Deviant Read online

  DEVIANT

  DON’T MISS THESE ACCLAIMED NOVELS BY HAROLD SCHECHTER

  NEVERMORE

  A dazzling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe

  Now available in hardcover from Pocket Books

  and

  OUTCRY

  Inspired by “Psycho” Killer Ed Gein

  LOOK FOR THESE TRUE-CRIME SHOCKERS BY “AMERICA’S PRINCIPAL

  CHRONICLE OF ITS GREATEST PSYSCHOPATIC KILLERS. ”*

  BESTIAL

  —Amazon.com

  “Compelling…chilling.”

  DERANGED

  —American Libraries

  “Horrifying.”

  DEPRAVED

  —Ann Rule

  “Shocking.”

  and

  THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA

  OF SERIAL KILLERS

  by Harold Schechter and David Everitt

  —The Boston Book Review*

  “The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”

  All available from Pocket Books

  AND BE SURE TO READ HAROLD SCHECHTER’S NEXT TRUE-CRIME NOVEL

  FATAL

  The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer

  Coming soon from Pocket Star Books

  Praise for Harold Schechter’s

  True-Crime Masterpieces

  THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS

  by Harold Schechter and David Everitt

  —The Boston Book Review

  “The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”

  —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

  “This grisly tome will tell you all you ever wanted to know (and more) about everything from ‘Axe Murderers’ to ‘Zombies,’… Schechter knows his subject matter….”

  —PI Magazine

  “The ultimate reference on this fascinating phenomenon.”

  DEVIANT

  The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”

  —Milwaukee Journal

  “A solidly researched, well-written account of the Gein story.”

  —Film Quarterly

  “[A] grisly, wonderful book … a scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.”

  DERANGED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!

  —American Libraries

  “This biography of the ultimate dirty old man, Albert Fish … pedophile, sadist, coprophiliac, murderer, cannibal, and self-torturer … [is] as horrifying as any novel could be.”

  —Booklist

  “Compelling … grippingly fascinating-repulsive.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real…. What Albert Fish did … would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  DEPRAVED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer

  —Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

  “A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer who embodied the ferociously dark side of America’s seemingly timeless preoccupations with ambition, money, and power. Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”

  —Ann Rule

  “This is must reading for crime buffs. Depraved demonstrates that sadistic psychopaths are not a modern-day phenomenon…. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “An astonishing piece of popular history. I unhesitatingly recommend [it] … to round out your understanding of the true depth, meaning, and perversity on [this] uniquely American brand of mayhem.”

  —Flint (MI) Journal

  “Destined to be a true-crime classic…. As chilling as The Silence of the Lambs and as bloodcurdling as the best Stephen King novel…. It will deprive you of sleep, and take your attention away from everything else on your schedule until you finish it.”

  —Syracuse Herald-American

  “[Schechter’s] writing keeps you turning the pages….”

  Critical Acclaim for Harold Schechter’s

  Novel Based on the Legend of Ed Gein …

  OUTCRY

  Voted Best Paperback Original of 1997 by Rocky Mountain News

  —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

  “This is a scary book….”

  —Paintedrock.com

  “FOUR STARS. Harold Schechter, an internationally acclaimed expert on true-crime murders by psychopathic serial killers, changes his medium by scribing a brilliant fictional account of these monsters…. All the characters are terrifyingly real…. Serial-killer aficionados need to read this thrilling tale that makes most of the subgenre seem cartoonish in comparison.”

  —Clues magazine

  “Schechter is unsurpassed…. Terrifying…. You will feel compelled to grip this novel in your hand until you finish.”

  Pocket Books by Harold Schechter

  The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

  (with David Everitt)

  Bestial

  Depraved

  Deranged

  Deviant

  Outcry

  Nevermore

  For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of 10 or more copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10020-1586.

  For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc., 100 Front Street, Riverside, NJ 08075.

  DEVIANT

  The Shocking

  True Story of the Original

  “Psycho”

  Harold Schechter

  Pocket Books

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1989 by Harold Schechter

  Cover art copyright © 1989 by Wide World Photos

  Originally published in hardcover in 1989 by Pocket Books

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue

  of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-02546-5

  ISBN 13: 978-0-6710-2546-5

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-0697-6

  First Pocket Books trade paperback printing October 1998

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover design by Brigid Pearson

  Cover photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Proverbs 21:16

  The man that wandereth out of the

  way of understanding

  Shall remain in the congregation of

  the dead.

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  ALTHOUGH THE SPELLING OF Gein would lead one to believe that the name rhymes with fine, it is actually pronounced with a long e, as in fiend.

  PROLOGUE

  In 1960, a maniac dressed in the clothes of his long-dead mother took a kitchen knife to a beauty in a bathtub and permanently altered the face of American horror. The murder occurred, of course, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a movie that not only changed the way an entire generation of filmgoers felt about being alone in the shower but also gave birth to a new kind of cinematic bogeyman. Psycho’s monster was not a Transylvanian vampire or a slithery, tentacled creature f
rom outer space but a shy, stammering bachelor with a boyish grin, a bland personality, and the utterly colorless name of Norman Bates.

  Although Norman never married, he has, during the past two decades, produced a multitude of offspring—an entire race of cinematic psychos who, following in his footsteps, have stalked and slaughtered countless young victims in movies with titles like Bloodthirsty Butchers, Meatcleaver Massacre, and Driller Killer. For all their extravagant goriness, however, few, if any, of these films can begin to match the supremely nightmarish power of Psycho.

  To a great extent, that power derives from Hitchcock’s diabolical ability to undermine our faith in the essential stability of our world. Like Norman’s first victim, Marion Crane, we are propelled on a trip down a very slippery road, one that carries us inexorably away from the familiar sights and signposts of the everyday world into a terrifying irrational night realm. Before we know it, we have come upon a place where the most ordinary situations and settings are suddenly transformed into the stuff of our deepest fears—where, in a single awful instant, a motel bathroom becomes a chamber of horrors; where an affable, perfectly harmless-looking fellow metamorphoses into a crazed, knife-wielding transvestite; and where a helpless old lady turns out to be a leering corpse, decked out in a knitted shawl and grizzled wig. By the time the trip is over, we step away from the screen with the gratitude of a dreamer just awakened from a particularly harrowing nightmare, thankful that the ordeal we have just lived through was only a fiction and persuaded that nothing in the real world could ever be as horrific as such a fantasy.

  Of all the shocks associated with Psycho, than, perhaps the greatest shock is this:

  It is based on the truth. There really was a Norman Bates.

  His name wasn’t Norman, and he didn’t run a motel. But on an isolated farmstead in the heartland of America, during the bland, balmy days of the Eisenhower era, there lived a quiet and reclusive bachelor with a lopsided grin and a diffident manner. During the day, his neighbors knew him as a slightly strange but accommodating man, the kind who could always be counted on to help with the threshing or lend a hand with a chore. It never occurred to any of them that his life was dominated by the overpowering presence of his dead mother or that his nights were spent performing the darkest and most appalling rituals. A robber of graves, a butcher of women’s bodies, a transvestite who dressed himself not in the clothes but in the very skin of his victims, he pursued his unspeakable deeds for years without detection. And when his atrocities were finally brought to light, they set off a spasm of national revulsion whose aftereffects are still felt today. They also inspired a writer named Robert Bloch to use them as the basis of a novel called Psycho, which, one year later, Alfred Hitchcock turned into the most frightening movie ever made. But compared to what really happened in Wisconsin thirty-odd years ago, Psycho is as reassuring as a fairy tale.

  1 Bloodlines

  1

  MICHAEL LESY, Wisconsin Death Trip

  “By the end of the nineteenth century, country towns had become charnel houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. ”

  Wisconsin, the natives will boast, is a garden state, and as you head north on the highway from Madison on a limpid spring day, you see at once that the claim is simple truth. On either side, the road is lined with postcard-pretty vistas—massive red barns, silos like silver bullets, tranquil white farmhouses nestled in thick groves of trees. The rich, rolling pastures are dotted with ponds, cattle graze lazily on the slopes, and the soil is dark and loamy. An air of prosperity pervades the landscape, as palpable as the aroma of freshly mown hay. One hundred years ago, the writer Hamlin Garland described this part of the state as a “panorama of delight,” and the region remains as picturesque as ever. This is Kodak country. Brightly painted billboards invite travelers to family restaurants, farmers’ markets, and campgrounds. A roadside advertisement for the American Breeder’s Service promotes business with the kind of gently self-mocking good humor characteristic of America’s heartland: “I Heard It through the Bovine.”

  Thirty miles farther north, the landscape changes. The farms thin out; the countryside seems devoid of inhabitants. Occasionally, the highway passes through an improbably small town, a one-street village lined with a general store, a gas station, a tavern, a church, and a handful of white clapboard houses. Even with your speed cut down to thirty, you make it through the entire length of the village within a few seconds. Then you are out in the country again, traveling for miles without passing another vehicle or spotting a single creature, except, perhaps, for a solitary red-winged blackbird settling on a fencepost or the rigid corpse of a run-over deer sprawled stiff-legged by the roadside. Still, the landscape is intensely pretty here, perhaps even more seductively peaceful than the farmland to the south. Here, Wisconsin seems less like a garden state or a vast, thriving dairyland than a lush, sprawling park, an endless expanse of bright green meadows and thickly wooded hills.

  It is not until you cross over into the south-central plain area, sixty or so miles north of the capital, that you feel you have suddenly entered a different—and far less hospitable—world. Though the signs along the shoulder offer a variety of neighborly greetings—“Marquette County 4-H Club Welcomes You,” “Welcome to Waushara, Christmas Tree Capital of the World”—the area has a lonely and distinctly desolate air. The few ramshackle farms you pass look as though they haven’t been worked in years. Across a yard littered with the rusting scraps of farm machinery, a wasted old man, dressed in ragged bib overalls and supported by a pair of wooden canes, makes his way painfully toward a tumbledown barn. The sense of hardship and privation here is as tangible as the smug prosperity of the south. Every part of the landscape seems bleak and ungiving. The grass looks parched; the sky, even on a perfect spring day, presses down on you; and the soil is a faded pink, the same sickly color that the makers of children’s crayons (in the days before anyone recognized the inherent racism of the label) used to call “flesh.”

  To some Wisconsinites, this flat and infertile section of the state is known as “sand country.”

  Others have called it Wisconsin’s “great dead heart.”

  Within the past twenty years, parts of this region have been resuscitated by advances in agricultural technology. Sophisticated irrigation equipment in particular has given the dead heart some life and kept it beating. Hundreds of failed, ramshackle farms have been razed, replaced by high-yield potato fields. Scattered throughout the countryside are modest ranch houses, some with satellite-dish antennas and backyard pools. Still, this has always been a poor and underpopulated land, oppressive in its emptiness, where most of the inhabitants have struggled to eke out a living in remote and isolated farm communities—places with humble, quintessentially American names: Friendship. Wild Rose. Plainfield.

  Plainfield—the name seems particularly well suited for a place so flat and featureless that even an official state guidebook characterizes it as completely “nondescript.” It’s surprising to discover, then, that the name doesn’t refer to the region at all. It was bestowed on the town by one of its founding fathers, a transplanted New Englander named Elijah Waterman, who settled there in 1849, put up a twelve-by-six shanty which served as both his home and the area’s only hotel, and christened the town in honor of his birthplace in Plainfield, Vermont. Within thirty years, the little village boasted several churches, a bank, a weekly newspaper, and a variety of businesses: three general stores, two blacksmiths, a drugstore, a tailor shop, a farm-implement warehouse, a gristmill.

  The population remained small, however, never rising much above eight hundred inhabitants, most of them poor, struggling farmers, toiling to wrest even a marginal living out of the dry, stony soil—growing some rye, raising a little livestock, cultivating potatoes that often turned out to be too inferior to sell as food and had to be hauled by the wagonload to the local starch factory. The land mocked their efforts. Everything about it seemed to speak of barrennes
s and futility, even the big lake set in the southeast corner of the township, whose name reflected the sterility of the surrounding countryside: Sand Lake, the settlers called it.

  In spite of all they had to contend with—the poverty, the crushing isolation, the unremitting struggle with the hard, unyielding land—the people of Plainfield took pride in their community. It was a solid, decent, neighborly place where old-fashioned values prevailed—where the whole town would turn out for the grade-schoolers’ annual Christmas operetta, where Mrs. Duane Wilson’s potluck dinner for the Plainfield Homemakers was a special event, and where Merle Beckley’s trip to the National 4-H Congress would make front-page news in the local paper. Even the minuscule size of their village—a small strip of houses and stores with a single paved road running through it—was a source of affectionate good humor. One thing about Plainfield, the townsfolk would josh, you never have to worry about kids hanging around the street corners. There aren’t any street corners.

  Plainfield, they would tell you, was a nice place to live.

  Of course, they had their full share of tragedy and disaster, too. Fires raged through the town on several occasions, consuming most of the buildings on Main Street. Cyclones, blizzards, and savage Midwestern thunderstorms took lives, killed cattle, and occasionally destroyed entire farms. Men were shot in hunting accidents, maimed by farm machinery, or left paralyzed when their pickups went skidding off icy roads or collided with trains. And suicide and murder took their toll. Indeed, for many years, the nice little community of Plainfield was identified in local history books as the site of a particularly vicious killing that occurred at the very beginning of the town’s existence.

  It happened in 1853, just five years after the first settler to the Plainfield area established the town by marking off a tract of land and setting up a simple log dwelling. A local squatter known as Firman was on a trip to Milwaukee, where he met a New Yorker named Cartwright, who was looking to migrate with his family to the Midwest. The territory around Plainfield—Waushara County—desperately needed more settlers, and Firman was willing to give Cartwright forty acres of his own property to entice the Easterner to the area. Cartwright accepted the offer.