by Paul Martin
With his three years of schooling and phony medical certificate, Brinkley finagled a few jobs in Arkansas as an “undergraduate” physician. He earned enough to pay off his tuition at Bennett Medical College, which allowed him to enroll in Kansas City’s Eclectic Medical University and complete his studies. In May 1915, just before he turned thirty, Brinkley finally received a medical degree of sorts, one that permitted him to practice in eight states.
The newly minted doctor did everything he could to project a professional demeanor. A small, sandy-haired man, he grew a beard—a goatee, no less—to lend gravity to his boyish face. He took to wearing owlish horn-rimmed glasses and conservative suits, usually with a clutch of pens in his breast pocket. He also tidied up his marital status by divorcing Sally, although in the proceedings he lied about his legal residence, where they were married, and where Sally was currently living.6
Just two years later, John R. Brinkley, MD, was sitting pretty in Milford, Kansas, talking up the amazing properties of goat glands and pondering a gold-plated future. Brinkley’s goat gland surgery wasn’t an original con. European scientists had been experimenting with gland implants for years, claiming to have rejuvenated men using the testicles of dogs, guinea pigs, and monkeys. All these treatments relied on the willingness of people to believe in a fountain of youth—and to pay dearly for a swig. The placebo effect convinced some patients that the procedure actually worked. Brinkley increased his own odds of success by announcing that the surgery worked best for those who were intelligent.7 Anyone claiming the treatment was ineffective was essentially admitting his own stupidity.
Brinkley promoted his procedure with direct mail advertising featuring testimonials by William Stittsworth, whose virility he’d reputedly restored. The more success Brinkley had, the more he inflated his claims. Before long, he was touting goat glands as a cure for everything from epilepsy to insanity. (Brinkley also learned that some goat breeds made better “donors” than others. At one point, he implanted Angora testicles in a few unsuspecting patients, which left them stinking like a rank goat on a hot summer day.)
Brinkley got a major shot of publicity after he operated on J. J. Tobias, chancellor of the University of Chicago Law School. Tobias was so thrilled with the results that he awarded Brinkley an honorary doctor of science degree. With his reputation growing, Brinkley built a new sixteen-room clinic in Milford. Opened in 1918, the Brinkley-Jones Hospital included a training school for nurses, the first graduate being none other than Brinkley’s true love, Minnie—who, as vice president of the institution, signed her own diploma.8
In 1922, Brinkley accepted an invitation to California from Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times. The doctor worked his billy goat trick on Chandler and some of his editors. When the operations were declared successful, Brinkley gained more publicity. Soon, fifty new patients a week were arriving in Milford—people from all over the world, from millionaire businessmen to Hollywood stars, each of them paying $750 for their surgery.9 Brinkley splashed their money around in his new hometown. He built sidewalks and electrical, water, and sewage systems. He even sponsored a baseball team, the Brinkley Goats. When he outgrew his sixteen-room clinic, he built a new and larger hospital.
While out in California, Brinkley had toured Harry Chandler’s new radio station, KHJ. Impressed, Brinkley vowed to build his own station. In 1923, station KFKB (“Kansas First, Kansas Best”) went on the air, with Brinkley’s nasal twang cajoling male listeners to take advantage of his rejuvenating treatment. (“Tired of feeling like a eunuch?” he asked.)10 Entertainment included astrological predictions, language lessons, and live country music. Brinkley’s masterstroke was the “Medical Question Box,” a segment that’s been called radio’s first advice program. Brinkley read listeners’ letters over the air and prescribed medicines for their ailments, dispensing his wisdom with a patina of Midwestern folksiness and religious fundamentalism. The beauty of the concept was that his prescriptions were only available at authorized pharmacies—specifically, ones that agreed to pay him kickbacks. Between his surgical procedures and pharmaceutical scam, Brinkley was raking in an estimated $2,000,000 a year by the end of the 1920s (over $25,000,000 in current value).11
Dr. Brinkley was on top of the world, but cracks were forming beneath his feet. His goat gland implants sometimes caused infections that led to serious complications. In his first dozen years of practice, forty-two patients died at his clinic, many of whom were perfectly healthy when they arrived.12 For years, Brinkley had been accused of quackery by the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Morris Fishbein. In the spring of 1930, the Kansas City Star added its voice with a series of critical articles. The Kansas Medical Board responded by revoking Brinkley’s license to practice in the state. The Federal Radio Commission piled on by refusing to renew his broadcasting license.
Brinkley decided that the best way to strike back was to get himself elected governor and name his own men to the Kansas Medical Board. He ran a write-in campaign in the fall of 1930, and some say he would have won if the state attorney general hadn’t issued a last-minute ruling that disallowed as many as fifty thousand votes.13 Brinkley would campaign again in 1932 and ’34, although he lost both times.
Miffed by his treatment, Brinkley sold his radio station and relocated to Del Rio, Texas, where he opened a new hospital, eventually closing his Milford clinic. He thumbed his nose at the Federal Radio Commission by erecting a monster transmitter just across the Rio Grande in Villa Acuña, Mexico. In October 1931, Station XER became one of the first Mexican “border blasters,” broadcasting facilities powerful enough to drown out the weaker signals of US-based transmitters—and beyond the reach of US laws.14 Along with Brinkley’s promotional spiels, XER featured live musicians such as Hank Williams, Eddie Arnold, and Gene Autry. Advertisers paid dearly to flog a hodgepodge of kooky products, including genuine simulated diamonds and autographed pictures of Jesus. XER became a prototype for border blaster stations used by moneygrubbing evangelists and screaming DJs like Wolfman Jack.
Despite his many challenges, Brinkley continued to prosper through most of the 1930s. His new radio station brought in all the business he could handle—an estimated sixteen thousand patients in one four-year stretch.15 He purchased a mansion in Del Rio for his family, which now included a son, the beloved Johnny Boy. He bought yachts and a fleet of Cadillacs. He imported exotic animals to wander the grounds of his sixteen-acre estate. He threw lavish parties and traveled the world like a grand pooh-bah.
Brinkley had outfoxed his detractors for so long that he must have considered himself invincible—which is when he made the biggest mistake of his career. Fed up with the ongoing criticism from Morris Fishbein, he sued the AMA editor for libel in 1938. Unfortunately for Brinkley, the trial provided just the forum Fishbein had been looking for. In addition to underscoring Brinkley’s medical shortcomings, Fishbein’s attorneys laid out every detail of his lifelong history of deception—including his marital escapades and his larcenous Greenville partnership with the slippery “Dr.” James Crawford. The Texas jury sided with Fishbein, confirming that Brinkley was precisely what Fishbein had been calling him—a quack.16
The upshot of the trial was the rapid and total collapse of Brinkley’s empire. Publicly exposed as a fraud, Brinkley saw his business implode. He was hit with numerous malpractice suits, which drained his finances. The IRS came after him for back taxes. The US Postal Service indicted him for mail fraud. In 1939, the Mexican government took over his radio station. In February 1941, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Finally, his health gave out. He suffered from cancer and heart problems, and he had to have a leg amputated because of a blood clot. On May 26, 1942, at the age of fifty-six, he died of heart failure in a San Antonio hospital.
The enormous success that Brinkley enjoyed for so long—and the preposterous nature of his scam—have earned him a special place among the world’s long parade of medical charlatans. Even today, his im
pact can be felt. The courtroom exposure of the ineffectiveness of his goat-gland treatment raised the profile of the AMA as a watchdog against quackery, a function the association still performs.17 Brinkley also had a lasting influence on broadcasting. His radio promotions of his fraudulent surgical procedure and prescription drugs underscored the need for greater vigilance against false medical advertising. Today, the Federal Trade Commission remains alert for bogus claims of miracle cures.
John Brinkley left this world with his reputation in tatters, his life a testament to the destructiveness of unbridled greed. Brinkley prospered by preying on the fears of physical decay and failure that exist in all of us. As newspaper editor William Allen White pointed out, with a little different wiring, Brinkley might have been “a real leader of men.”18 Instead, he deceived and robbed his patients, and far too often he was the direct cause of their deaths. Brinkley has been called one of America’s worst serial killers.19 He may have been a monster, but he wasn’t an aberration. He was simply another member of what may be the world’s second oldest profession—the smooth-talking peddlers of the illusion of youth.
Ed Gein
Gein (foreground) after his arrest
In the midnight hours of a summer evening in 1952, a radiant full moon shone down on Plainfield, Wisconsin, a small, tranquil farming community in the central part of the state. It was a warm, slumberous night. Strands of cirrus clouds, like wisps of smoke, drifted slowly across the moon’s bright surface. Crickets chirped in the surrounding fields, and the occasional night bird boomed its melancholy notes in the nearby woodlands.
On the outskirts of Plainfield, the moonlight lit the town cemetery with startling clarity. The loudest sound to be heard here was the chick of a shovel biting into the loose soil above the casket of a middle-age woman who’d been laid to rest earlier in the day. If any of the residents of Plainfield had happened upon this lonely spot, the scene they would have witnessed might have sent them fleeing for their lives—or screaming into insanity. Someone, or something, was digging up the freshly buried body.
Standing waist deep in the open grave was a short, gray-haired man of slender build. As he paused from his digging and listened for signs of intruders, a beam of moonlight illuminated his upturned face. It was a visage straight from hell. The man wore a leather mask made from the facial skin of a human being he’d previously exhumed and violated, stealing the head and genitals of the female corpse. This nightmare figure, this beast, was forty-five-year-old Ed Gein, a local handyman and loner whose twisted thoughts and horrid desires churned in his mind like a pot of writhing eels.
Edward Theodore Gein was a true original in the annals of American crime.1 Starting in the late 1940s, this grave-robbing abomination perpetrated some of the most ghoulish outrages ever committed by a man—and all because he wanted to be a woman, a longing prompted by his abiding love and reverence for his deceased, domineering mother.2 When finally revealed, Gein’s perversions would shock the world, ignite a firestorm of media coverage in his bucolic hometown, and inspire a slew of Hollywood horror films, led off by Alfred Hitchcock’s terrifying masterpiece Psycho. The irony of Ed Gein’s warped existence was that this fearsome necrophile, transsexual, and murderer was the quintessential momma’s boy.
Ed Gein was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in August 1906, the second son of George and Augusta Gein, an unhappily married German couple who endured one another’s presence solely because of their strong Lutheran beliefs. An alcoholic failure, George Gein was ridiculed by his wife as an example of male ineptitude. The strong-willed Augusta Gein also tyrannized her two sons, constantly preaching to them about the evils of the world. She bombarded them with Old Testament stories of sin and damnation, urging them to beware of scheming female temptresses. This bitter, angry harridan clearly had no love for any members of the human race.
Augusta Gein felt compelled to take over the responsibility for her family’s financial support from her ne’er-do-well husband.3 Shortly after Ed was born, she opened a grocery store in La Crosse. In 1914, she moved the family to a farm outside rural Plainfield, hoping to isolate her sons from the temptations of city life. Other than venturing off the farm to attend school, Ed Gein and his older brother, Henry, were virtual prisoners, subjected to an endless round of hard physical labor and verbal abuse.
The young Ed Gein was an average student, although he creeped out his teachers and schoolmates with his peculiar ways, which included the disconcerting habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.4 Effeminate and bashful, he had trouble making friends and was frequently attacked by bullies. Throughout Gein’s formative years, his entire life revolved around his sainted mother, who he always tried to please despite her constant hectoring. It would have taken a much stronger psyche than Ed Gein possessed to have emerged from that cauldron of wrath and angst without a warped personality.
The restricted, lonely lives of Ed and Henry Gein continued into adulthood. After their father died in 1940, the two men began doing odd jobs around town to help support the family. Perhaps because of his identification with his mother and his latent femininity, Ed started babysitting for neighbors. He seemed to get along better with kids than with adults, although the townsfolk in Plainfield regarded both Gein brothers as hardworking and honest.5 If only they’d known about those eels wriggling around inside Ed Gein’s head.
Unlike his younger brother, Henry Gein appeared to be emotionally stable. He managed to withstand his mother’s constant disapproval, and he didn’t share her hatred of the outside world. On occasion, Henry criticized his mother in front of Ed, which alarmed the younger Gein. That may have prompted the first violent expression of Ed Gein’s perverse nature.
One day in the spring of 1944, Henry and Ed set about burning off a marshy area on their farm. At the end of the afternoon, Ed was supposedly unable to locate Henry and reported him missing. However, when a search party arrived at the farm, Gein took the men directly to his brother’s dead body, which showed bruising about the head. Although the police were suspicious, they didn’t pursue the matter. The county coroner ruled that Henry had been asphyxiated by smoke from the fire. Henry’s death left Ed and his mother alone together in their bizarre self-exile.
Whatever joy Ed may have felt at having no competition for his mother’s attention was short-lived. Not long after Henry’s death, Augusta Gein suffered a disabling stroke. Ed nursed her tenderly during her illness, even sharing her bed at times. Then in December 1945, Augusta was felled by a second stroke and died, leaving her distraught thirty-nine-year-old son adrift without his guiding light. Over the next decade, Ed Gein became ever more unhinged mentally and morally, descending into madness while continuing to lead the life of an innocuous, retiring handyman.6 What the world saw and what went on in Gein’s mind and on the lonely farm out on the edge of Plainfield could not have been further apart.
The first symptom of Gein’s mental deterioration came immediately after his mother’s death, when he closed off most of the rooms in the family home, preserving his mother’s downstairs bedroom and parlor exactly as they were as shrines to her memory. Gein retreated to the kitchen and a small connecting room where he slept. Closeted away in those two rooms, Gein slipped into a macabre fantasy world. Ever since his school days, he’d enjoyed reading adventure stories. Now he began reading horror magazines and accounts of freakish Nazi medical experiments. He studied human anatomy, transfixed by the female body. Silently, the eels were slithering to and fro.
The residents of Plainfield didn’t pay much attention to what went on out at the Gein place until late in 1957.7 On November 16 of that year, Bernice Worden, the owner of a local hardware store, went missing. From her sales receipts, the police learned that the last thing Worden had sold before she disappeared was a half-gallon of antifreeze. Worden’s son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, recalled that Ed Gein had been in the store a short time before and had commented that he needed some antifreeze.
The police paid a visit to the Gein far
m. Gein wasn’t home, but the police proceeded to look for the missing woman. What they discovered traumatized some of the investigating officers.8 Hanging in a shed attached to the rear of the house was the naked body of Bernice Worden—what was left of her. Worden had been decapitated and disemboweled, slit from crotch to throat like a dressed-out deer carcass. As the police officers entered Ed Gein’s fetid, trash-filled farmhouse, their eyes fell on one horror after another.
The men found Bernice Worden’s heart in a plastic bag by the kitchen stove, and her entrails were wrapped in newspaper (Gein later said that he intended to burn them). The police recoiled at the sight of lampshades and chairs covered with human skin, several masks fashioned from human faces, and skulls sitting atop the bedposts in Gein’s room. They found bowls made from sawed-off skulls, a shoebox filled with female genitals, a belt made from nipples, and human lips dangling from a window shade drawstring. The gruesome array inside the farmhouse was almost more than the human mind could comprehend. And all of it was the handiwork of shy little Eddie Gein.
Bernice Worden’s head was discovered in a burlap bag, and the preserved face and scalp of another victim—local tavern owner Mary Hogan, who’d been missing since 1954—was found in a paper sack. The police also uncovered a vest-like wrap made from a female torso, a “woman suit” that Gein would admit to having worn around his house, along with other female body parts.9 At times, he even donned these “trophies” and danced about in his yard at night in a vile subhuman ritual.
Altogether, the police discovered the remains of at least ten bodies. Gein was arrested and eventually confessed to the murders of Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, saying both victims reminded him of his mother. He maintained that the rest of the body parts had come from corpses he’d dug up in area cemeteries, which authorities were able to corroborate by opening some of the graves. Gein claimed that he’d never had sex with any of the bodies he exhumed or eaten human flesh. He told investigators that he had a different reason for gathering his sickening collection: after his mother died, he’d wanted to have a sex change operation, and he’d taken to adorning himself with the skin of women so he could feel what it would be like to be female.10
