Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  After recounting the details of Bernice Worden’s slaying and the appalling discoveries made inside his farm, the article cited the diagnoses of anonymous psychiatrists, who saw Gein “as the victim of a common conflict: while consciously he loved his mother and hated other women, unconsciously he hated her and loved others. She had subjected him to deep frustration…. For Gein, cutting up women who reminded him of his mother and preserving parts of them satisfied two contradictory urges: to bring her back to life and to destroy her as the source of his frustration.”

  The Time story concluded by noting that at the end of the previous week, Gein had been committed to Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There, according to the article, the experts hoped to solve what was perhaps the deepest of all the mysteries connected to the Gein case: “why Eddie Gein’s childhood experiences, unfortunate but far from unique, exploded in his case into such horrendous crime.”

  34

  From the psychological profile of Edward Gein

  “The overall picture is not that of a well person.”

  Between November 25—two days after his admission to Central State Hospital—and December 18, Eddie underwent an exhaustive series of physical and psychological tests. The results of these examinations were compiled into a lengthy report, which was submitted to Judge Bunde the week before Christmas. This report is a fascinating document,, containing the first truly substantial information about Gein, whose life and behavior had been the subject of so much ungrounded speculation.

  The physical exams he was given were far more complete than any he had experienced in his life, certainly more thoroughgoing than the army physical he had received fifteen years earlier in Milwaukee during his only trip away from home. He was gone over from head to foot, every part of him weighed, measured, prodded, poked, X-rayed, and analyzed. His scalp was checked for vermin, his tonsils for inflammation, his rectum for hemorrhoids. A small lesion on his tongue was detected and duly recorded, and his testicles were palpated by hand (“pain elicited by pressure,” the physician noted). Samples of his blood, urine, and spinal fluid were collected and analyzed.

  On the whole—and in spite of the existence of a suspiciously enlarged lymph gland “in the left supraclavicular area” which the physician wanted biopsied—Eddie appeared to be in good health. His muscle tone was not what it had once been (indeed, the wiry little man was beginning to go to flab). Still, his weight—one hundred forty-one pounds—was only slightly above the ideal for a man of his height (sixty inches). His posture was poor (Eddie had been stoop-shouldered all his life), but his temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and respiration rates were normal. All in all, for a fifty-one-year-old man who had led what was in many ways a bitterly deprived life, he was in decent shape.

  There were a few things the report took special note of. One was the soft, fleshy growth on Eddie’s left eyelid, which, though nonmalignant, caused the eyelid to droop and contributed to the slightly quizzical simpleton’s expression that Eddie so often wore. The physician was also struck by Eddie’s constant and apparently psychosomatic complaints of headaches and nausea. Often during his examinations, he would begin to whine like a sickly old woman, insisting that his head hurt or that he was feeling sick to his stomach and needed a wheelchair to take him back to his ward.

  And then there was the matter of the smells.

  Eddie was always complaining of smelling “bad odors.” When the doctor asked him to describe exactly what it was he smelled, Eddie thought for a while and then came up with the closest analogy.

  “It smells,” he said, “like flesh.”

  Following his physical exams, Eddie was put through a full battery of standardized psychological tests, beginning with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. His Verbal IQ was computed at 106, his Performance IQ at 89, and his Full Scale IQ at 99—a score that placed him in the “low average” category. According to Eddie’s examiner, however—a psychologist named Robert Ellsworth—Gein possessed “a fair amount of information, a good vocabulary, and an ability to reason abstractly,” all of which pointed “toward a higher intellectual potential, near the ‘bright normal’ level.” The great discrepancy between his verbal and performance levels suggested to Ellsworth that Gein’s functioning was impaired by a “strong emotional disturbance” which was probably “psychotic in nature.”

  Ellsworth’s assessment of Eddie’s intelligence seemed confirmed by the results of the Rorschach (or “inkblot”) test, which indicated, again, that the subject was of “better than average intelligence” but functioning at an “inefficient” level. “The overall picture” that emerged from this test was, in Ellsworth’s words, “not that of a well person but of one with insufficient ego, immaturity, conflict concerning identification, and possibly the presence of illogical thought processes.”

  Other tests administered by Ellsworth—Bender-Gestalt Designs, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and more—brought to light other traits: a strong “feminine identification,” “bizarre religious beliefs,” a tendency to “project the blame for evil on some other person,” and a strikingly immature level of sexuality characterized by “strong feelings of guilt.”

  All in all, Ellsworth concluded, the tests showed the patient to be “a very suggestible person who appears emotionally dull. Beneath that lies aggressiveness that may be expressed by inappropriate reactions that are followed by remorse and mild-manneredness. He is an immature person who withdraws and finds forming relationships with others difficult. He has rather rigid moral concepts which he expects others to follow. He is suspicious of others and tends to project blame for his own inadequacies onto others. His fantasy life is immature in nature, possibly he pictures himself as a much more adequate and bigger man than he is.

  “Sexually he is a conflicted individual and is functioning on an immature level. Guilt feelings are great and repression is put to use quite frequently in this area.

  “In general, it appears that this is basically a schizophrenic personality with several neurotic manifestations. At the present time, he is confused and has difficulty in looking at his situation realistically.”

  The report also included a “social history” of the patient, put together by hospital social worker Kenneth Colwell, who obtained most of his information from Gein, though he also drew on interviews he had conducted with some of Eddie’s neighbors in Plainfield. Eddie, as always, was extremely cooperative. Indeed, he seemed deeply—almost touchingly—appreciative of all the attention he was receiving at the hospital. As Colwell put it, Gein seemed to “view the staff’s professional approach as an acceptance of him personally that he has not experienced in his home community in many years.” Colwell noted that Eddie talked “freely in a low voice, frequently with his head in his hands.” Occasionally, however, Gein “professed confusion, partial loss of memory, as well as trouble distinguishing between what he remembers and what he was told.”

  The bulk of Colwell’s report consisted of a brief review of Eddie’s life—his family background, his schooling, the deaths of his parents and older brother, his relationship to the community. In terms of Eddie’s psychological condition, however, the most illuminating part of Colwell’s report is the section labeled “Sexual History”:

  Patient’s early sexual information was given by the mother who impressed upon him the need for sexual abstinence prior to marriage. He indicated that she was not as strict in her admonitions against masturbation. He obtained additional information in a more uncouth manner from his classmates. He views not marrying, in part, as a family trait, saying that his brother did not marry, nor did two of his mother’s brothers.

  The patient gave more thought to marriage after the death of the mother and felt he would have married if he could only have found “the right girl.” He rejected one girl after he learned that she could not get along with her mother and “I couldn’t straighten her out on that. I almost fell in love with another gi
rl, but found out that she had many affairs with other men. Morality is pretty low in Plainfield.”

  The patient also described the moral standards of his two victims. The first “was a dirty talker, operated a tavern, and people said she was in some crooked business.” He states that the second victim wooed her husband away from another girl and married him shortly after the other girl committed suicide. (He became tearful when describing his sorrow for the other girl.) He went on to describe the husband’s death as his just punishment and then relates that his victim broke up another marriage. His comments have a strong religious connotation….

  He indicated that he would not have gotten into his present difficulty if he had married, if the neighbors had treated him better, or if he had been able to sell his farm and travel. He stated that prior to the first grave robbing incident, he had been reading adventure stories of head hunters and cannibals. He related in detail one story of a man who had murdered a man, acquired his yacht and was later captured and killed by head hunters. He learned about shrunken heads, death masks, etc., from other similar stories.

  He admitted to feelings of excitement during the grave robberies and describes periods when he felt he should return the bodies. There were also feelings that the bodies should be preserved and that he should care for them. When asked about the sexual aspects of this activity he commented on the great variations in age of the bodies. When it was pointed out that he was interested only in the bodies of women, he stated that the articles he read indicated that these heads were more valuable because of their longer hair.

  The heart of the Central State document, however, consisted of three lengthy reports. The first was written by Schubert, who interviewed Gein on two occasions. Their first meeting took place on December 9, and, almost immediately, Schubert later wrote, Gein began speaking “about the difficulty which had brought him to the institution”:

  He rather vehemently stated that none of this would have happened if his neighbors had shown some interest in him and would have visited him. He stated that the only time the neighbors came to his home was when they wanted to borrow things. He complained about the neighbors playing “dirty deals.” He applied this phrase to business dealings that he had had with one particular neighbor who had rented a field from him some years ago for $10.00 a year. This neighbor paid the rent for the first year but neglected to pay the rent for subsequent years. He claims that about five of his neighbors were constantly taking advantage of him and that they all owed him money. He denied that he had any difficulty with the people in Plainfield, although he said that many of them didn’t appreciate the things that he did for them.

  He complained of memory deficits and more specifically with regard to the crimes he is accused of committing. He stated that he is unable to recall any of the details of the murder of Mrs. Hogan and … is not clear on many of the details involved in the murder of Mrs. Worden. He vaguely remembers putting a cartridge, which he found in his pocket, in a rifle which he took from a rack in the Worden store, but he feels that her death was an accident because the gun must have discharged accidentally. He states that he does not remember putting the body in his truck and driving it to his home, although he admits that he must have been the one who did this.

  His opinion of Mrs. Worden is that she was a rather disreputable woman who was known to have a bad reputation. To illustrate this opinion, he stated that, prior to the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Worden, Mr. Worden was keeping company with the daughter of a dentist and that Mrs. Worden stole her future husband from this other woman, and that this woman subsequently killed herself with chloroform because of this. He denies that he blames Mrs. Worden for the girl’s death, but he also stated that he feels Mrs. Worden received her just desert when her husband died of some blood dyscrasia and feels that this was in the nature of a punishment for her.

  Much of the interview was spent in discussing his feelings about his mother. His mother was a very religious woman and his only description of her was that “she was good in every way.” His mother suffered two strokes, and much of his time was spent in caring for her after the first stroke. He began to cry when he described his mother’s infirmities and stated that “she didn’t deserve all of her suffering.”

  His feelings for his father are completely negative. He stated that his father drank excessively and would abuse both him and his brother….

  With respect to his claims of memory deficits, he says that his lapses of memory started after the death of his mother. When asked specifically about his interests since the death of his mother, his only answer was that he wished he could have had more contact with other people. He stated that since the death of his mother he has had feelings that things around him were unreal and at one time, shortly after the death of the mother, he felt that he could raise the dead by will power. He also stated that he heard his mother talking to him on several occasions for about a year after she died. His mother’s voice was heard while he was falling asleep.

  He mentioned one unusual experience occurring two or three years ago in which he saw a forest with the tops of the trees missing and vultures sitting in the trees.

  He feels that the death of Mrs. Worden was justified because she deserved to die, and he goes on to explain that he is actually fatalistic and that this whole sequence of events was ordained to happen.

  Three days later, on December 12, Schubert concluded his examination of Gein.

  He again denied any knowledge about the death of Mrs. Hogan and stated that he admitted this crime because this was what the investigators wished him to do. It was impossible to obtain a chronological series of events with regard to the death of Mrs. Worden. He specifically denied remembering the evisceration of the body.

  He stated that he had violated nine graves and when questioned as to his reasons for doing this, he stated he thought it was because he wanted a remembrance of his mother. He denied any sexual relations with any of these bodies and gave as his reason for this that “they smelled too bad.” He again admitted that, for a period of time after his mother’s death, he felt he could arouse the dead by an act of will power. He claimed to have tried to arouse his dead mother by an act of will power and was disappointed when he was unsuccessful. He also admitted this sort of thing with some of the bodies which he had exhumed….

  There is ample reason to believe that his violation of the graves was in response to the demands of his fantasy life, which was motivated by his abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.

  On December 13, the day after Schubert’s second interview, Eddie was examined by the hospital’s chief of medical services, Dr. R. Warmington. The record of that meeting sheds additional light on the bizarre operations of Gein’s profoundly disordered mind.

  After a brief review of the patient’s family background, Dr. Warmington’s report goes on to consider three major aspects of Gein’s psychological condition—his personality makeup, mental status, and criminal motivation:

  The subject is an introverted, odd, withdrawn personality that has had difficulty relating closely to other people. He also has shown some paranoid trends but on the other hand may have been duped and unfairly used on some occasions as he speaks of doing work for other farmers and failing to be paid for his labor. He is passive, inhibited, and somewhat evasive when questioned about the offense and may harbor deep-seated feelings of hostility.

  He denies ever having had sexual experience and declares that in this connection he was taught the moral code by his mother that sexual experience before marriage was wrong—“If a woman is good enough for intercourse, she is good enough for marriage.” …

  Since coming here, the patient has been very tractable, cooperative and readily abides by the institution rules. Consciousness is clear, there is no history of epileptic seizures, orientation is correct in all fields and the train of thought is coherent and relevant but sometimes somewhat illogical. Faces have been seen by him in leaves and he spoke of hearing his mother’s voice while in a twilig
ht sleep, but it is uncertain if these should be designated as overt hallucinations.

  No delusional material has been elicited but his behavior has been very unusual as he admits to excavating several bodies. During interviews he talked of using a rod to determine the nature of the rough box by its sound upon tapping and he also knew some of the exhumed people in life. They were all women of varying ages. The bodies were removed from three cemeteries—Plainfield, Spiritland, and Hancock—but some were returned after a short time because he became remorseful.

  In other instances, he made the so-called masks from the head by removing the skin and separating it from the bones. The tissue in the back of the neck was cut and the cavity stuffed with papers or sawdust. One of these was placed in a cellophane bag but others were kept throughout the house. The unused parts of bodies were burned or buried and eating is denied. He also denied having sex relations with the bodies or parts of them as he declares the odor was offensive.

  His memory is intact for most subjects but when emotionally charged situations are encountered there is a suggestion of a self-serving amnesia or vagueness. At times the remark was made—“It seems like a dream, impossible.”

  Mrs. Worden, in one interview, was described as being short, inconsiderate, and brusque, but during a later interview was declared to be a friendly, pleasant woman. Physical attraction for either woman was not admitted and he denied seriously attempting to escort Mrs. Worden to a roller skating rink. Mrs. Hogan was a tavern operator. It is gathered that she was regarded by the patient as being a rather poor representative of womankind and that he could have felt justified in shooting her because of his self-righteous, rigid attitude.