Hogancamp takes me to see Marwencol. On our way we pass his old television. Sometimes at night, he says, he watches his wedding videos and thinks, “Wow, she’s hot.” Since the beating, he doesn’t remember his wife at all – not a moment of their five-year marriage. He doesn’t remember his life before or after his marriage either. He only knows what others have told him – that he was born and raised in upstate New York, scraped through school, spent five years in the US Navy, left with an honourable discharge, met his wife, became an alcoholic, and ended up alone. By the time he was attacked he was drinking nearly two litres of whiskey a day.
“I needed help from God,” he says. “And so he sent five horsemen.”
We head outside. “Marwencol was solely made up so I could kill those five guys,” Hogancamp tells me. “I had no way to do it in real life. I played it over in my head. I’d get caught. I’d go to prison. I’d get the chair. The first time I killed all five of them, I felt a little bit better. That violent hatred and anger subsided a little.”
“How many times have you killed them in all?” I ask him.
“Oh, over and over,” he replies. “For 12 years now. I’ve killed them every which way. I’ve killed them in ways Satan himself hasn’t even thought of.”
In one photo story – called The Giant of Marwencol – the five SS men are torturing and humiliating two women because they’re refusing to give up “Hogie’s” location. (Hogie is the action figure based on Hogancamp.) The Nazis are whipping the women. Their backs are streaked with blood. But suddenly a giant hand reaches in – the real Hogancamp’s hand – and gently touches the SS men. “With a touch,” the caption reads, “the bodies of the SS dropped where they stood. He took their souls from their bodies and sent them to hell.”
But this is an unusual photo story: most of the time the SS men are killed by the women of the town. “The only species on Earth that haven’t attacked me are women,” Hogancamp says. “And when they heard I had over 300 pairs of high heels they said: ‘We’ll take you in our tribe.’”
(In real life, the five attackers got off pretty lightly. Two got probation. Another two were sentenced to five years in prison, and the ringleader got nine years.)
