Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  GEORGE GEIN DIES

  George Gein, 66, was born August 4, 1873, and passed

  away April 1, 1940.

  His mother and father and little sister preceded him in

  death. They were gone to town and he was staying at home

  because of the high water, as it was raising in the Mississippi

  river. The father, mother, and sister never returned, leaving

  him an orphan boy. This flood occurred in Vernon county a good many years ago.

  He lived in La Crosse until 1914, then going to Plainfield,

  where he since resided.

  He is survived by his wife and two sons, Henry and

  Edward.

  He had suffered considerably for the past three years, but

  his sufferings were eased by his faith in God.

  He was a good husband and father and will be missed by

  all who knew him.

  George Gein’s death did not represent a serious loss to his family. Quite the contrary. As far as his sons were concerned, it relieved them of a particularly galling task. For as long as they could remember, the old man hadn’t been good for much of anything (except boozing and meanness), and in the last few years of his life, he had added to their troubles by requiring continual care.

  But even without the burden of a sick and unloved parent to take care of, life remained grueling for the Geins. Their efforts to eke out a living from the farm were both unending and almost entirely futile. In all the years they had lived there, the family hadn’t been able to scrape together enough money to afford a single improvement. In every essential respect, their house remained the same as it had been in 1914, unequipped with either electricity or indoor plumbing. The only major change was in the deterioration of its once trim exterior. With its flaking gray paint, splintered front steps, poorly patched roof, and sagging porch, the house Augusta had once been so proud of looked weatherworn and increasingly dilapidated.

  By this time, the most devastating war in the history of humankind was well under way, but neither of the brothers would be involved. Henry was too old for military service. Eddie was still eligible for the draft, but when he traveled to Milwaukee in 1942 for his physical exam, the army rejected him because of the growth on his left eyelid, which slightly impaired his vision.

  He was thirty-six years old at the time, and the one-hundred-thirty-mile journey he made to Milwaukee was the farthest from home he had ever been. Or would ever be in his life.

  Following the death of their father, the brothers undertook a variety of odd jobs away from the farm to bring in a bit of extra money. Eddie found occasional work in the Plainfield vicinity as a handyman—hanging windows, patching roofs, painting houses, repairing fences. He also did some babysitting. The kids were always glad to see Eddie. He would roughhouse with the boys and do silly magic tricks for the girls or tell them creepy stories about headhunters and cannibals from the adventure magazines he read all the time. In the winter he would join in their snowball fights and in summer treat them to ice cream.

  As a youngster, he had never felt at ease with his peers. But now that he was grown up, he related more comfortably to children than to other adults. Around people his own age, he felt self-conscious and insecure. He wasn’t sure how to act or what to say to them, particularly the women.

  As far as the people who hired him were concerned, Eddie Gein, unlike his stuck-up, holier-than-thou mother, was a good neighbor. True, he had his peculiarities. He didn’t say much, and it was always hard to tell what he might be thinking, since his lips were constantly forming into that sly, unsettling grin. But given his family background, a few eccentricities were only to be expected. For the most part, they regarded the soft-spoken little bachelor as a decent sort—a mite foolish, maybe, but a polite and dependable fellow.

  Of the two brothers, Henry was considered the harder worker. He had always been more independent than Eddie, and, during the early 1940s, he found more and more employment away from the family farm. He worked for a road-building contractor, set poles and strung wires for a power and utility company, and, at one point, was hired by a neighbor to act as a foreman, overseeing a crew of Jamaican farm laborers.

  Eddie had a deep admiration for his older brother. “He’s the only man in the area who can handle those guys,” he’d tell his neighbors when they asked if Henry was having any trouble managing the Jamaicans. Henry and Eddie had always had a good relationship, sharing chores, going fishing together, hunting their property for rabbits and squirrels. Sure, they had their share of arguments—what brothers didn’t? One particular sore point had to do with their mother. On more than one occasion, Henry suggested that Eddie’s attachment to Augusta was overly close. He never actually spoke disrespectfully of their mother. But Eddie could sense that Henry had some serious questions about her hold over her younger son.

  Eddie was astonished. He had always believed that Henry shared his own view of Augusta, regarding her as infallible, faultless, a saint on earth. Henry’s implied criticism of Augusta came as a real shock to Eddie. It was something he just couldn’t understand.

  And it was something he would never forget.

  The single indisputable fact about Henry Gein’s sudden death at age forty-three is that it occurred on Tuesday, May 16, 1944, while he and Eddie were righting a runaway fire on some marshland near their home. According to some accounts, the blaze began accidentally. According to others, it was started deliberately to burn off the dry grass. Eddie would later claim that setting the fire was Henry’s idea. “I coaxed him and tried to keep him home,” Eddie would tell his interrogators, years after the tragedy. “But he just kept at me ’til I took him there.” At the time it happened, though, newspapers reported that it was Eddie who insisted on burning the marsh that day, and that Henry had come along to help.

  But the biggest question surrounding the tragedy is, of course, the precise manner of Henry’s death.

  As Eddie later told it, when a strong wind suddenly blew up and the fire got out of control, he quickly moved to one end of the marsh and struggled to extinguish the blaze before it reached a stand of pines on the perimeter of the field. After managing to put out the fire, he returned to look for his brother, but darkness had fallen and he couldn’t locate Henry. Eddie then rounded up a search party that included Deputy Sheriff Frank Engle and took them back to the marsh.

  As soon as they arrived, Eddie led them straight to the place where his older brother was lying facedown and very obviously dead. Several odd things immediately struck the searchers. First, though the corpse was stretched out on a scorched piece of ground, there were no signs that Henry had been injured by the flames. His clothes were soot-covered but otherwise undamaged, and the exposed parts of his body were similarly free of burns. Moreover, when the men bent to look more carefully at Henry, they noticed what seemed to be some funny bruises on his head.

  The strangest thing of all was the way Eddie had guided them directly to the death site, though he apparently hadn’t been able to locate his brother earlier. When they mentioned that to Eddie, he only shrugged and agreed with them. “Funny how that works,” he observed.

  District Attorney Earl Kileen, County Coroner George Blader, and Dr. Ingersoll of Plainfield were immediately called to the scene. As the weekly newspaper the Waushara Argus reported in its issue of Thursday, May 18: “It was determined by the medical authority present that death was due to asphyxiation. After an investigation by the coroner it was decided that an inquest was not necessary, as foul play did not enter into the death of Mr. Gein.”

  Clearly, no one could seriously imagine that Henry was the victim of murder—at least, no one could imagine it then. Years later, of course, when his brother’s true nature stood revealed to a horror-stricken world, the very peculiar circumstances surrounding Henry’s abrupt demise would be instantly called to mind, and the phrase “Cain and Abel” would be bandied about by lots of people around Plainfield.

  But for no
w, the matter was considered closed. Henry, some said, had simply been overcome by the smoke and the heat and had hit his head on a rock when he collapsed. Certainly, he wouldn’t be the first middle-aged farmer from those parts to succumb while doing battle with a raging marsh fire. Others maintained that Henry had had a bad heart, and the struggle with the flames had brought on a coronary. But, though some of them criticized Eddie for his strangely unfeeling response, no one believed for a moment that he was in any way to blame. He might be a bit of an oddball, but the notion that the meek little man was capable of hurting, let alone killing, anyone was too silly to entertain.

  And so, in the third week of May 1944, Goult’s funeral parlor had itself another customer, and Eddie Gein had his mother all to himself.

  But not for very long.

  For all her adult life, Augusta had been not just the head of her family but its backbone, too. Single-handedly, she had kept the house in perfect order, educated her two sons in the tenets of her faith, and managed the family business. She even did a man’s share of the chores around the farm. To Eddie, she was a miracle of physical and spiritual fortitude. Even now, in his late thirties, whenever he thought or dreamed about her, she appeared in his mind as a towering being, impossibly large, a figure of immeasurable strength and willpower.

  And so it came as an enormous shock to him when, shortly after Henry’s death, Augusta suddenly complained of feeling terribly faint and sickly. She needed a doctor. By the time Eddie’s pickup pulled up at the Wild Rose hospital, she was so weak that she had to be transported to the examination room in a wheelchair. Eddie sat on a bench in the corridor, twisting his plaid deerhunter’s cap in his hands and blinking nervously. After an agonizing wait, a doctor appeared and solemnly informed him that his mother had suffered a stroke.

  During her hospitalization, Eddie stayed at her bedside every day, for as many hours as he was allowed. Finally, she was discharged. Eddie—whose slight, wiry frame gave no real indication of his considerable strength—took her home, carried her inside the house, and laid her in her bed. When he looked down at her drawn, twisted face, a wave of pity and horror washed over him. He had never seen her look so frail and ravaged. But at the same time, he felt strangely exhilarated by her helplessness. She was entirely in his care. After all these years, he had a chance to prove his worth to her. Perhaps she would even acknowledge his efforts. He imagined her reaching out to embrace him, to grasp him to her bosom in gratitude and love. He could not remember a time when she had ever held him closely.

  He waited on her every need. She never complained, simply lay there in bed and told him, as best she could manage, what work needed to be done. In the evenings, he would sit by her side and read to her by lamplight. Often, she would tell him to recite from Psalm 6:

  O Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger,

  Neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure,

  Have mercy upon me, O Lord; for I am weak;

  O Lord, heal me; for my bones are vexed.

  My soul is also sore vexed:

  But thou, O Lord, how long?

  Return, O Lord, deliver my soul:

  O save me for thy mercies’ sake.

  For in death there is no remembrance of thee:

  In the grave who shall give thee thanks?

  I am weary with my groaning;

  All the night make I my bed to swim;

  I water my couch with my tears.

  Mine eye is consumed because of grief;

  It waxeth old because of all mine enemies.

  Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity;

  For the Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping.

  The Lord hath heard my supplication.

  The Lord will receive my prayer.

  Slowly, she began to recover her strength. By mid-1945, she was ready to try walking. Eddie stood near her bed and offered a hand, but she shoved him off—“Move away, boy, I can manage myself”—and struggled to her feet.

  Eddie felt elated to see her on her feet again, though her failure to acknowledge the care he had provided during her long recuperation left him slightly crestfallen. But the important thing was to see her healthy, to have his mother back again.

  Then something horrible happened.

  It was the winter of 1945. The Gein farm still had some livestock, and Augusta announced that they must have straw for fodder. Eddie would go to a neighbor named Smith to arrange for a purchase, and she would accompany him to oversee the transaction.

  Whenever Eddie told the story afterward, his voice would tremble with fury and grief.

  As Eddie and Augusta drove into the yard, Smith—a sullen, quarrelsome fellow with a notoriously short temper—was laying into a mongrel puppy with a heavy stick. As the dog yowled in pain, the woman Smith lived with—out of wedlock, according to Augusta—appeared on the porch and began screeching at Smith, gesticulating wildly and begging him to stop. Smith continued beating the pup until it lay dead at his feet, while the woman wept and shrieked curses at him.

  Augusta was shaken by the scene. Strangely, it was the sight of the woman—“Smith’s harlot,” Augusta called her—that seemed to upset her most.

  Less than a week after the incident at Smith’s farm, Augusta suffered a second stroke. Eddie rushed her back to the hospital, but on December 29, 1945, at the age of sixty-seven, she died.

  The curtness of her obituary in the Plainfield Sun suggests something about the community’s feelings toward Augusta. Henry’s death had been front-page news, and even George had received a respectful farewell. By contrast, the entire obituary for Augusta reads as follows: “Mrs. Augusta Gein died at the Wild Rose hospital on December 29th of cerebral brain hemorrhage. The body was brought to the Goult funeral home where services were held Dec. 31, Rev. C. H. Wiese officiating. She is survived by one son, Edward, who lives on the home farm southwest of here.”

  Several of Augusta’s siblings attended the funeral, but otherwise no one besides Eddie showed up. Eddie was beyond caring. If anything, he was glad that so few people were present. He wept like a child—his face was smeared with tears and snot—and he would have been embarrassed to have his neighbors see him in such a miserable state. But he simply couldn’t control his grief. He had lost his only friend and one true love.

  And he was absolutely alone in the world.

  For millions of Eddie’s countrymen, it was a time of thanksgiving and celebration. Just a few months earlier, the long, terrible war had finally come to an end. Looking into the future, America saw nothing but bright days ahead, and, in fact, the coming years would be an especially sunny time in the life of the nation.

  But for Eddie Gein—and for the little Wisconsin town that harbored him—darkness had just begun to descend.

  2 The

  Deadhouse

  6

  HERVEY CLECKLEY, The Mask of Sanity

  “It is perhaps worthwhile to add here that not all those suffering from a typical psychosis, even when the disorder is serious in degree, give an obvious impression of derangement.”

  Small-town life is notorious for its lack of privacy. When you reside in a community whose entire population could easily be housed in a single New York City apartment building, you are likely to feel that every one of your neighbors is privy to the most intimate facts of your personal life and that you are on equally familiar terms with the details of theirs. Living in Plainfield, some folks would tell you, was like sharing a bed with every man, woman, and child in town. There aren’t many secrets that stay hidden for long.

  This image of the intense, often oppressive intimacy of small-town living has a great deal of truth to it, of course. But it is also true that many people who really do share the same bed—men and women who have been married so long that even their faces have begun to look alike—manage to conceal major secrets from each other, often for the better part of a lifetime. It is also the case that, precisely because they live in such tight proximity, small-town dwellers retain a necessary measure of
privacy by tacitly agreeing to avoid knowing certain things about each other. Denial, after all, is a basic psychological mechanism which operates even in the minds of the most dedicated busybodies and gossips. Like the parent who refuses to face the most disturbing signs of maladjustment in a favorite child, small-town dwellers will often manage to dismiss, explain away, or turn a blind eye to the extreme peculiarities of their neighbors.

  Moreover, for all their very real friendliness and hospitality, Midwesterners tend to be a reticent bunch, regarding certain personal matters as inappropriate subjects for conversation or examination. They also have a pronounced—and very American—tendency to take people at face value and to pay as little attention as possible to the darker side of human nature.

  All of this perhaps helps to explain how a middle-aged bachelor could live in a tightly knit community of just over six hundred people, all of whom knew him by name, and, for more than a decade, get away with murder—and worse.

  There is another factor, too. Beginning in 1945, and for the dozen years that followed, Plainfield was only one of the places Eddie Gein inhabited. For much of that time, he dwelled in a world so utterly remote and nightmarish that no normal person could possibly have known of its existence or guessed at its terrible secrets.

  As far as the citizens of Plainfield could see, Augusta Gein’s death hadn’t changed Eddie much. He was the same soft-spoken, mild-mannered individual he had always been—a little awkward around people but a polite and accommodating fellow, who would never say no to a neighbor who needed help sawing firewood, hauling grain, or repairing a barn. When Bob Hill’s car broke down or Georgia Foster had to go off on an errand and needed someone to sit with her children, Eddie could always be counted on to lend a hand. He’d go out of his way to do his fellow townsfolk a favor.

  True, there were a few detectable differences in Eddie. His appearance, never exactly well groomed to begin with, had become noticeably more unkempt. His jaw was often covered with a full week’s growth of stubble, and it was clear to anyone who stood within an arm’s length of him that he could stand to bathe a good deal more often than he did. Indeed, some of the shopkeepers in town—who generally looked down their noses a bit at the “hayseeds” from the surrounding countryside—had very little use for Eddie Gein. James Severns, for one—the proprietor of the Plainfield barbershop—regarded Eddie with undisguised disdain. In the barber’s eyes, the little man with his salt-and-pepper stubble and ragged homemade haircut was a sorry sight, a “filthy thing.”