by Ray Black
The inquiry has been given the task of looking at what went wrong in the Shipman case so that they can come up with recommendations about changes that need to be made. The need for changes in the way deaths were examined. As the system stood at the time of the Shipman trial, it was obviously inadequate and needed to be brought up to the standards of the twenty-first century. At present coroners are not involved and post mortems are not compulsory, if the deceased has recently been seen by a doctor or has been in hospital. If the body is to be cremated then the form must be countersigned by another doctor. However, Dr. Norman Beenstock, a former GP who practiced in Hyde and who countersigned eighteen cremation forms for Shipman, said doctors rarely ask questions of one another. He said, ‘I was reliant on what Dr. Shipman told me and I would have trusted a fellow GP to have been honest and open with me’.
The official results of the inquiry were released on July 20, 2002. The report announced that Shipman may have killed as many as 260 patients, but is only positive of 215, the other 45 have just been labelled as ‘suspicious’.
MOTIVES
At their trials Dr. Bodkin Adams and Dr. Harold Shipman both reacted very differently. Adams projected himself as a bumbling, inoffensive old duffer, utterly devoid of any malice, and a dependable and Christian family doctor. By way of contrast Shipman portrayed himself as a solitary, rather insular character, inscrutable and somewhat dour, with no obvious endearing or humane qualities.
Dr. Adam’s patients were all extremely elderly, and either seriously or terminally ill. Shipman’s, on the other hand, all appeared to be in good health and ranged from middle age upwards. The verdict on why Dr. Adams so-called ‘murdered’ his victims was that they felt any doctor in his situation was ‘entitled to all that was proper and necessary to relieve paint and suffering even if the measures he took might incidentally shorten the life by hours or perhaps even longer. The doctor who decided whether or not to administer the drug could not do his job if he were thinking in terms or hours or months of life’. It was considered that in the case of Dr. Adams, that the treatment he gave his patients was only designed to promote comfort. For some reason the fact that he obtained a vast amount of money in legacies from his patients somehow seems to have been overlooked in this summing up.
Shipman, conversely, is portrayed far more as a monstrous serial killer. When he was examined by psychiatrists they discovered that he seemed to be obsessed by having control over his patients’ lives. It appeared to give him some sort of a sexual thrill. As to why the majority of his patients were older women, this probably stems back to his childhood when he saw his mother dying from lung cancer. Perhaps these women reminded him of his mother and he couldn’t bear the fact they were still alive and healthy. Shipman thought of himself as untouchable and even mocked the police and anyone who tried to ascertain the motives for his killings.
Meanwhile, Hyde will take a long time to recover from the repercussions of this wicked doctor. The town had already been rocked by the forces of evil in the 1960s, for it was the hometown of the Moors Murderers, who are still the most hated murderers in England.
Harold Shipman hanged himself in his cell on Tuesday, January 13, 2004, at Wakefield prison. It is believed he took his own life because he was unable to face up to the prospect of an appeal court appearance at which his guilt would undoubtedly be re-affirmed and his life sentence upheld.
Although the scale of his crimes might be unique, Harold Shipman is certainly not the only doctor to have hit the headlines over the years. Back in the 1850s Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley, managed to poison a dozen of his relatives and patients. Jack the Ripper, whose murders were so anatomically perfect, could also have been a doctor. Finally, the name of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen will always be famous for the murder of his wife in 1910.
The Ultimate ‘Psycho’
Ed Gein is seen as one of the most weird and bizarre killers of the twentieth century. His crimes inspired the movies ‘Psycho’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
Ed Gein was born in 1906 into the small, farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The area was heavily wooded and had many isolated smallholdings and farms. His father was a heavy drinker and his mother was totally domineering, and much of his childhood was spent in solitude. His brother, Henry, was rather a weak and ineffectual character, and his mother taught the boys that sexual acts were a sin even from an early age. When their father died in 1940, the two brothers took over the running of the farm. Even as adults their mother still ruled their lives, insisting that they remain bachelors and instilled in them that women would only break up the family unit and eventually betray the love the boys gave them.
It was a hard life with the two boys doing all the work. The farm itself was not profitable and things went from bad to worse when Henry died from fighting a fire in one of their barns. Shortly after his brother’s death, Ed’s mother suffered a stroke which left her totally helpless. Ed managed to nurse her for a year, but then she had another stroke and died in 1945. Ed was now thirty-nine years old and was on his own for the first time in his life.
Ed was still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had ruled him for the whole of his life. In his solitude, Gein began to lose any sense of reality. He started to read medical dictionaries and books on anatomy and, for the first time in his life, developed an interest in women. He loved pulp horror books and pornographic magazines, and became obsessed with the atrocities committed during World War II. For reasons only known to himself, he developed a sick fascination in the medical experiments that were performed on Jews in the concentration camps.
Meanwhile, the large, rambling farmhouse became a complete shambles. Thanks to a government subsidy, Gein was able to give up his work on the farm and to earn extra cash he started doing odd jobs for the residents of Plainfield. While his neighbours thought he was a little strange, he was regarded as no more than a harmless eccentric, and they even entrusted him to the job of babysitting. His behaviour at home became more and more weird and he sealed off every single room in the farmhouse, with the exception of his bedroom and the kitchen. He was still haunted by the ghost of his dead mother, and her bedroom remained locked and completely undisturbed, in fact exactly as it had been before she died.
The first real sign of Gein’s impending insanity was when he took to exhuming decomposing female corpses, under the cover of night, from remote church graveyards. He enlisted the help of another very weird man named Gus and together they opened their first grave less than a dozen feet away from where Ed’s mother was buried.
Ed would store his grisly booty in a shed attached to the side of his farmhouse. Here, he would dissect the bodies retaining parts such as the head, sex organs, liver, heart and intestines. Next he would strip the skin from the body and either drape it over a tailor’s dummy or wear it himself in some weird ritual dance. A practice, apparently, that gave him a great deal of gratification. Over the next ten years Ed continued to rob the graves of the dead. He would check the newspapers for any fresh bodies and always visited the graveyards when it was a full moon. Sometimes he would take the entire female corpse and on other occasions just the parts he wanted. His experiments on the corpses became more and more bizarre. He would construct objects out of the skin and bones and would store some of the organs he had removed in the fridge to eat later. He committed acts of necrophilia and on one occasion even dug up his own mother’s corpse.
Gein was particularly fascinated by the removed parts of female genitalia which he would fondle and play with. Although Gus was aware that Ed was carrying out bizarre experiments, what his friend failed to tell him was that he had a growing desire to become a woman himself. Although he fantasized about having an operation to change him into a woman, the closest he ever got was by wearing a complete bodysuit with mask and breasts intact, made entirely of human skin.
His friend Gus was taken away to a mental asylum which meant that Ed was once more totally on his own. He was
already considered to be a very eccentric recluse, which meant that none of his neighbours bothered with him or his very decaying property.
MOVING ON TO MURDER
Gein’s complete obsession with the female body eventually led him into seeking out fresher samples – so he turned to murder. His first victim was fifty-one-year-old Mary Hogan. Mary was a divorcee who ran Hogan’s Tavern at Pine Grove about six miles from her home. It was a very cold afternoon on December 8, 1954, and she was on her own in the tavern when she was approached by the strange man. Ed shot her in the head with his .32 calibre revolver, put her body in the back of his pick-up truck and then took her back to his shed.
The police were alerted when a customer called by the tavern to find the place deserted and a large bloodstain on the floor. There was a used cartridge on the floor, and the stains ran out of the back door, into the parking lot, and stopped beside tyre tracks, that looked like those of a pick-up truck. It was easy to assess that Mary had been shot and her body had been driven away. The police were unable to find any clues as to her disappearance, but a few weeks later a local sawmill owner was talking to Ed about the disappearance of Mary, when Gein replied, ‘She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now’. The sawmill owner, who knew that Ed was very strange, didn’t even bother to take any notice of his response.
Although there were probably other victims in the following year, nothing is really certain until November 16, 1957. Bernice Worden was a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store. On finding Bernice on her own in the shop, Ed Gein took a .22 rifle down from a display shelf in the shop, inserted his own bullet into the gun, and then shot and killed Mrs. Worden. Next he locked the store and and took her body home with him in the back of the store’s truck. Gein also took the cash register containing $41 in cash, not because he wanted to commit robbery, but because he wanted to see how it worked. He genuinely intended to return the cash register later.
Mrs. Worden’s son, Frank, served as the Deputy Sheriff in Plainfield, and was often known to help his mother out in the shop. On this particular Saturday morning he had gone deer hunting, so it wasn’t until later in the day that he returned to the shop to discover the door locked and the lights still on. When he went inside he immediately noticed the blood on the floor and that the cash register was missing. A local garage attendant told Frank that the had seen the store truck driving away at around 9.30 that morning. Frank immediately alerted the Sheriff, Art Schley, and told him what he had found. They went through the record of sales made that morning and discovered that one of the purchases had been for antifreeze. At that moment Frank remembered that Gein had stopped by the previous evening at around closing time and told him that he would be back in the morning to buy some antifreeze. Ed had also made a point of asking Frank whether or not he intended to go hunting the next morning. Ed also remembered that Frank had been in and out of the stores on several occasions during the past week, which was quite unusual. It would appear that since the cash register was missing, they assumed that Gein had planned a robbery once the coast was clear.
Frank, the Sheriff and Captain Lloyd Schoephoester set off for the farmhouse which was seven miles down the road, the place the local children called the haunted house.
When they arrived at the house it was dark and Ed Gein was nowhere to be found. So, acting merely on an assumption, they drove to a store in West Plainfield where they knew Ed normally bought his groceries. Their hunch paid off and sure enough Gein was there as he had just had dinner with the proprietor and his wife.
Gein was about to climb into his truck when the Sheriff stopped and asked him to get into the police car for questioning. Ed immediately told the Sheriff that he thought someone was trying to frame him for the murder of Bernice Worden. The Sheriff knew at that point they needed to take him into custody for not once had he mentioned anything about Mrs. Worden being missing or indeed anything about a murder. After taking Ed down to the Sheriff’s office, the Sheriff and the Captain along with some fellow officers, returned to the farmhouse. The doors were locked, but the door to the shed at the side of the house wasn’t and it opened quite easily when the Sheriff pushed it with his foot. It was very dark by now and since the farmhouse did not have any electricity, the Sheriff had to use a torch. As he shone it around the shed his eye caught something hanging from a crossbeam in the roof. It was a naked corpse with the legs wide apart, and a long slit running right the way down the front of the body. The head and throat were missing, along with the genitals and the anus. Bernice Worden had been disembowelled just like a deer after hunting.
Horrified by what they had found, the officers then moved their search to the house. Once again the house was dark so they used lanterns, oil lamps and torches to carry out their inspection. The place was filthy and looked as though it had not been cleaned for years. There were piles of rubbish everywhere and they discovered that most of the doors had been nailed up. The rooms that were open were full of books, old papers, magazines, utensils, tin cans, cartons and a lot of other things that could only be described as junk. But what else the police officers found in that house was far more nauseating – the work of an extremely sick mind. They discovered two shin bones, four human noses, a can covered with human skin to convert it into a tom-tom, a bowl made from the inverted half of a human skull, nine ‘death masks; from the well preserved skin from the faces of women’, a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, ten female heads with the tops removed from above the eyebrows, bracelets made from human skin, a purse made with a handle of human skin, a sheath for a knife made from human skin, a pair of leggings made from human skin, four chairs with the seats replaced by strips of human skin, a shoe box containing nine salted vulvas (one of which was his mother’s which was painted silver), a hanging human head, a lampshade covered with human skin, a shirt made of human skin, a number of shrunken heads, two skulls for Gein’s bedposts, a pair of human lips hanging from a string, Ed’s full woman bodysuit constructed from human skin and complete with mask and breasts, Bernice’s heart in a pan on the cooker, and finally the refrigerator was stacked with human organs.
The scattered remains of an estimated fifteen women’s bodies were found at the farmhouse, but Gein could not remember how many murders he had actually committed. It is also rumoured that Gein used to take gifts of fresh venison round to his neighbours, and yet it is well known that he never shot a deer in his life.
Gein was committed to a mental institution and stayed there for ten years before he was judged to be sane enough to stand trial. Gein was found to be criminally insane in December 1956 and was committed to Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital. He died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984, at the age of seventy-seven. He was a model prisoner who was also polite, gentle and discreet and his death was natural from respiratory and heart failure.
THE MOTIVE
Gein was subjected to numerous psychological examinations at the Central State Hospital, where they proved without doubt that he was completely insane. The reasons for his actions were quite obvious – his mother. He had both loved and hated his mother, and that is why he always killed older women. He would never admit to being either a cannibal or necrophiliac, but did own up to robbing graves. The case created a sensation purely because of the atrocity of his crimes. After Gein was arrested thousands of people flocked to the farm at Plainfield to get a closer look at the scene of such horrendous crimes. Eventually the entire place was burned down by the citizens of Plainfield as they regarded it as a place of evil.
ALWAYS REMEMBERED
The heinous activities of Ed Gein certainly attracted the media. An early film which was based on Gein’s character was Psycho, portrayed originally in a novel by Robert Bloch and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. The connection here was the overpowering mother and the horror content of the film, which made it one of the first of a kind. When Bloch wrote the original book he got most of his ideas from the life of Ed Gein.
The Texa
s Chainsaw Massacre was another movie lightly based on Ed Gein. The story is about a group of teenagers who stumble across a house of horrors when they are out travelling. The people who live in the house are a family of weird homicidal cannibals who like to rob graves and construct furniture out of the human remains. The man who plays the leading role likes chasing people while wielding a chainsaw, he was known as ‘Leatherface’. His fetish was to wear a human face mask when he was chasing after his victims.
One final film which was also influenced by the true life story of Ed Gein is Silence of the Lambs. It is about an FBI agent who is trying to track down a serial killer and employs the help of an intelligent cannibal named Hannibal Lector. The killer she is trying to track is known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, a man who likes to kill women, make clothes out of their skin, and dress up in them because of his desire to be a woman. All very familiar when you have just read the case of Eddie Gein.
The ‘Real’ Dracula
Believe it or not there was a real Dracula, not just a figment of Bram Stoker’s imagination. He was a prince and as legend suggests was actually born in Transylvania.
For this story we are delving back into the archives of the fifteenth century. The true prince of darkness was Prince Vlad III, better known these days as ‘Vlad the Impaler’.
Vladislav Basarab was born in the town of Sighisoara, in the Tîrnava Mare valley, Transylvania, in the year 1431. He was the second son of the prince of Wallachia, and he had a elder brother named Mircea, and a younger one named Radu the Handsome. His mother was either a Moldavian princess or a Transylvanian noble, and it is said that she educated the young Vladislav.
