Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  In the course of his interrogation at the crime lab, Gein had revealed an “unnatural attachment” to his dead mother, Augusta, an attachment that had caused him to acquire perverse “feminine attitudes.” Even before her death, the investigator revealed, Gein “wished that he had been a woman instead of a man. He bought medical books and studied anatomy. He wondered whether it would be possible to change his sex. He considered inquiring about an operation to change him into a woman and even thought of trying the operation upon himself, but did nothing about such plans.”

  Following his mother’s death in 1945, Gein “brooded for a long time. From this disconsolate mood emerged his compulsion to visit cemeteries. After a few nocturnal trips to graveyards, he began digging into fresh graves.”

  After a while, however, the gratifications of his grave-robbing and corpse-collecting activities did not, apparently, suffice. One afternoon, Gein stopped for coffee at Mary Hogan’s tavern with a neighbor who had employed Eddie to help out with an odd job. As soon as Eddie laid eyes on the proprietress, “it struck him that she resembled his mother.” Later that day, Eddie returned to the tavern, shot Mrs. Hogan through the back of the head with a .32-caliber Mauser, loaded her two-hundred-pound body into his truck, drove home, hoisted her up by her heels with a pulley arrangement in the summer kitchen where his parents had once slaughtered hogs, and butchered her body with a homemade knife fashioned from a file.

  Several years later, he repeated this atrocity with Bernice Worden, another local businesswoman who strongly reminded Eddie Gein of his own hefty, strong-willed, dear departed mommy.

  Public reaction to these sensational disclosures (characterized by the Chicago Tribune as “the appalling denouement of the entire case”) was explosive, particularly among members of the psychiatric community, who, as one observer put it, had a “field day” with the findings. Though some psychiatrists refused to engage in idle speculation—as one Milwaukee doctor sensibly pointed out, “without questioning Gein at length, it would be difficult to explain his aggressive acts toward women whom he thought resembled his mother”—others lost no time in describing Gein as the most unique case of psychosis “in modern psychiatric history” and “one of the most dramatic human beings ever to confront society.”

  Opinions regarding the precise nature of Gein’s madness varied somewhat. One psychiatrist theorized that Gein was “a sexual psychopath, somewhat mentally defective, and possibly schizophrenic.” Dr. Edward J. Kelleher, on the other hand, chief of the Chicago Municipal Court’s Psychiatric Institute, was unequivocal in his diagnosis. Gein, he asserted, was “obviously schizophrenic,” a condition “created by a conflict set up by his mother.” Couching his explanations (insofar as possible) in layman’s terms, Kelleher explained that Gein’s behavior demonstrated a high degree of ambivalence—“two conflicting types of feelings.” The “biggest example of ambivalence,” said Kelleher, “is that love and hate are possible toward the same individual. It is possible to have this dual set of feelings toward women.”

  Gein “probably began this whole set of feelings with his relationship toward his mother,” Kelleher continued. Thus, “it would be more likely that these feelings would be there in acute form with women who resembled his mother.”

  Why Gein should have developed such violently divided feelings for his mother—with murderous hatred coexisting alongside worshipful love—had something to do, Kelleher suggested, with the sexual attitudes instilled by Augusta. Gein had told his questioners about his mother’s view of modern women, her belief that all of them (besides herself) had “the devil in them.” And “we know,” said Kelleher, “that whenever a mother hammers away at an abnormal attitude toward other women, it affects her children.”

  The result of Gein’s abnormally conflicted feelings for his mother, according to Kelleher, was a cluster of symptoms “unparalleled” in the annals of sexual psychopathology, a sickness combining acute forms of transvestism, fetishism (the “disordered love” of nonliving objects), and, ghastliest of all, necrophilia (the “love of the dead”).

  When Kelleher was asked if Gein’s behavior might somehow be “an extreme form of voyeurism,” the psychiatrist didn’t discount the presence of this aberration as a component of Gein’s personality but denied that it could account for the crimes. Voyeurs, he said, “are not any closer to murder than you or I.”

  Professional psychiatrists like Dr. Kelleher weren’t the only ones to engage in the long-distance diagnosis of Gein. Armchair psychoanalysis suddenly became a popular pastime in Wisconsin, and subjects that were not exactly the stuff of everyday conversation in 1950s Middle America—sexual deviance, transvestism, fetishism, necrophilia—were being tossed around as casually as the daily deer-hunting statistics. Even Crime Lab director Charles Wilson, a man not given to offhand pronouncements, agreed that “an oedipus complex” was probably involved in Gein’s case, though he denied knowing anything about Eddie’s purported desire to be a woman. “It’s news to me,” Wilson told reporters. In any event, Wilson went on, it would be up to the psychiatrists who examined Gein to figure out precisely what was wrong with him. “This is something that the boys in the short white coats will have to decide,” the Crime Lab director declared.

  And it was indeed true that, as of yet, Gein had not been examined by a single psychiatrist, though, as one commentator put it, that hadn’t “slowed up the torrent of words and explanations.”

  While the newspaper-reading public was being treated to a crash course in sexual psychopathology, the object of all this attention was being arraigned at Wautoma. Flanked by Attorney Belter and Sheriff Schley, the stoop-shouldered little man stood in the courtroom of Waushara County Judge Boyd Clark and heard himself formally charged with first-degree murder.

  Anyone laying eyes on Eddie for the first time would have found it hard to believe that he was the infamous “ghoul-slayer” of Plainfield. With his work clothes and pleasant mien, he looked more like a furnace repairman, there to service the courthouse’s heating system, than Wisconsin’s most notorious criminal. But even Eddie seemed to have finally comprehended the seriousness of his position. Though he had fortified himself that morning with his usual hearty breakfast—corn flakes, pork links, toast, and coffee—he trembled slightly as he listened to Judge Clark.

  The charge said that Edward Gein, “did on the 16th day of November, 1957, at the village of Plainfield in said county [Waushara] feloniously and with intent to kill, murder Bernice Worden, a human being, contrary to section 940.01 of the Wisconsin statutes against the peace and dignity of the state of Wisconsin.”

  The arraignment was over quickly. Eddie spoke only two words, acknowledging his identity and answering “Yes” when the judge asked if he was represented by an attorney. Belter then entered his pleas—not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity—and waived a preliminary hearing. After accepting the pleas, Judge Clark found “probable cause” that the crime had been committed, bound Gein over to the circuit court for trial, and ordered him held without bail. Three minutes after it began, the arraignment was over, and Eddie was escorted back to his cell.

  Eddie had two visitors that day. Adams County Sheriff Frank Searles—the officer who had found Mrs. Worden’s abandoned panel truck in the pine grove just outside Plainfield—arrived at the jailhouse to question Gein about the mysterious disappearance of the forty-three-year-old Friendship man, Victor “Bunk” Travis, who had last been seen leaving a Plainfield tavern in the company of a stranger named Burgess on the evening of November 1 five years before.

  After spending an hour in Gein’s cell questioning the prisoner, however, Searles came away unsatisfied. “I couldn’t get anything out of him,” he told a crowd of reporters afterward. “The only answers he would make were ‘I don’t remember’ and ‘I don’t know’ and others like that.” Still, Searles strongly suspected that Gein might “know something” about the disappearance of the two hunters along with their car. According to the sheriff, Gein had bee
n heard to comment on Travis’s disappearance in the same joking way he had spoken about Mary Hogan’s. “And if this happened with the Hogan case,” said Sheriff Searles, “the same could be true with the Travis case.”

  Shortly after Searles’s departure, someone else showed up at the jailhouse, asking to see Gein: Rev. Kenneth Engleman, the boyish-looking, thirty-three-year-old pastor of Wautoma’s Methodist Church.

  Though Eddie had previously told Schley that he would like to talk to a minister, the harried and overstressed sheriff hadn’t gotten around to summoning one. On Thursday afternoon, Rev. Engleman showed up without notice at the jailhouse, explaining that he felt Gein was in need of spiritual counsel. Eddie, of course, had been raised as a strict Lutheran. Nevertheless, he eagerly accepted the Methodist’s offer, welcoming the young minister into his cell.

  Afterwards, Rev. Engleman held a press conference to describe his meeting with Gein and set the record straight about the widely circulated reports of the killer’s “cold and unresponsive” nature.

  As far as he was concerned, Rev. Engleman told the reporters, those stories were completely inaccurate. Indeed, no sooner had he walked into Gein’s cell than the prisoner broke into uncontrollable sobs. Gein, said the minister, was “sorry for himself for having gotten involved in trouble” and full of remorse for the “pain he had inflicted on other people.” The two of them spent some time discussing Eddie’s parents, whose deaths, Gein told the minister, had left an “empty spot in his life.” Later, when the two men knelt on the cold floor of the cell to pray for “comfort, help, and strength,” Eddie began sobbing again.

  When one of the reporters asked the minister what had prompted his visit, Rev. Engleman answered without hesitation. “I’m a Christian minister and Mr. Gein is a child of God,” he said. Indeed, “God may be nearer to Mr. Gein than the rest of us because God comes closer to people in dealings with life and death.” And when it came to matters of life and death, the minister concluded, making an observation that would have been hard to dispute, “Mr. Gein is closer to such things than the rest of us.”

  Rev. Engleman’s interview with Gein was deeply envied by the reporters, none of whom had been allowed to exchange a single word with the prisoner, a situation they regarded as profoundly unjust. Now that the search of the Gein farm was complete and Eddie, for the present at least, was installed at Wautoma, the media spotlight had been turned on the county seat, where at least three dozen reporters could be seen roaming around the downtown streets at most times of the day.

  As had been true in Plainfield, feelings about all this media attention were mixed. Some residents wished that the reporters would simply go somewhere—anywhere—else. Others, particularly the local restaurant owners and the folks who ran Brock’s Motel on the east side of town where most of the press corps was lodged, couldn’t have been happier.

  One man, however, was unequivocal in his negative feelings for the newsmen. Sheriff Schley’s wariness and distaste remained as powerful as ever. Six weeks on the job, struggling to handle the most sensational murder case in Wisconsin history with a full-time staff of only two deputies and an annual budget of $11, 500, Schley had been trying his best to perform his duties while dealing with the demands and importunities of the press. Schley’s dislike of the reporters wasn’t anything personal. But it was simply impossible, he said, “to try to conduct an investigation with about sixty newsmen following you everywhere you go.” Only recently, Gein had volunteered to take Schley back to his farm and show him something. By the time the two men arrived there, however, the place was so overrun with newsmen and photographers that Eddie got spooked and changed his mind. Schley still didn’t know what Gein had intended to show him. For all he knew, it might have been another body.

  Schley’s respect for the newsmen’s methods—not high to begin with—dropped even lower when a reporter approached him on the sly and offered him a considerable sum of money for the opportunity to spend just ten minutes talking with the Plainfield “butcher-ghoul,” a bribe Schley angrily rejected, telling the reporter “what he could do with his money.”

  On the evening of Thursday, November 21, the simmering tensions between Schley and the newsmen—who for days had been hounding the sheriff for access to Gein—finally boiled over.

  Eddie’s lawyer had responded to the reporters’ increasingly clamorous appeals by promising to arrange for an interview between the newsmen and Gein. Thursday had been set as the tentative time, and in the early afternoon, immediately after Eddie’s return from his arraignment, about two dozen reporters crammed themselves into the small reception area at the front of the county jailhouse and waited. And waited. As more and more time passed without a sign of either Belter or Schley, the newsmen grew increasingly disgruntled. The suspicion arose that the whole thing was a setup, a ploy to keep the reporters occupied while Eddie took Schley back to his farm to show him where more bones and body parts were buried.

  As it turned out, Schley was in the jailhouse all along, down in the basement, where he was helping to repair some leaky hot-water pipes. Belter, meanwhile, who also served as justice of the peace, was busy hearing game-law violations.

  It was well into the evening—a good eight hours since the newsmen first began their frustrating wait—before Belter finally spoke to Gein and obtained his consent. Eddie would speak to six reporters, who would then pool the information with the rest of the journalists.

  The lucky six—three representatives from the major wire services plus reporters from Time magazine, the Milwaukee Journal, and the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern—were chosen by Belter. Only one reporter—the Chicago Tribune man—kicked up a fuss about being excluded, but even he was placated after a while.

  Belter and the chosen six left the building and walked around to the jail entrance at the rear. The rest of the reporters followed close at their heels, hoping for a chance to eavesdrop.

  Sheriff Schley had positioned himself at the entrance to the jail, and when he saw the jostling mob of reporters coming toward him instead of the agreed-upon six, he became furious. He would only allow three reporters inside his jail, he shouted. The newsmen began objecting loudly, denouncing Schley and pleading with Belter to intervene. The whole scene was becoming increasingly chaotic.

  Caught between Schley and the newsmen, Belter had little choice but to go along with the sheriff’s decree. As soon as he made the new cut, however—picking the reporters from the Associated Press, the United Press, and Time—the man from the International News Service howled in protest. An argument between Schley and the newsman ensued, which because increasingly bitter, until Schley leveled a few final swear words at the journalist, announced that the whole affair was off, and stepped inside the jail, slamming the door behind him.

  The reporters were devastated. They had spent the better part of the day packed inside the jailhouse, only to be denied, at the very last moment, their long-awaited interview with Gein. Their outrage and disappointment were amplified by their sense of helplessness. As long as Eddie was locked in Schley’s jail, they were left with no recourse.

  At least one of them, however—Robert Wells of the Milwaukee Journal—was capable of seeing some irony in the situation. “A week ago,” wrote Wells, “there wasn’t a person in the entire world who would have gone far out of his way to have a word with the little handy man with the twisted smile.” And yet here were the “representatives of the nation’s press” crying out in despair “over being unable to hear a few syllables from Gein’s own lips.”

  There could be no surer sign of Eddie’s new status. In a few short days, he had gone from being a complete nonentity—even in his humble hometown—to being a bona fide sensation. He had achieved the kind of phenomenal overnight fame that only the media can offer.

  Eddie Gein was a celebrity.

  26

  ROBERT BLOCH, Psycho

  “Somewhere along about the time they finished with the swamp, the men who knocked over the bank at Fulton were
captured down in Oklahoma. But the story rated less than half a column in the Fairvale Weekly Herald. Almost the entire front page was given over to the Bates case. AP and UP picked it up right away, and there was quite a bit about it on television. Some of the write-ups compared it to the Gem affair up north, a few years back. They worked up a sweat over the ‘house of horror’ and tried their damndest to make out that Norman Bates had been murdering motel visitors for years.”

  The Gein story was everywhere. It dominated not just the news media but daily discourse as well. For several weeks, wherever Wisconsinites congregated—in stores and schoolyards, in cafés or at the dinner table—it was all people could talk about. Such was the magnitude of the story that if you lived in Wisconsin in the fall of 1957, you simply couldn’t help knowing every detail of the case, even if you never picked up a paper or turned on the TV.

  One individual who first heard about the Gein affair from local gossip was a forty-year-old writer named Robert Bloch. A longtime resident of Milwaukee, Bloch had been publishing mystery and horror fiction since adolescence, having received his earliest encouragement from the celebrated fantasist H. P. Lovecraft. After a successful career as an advertising copywriter for the Gustav Marx Agency in Milwaukee, Bloch had decided in 1953 to devote himself to full-time freelance writing. His stories—many of them published in pulp magazines—were known for their gruesomely clever twist endings, which often made them read like extended sick jokes. Psychopathic killers featured prominently in his fiction. One of his best-known works was a tale entitled “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.”

  In the fall of 1957, Bloch was residing in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, his wife’s hometown, located some ninety miles north of Milwaukee and less than thirty miles east of Plainfield. Marion Bloch had been suffering from tuberculosis of the bones. The disease was in remission, but the couple had moved to Weyauwega so that Marion could be close to her parents in case her condition worsened again.