Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  “I guess that would be snapping.”

  Wilimovsky wanted further clarification. “Would you work the head back and forth in the same fashion as you would when you attempt to break a piece of wire in two?”

  “That’s a good description of it,” said Eddie. “I never took a saw to the cemetery.”

  Once again, Eddie explained his technique for collecting and preserving human faces and scalps. “You just peeled the skin off the skull and disposed of the bone and other material that was in the head, is that it?” asked Wilimovsky.

  Eddie nodded. “That’s right.”

  Wilimovsky wanted to know if the skins had been prepared in any particular way.

  “I probably put some oil on, that’s all,” Eddie replied. “To keep it soft, you know.”

  Then, for the first time, Eddie revealed shocking new details about the uses to which the face skins had been put. They were not, as the investigators had originally thought, simply ghastly souvenirs or ghoulish decorations. The whole truth turned out to be even worse.

  Following a hunch, Wilimovsky asked Eddie if he had ever used the skins as masks, placing them over his own face.

  “That I did,” Eddie replied without hesitation.

  When Wilimovsky asked how he secured the faces to his own head, Eddie’s answer was simple. With a cord, he explained.

  And would Eddie “wear the faces over a prolonged time?” Wilimovsky inquired.

  Eddie shook his head. “Not too long,” he said. “I had other things to do.”

  But there was worse to come. The skin masks weren’t the only articles fashioned from human flesh that Eddie Gein enjoyed wearing. He also admitted to slipping on the mammary vest, wrapping his legs in the crudely stitched-together skin stockings, and covering his penis with a preserved vulva. Then, decked out from top to bottom in his corpse costume—a cross-dresser who derived his pleasure not from donning women’s clothes but from wearing their skin and hair—he would parade about the cobwebbed rooms of his house or, on warmer nights, strut about in the moonlight.

  Eddie casually related other details. He described how he had sawed off the skullcaps and used them as bowls (an idea that came, he said, from reading about the “old Norwegian style” of drinking mead from human skulls). He told how he had sprinkled salt on the vulvas in an effort to preserve them, though one of them began to go green anyway. He explained that he had touched that one up with silver paint to see if that would stop it from decaying further.

  From time to time during the interrogation, Eddie complained of hunger and asked for something to eat. At one point, he was presented with a slice of apple pie, topped with a chunk of Wisconsin cheddar. Eddie munched on his snack while continuing to answer Wilimovsky’s questions. Apparently, however, the food did not come up to Eddie’s finicky standards. Interrupting his tale of body snatching and corpse flaying and flesh wearing, the little man who ate his soup from skullcaps and kept a shoebox full of salted vaginas, turned to his interrogator and began to fuss about the dryness of the cheese.

  23

  John 10:10

  “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.”

  While Eddie sat in Madison, casually confessing to a string of unparalleled perversions, the funeral rites for his final victim were taking place back in his hometown.

  The stores were closed and the streets hushed as more than two hundred of Bernice Worden’s relatives, friends, and neighbors filled Plainfield’s First Methodist Church, a handsome brick building located on Main Street, two blocks north of her hardware store. An anteroom that served as the church’s Sunday school had to be opened to accommodate the crowd.

  The predictable pack of reporters was there, mingling with the townsfolk, and a photographer from Life magazine shot pictures of the mourners as they filed past the open bronze casket, resting among a mass of bouquets. Mrs. Worden’s body—mended and restored by all the art at mortician Ray Goult’s disposal—showed no visible signs of the ravages inflicted on it by her killer.

  Following a solo rendition of “Abide by Me” sung by Mrs. Clifford Tubbs, the church’s young pastor, Rev. Gerald Tanquist, spoke. “We ask ourselves,” said Rev. Tanquist, “why does God let these things come about?” For an answer, he turned to both the Old Testament and the New, citing Psalm 23—“The Lord is my shepherd”—as well as John 10:11—“I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

  It might appear to some, said the pastor, “that our Shepherd has abandoned us here in Plainfield. But the psalmist didn’t promise to keep us from all the dark days of our lives, but only that the Shepherd will be with us, comforting us. He is still the guardian of our souls and our lives.”

  Rev. Tanquist went on to urge the community to reaffirm its faith in God and to remember that even “in the face of this horrible incident,” the “Lord has not abandoned us.”

  Following rites by the Order of the Eastern Star, of which Mrs. Worden had been a member, the casket was carried outside to a waiting hearse and driven slowly down Main Street, past the Worden hardware store, and out to the village cemetery, west of town.

  There Bernice Worden was interred beside her husband—dead since 1931—in a snow-covered family plot sheltered by cedars and pines.

  24

  SHERIFF ART SCHLEY

  “He’s got a good appetite and never talks back to anyone.”

  At around two P.M. on Wednesday, just twenty-four hours after his arrival in Madison, Eddie was taken from the Crime Lab headquarters by Sheriff Schley and Deputy Murty and placed in a police car for the trip back to Wautoma.

  Though the “Plainfield head collector,” as some of the local tabloids had taken to calling Gein, looked a bit wan, he was clean-shaven for the first time since his arrest and smiled broadly for the cameras as he was led through the throng of newsmen eagerly awaiting the results of his tests. In fact, he seemed so relaxed and cheerful that the reporters wondered whether he was simply enjoying some attention for the first time in his life or experiencing the cathartic aftereffects of confessing. As one observer put it, perhaps Gein “had gained mental release by unburdening his mind of his long-hoarded fiendish activities.”

  Immediately after Gein’s departure, Charles Wilson met with the press to release a short, highly selective summary of the polygraph findings. “The lie detector tests of Edward Gein have now been completed,” read the statement, “and after consultation with the several interested district attorneys we are able at this time to state that the results of the tests referred to eliminate the subject, Edward, 51 years, as the person responsible for and/or involved in the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley in La Crosse County on Oct. 24, 1953; the disappearance of Georgia Jean Weckler in Jefferson County May 1, 1947; and Victor Travis in Adams County Nov. 1, 1952.

  “Mr. Gein has now admitted that he is responsible for the deaths of Mary Hogan in Portage County on Dec. 8, 1954, and Bernice Worden in Waushara County Nov. 16, 1957. This release jointly concurred in by the interested local officials is being made to eliminate Mr. Gein from unnecessary suspicion and conjecture.”

  Gein had also been questioned about another, more recent missing-persons case, that of a thirty-year-old Fort Atkinson woman named Irene Keating, who had vanished the previous August, but though the lie detector tests were inconclusive, he never seemed to be a serious suspect.

  As for Gein’s other crimes, Wilson would only say that “an avalanche of evidence has been recovered which will take weeks, and possibly months to completely evaluate and process. When this is done the results will be made known to the proper local officials.”

  After trying unsuccessfully to pump the Crime Lab director for additional details, the reporters hurried off to file the news of Gein’s confession in time for the evening headlines.

  So many stories linking Eddie to the Hogan murder had already been circulated—including, most sensationally, Sheriff Wanerski’s identification of the murdered woman’s hea
d as one of Eddie’s “trophies”—that Wilson’s announcement was almost anticlimactic. It did, however, produce one immediate and dramatic result. A thirty-seven-year-old woman from Carlinville, Illinois, Mrs. Christine Selvo, revealed that she was Mary Hogan’s daughter, abandoned by her mother twenty-seven years earlier and raised by foster parents. For several years, Mrs. Selvo had been trying to locate her natural mother’s whereabouts. With Wilson’s official confirmation of Gein’s guilt, her search was over. She had managed to trace her mother’s movements from Springfield to Joliet to Chicago to Pine Grove, Wisconsin—a wayward path that had come to an abrupt and appalling end in the blackness of Eddie Gein’s charnel house.

  Back in Wautoma, District Attorney Kileen told a group of reporters that he hoped to file a first-degree murder charge against Gein on the following day. He was only awaiting the results of a ballistics test that the Crime Lab was conducting on a .22-caliber rifle recovered from the display rack of the Worden hardware store. An expended cartridge had been found in the chamber of the rifle, and Crime Lab technicians were checking it against the bullet extracted from Bernice Worden’s severed head.

  Kileen added that he intended to ask the court to order a sanity hearing for Gein. Then he broke the bad news.

  According to Kileen, whom reporters had come to rely on as their primary source of information, he had been given “a spanking” by Attorney General Honeck, who had advised him not to release any further information that “would tend to inflame potential jurors.” Kileen was a bit defensive, insisting that “the only things I have divulged are what everybody knew anyway.” But he told the newsmen that he had no intention of disregarding the attorney general’s “advice.”

  From the press’s point of view, Kileen’s announcement was undoubtedly the single most upsetting development in the case. When they approached Honeck to protest his directive, the attorney general brushed their objections aside, explaining that he was simply acting in the interests of justice. “With the widespread statements being made, some ill-founded, contradictory, and groundless on things that are supposed to have happened,” Honeck said, “people might reach conclusions which might affect their ability to sit as jurors. In some places, confessed murderers are walking the streets, turned loose on the grounds that they couldn’t get a fair trial. That’s what we’re trying to avoid in this case.”

  Honeck insisted that a news blackout was the “farthest thing from our minds.” But he made it clear that his order to withhold information would remain in force until Gein was brought to trial. “I think the public will know the whole story at the proper time,” he said.

  There wasn’t much the press could do about Honeck’s position except grumble. In spite of the attorney general’s disclaimer, it looked, one reporter complained, as if the news blackout that had “confused the details surrounding Edward Gein’s butchery” was about to “become even blacker.”

  By this time, Eddie was back in his cell in the Waushara County jailhouse, wolfing down a dinner of roasted lamb, mashed potatoes, canned corn, lettuce salad, apple pie, and coffee.

  After disposing of his meal, Gein was visited by his attorney, William Belter, who informed Eddie of his intention to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Eddie nodded agreeably—happy, as always, to go along with a good suggestion.

  He assured his attorney that he had been treated fairly in Madison. In fact, he expressed only the warmest feelings for his interrogator, Joseph Wilimovsky. “Joe,” as Eddie called him, had never once tricked him into saying anything he didn’t mean. His questions had actually helped Eddie “clear his mind.”

  Still, as Belter told newsmen after conferring with Gein, there were lots of things that Eddie was “still hazy” about. And it was obvious to everyone who came into contact with Eddie, his defense attorney included, that one of the things Gein was most glaringly “hazy” about was the sheer magnitude of his crimes. Gein exhibited no awareness at all of their enormity. He couldn’t have been any more nonchalant about them if they had consisted of a string of parking violations. As Belter, displaying a real skill for understatement, later said of his client, “I don’t think he has a full appreciation of what he has done.”

  By late Wednesday afternoon, it was evident to the reporters who were still staking out Eddie’s farm that the investigation was drawing to a close. Police had boarded up the first-floor doors and windows and nailed a “No Trespassing” sign to the house. The only significant activity at all was taking place outside, where several Wood County deputies were busily digging up some holes around the property. At one location—the spot near the outhouse where Eddie had dumped Mrs. Worden’s blood—the searchers found nothing. At another site, they turned up a small bone. Unable to determine if it had come from an animal or a human finger, they dispatched it at once to the Crime Lab.

  At the jailhouse in Wautoma, Sheriff Schley confirmed that, from his point of view at least, the investigation was over. Whatever remained to be done was “up to the State Crime Lab.” “They’ve got the skulls,” Schley told reporters in an uncharacteristic burst of communicativeness. “Let them find out if they’re embalmed. That’s what they’re for.”

  Kileen seconded Schley’s statement, adding, “There aren’t any more facts left.”

  Kileen had no way of knowing it, of course, but in less than a day, his pronouncement would be belied, for the Gein case was nothing if not a seemingly never-ending source of lurid revelations. And blackout or no blackout, a new and particularly sensational one was about to come to light.

  25

  COLIN WILSON, A Casebook of Murder

  “Gem was a sexually normal man.”

  Under the sponsorship of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, the whiskey concern, which was celebrating its centennial in 1957, a symposium entitled “The Next Hundred Years” was held in New York City on January 21. Eight prominent scientists, including two Nobel prize winners and rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, took part in the conference, and their rosy predictions were reported on the front pages of papers across the United States.

  The panelists foresaw a world transformed into an earthly paradise by the wonders of science and technology, a world where savory synthetic foods would eliminate hunger; where deserts, irrigated by purified sea water, would blossom with vegetation; where advanced automation would lead to a four-hour work week; and where, thanks to miraculous psychoactive drugs, no one would ever be “mentally or emotionally sick.”

  But this hypothetical wonderworld, according to the experts, was still a century away. And to anyone following the unfolding of the Gein case—and that would have included most of the population of Wisconsin—the gap between the marvels of this imagined future and the much bleaker realities of the present couldn’t have been clearer. For on the very day that Wisconsin newspapers were reporting on the Seagram symposium and its vision of a twenty-first-century utopia free of labor, hunger, and mental disease, their front pages were dominated by the latest revelation regarding Gein’s own mental condition, a condition that more than one psychiatrist would come to describe as “unparalleled in modern history.”

  It is remarkable that in the four days since the Gein atrocities became known to the public, no one involved in the investigation—not Sheriff Schley or District Attorney Kileen or any of the Crime Lab personnel—had said a word about a motive. It was as if Gein’s behavior was so incomprehensibly monstrous that it was simply beyond explanation. But on Thursday, November 21, all that began to change.

  Generally speaking, identifying a cause for even the most heinous of acts can offer a degree of comfort. Crimes that seem completely unmotivated—the casual slaughter of a family by a serial killer who selects his victims at whim, for example—terrify because of their very randomness. They strike at one of our most fundamental human impulses—the urge to believe in a universe governed by forces other than sheer accident and chance. It was typical of the Gein case, however, that the motives put forth for his actions only added to t
heir horror. Though nothing could be more appalling than the crimes themselves, the explanations that began to emerge on the twenty-first conjured up a whole new set of nightmares.

  The story broke in the Chicago Tribune and spread quickly to the front pages of every newspaper in Wisconsin. But it was the headline in the late edition of that day’s Milwaukee Journal that best summed up the newest Gein-related shocker. The headline read:

  OBSESSIVE LOVE FOR HIS MOTHER DROVE GEIN TO

  SLAY, ROB GRAVES

  GHOULISH ACTS WERE STIRRED BY HER DEATH

  He Thought Victims Resembled Parent,

  Authorities Learn During Quizzing

  The source of the story was an “unidentified investigator” who had been present during Gein’s interrogation at the Crime Lab on Tuesday and Wednesday. From this informant, the public learned for the first time the ghastly details of Gein’s unspeakable practices—how he would carry the freshly disinterred corpses home and “cut them up,” keeping only the heads, strips of skin, and what the papers euphemistically referred to as “some other parts” and disposing of the rest by “burning it in small pieces in his kitchen cook stove.” They learned how he “gave particular attention” to the faces, which he would peel from the skulls, “leaving a human mask,” and how he preserved these masks by keeping them “as cold as possible” and rubbing “oil on them whenever they became stiff.”

  Then came the revelation about the skin vest stripped “from the upper part of one woman’s body.” The public read the appalling particulars of Eddie’s grotesque masquerade—how he would, on occasion, “don one of the masks, slip into the torso skin vest, and attach to himself other parts he had removed from a woman’s body and parade around by himself in his lonely farm house,” a ritual that “gave him great satisfaction.”

  Almost as shocking as these deranged acts, however, was the motive which, according to the anonymous informant, had driven Gein to perform them. Gein, the investigator explained, suffered from an Oedipus complex which accounted for all his criminal behavior, including the murder of two women “who resembled his mother.”