Criminology - Christine Rothschild

Episode Date: October 19, 2019

18-year-old Christine Rothschild was an intelligent and beautiful student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her lifeless body was found on May 26th, 1968, outside of Sterling Hall at the college. Police could not develop any leads or suspects regarding Christine's murder. But many believe that she was killed by a middle-aged medical resident who was obsessed with Christine. He had asked her out and began harassing and stalking her after she turned down his advances. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the life and murder of Christine Rothschild. Linda Schulko, who became good friends with Christine at college, joined us for this episode to help shed some light on the mysteries surrounding her death. Linda is definitely in the camp of those that believe the middle-aged medical resident, Niels Jorgensen, is the most likely suspect in Christine's murder. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Monarchmoney.com slash podcast. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 83 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford, how are you today? Doing pretty good.

How about you? I'm doing great. I'm having a good run of a couple of weeks. Let's put it that way. Things have been going well. We've been putting out some good content, which I'm happy about always. Yeah, I think you just got to stay busy. Well, I don't think you and I have a problem with that, right?

Staying busy when you have the number of podcasts that you and I both do. And an episode has to go out, right? That's the thing I always think about. It's not like you can say one week, eh, I'm not going to put that out. because you haven't told people ahead of time. They are expecting an episode to come out and you don't want to disappoint. So, you know, it is a lot of pressure week in, week out. Yeah, but it's a lot of fun too, I think putting the podcast together.

So I actually look forward to it every week. That's true. I'm glad you said that. I mean, I used the word pressure, but it's good pressure, right? It has to get done, but it's something that you and I enjoy as well. So all right, more if we had some new Patreon supporters. So let's give our shoutouts. We had Susan Clinton Redfern, Devin Brewster, Lisa Bordman, Melissa Poff jumped out at our highest level.

And then we had Tracy Brownell. So a lot of new support. We appreciate that. It goes a long way. We say it all the time. But it really does. It goes a long way towards helping you and I to defray costs to get this podcast out. Yeah.

And big thanks to everybody you just mentioned for that. support. That's awesome. And if anyone out there listening would like to help support criminology on Patreon, you can do so by visiting patreon.com slash criminology. So we're starting out in May 1968. That was when a brutal and vicious murder occurred on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was 18-year-old Christine Rothschild that was murdered at UW Madison. And many of the university. people believe that a middle-aged medical resident who had become obsessed with Christine may have had something to do with her murder as a result of her rejecting his advances.

Christine's college friend Linda made it her life's mission to bring justice to her dear friend for decades. She investigated the case, interviewed people, tracked down, and even even confronted who she believed to be Christine's killer, and eventually Linda wrote a book. But despite all of her hard work, the man that she believes killed Christine was never arrested. And Linda joined us for this episode to talk about her friend Christine, Christine's murder, and her efforts to keep the case from being forgotten. And you'll hear from Linda throughout the episode. Madison is the capital city of Wisconsin, and it's located about 40 to 50 miles from the Wisconsin-Illinois border in the south-central part of the state.

Situated on an isthmus between the lakes Mendota and Manona in Dane County, this decent-sized city of roughly 255,000 people, has plenty of restaurants, attractions, and employers. Despite all of that, the city still retains a small-town vibe, something that dates back decades. Madison was rated 12th in U.S. News's best places to live and number 30 and best places to retire. One of Madison's largest employers is the University of Wisconsin, an estimated 10,000 people work there. And it has a total annual student enrollment of around 45,000 students. UW is considered one of the best colleges in the country. And it's part of the Big Ten Conference. U.W. Madison is the college that a bright and beautiful Christine Rothschild begrudgingly chose to attend in 1967 at the insistence of her parents.

It's a decision that after Christine's death would haunt her parents. It's something that they had to live with for the rest of their lives. Christine Rothschild was born in Chicago on November 14, 1949, to Emmanuel and Patriot Roschild. She was one of seven children born to the couple, and the second oldest daughter of the four. Two children had been stillborn, and her brother Richard died in 1942 at the age of one. The surviving Rothschild children had a good upbringing. Their parents were living the American dream.

Emmanuel worked hard to provide for his family and earn plenty of money, enough to to live in a two-story English tutor home in the Edgewater community of Chicago, located at 6338 North Kenmore Avenue. Emmanuel was an inventor and president-owner of two firms. In the 1950s, he invented the coin-operated gate for city parking lots that's still used today. Patriot was a homemaker and considered very strict. She took her role as mother and house manager very seriously. The girls were raised to be.

proper women and schooled in social and table etiquette, they would be educated and marry well. That was the thought. She was rarely affectionate. Patriot preferred to show her daughter's love through gifts. Emmanuel was the complete opposite. He loved showing his girl's affection. He was constantly giving them hugs and kisses. His girls could tell him anything.

And he seemed genuinely interesting. in everything they had to say. He inspired them to follow their dreams and live extraordinary lives. Christine Rothschild grew into a beautiful young woman with natural blonde hair and hazel eyes. She stood 5'7 and weighed 120 pounds. So it's no surprise that during the spring and summer, while in high school, she worked as a part-time model for Sacks Fifth Avenue and Carson Pury Scott, appearing regularly in Chicago newspapers fashion sections.

Being the frugal person she was, she saved every penny she earned from modeling for college tuition. Christine graduated from Nicholas Sin High School in 1967 at the top of her class. She placed fourth out of 500 students. That's extremely impressive, more. I was nowhere near fourth out of what was a much smaller pull of. of students in my high school. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I had a much smaller class. I think we had less than a hundred and I was nowhere near close to fourth. Well, you weren't near the bottom though,

right? So that's what counts. Yeah, and I think you always want to get lost in the middle because if you're at the top or the bottom, people are going to notice you and you want to blend in. There's too much attention. That's kind of like where you choose to sit in the classroom, right? You have the exceptional students up front, they're hanging on every word. You got the people that are into it, but don't want to be asked too many questions in the middle. And then, you know, near the back, those are usually the people that they don't really care. They just hope you do not call on them. They're trying to get as far away from the teacher, the chalkboard as possible. They just don't really want to participate. But obviously, that was not Christine. Her dream was. Her dream was.

to become a journalist. And she desperately wanted to attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in the fall of 1967. That's a very well-known, very well-respected college, Vassar. But her mother, Patriot, had other plans. She wanted Christine to attend either the University of Wisconsin or Loyola University right there in Chicago near their home. So you really get the sense, morph that Patriot didn't want Christine to go too far away from home. The University of Wisconsin is not all that far. And Loyola, very close to where they lived. Patriot was relentless about this college decision.

So in the end, Christine decided on the University of Wisconsin and Madison. And I think the thought was at least at UW. She could have a little bit of independence and some distance from her mother. If she had chosen Loyola, she probably wasn't going to have either. Emmanuel and Patriot drove Christine to the UW campus at the end of the summer in 1967. And there's no way that Patriot could have known that this decision to keep Christine from attending Vassar would change their lives forever. But as often happens, she would spend decades living with guilt. Christine moved into room 119 of Anne Emery Hall, located on the corner of North Francis and Langdon Street.

She was one of 188 female students living in the five-story, dorm. Christine was a private person, but she would invite other girls into her room. She was quiet and friendly. Linda Shulko first met Christine Rothschild during UW's orientation week of the first semester. Linda was living in Whit Hall, but had a meeting with the Dean of the Letters and Science Honors Program in South Hall. While waiting for her interview with the dean, she saw Christine and smiled at her. Christine stood out, not only because of her beauty, but also for the way she presented. presented herself, always stylish and polished. Her hair was perfectly combed in a 60s hair flip, and her skin was flawless. She was composed and confident. During the first week of school,

the girls' paths crossed again when Linda saw Christine sitting on a bench next to the Carolon Tower. She was smoking a cigarette and studying a French textbook. The two hit it off quickly and became fast friends. We had met in August and she died in May. So of course, you know, that's not a lifetime as would have been most appreciated and wanted. But we were close. We were very similar in so many ways and very different in other ways to the point where we actually, I would say, we clicked. There were a lot of campus events that we enjoyed. We enjoyed the fine arts. And we also enjoyed the sporting events, such as swimming meets. Whenever they'd have something at the Wisconsin Theater, we would go to that if there was some kind of an avant-garde production

in the theaters nearby. They were all real cheap on campus in those days. We would make time in our schedules to do that. But neither one of us ever went like bar hopping or anything like that. We were academics. We were the nerds. Chris was an exception. serious student. She had all of her ducks in a row. She knew exactly what she wanted to do in her life. She wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to deal with international affairs. She eventually wanted to write books and be a publisher. Christine and Linda had some things in common. Both were extremely serious about their studies. They both had big dreams to achieve. And they loved animals in nature. Not long into their friendship, Linda noticed that Christine rarely seemed hungry.

It was almost as if she lived off of just coffee, cigarettes, and canned spinach. When Linda found out that Christine used laxatives, she knew her friend had a problem, but Christine would brush off any of Linda's concerns saying she was fine. Even though Anne Emery Hall was a nice dorm to live in, it was surrounded by old mansions that had turned into fraternages and sororities. So every night was a party night. The legal drinking age at that time was only 18 for 3.2% alcohol beer. UW Madison was the first public university to serve 3-2 beer since 1933. Christine hated the partying part of UW and kept dreaming about going to Vassar College.

Freshman year of college progressed nicely for Christine and Linda. Both were extremely busy with their studies. But college life for them changed in March of 1968, with the arrival of a certain middle-aged medical resident named Nealz Jorgensen. Christine was an early riser who never slept all that well at night, probably because of all the coffee she drank and the cigarettes that she smoked, every morning at 7 a.m., she would take a walk. Her exact route is unknown because she never really told anyone and she always went alone.

What is known is that she would complete her stop at Renniebaum drugstore at either its university drive location or the one that they had on State Street. Before the final stop on her walk, she would stop outside of the university hospital to smoke with a group of medical residents, nurses, and other staff that she had befriended. They spent their smoke break at a non-public side entrance that faced Sterling Hall on Charter Street. Sometimes a UW police officer would stop and have a smoke with the group. It was during one of these smoke breaks when Nealz Jorgensen first spotted Christine Roshchow. Neals Jorgensen was an arrogant and cocky medical resident from California, who was disliked by almost everyone he came into contact with.

And he was strange, to say the least. He carried pictures of massacred members of the Maori tribe, claiming he witnessed the massacre while in Africa a decade before. But a female nurse called his bluff. She knew the tribe lived in New Zealand. It was just one of many lies Niels Jorgensen told throughout his time in Madison. Neal's lived with another medical resident. And throughout this entire time,

Neal's never received any mail, phone calls, or visitors. It was also said that he never studied, which is strange to be a medical resident. They are known for the massive amounts of study that they have to do to keep their grades up. He once put a gun to his roommate's head and it was said that he began dressing in military attire. This guy, Nealz, was in his early 40s and single, but had a thing for young college girls, specifically tall, blonde, and wealthy college girls. So when he saw Christine Rothschild smoking with the medical staff during the second week of April 1968, he knew that he had to meet her.

And it wasn't long after this that he introduced himself to Christine. Neal's was six foot two inches tall with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. He had an athletic physique and sported a mustache. But Christine disliked him from the get-go and tried to stay away from him as much as possible. She thought that this guy was strange. And she also saw that he was very insensitive to his peers. But Neil's attraction to Christine. evolved into a full-blown obsession.

When he found out that her last name was Rothschild, he mistakenly took her for a relation of the famed European Rothschild family and thought, hey, I want to be a part of that wealth and lineage. Neil started following Christine everywhere she went. He finally asked her if she was seeing anybody, and she replied that she wasn't. He then asked her out, but Christine declined. regardless, he kept pursuing her.

Then Christine started receiving prank phone calls from a silent caller, and she assumed it was Neal's. One time, she saw a man standing outside her window looking right at her. After that, she kept the shades down, and her curtains drawn at all times. Initially, Christine didn't take Neals too seriously, because he seemed harmless, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. After she rejected him, Neals was determined to make her pay and wanted to punish her for rejecting him. He took her rejection as an insult, and he also took the harassment and stalking to a different level. The phone calls went from silent to ominous, and everywhere Christine looked, there he was. By the 1st of May 1968, Christine's demeanor had changed.

Linda noticed this when the two were together. Christine never joked around anymore. It seemed as though she was on edge all the time. She rarely spoke about Neals, but did tell Linda at one point that Neals might be more than just really strange. Christine was never a person to stress out or to intentionally worry her friends. So she kept a lot of things to herself, including what Nealz was doing to her. She thought that she could handle this guy herself.

Christine decided to escape the torment and went home to Chicago in early May. She wanted to convince her mother to let her transfer to Vassar College in the fall of 1968. Fall registration for the school would soon end, and she didn't want to miss the deadline. She spent the weekend pressuring Patriot to approve the transfer to Vassar, but Patriot was as stubborn as ever, and she refused. This highly upset Christine, and before the taxi picked her up to take her to the bus station on Sunday, she shouted, I hate you several times to her mother. She left crying and Patriot was just as devastated.

That is a very tough situation, morph, something that I find myself in the middle of quite a bit, right? I have... In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved. until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Two girls. I have a wife. The three of them don't always seem to see eye to eye on everything. And there have been times, I don't know about I hate you, but there is a lot of fights. let's put it that way, that tend to break out when you have teenage girls. It's tough. It's tough for my wife. It's also tough for me to be in the middle of it, trying to moderate everything. I feel like I'm the referee sometimes in a heavyweight boxing match. I don't know about you, but the I hate you card. I think I played that a couple times when I was a kid, and I've had my kids play that with me a couple times. And it always hurts no matter how old they are. Well, it cut you to the quick pretty fast, right? This is the people that you love the most in the world. I get it, they're upset. But to play the I hate you card, oh, man, that just cuts you to your core. Two days after Christine left Chicago, her parents changed their mind and decided to let her transfer to Vassar College. They were going to surprise her at the end of the school year with a huge part.

But they never got the chance to surprise Christine with this great news. Christine returned to the UW campus in the late afternoon on Sunday. When Linda saw her, Christine's eyes were bloodshot and she was livid. But Christine didn't say much to Linda about what happened over the weekend. Not long after returning to campus, Christine spotted campus police officers, Tiny Frey and Roger Gollump, and decided on the spot to report Nealz Jorgensen's harassment. Her voice trembled and her hand shook. But Frey didn't take her seriously and told Christine to buy a whistle instead,

which she already had as a gift from her mother. The next day, Officer Gollum checked the previous day's reports, and there was no mention of Christine's complaint. Chris had decided that it was time to talk to the police, that she wasn't able to handle the person who was stalked. talking her anymore. She contacted patrol officers Roger Golem and Tiny Frey, and they were standing in the vicinity of Bascom Hall at the time, and she told them that she was being stopped by Niels Jorgensen, and she explained that he was a third-year medical resident, and that within the

past month and a half, he was everywhere, and that he had started calling her and leaving questionable messages on the phone, and she was becoming afraid because he wouldn't leave her alone. And she thought that it all had started because she had refused to date him. So Officer Golem, he was right out of the academy at the time, the police academy. So he stood silently by while Tiny Frey took control of the situation. Well, Officer Frey never took any notes, and he never, he never made a report on this. And his response to Chris about all of this was that she should get herself a whistle.

But she already had a whistle. That wasn't going to save her life. But anyways, it was kind of a sexist remark because she was so pretty. And so many guys looked at her, he just assumed that this was the price you pay for being pretty on a campus and popular on a campus. And I do not believe that he took anything serious about this conversation because if he had, he would have filed a report. She went on Monday the 20th and she died on the 26th. So, Mike, you have a daughter in college right now.

How would you feel if she went to campus security to tell them about an issue she had with somebody and she was treated this way? I don't even know more if I could put it into words. Now, my daughter knows me. She knows how I am. I think right away if she was having any problems. She would probably call me first. The Liam Neeson, John Wick and me might come out, which is not always a good thing.

I'll be honest with you. But you better believe that I would make damn sure that, number one, police security, campus security, police, whatever you want to call them, were taking what she had to say seriously and not only that, but doing something about it. I would like to think that I would not take matters into my own hands, but I can't always rule that out. Well, I think we teach our kids from an early age. If you need help, if you need someone to protect you, you go to a security guard, you go to a police officer. I don't think that changes when they get to be college aged. Here she's going there to the person she should be talking to and being rebuffed like that is very disheartening.

And this is the late 1960s. Morph, I know you've done a lot of cases. We've done a lot of cases together. I've done cases on my other podcast. I can't even put a number on the cases that I've done where women have reported something and were not taken seriously. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about, you know, a woman, a very young woman like Christine going through something that she knows is wrong, telling the people that the system has put in place for her to tell and then brushing it off. What a hopeless feeling that would be. You're pretty much saying, I have no other recourse. I've done what I'm supposed to do.

You're not helping me. On Wednesday, May 22nd, 1968, Linda spotted Christine walking on campus and she shouted at her. So the two met up. And Linda asked her if she wanted to go to the Saturday night swim meet with her. Christine said yes. Linda told her that she would call her Friday night. But at the last minute, Linda decided to go home to Milwaukee for the weekend to work on a term paper. She called Christine early Friday morning, but there was no answer. And Linda figured that Christine was most likely on her morning walk. So Linda went home that weekend, unprepared for the news that she would receive during an early Monday morning phone call from a University of Wisconsin police officer. It was 2.15 a.m. on May 27th, and Linda was still up working on footnotes for her term

paper when the phone rang. It was Officer Hendrickson of UW Campus Police, and he wanted to speak with her. Linda's life and her career path changed at that very moment. The weekend that Chris died, she died on, actually she died on Sunday morning, May 26, 1968. I went home that weekend. We were supposed to meet for a swim meet that Saturday, but on Friday I started getting panicky because I had a turn paper that counted for half of my course grade and I hadn't started it. So I went to her dorm and left her a note because she wasn't there. And Friday morning, I went home for the weekend. On Monday morning, around 2, 215 a.m. into the morning, I got to, a call from UWPD from an officer Erickson, excuse me, Hendrickson, and he was, he was questioning me

about the last time I had seen Chris and if I could tell him anyone who had wanted to date Chris who had been turned down by her recently. I just came to the conclusion that perhaps somebody had spiked her soda over at the Christ Scientist Community Center there or perhaps somebody had threatened her or something like that and they were doing like a follow-up call, but it never dawned on me that she had really been in harm's way in any shape or form. That same day, that Monday morning when my father got up, he turned on the news and the very first thing on the news was a statement that a University of Wisconsin-COid Christine Rothschild was murdered. It's hard to describe that, but it actually just drained and went gray.

It's like I wasn't crying. I wasn't screaming. I didn't fall to the ground, you know, with anything like that. I just, it's just like my whole spirit just disappeared. Some people, they react very emotionally. Others hardly say anything. People laugh when people die because they're so emotionally upset. I just became silent.

and I felt that the whole world just kind of looked gray and sounded gray and was totally empty. I knew that this was a change, a permanent lasting, horrible change. On Sunday, May 26th, a boy was riding in a car with his parents and younger brother on North Charter Street when he alerted his parents that he saw someone lying in the bushes outside Sterling Hall. His parents didn't take him very seriously thinking that, you know what, he probably saw a mannequin, or it was some type of college prank. Either way, they continued on with their drive. Later, at around 7.30 p.m., 23-year-old UW student Philip Van Valkenberg leaned over the right front railing of Sterling Hall to tap on a lower level window to let his friend know that he was there.

He looked down, and that's when he saw the bloody and battered body of Christine Rothschild and called the police once he got inside the building. The first responder to the crime scene was Officer Gullum. Then UWPD, police chief Ralph Hanson, followed by detectives of the Madison Police Department and members of the Dane County Sheriff's Office. So it seems like very quickly they had a full crew there at the scene. They cordoned off the area, took photographs of the body, bagged several items of evidence, and searched the area for a weapon. Officer Gullum recognized the body as soon as he saw it.

He knew it was Christine Rothschild because of a recent complaint about Niels Jorgensen. However, Gullum and Frey never told anyone about the harassment complaint in order to save their jobs. Christine's body was taken to St. Mary's Hospital for the awaiting coroner. Christine was dressed in a coat, a smooth dress and boots that were all covered in blood. And I think very quickly on, Morph, they figured out that robbery was not the motive because Christine was still wearing too expensive ring. Her hair and makeup were somewhat in disarray. They identified her through the name sewn into the neckline of her dress.

A Dr. Clyde Chamberlain, St. Mary's chief pathologist, performed the autopsy. He had been the Dane County coroner since 1961. He determined that Christine had been stabbed with a surgical scalpel, a total of 14 times in the chest and neck area, but it was a single stab to the heart that killed her. Christine had also been strangled. A garot had been tied around her neck, but removed. at the crime scene. Both of Christine's gloves were lodged deep inside her throat, shoved in there after death. Her jaw and several ribs were broken. There was no evidence of a sexual assault.

Her stomach contents revealed that Christine had her last meal, a spinach salad, about one hour before her murder, which they believe occurred around 7 a.m. Linda returned to Madison. on Monday, May 27th, to turn in her term paper and take the semester exam in the afternoon. In a days after hearing the news about her close friend, Linda had no choice but to carry on with her day. After the news spread around campus about Christine's murder, many female students were on edge, and rightly so, because a killer was walking among them. Some parents drove to pick up their daughters, while others sent safety care packages containing mace, horn, and whistles. Parents told their daughters to never go anywhere alone, especially at night.

The Board of Regents met on Monday, and what happened is because of the fear mania that was penetrating throughout the entire campus, they decided that students could leave campus without taking their final exams and still get full credit for their courses, because students were afraid to leave their dorms. They had no idea if the killer was a male or a female, a student or a non-student. And consequently, people, people were hesitant. And parents were sending children by their children by overnight express, mace, whistles, anything that they could do to keep them safe until they could pick their children up within the next day or two. On May 29th, stained pants found near the crime scene were sent

off along with other evidence to the FBI crime lab for testing. Two days later, the FBI report arrived back from Washington, D.C. Nothing conclusive was found. Blood on Christine's clothing and a blood-soaked man's handkerchief turned out to belong to Christine. Christine Rosschild was laid to rest on Wednesday, May 29, 1968. She was buried in a long, dark skirt and long-sleeved lace blouse with a high neckline that concealed the stab wounds to her neck. Her senseless murder devastated her family for the rest of their lives. Her mother, Patria, sunk into a deep depression, often sleeping in Christine's bed and wearing her clothes. Christine's bedroom became a shrine and nothing was moved or changed. What happened is after Chris died, the parents, Emmanuel and Patria, put the case completely into the hands of Chief Ralph Hanson and told him they did not want any updates on the case.

They were totally uninvolved in the case because the devastation was too overwhelming and they never even discussed the case with their children. After Chris died, Chris was barely mentioned in the family, and no mention of UWPD was mentioned again. Her mother spent the last years of her life sleeping in Chris's bedroom, surrounded by Chris's possessions, and so forth. And it became like a treasured sanctuary for the mother. The girls were devastated. They did not know or understand much about this. The oldest daughter was 24, but the younger daughters were 16 and 14 at the time of Chris's death. And they worried that they might become victims of the killer.

And they were afraid to go out of the house. You know, they lived in fear. Later on, they developed survivors' guilt. You know, their lives never came together. and the family, because it was not united on this, they never got mutual family support from each other. They just kind of divided into five separate pieces. The investigation into Christine's murder began with the University of Wisconsin PD in charge.

Madison PD, the Dane County Sheriff's Office, and the FBI were called in to assist. A task force of six UW, police officers and four detectives from the other agencies were set up. Over the next two years, police conducted 1,500 interviews, including every female student who resided in Anne Emery Hall, but every interview resulted in a dead end. The University of Wisconsin Police Chief believe that someone working in the morning shift at the hospital on the day of the murder had to have seen something. His reason for thinking this was because the hospital wasn't far from the crime scene.

Yet no hospital employees ever came forward, and police didn't interview any of them within the first 48 hours. It wasn't long before the case went cold, just a few days, as a matter of fact. Police had no suspects in the gruesome murder, but Linda was sure she knew who killed her friend, Niels Jorgensen. In her mind, it really couldn't have been anyone else.

He had been harassing and stalking her since she rejected him. Linda went to police about her suspicions. But the response, or lack of one, was troubling to her. It started as a bad nightmare when Officer Hendrickson called me the morning after her murder. When he asked if there was anybody who had wanted to date her that she had turned down. And I mentioned the guy named Nealz who lived in an adjoining dorm. And actually, as I was even saying this in the back of my mind, I was thinking of Neal's Jorgensen, but I never said his name.

And it took me until the beginning of my sophomore year to realize how I made that mistake. And I finally realized that, you know, in my good Catholic background, I had been brought up that, you know, you always respect the police officer, you respect the policeman, and you respect the doctor. And I think that my hesitation was based on that. So what happened is at the beginning of my sophomore year, I was really beginning to have anxiety about the fact that I needed to correct this mistake. It was something that I felt was pertinent to the case. So I had sent a letter through campus mail to UWPD and told them that I needed to speak to them about the murder of my friend Christine Rothschild that I had information that I wanted to share. I waited about a month. I got no response.

And then on a Sunday evening, I called and I asked to speak to the detective in charge of Christine's case. And he told me that the officer normally didn't work on Sundays, but he would relay the message to him and get back to me. And nobody ever did. And I think at this point, I think embarrassment and shame set in in my mind. And I decided that I would pursue this case on my own because, I felt that I had done a grave injustice by not clarifying it earlier, and perhaps they felt that what I had to say was of no importance anyways. Because I didn't know where the trail of the case was going at this point anyways,

because the public was not privy to this. So I started my own investigation as of my sophomore year. After not getting any help from police, Linda began her own investigation, while still a student at UW, but it led nowhere. But she made it her life's mission to expose Neal's Jorgensen as being Christine's killer. After graduating from UW, Linda studied in Mexico City. She toured Europe for a summer and finished her master's degree. She was offered a teaching assistant job and a chance to get her Ph.D.

At Cambridge University in England, but turned it down. She taught middle school briefly before realizing that it, just wasn't for her, Linda eventually got married and relocated to Texas. Meanwhile, Christine's case got colder and colder. Linda dove into investigating her friend's case once again. With the invention of the internet, she no longer had to spend hours at the library using microfish. Information was now at her fingertips. She also spent decades going back and forth with UW and Madison Police, interviewing former UW students and hospital medical staff. and she even tracked down and confronted Nealz Jorgensen himself.

Linda was relentless and a force to be reckoned with. The first things that I did is we used to hang out at Rennebaum's drugstore on University and seldomly at University drugstore on State Street. The staff, their new Chris and Neil were on University. And I went there and talked to everybody one-on-one about if they ever remembered anybody hanging around the counter while Chris and I were there or when Chris was alone or when Chris was with somebody else at Rennebombs. And I gave a full description of Niels Jorgensen to them and my contact information.

Of course, I didn't have business cards. And I went to every store on State Street and State Street runs quite a distance between the campus. and the Capitol, and I went into all the stores there, and likewise, I asked if Chris had ever shopped there or if they remembered anybody following her into the store or being with her that fit Neal's description or her being with another male at the time, because I knew she always shopped alone. Then I also contacted the law department and spoke with several professors there, and I asked them if they would possibly present this as a case study for their students. And I was turned down there. And then I started speaking with some of the past Anne Emory students and students that I knew

from the Church of Christ scientists that had been friends with Chris to get information about anybody resembling Niels Jorgensen who had hung around there or they remember being a constant presence whenever Chris wasn't with them. And that was kind of the start of my personal investigation, as I called it. Linda wasn't going to forget or let anyone else forget Christine Rothschild. She felt that the case started and ended with Nealz Jorgensen. Neals Jorgensen was fired from his medical residency in Madison on Monday, May 27, 1968 and after that he moved to New York City. But you can't help but think about the timing.

May 27th is the Monday after Christine was murdered. Now, Morph, could that be a coincidence? Maybe. But if it is, it's one hell of a coincidence. Now, I think the thing is we don't know the exact details around why Niels Jorgensen was fired from this. medical residency, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it occurred the Monday after Christine was murdered. And then the quick, almost escape to New York City, it seems like that's halfway across the country, was that something to distance himself from the crime? Or was it just a coincidence? Yeah, I think when you look at the whole situation morph, you can't help but think. It doesn't really look good for Neals. Right? He's fired.

he makes this getaway to New York City, Madison detectives flew to New York to interview Neels. But things didn't go as planned. In 1968, and I believe it was towards September, there was a newspaper article that I saw years later that I wasn't aware of at the time in the Watertown newspaper said that two investigators had been sent in pursuit of, they called it a bad-tempered medical resident,

and they had gone to New York City to check him out. That was when Detective Charlie Lulling from Madison PD and Captain Dick Josephson from the Sheriff's Department had been authorized by UWPD Ralph Hansen to go check out Niels Jorgensen. They wanted to polygraph him and interpret him and interview him. At the time he was renting an apartment in Brooklyn, they found his address because he had applied to Mount Sinai and New York Presbyterian hospitals. And that was his home address

temporarily. And they went there and they were accompanied by two New York PD officers. And they got him into the car. He was very willing to go along with them. They were on their way to the police station. and Nealz claimed that he felt ill and wanted to reschedule. So they decided they would take him back to his apartment, pick him up the next morning, polygraph him, and interview him. When they came back the following morning on schedule, Nealz had cleared out his apartment and was gone. Neal's eventually moved back to California,

where he lived with his aging mother, Harriet. Neil's father, Neil Sr., died in 1974. Unlike his son, Neil Sr., was considered a gentle man, and he was well liked. When Neal's Jr. was 24, his younger brother, Soren, drowned at the age of 20. Neal's and Soren were experienced divers and usually went fishing together. On the day of Soren's death, Neal's declined to go fishing with his younger brother. Harriet went to a grave believing Neal's killed Soren by cutting Soren's diving hose prior to the fishing trip.

A little rough for your own mother to believe that. you killed your brother. After Harriet Jorgensen died in 1984, Neals was rummaging through her things when he came across a spiral notebook, which contained a novel written by his mother. It was titled The Love Pirate by Heidi B. Jorgensen. She wrote it three years before her death. The book referenced Soren and also the kidnapping of a beautiful blonde girl from a wealthy family. family. But instead of being insulted by the novel, which you know, Morp, he would have thought had to have been about him, this guy was flattered and had 12 copies of this printed so that he could hand them out to people. Although police apparently never caught up with Neal's

Jorgensen, Linda Shokul was able to track him down and talk with him many times prior to his death. One of the first things she wanted to know was why he quickly left his New York apartment after police came there to question him. Well, that actually was something that I had mentioned many times to Neels when I spoke with him. And his response about, you know, the average person looking guilty or feeling guilty or having anger to being presented as a person of interest never bothered him. He said, that's their problem, not mine. I don't care. So it didn't face it. It him in the least that people thought he might have killed Chris or that he might have been involved in other crimes or whatever. He was indignant to everything. He got very chatty with me the last

five years of his life. And I think it was because I think I was the only person with whom, probably I was the only person that, who knew about the case, because at this point he was residing in California. And secondly, I was the only person who was familiar with actual details of the case and the actual person who was victim. You know, it just wasn't like idle chat about a third person. It was about somebody who was very important to me and somebody that obviously Niels knew that I knew. And also, there was no way he could get around the fact that both he and I knew that

he had been stalking her. Linda didn't pull any punches. And she asked Niels directly if he murdered Christine. Oh, many times. He always laughed and he would say something to the, his response was basically always the same. It's like I had nothing to do with such a young girl. And he says, he always referred to her as Miss Rothschild or that Rothschild girl. He distanced himself from her. And he said, I never even knew about her until years later when I, you know, was a doctor in a another location. But this was absolutely true, false, because during our conversations over the years, he would add little details like, yeah, when she would be in the, he called Renabom's the coffee shop. When she was in Renabom's drugstore, he would say, yeah, she would be flaunting her beauty and her brains at the coffee shop, and she had so many friends. And he knew details

about things, and he knew all about her dorm and her courses. He had also been at the UW Madison has a library called Memorial Library, and there's a very large reading room on the first floor, and he sat for hours a few rows across from her watching her in the evenings when she studied. I was in contact with his roommate during this time, who was David Kwanbeck, and David Kwanbeck was also a doctor at UW hospital. And it was the week prior to Chris's death that every morning, Niels Jorgensen would dress up in military fatigues and disappear for an hour or so and then come back, change clothes, and then go to his 8 o'clock shift.

And he did this starting the Wednesday prior to Chris's murder. And what's interesting about this, is Chris was killed at Sterling Hall. And on the upper six to eight floors of Sterling Hall, it's the Army Math Research Center. So people going in and out of that building and military clothing was no big deal. That's how it was. That's what you saw all the time. And I think that he used this type of dress in order to make himself blend into the whole

Maloo of that area. And so when he actually did kill Chris, it was no big deal to see him there early in the morning because he was in military fatigue and he was at the right building, which is where the army was working at the time. Despite decades of investigation to uncover and expose the truth behind her friend's murder, Linda never got the arrest she fought for. Nealz Jorgensen passed away in 2011. A little over two years, After Christine Rothschild's brutal murder, Sterling Hall was bombed at about 4 a.m. on August 24th, 1970, by anti-war radicals, Dwight and Carl Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burke. Housed inside Sterling Hall was the Army Math Research Center. It occupied six floors of Sterling Hall.

The group believed that the AMRC conducted secret research for the military. that was used in developing weapons and that these weapons then supported what they called United States imperialism. The next day, an unknown male and female plastered posters around campus defending the bomb. Now, you have to keep in mind, this was during the Vietnam War. There were many protests taking place across a large number of U.S. college campuses. This explosion caused extensive damage to Sterling Hall, but it was later repaired, and it still stands today. In 1971, Christine's dorm, Anne and Mary Hall, closed its doors. Today, it's a private apartment complex. On October 21, 1983, the Rothschild family once again suffered tragedy when Suzanne,

Christine's youngest sister, died from a heart aneurysm at the age of 29, just two days shy of her 30th birthday. Suzanne had changed her name to Lee and lived in San Francisco at the time of her passing. 20 years later, Emmanuel and Patriot Rothschild both passed away in 2003. Christine's surviving sisters, Roxanne and Arlene, still reside in Chicago. In late August 2009, police announced that a person of interest had emerged in Christine's case, William Floyd Zamestill, who at that point, was 57 years old, was serving a life sentence for the 1978 rape and murder of a Madison woman. At the time of the announcement, he had been indicted in Arizona for a 1973

rape and murder case. At the time of Christine's murder, Zamestill was 16 years old. But Linda Shulko was skeptical of this suspect. It's thought that if it was Zamestimus, still, Christine would have been his first victim. So I think rightfully so, morph, Linda questioned whether this kid would have had the confidence and experience to commit what appeared to be a very personal and complex crime. Zamestill's known MO was also very different than what happened to Christine, he raped and shot his victims and then dumped their bodies away from the crime scene. Obviously, we know in telling about what happened to Christine, that's not even close to what happened in her murder.

In 2017, Michael Arnfield, a criminologist and true crime broadcaster, wrote a book called Mad City, the true story of the campus murders that America forgot. In the book, he covers Christine Rothschild's murder and other killings in medicine. He believes that Nealz Jorgensen killed another college girl a year before Christine. The two murders were very similar. Christine's murder on the campus of the University of Wisconsin is still talked about by some of the students and faculty today. The murder itself has added fire to the campus's already creepy mystique. there are several places on UW's campus that are reportedly haunted. One in particular is Memorial Library, where Christine liked to hang out.

Students have witnessed weird things go on there, and many believe it is the ghost of an English professor and novelist named Helen Constance White, who died in 1967. Helen had also worked in the library. But some people still wonder, if the spirit, that reportedly roams the library might be that of Christine. As we mentioned early on, Christine's case affected her friend Linda Shulke was so much that she wrote a book about the murder titled Murder on the 56th Day. And it wasn't a quick or easy endeavor for her.

It's available on Amazon. It came out in August, and it's available both in Kindle and paperback. The actual writing of the book took me a prospect. two, two and a half years. But the research in the book took me 51 years. The University of Wisconsin Police Department is in charge of the case. It's under their jurisdiction. And they still consider it a cold, open case. So nothing is available to the public. So consequently, I had to do all my researching through archives, interviews, private research, and that's how I accumulated my information over the years. So the book about Christine's tragic and violent murder took 50 years

more for Linda to complete. And I think it shows you just how dedicated Linda Shulko was to her friend Christine and to telling her story. And sadly, if Linda is correct, about who she thinks murdered Christine, then he took that knowledge to the grave with him, having never been punished for the crime. And I do think more if that is tragic in a lot of the cases that we talk about, especially unsolved cases where persons of interest, people that authorities or other folks believe have a lot of knowledge

regarding the case and most likely may have been involved in the case, they pass away. And we say it all the time, right? When they do, unless they've told somebody else. And I think a lot of people probably don't want to do that. It's not something you want other people to know. They take that information to the grave with them. One frustrating thing for me, we talk about a lot of cases where there is no good suspect. there's no clue as to who did it and police are scratching their heads.

And in this case, there seems to be a very good suspect. And for whatever reason, police just weren't able to build a case against them. Yeah, I think both scenarios are tough, right? The cases where they don't have any good suspect. That's tough. But like you said, I agree with you. The cases where there seems to be a very good suspect, but they're. but they just can't put together the evidence that would really tie this person to the murder.

Now, you have to ask the question, is that because the evidence didn't exist? Or is it because investigators didn't, you know, follow the right clues? They didn't uncover the right clues. Who knows? We don't know. But that's the case of Christine Rothschild. Special thanks to Linda Shulko for joining us to help tell Christy. story. Thanks also goes out to Debbie Buck at truecrime diva.com for writing and research

assistance in this episode. As always, if you haven't done so and you love the show, just take a quick minute, go out, give us a five-star rating. But on top of that, keep telling your friends about criminology. That goes a long way towards helping the show grow. If you want to find us on social media, you can find us on Twitter with the handle at Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for criminology podcast. And if you want to join our Facebook discussion group, just search for criminology podcast discussion and fans. All right, Morph, that is it for another episode of criminology.

We will be back with you next Saturday night with an all new episode. So until then, for Mike and Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.