Stories

Philip Schuth: The man behind French Island’s ‘Freezer Mom’ case speaks out
By MATT JAMES/ La Crosse Tribune

He didn’t cry for days.

His mother’s body was still warm when he found it the morning of Aug. 15, 2000.

He panicked. His mind raced. “Oh no, I’ve lost her. Everybody’s coming to get me. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

Days later, he was at a table when he finally started blubbering and couldn’t stop. He bawled and bawled until one day he was at a window, sobbing so loudly a man in the driveway next door heard him.

So he went to the basement.

Weeks passed, then months. The hair on top of his head fell out in clumps. He lived on Spam, tuna sandwiches, Little Debbie snack cakes and cold beans he stockpiled on rare trips to the grocery store.

His box-shaped house with the flat roof had been falling apart for years. Water seeped through the roof, trickled down the walls and shorted out the wiring. The electricity went out room by room, until all he had was the basement and three outlets on the second floor.

The water heater quit. So did the furnace. After the water was shut off, he dragged 20-gallon plastic drums into the yard to catch rainwater. He kept six in the living room and two in his bedroom. In the winter, he shoveled snow into them, melted it with a space heater.

Often, he pictured himself dead, lying on an autopsy table.

“I just wanted to be alone,” he says.

And in his loneliest moments, Philip Schuth would disappear into his basement and stare at that freezer.

Investigators say Schuth put his dead mother, 86-year-old Edith Margorie Schuth, in that freezer the day she died. An autopsy would show her kidneys and heart gave out. They say he filled it with ice, which during the next 4½ years hardened into a solid block.

They say he confessed, that he did it because he thought he would be blamed for her death. They say he had no job and needed her Social Security checks to keep the house.

Against his lawyer’s advice, Schuth has given more than three hours of telephone interviews to the Tribune during the past two weeks. He wants to set the record straight, he says, about his life, his family, the case and some of the events on Friday, April 22, the day he could hide no more.

Two boys were in Schuth’s backyard that afternoon at 1330 Bainbridge St. in Campbell, Wis., a town of 4,400 wedged between the Mississippi and Black rivers. The boys were tearing apart his steps, Schuth says. Police say he came out and smacked 10-year-old Josh Russell on the side of the head.

Randy Russell Jr. and his wife, Melissa, went to confront Schuth, who was in the backyard. And then, according to police, the man who had spent most of his life trying not to draw attention to himself pulled a handgun from his pocket and started pulling the trigger.

Just like her only son, Margie Schuth never made friends easily. She never became a U.S. citizen, never trusted Americans, never got a driver’s license, never really let go of her native England.

She didn’t love her husband, James Schuth, who Philip says was sexually abusive and had a violent temper.

Where would she go? She had no family in America and none in England that wanted her. She had no experience to get a job.

Her husband told her she had no right to own property as a foreigner, and if she divorced him, she would be out on the streets with only her “little bastard.”

Philip graduated from Logan High School in 1971 and from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse 3½ years later, but never moved out of the house. He refused to leave his mother behind, to abandon her as he felt he’d done his grandmother in England, the one who had gone crazy after they left, who begged for change on street corners and didn’t even recognize Margie or Philip when they went back to visit. She had died, among strangers, in a dump of a nursing home.

When a black spot formed on her face, she was scared chemotherapy would turn her into a walking skeleton, like Hubert H. Humphrey and John Wayne had looked in the end. She pulled her hair over the spot, so doctors wouldn’t notice.

She had high blood pressure and would collapse on her bed. The room would spin like she’d had too much to drink.

That’s what their deaths would be like, she told her son, with the world spinning, surrounded by strangers who didn’t care if you lived or died, as had happened with her mother. She told him there was no afterlife, there couldn’t possibly be enough room in heaven for everyone.

After she died, images would come to Philip. He saw his own corpse on an autopsy slab, ready to be cut open. He pictured Jim Schuth’s penis. He envisioned his grandmother, raving in a nursing home.

He heard his mother’s voice, describing death.

He lived in fear. More than once, he says, his house was broken into, that kids would throw snowballs and shoot BB-guns at him as he walked.

In 1985, Schuth says, two men came onto his property and wrestled him to the ground, one saying, “Do you know how easy it is to break a neck?” They kicked him in the face, breaking two of his front teeth and parts of two more, and then ran off when his dog bit one of them. He didn’t report the attack, and never got his teeth fixed.

Television was his only distraction. “My 70 friends,” he called his 70 channels. It was the shows with heroic female leads that he loved the most, “La Femme Nikita,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and, especially, “Alias.”

He subscribed to the “Alias” magazine, along with “Fangoria,” a horror magazine he was embarrassed about getting, so he subscribed under the name “Gail Schuth,” which he borrowed after watching a special about Olympic sprinter Gail Devers. If it was late, he would call and complain his “daughter’s” magazine hadn’t arrived.

He fell in love with “Alias” actor Jennifer Garner. He imagines an alternate universe where he isn’t an “ugly old man” and he and Garner are married.

He says police accused him of stalking Garner, but he swears he’s never tried to contact her.

They asked him if he was trying to impress Garner.

“Somehow,” he says, “I don’t think Jennifer Garner would be impressed by any of the alleged incident on French Island.”

Five bullets flew towards the Russells as they ran to a neighbor’s house and Schuth went back into his house.

Police tried to talk Schuth out of his house for 14 hours. That’s when they say he told them his mother’s body was in a chest freezer in the basement.

At 7:25 a.m., he finally came out. They found homemade explosives and an illegal sawed-off shotgun in the home, as well as a body in the freezer.

During interrogations, he says, investigators accused him of wanting to kill everyone on French Island, of being the rumored serial killer who drowns young men, and of murdering Tong Thao, the 37-year-old man whose body was found in a French Island park in March 2003.

He denied it all, and isn’t sure if they believed the accusations, or whether they were just interrogation tactics.

The lead investigator in the case, Sgt. Kurt Papenfuss of the La Crosse County Sheriff’s Department, says they did ask him about the French Island murder but doesn’t remember any questions about the drownings.

“He was hard to keep quiet,” Papenfuss says. “He was kind of hard to keep focused, but if you live alone as many years as he did, it’s nice to have anyone to vent to. Even a cop can listen.”

Philip Schuth has been in jail for three months on a $100,000 cash bond he can’t pay. He had $10,000 in cash at his house and $25,000 in an account, funded by his mother’s Social Security checks, but his assets have been frozen.

He lives in the downstairs portion of the jail, where they keep high-profile inmates, or those who are physically or mentally disabled, or the ones who get into fights in the general population upstairs.

The number of inmates downstairs has been low recently, a sign, the other inmates tell Schuth, his “evil vibrations” are driving everyone away.

The inmates have nicknames for him. “Sub-Zero.” “Freezer Boy.” “Frosty” is their favorite.

An inmate was arrested, Schuth heard, while wearing one of the “What’s in Your Freezer?” T-shirts that have popped up in the La Crosse area, and the shirt was confiscated at the jail. The jail administrator, Doris Daggett, says that could be true; inmates aren’t allowed to have T-shirts with writing of any kind.

The shirts are a play on the “What’s in Your Wallet?” Capital One bank commercials, and read, “French Island, WI.” on the back. After the shirts came out, a businessman began selling car magnets, one with the same logo, and two others that have a picture of an arm hanging out of a freezer that read, “My Mom is Cooler than Yours!” and “My Old Lady is Cooler than Yours!”

“What really upset me about those magnets was the picture of an arm sticking out of the wretched deep freeze,” Schuth says. “I didn’t care for that. It implied, in my mind at least, it was a horror movie and she was put in there alive.”

Tom Locante, a public defender assigned to Schuth’s case, had no comment for this story, and has repeatedly asked Schuth not to talk to the media.

A local TV reporter came to see him not long after the arrest, Schuth says, claiming to be an old girlfriend, but then pulled out a notebook as soon as they were face to face and started asking questions.

The reporter says that’s not true, that she just signed in and was allowed to see Schuth, and when she identified herself, he asked if she would like to take notes, and proceeded to talk for most of the next 20 minutes.

Locante was livid with the sheriff’s department that she’d been allowed in the jail.

Don’t talk to the media, Locante tells him.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Schuth says.

“I figure I might as well get my story out,” Schuth says.

During interviews with the Tribune, Schuth did not admit to any of the charges: attempted first-degree homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, hiding a corpse, possession of a short-barreled shotgun and three counts of possession of explosive devices.

He referred to them as the “alleged incidents,” as much to mock the American legal system as to avoid the subject. He was a National Honor Society member at Logan, then graduated from UW-L with honors. One college classmate remembers Schuth read his entire textbook the first week of class, and Schuth admits he did that in history classes because he was so worried about pop quizzes.

On July 19, Schuth was declared competent to stand trial, on the recommendation of Kenneth Smail, a psychologist with the Wisconsin Forensic Unit, who Schuth says seemed bored during his evaluation and repeatedly sighed, “Where are you going with this story?”

Schuth agreed with his assessment at the competency hearing, telling La Crosse County Circuit Judge Ramona Gonzalez, “I do not feel I am daft.”

At his preliminary hearing Wednesday, prosecutors showed they have enough evidence to go to trial, which is scheduled to start Oct. 24. Randy Russell Jr. also testified about his three bullet wounds. Before the hearing, even Schuth had said, “If (district attorney) Scott Horne hasn’t come up with enough evidence by now, he never will get that judgeship he’s been pining for.”

Russell was treated and released the evening of the shooting, having been hit twice in the arm and grazed in the face, but Schuth says Russell’s version of the shooting isn’t true.

The day after the shooting, Russell told a reporter he had asked Schuth, “Sir, did you hit my son?”

“I don’t understand how anybody could believe a modern man in a stressful situation would use such language,” Schuth says. “It’s not Victorian times.”

The D.A. told reporters at the competency hearing he had made a plea offer, but Schuth hasn’t been told the details and probably isn’t interested.

“I talked to my lawyer and encouraged him to fight it out, unless it’s a very excellent plea bargain,” says Schuth, who pleaded not guilty to all charges Wednesday and faces 143 years if convicted of everything.

“I’m not interested in going away for 190 years instead of 200 years.”

Philip Schuth is a contradiction — articulate, educated, well-read, funny at times, yet his life has been defined by isolation, a struggle to connect with other people.

“If you’ve talked to him, I think you understand,” says Brent Larson.

Larson was a 25-year-old teacher at Lincoln Junior High when UW-L assigned Schuth to be his student-teacher in the spring of 1974. Of the more than 50 student teachers he’s had through the years, Schuth is the only one Larson didn’t recommend for teaching.

“He’s not a very warm person,” Larson says. “I don’t know how to put it. He’s very intelligent, but he didn’t react well with kids. Kids did not respond to him in any way.”

Schuth was assigned to work in Murphy Library for the rest of his final semester. He was given a bachelor of science degree, rather than education.

Schuth’s version is he approached Larson, saying he wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, but the result was the same.

“Once (education majors) get to that point, they’re really screwed,” Larson says. “What are you going to do now?”

Schuth worked as a security guard at Menard’s, where he was required to carry a revolver. He worked at his parents’ upholstery shop, but he was never any good at it because he has little feeling in the tips of his fingers. He cleaned businesses at night.

He cleared tables and washed dishes at several North Side restaurants. A former co-worker at Embers says he didn’t hear Schuth say one word for an entire year.

In 1979, he wrote a novel he called “Chrisagone,” about a hero who fights creatures and sorcerers. He paid an artist $50 to paint a map of Chrisagone’s world, like the “Lord of the Rings” books.

He published a science fiction and fantasy magazine he called “Bloodrake” that had a circulation of a few hundred.

He wrote short stories, many of them horror, some with characters he wasn’t proud of. One, he remembers, wanted to “skullseal” a human. Chop off his ears, cut out his eyes and tongue and remove his fingers so he couldn’t even read braille. A man trapped inside his own skull, with only his own thoughts.

“I was definitely daft,” he says, “when I came up with these ideas.”

Margie walked her son to fourth grade after they first came to French Island. She walked with him the next year, too, and the next and the next, until he was a high schooler with an English accent, getting walked to school by his mother.

She doted on him constantly, bought him french fries every day after school, made him his favorite foods when they got home.

Classmates of Schuth say she acted child-like and would steal things from the 5 and Dime.

Their cat, Tiger, was sitting in the window one day, watching two cats fight outside, when Margie tried to move Tiger and it attacked her, Philip says. It gashed her arm and bit her chest, and blood smeared against the wall.

If he had reported her death, he figured, police would have seen the scars and her blood on the wall and read his stories and come to only one conclusion: He was “looney” and probably killed her.

Does he consider himself looney?

“I’d say I’m not exactly in the 90 percent average people,” he says. “Not too many people would be willing to live in a house under the conditions I allegedly was living under, and would be constantly afraid that somebody was going to inflict physical injury upon them. I’d say that’s strange, it’s not clinically insane.”

Schuth’s parents met in England during World War II. Jim was in the U.S. Army. Margie was well into her 30s, so scared of ending up alone she lied to Jim about her age.

They were married in 1945 and moved to French Island, where Jim’s parents, Tony and Anna, owned Schuth Upholstery at 1330 Bainbridge St., and lived in the house next door. Jim and Margie moved into the second floor above the shop, the same building where 50 years later Philip was still living and where they would find his mother’s body.

Margie left Jim not long after they came to French Island and moved back to England. She dated an English railworker named Ronald Bellamy and became pregnant with Philip.

Bellamy, he says, was killed in a train accident before the birth.

By 1961, Philip was nearly 9 and Margie’s mother, Mary Philips, who they were living with, was becoming elderly. Margie didn’t want to end up alone raising a son, so she agreed to come back to the U.S. if Jim agreed to sign paperwork that stated he was Philip’s biological father.

Philip says he didn’t know about Ronald Bellamy until after Jim died, when he found a letter his mother had written. His mother told him the story and they never spoke of it again.

All those times Jim had called Philip his “little bastard,” he had meant it.

Philip claims that within two weeks of their coming to French Island, Jim began abusing him. He says he would bounce Philip on his knee to become aroused and then have sex with Margie.

Jim slapped him and his mother around, he says, and tied Philip up at least once. Another time, he says, Jim shoved a pencil in Philip’s anus.

Philip says on several occasions he loaded a .22 rifle and waited for Jim to walk through the door. He chickened out every time.

“(Margie) just thought he was a slob,” Philip says. “She didn’t think he would do things to me.”

As he became older and heavier, Philip says, Jim’s behavior became more and more disgusting. He cut the tops off milk jugs and urinated in them while sitting in his chair. When the floor was covered in full jugs, he would have Philip dump them in the yard.

After Jim’s teeth rotted to the gumline, he would pop the sores in his mouth with his fingers and rub the pus on his shirt.

Near the end of his life, doctors amputated Jim’s infected lower leg. In the final year, Jim sat in his chair, naked, a towel draped over his lap, flies laying eggs on his stump.

He died Sept. 24, 1994, and Philip doesn’t know where he is buried.

Gene Goyette lived in Philip’s grandparents’ house for years after they died, renting it from Jim and then Margie. He has been Schuth’s only friend for the last 20 years. He visits Philip twice a week at the jail and puts money in his “canteen fund” so Philip can buy a daily newspaper.

He never saw Jim’s violent temper or abusiveness.

“Of course I didn’t live there, so I don’t know,” he says.

Schuth lied about his mother to Goyette, too, telling him she was too sick to say hi, or was upstairs watching “Jag.” She had a crush on the lead actor, David James Elliott, Philip told him.

“If he’d have told me (she was dead),” Goyette says, “I’d have gotten her out of there.”

Schuth would like to put a headstone on his mother’s grave with the inscription, “Delenda est tyrannis,” a Latin phrase meaning, “Tyrants must be destroyed.”

The inmates tell him he should sell the freezer, that he could get a lot of money for it, and he’s asked Goyette to try to sell it online so he can pay for his mother’s inscription.

He wants his own gravestone to one day read, “Sic transit amore.”

Thus passes away all love.

He won’t plead insanity, he says.

“I told (my lawyer), ‘I’m not Charles Manson,’ I’m not going to carve a swastika in my forehead or prance around the courtroom to entertain the guests or spectators or whatever you want to call them.

“I don’t feel like acting like a madman. It’s not really my style.”