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"They're Moving North": Milwaukee, the Media, and the Murder of Barbara Anderson

Kevin Lynch at BELA, 1996

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Chapter 4: Aftermaths     Jesse Anderson’s trial began on August 3, 1992. Although Jesse maintained his innocence throughout, his defense attorneys were limited to asking for some of the evidence to be ruled inadmissible, given the weight of the evidence against him. The defense tried and failed to have the trial moved out of Milwaukee, because of the overwhelming media coverage that almost all local residents had seen, which they argued would bias all potential jurors. After nine hours of deliberation, the jury found Jesse Anderson guilty of first-degree homicide on August 13.

    He was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole no earlier than 2052, by Judge Michael Guolee, who said in his sentencing that he had “preyed upon ‘fear and racism’”. Jesse said that he had “been made a scapegoat in a farce that some people call a trial,” and that he would “never stop looking” for what he claimed were Barbara’s true killers. His sentencing drew attention to the fact that, under Wisconsin law, a parent being convicted for the murder of their child’s other parent was not grounds for revoking their parental rights, preventing the Andersons’ children from being put into foster care. This inspired state legislators to introduce the “Barbara Lynch Anderson Bill,” changing the law to eliminate the situation.

    While in prison at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, Jesse appealed his conviction. In an exclusive interview with Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal, he described his efforts to get a new trial, the occasional letters of support he had received, and his interactions with fellow Columbia inmate and notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who worked as a recreation assistant in the prison. Stingl counterbalanced his sympathetic profile with a more negative article headlined “Victim’s family grants her husband no forgiveness.”

    Acting as his own attorney, Jesse hired a private investigator and found two men who claimed to have witnessed the botched mugging Jesse had described. Together, they claimed to have identified three black men as the attackers, prompting the district attorney who had prosecuted the case to respond that the claims were clearly implausible and had “not only not shaken our belief that Jesse Anderson did this, but has reconfirmed it.”

    While working in the prison’s hobby shop, Jesse did not get along well with his fellow inmates. At one point, he vandalized a prisoner’s drawing of Martin Luther King, Jr., adding to it a bullet pointed toward King’s head. He then said that another prisoner had done this, one that he already had a known dislike for, and whom he had previously said he wanted to get into trouble. After the marker used for the vandalism was found in Jesse’s cell, a hearing examiner ordered Jesse to spend five days in solitary confinement, making the ruling on April 21, 1994, the second anniversary of Barbara’s death. A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections noted the irony: “That's what he did in his crime, wasn't it, set it up and blame others?”

    On August 30, 1994, Judge Diane Sykes agreed to hear the testimony of the two alleged witnesses Jesse had located, after months of debate. By this time, the defense team had dropped their claim to have identified the real perpetrators. One of the witnesses quickly admitted that he had lied, while the other told an inconsistent story, and halfway through the following day of testimony, Sykes threw out the case. Jesse continued to maintain his innocence, and began to work on his defense against a wrongful death lawsuit seeking $20 million on behalf of his and Barbara’s children. On November 15, that case was postponed until the following year.

    Two weeks later, on the morning of November 28, 1994, Jesse Anderson was assigned to a routine bathroom-cleaning detail at the prison, alongside two of his fellow inmates: Christopher Scarver, a black man who had been convicted in the 1990 murder of his former employer, and Jeffrey Dahmer. While the three were unsupervised for upwards of twenty minutes, Scarver used a metal bar he had removed from the prison’s weight room to severely beat Dahmer and Anderson.

    Scarver then calmly returned to his cell. The bloody aftermath was discovered by guards only after they asked Scarver why he had stopped working early, to which he responded, “God told me to do it. You will hear about it on the 6 o'clock news. Jesse Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead.” Dahmer was pronounced dead an hour after the incident at a nearby hospital. Jesse Anderson remained in critical condition for two days before succumbing to his wounds.

    The exact motivations of Scarver, who had had a history of schizophrenia and had previously claimed that voices in his head told him he was the “son of God” and “the chosen one”, have been discussed mostly regarding his killing of Dahmer, several of whose victims were black and other people of color. The racial motivation in Scarver’s killing of Anderson is even more obvious, and frequently serves as a footnote at the very end of biographies and documentaries about Dahmer. The means of their deaths have also provoked suspicion, with some suggesting that prison guards deliberately allowed Scarver to work unsupervised with the prison’s two most notorious inmates, knowing or expecting that he would kill them.

    In the aftermath of Barbara’s death, her family was shocked to hear about Jesse’s history of abusing her, because she never told her family about the abuse. Believing that Barbara would never have been killed if that silence had been broken, the Lynch family started BELA Charities, a non-profit organization aimed at supporting victims of domestic violence, raising thousands of dollars for family shelters and pro-bono divorce lawyers near their hometown of Orland Park, Illinois. By 2008, BELA (which stands for “Barbara Ellen Lynch Associates”) had raised over $150,000 for its cause.

    Despite the revelation that Jesse Anderson had lied, Northridge Mall never recovered from the blow to its reputation. The acceleration of white flight from the area devastated retail stores in and around the mall, which like Capitol Court could not survive with only black and lower-income customers. By 2001, just nine years after the murder, three of Northridge’s four anchor stores and most of its smaller store spaces were vacant, and the whole building was sold to Tucker Development Corporation for just $3.5 million. The mall’s last tenant, a Boston Store department store, closed in March 2003, leaving Northridge empty and its new owners free to begin planning its demolition and redevelopment.

    Tucker soon found that demand was low because the underlying demographics of the area, combined with its broader reputation, turned off companies that considered opening stores there. Today, in 2020, in the midst of the so-called “retail apocalypse” brought on by the rise of e-commerce companies like Amazon and irresponsible business practices by private equity firms, an abandoned or nearly empty shopping mall is a common sight. In 2003, it was an unmistakable sign to retailers that the mall had failed for a particular reason, so they avoided Tucker’s new project and demolition never even began.

    A Chinese investment firm, U.S. Black Spruce Enterprise Group, purchased the former mall from Tucker in 2008. By this time, a major economic recession was ongoing, and many of the nearby commercial developments that had initially survived the closure of Northridge were now going under. Black Spruce came in with ambitious plans for the property, proposing a distribution center and emporium for goods imported from China. In the years that followed, Black Spruce made numerous promises to the city of Milwaukee that never came to fruition. The company also was inconsistent in paying its property taxes and mortgages, and at one point the mall was days away from foreclosure before its outstanding debts were paid off.

    Penzeys Spices, a retail chain based in Milwaukee, attempted to buy the property and convert it into a warehouse for its operations, but Black Spruce refused to sell. Penzeys was one of many companies looking to convert Northridge-area retail spaces into industrial facilities, essentially giving up on the area’s former purpose. A nearby Target store, for example, was converted into a facility for a local refrigeration company, while a Walmart has become home to a vehicle transmission manufacturer. These conversions are often controversial, because local residents still want places to shop, but more importantly they need the jobs that the new facilities promise to provide, which the retail industry no longer can.

    Since the mall was abandoned, it has become popular in a new way with rebellious teenagers, who consistently vandalize and break into the building. While some of these incursions have positive value – one group of “urban explorers,” for example, saved several abandoned boxes of photographs and videotapes documenting the mall’s history – they are dangerous, have structurally weakened the building in some places, and have made potential redevelopment even harder. This became an endemic problem after YouTube celebrity Casey Neistat, with permission from the mall’s owners, filmed himself and his team converting one of the mall’s concourses into a “winter wonderland” for the benefit of local children in December 2017. While Neistat’s video was both legal and well-intentioned, it inspired some of his eleven million subscribers to go there and break in.

    With the former Northridge Mall becoming increasingly hazardous, and Black Spruce taking little action to secure the property, the City of Milwaukee condemned the building in April 2019 and ordered Black Spruce to tear it down. At that time, the city estimated, the building was worth a mere $81,000, mostly because the complete overhaul necessary to make it habitable again was expected to cost millions of dollars. The city considered demolishing the building itself and charging Black Spruce for the costs, expected to total more than $10 million, but Black Spruce appealed the demolition order in court, claiming that it had not been given enough time to make its proposal a reality.

    By July 2019, neither Black Spruce nor the city had made any progress with the building. On July 22, Black Spruce maintenance worker Victoriano Diaz and his crew investigated a broken high-voltage transformer on the property, from which copper wires had been stolen. When Diaz touched the metal door of the transformer box, he was electrocuted and died within minutes. His coworker and brother-in-law, Alex Sanchez, pulled him away from the box and received third-degree burns from touching him. The crew had believed that power had been cut off at the mall building and were unaware that Black Spruce was still paying for electricity. The death strengthened the city’s case for demolishing the building immediately, but as of March 2020 Black Spruce has not begun demolition and its appeal against the order is still being heard in court.

    The fate of Capitol Court and Northridge Mall may already be repeating itself at Bayshore, several miles east. Long considered upscale and relatively “safe” from crime and violence because of its proximity to Lake Michigan and the surrounding high property values, Bayshore is suffering both from the ongoing “retail apocalypse” and from a decline in its reputation. Since January 2020, a fatal shooting and a major theft at the mall, both of them highly publicized, have contributed to this decline. It is entirely possible that an incident similar to the Jesse Anderson case could occur at Bayshore today, and it is unlikely that local media outlets – including social media, which did not exist in 1992 – would handle such an incident better than how the Anderson case was covered. Nearly three decades after they were said, Dave Berkman’s words still remain relevant: “if something similar happened a month from now [...] we will have the same reaction: 'it should not be happening to fine, upstanding, blonde white people, it's OK and acceptable if it happens to black people.'”