Deviant (8 page)

He climbs into his pickup and heads off into the night.

8

Editorial headline,
Plainfield Sun

“
What Happened to Mary Hogan
?”

D
uring a ten-year period, beginning in the late 1940s, Wisconsin law-enforcement officials were baffled by a handful of mysterious disappearances.

An eight-year-old girl named Georgia Weckler was the first. On sunny Thursday afternoon, May 1, 1947, little Georgia was given a lift home from her grade school in Jefferson, Wisconsin, by a neighbor, Mrs. Carl Floerke, who dropped the girl off by the half-mile lane that led from Highway 12 to the Weckler farmhouse. Mrs. Floerke watched as the girl paused to open her family’s roadside letterbox and remove a stack of mail. Then Georgia gave Mrs. Floerke a final wave goodbye and turned up the lane toward home.

She was never seen again.

When the girl failed to show up at home by evening, local lawmen were called in and immediately launched an all-night search, which proved fruitless. By Friday, hundreds of area residents had joined in the hunt, scouring ten square miles of countryside without finding a trace of the missing girl. Farmers and businessmen from around the county also contributed more than eight thousand dollars as a reward for information leading to the Weckler girl’s recovery.

The only clue to her disappearance was a black Ford sedan which had been seen backing out of the Wecklers’ lane shortly after Mrs. Floerke let Georgia off by the mailbox. Sheriff George Perry of Jefferson discovered deep ruts in the gravel—clearly caused by the rapid spinning of automobile tires—which suggested that the Ford had taken off in a hurry.

On Monday night, Georgia’s father—a respected member of the community who served as town treasurer#8212;went on the radio to appeal for his daughter’s release. But when a week had passed without a word from the abductors, Georgia’s parents and neighbors could only assume the worst. As the headline article in the May 8, 1947, issue of the
Jefferson Banner
put it, “Lack of any effort on the part of the kidnappers to contact the parents gave rise to fears that her disappearance may have been the work of a perverted mind.”

The same sort of mind was at work once again in the case of a pretty teenaged girl named Evelyn Hartley, the daughter of a biology professor at Wisconsin State College in La Crosse. A fifteen-year-old honor student at Central High School, Evelyn occasionally babysat for family friends, and at six-thirty
P.M.
on Saturday, October 24, 1953, she arrived at the home of her father’s colleague, Professor Viggo Rasmussen, to take care of the Rasmussens’ twenty-month-old daughter, Janis, while the parents attended Wisconsin State’s homecoming game.

Evelyn had only been babysitting for a year, and it was her practice to check in with her parents by phone at some point in the evening. But on this night, there was no word from her. Shortly before nine, Richard Hartley picked up the phone and tried reaching his daughter. She didn’t answer. Worried, Hartley quickly drove the mile and a half to the Rasmussen home and knocked on the door. Again, no answer. Peering through a picture window, he caught sight of his daughter’s eyeglasses and one of her canvas loafers lying in the middle of the living-room floor.

By now his concern had flared into alarm. He searched for a way in, but the doors and first-floor windows were all locked. Then he spotted an open basement window. He also spotted something else: footprints underneath the window. And bloodstains leading away from the house.

Hartley crawled through the window and discovered his daughter’s other shoe lying on the basement floor. Upstairs in the living room, the rugs were disarranged, as though they had been disturbed during a scuffle. Hartley quickly notified the police.

During the search that followed, police and sheriff’s officers discovered more blood on the lawn, as well as several bloody patches, including a palm print, on the house of a neighbor. Bloodhounds were brought in to follow the trail that led away from the basement window, but the dogs were stopped cold at a spot about two blocks away. Apparently, the girl had been forced into a car at that point.

From the slim evidence they could gather, the police theorized that Evelyn had heard a noise in the basement and went to the top of the stairs to investigate. When she saw the intruder coming up the stairs, she turned and tried to flee. There were indications that she had even managed to reach the front door when she was overtaken. Neighbors reported hearing a single scream at around seven-fifteen, but at the time they had thought nothing of it, assuming it was the sound of children playing.

As in the Weckler case, no word was heard from the abductor. Police Chief George Long told reporters that night that he assumed the girl had been kidnapped. “But not,” he added ominously, “for ransom.”

Over the next few days, a massive search was conducted—“the most intensive combing” of the region that had ever taken place, according to Chief Long. At least a thousand volunteers—farmers, members of veterans’ organizations, Boy Scouts, church groups, students and faculty from Wisconsin State College—joined law-enforcement officers in a fifty-mile hunt that extended into Minnesota. River patrols dredged the waterways, an Air Force helicopter searched the bluffs and woodlands, and every swamp, ravine, culvert, and cave was explored.

By Tuesday, Evelyn’s whereabouts remained a mystery, though the searchers had located several pieces of evidence that seemed to confirm the police chief’s suspicions. Two blood-smeared items of girls’ underclothing—a white pair of panties and a brassiere, identical to the kind worn by the victim—were discovered just off Highway 14, about two miles southeast of La Crosse. And about four miles farther south, near a place called the Sportsview Inn, police found a bloodstained pair of men’s trousers.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Hartley issued an emotional appeal for the return of his daughter. His wife, tight-lipped and tearful, refused to speak to any more reporters. “I’ve answered all the questions I can,” she told them. “I don’t want to think about it anymore. It’s terrible. It’s almost beyond bearing.” Meanwhile, searchers began using long poles to explore the mounds of soft earth in the fields around the Rasmussen home. By that time, as the
Milwaukee Journal
reported, “every indication was that the search was directed toward finding a corpse.”

But the body was never found.

Three more people vanished during this period. And whereas the Weckler and Hartley abductions were committed more than a hundred miles apart from each other, these other disappearances occurred in the same vicinity.

All of them happened around Plainfield.

On November 1, 1952, a forty-three-year- old farmer named Victor “Bunk” Travis—a resident of Adams County, just west of Plainfield—said goodbye to his wife and went off to hunt deer in the company of a Milwaukee acquaintance named Ray Burgess. At some point in the late afternoon, the two stopped for beers at Mac’s Bar in Plainfield, where they remained, drinking and chatting, for several hours. At around seven P.M., they left the bar, got into Burgess’s car, and drove away.

That was the last that was ever seen of them. The two hunters, along with the car Burgess was driving, simply disappeared. A month later, local lawmen were still searching for the missing men but without much hope of ever finding them.

“What has happened to Travis?” asked the editor of the county newspaper, the
Waushara Argus
. Why would he leave his pretty young bride of two months, or his mother, without telling her that he didn’t expect to be back within a few hours? These questions are stirring the imaginations of the natives of Adams County, a county that has thousands of acres of wilderness. A wilderness that is seldom traversed except in limited fashion during deer hunting season.

“It is wild country,” the article concluded. “Country that could hide violence for years and perhaps never give up its secret.”

In a sense, the final disappearance was also the least explicable. After all, the abduction of children by psychopathic strangers is every parent’s worst nightmare and a common enough occurrence to be a legitimate fear. And heavily armed hunters who spend a chunk of the afternoon drinking beer in a country tavern before venturing back into the woods have been known to come to unhappy ends.

But to the people of Plainfield, the disappearance of Mary Hogan—the two-hundred-pound tavern keeper with the profane tongue and mysterious past—seemed especially baffling. And sinister.

When a Portage County farmer named Seymour Lester walked into Mary Hogan’s tavern on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 8, 1954, he was immediately struck by how silent and empty the place seemed. Then he noticed the pool of blood on the floor. Hurrying down the road to the nearest farmhouse, he first telephoned Villas Waterman, town chairman of Pine Grove, then notified the sheriff’s office in the city of Stevens Point.

Within a short while, Waterman and Sheriff Harold S. Thompson, along with a number of deputies, arrived on the scene and saw at a glance that Hogan had fallen victim to foul play. A spent .32-caliber cartridge lay on the floor next to a large patch of dried blood. The patch was streaked, as though a body had been dragged through it. A bloody trail led outside the door to a spot in the parking area where the body had apparently been loaded into a pickup truck.

Realizing that he needed additional help, Thompson contacted the state crime lab at Madison, whose investigators carefully searched the tavern for fingerprints and other clues. A farm-to-farm check was made in Portage and surrounding counties, and an alert was transmitted to the police in Chicago, Hogan’s previous home. But the authorities were unable to turn up a single lead.

On December 8, 1955, the anniversary of Hogan’s disappearance, Ed Marolla, editor of Plainfield’s weekly newspaper, the Sun, ran a front-page column headlined “What Happened to Mary Hogan?” A year later, in the issue of December 15, 1956, he was still asking the same question:

After two full years, complete mystery surrounds the disappearance of Mary Hogan who apparently was shot and dragged from her Town of Pine Grove tavern on December 8, 1954.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has come to light, and the questions concerning the whereabouts of Mary Hogan’s body are as unknown today as they were on that bleak December day when a neighbor stepped into the tavern to find a strangely silent building and blood splotched on the floor—.

Following the disappearance of Mary Hogan, a series of crimes took place in the Almond area some miles to the east but along the same highway. Other crimes were committed at Wild Rose and at Plainfield. Some of these crimes were partly solved by the confessions of a town of Almond man.

But in so far as the Mary Hogan case is concerned, it is still a complete and deep, dark mystery. Speculation is still rife about what happened to her, and people still talk about Mary Hogan. Was it something out of her past that caught up with her? Or was it just plain local hoodlums who perpetrated the crime?

Was the body of Mary Hogan taken away and cremated somewhere as some people surmise, or does the body of Mary Hogan lie rotting in some lonely Town of Pine Grove or nearby area grave?

The authorities don’t know. No one knows—that is, except the murderers themselves.

9

ROBERT E. GARD and L. G. SORDEN,
Wisconsin Lore

“
Wisconsin contains, if the yarns are an indication, more ghosts per square mile than any state in the nation
.”

A
mong the men who occasionally employed Eddie Gein as a handyman was a local farmer and sawmill owner named Elmo Ueeck. Like many of Eddie’s acquaintances, Ueeck sometimes twitted the meek little bachelor about women.

One day, shortly after the disappearance of Mary Hogan, Ueeck and Gein were chatting, when the conversation turned—as it so often did in Plainfield during that time—to the subject of the missing tavern keeper.

“Eddie,” said Ueeck. “If you had spent more time courting Mary, she’d be cooking for you instead of being missing.”

Ueeck would never forget Eddie’s response. As he recalled years later, Eddie “rolled his eyes and wiggled his nose like a dog sniffing a skunk.” Then he smiled and said, “She’s not missing. She’s down at the house now.”

Coming from anyone else, such a comment might have seemed questionable, if not downright suspicious. But Eddie was always talking crazy like that, so Ueeck didn’t make much of it.

Nor did anyone else who heard Eddie make the same remark. Eddie had become increasingly reclusive, but whenever he happened to find himself in the company of other men and the question of Mary Hogan’s whereabouts came up, he would always crack the same strange little joke. “She’s at the farm right now,” Eddie would say, grinning his idiot’s grin. “I went and got her in my pickup truck and took her home.”

The men would snicker or shake their heads at Eddie’s lame attempt at humor.

No one paid much attention. It was just the sort of damn fool remark you’d expect from an oddball like Eddie Gein.

It was about this time that a strange rumor concerning Eddie began circulating around Plainfield.

According to some local youngsters who claimed to have seen the objects in question with their own eyes, there were shrunken heads in Eddie Gein’s house.

Bob Hill was one of the people who swore he’d seen the heads. The teenage son of Irene and Lester Hill, the West Plainfield storekeepers, Bob was the closest thing Eddie had to a friend. He hunted rabbits with the older man, accompanied him to movie shows and an occasional high-school baseball game, and was one of the few individuals who had ever been inside Gein’s dark, decrepit house.

It was on one of those visits, the teenager declared, that Eddie had brought out and shown him a pair of preserved human heads—creepy things, with leathery skin, long matted hair, and hollow eye sockets. When Bob asked Eddie where they came from, the little man replied that they were genuine South Seas shrunken heads, sent by a cousin who had fought in the Philippines during the war.

Several other Plainfield youngsters saw the heads, too. Not far from Eddie’s farm lived a family with two young sons—a teenager and his eight-year-old brother. Every now and then, the pair would come over for a visit. Eddie and the older boy would play cards in the kitchen, while the eight-year-old amused himself with some of the intriguing objects scattered around Eddie’s floor.

Years afterward, as a middle-aged man, the younger of the two brothers would relate a particularly disquieting episode that took place on one of those occasions. “Cards didn’t fascinate me at that particular time, but Eddie had other things, like a tool that would punch holes in leather or paper. I’d spend my time doing that while my brother and Eddie played cards.

“One of these times when we were over there, I ran out of paper and asked Eddie where I could get more. He told me to go into his bedroom. When I went around the corner, there were three heads hanging on that door. Just the heads—the faces were dried and they had hair on them. Remember those African movies with the shrunken heads? That’s what they looked like. Not really shrunken. I’d have to say they were the actual size of the head. But skin, hair, all that.

“I didn’t say nothing. When we walked home, I asked my brother what the heads could be, and he told me they were probably Halloween get-ups. And I was young enough that I believed it.

“I never asked Eddie about it. But from that particular time or shortly thereafter, Eddie no longer let my brother or me into the house.”

In a town as small and sealed-off as Plainfield, gossip spreads like the flu, and it wasn’t long before the entire community had heard the reports of Eddie Gein’s peculiar possessions. Still, no one was especially disturbed or even surprised by the story. A set of souvenir shrunken heads from the South Pacific was exactly the sort of collectible you’d expect someone like Eddie Gein to own.

Indeed, the hearsay about Eddie Gein’s heads became a kind of joke around Plainfield. At some point during this period, Eddie had a notion to move away from his old farmstead and approached two of his neighbors, Donald and Georgia Foster of West Plainfield, with a proposition. According to Mrs. Foster, who later described the incident for reporters, “Ed came around and wanted to know if we’d like to trade our house for his farm. We have only an acre or so of land here and we thought the idea was worth considering, so we went out to look his place over.

“We looked into all the rooms except the front bedroom and one room right off what I suppose was originally the dining room but that Ed used for a bedroom and a living room. He had the door closed to that one room. He said it was just an old pantry and was filled with junk.

“We didn’t see anything to make us suspicious. The place was awfully dirty and full of stuff piled all over the floor. It was pretty dark, too. He had those dirty old curtains at the windows, so we couldn’t see much.

“The kids have always brought back stories about him having shrunken heads there. So when we were upstairs in his house, I kidded Ed about it. I pointed to one of the bedrooms and I said, ‘Is that where you keep your shrunken heads?’ He gave me a funny look. My husband looked at me, too, and I wished I hadn’t said it. But then Ed gave that little grin of his and pointed to another room.

“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘they’re in this other room over here.’

“People were always kidding Ed about things like that.”

For various reasons—Eddie’s increasing weirdness, the story of his shrunken heads, the progressively rundown appearance of his property—the old Gein farmhouse gradually developed a reputation among the children of Plainfield as a haunted house.

Especially toward evening, when the darkness started to gather around the dismal, lonely place and the only light to be seen from Eddie’s house was the somber glow of an oil lamp behind his moldering kitchen curtains, it was easy to believe that evil really did live within those walls. Roger Johnson, son of Eddie’s nearest neighbor, remembers vividly how, when walking home from a friend’s house at dusk along the road that led past the Gein farm, he would “save all his energy up for that last hundred yards” and then “run like hell” until he was well clear of Eddie’s place.

“It wasn’t that I feared Eddie,” Roger would later explain. “I feared the house.”

The grownups, of course, would listen to these fears and smile. After all, every small town in America has its own haunted house, some tumbledown place inhabited by a harmless old eccentric who has been transformed by the colorful imaginations of the neighborhood children into a monster, a ghoul, a fairy-tale ogre—the kind of fiend who lurks in the gloom of his parlor, carving knife in hand, just waiting for an unwary child to knock on the door.

But every parent knows that this is just one of the many wild fantasies young children are prone to. In real life, such creatures simply do not exist.

One thing is certain: if Eddie’s young neighbors were spooked by the mere look of his gloomy old farmhouse, it’s fortunate for them that they weren’t around on those nights when a far more ghastly sight could be seen in his front yard—the figure of what seemed to be a naked elderly female with wiry gray hair, mottled flesh, withered dugs, and the face of a corpse.

Indeed, to see this grotesque apparition, you might well have imagined (had you known of Eddie’s belief in the power of his will) that his efforts to raise his mother had succeeded after all and that the creature cavorting obscenely in the moonlight was the resurrected person of Augusta Gein herself.

It was a sight that would have supplied any of Eddie’s impressionable young neighbors with a lifetime’s worth of nightmares. It might even have persuaded their parents that the stories about Eddie Gein’s house of horrors were more than just childish make-believe.