It was 1976 when they first met, broke the ice, and began discussing their respective twisted fixations. By the time Lucas was arrested in Texas and Toole picked up for an arson in Florida, the arrests coming within months of each other in 1983, they were each prepared to talk. The police were soon able to link Toole to at least six murders, some carried out with the assistance of Lucas, some carried out on his own. The latter set of murders included a Florida man he had barricaded in his house and then burned alive after setting the place on fire, as well as—most infamously—the 1981 murder of Adam Walsh, kidnapped from a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida and later decapitated. The boy’s murder turned Adam’s father, John Walsh, into an unrivaled anticrime crusader, with the murder of his son leading him to spearhead the long-running America’s Most Wanted series, followed by the recent The Hunt, which similarly uses reenactments to solicit tips on the whereabouts of wanted fugitives. Lucas’s murderous exploits were, however, harder to pin down.
Claiming to be emissaries of a secret underground Satanic cult operating nationwide known as the “The Hand of Death,” Lucas asserted that he and Toole had left a grisly trail of hundreds—possibly thousands—of victims, mostly hitchhikers, prostitutes, and truck-stop lot lizards all across the Lower 48. Lucas initially claimed to have killed twenty-eight people as part of his indoctrination into the cult, a number that quickly ballooned to over one hundred as soon as investigators from various states got a chance to sit down with him. Lucas reveled in the attention, and as dubious as some of his admissions were, he was hitting all of the hot buttons within the American psyche at the time: serial murder, interstate flight, and most importantly, Satanism. An unrepentant and malignant narcissist and attention seeker, Lucas was playing a nationwide consortium of cops eager to clear the books like a collection of Stradivarii—and it was working. By November ’83, the Lucas Task Force was officially formed. He was set to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. He’d make sure of it, and the cops would do their best to help make it so.
In the end, Lucas was convicted of “only” eleven murders of the roughly three thousand to which he had confessed. Experts who’ve examined the cases in detail and are able to see the forest through the trees amid his many confessions, often later recanted, have sanded down his admitted number to roughly forty slayings where there appear to be actual linkages. For ten of these murders Lucas was sentenced to terms of life imprisonment. The sole murder to which Lucas conclusively could be linked and which sent him to death row was that of an unidentified Jane Doe found in a culvert off I-35 near Georgetown, Texas. Apparently thrown off the freeway overpass to the pavement below, the body had no identifying or distinguishing features other than two missing front teeth, a distinctive ring, and two matchbooks, including one from a dive motel in Henryetta, Oklahoma, some four hundred miles away. Discovered on the afternoon of Halloween ’79, the victim was also wearing a fittingly themed set of orange stockings, the only clothing left on the body. The unidentified woman was soon assigned a new name. They called her Orange Socks.
Eventually sentenced to what the inmates call the “stainless steel ride”—death by lethal injection—at Huntsville for the sexual assault and murder of Orange Socks, Lucas would later have that sentence commuted because of concerns raised about his confession to the murder. These concerns centered on his penchant both for grandstanding and for recanting confessions. Moreover, lawmen bet on the fact that, in the Orange Socks case, carrying out an execution under these circumstances would not be judged favorably by history—even in Texas. It seems that many people, all the way up to then Governor George W. Bush signing off on the commutation, had their doubts about the confession and Lucas’s actual involvement in the death of Orange Socks—today still an unidentified Jane Doe. Prior to receiving executive clemency in 1998, Lucas had spent the better part of fifteen years on death row. All the while, he was still ready and willing to talk to anyone who would listen.
In the meantime, cops in plain clothes with trunk loads of banker’s boxes full of manila folders, each folder containing a cold-case murder book and an array of gruesome murder scene pix, were happy to make the drive to Texas to obtain Lucas’s confession, clear the books, and be gone again. For many a weary and ethically pliable homicide cop, Lucas’s compulsively blabbing about the Hand of Death, murderous road trips with Toole from coast to coast, and dabbling in Satanic ritual and torture seemed to loosely fit just about every MO of every unsolved case in America. Before long, word of Lucas’s self-proclaimed exploits, his road trips through flyover states as a murderous drifter, and the likelihood of his having the highest body count of any serial killer in national history—maybe even toppling H. H. Holmes—had made its way to the Mad City. As 1983 drew to a close, fifteen years after the Rothschild murder, the first in the series of Madison’s cold campus and area slayings, opportunity seemed to be knocking. The Wisconsin police would answer. Soon Lucas would be happy to oblige them.
Senior Year
As the Major Case Unit back in Madison dusted off old manila folders—more than a decade’s worth of pain and torment relegated to the pages of handwritten reports, photostats, teletypes, and carbons—the Mad City and its beloved UW wondered if they might finally be out of the woods. Although the year 1983 had elsewhere brought about interesting times, in Madison, things seemed relatively sedate. Things still more or less seemed as they used to be or at least as people thought they used to be. Unfortunately, as 1984 came into focus, the UW campus, the common denominator in at least six sex murders dating back to the spring of ’68, was about to pivot toward a new and unforeseen connection. Soon, those who didn’t know or who’d forgotten that UW had other campuses outside the Mad City would find the fall of ’84 to be a revelatory time. The events of that same autumn would also set in motion new theories—new spook stories and scattershot conspiracies—that in coming years would propel the entire UW campus system back into the national spotlight.
That same August of ’84 would mark the start of the fourth and final fall term—the start of senior year—for twenty-year-old Janet Raasch. Like Donna Mraz before her, Janet was a business major; like Julie Ann Hall, she also worked in an administrative position on campus. The distinction in Janet’s case was that she was based at UW’s lesser-known campus at Stevens Point, a small city about a hundred miles north of the Mad City in Portage County and roughly the same distance due west of Green Bay. Despite the change of venue, by October of that year, the similarities to the other UW girls before her would soon reveal themselves.
In the fall of ’84 UW’s Stevens Point campus had been a university in the traditional sense for just a little over twenty years, having been founded originally as a “normal school” in 1894 by Portage County to train teachers. Unlike the Madison campus, UW’s flagship venue, Stevens Point was and remains a comparatively rural area with its just over four hundred acres of rolling green campus lying between State Route 66 and I-39. With less than a quarter of the students hosted by the Mad City campus, it also remains a place—apart from the nature reserve and twenty-five-acre lake within the campus boundary—that typifies the state’s scenic veneer. In addition, it’s isolated enough that, once word got out, a number of NFL teams used the campus and surrounding areas as an off-season training ground, the so-called “Cheese League” to rival Major League Baseball’s spring training “Grapefruit League” in Florida.
Simultaneously balancing her senior-year studies with her part-time job at the DeBot Center on campus—the principal dining and conference hall—Janet Raasch was, like so many of the victims before her, someone never afraid to burn the candle at both ends. A farm girl born and raised, young Janet wasn’t afraid of hard work, or afraid of getting her hands dirty, or afraid of much of anything. She was also too young to remember, much less likely even know of, what happened to the girls back at or near UW–Madison—girls hitchhiking, walking, or simply going about their daily business when they were found by their killers. Then aga
in, that was Madison, and Stevens Point was not the Mad City. The Capital City Killer stuck to the capital as his name implied, and those sorts of things simply didn’t happen in agrarian Portage County. UW–Stevens Point, like UW–Madison, was a decent place—or so it was thought. The reality is that, in 1984 Middle America, nowhere was safe. It was an inconvenient truth few would admit.
On the afternoon of October 11, 1984—a Thursday in broad daylight—an acquaintance from campus dropped Janet off at a county road junction along State Trunk Highway 54, just outside the Stevens Point city limits. Janet told the man that she was going to head home for a few days, likely just for the weekend, back to her family’s place in the town of Merrill about fifty miles north of the campus. Yet the driver, as he later reported, had picked her up hitchhiking while carrying a small satchel in Stevens Point and driven her beyond the city limits to the south, not the north. In fact, it was never clear—never reported by the media, never clarified by police—why exactly Janet was brought to that particular intersection to be dropped off. It was also never clear why, on a Thursday barely into her final fall term, she was already headed back home. Perhaps most curiously, no one ever explained—or bothered to ask—why she was dropped off roughly fifteen minutes away, near the town of Buena Vista, when she was actually headed in the opposite direction. Unlike Julie Speerschneider, the vanishing hitchhiker who disappeared into the night less than a block from her destination, the intended final stop defied the drop point. Unlike Speerschneider, Janet was also left at the roadside alone and nowhere near where she was headed—in fact, in the opposite direction entirely. Yet, precisely like Speerschneider, it was in the rearview mirror of a car speeding away that Janet was last seen alive.
Four days later, October 15, the manager at the DeBot Center made a call to Janet’s room at Watson Hall on campus to ask her to come in for a shift, only to find she wasn’t there. She always answered the phone during the week; she never missed the opportunity to work an extra shift. It was a simple but revelatory turn of events. One thing led to another—and to another—and before long, friends and coworkers started piecing together that Janet never made it to her family’s home in Merrill. Her family had some concerns of their own and eventually called the university administration and staff at Watson Hall. In the first critical few hours, it seemed that her family had assumed she was back in Stevens Point, either working at the DeBot Center or out with friends and otherwise delayed in leaving. Her friends on campus and the staff at DeBot assumed at the same time that she had arrived safely back in Merrill. All the while, she was somewhere else entirely.
Before long, Stevens Point was Madison from fifteen years earlier, transplanted. Though the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Janet Raasch were vaguely reminiscent of the Julie Speerschneider case, the vigorous leaflet campaign certainly had the makings of an encore of the community closing ranks in the aftermath of Julie’s disappearance in March of ’79. Posters bearing Janet’s smiling visage—the quintessence of rural innocence—went up on the front doors of grocers, hardware stores, and greasy spoons across three counties. The media reported as best they could on the case but the timeline and even a theoretical itinerary was difficult if not impossible to nail down. Why did she choose to get dropped off in Buena Vista? Why was she going home to Merrill? Whom might she have been waiting for on Highway 54? An appeal for witnesses and fresh tips came up dry, other than a reported sighting in Marshfield, a town located about a forty-minute drive west of the campus. The cops chased it down and, like so many false sightings that waylay investigations, it was ruled out as bunk. As Janet’s name and details were flagged as endangered missing on the National Crime Information Center and her face became a fixture on every lamppost, mailbox, and storefront across central Wisconsin, all anyone could do was wait. All the while, the man who’d dropped her off in the middle of nowhere—the last to see her alive—was sticking to his story.
Hunting Season
The morning of November 17, 1984, marked the start of a seasonably cold Saturday in Portage County, one week before the Thanksgiving weekend and within that narrow window when it was open season on the state’s bird population before they flew south for the winter. With that, a small hunting party set out into the woods southwest of Highway 54 and County Road J near the village of Plover, dried autumn leaves rustling beneath their feet from the trees above, which had long since been rendered bare. The hunters were only a dozen paces or so into the bush when they happened upon a partially clothed and partially decomposed body lying on the forest floor. It was the remains of Janet Raasch, found a mere three turnoffs east down Highway 54 from where she had purportedly been dropped off near Old Amish Road.
The total distance from where she was last seen alive to where she was found dead was less than two miles. The total time elapsed between when she was last seen by her friend at the roadside to when she was found by the bird hunters was thirty-seven days. She had been dead since the day she was last seen, and, in the intervening weeks, the weather and local scavengers had made the identification process difficult. The missing-person poster circulated throughout the area and the local news reports, however, had specified the clothing she was last seen wearing, and in the early hours of the investigation, it allowed for a tentative identification. Janet’s sister and father back in Merrill had just finished a day of hunting that same Saturday when they returned to the homestead and the phone rang. It was the dreaded call that changed everything and allowed the Raasch family to join the Rothschilds, the Bennetts, the Halls, the Speerschneiders, the LeMahieus, the Stewarts, and the Mrazes as the collateral damage of the Capital City Killer’s mayhem. Only now, it was no longer the Capital City. The scourge knew no limits other than, as some speculated, restricting the hunt to on or near additional UW campuses.
A subsequent autopsy and cause of death determination was slow going. Two months after the body had been discovered, the crime lab in Madison still hadn’t completed the full postmortem exam and report, nor conducted tox screens on the victim’s blood and hair. In fact, it wasn’t until the final days of January ’85 that Portage County Coroner Scott Rifleman was prepared to confirm that Janet’s death was a homicide at all. He speculated that the girl had been strangled to death, though the state of the body—as with so many of the others—made it impossible to say for certain. Investigators on the case who refused to be named conceded that “partially clothed” meant that Janet’s pants had been removed, and that she had likely been “sexually molested,” as they discreetly leaked to the press.
With that, Janet Raasch, missing person, became case number 84-I-1548—homicide. Over the years that file number would become engraved into the minds of countless investigators. Unlike the quagmire back in the Mad City, the case was a Portage County affair from start to finish. The Sheriff’s Department maintained sole custody of the case and worked it as best they could given the investigative and technological limitations of the era, and for a small agency actually managed to punch above its weight and give the case a serious effort. But just like back in Madison, detectives came and went, banker’s boxes piled up, tips were reviewed and vetted—all to no avail. No one would admit it, but by the close of 1985 the case was already cold.
Seventeen years later, in 2002, Janet’s remains were, like Donna Mraz’s body, exhumed as part of a desperate attempt to probe for new evidence—offender DNA in this case. They found none. Later, in July 2013, the Stevens Point Journal printed new information—once again leaked, but with the best intentions—that cops were working a new angle: that Janet was pregnant at the time of her murder. It might explain the sudden unscheduled and unannounced return home that autumn, the odd drop point—perhaps a meeting spot—and could certainly yield one or more people with a motive. The other possibility is that the removal of the clothing, the pregnancy, and the cops staying mum on the cause of death all converge. It could be that their refusing to cough up the precise cause of death, refusing to confirm or deny—or refut
ing altogether—the coroner’s earlier proclamation that she was strangled, reflects the fact that the theory of a botched abortion matches injuries observed at the scene thirty years earlier. The theory might even explain why, over a month after she was discovered, a precise cause of death couldn’t be determined for certain. It may, in fact, explain a lot. If the tip is indeed genuine, the suspect list should have been—and still should be—a short one. The driver who was the last to see her alive should also still be at the top of that list.
As unlikely as it seems, there are indeed tragic cases—many cases, in fact—where missing-person and murder investigations end up being revealed as accidental deaths. They often then end up as criminally negligent homicides rather than murders per se, but horrific losses of life no less, and typically at the hands of someone the victim trusted—or was simply duped into meeting before a procedure, such as a high-risk abortion, being forced upon them. In Janet’s case, it might explain the drop point, with the story of going home for the weekend being subterfuge. It would certainly explain why the cause of death was never publicly revealed. Unlike the other Mad City victims, many of whom were found months or years later, a single month over the course of a cold Wisconsin autumn wouldn’t be enough to render a cause of death determination impossible if carried out by a competent pathologist. The more likely scenario is instead that the cause of death is the most significant piece of holdback information the cops had at the time—and still have. It would mean that the cause of death was central to the motive and to the probable offender-victim relationship. Either way, the revelation of the new theory by the local press got someone talking—or more accurately, writing.
Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot Page 29