Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Listening to the rumors about the nightmarish discoveries in the nearby town of Plainfield and reading the unbelievable facts in the Weyauwega Chronicle and the Milwaukee Journal, Bloch immediately saw in the Gein case the raw materials for a first-rate tale of terror. Here was a real-life horror story far more grisly than anything ever dreamed up by Lovecraft. A story that featured the darkest acts of depravity, all performed by a shy, bland, completely harmless-looking bachelor driven to his abominations by his pathological attachment to a tyrannizing mother who continued to dominate her son’s existence years after her death.

  What Bloch found most intriguing about the Gein case, however, was its setting—the notion, as he later put it, “that a ghoulish killer with perverted appetites could flourish almost openly in a small rural community where everybody prides himself on knowing everybody else’s business.”

  As Bloch pondered the outlines of his story, he quickly confronted an important problem: how to furnish his killer with a suitable supply of victims.

  Given the shy, retiring nature of the main character, it didn’t seem credible to have him actively go out and stalk his prey, like Jack the Ripper. The prey would have to come to him. And what better way to provide a killer with a steady stream of victims than to have him operate some kind of business—say, a small, run-down, out-of-the-way motel?

  4 Diggings

  27

  From the diary of a necrophiliac

  “In the damp and cold November night

  on the day of the dead,

  our love awakes.

  The love of the dead.”

  Gein was in court again on Friday for a brief appearance before Circuit Judge Herbert A. Bunde. Dressed in baggy green work pants and a blue woolen jacket, Eddie, his stubbled face displaying no trace of emotion, was led into the large, high-ceilinged courtroom by Sheriff Schley. About eighty spectators, at least thirty of them newsmen, half filled the courtroom. The crowd was hushed as the fragile-looking “ghoul-slayer” was brought before the bench, though the news photographers present were squirming with frustration. At Eddie’s request, they had been barred by Judge Bunde, a stern, no-nonsense jurist, from taking pictures during the proceedings.

  Throughout the week, rumors had continued to circulate that certain individuals in Plainfield were outraged at the notion that Gein, by pleading insanity, might evade punishment for his crimes. District Attorney Kileen had sought to reassure the public by stating categorically that “Gein would never walk the streets of Plainfield again.” Still, there was a good deal of bitterness at the thought that Gein might end up in a mental hospital, which, as far as certain people were concerned, would be tantamount to his getting away with murder.

  Fearing, perhaps, that there might be some sort of outburst among the spectators—an angry, possibly violent display of protest or even an attempt on the prisoner’s life—the judge had ordered an unprecedented degree of protection for the defendant. Seven armed men—three city policemen, three deputies (including Leon Murty, who arrived at court dressed in a bright red deer-hunting outfit), and Sheriff Herbert Wanerski—stood with their backs to the bench, keeping a close eye on the spectators. Schley, who never left Eddie’s side, wore a revolver on his hip.

  As it turned out, these precautions were completely unnecessary. The spectators, many of them courthouse employees, looked on politely, as silent and undemonstrative as the defendant. Even the photographers kept their disgruntlement to themselves and sat watching with quiet interest.

  Like the preliminary hearing on Thursday, Friday’s arraignment was over quickly. His manacled hands folded in front of him, Eddie stood before Judge Bunde and once again heard himself formally charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery. As on Thursday, he was required only to confirm his identity and point out his lawyer, William Belter (who had been mildly rebuked in a Milwaukee Journal editorial that day for having told reporters that he had accepted the distasteful task of defending Gein with “reluctance”). Once more, Belter entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

  What was different this time, however, was the recommendation by Kileen that Gein be committed to the Central State Hospital for a sanity test before a trial date was set. By way of buttressing his request, Kileen described for Judge Bunde the condition Bernice Worden’s body had been found in, “hanging by its heels” and “dressed out” like a deer. “I don’t know whether a person in his right mind would do that sort of thing or not,” Kileen opined.

  Belter, who had announced several hours before that he intended to get an independent medical opinion on Gein’s sanity from a Milwaukee psychiatrist, concurred with Kileen. He told the judge that Gein had admitted removing entire corpses and various body parts from graves. “Some mental aberration is involved,” was Belter’s assessment.

  The entire arraignment lasted little more than five minutes. After listening to the recommendations of the prosecutor and the defense attorney, Judge Bunde made a statement. “It seems advisable under the circumstances as related by both the counsel for the state and the counsel for the defendant,” he said, “that expert determination be had whether he is now competent to stand trial,” as well as whether he was sane at the time of Mrs. Worden’s murder.

  Then Bunde signed an order committing Eddie to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Waupun for a thirty-day examination period and remanded him to the custody of Sheriff Schley, who led Eddie back to the jailhouse to await transportation to the mental institution.

  Later that afternoon, DA Kileen held a meeting with Judge Bunde and several other local officials, including Schley, Waushara County board chairman Earl Simenson, and Harold Collins, village president of Plainfield, to discuss a number of issues in connection with the Gein case.

  One of the questions they considered had to do with the round-the-clock protection of Gein’s home. Ever since the Gein story hit the front pages, deputy sheriffs from Waushara and Portage counties had been standing guard at the farm to discourage curiosity seekers, including groups of fraternity boys from the University of Wisconsin bent on throwing beer parties in the infamous “house of horror.” But the officials didn’t know how long the county could afford to post a twenty-four-hour watch at the crime scene.

  Another of their concerns, also based on economics, had to do with the Travis case. Was it worth the county’s while to pursue its investigation into that and the other disappearances Eddie was suspected of? Kileen’s feeling was that Waushara—“a poor county”—shouldn’t have to “foot the bill” for the investigation of any crimes that Gein may have committed elsewhere. “Why should we be the goat?” he argued. As long as Gein was locked away—either in prison or in a mental hospital, it made no difference to the district attorney—he would be satisfied. The fact that Gein might have killed people in other parts of the state was regrettable but not, in the end, the concern of Waushara County.

  Neither of these questions, however, was the main item on the district attorney’s agenda. The primary reason Kileen had called the meeting was to deal with a far more sensitive, indeed potentially explosive, issue—the issue of exhumation.

  From the moment that Eddie claimed to have procured his anatomical “trophies” from local cemeteries, the issue had generated a considerable degree of controversy. Sheriff Wanerski—who had sneered at Eddie’s grave-robbing story—was by no means the only skeptic. In general (no doubt because the notion was too awful to entertain), the citizens of Plainfield refused to believe that Gein’s hideous collection had been assembled from the town’s graveyard, that the faces, vaginas, and other parts found in the squalor of his farmhouse were the relics of their own closest relations, the mummified scraps of their departed sisters, wives, and mothers.

  That a person as passive as Eddie could have committed such depredations seemed highly unlikely to most of the townspeople, who viewed the little bachelor as too meek and shiftless for such a deed. “I don’t think he ever had ambition enough to open a grave,
” was the way Gyle Ellis, the owner of a local grocery store, put it. Though Gein was a wiry fellow, it seemed impossible that he could have had the strength to dig up a grave by himself, break open the casket, remove the corpse and perform his grisly operations on it, then rebury the coffin and smooth over the sandy soil so that no trace of his crime remained—all in the space of a few hours.

  Moreover, the townspeople didn’t see how such an activity could possibly have gone undetected, particularly over the course of several years. Gein, they argued, would have had to perform his nocturnal pillaging by lantern light, and even in an area as isolated and lonely as Plainfield, it hardly seemed credible that no one would have once spotted a suspicious glow coming from the cemetery or noticed Gein’s pickup truck parked there in the night and wondered what the strange little recluse was up to.

  One person eminently qualified to comment on the situation was the sexton of the Plainfield cemetery, Pat Danna, who completely discounted Gein’s story. Danna insisted that during the time he’d been caretaker, no graves had ever been molested. He was out at the cemetery all the time, mowing it once a week during the summer and checking it regularly in the winter, and he had never seen a single sign of disturbance. Moreover, he’d kept a particularly close eye on the place for the past several years, ever since a couple of vandals did about twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of damage to a nearby cemetery during a drunken spree.

  Gein’s claim just didn’t seem credible to Danna. In the summer months, the cemetery was “too busy” for anyone to get away with grave tampering (among other things, local teenagers were known to use it as a trysting place). And in the winter, the ground was just too hard. It would take a strong man half a day of heavy labor to dig up a grave when the cold weather set in. Moreover, in tombs with concrete vaults, a “body snatcher” would need a block and tackle to get at a corpse—and concrete vaults were common in Plainfield because of the area’s notoriously sandy soil. Besides, Danna explained, most modern coffins were made of steel, hermetically sealed, and exceptionally hard to pry open.

  Danna was firm in his belief. Whatever other kind of monster Eddie Gein might be, he certainly wasn’t a grave robber.

  Another authority in the matter was a bit less positive than Danna. This was Ray Goult, Plainfield’s only mortician. According to Goult, many caskets were not enclosed in concrete vaults but rather within wooden boxes whose covers were secured with eight or ten easily removable screws. As for the caskets themselves, they were not always sealed tight. This was especially true of wooden coffins. But even ones constructed of steel were often put into the ground with their lids unlocked.

  Still, Goult tended to agree with Danna. He confirmed that the digging would be difficult and extremely time-consuming for one man. And because of the sandiness of the soil, it was generally necessary to shore up the sides of a grave with timber to prevent cave-ins. All in all, it seemed highly unlikely that little Eddie Gein could have broken into even one buried coffin, let alone a bunch of them.

  But if the human fragments in Gein’s collection hadn’t come from desecrated corpses, that could mean only one thing: they were the remains of at least ten murder victims. And that explanation was equally hard to accept. As a killer, Gein wasn’t known for behaving (in the words of one observer) “with any large degree of cleverness.” In the case of both the Hogan and Worden slayings, he had simply strolled into the victims’ business places in broad daylight, shot the women in the head, and then dragged their bodies out to a waiting truck, without bothering to remove even the most obvious clues (such as the empty shells from the guns he had used to kill them). Considering this modus operandi, it hardly seemed possible that Gein could have gotten away with eight other killings without being caught.

  Still, of the two equally improbable alternatives, most Plainfield residents found it easier to conceive of Eddie Gein as a mass murderer than a ghoul. “The people here will have to be shown the dug-up graves before they’ll believe it,” Ed Marolla told a reporter, summing up the sentiments of his fellow townspeople. And indeed, digging up some graves did seem to be the only way the matter would ever be definitively resolved.

  At first, Kileen seemed strongly opposed to the idea of disinterment. As the district attorney of Waushara County, he was concerned only about the slaying of Mrs. Worden, to which Gein had already confessed. As for the other remains uncovered in Gein’s charnel house, Kileen seemed willing to take the prisoner at his word.

  During a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Kileen had announced that Waushara County was not about to conduct any exhumations. “I want no part in opening any graves to prove anything,” he told the newsmen. “Just think how the poor relatives would feel.”

  He repeated that his county had no unsolved missing-persons cases. From his point of view, therefore, a check of the cemeteries wasn’t necessary. “If other counties want to get court orders to open graves,” Kileen said, “it’s up to them,” though he added that if the survivors “don’t like it, I’ll do everything possible to stop it.”

  For a while, it seemed as if the Crime Lab might offer the best solution to the problem. Charles Wilson had nine of his men working full-time on the case, analyzing the evidence and employing the most up-to-date techniques for identifying the victims from their remains. By comparing dirt particles gathered at the crime scene with soil samples from local cemeteries, the technicians hoped to determine the validity of Gein’s claim.

  But the sheer quantity of evidence—by far, the largest amount ever handled by the ten-year-old Crime Lab—made it hard for Wilson to promise a quick resolution. Though Kileen urged the director to give the soil analysis top priority, it was clear that a final answer might take weeks, even months.

  In the meantime, Kileen was under growing pressure from the Plainfield citizenry to determine the truth of Gein’s assertion. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the townsfolk would never be able to rest without knowing whether their loved ones had, in fact, been ravaged in their graves.

  On Friday afternoon, therefore, following his meeting with Judge Bunde and the other officials, Kileen called a press conference to make an electrifying announcement.

  Early the next week, he told the reporters, and contingent on the permission of the next-of-kin, two graves would be opened in the Plainfield cemetery.

  Kileen’s change of mind regarding the exhumations wasn’t his only about-face. He also seemed to have become suddenly dubious about the whole grave-robbing story. When one of the reporters asked him if he still believed Gein’s claim, Kileen snorted. “Do you?” he asked in a heavily sarcastic tone that made his skepticism clear.

  For the first time, the district attorney revealed that Gein had supplied authorities with a list of “eight or nine” people whose corpses he had presumably violated. Kileen’s intention was to dig up two of these graves, “unless the ground freezes.” If nothing was found, he explained, no other bodies would be exhumed. On the other hand, if Gein turned out to be telling the truth, Kileen might go ahead and order the opening of “the other graves named by Gein.”

  When the reporters asked Kileen how he reconciled the “eight or nine” names with the significantly larger number of masks and skulls recovered at the farm, the DA only shrugged. “That’s a question I can’t answer and nobody can answer,” he said. “Only Gein can.”

  Kileen refused to disclose the names on Eddie’s list, with one exception. He told the newsmen that the first body he intended to disinter was that of Mrs. Eleanor Adams, a fifty-two-year-old woman who had died six years before and been buried in a coffin enclosed in a wooden box. Mrs. Adams’s grave, the district attorney revealed, was right next to the burial plot of Eddie Gein’s parents.

  When a reporter asked Kileen if Augusta Gein was one of the women on the list, the DA shook his head. According to Kileen, Gein had denied opening his mother’s coffin.

  Of course, his mother’s coffin, added Kileen, was encased in a concrete vault. Whether Eddie
had tried—and failed—to reach Augusta’s body was something that the district attorney could not, or would not, say.

  28

  GERSHOLME GMANR,Rationale of the Dirty Joke

  “What we are dealing with here, in a large number of cases, and what is probably one of the main functions of folk-humor, is an interesting folklore mechanism of great importance and relative frequency…. It is the rationalization—the attempt to make understandable, or at least believable, even endurable, if only as a joke—of some highly charged situation into which the original folk-teller of the tale has stumbled or has found himself forced to live…. This is certainly the principal function of the creation of humor, and certainly of the accepting of things as humorous, such as cuckoldry, seduction, impotence, homosexuality, castration, death, disease, and the Devil, which are obviously not humorous at all. [Such] humor is a sort of whistling in the dark, like Beaumarchais’ Figaro, who laughs so that he may not cry.”

  It has been said that in the midst of tragedy, time seems to drag, that every moment becomes an eternity. But it is equally true that tragedy can make time spin by with a terrifying swiftness. Nothing causes life to change more quickly than a tragedy.

  Saturday, November 23, was a somber anniversary for the people of Plainfield. It had been a week ago exactly that one of their most beloved neighbors had met an unspeakably awful end. But in the short time since Eddie Gein had shambled into Worden’s Hardware Store with a glass jug in one hand and a couple of .22 shells in his overalls pocket, the world had changed forever, not only for the slain woman’s family and the deranged little bachelor who had slaughtered her like a game animal but for every member of their stunned and beleaguered hometown.