Free Deviant by Harold Schechter Page B

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