There was no escape this time for Gaskins. The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in June 1991, clearing the way for Gaskins to be executed in September. Hours before his date with ‘Old Sparky’, Gaskins slashed his arms from wrists to elbows with a razor blade he had swallowed days earlier then regurgitated, in a futile effort to postpone death. Prison medics stitched his wounds in time for Gaskins to be executed at 1.05am on 6 September 1991.
The exact number of victims murdered by Gaskins was never known. Police believed that the number may have been as high as 200. Gaskins went on record as suggesting that the total may be around 90.
ED GEIN
Ed Gein (b. 1906) lived with his parents, who ran a small family shop in Wisconsin. They eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, also in Wisconsin. Gein’s mother was very religious and drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evils of drink and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were whores. According to his mother, the only acceptable form of sex was for biological reproduction. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder and divine retribution.
When Gein reached puberty, his mother became increasingly strict, once dousing him in scalding water after she caught him masturbating in the bath, grabbing his genitals and calling them the ‘curse of man’. With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanour, the young Gein became a target for bullies. Despite this, he did reasonably well at school. His father died in 1940 and by then he had begun to reject his mother’s views on life. His brother died mysteriously in a fire at the farm, also in 1940. In 1945 his mother died, leaving him all alone at the farmhouse.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, police began to notice an increase in missing person cases. There were four cases in particular they took an interest in. The first was that of an eight-year-old girl named Georgia Weckler, who had disappeared while coming home from school on 1 May 1947. Hundreds of residents and police searched an area of 10 square miles around her home address, hoping to find the young girl. Unfortunately, Georgia was never seen or heard of again.
Another girl disappeared six years later in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley was babysitting at the time she disappeared. The girl’s father immediately drove to where she had been, but nobody answered the door. When he peered through a window, he could see one of his daughter’s shoes and her glasses on the floor. He tried to enter the house, but all the doors and windows were locked, except for one, the back basement window. It was at that window where he discovered bloodstains. Petrified, he entered the house and discovered signs of a struggle.
Immediately he contacted the police. When they arrived at the house, they found more evidence of a struggle, including bloodstains on the grass leading away from the house, a bloody handprint on a neighbouring house, footprints and the girl’s other shoe on the basement floor. A larger area was searched but Evelyn was nowhere to be found. A few days later, police discovered some bloodied articles of clothing that belonged to Evelyn near a highway outside La Crosse. The worst was suspected.
In November 1952, two men stopped for a drink at a bar in Plainfield, Wisconsin, before heading out to hunt deer. Victor Travis and Ray Burgess spent several hours at the bar before leaving. The two men and their car were never seen again. A massive search was conducted but there was no trace of them. They had simply vanished.
In winter 1954, a Plainfield tavern-keeper by the name of Mary Hogan mysteriously disappeared. Police suspected foul play when they discovered blood on the tavern floor that trailed into the car park.
In mid-November 1957, a robbery took place at a local shop where the female owner, Bernice Worden, was abducted. The police had reason to believe Gein was involved and went to his farmhouse to talk to him. When they arrived at the farmhouse, there was no sign of Gein. They went inside the dimly lit room and noticed the stench that immediately hit them. The smell of filth and decomposition was overwhelming. One of the officers went into the kitchen. It was dark and he felt something brush against his jacket. He flashed his torch to see what it was and saw a dangling carcass hanging upside down from the beams. The carcass had been decapitated, slit open and gutted. He initially thought it was a deer carcass. However, after a few moments the officer realised that it wasn’t a deer at all; it was the headless body of the missing woman, Bernice Worden. She had been shot and killed before being butchered.
The officers started a search and soon uncovered more grisly secrets. There were severed heads acting as bedposts in the bedroom. Human skin had been used to upholster the chair seats. Several human skulls had been made into soup bowls. A single human heart was in a saucepan on the stove. A facemask made out of facial skin was found in a paper bag. There was a necklace made out of human lips. In the wardrobe they found a waistcoat made up of vaginas and breasts sewn together. In addition there was a belt made solely from nipples. In another wardrobe was an entire wardrobe made from human skin consisting of leggings, a gutted torso (including breasts) and an array of tanned, dead-skin masks.
Gein was later arrested and interviewed and initially remained silent. However, the following day he confessed in detail how he had murdered Bernice Worden and how he had acquired all the body parts found at the farm, which he stated he had dug up from the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother. He would take the bodies home, where he skinned them, subjecting the skin to a tanning process, then using it to make his macabre possessions. Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, saying that they smelt too bad. During interrogation, Gein also admitted to the shooting of Mary Hogan, the local tavern-owner missing since 1954.
Gein told police that shortly after his mother’s death he had decided he wanted a sex change, hence the female ‘attire’ manufactured from body parts – he could wear it and pretend to be his mother, rather than change his sex. Gein showed no signs of remorse and he appeared to have no concept of the enormity of his crimes. The police continued to search the land around his farm. They discovered within Gein’s farmhouse the remains of 10 women. Although Gein swore that the remaining body parts of eight women were taken from local graveyards, the police had their doubts. They believed that it was highly possible that the remains came from other women he had murdered. The only way to ascertain whether the remains came from women’s corpses was to examine the graves that Gein claimed he had robbed. Following much controversy over the morality of exhuming the bodies, police were finally permitted to dig up the graves of the women he claimed to have desecrated. All of the coffins showed clear signs of having been tampered with. In most cases, the bodies or parts of the bodies were missing.
A further discovery on the farm would again raise the issue of whether Gein did, in fact, murder others. On 29 November, police unearthed more skeletal human remains, suspected to be Victor Travis, who had disappeared years earlier. The remains were immediately taken to a crime lab and examined. Tests showed that the body was not that of a male but of a large, middle-aged woman, another victim of Gein’s grave-robbing. Police tried desperately to implicate Gein in the disappearance of Victor Travis and the three other people who had vanished years earlier in the Plainfield area. The only murders Gein could be held accountable for were Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan.
Gein was deemed not competent to stand trial and was confined to a mental hospital. However, after spending 10 years in the mental institution, the courts finally decided he was competent to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden. The proceedings began on 22 January 1968, to determine whether he was guilty of the murder of Bernice Worden. The actual trial began on 7 November 1968. However, Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a mental institution, where he came to be regarded as a model patient. On 26 July 1984, he died after a long battle with cancer. He was buried in Plainfield cemetery next to his mot
her, not far from the graves that he had robbed years earlier. His gravestone in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalised; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is presently displayed in a museum in Wautoma, Wisconsin.
ROBERT HANSEN
Born at Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1940, in his youth, Robert Hansen (b. 1940) was skinny and painfully shy, afflicted with a stammer and a severe case of acne that left him permanently scarred. Shunned by the attractive girls in school, he grew up hating them and nursing fantasies of cruel revenge. Hansen spent much of his early life as a loner and was a victim of bullying by his peers and his strict, domineering father.
Hansen married in 1960. On 7 December that year, he was arrested for burning down a local school bus garage, a crime for which he served 20 months in prison. His wife divorced him while he was incarcerated. Over the next few years, he was jailed several more times for petty theft and drifted through a series of menial jobs. In 1967, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, seeking a fresh start with his second wife, whom he had married in 1963. While he was well liked by his neighbours and was famed as a local hunting champion, his life eventually fell into disarray.
In 1972, Hansen was arrested and charged with the abduction and attempted rape of a housewife and the rape of a prostitute. Serving less than six months on a reduced charge, he was again arrested for shoplifting a chainsaw. In 1976, he was convicted of theft and was sentenced to five years in prison, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, the Alaska Supreme Court regarding his sentence as ‘too harsh’. In 1977, he was imprisoned for theft and diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder.
In 1980, construction workers digging near Eklutna Road discovered the partial remains of a woman buried in a shallow grave. Animals had taken off with the majority of the remains and there was very little evidence at the scene. The victim was never identified and was dubbed ‘Eklutna Annie’ by police. Later that same year, another body was found in a nearby gravel pit. The victim was later identified as Joanne Messina, a local topless dancer. Unfortunately, her body was badly decomposed and, as with Eklutna Annie, the police were unable to obtain any evidence from the crime scene.
On 12 September 1982, a third body was found. On that day, two off-duty police officers were out in the wilderness hunting. As darkness began to fall they decided to call it a day. The trek back to their camp was not easy, but both men were familiar with the area and cut across a wide sandbar. However, as they progressed up the river, they noticed a boot sticking out of the sand. Upon closer inspection, the two men were taken aback. Sticking out of the sand was a partially decomposed bone joint. Once they registered what they were looking at, both men retreated from the crime scene. The last thing they wanted to do was to disturb or contaminate any evidence. After making a note of the location, the men made their way back to their camp.
Forensics experts conducted a thorough examination of the crime scene and began sifting through the sand around the body. It took several hours for them to finish sifting, but in the end it paid dividends. They found a single shell casing from a .223-calibre bullet, used in high-powered rifles such as M-16s, Mini-14s or AR-15s.
Back in Anchorage, a preliminary post-mortem revealed that the victim was female, of undetermined age and had been dead for approximately six months. The cause of death was three gunshot wounds from .223-calibre bullets. Ace bandages were found mingled in with the remains, causing investigators to suspect that the victim had been blindfolded at the time of death. It took a little over two weeks to finally identify the body as that of 24-year-old Sherry Morrow, a dancer from the Wild Cherry Bar in downtown Anchorage. She had last been seen on 17 November 1981. According to friends, she was going to see a man who had offered her $300 to pose for some pictures. The police then reopened the files on other missing prostitutes.
On the night of 13 June 1983, the police got a lucky break. That evening, a lorry driver was passing through town when he noticed a frantic young female waving her arms and calling out to him. The girl had a pair of handcuffs dangling from one of her wrists and her clothing was dishevelled. She told the driver that a man was after her and asked him to take her to the Big Timber Motel. Once inside, she had the front desk clerk make a telephone call for her to her pimp. As she waited outside for her pimp, the lorry driver drove straight to the Anchorage Police Department and reported the incident.
When a police officer arrived at the Big Timber Motel, he found the girl alone and still in handcuffs. Once he removed her cuffs, she began telling him her story. She had been approached on the street by a male aged about 40; he had distinctive red hair, and had offered her $200 for oral sex. She agreed, but midway through the act the man locked handcuffs around her wrist and pulled out a gun. He told her if she cooperated he would not kill her. He then drove to his house. Once inside, the man brutally raped her, bit her nipples, and at one point shoved a hammer into her vagina. After a brief rest, the man said that he was going to fly her to his cabin in the mountains and told her he would let her go if she cooperated. Upon their arrival at the airport, he pushed her inside a small plane and began loading supplies. At that point she knew she was in serious trouble. She waited until his back was turned, pushed opened the plane door and ran for her life. The man chased after her at first, but then stopped when he saw her wave down the lorry.
After she had made a formal statement, police officers drove the young prostitute to Merrill Field, the airport where she said she had been taken. They were hoping she could identify her abductor’s plane. As they drove through the small airport, she spotted a blue-and-white Piper Super Cub, tail number N3089Z, and identified the plane. A check with the flight tower revealed that the plane belonged to Robert Hansen, who lived on Old Harbour Road. Officers then went to Hansen’s house. Hansen became outraged when confronted with the young woman’s charges. He claimed to have never met the girl, and said ‘You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?’ He said that he had spent the entire evening with two friends. His alibi checked out and no formal charges were filed.
On 2 September 1983, another body was found along the Knik River. The remains were partially decomposed and buried in a shallow grave. The victim was later identified as 17-year-old Paula Golding, a topless dancer and prostitute from Anchorage. She had gone missing some five months earlier. The post-mortem revealed that she had been shot with a .223-calibre bullet. Police were now convinced that they had a serial killer within the community, and turned their attentions back to Hansen, attempting to disprove the original alibi he had put forward regarding the abduction of the young prostitute. Police decided to bring in for questioning the two males who had given Hansen his alibi. Both men confessed and said that they had not been with Robert Hansen on the night the young prostitute was abducted and brought to the airport. Police also learnt from Hansen’s friends that he was committing insurance fraud. He had reported several burglaries of his house to the police, but these reports were false; the burglaries never occurred. Hansen was hiding the items he alleged were stolen in his basement. The police took out search warrants on his house and his plane.
On 27 October 1983, the police made the decision to move in on Hansen. They followed him to work and asked him to come with them to the police station for questioning. Hansen never bothered to ask why they wanted to talk to him and agreed to go along. Simultaneously, officers executed the search warrants on his house and plane. At the house, they found weapons but at first nothing to implicate Hansen in any of the murders. However, just as they were about to leave, one of the officers discovered a hidden space tucked away in the attic rafters. Within it, they discovered a Remington 552 rifle, a Thompson contender 7mm single-shot pistol, an aviation map with specific locations marked off, various pieces of jewellery, newspaper clippings, a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun, a driving licence and various ID cards, some of which belonged to the dead women. As incriminating as all these items wer
e, the most important piece of evidence was a .223-calibre Mini-14 rifle.
Hansen was then formally arrested and interviewed. He denied all knowledge of the murders. He was charged with assault, kidnapping, firearms offences, theft and insurance fraud. On 3 November 1983, an Anchorage grand jury returned indictments against Hansen. These were first-degree assault and kidnapping, five counts of misconduct in the possession of a handgun, theft in the second degree and theft by deception in insurance fraud. Police were still awaiting the ballistic test results on Hansen’s rifle, so it was decided to not charge him with murder at this stage. Hansen pleaded not guilty to all charges. Bail was set at half a million dollars.
The ballistic test results finally came through on 20 November, showing that Hansen’s rifle and the shell casings found at the murder sites matched. The firing pin and the extractor markings were identical. When confronted with the mass of evidence now against him, he asked his attorney to make a deal with the authorities.
In exchange for a full confession, the District Attorney guaranteed him that he would only be charged with the four cases that they knew of and he would be able to serve his time in a federal facility, rather than a maximum-security institution. Hansen reluctantly agreed to the conditions. During the confession that followed, he told of how he would abduct his victims, then take them on his plane to his remote cabin in the wilderness when, after raping and torturing them, he would let them go. After giving them a head start, he would track them down, killing them with either his hunting knife or his high-powered rifle. Hansen referred to the killings as his ‘summertime project’. He stated that he had hoped to forcefully teach his victims a lesson for their whoring and stripping ways.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 24
