Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Still, his self-diagnosis, his powerful, if dimly defined, sense that a baneful woman was at the root of his problems, was not, in itself, inaccurate.

  Eddie was simply too far gone to recognize the real culprit, the one who had truly driven him insane.

  30

  From a sermon on the Gein crimes delivered by Rev. John Schmitt of St. Paul’s Church in Plainfield, Sunday, November 24, 1957

  “We’re all human and make mistakes. We could have made the same mistakes.”

  Sunday, November 23, was a piercingly cold but brilliant day, with a cloudless, crystalline sky. The sunlight glaring off the snow-crusted ground was sharp enough to hurt. It was the final day of the 1957 deer season, and hunters hoping for a last crack at a buck headed out to the woods in droves.

  But the hunters weren’t the only ones to hit the road early that morning. Beginning just after daybreak, the highways cutting through central Wisconsin were filled with vehicles that carried, not groups of men geared up for a day in the woods, but parties of sightseers from around the state, all of them headed in the same direction.

  Throughout the day, a seemingly endless procession of cars—as many as four thousand by one estimate, most of them carrying entire families—crawled through the tiny community of Plainfield. Many of the passengers stopped for a bite to eat in local taverns and cafés; others pulled up at one of the town’s filling stations, looking for fuel and directions. One local merchant grew so weary of answering the identical question again and again that he simply drew the same little map on every sheet of a hundred-page notepad and, as soon as a car pulled up to his store, tore off a copy and handed it to the driver, without exchanging a word.

  It was a perfect day for a family outing, and all these eager sightseers had driven for hours just to take a peek at Wisconsin’s latest and hottest roadside attraction—the dilapidated building that served as residence and slaughterhouse for the “mad butcher of Plainfield.”

  Not that there was much for them to see—just a forlorn old farmhouse with a buckled porch, boarded-up windows, and rusted bits of farming equipment littering the snow. Deputies were posted on the property to keep traffic moving and turn away any curiosity seekers who tried approaching the house. The pilgrims had to content themselves with the view from the road. Still, a glimpse was all it took to get the feel of the place. Even in radiant sunlight, Eddie’s home was unbearably bleak and dispiriting. It wasn’t hard to imagine it as a breeding ground for madness.

  Apart from the sentries, the farm seemed utterly deserted. But though the sightseers had no way of knowing it, there was, in fact some important activity going on there that day. Seven men—Sheriff Herbert Wanerski and six other law officers from Portage County—were digging up and transferring into two-foot-high cardboard barrels the enormous ash pile that Gein had pointed out to them the day before. By the time they were done, they had filled up nine of the containers, which would be transported to the crime lab for analysis.

  Other items would be forwarded to the crime lab, too, for the pile contained more than ashes. In the course of the dig, Wanerski and his men came upon a number of charred teeth and blackened bits of bone. It was clear to the investigators that Mary Hogan wasn’t the only person whose incinerated remains had ended up in Eddie’s ash heap. Even at a glance, they could see that there were far more fragments than could have possibly come from a single human being.

  With hundreds of cars making their way down Main Street on that bright Sabbath morning (many of them slowing to a virtual halt as they passed the Worden hardware store), it would have been impossible for any of Plainfield’s citizens to put the Gein horrors out of their thoughts. The nightmare was simply inescapable. Even in their houses of worship, the townspeople couldn’t shut it out.

  In the Methodist Episcopal Church, the memory of Bernice Worden’s funeral was still fresh in the minds of her fellow parishioners, who had set up a special fund to purchase a new stained-glass window in honor of the murdered woman. In other churches, the pastors attempted to come to terms with the Gein crimes in the course of their Sunday sermons. “Everybody has been wondering how such a great sin could take place in our very midst,” said Rev. David Wisthols of the First Baptist Church. “But everybody has sinned, even if he is not guilty of murder.” Father John Schmitt of St. Paul’s Catholic Church also urged his congregation to keep the inevitable moral shortfalls of humanity in mind. Every person is liable to error, he insisted, and any of us “could have made the same mistakes” as Ed Gein did. Both clergymen urged their parishioners to look upon their fallen neighbor, Edward Gein, with as much compassion and understanding as they could muster.

  But however much they might have agreed with such sentiments in principle, the townsfolk of Plainfield weren’t about to forgive and forget.

  Elsewhere in the Midwest, a criminologist named Lois Higgens, president of the International Association of Policewomen, was drawing a very different moral from the Gein case. To Officer Higgens, the case was an object lesson, not in the innate sinfulness of human nature, but in the evils of modern-day American culture. Noting that any highly publicized murder is likely to set off a cycle of copycat killings, Higgens predicted that the Gein case would lead to “a rampage of bizarre crimes” throughout the country.

  What Higgens found most alarming, however, was not the prospect of a nationwide Gein-inspired orgy of violence but rather the widely reported fact that Eddie had been an avid reader of crime magazines and similarly lurid publications. To Higgens, the Gein atrocities could be traced directly to the harmful influence of such material on a dangerously impressionable mind, and her plan was to travel to Plainfield in order to collect firsthand information for a series of lectures on the dangers of crime magazines and horror comics—publications which, she maintained, offered their readers nothing less than “short courses in murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, and sadism.”

  In the meantime, while the clergymen were praying, the criminologists predicting, and the sightseers craning their necks for a better view of Eddie’s house, preparations were under way to carry out the next and most emotionally charged phase of the Gein investigation: the digging up of caskets to check out Eddie’s grave-robbing claim.

  Throughout Sunday, District Attorney Kileen and officials from both Waushara and Portage counties continued to review the list of graves Gein had provided. Kileen revealed to reporters that Gein’s nocturnal forays had been conducted not only in the Plainfield cemetery but in Spiritland cemetery in the nearby town of Almond as well and that over the course of several years, Gein had made, by his own reckoning, a total of more than forty visits to the two graveyards. On all but nine of those occasions, according to Eddie, he had turned back without attempting to get at a corpse. The question now confronting the authorities was which of the nine supposedly violated graves to check.

  The decision to disinter the coffin of Mrs. Eleanor Adams seemed firm, but as of Sunday afternoon, Kileen and his colleagues were still undecided about the other names on Eddie’s list. But if the DA was unable to say precisely which caskets would be dug up, he was unequivocal about the exhumation itself.

  On Tuesday morning, graves would be opened in the Plainfield cemetery—with or without the permission of the relatives.

  31

  “The Unquiet Grave”

  “The twelvemonth and a day being up

  The dead began to speak:

  ‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave,

  And will not let me sleep?’”

  something was happening at the cemetery.

  In spite of Kileen’s announcement that the graves would be examined on Tuesday, Ed Marolla, editor of the Plainfield Sun, decided to drive out to the cemetery first thing Monday morning, having heard rumors that the exhumations might, in fact, be carried out earlier as a way of circumventing the press. Sure enough, when he arrived at the graveyard entrance—a wrought-iron gateway topped with a filigreed sign—he was stopped by law officers.

  Wh
at, Marolla asked, was going on? The officers refused to say. But as the newspaperman stood there, trying to assess the situation, a pickup truck drove up and entered the cemetery, followed closely by two workmen carrying shovels and spades.

  It didn’t take long for word to spread. Within an hour or so, a crowd of newsmen had descended on the graveyard, only to find it ringed by a contingent of law-enforcement officials posted there for the sole purpose of keeping the media away. Three of the five roads leading into the pine-studded cemetery had been chained. The remaining two were guarded by deputy sheriffs.

  One enterprising reporter had come equipped with a tall ladder, which he leaned against the cemetery fence and mounted to its highest rung. But even from that elevated vantage point, he couldn’t make out very much. A knot of men was gathered around a grave site, but the plot they were examining was too far inside the cemetery to be clearly perceived from the perimeter.

  The newsmen, however, were not so easily deterred. By midmorning, a single-engine airplane carrying a cameraman from the Milwaukee Journal was circling the cemetery. But the authorities had anticipated just such a stratagem and had come prepared to counter it. By ten A.M., when the digging began, a tentlike canopy had been erected over the burial plot of Mrs. Eleanor Adams, so that the work of removing her casket from what was supposed to have been its final resting place could proceed in as much privacy as possible.

  The gathering at the grave site consisted of District Attorney Earl Kileen, Sheriff Art Schley, Deputy Arnie Fritz, Plainfield village president Harold Collins, mortician and cemetery director Ray Goult, Floyd Adams (the deceased woman’s widower) along with his son and son-in-law, Allan Wilimovsky of the State Crime Lab accompanied by a pair of colleagues, and two experienced gravediggers, sexton Pat Danna and an assistant named Don Wallner.

  Standing there on that bleak wintry morning, more than one member of that somber company was struck by two details in regard to Eleanor Adams’s grave: its proximity to the burial place of Augusta Gein and Mrs. Adams’s simple headstone inscription, which consisted of her name, the dates of her birth and death, and then, at the very top of the marker, a single word which must have resonated with a special meaning to a man like Eddie Gein—“Mother.”

  A cold wind blew that morning, and the frozen crust of snow that covered the ground made the digging hard going for Danna and his assistant. Even so, the job didn’t take long. The skeptics who had scoffed at the notion that a little man like Eddie Gein could, in the course of a few hours, dig down to a coffin buried six feet in the soil had failed to take account of a crucial fact. It was true that the coffins themselves lay fairly deep underground. But the coffins were enclosed in either concrete vaults or wooden boxes. And the tops of those containers lay little more than two feet below the surface.

  As a result, it took Danna and Wallner only an hour of digging before their shovels scraped the top of the rough wooden box that contained the casket of Mrs. Adams. It was immediately apparent to the observers that a determined grave robber could have easily reached his goal in a fairly short time, particularly if the job had been done when the grave was fresh and the ground wasn’t frozen.

  Gein had already divulged to his attorney that he had plundered Mrs. Adams’s coffin on the very night of its interment, before the grave had even been completely filled in. And Eleanor Adams had died in the summer, on August 26, 1951.

  As the diggers began to remove the last few inches of sandy soil from the cover boards of the crude wooden box, Kileen braced himself. He still entertained serious doubts about Gein’s claim and fully expected to be confronted that morning with the awful sight and fetor of a long-buried cadaver. But the instant the box cover came into view, he, along with the other witnesses staring into the dankness of the newly opened grave, saw that something was amiss.

  The cover had clearly been tampered with. It was split lengthwise in two.

  It was the work of a moment for Danna and Wallner to remove the two rotting pieces of cover. Inside the box lay Mrs. Adams’s wooden coffin. Dirt was scattered across its top. The workmen reached in and lifted the lid.

  The huddling group stared wordlessly into the coffin.

  The coffin was empty. Except, that is, for one object that lay on the spotted satin lining.

  That object was a twelve-inch crowbar.

  As Floyd Adams, Eleanor’s widower, would later remark to a crowd of reporters, “Everything was there but the body.”

  The plundered grave was photographed. The crime lab people took possession of the crowbar. Then the diggers refilled the grave, and the group moved thirty yards across the cemetery to the second of the selected sites.

  It was the burial place of Mrs. Mabel Everson, who had died of a lingering illness at the age of sixty-nine on April 15, 1951, just a few months before the death of Eleanor Adams.

  Once again, Danna and Wallner set about their task. Once again, the job took about an hour. This time, however, Kileen and the others had their answer even before the diggers got down to the top of the rough wooden box in which the coffin was encased.

  Fifteen inches or so below the surface lay a pile of eroded human bones—a jaw, a section of skull, part of a leg, and a scattering of smaller fragments. The diggers also turned up an upper and a lower dental plate, a scrap of clothing with a store label still attached, and a gold wedding band.

  As soon as the officials laid eyes on this grim collection of remnants, they knew that it was all they would find of Mrs. Mabel Everson.

  The digging resumed. Another foot down, and the workmen had reached the crude wooden box cover. This time, none of the men was the least bit surprised to see that it had been chiseled in two, crossways.

  Nor were they surprised when the coffin lid was removed to reveal nothing inside but the moldering lining.

  Several of the men did wonder about the bones they had found. What were Mrs. Everson’s remains doing there, outside her casket? But Eddie had already confessed that he had been troubled from time to time by “pangs of conscience” following his nocturnal forays and, on several occasions, had journeyed back to the cemetery to return the stolen bodies—or at least those parts he had no further use for—to their graves. The grisly odds and ends uncovered in Mrs. Everson’s plot only served to confirm Eddie’s story.

  The entire operation took only two and a half hours. At twelve-thirty P.M., the chilled and somber crew of investigators left the graveyard to meet with the mob of reporters, clamoring for the results of the exhumations. To a certain extent, Kileen could only have been relieved. The awful experience he had steeled himself for had not materialized. He had been spared the spectacle and stink of human decay. But the discoveries he and the others had made that morning were, in their own way, every bit as dreadful.

  “I won’t open any more graves if I can help it,” Kileen told the newsmen. “As far as I’m concerned, this verifies Gein’s story.”

  There could be no more doubt about it. For years following his mother’s passing, Eddie Gein had tried to slake his unbearable loneliness by seeking companionship in the community of the dead.

  32

  “The Unquiet Grave”

  “’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave

  And will not let you sleep,

  For I crave one kiss of your day-cold lips,

  And that is all I seek.”

  Though Eddie freely admitted to grave robbing and didn’t hesitate to supply the authorities with information—a complete list of his victims, the dates of his raids, and a detailed account of his methods—he never spoke about any sexual activity with the dead, except to deny that he had made use of the bodies in that way. Indeed, when asked whether he had ever performed sex on a corpse, he reacted indignantly—not, however, because the notion of copulating with the cadaver of a sixty-nine-year-old invalid seemed monstrous to him but rather because it seemed so unhygienic. He had avoided sexual relations with the unearthed bodies, he told authorities, because “they smelled too bad.”
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  No one can say for certain exactly what Eddie did to the bodies once he had them in the privacy of his home—besides, that is, dissecting them, preserving their parts, and, on occasion, arraying himself in their skin. But it is possible to draw some inferences by examining his crimes in light of similar cases. Gein would go to his own grave insisting that, besides masturbation, he had never had a sexual experience of any kind in his life. Nevertheless, his cravings and compulsions clearly fall under the category of necrophilia, that perversion which Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his classic study Psychopathia Sexualis, calls the most horrible of all the “aberrations of the sexual instinct.”

  The most thoroughly documented instance of this aberration—“the classic case of necrophiliac perversion,” as one authority calls it—is that of a young French soldier known as “Sergeant Bertrand,” who was born in 1822 and commenced his ghoulish career at the age of twenty-three. Out for a stroll near his garrison one afternoon in 1846, Bertrand was passing by a cemetery when he happened to notice a half-filled grave. A physician who later studied him, a man by the name of Epaulard, describes what happened next: “In the most horrible excitement, without thinking that he might be seen, it was in broad daylight, he tore open the grave with the shovel and began in a frenzy, for want of another instrument, to strike into the dead body with the shovel. He made such a noise that a workman who was busy near the graveyard came in curiosity to the entrance. When B. saw him, he laid himself close to the dead body in the grave and remained quiet for a short time. While the workman was bringing the authorities, he covered the corpse again and left by the cemetery wall…. Two days later, he dug out the grave once more with his hands, but now on a rainy night. His hands were bleeding, but he dug until he had the lower part of the body exposed. He rent it in pieces and then closed the grave once more.”