Outside a rainy town in Washington, a man named Rusty Hog ran a sprawling pig farm through the 1990s. In local dive bars he was a fixture—grinning, dirty jacket, cash for rounds. He bought drinks for women who drifted along the highway’s edges. “The kind nobody would miss,” he’d say. For years, no one connected the names. Police called them runaways. People said they moved on. In 2001, a cop serving an unrelated warrant stumbled onto Rusty’s farm after dark. In a freezer he found purses, IDs, and clothes that didn’t belong on a farm. Nearby sat a meat grinder, caked with a dark, dried residue that wasn’t from any animal he could name. They arrested Rusty at his favorite bar. He grinned and said one line: “I just recycled. The pigs ate well, wasted nothing.” The farm was bulldozed. The county swore it would forget. It didn’t. At breakfast counters people still pause over bacon and say the joke they’ve learned not to finish. This is the Rusty Hog legend—how a town’s rain washed tracks clean while the story festered in a freezer waiting for the right door to open.
