Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Though its citizens were doing their best to get back to the ordinary business of life, Plainfield remained a community in crisis, still reeling from the sheer monstrousness of the Gein revelations, mortified by the media attention that had turned it into a backcountry sideshow, and deeply riven by conflict over Kileen’s plan to dig up the graves. For, while most of the townspeople were eager to see the graverobbing question settled once and for all, others remained fiercely opposed to the idea of violating the hallowed soil of their little cemetery.

  Added to this tension were the unabating rumors that continued to send shocks through the town. Stories had spread, for example, that the grisly remains found in Gein’s bedroom and kitchen weren’t the worst of what the farmhouse contained, that its basement was full of horrors so dreadful that the police had deemed it best to conceal them from the public. There were also reports, which occasioned more than a few sleepless nights for the matrons of Plainfield, that investigators had turned up a “death list” in Eddie’s house, a roster of local farm wives slated to take their places on the walls, shelves, and ceiling beams of Eddie’s private death museum. Most unsettling of all, however, was the persistent rumor that Eddie had not worked alone, that another man had accompanied him on his gravelooting forays and even taken part in the depraved operations Gein had performed on his newly unearthed treasures.

  The citizens of the town had begun to feel like pariahs or freaks. According to one source, when the postmaster of Plainfield, Harry P. Walker, was introduced to his colleagues at a statewide convention in Milwaukee, he was “greeted first by audible gasps and then by a horrified silence.”

  Perhaps as a result of this distressing experience, Walker concocted a plan which he proposed in a letter to Senator William Proxmire, a plan he hoped would correct the poor impression of his town created by the press. “You are no doubt well aware of the intense national publicity Plainfield has received in connection with the Gein murders,” Walker wrote to Proxmire. “While Plainfield, of course, had nothing to do with the Gein affair, except to be unfortunate enough to be the locale, we have been damaged greatly by the horrible publicity.”

  What Walker proposed as a way of generating some positive feelings for his hometown was the printing of a commemorative postage stamp honoring the prairie chicken, which would be “introduced on its first day of issue” through the Plainfield post office. By designating Plainfield as the place of issue for the prairie chicken stamp, the government would create favorable publicity for the town, not only among the country’s millions of philatelists but also in the national press.

  Just how seriously Walker’s proposal was taken is a matter of conjecture. In any event, nothing ever came of it. Walker and his neighbors had no choice but to learn to live with their hometown’s new (and, as it would turn out, permanent) reputation—to resign themselves to seeing the “fair name of Plainfield” (as one observer put it) forever “muddied as the home of murder-ghoul Ed Gein.”

  Elsewhere in Wisconsin, the reaction to the Gein atrocities was markedly different, if no less intense. In fact, the statewide response to the Plainfield horrors was so striking that it immediately attracted the interest of various psychologists, who had never witnessed a mass phenomenon quite like it. Besides the extreme fascination with every detail of the case, from the precise number of masks found inside Eddie’s house to the menus of his jailhouse dinners, the crimes had generated an unprecedented outbreak of black humor, a craze for Gein-related sick jokes (dubbed “Geiners”) that quickly swept the state.

  Within days of the discovery of the crimes, every youngster in Wisconsin, it seemed, was swapping “Geiners” not only with schoolmates but with parents as well. Gein jokes became the latest rage, repeated with near-obsessive frequency wherever people gathered. As early as Friday, November 22, Dr. Rudolf Mathias, chief psychologist at the Wisconsin Diagnostic Center in Madison, was theorizing about the significance of Gein humor, which he likened to “the jokes exchanged among soldiers who are going into battle.”

  But it was a psychiatrist named George D. Arndt who undertook the most extensive study of the phenomenon. After making a field trip to central Wisconsin, where he gathered scores of examples, Arndt published the results of his research in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. Titled “Community Reactions to a Horrifying Event,” Dr. Arndt’s piece argued that the compulsive joking about the Plainfield killer was a collective coping mechanism, a way of dealing with the deep anxieties stirred up by the crime, of exorcising the nightmare with laughter.

  Arndt classified the jokes according to the taboos they dealt with—cannibalism, sexual perversion, and so on. But, in essence, all the jokes were the same—grisly quips of varying degrees of cleverness and wit whose purpose was to ward off terror with levity, in the way that children will whistle a cheerful tune while walking past a graveyard.

  Why did they have to keep the heat on in Ed Gein’s house?

  So the furniture wouldn’t get goose bumps.

  Why did Ed Gein’s girlfriend stop going out with him?

  Because he was such a cutup.

  Why won’t anyone play cards with Ed Gein?

  He might come up with a good hand.

  What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him?

  Have a heart.

  Why did they let Ed Gein out of jail on New Year’s Eve?

  So he could dig up a date.

  The most remarkable sample collected by Arndt, however, was not a joke but a poem, a macabre reworking of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas”:

  “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the shed,

  All creatures were stirring, even old Ed.

  The bodies were hung from the rafters above,

  While Eddie was searching for another new love.

  He went to Wautoma for a Plainfield deal,

  Looking for love and also a meal.

  When what to his hungry eyes should appear, But old Mary Hogan in her new red brassiere.

  Her eyes how they twinkled, ever so gay,

  And her dimples, oh how merry were they.

  Her cheeks were like roses when kissed by the sun. And she let out a scream at the sight of Ed’s gun.

  Old Ed pulled the trigger and Mary fell dead,

  He took his old axe and cut off her head.

  He then took his hacksaw and cut her in two,

  One half for hamburger, the other for stew.

  And laying a hand aside of her heel,

  Up to the rafters went his next meal.

  He sprang to his truck, to the graveyard he flew,

  The hours were short and much work must he do.

  He looked for the grave where the fattest one laid,

  And started in digging with shovel and spade.

  He shoveled and shoveled and shoveled some more,

  Till finally he reached the old coffin door.

  He took out a crowbar and pried open the box,

  He was not only clever, but sly as a fox.

  As he picked up the body and cut off her head,

  He could tell by the smell that the old girl was dead.

  He filled in the grave by the moonlight above,

  And once more old Ed had found a new love.

  He let out a yell as he drove out of sight,

  “If I don’t get caught, I’ll be back tomorrow night!”

  For all its crudeness, this raw parody reveals something important, a significant transformation in the popular perception of the Plainfield killer. It reveals Gein’s metamorphosis, in the imagination of the public, from a homicidal madman into a creature of folklore—a night-demon swooping down from his lair after sunset in search of new victims to gratify his unholy lusts.

  And so, the people of Wisconsin, faced with a horror too awful to absorb, found refuge in laughter. But if, on Saturday, November 23, jokes about “old Ed” were generating chuckles in playgrounds and taverns, truck stops and beauty parlors throughout the state, there wa
s one place, at least, where the quip about the contents of Ed Gein’s cookie jar (“lady fingers”) or the one about his favorite beer (“1.ots of body but no head) was likelier to provoke a sharp word or an angry scowl. That place, of course, was Eddie’s hometown.

  To the residents of Plainfield, the Gein affair was definitely not and never would be—a laughing matter.

  29

  NORMANB ATES

  “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

  Eddie was supposed to have been transferred to the state mental hospital at Waupun late on Friday. On Saturday morning, however, he was still sitting in the county lockup in Wautoma, under the watchful eye of Sheriff Schley. At the request of investigators from another jurisdiction who wanted to question Gein about yet another missing-persons case, Kileen had agreed to postpone the move.

  The customary crowd of newsmen was gathered at the jailhouse early Saturday morning to cover Eddie’s removal to Central State Hospital. When they caught sight of Schley, they began shouting questions at him, trying to pin down the intended time of Gein’s departure. The sheriff—whose few remaining traces of civility toward the press had completely evaporated since the shoving episode on Thursday—virtually snarled his reply. He had no idea when he would take Gein to the hospital. For all he knew, the transfer might not take place for weeks. “I have the right to hold him here a month if I feel like it,” he said, his tone compounded equally of bitterness and contempt.

  A short time later, however, Schley approached the reporters to offer a deal. Though his proposal seemed uncharacteristically conciliatory, it did not, in fact, reflect a shift in Schley’s attitude. He continued to regard the newsmen as a pack of predators. But there was something important he needed to do, and to keep them off his back for a while, he was willing to throw them a sop.

  Eddie, said Schley, had something to show the sheriff back at his farm, and Schley wanted the newsmen’s word that they would stay put in Wautoma. He didn’t want a replay of Eddie’s last aborted outing, when so many reporters and photographers had descended on the farm that the shy little killer had gotten cold feet. In return for their cooperation, Schley promised the reporters that he would not spirit Eddie off to Waupun without informing them in advance.

  Having secured the grudging agreement of his journalistic nemeses, Schley, accompanied by Deputy Arnie Fritz, led Eddie out of his cell and into a police car, then headed off in the direction of Plainfield.

  The trip consumed the rest of the morning. Eddie remained seated inside the squad car for most of the time, getting out only once at his boarded-up home, where he led Schley, Fritz, and authorities from Portage County (who, by prearrangement, were awaiting Gein’s arrival at the farmstead) to a large ash heap in a remote corner of his property. It was there, Eddie informed the lawmen, that they would find the residue of Mary Hogan’s body, which he had carved up in his summer kitchen and then, after saving the sections he coveted, cremated in his pot-bellied stove.

  Afterward, the two parties got back into their cars and, following Eddie’s directions, retraced the route he had taken on the day he had slain the tavern keeper. By noon, Eddie was back in his cell in Wautoma.

  True to his word, Schley informed the press that the prisoner would be transported to the maximum-security hospital at approximately two P.M. His announcement set off an instant mass exodus as the newsmen immediately decamped for the town of Waupun, located about fifty miles southeast of the county seat.

  After the nonstop media hoopla of the preceding week, the sudden silence that descended on Wautoma seemed slightly jarring. An air of abandonment, almost desolation, hung over the town’s two hostelries—Brock’s Motel and the Sheldon Hotel—after their noisy week-long occupation by the forces of the nation’s press. Still, as far as most of Wautoma’s citizens were concerned, the journalists—departure couldn’t have been more of a relief.

  Only two newsmen stayed behind in Wautoma to cover the start of Gein’s journey: a reporter and a cameraman from the Milwaukee Journal. At two-fifteen P.M., Eddie emerged from the jailhouse, dressed in the outfit—woolen jacket, work pants, high-topped rubber boots, and plaid peaked cap sitting askew on his head—that was by this point so inseparable from his public identity that he would have seemed unrecognizable in anything else. All that was missing, as he paused for a picture at the entranceway, was his simpleton’s smile. Hollow-cheeked and unshaven, he stared vacantly at the camera, like a nocturnal thing dazed by the sunlight.

  Schley ushered Eddie into the back seat of the squad car and got in beside him, while Arnie Fritz took the wheel.

  Precisely sixty-five minutes later, the car pulled up before the walls of Central State Hospital, the prisonlike institution that would be home to America’s most famous psychotic for some time to come.

  Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane has since been converted into a “correctional reception center,” a way station to which all of Wisconsin’s convicted felons are sent for evaluation before being moved on to prison. Its name has been changed, too, to Dodge Correctional Institute. In 1957, however, it was, and had been since its founding in 1913, a maximum-security mental institution with an all-male population of dangerously—and, for the most part, incurably—deranged inmates. Constructed on a seventy-two-acre site close to but separate from the state prison, the hospital consisted of a central administrative area with eight wards that housed, at the time of Eddie’s arrival, just over three hundred inmates.

  Though special precautions were taken to ensure that the inmates stayed put, many of them enjoyed a fair amount of freedom within the institution. During the day, they were permitted to move about the hospital at will, to watch TV, read magazines, play cards, take part in sports (there was a baseball diamond on the grounds), and participate in various occupational pursuits such as gardening, ceramics, and farm work (the hospital maintained a one-hundred-fifty-acre stock farm, complete with hogs and chickens).

  At night, the inmates were immured in rooms with locked doors and barred windows. The rooms—some of which held as many as five men—had been painted in pastel colors in an effort to soften their distinct prison feel.

  New admissions to the hospital were not permitted to participate in the normal round of hospital activities until they had undergone a prolonged observation period, during which their behavior and attitudes were evaluated by the staff. Given the extraordinary nature of the Gein case, additional tests and procedures would be employed, which were outlined for the press on Saturday by Dr. Edward F. Schubert, head psychiatrist and superintendent of the hospital.

  Besides a thorough physical exam “to determine if he is physically ill and if such illness had a bearing on his acts,” Gein would receive a “full battery” of psychological tests, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test, the Rorschach (or “inkblot”) test, and “many, many other tests” to determine his psychological and, more specifically, his sexual attitudes. Gein would also undergo “exhaustive” interviews by the staff. His family background, meanwhile, would be researched by Kenneth Colwell, head of the hospital’s social service department, who intended to seek out and question Gein’s relatives and friends, assuming any existed.

  The main purpose of this elaborate evaluation process, Schubert explained, was to determine “the legal question of Gein’s sanity,” whether he “understands the nature of his acts, can cooperate in his defense, and knows the difference between right and wrong.” If, at the end of the thirty-day observation period, the psychiatrists deemed Gein to be sane, he would be tried for first-degree murder in the slaying of Bernice Worden.

  On the other hand, if his examiners judged him mentally incompetent, Gein could expect to spend the rest of his days inside the walls of Central State.

  While Schubert and his staff were preparing to begin their examination of the most significant case ever consigned to their care, Eddie’s attorney, William Belter, was back in Wautoma, making a most surp
rising disclosure. According to Belter, Eddie’s week of confinement in jail had allowed him to engage in some deep introspection—“amateur psychological probing,” as Belter put it—which had led him to nothing less than the ultimate source of his troubles. All by himself, Gein had solved the mystery of his madness. The news story that appeared in the next day’s issue of the Madison Capital Times summed up the results of Gein’s self-analysis in its headline: “GEIN DIAGNOSES OWN CASE: BLAMES DOG.”

  What Gein had described to his attorney was the distressing incident he and his mother had witnessed back in 1945, when, having gone to a neighboring farm to purchase some straw, they had come upon the owner in the process of beating a puppy to death. Gein told Belter about the woman who had come rushing out of the farmhouse, screaming at the man to stop, and how upset his mother had been by the incident, primarily because the woman “wasn’t married to the farmer” and “shouldn’t have been at his house.”

  As a result of this unfortunate episode, Gein was convinced, Augusta had suffered her second stroke, the one that had killed her. And it was the unbearable loneliness caused by his mother’s death which had, he felt, driven him to dreadful extremes.

  The headline of the Capital Times story, however, turned out to be misleading in one important respect, because it wasn’t the dog that Eddie blamed for his downfall. Nor was it the farmer who had brutalized the pup. “Oddly,” Belter commented, “he blames the woman. If she hadn’t been there, his mother wouldn’t have had the stroke, and he wouldn’t have been left alone.”

  Eddie’s habit of blaming life’s troubles on the wickedness of women was, as Dr. Schubert and his staff were about to find out, a hallmark of his derangement. Certainly, his identification of the unmarried farm woman—whose greatest crime was her frantic attempt to prevent the brutal slaughter of a puppy—was patently insane.