Free Deviant by Harold Schechter Page A

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