Every few years, Wisconsin makes national headlines not for the Packers, cheese, and snowmobile races but for some form of a story so strange, so dark, that the rest of America quietly sets their brat down and stares. This month, it happened again.
Durand, a quiet riverside town nestled in western Wisconsin and minutes away from the confluence of the Chippewa and Mississippi Rivers, is now on the map for something other than trout fishing. This time, it’s because a nurse amputated a dying man’s foot without a doctor’s order and planned to put it on display in her family’s taxidermy shop. No, this isn’t satire. No, it’s not a Netflix pitch. It’s real. It’s documented. And it happened just 200 miles from Plainfield, the hometown of Ed Gein, the inspiration for "Psycho," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Silence of the Lambs."
What’s in the water here?
Just Another Day in the Dairyland Twilight Zone
Mary Brown was a hospice nurse whose job was to help people approach the dignity of death. With a twisted brain in 2022, she decided to amputate a frostbitten foot from a 62-year-old man without medical authorization.
The man's prognosis was terminal, and he was in and out of consciousness. Brown had plans to use the foot as an educational tool in her family's taxidermy shop with a sign saying, "Wear Your Boots, Kids."
You can't make this stuff up.
Open and shut case, you'd think. She should be a guest in prison, right?
Wrong. From the New York Post:
She was initially charged with intentionally causing great bodily harm and mayhem and physically abusing an elder person, but the felonies, which could have each carried a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, were dismissed after pleading guilty to lesser charges.
Well, guess what? She walked.
A Wisconsin nurse who amputated a patient’s frostbitten foot without authorization and planned to use it as a ghoulish display in her family’s taxidermy shop was given a sweetheart plea deal in which she’ll serve no time in prison and pay just $443 in court costs.
Wouldn't you think the HR Department would have a rule?
In addition to probation and the fine, she is no longer permitted to work as a nurse.
Following in the Footsteps of Ed Gein
Brown is no Ed Gein. She didn't rob graves or wear faces. But the cultural through-line is hard to ignore. Just over three hours southeast of Durand sits Plainfield, where Ed Gein’s crimes shattered the postwar illusion of Midwest normalcy. Gein dismembered corpses, decorated his home with bones, and carved human skin into household objects. He wasn’t just disturbed.
He was Americana's first boogeyman.
And here we are, nearly seventy years later, and the echoes continue. We don’t celebrate this stuff, but we can’t deny it either. Wisconsin has a history of producing the kind of horror that feels too bizarre to be real.
From Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment to Gein’s farmhouse to now a taxidermy foot, it’s clear that when Wisconsin goes dark, it doesn’t just go dark. It brings props.
A Justice System More Bizarre Than the Crime
Brown didn’t just commit an act outside the bounds of medical ethics. She violated the trust between the caretaker and the patient. The patient’s family never consented. The man never gave permission. But somehow, after a two-year legal process, she was spared jail time. The judge claimed she had “lost her career” and “suffered enough.”
Imagine saying that about anyone else who removed a body part without consent. A gang member. A corrupt doctor. A mortician running a side hustle. Would they walk? Of course not.
But Brown had the good fortune of committing her crime under the flag of rural America, where crimes against the poor and terminally ill often fall through the cracks. And now, she walks free while the man she dismembered is buried without a foot.
When Satire Becomes Documentary
You can’t write satire about Wisconsin. You just described it.
Where else could someone remove a human limb, plan to mount it next to deer antlers, and receive a lighter sentence than someone caught with an ounce of weed in Milwaukee?
Where else would the local culture shrug and say, “Well, that’s messed up,” and then go back to tending bar or shooting darts?
There’s something undeniably Midwest about it: the combination of politeness, absurdity, and dark humor that makes a human foot in a freezer feel like just another day at the shop.
Final Thoughts
Wisconsin doesn’t just have a true crime history. It has a true crime personality. It wears it like a flannel. Maybe it's our long winters?
There’s something chillingly casual about how the most unspeakable events happen in barns, basements, and backwoods clinics just off the state highways. We don't mean to be bizarre. We just lean into it when it shows up.
So yes, Durand is now forever marked, not by war, not by a storm, but by a nurse with a hacksaw and a twisted sense of décor.
And somewhere out there, in the haunting legacy of Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a thousand unsolved backwoods crimes, Wisconsin keeps quietly asking the same question: “She thought this was okay?”
