Mad City by Michael Arntfield

Author:Michael Arntfield [Arntfield, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503942653
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2017-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

Familiar Figure

Back in the vicinity of the Main King Tap, the sketchy watering hole east of the Capitol Square where Julie Ann Hall was last seen alive in June of ’78, there was, by the end of 1979, a new hangaround whom the police would later describe euphemistically as a “familiar figure.” By December of that same year, as Christmas shoppers shuffled along West Main and Pinkney and their children peered into store windows, twenty-four-year-old Susan LeMahieu had become a Main and King Street habitué. She could be frequently found loitering near that same intersection while popping in and out of the various bars and coffee shops that by then were known haunts for some of the prostitutes who had migrated from the Cardinal Hotel after the Debbie Bennett murder.

Young Susan was not, however, a street worker or even a drug user. She was simply one of the forgotten, a cognitively delayed woman whose amalgam of mental and physical disabilities had left her partially paralyzed on her left side. She had largely been forsaken even by her own family as a result of her disability and later would be described insensitively—perhaps a sign of the times—as “retarded” in newspapers during the coming months. She was for all intents and purposes relegated to being the village idiot and a soon-to-be inconvenient victim for police amid the deluge of more photogenic missing and murdered coeds. Sent off to live in a state-funded chicken coop of a group home by her family, Susan resided at Allen Hall on nearby State Street where she was given room and board, but had taken to roaming the Mad City streets during the Christmas shopping season in hopes of finding some kind of human connection with somebody—anybody.

By the time she was reported missing to Madison PD by the group home staff the night of December 19, a Wednesday, after she failed to turn up for the home’s imposed curfew on the previous Saturday, a belated and begrudgingly written report was filed but no media release was made and no real investigation undertaken. A “retarded” and physically disabled woman wandering the streets in subthermal conditions—with the Capital City Killer on the loose no less—was apparently little cause for concern. It’s also unclear whether the group home or police notified Susan LeMahieu’s family, parents separated, with her mother still residing in their East Madison home—not far from Allen Hall—where the rest of the family was apparently preparing to celebrate Christmas, apparently without Susan. If her mother Ruth—or even her father Gary who was by then living in the town of Mauston some eighty miles away in Juneau County—was notified, it would likely have been too much to bear. They might have thought, and would later know for certain, that history was repeating itself. Indeed, both Susan’s status as a burden and her parents’ marriage were casualties of family tragedies past.

In 1966, when Susan was only ten years old, her two youngest brothers, Bill and Doug, age four and six

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