Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot

by Michael Arntfield

  Beginning in 1997 through to the most recent case in 2014, at least nine UW–La Crosse undergraduate students—all male—have drowned in the Mississippi River, all tragic cases that the diligent La Crosse PD rightfully ruled as being accidental. In nearly every case, the men, last seen at or near bars close to the waterfront, were found to have blood alcohol concentrations of two to three times the legal limit for driving following postmortem toxicology tests. While the bereaved families of these same young men were incredulous that the victims, many of whom were varsity athletes and accomplished swimmers, could drown, many were also neophyte drinkers or previous abstainers seemingly unprepared for the effects of alcohol after what may have been an evening of predictable college bingeing.

  The path of least resistance for many inebriated and confused students would have been a downward trajectory toward the river with the risk of accidentally tumbling in. Add in drunken horseplay and showing off, and a deadly combination ensues. Water temperature at nearly any point in the school year combined with the effects of alcohol would lead to near-instant immobility leaving even the most seasoned swimmer quickly at risk under such circumstances. With drowning as the second leading cause of accidental death in America (after traffic accidents and ahead of firearms) for males within the same age range as these students—at the rate of about ten a day according to the Centers for Disease Control—and with alcohol consumption a leading contributor in these drownings, the La Crosse water deaths reflect a constellation of circumstances that, while horrible and no doubt preventable, actually mirror larger trends in the data nationwide with respect to lives lost to the water. The cases should have been open-and-shut with a discourse geared toward waterfront safeguards and the perils of immoderate alcohol consumption by college students. Instead, by 2008 that common sense narrative veered in another direction—toward the florid and the implausible. Toward that of a serial killer.

  Perhaps it was the ever-looming public myth of the Capital City Killer and the mysterious spate of UW-related murders within recent memory that fueled such talk. Perhaps it was something else entirely. Either way, talk of men being murdered—lured to the water’s edge, held underwater, thrown in the water, killed elsewhere and dumped in the river, you name it—began to gain unlikely but predictable momentum. Soon people started looking for a broader pattern, an MO and signature that could be belatedly or retroactively used to suit the theory—that might lend credence to the latest UW legend and justify the latest bandwagon conjecture.

  Two unlikely people aboard this same bandwagon—and unfortunately later driving it—included retired NYPD detectives named Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte. While selectively collating data from across the US, the retired cops apparently found a total of at least forty young men with similar demographic backgrounds—mostly white, mostly college students, mostly jock types—whose drowned corpses had turned up in bodies of water across a total of eleven states. While La Crosse and its campus students led the pack in terms of an overrepresentation of victims, the erstwhile detectives went public with what they thought was the signature of the killer or killers—spray-paint graffiti. Not just any graffiti, in fact, but rather graffiti images, or “tags,” depicting smiley faces. And so, with a flick of the switch and just like the Capital City Killer before it, the Smiley Face Killer was born. With that, a new era of speculation and storytelling began.

  The two retirees, having persuaded many of the dead teens’ parents to believe this, later went on to reference an undetermined number of cases where at least one smiley face graffito had been found at or “near”—in the most liberal sense of the word—where a body had been recovered. Some bodies turned up on shore with a smiley face tag anywhere from feet to miles from that location. In other cases, the tag was in the general vicinity of where it was believed the men had fallen into the water. Either way, the deaths, like all drowning deaths in fluid and moving bodies of water, made it difficult if not impossible to determine the precise point of entry and point of drowning. Also, because graffiti turned up at various locations adjacent to the river or in the surrounding urban area—in some cases, either miles upstream or downstream and blocks inland from the waterfront—this coincidence was summarily considered “proof” of the common signature. It was said to be the Smiley Face Killer’s calling card.

  But the truth is, just as drowning is the most common cause of accidental death among young men of this age group, so too are smiley faces the most common non-gang-affiliated graffiti image according to the FBI’s database, notwithstanding the fact that no two of the smiley faces appearing “near” the drowning sites are remotely similar in style, size, paint color, or drip pattern—the graffiti vandal’s, or “artist’s,” equivalent of a fingerprint. Some have tried to account for the latter detail, the overwhelming discrepancies between the tags, by actually suggesting that the Smiley Face Killer is actually a composite offender, a larger underground movement shoehorned into a single public persona. That it amounts to some kind of murderous syndicate or occult group targeting collegiate jocks and their lookalikes across America.

  Some murder-enthusiast and armchair-detective hobbyists have even theorized that the different murderers in different cities are all connected by a common goal and ideology with the “Smiley Face” members themselves—much like the shadowy hacktivist group Anonymous—being intentionally unaware of the real identities of their collaborators spread across America. The difference in this case of course is that, instead of launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against news corporation websites and exposing child predators like Anonymous does, the Smiley Face syndicate is stalking and luring students to the water and then drowning them. Especially, it seems, UW students. Especially, for whatever reason, Midwestern jocks. At some point, someone—either the killer or an accomplice—then spray paints a smiley face on an exposed surface somewhere in the surrounding vicinity to taunt authorities and leave the group’s calling card. The pattern continues from there, from city to city, campus to campus.

  The theory was and remains pure fiction. It’s also a combination of sheer opportunism and exploitation at its worst. Greater emotional toll is exacted upon families already devastated by the drowning death of a loved one by being told that death was at the hands of a murderer, possibly a serial killer or member of some occult group targeting young men. The Smiley Face Killer theory has been disproven wholesale by a number of expert bodies, most notably the Homicide Research Center located across the river from La Crosse in nearby Minneapolis, as well as countless independent subject matter experts. Referring to the “Midwest river deaths,” the FBI, in a 2008 press release, also described the Smiley Face hypothesis regarding the drownings as having no “evidence to substantiate the theory” that the deaths were anything more than alcohol-related drownings. Famed criminal profiler Pat Brown, in her own interview about the theory back in 2009, was less measured in her choice of words, calling it “ludicrous.” Yet, despite these same findings and an endless list of irrefutable rebuttals to the theory, for some, this modern-day reincarnation of the Ripper myth—one that has once again been transplanted to Wisconsin—lives on.

  Night Class

  On the morning of May 26, 2008, Linda hosted a fortieth anniversary memorial she had organized to commemorate Christine’s life—and death—at the Bell Carillon Tower at UW. Although the turnout four decades later was predictably scant, some UW PD and Madison cops—both old and new—showed up as a sign of support and respect. After Christine’s one-time philosophy professor offered a few solemn words, former UWPD Chief Ralph Hanson—now looking like Father Time in a pair of balmorals—stepped to the podium. He spoke honestly and reverentially. He said he’d wished he’d run the race that was the Rothschild murder as a younger man. What the current complement of officers on the force never told him is that Linda had already run it. She’d had tabs on Jorgensen the whole time, the department’s official all-points want long since evaporated.

  As the ceremony closed and
the bourdon bell in the campus belfry rang eighteen times—one toll for each year of Christine’s brief life—Linda scanned the small crowd and saw that none of Christine’s surviving family had made it out, save her sister Arlene. Christine’s mother, Patria, was by 1968 long since dead. Now, forty years after what should have been Christine’s original vigil had been denied, an aging Arlene approached and spoke to Linda. She described how the murder, the third child of the family being taken—stolen—too young, was the veritable end of her parents. She told Linda how, after that day, Christine’s name was seldom if ever mentioned again in the home; how everyone on Kenmore Street died with Christine that day.

  While Linda was never contacted by any of the Rothschilds between 1969 and 2008, the promise she kept was not to them but to Christine—a commitment made to Christine and only Christine. Her sister, Arlene, understood it all where others didn’t. She knew Linda had done—and was still doing—what the rest of the family simply couldn’t. They were simply all too broken. True to form, Arlene confirmed that Christine’s parents both died largely as strangers in the same house from different causes in later years. The attending pathologists offered some medical mumbo jumbo with respect to the specific reasons for organ failure but in layman’s terms it was a set of broken hearts that claimed them both. They both checked out early.

  After Arlene quietly stepped out of the room, some cops in addition to former Chief Hanson stepped forward as the rest of the modest crowd dispersed. But, unlike Hanson, they weren’t there to pay their respects, at least not as much as they were to keep tabs on Linda—to eavesdrop on the types of conversations she’d just had with Christine’s sister. To find out how she might upstage them, embarrass them. One detective with the campus PD in particular took Linda aside, ending the emotive occasion on a crassly sour note with a dire warning: that her “meddling” might just very well compromise their “very active” investigation on which they were working “very hard.” He warned her flat-out that she “outta” back off, mind her own business, and stop monkeying with their case—that she was flying too close to the sun.

  That’s all he could tell her; or, more accurately, all he would tell her. The latest generation of UW cops, it seemed, wasn’t interested in the most recent and actionable information on Jorgensen, including his current address, his unsettling correspondence, the missing Argentinean, or any of it. Ironically—or not—within a couple of years, that same detective purportedly working so “very hard” on the Rothschild case was revealed to be himself a high-risk paraphiliac and exemplary campus creep drawn to UW for all the wrong reasons. He was soon tossed from the department and criminally charged, as his career ended in disgrace, his so-called “very active” investigations had, as confirmed by 2010 and likely earlier, come to include the use of hidden up-skirt cameras while interviewing female victims in his office. Victims who, like Christine Rothschild, had approached the UWPD for help about stalkers and other issues that plagued just about every college campus, no matter how neatly preened. Like Jorgensen, whose updated details the same cop had refused to hear, he had been drawn to the Mad City under the pretense of public service—a position of trust and authority—for reasons we may never know. He’s since slipped off the map. Whatever was left of the Jorgensen case seems to have gone with him.

  Two months after the fortieth anniversary memorial organized by Linda, as the conspiratorial rhetoric surrounding the Smiley Face Killer, as the millennial version of the Capital City Killer, was gaining momentum, Linda decided to pen another note—not to Jorgensen but to William J. Bratton, chief of the LAPD. As a walk-in, she’d spoken to a desk officer at the closest station to Jorgensen’s condo, the Pacific Precinct on Culver Drive, when she was last there in the summer of ’94 to conduct one final stakeout. It’s where and when she first learned of the MIA Argentinean. With Jorgensen now living adjacent to Chief Bratton’s expansive jurisdiction—though officially LA Sheriff’s Department territory—and apparently gearing up, once again, for something sinister, Linda e-mailed Bratton a synopsis about the monster hiding in plain sight next door to his department. Linda, leapfrogging over the LA Sheriff’s Department with official jurisdiction in Marina del Rey, knew that the LAPD’s resources and street savvy would be needed to contain Jorgensen, even as an old man. Although he had thus far outwitted or otherwise eluded every police force in every city he had ever lived in or passed through, including the venerable NYPD, Linda hoped that the tenacious pedigree of LA chiefs might help to advance her cause.

  In LA and beyond, the names of the city’s previous police chiefs were synonymous with the annals of American crime fighting and winning the new west. One was William H. Parker, a native of the gunslinger capital, Deadwood, South Dakota, who moved to America’s “white spot” and joined the force in ’27. Wounded at D-day in ’44, he had become chief in August of ’50.

  Parker, unfortunately known for his racism and hard drinking, is also known for his zealous efforts to combat crime and to modernize the department, the creation of the department’s Gangster Squad to crush West Coast mobsters being one example. No doubt unknown to him at the time, Parker also had a stable of future talent under him. Day drunk 24/7 by the time he got his brass buttons, Parker was also smart enough to know he had no business trying to drive or write his own speeches. Those were the first two tasks that would require full-time assistants once he made chief. The first spot filled was his speechwriter: a young public-information officer named Gene Roddenberry. Later, his chauffeur would be a rookie cop named Daryl Gates. Roddenberry quit the force in ’56 to develop, among other projects, the original Star Trek—Mr. Spock is reportedly modeled on Parker’s cerebral but no-nonsense disposition. Gates later went on to become chief himself, first cocreating the original SWAT team in America and then later retiring to design first-person shooter video games after watching LA burn on his watch in the riots of ’92.

  By October of ’02 Bratton was sworn in, and by ’07, he was the first chief to receive a second term in over two decades. Linda, sensing that he’d want to know about Jorgensen, was confident that Bratton and his force were not the Major Case Unit of a generation past. Police work had grown up—at least a little—with serial killers, psychopaths, and criminal paraphilias now all part of the law enforcement nomenclature. She knew what buzzwords would get his attention. In an e-mail dated July 6, 2008, Linda laid out a brass-tacks summary of the last four decades, the names of witnesses, a timeline of events, and Jorgensen’s current lair. She laid out what had been done by Jorgensen, what was likely done, and what would no doubt be done again if left unchecked. It wasn’t a presumptive, sanctimonious missive. Linda’s lifetime of communiqués to the UWPD and other stakeholder law enforcement agencies never were. Rather, the letter was a concise and effective appeal to logic. She hit “send” and transmitted it to a general handle for the department’s senior brass and then waited. In two days, she had received a reply from a Captain Jackson on behalf of Chief Bratton. They were interested.

  They were also circumspect. The reply disclosed that there were, predictably perhaps, a slew of cold-case hospital-related murders, most in the city proper—LAPD jurisdiction—that seemed to square with the time Jorgensen had returned to the area. Although the department would look into a possible connection, she was told, it would take time. After waiting forty years, another few years, Linda thought, wouldn’t matter. At least now someone was paying attention. But it wasn’t just the LAPD.

  In the fall of ’08, two months after the LAPD got back to Linda, a class convened in a lecture hall over a thousand miles away in Canada on the grounds of Western University, one of the nation’s so-called “Old Four” colleges and distinguished institutions of higher learning. It was the first cohort of a new criminology-meets-communication class designed and taught by this author for senior undergraduate students. In lieu of a conventional term paper, students, after analyzing a series of five cold cases from across the United States, were to provide a report with a hypoth
esis on the solvability of the case today by the use of contemporary methods and technologies to reignite the case and—if possible—to create a suspect profile in the process. Although the students, other than what had been taught in the course, had no training in criminal investigative analysis, forensics, the tabling of preparatory and attack paraphilias, or criminal signature reading, that was exactly the point.

  It was to be a fresh look at the cases through the eyes of civilians exploiting the resources of modern technology—a think tank unconstrained by the forces of bureaucracy or the egos of blow-dried politicos. The class, mostly Dean’s honors students with advanced technological skills, hadn’t even been alive when the assigned cases had occurred. They consequently held no existing opinions or suppositions, none of the biases or inflated notions of expertise. Such biases or notions, often cited as a recipe for investigative “tunnel vision,” tend to occur when cops think they already know the ending. They can also occur when new attempts to investigate cold cases within the same department lead to what’s known as an institutional memory—the same missteps being repeated when new cops on the case still follow the same flawed playbook. Inspired in part by groups such as the Vidocq Society—a Philadelphia-based unsolved crimes club made up of subject matter experts—the class was an experiment as much as it was a credit course.

  Since the course was headed by me while still a cop at the time, and also moonlighting as a professor while completing a doctorate, it commingled law enforcement and academia so that students were effectively part of civilian reactivated homicide investigations. Offered as a night class—a pragmatic decision to accommodate personal scheduling—it quickly filled to capacity. In a regal, old lecture hall, perhaps reminiscent of ones at UW that Linda and Christine attended, students soon found themselves poring over files and workshopping murders that time had forgotten. Vetting and compiling suitable cases for the students had taken some serious legwork, and the goal was to select those cases that seemed to offer either one of two outcomes. Either the cases conveyed some semblance of solvability through the benefit of new technologies, or they were cases, woefully investigated the first time around, that might benefit from a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm without the type of intra-agency factionalism often bogging them down—in part why those same investigations seemed to have fizzled out and failed in the first place. Why they were to some extent doomed from the outset as products of a flawed system.