Deviant Read online

  GEIN: That is as close as I can remember. I was in a regular daze like, and I can’t swear to it.

  KILEEN: Then you said that you took the blood from the body and put that out—buried it out by the toilet house where you pointed out.

  GEIN: East of the toilet.

  KILEEN: Do you remember what you had the blood in? Was it a pail, bucket, or jar?

  GEIN: It must have been a pail.

  KILEEN: What kind of pail?

  GEIN: Probably galvanized. Probably a 10-quart pail.

  KILEEN: Then you proceeded to dress out the body? You told me that you thought you were dressing out a deer.

  GEIN: That is the only explanation I can think was in my mind.

  Kileen had also raised the question of cannibalism, asking Eddie if he had butchered Mrs. Worden with the intention of eating her. But the little man had been evasive. “On that point,” Kileen told reporters, “he still has a lapse of memory.”

  But the confession of Mrs. Worden’s killing was not in itself the most sensational part of Gein’s statement to Kileen. After all, Eddie’s guilt had never been in doubt, not since Friday evening when Frank Worden searched through his mother’s store and turned up the receipt for the antifreeze Gein had purchased that morning. The real shocker had to do with Gein’s revelation regarding his unholy collection of human scraps and tatters.

  Gein denied that his “trophies”—the faces and heads, vulvas and breasts, noses and lips, skin and bones which littered his hell-house—were the remnants of murder victims. He wasn’t a crazed killer at all. In fact, Eddie claimed, Mrs. Worden’s murder was an aberration, an accident. When Kileen asked if Gein had ever killed anyone else besides the shopkeeper, Eddie shook his head. “Not to my knowledge,” he said.

  Then where, Kileen wanted to know, did all the body parts come from?

  The answer was simple. From graveyards, said Eddie.

  As the lawmen listened in astonishment, Gein explained that for a five-year period, beginning in 1947, he had made a large number of nocturnal visits—as many as forty—to area cemeteries. Most of the time, he had returned home without committing any offense. But on at least nine of those occasions, he had dug up and opened caskets, removed what he wanted, then covered over the coffins again, leaving the violated graves, he assured Kileen, “in apple pie order.”

  The cadavers were all newly dead women, middle-aged or older, whose obituaries Gein had read in local papers. Eddie had known a number of them while they were alive. Beyond these few facts, Eddie had little to say. All of his grave robbing, he insisted—like the murder of Mrs. Worden—had taken place while he was in a “daze.”

  * * *

  Immediately after Kileen’s announcement, at eleven A.M., the fifty-one-year-old suspect, looking frail and wearing what was to become his trademark outfit—rubber boots, red cloth gloves, workshirt buttoned to the neck, woolen jacket, plaid deerhunter’s cap—was hustled from the jail to a waiting automobile. Accompanying him were Kileen, Sheriff Schley, and County Judge Boyd Clark.

  “He has something he wants to show us,” said Kileen.

  It was the first time Eddie had appeared in public since his arrest, and as he moved through the throng of reporters, flashbulbs popping all around him, he buried his face behind his shackled hands.

  Gein was driven out to his farm, where he took a group of officials on a tour of the premises, pointing out various locations around the property, including the spot behind his outhouse where he had emptied the pail full of blood drained from Mrs. Worden. A crowd of journalists followed close behind. Already, Eddie seemed much more at ease with the news photographers, making no efforts to hide his face from their lenses. On the contrary, he gazed directly at the cameras, smiling for them with his shy little grin.

  The pictures taken that morning show a slight, perfectly ordinary-looking, middle-aged rustic who seems about as threatening as a Salvation Army Santa Claus. For the newsmen who snapped those pictures, as well as for the millions of people who would see them that evening on the front pages of papers across the Midwest, it was almost impossible to believe that such a meek-looking fellow was—by his own admission and in the strict sense of the term—a ghoul.

  Eddie was returned to the jail at around one P.M., but less than two hours later, he was taken from his cell again and brought to the Waushara County Courthouse, an imposing edifice adorned with a row of Ionic columns and fronted by a handsome pair of statues honoring the heroes who died for the Union and on the battlefields of World War I. There he was arraigned before Judge Clark on a charge of armed robbery, stemming from the theft of Bernice Worden’s cash register (containing forty-one dollars), which had been found in Gein’s home.

  Kileen had told reporters earlier that Gein would be charged with first-degree murder “in a day or two.” In the meantime, he was filing the larceny charge at the request of Charles Wilson, director of the State Crime Laboratory, who wanted to hold off on the murder charge until his staff had finished going through the gruesome mass of evidence on Gein’s farm.

  Brought before the bench, Gein told Judge Clark that he wanted a lawyer and could afford to hire one. The arraignment was adjourned for a week to permit the prisoner to obtain counsel. Bail was set at ten thousand dollars, and Eddie was returned to his cell.

  19

  JUDGE ROBERT H. GOLLMAR

  “Mostly, Gein liked older, more well-developed women—dead that is.”

  Late Monday, Lieutenant Vern Weber, chief of detectives of the La Crosse Police Department, arrived in Plainfield to check out the purported uncovering of clues linking Gein to the abduction of Evelyn Hartley. Reports issuing from the farm were scattered and often contradictory, but, according to some accounts, one of the vulvas found among Eddie’s genitalia collection was that of a young girl. There were also rumors that clippings on the Hartley case had turned up among the mountainous piles of old newspapers inside Gein’s home. When reporters asked Weber if a solution to the four-year-old case was finally at hand, the lieutenant was hopeful but noncommittal. “It looks good, and then again it doesn’t look good,” he replied.

  After spending some time examining the evidence inside Gein’s home and interviewing Eddie twice at the Waushara County jailhouse, Weber met once again with the press.

  Like every other person who had actually been inside the house or talked directly to Gein, Weber was subjected to an interrogation himself, grilled by a news-hungry mob of reporters who were desperate for any eyewitness descriptions of the contents of the “death farm” or of the man they had dubbed “the mad butcher of Plainfield.”

  Weber told the journalists that much of Eddie’s macabre collection had already been transferred to the crime lab’s truck. There he had seen “ten women’s heads, some with eyes and some without.” A few of the heads “were complete with skulls, others were merely skin.” The heads—some of which had been found behind chairs and other pieces of furniture—“were in a very good state of preservation.” Weber had asked Eddie about that, and Eddie had replied that he had cured the heads in brine.

  Weber said that he had beheld with his own eyes “a chair with a seat which appeared to be made of human skin.” The chair, he explained, was “a typical kitchen chair which probably once had a rattan seat.” He had also seen “a knife with a handle that appeared to have skin covering.”

  Weber went on to describe his conversations with Gein. The detective said he was “inclined to believe” Gein’s story about being in a daze during his body-snatching expeditions. The little man had told Weber that whenever he felt one of his “grave-robbing spells coming on,” he “would pray and that sometimes the prayers would snap him out of it.” According to Gein, he had “come out of a spell one time while he was digging up a grave and had stopped” and immediately returned home.

  At the same time, he suggested to Weber that his interest in the cadavers was purely scientific. All during his youth, Gein told the detective, “he had wanted to be a doctor.” The
grave robbing, he implied, was motivated by his intellectual curiosity. He wanted bodies to dissect in order to learn about human anatomy firsthand.

  In any event, he insisted he hadn’t looted a grave since 1954. “He said maybe his prayers had been answered,” Weber told the reporters. Weber discounted the stories of cannibalism. “That’s out,” he told the reporters. He had asked Gein “strong questions” on that subject. Gein had sworn that “he never ate a bit of that stuff and I don’t believe that he did,” Weber said.

  As for the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, the lieutenant was inclined to believe that Gein was not, after all, involved. Though one of the cellophane-wrapped heads in Eddie’s collection seemed to have come from a younger woman, the face “bore no resemblance whatever” to Evelyn Hartley’s. Moreover, Weber said, a pair of tennis shoes which had been recovered at the time of the crime and were believed to belong to the kidnapper were much too large for Gein. “The shoes we found are size eleven-and-a-half,” the detective explained. “Gein wears about an eight.”

  There was, Weber stated, another piece of physical evidence that might conceivably be linked to Gein—a denim jacket which had been discovered just off a highway near La Crosse and was presumed to have been worn by the kidnapper. The jacket had a faded stripe running across its back, as though it had been worn under a harness or suspension belt, the kind used by painters and ironworkers. Since Gein had occasionally worked as a logger, he himself might have used a harness while trimming branches from treetops. But “on the whole,” Weber conceded, “I’m not too encouraged about developing anything along that line.”

  Weber also said that, though Gein had been born in La Crosse and lived there until he was seven, “he claims he hasn’t been back since.” Gein still had relatives who resided in La Crosse, Weber told the reporters, “and we’re going to check with them.” Gein’s alibi—that on the day of the girl’s disappearance he had been doing some odd jobs for a neighbor—would also be checked out.

  In the meantime, the heads and skulls discovered in Gein’s home were being examined against Evelyn Hartley’s dental charts, which had been forwarded to District Attorney Kileen by La Crosse County Criminal Investigator A. M. Josephson.

  Weber concluded by offering his personal assessment of Gein. “He is a very sincere, very meek fellow. You’d never believe he’d be the kind of guy to do such a thing. You feel like he needs help awful bad.”

  This level-headed—even sympathetic—description differed markedly from the picture of Gein as a fiendishly depraved sex-butcher that was being promulgated by the popular press. But it was, in fact, consistent with the reactions of many professionals—lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, nurses, and others—who would have contact with Eddie Gein in the years to come.

  Although a link between Gein and Evelyn Hartley was coming to seem increasingly unlikely, there were signs that Eddie’s farmhouse might, in fact, contain an answer to the three-year-old mystery of Mary Hogan’s disappearance. Gein’s possible connection to the apparent murder of the middle-aged tavern keeper was a subject of open speculation by the press. Monday’s newspapers ran front-page stories suggesting that a major break in the Hogan case was imminent. Though the information filtering out of the farmhouse was spotty, there were reports that investigators had uncovered a large cache of firearms inside Gein’s home and that one of the weapons was a .32 automatic pistol. One of the major clues in the Hogan case was a spent .32-caliber cartridge, which had been found next to a dried puddle of blood on the floor of her tavern the day she disappeared.

  It was also known that Portage County authorities, including Sheriff Herbert Wanerski, Undersheriff Myron Groshek, and District Attorney John Haka, had spent several hours questioning Gein, who had steadfastly denied knowing Mrs. Hogan, though he did concede that he had been inside her tavern—located just six miles north of his farm—on several occasions.

  Wanerski and his colleagues, however, had no intention of letting up on Gein until they had extracted a confession, since, unbeknownst to the press, they already had in their possession a piece of evidence that left no doubt about his guilt.

  What they had was the grisly relic discovered in Eddie’s charnel house by Deputy Sheriff Arnold Fritz—Mary Hogan’s face, skinned from her skull, softened with oil, and stuffed inside a paper sack.

  20

  CORONER RUSSELL DARBY, after viewing Edward Gein’s home

  “It’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.”

  A brutal storm, one of the worst November blizzards Wisconsin had suffered in years, dumped more than a foot of snow onto parts of the state before tapering off on Tuesday. Three people died of heart attacks while shoveling their front walks, another was crushed to death when the ice-laden roof of his carport collapsed on him. Several hunters were lost in the woods; others were stranded in snow-bound camps. The hunting itself came to a virtual halt, the three-day kill figure standing at 28,675 deer.

  The savage weather, however, did not deter a crowd of newsmen from making their way out to the Gein farm Tuesday morning. The press had finally received permission to enter Eddie’s house.

  By then, the State Crime Lab had removed the ghastliest of Gein’s possessions from the premises. But even so, the house conveyed an intense impression of madness and morbidity, and, as one reporter noted, the newsmen—after days of clamoring for a peek inside the killer’s home—did not seem particularly eager to stay once they found themselves there.

  They did, however, remain long enough for a tour of the already infamous “death house,” conducted by Deputy Dave Sharkey, who pointed out the spot in the summer kitchen where Mrs. Worden’s butchered carcass had dangled from the rafters, the pile of old clothes in Eddie’s bedroom under which investigators had found a box full of human skulls, and the kitchen table that held one of Eddie’s cranial-cap soup bowls.

  News photographers were finally allowed to take pictures of Eddie’s living quarters. The grainy black-and-white photos, which caught the heart-sickening gloom of Gein’s household, appeared that evening in papers throughout the Midwest. For the first time, the public got a close inside look at Eddie’s madhouse. The papers also printed shots of various crime lab investigators sifting through the remaining contents of the rooms. Since nothing of Eddie’s graveyard gleanings was left in the house, the caption writers had to rely on lurid speculations to create the necessary titillation. One typical photograph showed a couple of investigators shining a flashlight on a perfectly ordinary-looking woman’s handbag, presumably “in an attempt to determine whether it is made of leather or human skin.”

  The most vivid description of Gein’s dwelling, however, was provided by a Milwaukee Journal staff writer named Robert W. Wells in a lengthy piece headlined “INCREDIBLY DIRTY HOUSE WAS HOME OF SLAYER.” The article captured both the unimaginable filthiness of the house and the crazy incongruity of its contents. Wells evoked a place where a picture of Christ gazing skyward at an angel might hang on one wall and the eyeless face of a female corpse on another. Where a stack of old children’s books with titles like Dorothy Dale, A Girl of Today might lie on a table alongside a book on embalming. Where a pile of Crackerjack premiums—plastic whistles, toy airplanes—might share shelf space with a section of human skull. Though Wells’s piece conjured up the overpowering creepiness of the ghoul’s abode, it ended on a distinctly poignant note, one that called attention not to Gein’s derangement but to his terrifying isolation:

  The little man who lived here amid his mad collections, in a state of disorder that few of the animals who were his closest neighbors would have tolerated, had most of the doors and windows sealed with heavy tarpaper or thick, dirty draperies.

  Inside the decaying house the four rooms which he used were so filled with junk that even so slight a man as Gein must have had difficulty moving about.

  There was plenty of space that could have been his for the taking, however—the nearly empty upstairs with its five uncluttered rooms; and the two downs
tairs rooms which he had sealed up securely and dedicated to the dead past when Ed Gein was not alone in the world.

  Someone else visited the Gein home on Tuesday—William Belter, a thirty-year-old former state assemblyman from Wautoma who had accepted Gein’s request to serve as his defense attorney. A Wood County deputy sheriff gave Belter a guided tour of the house, complete with a graphic description of Eddie’s death-mask collection, which Belter later shared with the press.

  The officer explained how the masks had been made by separating the faces from the skulls, then stuffing the skins with newspapers. According to the deputy, investigators had found “more noses than faces,” which had led them to revise their estimate of the number of Eddie’s victims. Originally, the officer explained, the police believed there was a total of ten or eleven women involved—“depending on whether Mrs. Worden’s head was counted.” The sum now stood at fifteen, a figure based on the recovery of ten masks, Mrs. Worden’s severed head, and four “extra noses.”

  Gein had spent the previous night being questioned by a pair of police officers from the Chicago Homicide Bureau, who had traveled to Wautoma in the hope of shedding light on three highly publicized unsolved murder cases: the butchering of a woman named Judith Anderson, the mysterious deaths of two sisters named Grimes, and the slaying of three young boys whose mutilated bodies had been discovered in an Illinois forest preserve in 1955.

  Gein insisted that he had never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and then only once, for his army physical in 1942. After an interrogation that lasted until three in the morning, the Chicago detectives announced to the press that they believed Gein was telling the truth.

  Still, there were those who felt that Gein, for all his apparent meekness and simplicity, was actually a shrewd and calculating individual—a “smart cookie,” in the words of one observer—whose cagey replies to his questioners revealed the workings of a diabolically cunning mind. The best way to check the validity of his claims, Kileen and others felt, was to administer a lie detector test. Plans had been made to transport Eddie to Madison on Tuesday morning, where he would be questioned by the crime lab’s polygraph expert, Joe Wilimovsky.