Crime Immemorial

Eighteen-year-old Christine Rothschild was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, having just moved into a dormitory on campus the previous autumn from her native Chicago. She was studying journalism, and had even managed to get some work modeling for department store catalogs on the side.

On the morning of Sunday, May 26th, 1968, Christine was up at around four-thirty a.m.; she had always been an early riser, and enjoyed taking walks around the campus shortly after sunrise. On this particular morning, she was also planning to go to church after her walk. As the dawn rose, she shrugged into her beige overcoat, greeted house mother Gertrude Armstrong as she passed her in the hall, and set out into the day.

Christine didn’t make it to church that morning, though no one but her killer is entirely sure what her final movements were. In fact, it would be much later that evening before anyone would realize the horror that had befallen her.

At around seven-thirty p.m., twenty-two-year-old Phillip van Valkenberg was attempting to get into Sterling Hall to visit a friend. Finding the doors locked, he went around the side of the building so he could knock on his buddy’s window. There, in the thick shrubbery on the west side of the dormitory, Phillip stumbled across a scene of almost unimaginable brutality.

Christine Rothschild had been stabbed fourteen times in the neck and chest with an instrument thought to be a surgical scalpel. She had also been severely beaten, in an attack so savage that both her upper and lower jaws were broken, as were several of her ribs. And if that wasn’t enough, the killer had also torn the lining out of Christine’s coat and used to it form a crude garrote, which was found still tied around her neck; and in a final, ghoulish touch, the assailant had also crammed a pair of the young woman’s gloves down her throat, apparently after she was already dead.

Though Christine had not been raped, her clothing was torn and somewhat disordered. Police also recovered a bloody handkerchief that had been placed beneath her head, and a broken umbrella that had been stuck into the ground near the body. The presence of a massive amount of blood around the remains suggested that she had been murdered on the spot.

Robbery was obviously not the motive, as Christine still had money and a few pieces of expensive jewelry on her person. But if neither rape nor robbery had been the intent, then why had someone dispatched Christine with such ferocity?

Investigators had very little to go on, even from the start. Though physical evidence from the crime scene was sent to a forensic lab for analysis, nothing was found that would lead to a solid suspect. No murder weapon was ever recovered, and several key items in the investigation, such as the handkerchief and the broken umbrella, were later supposedly lost or misplaced.

Decades later, in 2009, detectives announced that known serial killer William Floyd Zamastil—who was convicted in 2004 of the 1978 murders of brother and sister Jacqueline and Malcolm Bradshaw—was considered a person of interest in the murder of Christine Rothschild. Zamastil was thought to have been living in Madison, Wisconsin at the time of the slaying, though he would have been only sixteen years old.

However, several researchers into the homicide dispute this hypothesis, as Zamastil’s usual modus operandi involved raping and shooting his victims before transporting them some distance to dump the bodies, a manner of killing which doesn’t quite square with the method in which Christine was murdered.

In fact, both Christine’s best friend and a Wisconsin-based criminologist remain convinced that Christine Rothschild knew her killer, and that not only had he been suspected of stalking her shortly before she was murdered, but also might have killed as many as five other people prior to Christine’s death, including his own brother.

Medical resident Niels Bjorn Jorgensen was forty-two years old in 1968, and worked at the hospital directly across the street from Sterling Hall. Evidently, he had intense romantic feelings for Christine Rothschild, though she had informed him that she was not interested in dating him. She had wanted to remain friends with him, however, and sometimes stopped to have a cigarette with him during her morning walks around the university.

According to Christine’s friend and schoolmate Linda Schulko, though, Jorgensen began lurking more aggressively around the periphery of Christine’s life after she spurned his advances: following her around campus, making prank phone calls, even reportedly breaking into her dorm room at one point. Linda asserted that Christine had reported her concerns to campus police, but had been met with a shrug and an admonition to buy herself a rape whistle.

Michael Arntfield, who wrote a book called Mad City about the murders taking place in Madison, Wisconsin at the time, stated that Jorgensen had allegedly pulled a gun at his work on the same day that Christine was murdered, and was also spotted by a witness cleaning a scalpel shortly afterward. It is also believed that he left town only a day or two later, and Arntfield further claimed that Jorgensen had made a habit of moving from school to school in order to target students amid the particular tumult of 1960s campus life.

Though Arntfield and his own students were able to locate Niels Jorgensen in New York in 2011 and establish contact with him, the suspect was at that point eighty-four years old. He denied involvement in the slaying of Christine Rothschild, and passed away a short time later.

There has also been some speculation that Christine Rothschild may have been the first victim of a serial killer (or killers) at work around the University of Wisconsin campus. From 1968 to 1984, at least seven other women—all of whom had connections to the college—were murdered in a series that is usually referred to as the Capital City Killings or the Mad City Murders. All of the killings in this series are unsolved, and it is still unknown which—if any—of the crimes are linked to one another, or if indeed they are all the work of separate offenders.