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

Tommie Myles testifies at Jesse Anderson trial, August 7, 1992

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Chapter 3: “They’re moving north”     April 21, 1992 began as a typical Tuesday at Northridge Mall. Tuesday was typically the slowest day of the week at the mall, and as Jesse Anderson described it, it was a slow day at the office, too. He left work after only three hours, then ran errands, watched the children while Barbara went to a clinic to have a sinus infection treated, then played nine holes of golf at his favorite country club. The Andersons hired a babysitter for the evening, because tonight was a date night they had planned for weeks.

    Jesse and Barbara then left their home in Saukville at 6:30 pm, and, because of the mall’s convenience to drivers from the distant northern suburbs, barely missed the start of the 7:00 showing of City of Joy at the six-screen movie theater inside the mall. After the movie, they returned to their car, drove around the mall, and parked behind the T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant on the outer edge of the parking lot, facing the apartment blocks of Northridge Lakes. They ate at the restaurant for about forty minutes without incident, according to Eric Shernell, who waited on the pair.
    At 10:15 pm, Daniel Brautigam heard screaming coming from outside the window of his mother’s fifth-floor apartment in Northridge Lakes. He ran down the stairs and into the building’s parking lot, where he assumed a woman was being sexually assaulted. Instead, he realized, the screams were coming from across the street, from the T.G.I. Friday’s parking lot, so he went into the restaurant to raise the alarm. By this time, other residents of the apartment building had called the police, and officers arrived within five minutes, in which time diners and employees at the restaurant had begun to congregate in the parking lot.

    Jesse Anderson was found with a fishing knife sticking out of his hand, sitting beside his car, directing onlookers and paramedics to help his wife instead of him. Barbara was lying underneath a car, her upper body coated in blood. Medical examiners struggled to determine exactly how many times she had been stabbed in the face, because the wounds were so severe and so close together, but it was later reported that there were at least nineteen separate cuts.

    When questioned by police, Jesse said that they had been confronted by two young black men who attempted to mug them with the fishing knife. The men had stabbed her, he said, then ran away without taking any money or other valuables from the couple. Jesse said he then grabbed the hat of one of the assailants who was fleeing the scene, which had the logo of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team on it, and which Jesse gave to the police as evidence along with the knife removed from his hand.

    The Andersons were brought to the Milwaukee County Medical Center, with Barbara being put on life support in critical condition. Meanwhile, throughout the night and into the following day, Milwaukee police officers searched for potential suspects meeting Jesse’s description of the attackers. While they questioned white suburbanites about reports of similar robberies, and black locals looking for any relatives known to wear Clippers gear, the shadow of their department’s mismanagement of the Jeffrey Dahmer case the previous year hung over them.

    On May 26, 1991, less than a year before the Anderson case, Dahmer kidnapped a 14-year-old Laotian-American boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone and brought him to his Milwaukee apartment. Sinthasomphone escaped, naked, and three witnesses called the police. When Officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish arrived on the scene, Dahmer told them that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, and successfully convinced them to return Sinthasomphone to his apartment over the protests of the (black) witnesses, who pointed out that the victim was bleeding. After the officers left, Dahmer killed and dismembered Sinthasomphone.

    The officers did not ask for Dahmer’s identification, which would have shown that he was already a convicted sex offender. As Balcerzak and Gabrish returned to the station, they were recorded making homophobic comments about the pair to their dispatcher over the radio. When Dahmer was caught two months later, and the two officers’ role in facilitating the murder of Sinthasomphone was discovered, the officers were fired. In 1994, however, they were both reinstated, and Balcerzak later became the president of the Milwaukee police union.

    The incident had seriously damaged the reputation of Milwaukee police, and served as a tragic object lesson about the consequences of not investigating a suspicious situation. Now, several months later, officers grew suspicious of Jesse’s testimony, particularly because, despite the urban legends that circulated about Northridge, the mall had a low crime rate. Lieutenant Ernie Meress, an officer who had supervised the crime scene that night, said as early as the following morning that the case “stinks to high heaven,” according to a fellow officer. Nevertheless, police stopped and detained numerous black men in the Northridge area, and did not attempt to dispel the media sensation that grew in the coming days.

    Despite their skepticism, local media began to report heavily on the incident, with extensive interviews of the Andersons’ grieving friends and relatives. A particular focus was placed on the changing reputation and racial makeup of the Northridge area, and what that change meant to white suburbanites from places like Cedarburg. These suburbanites saw themselves as “safe” from the crime and violence they associated with the black population of inner-city Milwaukee, and they found that the Anderson incident shattered their illusion of safety. One local resident being interviewed on television summarized the perceived implications of the stabbing simply: “They’re moving north.” It was clear that “they” were both the stereotypical gang members of the suburbs’ nightmares and African Americans as a group. (The major Milwaukee television stations – WTMJ, WITI, WISN, and WDJT – have all refused requests to view or copy their archival footage regarding the case.)

    Two days after the stabbing, as Barbara’s chances of recovery dwindled, Jesse asked for his wife to be removed from life support, saying that she had told him she never wanted to be kept alive in such a state. After she was pronounced dead, Jesse received her life insurance policy of $250,000. At that same time, police were following up on a call they had received the previous night from an 18-year-old black student who said that the Clippers hat found at the scene of the crime belonged to him.

    Tommie Myles and his girlfriend Wanda Jackson, both from the Capitol Heights neighborhood, visited Northridge Mall shortly before noon on the day of the murder. They were there to apply for jobs at the mall, when they were approached by a middle-aged white man who said he was also applying for a job. This man told Myles that as part of a job interview, he was being asked to buy something from a mall customer, and offered Myles $20 for his Clippers hat. Myles said that the person who bought his hat strongly resembled Jesse Anderson, and that he recognized the hat as soon as he saw it on the evening news.

    Rumors about Myles’ story spread across Milwaukee faster than the police could investigate, and they became mixed with another story about a suspicious black man wearing a similar hat at a nearby gas station. By Friday, three days after the stabbing, these rumors grew into false reports that Jesse Anderson had been arrested for the death of his wife, which were then apparently reported on the local news, greatly upsetting Jesse. Further investigation of the hat showed it had hairs inside it, which matched the hairs of the Andersons’ dog that were found all over the floor of their car. On the basis of this evidence, Jesse was arrested Saturday afternoon, shortly after he was discharged from the hospital. Having just been told the previous day by police that the rumors of Jesse’s arrest were false, however, the local media was slow to report about this new development, with the Milwaukee Journal saying on Sunday only that Jesse had been questioned by police again.

    With Jesse in custody but not yet formally charged with a crime, police further investigated the other key piece of evidence found at the crime scene. Ora Ronkowski, an employee at a local surplus store, told police she recognized the unusual red-handled fishing knife that appeared to be the murder weapon. About a month ago, she said, she had sold one of those knives to a balding white man who resembled Jesse Anderson, and she remembered this because it was the only time in several months that one of those knives had been sold. On further investigation, police were unable to find any other store in the Milwaukee area that sold the same type of knife.

    Monday, April 27, was the day of Barbara’s funeral. Police officers brought Jesse to the funeral home in handcuffs for a private viewing of her casket, in the hopes that it would inspire a confession. On the way there, Jesse was casual, chatting with the officers about sports and even offering to buy them breakfast, which they declined as a matter of policy. When they arrived, the officers reported, “his entire demeanor quickly changed from the person that they had in the back seat of their car to the person that was viewing the body.” Meeting his attorney in the lobby, Jesse reportedly said “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you” as he stood over the casket, then became ill and was escorted to the back of the room.

    While Jesse continued to maintain his innocence, the news of his visit to the funeral home in handcuffs proved to the media that the rumors of his arrest had become true, despite the reluctance of the police to say so outright. This news was bolstered by Jim DeShazer, the owner of the surplus store that sold the knife, and Tommie Myles, both of whom went to the media to back up the incriminating allegations they had made to police. These revelations sparked a backlash against the media, both from members of it who felt they had been duped, and local black community leaders, who argued that the reporting of the case was irresponsible and contributed to a long pattern of racism and racial double standards in the media.

    On Wednesday, the Milwaukee Journal published an editorial cartoon by its cartoonist Gary Markstein, lampooning the response to the case. In it, an unlabeled caricature of local conservative radio host Mark Belling speaks hysterically about the murder representing the danger of gang violence to suburbanites. He then introduces his guest, a wart-covered troll labeled “RACISM” sitting next to him. The Journal retracted the cartoon in the following day’s paper, after many of Belling’s regular listeners protested and said that Belling was actually critical of the sensational reporting of the case. UWM professor and media critic Dave Berkman, on the other hand, described Belling as “somebody who preaches [a] vitriolic, racist message”, and said that his popularity illustrated how “racism is the overriding reality of America, historically and contemporaneously”. (As of 2020, WISN Radio stated that it could not fulfill requests to listen to or copy archival recordings of Belling's show from the period.)

    The same day that cartoon was published, two thousand miles away from Milwaukee in Los Angeles, four police officers were acquitted of the assault of Rodney King. The reaction to that verdict, which culminated in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, quickly became national news and swept the Anderson case out of the Milwaukee headlines. The news of these riots was similarly sensationalized: the national media breathlessly reported on incidents of crime, looting, and violence, and in doing so encouraged further violence. While these incidents were real, not just racially-motivated hoaxes, the media’s role in perpetuating the violence through its coverage validated Berkman’s prediction that news outlets would learn nothing from the Anderson incident.

    Jesse Anderson’s choice of Northridge Mall as the location to murder his wife was an obvious effort to make use of existing racist fears, and the mall’s resulting declining reputation, for his personal gain. In doing so, he perpetuated those fears and that decline, and had an effect that lasted long after the hoax had been uncovered. Social scientist Katheryn Russell-Brown cites the Anderson case as a prominent example of a racial hoax crime designed to capitalize on the stereotype of “the criminalblackman” – with the spaces between the words removed to represent how closely American society associates blackness with crime. As she puts it, “the harm of the racial hoax is not limited to reinforcing centuries-old, deviant images of Blacks. Hoaxes also create these images for each new generation.” She argues that creating such a hoax should be treated as a criminal offense in its own right.