, they are more difficult to assign to a named person; however, sometimes the connections are just close enough, the suspect just believable enough in his pathetic need for attention, that the public buys it.
To try and stem the flow of nutcases who come out of the woodwork during multiple murder panics claiming to be responsible, and to allow themselves to focus on finding the real killer, most police departments limit key information relating to MO, signature, victimology, disposal pathway, and other sensitive details to a handful of lead investigators within the inner circle of an investigation. This inner circle is intended to function as something of a containment field, a way to keep what’s known as “holdback evidence” out of the public eye. That same privileged information can later be used to test the stories of those coming forward, claiming responsibility. False confessors can be weeded out if, when questioned on certain details, they can’t recite what was held back from press reports and seem to just be aping what they read, saw, or heard in the news.
The value of having a holdback evidence policy was first suggested in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, a fictional treatment of the actual 1841 murder of a young New York tobacconist named Mary Rogers, and arguably the first piece of true crime ever written. Holdback evidence, as first recommended by Poe though not by using this precise terminology, is a list of facts about an open or unsolved case that are concealed from both the public and even rank-and-file officers who inevitably talk too much. Aside from being a good practice to identify false confessions, it was also proposed by Poe, in a roundabout way, to deter copycats. In reality, the two phenomena are closely connected. Albert DeSalvo, who had confessed to being the “Phantom Fiend”—the Boston Strangler’s alternate nickname—back in 1964, is confirmed by DNA to have murdered the thirteenth victim attributed to the Strangler, Mary Sullivan, but questions remain as to whether DeSalvo actually killed the other twelve women. Some ponder whether he was simply a copycat seeking attention and also educated in how to offend based on the leaks about the Strangler’s MO and signature in the local press. Others have suggested that there may be as many five Boston Stranglers—plural—and that the failure of the Boston police to maintain a holdback evidence policy when the first linkages were made in 1962 actually opened the door for a wave of other paraphilic psychopaths to begin escalating to murder by mimicking the Strangler’s successful methods and forensic countermeasures. Lucky for them, DeSalvo admitted to them all.
But in Madison the linkages were even looser, the murders more spread out over space and time. To have someone willing to admit to them all would require a number of things to occur simultaneously. An offender would need to be in custody for a similar or related crime, preferably a sexual homicide. That crime would need to be substantively similar to at least one of the Capital City Killer’s crimes, much like DeSalvo’s murder was close enough to the other twelve credited to the Strangler. Lastly, ideally the offender, if old enough, would need to be willing to confess to all of the crimes dating back to the Rothschild murder and allow the cops to close the books, or alternatively there would need to be some other connection that would allow public opinion to make that linkage. Although it wouldn’t be a frame-up, it would, if such a person confessed, be a convenient solution for so many unsolved attacks. With Ed Edwards already well off the table as a potential Capital City Killer at the time of the Mraz murder, by the fall of ’82 the cops had a new name. While his age didn’t necessarily make him a match for most of Madison’s previous outrages, he could take the heat off the stalled Donna Mraz investigation and some of the more recent attacks. His name was Lonnie Taylor.
Exhumed
On November 3, 1982, the UW Police Department, a Captain Robert Hartwig now doing the talking, confirmed that they had obtained a judge’s order to exhume the body of Donna Mraz, her remains having been interred just four months earlier—nearly to the day. While exhumations would in later years become increasingly common for the purposes of procuring DNA samples and performing other more contemporary forensic tests, they dug Donna out of the ground for a more rudimentary procedure—to check her teeth. All things considered, it was actually a good hunch.
A week earlier, Madison city cops arrested eighteen-year-old Lonnie Taylor, a local creepo who’d been seen slowly following a young woman down Regent Street as he stealthily rode a ten-speed bicycle in the wake of her heel clacks—along the same block no less where a series of random slashings had occurred in the weeks leading up to Donna’s murder. The student witness in the window of the Breese apartments outside Randall Stadium of course hadn’t seen the killer on a bicycle but rather a silhouette fleeing on foot into the night. That posed a problem given that there was nothing to suggest any possible linkage to Donna’s murder or the other previous slayings that the police now seemed increasingly—and officially—prepared to chalk up to the work of a single serial killer. The witness who had reported the suspicious cyclist on Regent Street made, however, an additional revelation that police glommed onto. Taylor, the witness insisted, was also the same man he’d seen trying to break in to a home on North Randall Avenue, immediately to the east of the stadium where Donna was attacked. Once confronted in that incident, the burglar pulled out a blade—a stiletto knife, in fact—and threatened the witness before fleeing the scene. In that case, the same perp fled not on a bicycle but on foot.
Young Taylor’s presence near the leaning houses of Regent, cycling behind an oblivious female while inferentially preparing to pounce, might well have been a coincidence. He might have also been part of the next wave of Mad City paraphiliacs, someone inspired by the generous reportage of the earlier incidents that were all still unsolved. If so, he would have learned of the previous attacks in the same Regent Street corridor that offered a plethora of young women walking alone and, in keeping with the routine activities theory of crime, available as soft targets. Whatever the reason, it paled in comparison to the significance of the attempted B&E and subsequent knife threat. Not only did the MO and weapon mesh with the home invasion that immediately followed the Mraz stabbing, the style of knife—a thin stiletto edge consistent with a switchblade—was also believed to approximate the weapon used on both Donna and the later rape victim attacked on Fiedler Lane.
The daytime break-in on Randall Street, whether sexually motivated or not, is also in keeping with the activities of habitual or serialized offenders as they experiment with new crimes. Contrary to popular opinion—and misconception—serial offenders, whether serial killers, serial rapists, serial arsonists, or other, don’t continuously and unidirectionally escalate their offenses. Since all serial offending is defined by fluctuating intervals of compensation and decompensation, some offenders abstain for a time from committing crimes entirely while others may revert to the same default behaviors that often preceded their current fixations. More often than one might think, that means breaking and entering.
One example is Timothy Wilson Spencer, dubbed the “Southside Strangler,” who graduated from financially motivated burglaries to being a nighttime intruder and sexual murderer in Arlington, Virginia, between 1984 and 1987. Murdering at least five women in the area, Spencer continued his financially motivated breaking-and-entering exploits simultaneous with his murderous home invasions, each MO complementing the other. Spencer is, however, a notable but lesser-known case of the correlation between residential break-ins motivated by theft and what are known as “hot prowl” burglaries, motivated by sexual assault and, often, homicide.
The better-known example is, once again, Richard Ramirez, the LA “Night Stalker” mentioned earlier. A self-avowed Satanist, he terrorized residential areas between Los Angeles and San Francisco through a series of home-invasion rapes and murders, which a California judge would later describe as displaying “viciousness beyond any human understanding.” Cla
iming a total of fourteen victims, both male and female and ranging in age from nine to eighty-three between 1984 and 1985, Ramirez first began by burglarizing guest rooms with a master key while working as a Holiday Inn night clerk. Eventually, as his twisted and sadistic perversions began to overtake any remaining ability to function normally, Ramirez’s intrusion skills were used to facilitate nighttime rapes and murders as he continued to still commit daytime B&Es with theft of property. The crimes, though seemingly poles apart in terms of motive and MO, weren’t always mutually exclusive, one crime often complementing the other in terms of technique or knowledge gained. On at least one occasion, he first targeted a home for property, then used his newly gained knowledge of how to defeat the locks to return months later to rape and murder the female occupant and whoever else was there. Ultimately receiving thirteen death sentences, Ramirez was supposed to have been gassed in the green room at San Quentin State Prison—the infamous “Big Q”—where in 1996 he married his equally deranged long-term pen pal Doreen Lioy. He ended up cheating the hangman—or by then the needle man—and died of B-cell lymphoma in 2013 shortly after the couple divorced.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 27