Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Shortly afterward, Bertrand began digging up the corpses of women and cutting out their genitals, an act that provided him with the “greatest satisfaction.”

  He also began to perform coitus on the cadavers. At the Douai cemetery, he dug up the corpse of an adolescent girl and there, as he later described the experience, “gave myself up for the first time to the mad embrace of a dead body. I cannot describe my sensations, but all the joy procured by possession of a living woman was as nothing in comparison with the pleasure I felt. I showered kisses upon all parts of her body, pressed her to my heart with a madman’s frenzy. I overwhelmed her with the most passionate caresses. After having regaled myself with this pleasure for a quarter of an hour, I started to cut the body open and pulled out the entrails. Then I replaced the body in the grave, covered it lightly with earth, and returned to the barracks by the same road I had come.”

  Still, as intense as it was, the pleasure Bertrand derived from having coitus with a corpse “was as nothing,” he explained, to the delight he felt in cutting it to pieces. “The urge to dismember the bodies,” he declared, “was incomparably more violent in me than the urge to violate them.”

  Much of Eddie’s behavior matches the insane actions of Sergeant Bertrand and others of his kind. Even Gein’s attitude toward his corpse collecting—which, in spite of occasional twinges of guilt, he didn’t regard as a particularly serious crime—fits the pattern. According to one authority, the necrophile is “likely to feel, when he attempts to analyze his own behavior, that he could not have done otherwise, that he was driven by forces quite beyond his control, and that there is, therefore, no basis for remorse or guilt; also, he ‘didn’t hurt anybody.’”

  There is the case, for example, of the infamous French necrophile, Henri Blot, a pleasant-looking fellow of twenty-six who was in the habit of falling into a “profound sleep, or coma, or trance state” after digging up and performing coitus on the cadavers of young women in the Saint-Ouen cemetery. On one of these occasions, Blot passed out so completely following his ghoulish act that the next morning, cemetery workers discovered him lying fast asleep beside a ravished corpse. Brought to trial, Blot displayed an astonishing nonchalance about his behavior and (in the words of one commentator) “won a certain immortality for himself” in the annals of psychopathology when, after being rebuked by the judge for the “depravity of his offense,” he responded loftily, “How would you have it? Every man to his own tastes. Mine is for corpses.”

  Eddie, too, as it turned out, felt that he was driven to his ghoulish activities by an irresistible force, which he experienced and described to his interrogators as an “evil spirit” invading his mind from someplace outside himself. He also confessed to another motive for his graveyard expeditions. Eddie had first been impelled to the Plainfield cemetery by a conviction that he possessed the power to raise the dead.

  In this belief, he was similar to another notorious deviant, a young man named Viktor Ardisson, who was born in 1872 and, at the age of twenty-eight, after having pursued his perverse activities for more than nine years, was caught and convicted when his neighbors complained to the police of a terrible stench emanating from his house. The source of this odor turned out to be the cadaver of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl that Ardisson had brought home from the graveyard a week before and (until the body had reached such an advanced state of decay that he “no longer ventured to touch it”) performed cunnilingus on, believing, in the words of the physician who examined him, that “this sort of caress could wake the dead.”

  Other features of Eddie’s behavior can be found in the case histories of “classic” necrophiles. Like Eddie, many of these deviants derive intense, fetishistic satisfaction from possessing specific parts of their victims. Before Ardisson was arrested, for example, he had dug up and decapitated the corpse of a thirteen-year-old girl and carried home her head, which he kept for so long that it eventually “underwent a kind of mummification.” Ardisson would speak to this prized possession in the tenderest tones, smother it with kisses, and call it “my little bride.”

  Another necrophile, a middle-aged laborer, “first gratified himself sexually upon a corpse, then in a fury, hacked the body in pieces and took away with him the severed breasts and genital portions of the body, including the anus.” In another, very similar case, a forty-three-year-old man named Albert Beyerlin “used a dead woman for sexual intercourse, then slit open the abdomen, cut out the breasts and sexual parts of the corpse, and still carried them in his pocket the next day.”

  Cases have been reported of necrophiles who were particularly attracted to the hair of the dead and collected their scalps (as did Eddie Gein). In another case, described by R.E.L. Masters, the individual “derived his gratification from eating the nail trimmings of corpses.”

  There is one last but all-important trait which Eddie shared with many other necrophiles. Almost without exception, writes Masters, the necrophile is a man who is “quite incapable of making an effective sexual approach to a living woman.”

  Lodged in Central State Hospital, Eddie Gein was about to undergo a monthlong battery of tests to determine the question of his sanity. But Dr. Schubert and his staff could have resolved that issue simply by consulting Krafft-Ebing, who, in speaking of necrophilia, writes that “this horrible kind of sexual indulgence is so monstrous that the presumption of a psychopathic state is, under all circumstances, justified.” The discovery of the empty graves in the Plainfield cemetery had not only substantiated Eddie’s story but earned him a permanent place in the standard histories of sexual psychopathology. The list that included some of mankind’s most deranged sex criminals—Bertrand, Ardisson, Beyerlin, and their fellow necrosadists—had just been augmented with the name of Edward Gein.

  33

  JIM MCBRIAR, Plainfield resident

  “Halloween came a little late this year.”

  To most of those following the unfolding of the Gein story, Monday’s graveyard revelations represented the shocking denouement. To be sure, further developments in the case continued to make headlines throughout the Midwest. But as far as the public could tell, the true climax had occurred when Mrs. Adams’s coffin had been opened to reveal nothing inside but Eddie Gein’s twelve-inch pinchbar. What resolution could be more dramatic? And for a while, at least, it looked as though the public might be right.

  Indeed, it looked for a while as though the Gein investigation might come to a complete halt with the exhumations. Under the state law of the time, any county requesting the assistance of the Crime Lab in a murder case was obligated to pay fifty percent of the lab’s expenses. It was costing the Crime Lab about one thousand dollars a day to analyze the truckload of evidence that had been gathered at Gein’s farm. Thus, a heavy financial burden had suddenly fallen on Waushara, a sparsely populated and unprosperous county.

  Earl Kileen had already made it clear that Waushara couldn’t afford to foot the bill for a prolonged investigation into every crime Gein may have committed. Assuming Gein was found sane by the experts, the district attorney had more than enough evidence to convict him of Bernice Worden’s murder. The doubts about Gein’s grave-robbing claims had been definitively resolved. As far as Kileen was concerned, there was no need to continue a probe that was proving so costly to his county.

  Other officials, however—particularly Crime Lab director Charles Wilson—took a very different position. To Wilson, the fact that some of Eddie’s body-part collection had been acquired at the local graveyard did not rule out the possibility that other of his “trophies” were the remnants of murder victims. Arguing that “bookkeeping considerations” should not interfere with a matter that was “of concern to all the citizens of the state,” Wilson appealed to Governor Vernon Thompson. Thompson’s response was prompt and decisive. On Monday afternoon, directly following the disinterments at the Plainfield cemetery, the governor announced that he was ordering Attorney General Stewart Honeck to take immediate charge of the Gein investigat
ion.

  “Developments in the case now indicate a state-wide concern in ascertaining the facts,” Thompson said. His order—which also ensured that the state would provide all the necessary funds for the Crime Lab to complete its work on the case—guaranteed that the investigation would continue until, in the governor’s words, “the possibilities of additional homicides” committed by Gein had been thoroughly “exhausted.”

  Honeck’s first act as the new head of the Gein investigation was to announce that at the suggestion of Charles Wilson, Gein would be taken back to Madison for another lie detector test.

  Honeck’s announcement was made to the press early Wednesday morning, November 27, following a closed-door meeting with Wilson, Kileen, and John Haka, district attorney of Portage County. The authorities wanted to question Gein about the bones and other objects unearthed during the exhumation—“valuable evidence,” according to Honeck, which might shed more light on the crimes. At present, the attorney general couldn’t say whether more coffins would be opened. But if Gein’s role in any other homicides could only be “determined by digging up more graves,” he declared, “rest assured that they will be dug.”

  The state, Honeck continued, was “proceeding on the assumption that Gein would be found sane and would have to stand trial,” first for the slaying of Bernice Worden and then for that of Mary Hogan (although Gein had yet to be charged with the second crime).

  There was another assumption that the state was operating under: that those two murders were not the only ones Eddie was responsible for, that Gein, as Honeck put it, “may have been involved in more deaths.”

  Accompanied by attendants from the state mental hospital, Eddie arrived at the crime lab headquarters in Madison later that morning for a polygraph test. Though it lasted well into the afternoon, the examination failed to produce any startling revelations. The authorities did learn that one of the nine graves Eddie had pillaged was located in yet another rural cemetery, the one belonging to the little town of Hancock, several miles south of Plainfield in Waushara County. They also confirmed that, in the words of the statement released later that day by Attorney General Honeck, “the subject’s activities which involved the disturbance of graves and murder, did not involve any male victims.”

  Much of the questioning focused on the matter of a possible accomplice, but, in spite of persistent rumors that Eddie had been assisted by a shadowy figure named “Gus,” the lie test seemed to substantiate Gein’s claim that he had performed his ghoulish activities alone.

  Gein was also interrogated one more time about the disappearances of Evelyn Hartley, Georgia Weckler, and Victor Travis. Again, the polygraph results excluded him as a suspect.

  At four-thirty P.M., after seven and a half hours of questioning, Gein began complaining of a headache. The examination was halted, and the prisoner was transported back to his room in Central State Hospital.

  On Thursday, November 28, families all across America sat down to their turkey dinners and pumpkin pies, but to most of Plainfield’s citizens, it didn’t feel much like Thanksgiving. As more than one of them remarked, it felt more like Halloween.

  Perhaps people were simply glutted on horror. Perhaps, after the nonstop nightmare of the previous two weeks, the ghastly had come to seem run-of-the-mill. Whatever the reason, the news that still more skeletal remains had been uncovered on the Gein farm no longer seemed very sensational. Certainly, it wasn’t shocking enough to unsettle a public that had grown used to reading daily descriptions of butchered grandmothers, human-face wall decorations, flesh-upholstered furniture, and abducted cadavers.

  The new discovery was made on Friday, November 29. Herbert Wanerski, sheriff of Portage County, and his deputy, George Cummings, had learned about the location of a garbage trench in a wooded area on Gein’s property, about a quarter-mile from the farmhouse. According to some of Eddie’s neighbors, the strange little recluse was in the habit of going out there with a shovel at all hours of the day and night to bury things. Up until two weeks ago, the neighbors had assumed he was burying garbage.

  Equipped with shovels, Wanerski and his deputy drove out to the farm on Friday afternoon and hiked to the spot pointed out by Gein’s neighbors. It didn’t take long to locate the forty-foot trench. They began at one end, digging up the trench to a depth of two feet. Thirty minutes later, they came upon the bones, scattered in the dirt among rusted tin cans and decomposing clumps of household rubbish.

  Even at a glance, it was clear that—though some pieces were missing (there was no rib cage, for example, and only one foot)—the remains they had unearthed constituted a nearly complete human skeleton. When the two men bent to examine its skull, they were struck almost immediately by two things. The first was the condition of the teeth or, more precisely, of one particular tooth. It was a molar, and it was crowned with gold. The second was the skull’s size. It seemed noticeably larger than the other heads found inside Eddie’s farmhouse.

  Further digging turned up a three-by-five-inch patch of denim with a brass button attached to it and several stiffened pieces of leathery material that appeared upon inspection to be dried-up chunks of human flesh. At three-forty P.M., the officers abandoned their excavations but returned the next morning with a party of fifteen men, including Sheriff Frank Searles of Adams County and Sheriff Schley. This time, however, though the digging was conducted at various places around the farm, nothing was found but a few additional bones lying close to the spot where the remains had been discovered on Friday.

  News of Friday’s find set off widespread speculation that the bones had belonged to one of the men who had disappeared from the area in 1952—the mysterious stranger known as Ray Burgess, the last person to be seen in the company of the missing Adams County farmer Victor “Bunk” Travis.

  To some of the investigators, the dimensions of the skull suggested that, unlike the others in Eddie’s collection, it was that of an adult male. And Burgess was known to have had a gold tooth. Indeed, a week before the ill-fated hunting trip (during which the pair had simply vanished from sight after setting off to hunt the property of Gein’s neighbor Lars Thompson), Burgess had drawn considerable attention to himself at a local tavern by flashing a broad gold-toothed grin and a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

  The discovery of a skull with a gold-crowned molar in Eddie Gein’s garbage trench lent weight to the suspicion that in spite of the results of the polygraph tests, which seemed to exonerate Gein, the “killer ghoul” had been responsible for the disappearance of the two hunters. By early Saturday, rumors had begun to spread through Plainfield that the missing men’s car, which had vanished along with them, was hidden somewhere on Gein’s land. A search party, led by Sheriff Schley and comprising officers from Waushara, Portage, and Adams counties, spent the better part of the day covering Gein’s one-hundred-sixty-acre property on foot. But no car was ever found.

  In the meantime, Attorney General Honeck met with the press to announce that in the opinion of the technicians at the crime lab, it was highly unlikely that the gold-toothed skull was Burgess’s. Their belief—based on information Gein had supplied during his recent polygraph examination—was that the latest remains were those of still another cadaver taken from the Plainfield cemetery. Moreover, state authorities remained convinced that, as Honeck repeated, Gein’s crimes did “not involve males.”

  And, indeed, once the new remains were conveyed to the crime lab, it took technicians only a day or two to confirm that they were the bones of an adult woman, thirty to fifty years old, whose corpse—like those of eleven other wives and mothers who had died in the Plainfield vicinity between 1947 and 1952—had been snatched from its grave.

  The first of December was a Sunday very much like the previous one in Plainfield, with thousands of sightseers passing through town on their way out to the Gein farmstead. Throughout the afternoon, traffic was bumper to bumper on Main Street. Once again, however, rubberneckers hoping for a close look at the crime scene were severely
disappointed. Indeed, security measures had been tightened up at the farm since Friday’s discovery. Even Eddie’s lawyer, William Belter, was turned away when he drove out to his client’s home to examine the site of the latest find.

  Belter had become the subject of a good deal of speculation in Plainfield. Rumor had it that as payment for his legal services, he would eventually come into possession of the Gein farm. Besides its inherent value, the property—and particularly the house itself—had suddenly acquired a new and possibly incalculable worth. It was known that various entrepreneurs had already inquired about purchasing the place, and the citizens of Plainfield were of the belief that the eventual owner, whoever that turned out to be, was likely to convert Eddie Gein’s “house of horrors” into a tourist attraction.

  Some people pointed to the case of the Little Bohemia tavern, where John Dillinger had shot his way out of a police trap years before. The owner of the bar had reportedly gotten rich by charging curiosity seekers an admission fee. Needless to say, the prospect of having their little town become the home of a permanent Eddie Gein horror museum did not fill the good people of Plainfield with enthusiasm.

  If there were still places in America that hadn’t heard of the Gein crimes, that situation changed on Monday, December 2, when that week’s issue of Life magazine hit the stands. The Gein case was the lead story, covered in a nine-page spread headlined “House of Horror Stuns the Nation.” The text conveyed the gruesome substance of the case, and the accompanying illustrations—somber photographs of the hollow-cheeked killer, his grim decaying home, and the insanely cluttered rooms in which he dwelt—powerfully caught its American Gothic essence.

  In the same week, the case also received detailed coverage in another major weekly, Time magazine, which—in contrast to the horror-stricken tones of the Life piece—adopted a distinctly sneering attitude toward Gein. The article described the killer ghoul (whose last name, the writer explained, “rhymes with wean”) as an extreme case of “arrested development,” a middle-aged “mamma’s boy” whose fanatical, domineering mother had taught him to shun all women but herself.