Today, well tonight, will mark 25 years since Lisa Lambert, Phillip DeVine and Brandon Teena were brutally murdered in a farmhouse just south of Humboldt, Nebraska. Culturally, far more has changed in the intervening years regarding the social issues surrounding their deaths than I would have imagined. But the place and the people inhabiting the place, which is my interest as a geographer, remains mostly unchanged. The owner of the land, a local farmer, tore the house down around 2014 so anybody going there sees typical southeast Nebraska farmland:
I documented my efforts to find the site of the murders almost two years ago:
Searching for Brandon Teena
What I’ve been doing since then is visiting the site and “tending” to the descansos. The original effort was last-minute and ad-hoc.
I wanted to get any memorial effort off of the property because I know over the years that farmer who owns it has taken great umbrage when catching people trespassing on his land, thus I did something a bit more substantial and also off his land.
Over the last 2 years, I’ve been surprised the memorial has remained standing. I half expected somebody to tear it down. That kinda happened when I was there earlier in this month.
My instincts about this project have always been "get in, get out, don't trespass, let nobody figure out wtf you're doing." I was about 2 minutes too slow this time around. I straightened up the pole, stuck the blue flower in there and was gonna leave. Then decided, no vehicles had gone by, I had time to better fasten a few things. I was still there less than 5 minutes.
The problem was it was 5 minutes at noon, not 5 minutes at 8am. As I'm done and walking to the car, I see a mule come out of a "driveway" about 150 yards down the highway. I *knew* it would be related to this, just didn't know who it would be. So I waited.
Mule comes up with a couple who are focused solely on the license plate of the car. I recognize the driver from a couple of photos I
found online, it was landowner. I've always wanted to meet him. Just not here. He has an oft-reported belligerence when dealing with people on his property. I can now say that his belligerence isn't a) limited to just his property, and b) extends to *anything* relating to what happened on his property 25 years ago.
I gave he and presumably his wife (she had the phone photographing the license plate) a cheerful "Hi!", then he started yelling. Not screaming or overly loud but yelling nonetheless. I said "I haven't been on your property--I didn't want to trespass." He then pointed to the pole and said "what were you doing there?" That told me they spied me from the gitgo. "Just looking" I replied. "Well, if you put that there, I'll tear it down now." I shrugged. He then said "That flower’s new". Heh heh, he clearly doesn't miss much but then small town, rural people in my experience over the last 22 years don’t miss a thing.
I shrugged again and said "beats me". He then launched into something about getting the license plate and calling the sheriff immediately, yada, yada, yada. He finally said something to which I replied "I know what happened here. I stopped to see this." His wife then said "People who stop here for that, it's morbid. You can't imagine the trouble we've had."
By this point he was back on the sheriff deal, then said "You tell your like [emhasis mine] to stop coming around here." I'm paraphrasing because I couldn't get past the term "your like" which I took to mean "my ilk". I didn't bother to ask what he meant by "your like" but got the message.
I then asked them if they got the plate info they needed. They were taken aback at that. I then got in my car, drove down the road a ways, waited 10 minutes and came back. That's when I saw the memorial had been uprooted. It was still there on the ground so that's a plus. Whether it’ll be there when I’m back in the spring is anybody’s guess.
If you happen to find yourself there, replant the pole...quickly. ;)
One thing I do on these trips to Lincoln is to visit Brandon’s grave. There’s always stuff there, even in the dead of winter.
By far the most touching and hopeful item I’ve found (the cemetery clears out everything on a regular basis so there’s almost always something new to be seen) was a folded letter. Its contents speak for themselves.
Lest we forget, two other people were gunned down 25 years ago. My efforts to find Phillip DeVine’s final resting place has resulted in nothing. However, Lisa Lambert is buried nearby in Pawnee City, where she was born, raised and now rests.
My conversation with the landowner notwithstanding, I’ve found this effort to be a hopeful one because I know people regularly pay their respects at the grave sites and even the descansos despite it’s out-of-the-way location.
Hope is not something even an irate landowner can permanently thwart.