Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Robert Wells—the Milwaukee Journal reporter who had described the lunatic interior of Eddie’s farmhouse in such graphic detail—provided an equally vivid look at the local reaction to the crimes. In light of what had happened, Eddie’s oddball behavior—which had been dismissed as harmless, even amusing eccentricity—had taken on a terrible new significance. Eddie’s neighbors recalled his various quirks—his refusal, “with rare exceptions,” to “allow anyone in his house”; the way he would smile and nod in agreement “when people kidded him about what a dangerous fellow he was—a joke that was only funny because he seemed so harmless.”

  “And did not the children, half believing it while they laughed, say his old house was haunted?” asked Wells. “And were there not tales, which seemed to have been fairly common knowledge among the youngsters, that he had a collection of ‘shrunken heads’? Did he not read detective stories avidly and exhibit more than the ordinary interest in talk of crimes and violence?”

  There seemed to be some vaguely guilty sense among many of the townsfolk that the community should have taken these things more seriously. Looking back at Ed’s behavior—and at the strange stories and rumors that had clustered around him for so many years—his neighbors could see the warning signs, the symptoms of Gein’s growing derangement. But that perception was purely retrospective. At the time, there seemed no real cause for alarm. After all, as Wells pointed out, “every child knows of a haunted house, and you can buy shrunken heads made of plastic for $2.50, and every man, especially every little man, must learn to go along with a joke when he’s the butt of it.”

  To be sure, many of Eddie’s neighbors regarded him as peculiar, but no more so than “any of dozens of other people they knew. Every small town knows a few lonely bachelors living out their bleak lives on remote farms, the objects of occasional pity and a little good-natured ridicule.” For all his adult life, Eddie was perceived as one of these poor, pathetic, slightly ludicrous souls—until the night, that is, when Bernice Worden’s headless body was found hanging by its heels in his summer kitchen.

  Though the press may have had an enormous appetite for rumor, it was the townspeople themselves who kept that appetite fed, dishing up gossip as fast as the news media could gobble it down. “To reporters who spent the last week in the neighborhood,” Wells wrote, “it has sometimes seemed that everyone they met had a tale to tell of how Eddie peered in their bedroom window on some bygone night or how he sneaked around on tennis shoes, startling women.”

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was the female population of Waushara that had the most spine-tingling stories to tell. The county suddenly seemed to be populated by women who had just barely escaped death (or worse) at the hands of the mad butcher of Plainfield. Effie Banks, the wife of one of Eddie’s neighbors, told a reporter for Life magazine about the time, shortly after Eddie’s mother died, when her “daughter kept hearing rustling noises outside the house at night.” Her parents “thought she was imagining things.” One afternoon, “Gein knocked on the door and asked if he could come in.” He “said he might want to build a house and wanted to get a look at ours,” Mrs. Banks explained. “Nobody else was here and for some reason I decided not to let him in. I guess I can thank my lucky stars for that.”

  Another neighbor of Eddie’s recollected the time when the little man had dropped by her house for a visit late in the afternoon, before her husband and sons had returned from work. She was in the midst of setting the table for dinner. All of a sudden, she had a funny feeling, and when she turned around, there was Eddie, standing right behind her with a big kitchen knife in his hand. Naturally, she “about jumped sky high,” but Eddie hastily explained that he had noticed a string hanging down from her apron and had just meant to cut it off. Fortunately, the menfolk showed up about then, but Eddie was never allowed inside the house again.

  And then there was the young girl who worked in the bakery in Wautoma. Eddie had come by the shop on a Friday, just the day before he murdered Mrs. Worden, as it turned out. The two were alone. Suddenly, Eddie stepped behind the counter, touched her hair, and said, “You look like my mother.” Just then, some other customers entered the store, and Eddie left in a hurry. At the time, the girl didn’t know what to make of the incident, but when she later realized who the weird little man had been, she broke down into hysterics.

  There were plenty of other stories like these, many of which were clearly the products of overheated imaginations. One of the few women who may, indeed, have found herself in a ticklish situation with Gein was Irene Hill, who also had a story to tell about a time she and Ed were alone. They were standing in her grocery store when the little man suddenly picked up a butcher knife. “He run his finger along the top of the thing,” Mrs. Hill recounted, “and he looked at me kind of strange, and I said, ‘Ed, put that darned thing down before you get cut! That’s sharp!’ And he dropped it, just like that. But what he had in mind, I don’t know.” There is good reason to believe that this story is true, since, besides spending a fair amount of time in Gein’s company, Mrs. Hill possessed two important characteristics shared by the other murder victims: she was middle-aged and the proprietor of her own business.

  Referring to the spate of rumors circulating through Plainfield in the days immediately following Gein’s arrest, Robert Wells opined that “it is probable not even the tellers of some of these anecdotes are sure any more where fact stops and embroidery begins. It hardly seems likely, however, that Gein found time to do one-tenth of the things he is now credited with doing.”

  Still, the papers couldn’t seem to get enough of these stories. The Madison Capital Times ran a front-page article about an Oregon man who, while hunting near Gein’s farm years before, had been told, “We don’t want any snooping around here” and then “run off the property.” The most remarkable thing about this story—considering its prominent position on page one—was that it had nothing at all to do with Eddie. As it turned out, the person who had ordered the trespassers off his premises was Gein’s older brother, Henry.

  But even this bit of trivia seemed less inconsequential than some of the “news” items the papers were willing to print. Still, it wasn’t until an article headlined “300 POUND MAN RECALLS PINCH AND REMARK BY GEIN” appeared in the Milwaukee Journal that the press’s greed for any Gein-related material reached its ludicrous extreme. According to this hard-hitting story, “A 300-pound Neenah barber who owns a farm near slayer Ed Gein’s house, said the recluse pinched him on the belly once and said he’d be ‘just about right for roasting.’” The barber also revealed that, though he “didn’t think too much of the remark at the time,” he definitely noticed that “Gein had a peculiar look in his eye” when he said it.

  Undoubtedly, there were those in Plainfield who enjoyed all the journalistic attention, who basked in the media spotlight and were excited to find themselves, as one observer put it, “part of an event which the whole nation was watching.” But in general, the townspeople felt increasingly exploited, even victimized, by the press. And not just by what Ed Marolla continued to refer to as the “big city” press. Indeed, the single most outrageous news item, from the point of view of the Plainfield citizenry, was one that appeared in a small-town weekly, the New London Press (“The Only Newspaper,” in the words of its motto, “That Gives a Hoot about New London”).

  Written by editor Gordon Culver, a one-time resident of Waushara County, the article strove to make sense of Gein’s atrocities in the context of their social and geographical setting. Culver offered a haunting portrait of a place ideally suited for the breeding of madness and crime, an area he referred to as the “great dead heart” of Wisconsin.

  Like the rest of that “dead heart” region, Culver wrote, the western edge of Waushara County is marked by a “peculiar, lonely, wild feeling. A feeling of people struggling just for subsistence. A feeling that an honest living is hard to come by in this throbbingly poor area. Western Waushara County has some farms, but almost all show n
o signs of prosperity. Almost all look run down. And as the line is crossed into Adams County, the wildness takes over into desolation.”

  Culver recalled his childhood in the nearby town of Almond and how, even as a young boy, he “could feel the mystery of that wild marsh and woods country. We knew the rule there was to disregard game laws. We knew that big fights at dances always took place back in the marsh country in the shacky dance halls that sprang up there. We knew that moonshiners worked that desolate area…. And always and down through the years that area has been burned into our memories as wild, willingly not law abiding, and poor.

  “And so, when this murder took place on the border of that netherland, it was something we’d suspect would take place. Could take place. People seemed to have a disconcern about what other people, even their neighbors, do. Their own struggles are sufficient for their capacities. And if something strange or odd takes place, it is much more likely to be accepted as their business and nobody else’s.”

  Culver acknowledged the existence of “law abiding citizens” in the area, of “successful farmers,” “huge acreage used for potato and onion farming,” and a certain “aura of civilization.” But “always coming out of the ‘dead heart’ area,” he insisted, “is the everlasting mood of wildness and mystery. And we suspect the lonely, fifty-one-year-old bachelor now being held in the Waushara County jail at Wautoma was held to that spell of wildness. Where he was alone. Would be left alone. Where the laws of man were obliterated by the constant and encroaching frontier of wilderness. Where a man would kill a person and clean it like he would a deer.

  “Having known this area all our lifetime,” Culver concluded. “Hunted in it. Fished in it. Planted trees in it. Driven cattle in it. Investigated mysterious disappearances in it. This is where murder like Edward Gein carried out would be most likely to spawn.”

  Bad publicity wasn’t the only unpleasantness that Plainfield had to contend with in the wake of Gein’s crimes. The community was wracked with deep, if irrational, fears. Doors and windows were bolted shut by people who had never known the need for a lock. Parents reported an outbreak of bad dreams among their children—the first manifestation of a mythicizing process that would eventually see Gein transformed into a creature of nightmare, a semilegendary bogeyman.

  The stories of Ed’s cannibalism generated even ghastlier rumors—that the little man had handed out packages of human flesh to his neighbors, passing the meat off as venison—and local clinics suddenly found themselves trying to cope with an epidemic of gastrointestinal complaints. Every newspaper in Wisconsin, it seemed, published a map pinpointing the exact location of Gein’s farm, and hordes of curiosity seekers swarmed into Plainfield to gawk at the notorious “house of horrors.”

  As the publisher of the Sun, Marolla found himself acting as the town’s unofficial spokesman, writing a lengthy defense of his community for the Milwaukee Journal. He urged the “outside world” to “take the time to notice and remember some of the nicer things” about Plainfield, “a village where farm and townspeople work and play together, without distinction of any kind, for the good of the schools, the churches, and the little civic things that go toward making a town a pleasant place in which to live.” That congenial little town, Marolla maintained, is “Plainfield as it was, as it is, and how we hope it will continue to be.”

  And, indeed, the people of Plainfield did their best to restore a sense of normalcy to their lives. They went about their business. The dairy farmers did their chores, the women their shopping and housework. Merchants shoveled the sidewalks in front of their stores and hung their windows with Thanksgiving decorations. Children went off to school and deer hunters headed into the woods. Even Frank Worden reopened his mother’s hardware store less than two weeks after her murder. “We’ll try to carry on as before,” he said.

  But, of course, things would never be quite the same as they were before. Plainfield would never free itself of its reputation as the hometown of Edward Gein. And its citizens would not find it easy to shake off those questions that even Ed Marolla—for all his boosterism—found so intensely troubling that he posed them on the front page of his paper, for all the world to see.

  “Why didn’t the neighbors suspect Edward Gein,” he asked, “when it was known he had human heads in the house?

  “Why didn’t the authorities check after Mary Hogan disappeared and it was known Gein had a truck similar to the one suspected?

  “As the story of the awful crimes still unfolds, people around Plainfield find it hard to believe. They know it happened, they know it happened here. But why … and how … and how the series of crimes could have so long gone undiscovered is beyond comprehension.”

  22

  “It seems this item is from a leg, or probably from two. Is that sewed in two places?”

  “That’s from a person from the grave.”

  “What about the face masks?”

  “When I made those masks, you see, I stuffed them all out with paper so that they would dry. On the vagina I did, you know, sprinkle a little salt….”

  “Was there a resemblance in some of these faces to that of your mother?”

  “I believe there was some.”

  From Edward Gein’s confession

  Altogether, Gein was questioned for just under nine hours. The first part of the interrogation, conducted at the Crime Lab headquarters, commenced at one-forty on Tuesday afternoon and continued until seven-twenty-five P.M., when Eddie was removed to the Madison city jail. There he spent the night under double guard in a special seventh-floor detention cell. At eight-forty-five the next morning, the questioning resumed.

  Various investigators were present during these sessions, though the interrogation itself was conducted by the Crime Lab’s polygraph specialist, Joe Wilimovsky. The actual testing time was brief—Eddie was hooked up to the “lie box” for only nineteen minutes on Tuesday and eleven more on Wednesday. The rest of the time, Wilimovsky alternately conversed with and quizzed the prisoner, delving into those details of the crimes that Eddie was able, or willing, to recall.

  Though Gein displayed no signs of remorse or, indeed, any awareness at all of the enormity of his deeds, he did not come across as a cold-blooded killer. On the contrary, he seemed so friendly and cooperative—so childishly eager to please—that Wilimovsky had to be careful not to put words into his mouth. Eddie would cheerfully admit to the most extreme perversions.

  Do you have any recollection, Eddie, of taking any of those female parts, the vagina specifically, and holding it over your penis to cover the penis?

  I believe that’s true.

  You recall doing that with the vaginas of the bodies of other women?

  That I believe I do remember; that’s right….

  Would you ever put on a pair of women’s panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?

  That could be.

  On the other hand, Eddie was much less forthcoming about the murders he had committed, a sign to some observers that he was not as crazy as he seemed. Clearly, looting graves and violating corpses are mad and odious crimes—abominations in the eyes of God and man. But from a legal point of view, they are not exceptionally serious ones compared to first-degree murder. Eddie did finally confess to Mary Hogan’s killing, though the evidence against him was so overwhelming that he had very little choice. And though he acknowledged once again his responsibility for Bernice Worden’s death, he continued to maintain—as he would throughout his life—that the shooting was accidental.

  To some of those present at Gein’s interrogation, the prisoner seemed like an obedient, if hopelessly demented, little boy. But others saw in his answers the signs of a cunning criminal intelligence. For the rest of Gein’s life, people who met him would come away with the same paradoxical impression, struck by both his childlike simplicity and his monstrous criminality. One person who got to know Eddie in later years probably captured this contradiction best when he said that Gein
seemed to be a kind of “idiot savant” of the macabre, “a genius at the ghoulish things he did but, in anything else, an innocent.”

  Patiently, methodically, Wilimovsky ran through the details again and again, until he had obtained a complete, step-by-step account of Eddie’s insane procedures. Throughout his testimony, Eddie’s tone remained perfectly matter-of-fact, as though he were explaining the mechanics of the most ordinary of hobbies—furniture refinishing, say, or leathercraft.

  Eddie explained how he would test the freshness of a grave by inserting a metal rod into the soil. After digging up the casket, he would work the cover open with a pry bar.

  “Would you open the entire casket or just one of the halves?” Wilimovsky asked.

  “Just the half,” Eddie said.

  “And slip ’em out?”

  “That’s right.”

  On some occasions, Eddie would spirit his prize back home and busy himself with it at leisure. At other times, working hurriedly by moonlight in the fetor of the open grave, he would remove only the anatomical parts he wanted, then return the mutilated cadaver to the coffin.

  “What section of the flesh would you remove?” Wilimovsky wanted to know.

  “The head.”

  “The head?” asked Wilimovsky. “How about the vagina?”

  Eddie seemed a little flustered. “Well, that—not always.”

  “In removing the head, did you first cut through and then snap the bone?”