“I didn’t say nothing. When we walked home, I asked my brother what the heads could be, and he told me they were probably Halloween get-ups. And I was young enough that I believed it.
“I never asked Eddie about it. But from that particular time or shortly thereafter, Eddie no longer let my brother or me into the house.”
In a town as small and sealed-off as Plainfield, gossip spreads like the flu, and it wasn’t long before the entire community had heard the reports of Eddie Gein’s peculiar possessions. Still, no one was especially disturbed or even surprised by the story. A set of souvenir shrunken heads from the South Pacific was exactly the sort of collectible you’d expect someone like Eddie Gein to own.
Indeed, the hearsay about Eddie Gein’s heads became a kind of joke around Plainfield. At some point during this period, Eddie had a notion to move away from his old farmstead and approached two of his neighbors, Donald and Georgia Foster of West Plainfield, with a proposition. According to Mrs. Foster, who later described the incident for reporters, “Ed came around and wanted to know if we’d like to trade our house for his farm. We have only an acre or so of land here and we thought the idea was worth considering, so we went out to look his place over.
“We looked into all the rooms except the front bedroom and one room right off what I suppose was originally the dining room but that Ed used for a bedroom and a living room. He had the door closed to that one room. He said it was just an old pantry and was filled with junk.
“We didn’t see anything to make us suspicious. The place was awfully dirty and full of stuff piled all over the floor. It was pretty dark, too. He had those dirty old curtains at the windows, so we couldn’t see much.
“The kids have always brought back stories about him having shrunken heads there. So when we were upstairs in his house, I kidded Ed about it. I pointed to one of the bedrooms and I said, ‘Is that where you keep your shrunken heads?’ He gave me a funny look. My husband looked at me, too, and I wished I hadn’t said it. But then Ed gave that little grin of his and pointed to another room.
“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘they’re in this other room over here.’
“People were always kidding Ed about things like that.”
For various reasons—Eddie’s increasing weirdness, the story of his shrunken heads, the progressively rundown appearance of his property—the old Gein farmhouse gradually developed a reputation among the children of Plainfield as a haunted house.
Especially toward evening, when the darkness started to gather around the dismal, lonely place and the only light to be seen from Eddie’s house was the somber glow of an oil lamp behind his moldering kitchen curtains, it was easy to believe that evil really did live within those walls. Roger Johnson, son of Eddie’s nearest neighbor, remembers vividly how, when walking home from a friend’s house at dusk along the road that led past the Gein farm, he would “save all his energy up for that last hundred yards” and then “run like hell” until he was well clear of Eddie’s place.
“It wasn’t that I feared Eddie,” Roger would later explain. “I feared the house.”
The grownups, of course, would listen to these fears and smile. After all, every small town in America has its own haunted house, some tumbledown place inhabited by a harmless old eccentric who has been transformed by the colorful imaginations of the neighborhood children into a monster, a ghoul, a fairy-tale ogre—the kind of fiend who lurks in the gloom of his parlor, carving knife in hand, just waiting for an unwary child to knock on the door.
But every parent knows that this is just one of the many wild fantasies young children are prone to. In real life, such creatures simply do not exist.
One thing is certain: if Eddie’s young neighbors were spooked by the mere look of his gloomy old farmhouse, it’s fortunate for them that they weren’t around on those nights when a far more ghastly sight could be seen in his front yard—the figure of what seemed to be a naked elderly female with wiry gray hair, mottled flesh, withered dugs, and the face of a corpse.
Indeed, to see this grotesque apparition, you might well have imagined (had you known of Eddie’s belief in the power of his will) that his efforts to raise his mother had succeeded after all and that the creature cavorting obscenely in the moonlight was the resurrected person of Augusta Gein herself.
It was a sight that would have supplied any of Eddie’s impressionable young neighbors with a lifetime’s worth of nightmares. It might even have persuaded their parents that the stories about Eddie Gein’s house of horrors were more than just childish make-believe.
10
Anonymous, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy
“Death nor the marble prison my love sleeps in Shall keep her body lockt up from mine arms.”
Her name is Eleanor Adams; her age, fifty-one. Wife of Floyd Adams of Plainfield and mother of two adult children, George and Barbara.
Tonight, though her family has no way of knowing, she is alone with Eddie Gein.
Eddie has known her by sight for many years, though he has never spoken so much as a word to her. But on this balmy August night, driven by those desperate urges that seem to come from someplace outside himself, like the proddings of an evil spirit, he has gone and fetched her to his remote, decaying farmhouse.
At the moment, she is stretched out on his soiled mattress, her features illuminated by the dingy glow of his oil lamp. Though she is surrounded by the souvenirs of Eddie’s other conquests, she has no way of knowing what is about to happen to her.
Eddie hovers over the bed, ogling his prize. There is something about Mrs. Adams that has always reminded him of Augusta. But the excitement welling up in him as he stares down at the woman is like nothing he ever felt for his mother.
A shiver of pleasure snakes through him as he begins to disrobe her. Mrs. Adams offers no resistance. When her waxy flesh is exposed to his view, he raises his lamp and moves it slowly down the length of her body.
He has heard other men refer to women as “dolls,” and that is precisely how he perceives Mrs. Adams—as a doll. But only little girls play with dolls, he reflects. The thought makes him smile.
Standing by the foot of the bed, he moves her legs apart and, with the lamp in one hand, bends nearer for a better look. Abruptly, he jerks back, repulsed by her smell. Mrs. Adams lies absolutely still.
On a table nearby lie all of Eddie’s instruments. He sets the oil lamp down, picks up one of the tools, and then, turning back to his guest, applies himself to his work.
Though his excitement is so intense that it causes his hands to tremble, he proceeds at a leisurely pace. There is no need to hurry. The night has just begun.
And Mrs. Adams, as Eddie knows from experience, will never be missed.
3 The Butcher
of Plainfield
11
Popular limerick, Wisconsin, ca. 1958
“There once was a man named Ed
Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed.
When he wanted to diddle,
He cut out the middle,
And hung the rest in the shed.”
The fall of 1957 was a trying time for America, a season of crisis. In late September, the nation was shaken by racial turmoil in Little Rock, Arkansas, where federal paratroopers, ordered in by the President, clashed with redneck mobs bent on blocking the integration of the city’s public schools. Less than two weeks later, America’s postwar pride in its military and scientific supremacy was rocked by the successful launch of Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Later that autumn, the country received still another shock when the White House announced that during the welcoming ceremonies for a visiting dignitary, President Eisenhower had suffered a stroke.
It was a year when sugary singles such as Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy,” Tab Hunter’s “Young Love,” and Pat Boone’s “Don’t Forbid Me” shot to number one on the record charts. But in the fall of 1957, a stranger kind of music was being heard, too. In its October 28 issue, Time magazine repor
ted the release of a sick-humor album containing lyrics such as these:
I love your streak of cruelty, your psychopathic lies,
The homicidal tendencies shining in your eyes.
Don’t change your psychic structure,
Weird as it may be …
Stay, darling, stay way under par …
Stay as sick as you are.
Only a week earlier, Time had run a column on the countrywide craze for an even blacker kind of comedy, ghoulish jokes known as “Bloody Marys”:
—Mrs. Jones, can Johnny come out to play baseball?
—You know he doesn’t have any arms or legs.
—That’s okay. We want to use him for second base.
—Mommy, why do I keep walking around in circles?
—Shut up, or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.
We tend to mythicize the fifties, to remember them as a golden age of simplicity and innocence—the era of sock hops, after-school milkshakes at Pop’s Sweet Shoppe, and Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Happy Days. But in many ways, the Eisenhower era was an anxious time, fraught with A-bomb fears and haunted by the still recent nightmare of the death-camp horrors. At newsstands and in corner candy stores, clean-cut comic books like Archie and Little Lulu competed for rack space with publications like The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, gore-drenched fantasies in which putrefying corpses return from the grave to take revenge on their murderers and butcher shops proffer prime cuts of human flesh to their unsuspecting customers.
The crises that occurred in the fall of 1957—the ugliness in Little Rock, Russia’s sudden leap into space—gave the national sense of confidence and self-esteem a serious battering. And in mid-November of that year, the country would be jolted again, this time by a crime so appalling that, in a very real sense, American culture still hasn’t recovered from the shock.
The Wisconsin woods are a hazardous place to be during the state’s nine-day hunting season—and not just for deer. By Sunday, November 24, the final day of the 1957 season, the death toll stood at forty thousand bucks and does and thirteen hunters. Two of the men suffered fatal heart attacks while traipsing through the frozen woods. The remaining eleven were killed by stray bullets, generally fired by overeager strangers, though both Eskie Burgess, 44, of Chicago and George Schreiber, 64, of Stratford died at the hands of their own sons. Other hunters got off more easily, suffering serious but nonlethal gunshot wounds (some of them self-inflicted) to various parts of their bodies—legs, shoulders, neck, groin.
Opening weekend is a particularly busy—and deadly—time. During the first three days alone, the kill figure for the 1957 season reached 28,675 deer. Many of the sportsmen who stalk the central Wisconsin wilderness come from Milwaukee and Chicago. The rest are local hunters, who pour into the woods in such profusion that their little rural towns are left all but depopulated of every male capable of managing a rifle.
Of course, trying to bag a spiked-horn buck in freezing Midwestern weather is a rigorous, often frustrating business, and many a hunter will take temporary refuge from the cold in the handiest tavern, fortifying himself with a few stiff drinks before returning to the woods and venting his exasperation on virtually anything that moves. “Better lock up the livestock,” the local farmers joke when hunting season commences, and in Marquette County, they like to tell the story of the game warden who stopped a party of inebriated hunters with a milk cow strapped to their car.
When a legal kill is made, the deer is field-dressed—slit open and gutted—tagged, and brought to the nearest inspection spot, which might be a government office or, in smaller communities, a tavern or gas station, designated as an official checkpoint by the state. In the middle of November, a traveler through rural Wisconsin will see the evidence of the hunt all around him—fenders and car roofs draped with the day’s kill and filling stations festooned with gaping carcasses.
An icy drizzle was falling on Saturday, November 16, and the land lay buried under three inches of snow. But a bit of inclement weather wouldn’t interfere with the hunt—a fact that must certainly have been in Eddie Gein’s mind as he sat in the squalor of his kitchen that morning, planning his day’s activities. Eddie was one of the few adult males who wouldn’t be venturing into the forest. He wasn’t a killer of deer, and the prey he was after wouldn’t be found in the woods.
It would be found right in Plainfield. And on that day—the start of the 1957 deer-hunting season—Plainfield, Eddie figured, would be nearly deserted.
By the time he finished breakfast, the rain had stopped falling. He put on his jacket and plaid deer hunter’s cap, loaded a fuel can and a large glass jug into his maroon ’49 Ford sedan, and headed for town. The time was just after eight A.M.
Eddie’s first stop was the local Standard station, where he filled the can with kerosene. Then he got back into his Ford and, moments later, pulled up in front of his ultimate destination—Worden’s Hardware and Implement Store, situated between a vacant building and an unoccupied house near the east end of Plainfield’s business district. He parked his car and, carrying the glass jug, stepped inside the store.
Worden’s—which had begun as a harness shop back in the 1890s—was one of Plainfield’s oldest commercial establishments. Throughout most of the 1920s, it was co-owned by two men, Leon Worden and Frank Conover, who were also in-laws, Worden having married his business partner’s young daughter, Bernice. Worden bought out his partner’s interest in 1929, and when he died two years later, his young widow assumed the ownership and operation of the store.
Though a few of her neighbors—perhaps out of envy of her rumored wealth—regarded Bernice Worden as a bit snippy and sharp-tongued, she was held in high regard by most of the community. Indeed, in July 1956, she was the first woman to be honored on the front page of the local newspaper as Plainfield’s “Citizen of the Week.” A pleasant-featured, solidly built, fifty-eight-year-old widow, Bernice Worden was a devout Methodist, a doting grandmother, and an exceptionally capable business woman, who had purchased the corner building that housed her establishment, expanded her inventory to include modern farm implements and household appliances, and for many years had the distinction of being the only female dealer of International Harvester products in the region. Though most of her time was devoted to business, she occasionally took time off to indulge her passion for fishing.
Even a person as industrious as Bernice Worden, however, couldn’t manage all the work by herself (besides being the area’s main supplier of hardware, appliances, and farming equipment, Worden’s served as the town’s freight depot and telegraph office). For that reason, she was assisted on most days by her son, Frank, who had clearly inherited his parents’ formidable energies. In addition to his work in the family business, he served for a time as village constable and, later, as both town fire marshal and deputy sheriff.
But on November 16, 1957, Frank was nowhere around. Like much of Plainfield’s male population, he was in the woods hunting, just as he had told Eddie Gein he would be when the little man had inquired the day before.
As a result, when Eddie entered Worden’s early that Saturday morning, its fifty-year-old proprietress was alone in the store—exactly as Eddie expected.
Mrs. Worden wouldn’t have been surprised to see Eddie, since he had stopped by around closing time on Friday to check on the price of antifreeze. But she might not have been entirely pleased. Lately, Eddie had taken to hanging around the store more and more frequently and was beginning to make something of a pest of himself. On one recent occasion, he had actually had the gall to invite her to “try out the floor” at the new roller-skating rink in Hancock. The pale-eyed little man seemed to mean the offer as a joke—he was wearing his silly little smile when he asked—but Mrs. Worden had not been amused. Like most of Plainfield’s merchants, she regarded Eddie Gein as little more than the village idiot.
Still, the Geins had been good customers for many years, and Mrs. Worden was not about to treat Eddie wi
th anything less than politeness and cordiality. When he explained that he was there to purchase some antifreeze, she filled up his jug from a steel barrel in her office, took his money, wrote up a sales receipt, and watched as he shambled out the door.
Moments later, Eddie reentered.
He was thinking, he explained, of trading his Marlin rifle—which only fired .22 shorts—for one that could accommodate all three .22 calibers, short, long, and long rifle. He pointed to one of the Marlins lined up in the store’s gun rack and asked if he could examine it.
“Sure,” Mrs. Worden said. “That’s my favorite kind of rifle.” Eddie reached over and slid the weapon out from under the chain that hung across the front of the rack. He began to look the rifle over.
Mrs. Worden moved to the store window and looked outside. Across the street, in front of Gamble’s General Store, stood her son-in-law’s new red Chevy. “I see Bud has a new car,” she said aloud, more to herself than to Eddie. “I do not like Chevrolets.”
Standing there with her back to Eddie, she had no way of knowing that at that very moment, he was reaching into his overalls pocket for a .22 shell. Or that in his festering madness, he had begun to perceive the fifty-eight-year-old widow as a wicked creature deserving of divine punishment, the evil antithesis of his own sainted mother—just like Mary Hogan, another middle-aged local businesswoman who had, not very long before, come to a bad end. A very bad end.
That day, Bernard Muschinski, Sr., was manning the gas pumps at his Phillips 66 station directly across the street from Worden’s. As he tended to business, he had ample opportunity to notice the early-morning comings and goings at the hardware store—Mrs. Worden returning with her mail at around eight-fifteen, a delivery truck unloading freight just a few minutes later.
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