The Black Angel's Thumb

Johnson: In Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery, just within smiling range of the infamous Feldevert Monument, known as The Black Angel, lies another grave reportedly containing the remains of cadavers from the University of Iowa Hospital School. And amongst these fine deli sliced bits of human flesh and bone are last mortal odds and ends of Jeffrey Kaiser. Many Iowa City natives believe it's fitting that Jeffrey wound up here since this is where his journey began; precariously poised upon the pedestal of the Black Angel on Christmas Eve, 1985, with a hacksaw in his hand.

     Several accounts attempt to explain his actions that night and have become urban myths. One says Jeff wanted to join a Satanic cult and had to desecrate a grave by way of initiation. Another has it that Jeffrey did what he did because he believed the trinket would work as a sexual talisman and make him irresistible to young women. But the most believable comes from his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Rausch.

     "Jeffrey needed to do something wild, to set himself free. He was a senior at Regina Catholic Highschool and had been a model student for years and already been accepted Yale and then planned to go onto medical school, possibly at Johns Hopkins. But in the fall of 1985, all these carefully orchestrated plans lost their meaning to him." Jeffrey grew listless, and while his grades remained high as ever, Rausch says, he acted more and more as if he was an automaton caught up in a meaningless routine. Then he read a news article about two highschool kids from Petersburg, Virginia who had gotten stoned and went deer hunting at 2 AM---near a hospital---on an Army base. At that, he realized he had arrived at a rite of passage in his life. He knew exactly what it meant and exactly what he needed to do.

     "He told me he had to do something totally pointless and stupid before it was too late."

     Hacksawing the left thumb off the Black Angel may not have been as wild and irresponsible as shooting a deer in an Army Hospital courtyard in the dead of night, but it was easier and whole lot quieter. Plus, there was the added supernatural mystique in having a souvenir from the most mysterious cemetery monument in the state. How could he know how it would change his life?

     Perhaps he had an inkling tickled his spine when he first drew the hacksaw over the thumb's base on that outstretched hand; the hollow metal statue must have shrieked as the saw's teeth tore into the bronze. No doubt faded as he his saw strokes with grew longer and even, biting deeper into the black bronze. Then the thumb fell from the hand and plunged hissing into the snow covered ground below, a faint plume of steam curling up from the spot in the light of his flashlight. When he scooped up the metal digit still warm from being sawed, it must felt as warm as a real finger does when it's been just sawed off.

     "Something changed him. He showed me the thumb a day or two after Christmas," says Rausch. "He put it on a little silver chain around his neck. He wouldn't let me touch it. And he just sat and stared at it for hours. I never saw him after that."

     Now, it's generally agreed that this stunt set off something new inside him, an urgent restlessness, a desire to roam. By New Year's Eve, he had quit school. He traded in his Alvarez classical guitar upon which he had learned to play "Jesu, Joy of Mans' Desiring" for a scratched-up Stratocaster to play "God Is A Bag Of Vomit" with a Chicago punk rock band called "Andy and the Aryans". On St. Valentine's Day, Chicago police arrested him when a brawl broke out at a punk rock bar.

     His parents hardly recognized him when they arrived to bail him out. Here was their son, their pride and joy, who had never been rude to anyone while he lived under their roof, whom they had dreamed of seeing graduate from honors from Yale, his hair carved into a blue mohawk and a safety pin stuck through his nose, wearing a torn and stained leather jacket with a cigarette tottering on the very edge of his cut lip. The first words from him as soon as they got him on the street were, "Gimme a hundred bucks."

     Jason Kaiser, Jeff's father recounts that meeting with his son. "He wasn't our boy anymore. It was as if our Jeff fell apart and become a a wild animal. I figured he'd gotten hooked on dope or something. I gave him a couple of bucks; he told us to get out of his life. It broke his mother's heart; I about slugged him, I was so mad. What can you do when your own kid turns on you like that? He coulda had everything anybody could ever want---a great career, a brilliant future. I still don't know what happened to him; but I'm dead sure it was nothing we did."

     Andrew Dempsy, known then as "Andy Füror", lead singer for Andy and the Aryans at the time, now a Computer Systems Administrator for a Chicago regional mortgage firm, recalls that after being bailed out, Jeff's behavior grew even more erratic.

     "I have never seen anyone just fall apart, like that. And it wasn't like he was on crack or heroine or nothing. Sure, we were young and stupid then, but he just disintegrating. He only paid attention to stuff that he wanted to. He rarely listened to anyone in the band---and I don't mean musically, he had that down. But sometimes, if you tried to talk to him, he would act as if you weren't even there---especially at night. He hated going outside at night, you know. He'd always be looking up at the sky---and listening. We always had to be real quiet with him, then. But one gig, right before Valentine's Day, we had to walk under the El. So this train went over with its brakes screeching and a bunch of pigeons started up. Well, that wing flapping and the screeching scared the living shit out of him! He crawled under a car and started screaming 'Oh god, oh god oh god!' you know! God, he drank a lot---and picked fights with people. But you know, that was part of being in the band's image; screaming and yelling, slam dancing at gigs. It was all show. So, I don't know exactly what times he was just acting up like the rest of us or those times he was really crazy. He only came to practice when it suited him, you know, but he always knew his stuff. The rest of the time, it was all that stupid black metal thumb he kept on a chain around his neck! He used for a guitar slide during the show. Wild effect---he had it cranked so loud that it sounded like a 747 plowing into a mountain. It was, like, this talisman, or something sacred to him. And he never let anyone handle it, you know. Like once, during a gig when we were taking a break, he punched this chick in the face for touching the thing. Luckily she never pressed charges or nothing, but afterwards it made me sort of keep my guard up when he was around. Couple of times me or the other guys would find him off in a corner with this stupid thumb; totally focused on it like he was praying, other times bawling his head off. Hell, the night we fired him, I caught him in the men's room jerking off while licking that stupid thumb like he was teasing it with his tongue. Damn sick puppy."

     After performing with Andy and the Aryans for six months, the band fired Jeff after he attacked a bartender at one of their venues. Jeff took the matter so personally, that he routinely harassed the other three members of the band and at one point allegedly set fire to a truck containing their equipment.

     It's unclear what Jeff did during the next several months, though it is known that he enjoyed a brief tenure as the late night clerk at an adult arcade until he vanished after beating a patron so badly that the man can only walk with a cane. Jeff doesn't surface again until Christmas morning, 1986. And only then in the Chicago River.

     Initially, the Police said he jumped from a railroad bridge, but coroner concluded after his examination that Jeff had been strangled at some other location before his body was dumped in the river. He could offer little information on the killer's identity since the sole mark was a thumb print on his throat. He suggested the killer might have worked at a foundry or metal casting shop since he discovered traces of bronze in the thumbprint.

     Cook County notified Jeff's parents of their possession of his body. His parents arranged to have it returned to Iowa City. It never came. For five years, Jeff's parents hacked their way through a mass of paperwork and phone calls, getting nothing back but a great deal of assurances and concerned looks from managers and supervisors. Finally, they discovered a computer clerical error had routed his remains to another location: the University of Iowa Hospital Schools.

     By that time, though, the medical students had learned as much as anyone could from him.

     The black thumb Jeff had severed from the cold, dark figure looming so near his own resting place, meanwhile, has not been seen since. Yet, a rumor persists in this town that on the Christmas morning Jeff's body was pulled from the Chicago River, the Oakland Cemetery Attendant on duty day found a blackened bronze metal object---the size of a thumb---lying on the Black Angel's pedestal.