As Linda hit the road to California, she didn’t know it, but the past, present, and future were all about to converge. The Age of Aquarius and the Information Age were on a collision course. The impact would be seismic. It would change everything. It would wake the dead.
Chapter 10
SCATTERED ASHES
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Endgame
The 1990s were a blur. Arguably the nadir of twentieth-century Western civilization—the doldrums of artistic and intellectual advancement save the rise of the Internet—most of the decade was spent by Linda regrouping in what seemed like an endless state of in-between. By the summer of ’94 she was well into emotional overdraft, her life consumed by press clippings and adversarial correspondences with police brass who couldn’t be bothered, and by the preoccupation that she might be tasting defeat, having let Christine down after all. Back in 1968, few people understood the root of her obsession with seeing the case through, essentially mortgaging her own life for Christine—a girl she’d only known a few months. But by 1994, people understood it even less, and most were tired of hearing about it. Linda was herself tired of trying to explain it all—the fire in the belly that no one else seemed to have. Whether she’d known Christine only a few months—not quite a full UW school year—or for a lifetime was immaterial, she thought. Christine’s case was a mantle that Linda picked up when no one else would. It was a calling few people ever have the guts or the moxie to answer; it was the reason the two of them met in the first place—it had to be. Or so Linda told herself, now over a quarter century later. Time had gotten away from her while riding slipstream in Jorgensen’s dark wake for most of her adult life. When others gave up, she refused. Even she didn’t know why. Or, by the summer of ’94, perhaps she’d forgotten—she’d chosen to forget. It was now an end in itself. Jorgensen had to go down.
By August of that same summer, fifteen hundred miles west of Linda’s home in Dallas-Fort Worth, it had also been ten years since Heidi Jorgensen had died. By then, her son—now nearly seventy—was an old man in body and even older in mind. Timeworn and turned out, Jorgensen could be found routinely wandering Marina del Rey in one of his now old, yellowed, and tattered white coats—like Dr. Corcoran’s “hunting” outfit in The Love Pirate that had seen better days—as the cliché local eccentric. His daily routines consisted of hassling people on the boardwalk while trying to solicit donations for a phony foundation he’d set up for the brother he’d murdered, Linda believed, over four decades prior. Jorgensen was played out—or so it seemed.
Why he, apparently with the blessing of his mother years earlier, set up the Søren B. Jorgensen Foundation was nothing short of puzzling. As for the foundation’s ostensible goals, no one seemed to ever know. What is clear is that by that summer of ’94, for Jorgensen, money had already become tight as a drum. Yet, while he might have been a husk of a man and down to his final few dollars, Jorgensen’s predatory instincts were still intact—razor sharp and laser focused. That same year, he had also made some interior adjustments to his mother’s former one-bedroom place, moved out the Rickie and Lucy beds in their once-shared quarters, and started sleeping in the bedroom that had been previously used as a den—that housed the now hardcover edition of The Love Pirate. He then listed the bedroom as a rental accommodation for tourists or those in town on business—a want-ad hotel alternative twenty years before Airbnb. In due course he had a taker, an Argentinean immigrant—a Seventh-day Adventist hailing from somewhere else in California who had come to Marina del Ray for some church business—who had been referred to him by Ezra Jameson. Sometime that summer the now nameless Argentinean arrived but the circumstances of any departure remain a mystery, with Jorgensen ignoring all questions about whatever became of him in later years. Whatever actually happened to the young Argentinean, Jorgensen had in the meantime managed to find God. Or, as he would later describe it, God had found him.
Newly obsessed with penance and forgiveness, Jorgensen came to embody what is known as religious mania—a curious condition that has accompanied the homicidal impulses of a number of infamous serial killers and necrophiles making up some of this era’s most cruel and depraved murderers. Commonly seen during periods of compensation, the condition crosscuts both psychotic and psychopathic killers alike, from cannibal Albert Fish to Gary Ridgway and “BTK Strangler” Dennis Rader. The Babes of Inglewood murderer mentioned earlier, Albert Dyer, was a sadistic school crossing guard and opportunist who was hanged at San Quentin within a year of his arrest. Prior to his execution, however, he had also admitted to praying over the bodies of his victims after having posed them in a ravine while in a state of religious mania that accompanied his sexual arousal and sadistic bent. It was among the first of several key and largely consecutive cases in America and elsewhere to quantifiably suggest that while hyperreligiosity is not in itself necessarily linked to violence, the opposite might sometimes be true. Serial killers, it turns out, are often among the most God-fearing of people. They have good reason to be.
But unlike other sexual sadists and serial killers hiding behind a façade of religion, Jorgensen, it seems, came to genuinely believe. Like Dennis Rader, a deacon in his Kansas church admonishing members of his flock for their minor sins on one hand and a twisted sadist torturing and murdering entire families on the other, Jorgensen began using religion first as a crutch, then as a defense and, before long, realized it also made for a solid offense—an enabler. Almost two decades since his last maneuver against Linda on their proverbial chessboard, she would become the target of his first ecclesiastical assault. But not only was Linda ready for it, it was also just what she’d been waiting for.
Over twenty years earlier, Linda had sent her first cryptic Valentine card, providing not only her name—her full name—but also her address and telephone number, inviting, or more accurately daring Jorgensen to call. It soon became an annual tradition, each correspondence becoming increasingly pointed, ever more vexatious. She had crossed over the threshold and was now poking the bear—goading and provoking him with a thumb to the eye but also offering him a pool to reflect in, one that every malignant narcissist craves. Jorgensen, after two decades of stewing and historically accustomed to getting the drop on his victims, in 2006 finally had the fortitude to mail Linda a greeting of his own. Of all things to send as a rejoinder, it was the newly published pocketbook by Lee Strobel titled The Case for Easter—the follow-up to The Case for Christ. Linda first wondered if this was Jorgensen’s attempt to get inside her head as she had his—a veiled reference to her time at St. Mary’s Academy before leaving Milwaukee for UW where she later met Christine. She soon realized she was giving him too much credit. It turns out he was just losing it.
Linda dug into the book. Manically scribbled inside on nearly every page, the innards of what was for many years in the 1990s a supermarket checkout-line staple, were various screeds and streams of consciousness in Jorgensen’s chicken scratch annotating the text of the otherwise pristine and thoughtful book. Some annotations in the margins seemed to, along several points of basic comparison, match to penmanship of the “St. Donna” Christmas card from December ’70 that had been sent to the sister of the still-missing Donna Ann Lass. Other entries looked to be written by another person entirely, Jorgensen experimenting with both dominant and nondominant hands, masking his penmanship, maybe even adopting different personalities while writing and adjusting that writing accordingly. By then, anything was possible. And while most of these same rambling annotations related to the author Strobel’s existing content, Jorgensen also cited verbatim passages from the New Testament, the general theme being that Linda’s soul needed saving from a lake of fire. Other entries were either illegible or inscrutable. Some of the inscriptions were also more specific, but esoteric:
To Linda: Do you really comprehend? Who pushed the button?
The day of wrath, when the dead
shall awaken. YES, very dead.
The forgiveness of life everlasting OR death . . . and lies.
It was a cryptogram, or so it seemed. Everything about it could lead to an answer at last—or it could all be nothing. When desperately looking for purpose in the words of the deranged, we so often want their madness to mean something. The Zodiac’s ciphers sent to the press were similarly subterfuge—most were pure nonsense. The Zodiac, an avid reader—quoting Richard Connell’s 1924 novel The Most Dangerous Game in one of his letters—may also very well have been an aficionado of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. As best can be determined, this theory—the connection between Poe and the Zodiac’s writing styles—has never been previously explored in detail; however, it’s worth noting that Poe, in the December 1839 issue of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, challenged readers to write to the newspaper using a substitution cipher of their choice, a cipher that Poe vowed he could solve without a decoder ring. This mirrors what the Zodiac himself did, almost as if he were sending the communication to Poe via the San Francisco press over a century later. The problem is that the Zodiac’s decoded letters were just ramblings. He was a pure amateur; he was certainly no Edgar Allan.
The same was the case for Eric Harris, the alpha male and malevolent psychopath of the pair of shooters behind the Columbine High School massacre in 1999—the progenitor to what later became a wave of school shootings that still haunt America. In the hours leading to the mass murder at the Colorado high school where he was soon set to graduate, Harris left an audio-recorded manifesto on a microcassette labeled “Nixon” for posthumous discovery after the rampage was over—to be found along with his deranged journals and video recordings after he and his accomplice Dylan Klebold committed suicide. Experts analyzed and were particularly confounded by the “Nixon” title of the cassette, for months searching for some meaning—a window into Harris’s twisted mind that might disclose a motive, a trigger point, or an intended legacy. In the end, the label was determined to be meaningless and no more than further manipulation and game playing. It was purely random, the net sum of a pathologically disordered mind in its final hours on Earth. It also underscored the reality that the words of killers are so often either pure subterfuge or amount to an arcane worldview that only they and they alone will ever be able to comprehend.
Be that as it may, Linda would still try to make some sense of the book’s annotations in this rather belated and bizarre move by Jorgensen. She cross-referenced the ramblings and ominous declarations and questions scribbled in The Case for Easter against The Love Pirate as a possible decoder ring. Before long, however, she was underwater and had lost her bearings—worse off than when she had started. For all she knew, that had been Jorgensen’s intent all along—perhaps he knew full well she’d take the bait. But after having spent the 1990s boning up on the evolving MOs of serial killers, Linda by then also knew the missing Argentinean seemed to fit the methodology of what is now known as a “trapper” offender—an often aging killer who brings victims to familiar turf under false pretexts. It’s a calculated deathtrap scenario where a weaker or more tentative killer can exploit home advantage.
In suburban Chicago during the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy had once lured young men to his home with job offers and other ruses before plying them with alcohol, having them volunteer for a “handcuff trick,” and then raping and murdering them while immobilized. When he was finally busted in December ’78, Illinois cops found twenty-nine bodies buried either in the crawl space or under the driveway of the modest house to where he’d lured the boys, many of them daily laborers at Gacy’s construction company. After running out of room to accommodate further bodies, Gacy dumped his last four victims in the local river.
Fifteen years later, John Edward Robinson, widely cited as the Internet’s first serial killer, trolled sex-fetish chat rooms on early versions of Web 1.0 social media in order to lure victims to his home for role-play and kinky bondage. Once victims were restrained, Robinson—by then in his fifties as had been Gacy—would murder his guests much like H. H. Holmes did a century prior. Linda knew this same MO when she saw it. Jorgensen was trying to draw her in just as she had spent over a decade trying to draw him out into the light. She also knew that Jorgensen had resurfaced after all this time for some particular reason.
Although he might have begun his criminal career as a “hunter” (a killer who stalks outdoor areas familiar to him) or even a “poacher” (a killer who uses the pretext of legitimate travel to slip in and out of cities and murder anonymously), Jorgensen, like others before him, had transitioned, it appeared, to become a textbook trapper. Linda knew that Jorgensen’s manic writings, as cryptic as they appeared, were also warnings. Maybe he knew that Linda of all people was the only one left who might stop him. He was right. But if the Wisconsin police wouldn’t follow her lead and follow Jorgensen to make him pay for the past, she could at least stop him from what he might do next. If she couldn’t bring him to justice, she would bring justice to him—one way or another. It was then that Linda made a new friend while briefly back in California—the LAPD. In the meantime, what she didn’t know about Jorgensen was that The Case for Easter wasn’t a book he chose at random. It seemed that he might be starting a new tradition of his own.
Remnant
Back in Madison, the Capital City Killer began as an urban legend to try to make sense of the senseless. It became a legend that was later buoyed, like the Ripper myth before it, with “can neither confirm nor deny” public reticence that only fanned the flames of paranoia and intrigue at once. Once the Lucas Task Force hit the ground running and no state seemed to be out of bounds with respect to Lucas’s binge confessions of serial murder and Satanism, delegates from the Major Case Unit now handling most of the Madison and UW murders were forced to consider consolidating their open/unsolved cases. Consolidation meant connection—connection meant a common offender.
It began with a slow trickle when the simultaneous brutality of the Rothschild and Bennett murders seemed to connect the campus area as an unlikely hunting ground. By the mid-1980s, the dam had burst and both Dane County and the entire state of Wisconsin were subsumed in talk of a serial killer. In time, with clear outliers like Donna Mraz and certainly Janet Raasch, talk of two more killers—operating either discretely or as a murderous dyad—came to dominate a new narrative. As “Killer” became “Killers,” and then simply “killings” with a lowercase “k,” theories became more and more erratic. The Internet didn’t exactly help.
As unsolved crime forums and similar threads and chat rooms came to dominate the web from its outset, the story of the Madison campus killings transmuted into something that should never have been—what should not be today. Like the Ripper legend, the facts of the cases—the faces and names of the eight young girls whose lives were snuffed out and subjected to horrific atrocities—have become the inconvenient backgrounds to all sorts of off-the-wall theories proffered by all forms of wannabe detectives and general troublemakers. In time, people stopped caring about what really happened and preferred the version that would transform the cases into a ghoulish Madison spook story. As legendary film director John Ford said about how he made films depicting the heroes and villains of the old west: “When it’s a choice between writing the history and writing the myth, write the myth.”
The problem is that myths, legends, and criminal supposition, once alchemized into “real” history, can have additional unforeseen consequences. In Madison, on the UW campus, and throughout the entire state of Wisconsin, this is exactly what happened. By the mid-2000s, cresting at the same time that Linda was receiving her threatening cryptogram from Jorgensen as part of their slow, ongoing chess game, a new UW myth was taking hold: the Smiley Face Killer.
As a byproduct of the same local predisposition to legend that spawned the Capital City Killer before it, the Smiley Face Killer was yet another theory borne out of conjecture. It was one also sourced in numerous deaths associated with UW but, unlike the Madison slayings
, deaths less clear in their origin. In fact, for many years, none of these deaths had been reported, much less investigated, as murders at all. The legend of the Smiley Face Killer came about insidiously following a series of bizarre and tragic drownings that some conspiracy theorists decided were more than coincidence. There was even some patently ludicrous suggestion that the Smiley Face Murderer and the Capital City Killer, one and the same, had used the Raasch murder near the Stevens Point campus to transition. That the murder marked a turning point from UW–Madison to UW–La Crosse—another state campus located about two hours northwest situated on the Mississippi—where the killer supposedly resumed his murders with a new MO and signature. The idea that the two sets of deaths were linked was nothing short of preposterous, as was the idea that the La Crosse campus deaths to follow were murders at all. It didn’t, however, stop the legend from becoming fact in the minds of many. But contrary to the Ripper and Capital City Killer myths, proponents of this legend, unfortunately, included those who should have known better. Those whose jobs it was to know better.
The UW–La Crosse campus, like the Stevens Point campus, had been founded as a normal school and operated as such until 1927 when it was opened up to offer other baccalaureate degrees. Today, with just over 10,000 students and as one of the most populous of the eleven smaller “comprehensive” campuses within the UW system, it has produced a number of notable alumni, mostly with respect to pro sports. The town of La Crosse itself, with just over 50,000 people—a total of 150,000 residents in the metro area—also boasts its own notable distinction: more bars per capita than anywhere in America for a metro area of its size. Not surprisingly, the combination of an unprecedented supply of watering holes, a college campus, and city streets that in many cases slope toward one of the most majestic and unforgiving rivers in the continental United States has often proven to be a deadly confluence of circumstances. Enter the legend of the Smiley Face Killer.
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