Eat Thy Neighbour

by Daniel Diehl

  Now almost completely lost in his own, increasingly strange world, Ed only rarely went into Plainfield unless he needed groceries or someone called and asked him to do some odd job or other. The only times he opened up a little bit were on those rare occasions when he stopped in at Mary Hogan’s Tavern, a roadhouse next to the highway that ran between the Gein farm and Plainfield. Mary was a pleasantly plump woman at the top end of middle age who, like almost everyone who knew Ed, felt sorry for him. Being of a charitable nature, she referred to him as a ‘poor soul’ or called him ‘Eddie’, as though he were still a child who had somehow not quite grown up. More callous types just called him ‘Weird old Ed’.

  It was only the town’s kids who really gave him a hard time. They taunted him mercilessly. Among younger kids the Gein home had the reputation of being haunted, and the boys would dare each other to run into the yard and throw stones at the house or get close and peer in at the windows. On more than one occasion a terrified child would run home with tales of ‘dead people’s heads’ hanging on the walls inside the house. On the one occasion when a customer at Mary Hogan’s brought his son’s ramblings up to Ed, Eddie laughed and said that he did have heads on the wall at home. His cousin had been in the Pacific Islands during the war and had sent back some Maori shrunken heads that now hung in his bedroom. Ed probably got some strange looks for that comment – but everybody knew Ed was a little strange. When he had ‘had a few’ he would ramble on about head-hunters and Nazi experiments and the sex-change operation that Christine Jorgenson person had had, and odd things like that. But then, Ed had always been ‘different’, but he was harmless. He wouldn’t even go hunting with the guys from town because he said he just couldn’t shoot anything. Certainly, he didn’t seem any more peculiar now than he had been before his mother died. Or so it appeared.

  Thanks to his bizarre library, Ed developed a fascination with female anatomy for the first time. Never having allowed himself to have any sexual feeling for fear of being seduced by an evil woman and sent straight to hell, Ed had no idea how to deal with these new, disturbing thoughts. He wasn’t even sure how they related to his mother who had been the best and purest woman he had ever known. What Ed did know was that women were stronger than men. He knew this because of the way his mother had dominated him and Henry and their dad. But now that she was gone, Ed didn’t have anywhere to turn for that kind of strength. If he were a woman, it would all be different. With reality now slipping further and further away from him, Ed could no longer tell if he just wanted to look at women, or to touch them or, maybe, to be one of them. What would it be like to have breasts and a vagina? Would he feel different . . . stronger?

  For a while he contented himself with dressing up in his mother’s clothes and telling himself what to do. It must have seemed a relief to have his mother near him again, advising him and taking away the confusion. Later, he toyed with the idea of castrating himself, but gave up the idea; it still wouldn’t make him a woman. He needed something else.

  One day in 1947, while reading the newspaper, Ed’s attention landed on the obituary column where he saw the funeral notice for a local woman. Finally, Ed knew what it was he wanted to do. He called one of his few friends, another old farmer named Gus, who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and told him he needed some help with a little project. When Gus came over, Ed explained that he was doing some medical experiments and needed a human body. Since grave digging was hard work, Ed wondered if Gus would mind giving him a hand? Gus had no objections, so together they robbed the grave the night after the funeral and took the body back to Ed’s place. Over the next few years, Ed would enlist Gus’s help any number of times. On one occasion they even robbed Augusta Gein’s grave. Gus never knew what Ed was doing with all those cadavers and, so far as we know, he never asked. It was just part of Ed’s experiments. Things went on this way until the day Gus was committed to an old people’s home and Ed was left without anyone to help him rob graves. But grave digging was hard work and Ed was not quite up to doing it himself. He would have to find another way to get women’s bodies.

  On the afternoon of 8 December 1954, police got a call from a customer who had stopped off at Mary Hogan’s Tavern and found the place standing wide open but with no sign of Mary. The police found bloodstains behind the bar leading all the way through the back door and into the parking lot. On the floor of the taproom was the spent cartridge from a .32 calibre pistol. But with no body and no other evidence, they had little to base an investigation on. It wasn’t the first disappearance in that part of Wisconsin, either. In the past seven years two other girls had vanished. On 1 May 1947, eight-year-old Georgia Weckler had disappeared on her way home from school, in the town of Jefferson, and was never heard from again. Six years later, a fifteen-year-old La Crosse girl named Evelyn Hartley had vanished while babysitting. In the house, police found Evelyn’s glasses and shoes and several miles away they discovered some of her clothes, but no trace of the girl was ever found. Mary’s murder seemed to form part of a pattern, but there just weren’t enough pieces to solve the puzzle.

  Meanwhile, life around Plainfield stayed pretty much the same. New owners took over Mary’s Tavern, Eddie Gein came into town now and again, only stopping in at the grocery store, the hardware store or the bar for a few ‘quick ones’ before driving back to the increasingly dilapidated farmhouse.

  One of the occasions when Ed dropped into town was on 15 November 1957. On his regular rounds he stopped at Worden’s hardware store where he chatted with Bernice Worden, who had run the place since her husband’s death some years earlier. Sometimes her son, Frank, came in to help her out but he worked as a local deputy sheriff, so his time was limited. That day, Frank was in the store and both he and his mother took time to chat with poor old Eddie. They exchanged pleasantries and Ed asked Frank if he had been out deer hunting yet that year. Frank said not yet, but he was going out the next day. Ed mumbled something to Bernice about needing some anti-freeze for his Ford, but left without buying anything.

  Late the next afternoon Frank called at the hardware store on his way back from hunting. He hadn’t had any luck and was tired and cold, but decided to take a minute to see his mother before he went home. The door was open and the lights were on, but there was no sign of Bernice. Frank called for her and looked around for a minute before he realised the cash register was gone. On the floor behind the counter was a coagulating pool of blood. The only thing near the spot where the cash register should have been was a receipt for a half-gallon of anti-freeze – made out to Ed Gein.

  Frank decided that Ed must have come in the afternoon before to find out when he would be away, and then returned to rob the place. Obviously he had got into a struggle with Bernice and something terrible had happened. Frank immediately called his boss, Sheriff Art Schley, and repeated his findings and suppositions. They agreed to meet at the Gein farm and Schley told deputies Chase and Spees to scour the area for any sign of Ed Gein and arrest him on suspicion if they located him. Almost before Sheriff Schley arrived at the Gein farm, Chase and Spees were driving past Hill’s grocery store just as Ed was backing his battered pick-up truck out of the parking lot. When they pulled up behind the truck, Ed offered no resistance, but mumbled, ‘Somebody framed me.’ ‘Framed you for what?’ Chase demanded. Ed looked at the officer as though he were confused. ‘Well, about Mrs Worden.’ He answered. ‘What about Mrs Worden?’ ‘Well, she’s dead, ain’t she?’ Without another word, Chase and Spees hauled Ed to jail.

  By the time Art Schley and Frank Worden got to Ed’s house it was already dark, both inside and out. Ed was not there, but Frank and Art decided to try the doors. The main doors were locked, but the door to the old summer kitchen, which Ed used as a woodshed, was slightly ajar. Since there was no electricity at the house, the two had to use their electric torches. Fumbling around in the near dark, Schley felt something bump against his shoulder. Raising his light, he saw what, at first, appeared to be a field-dressed deer.
The carcass was hanging from the ceiling, legs splayed, its torso slit from pelvis to throat, the innards, genitals and anus removed. It took a minute for the men to realise what they were looking at. It was the body of Bernice Worden. Nearby, in a box, were her intestines but her head was nowhere to be seen.

  After a few seconds of frozen horror, the men stumbled outside to be violently sick. Once they gathered themselves enough to function, Art Schley called his office and demanded reinforcements. Within minutes more than a dozen officers had answered the frantic summons. While some of the men scoured the grounds and outbuildings, Art, Frank and the rest forced their way into the house. What they found would make Jack the Ripper look like a rank amateur.

  Using their torches and kerosene lamps, the men stumbled through a maze of reeking filth and collected garbage. Boxes of junk, piles of newspaper, magazines and rotting food waste were everywhere, but it was what lay mixed in with the mess that told Ed’s real story. In a pan on the stove lay a human heart and in the refrigerator were piles of human organs, some fresh, others quietly putrefying. The kitchen chairs had been reupholstered in human skin and the same material had been used to recover the lampshades and wastebasket. More skin had been used to turn an old 2lb coffee can into an Indian style tom-tom. The odd-looking bowl on the table was the top of a human skull. The finds in Ed’s bedroom were even worse. A broken table had been propped up with a human shinbone and skulls grinned at them from the top of the bedposts. Beneath the bed they found a box of women’s vaginas – the one painted silver turned out to be Augusta Gein’s. On the walls were what appeared to be a collection of shrivelled Halloween masks. They were actually the facial skin of nine of Ed’s victims. The main wall decoration was a preserved human head – the one the boys had been babbling about and could not get anyone to believe them.

  Hour after hour the dazed deputies combed through the mess, uncovering one nightmare after another. In the wardrobe, the dressing table and scattered around the room were Ed’s clothes. There was a waistcoat of human flesh, the breasts still in place, a pair of hip-length stockings made of flesh and bracelets of plaited skin. Finally there was an entire bodysuit: it was anatomically correct, breasts, vagina and all. There was even a lovingly crafted mask to go with the bodysuit: the face, like the suit material, had once belonged to Augusta Gein. Finally, around 4.30am they found Frank Worden’s mother’s head inside a burlap bag. Nails had been driven into her ears and a length of twine tied to each of them, as though Ed were going to hang it on the wall next to his other trophies. In all, the remains of more than a dozen female bodies were scattered around the pigsty of a house.

  The days that followed were a nightmare of confusion for everyone connected with the case. Local deputies and State Police combed every inch of the Gein property looking for whatever new horrors they might uncover, while forensic experts from the state capital in Madison came and went, carting away the finds in an effort to – quite literally – piece together the exact number of Ed’s victims. The number they eventually came up with was fifteen, but they admitted it was only a ‘best estimate’. How many more had been done away with entirely, no one could say.

  While one group of officers grilled Ed in the Watoma County Jail, others tried to connect Ed – or some of his ‘trophies’ – to the long-missing girls, Georgia Weckler and Evelyn Hartley, and to the disappearance of saloon owner Mary Hogan.

  At first, Ed simply refused to talk about anything but finally, after more than a day of intensive questioning, he admitted culpability in the death of Bernice Worden. He insisted that although he did remember going to the hardware store, he didn’t remember killing her. He said he was confused and felt dazed before and during the murder. He did remember taking the cash register, but insisted he had not meant to rob the store – he just wanted to take the register apart to see how it worked and Frank was welcome to take back the $41 that had been in the cash drawer.

  As to the rest of the body parts that littered the Gein home, Ed insisted they were all the pickings of his forays into the graveyard but, with the exception of his mother, he couldn’t be sure who they all were. He was, however, happy to give the officers all the names he could remember. The whole story was reeled off in a completely matter-of-fact way. Sometimes Ed even seemed to enjoy telling it. He appeared to have no concept of the enormity of what he had done. In an attempt to verify, or dismiss, Ed’s story Sheriff Schley asked the local judge for an exhumation order to dig up the graves Ed had so far admitted to desecrating. All of the coffins in question proved to have been tampered with, some of their contents missing entirely, while others were only missing some parts of the body.

  Eventually, Ed admitted to killing Mary Hogan, explaining that both she and Mrs Worden had reminded him of his mother. It seemed that slightly overweight, middle-aged women were the only type he was interested in – and only because they looked like Augusta Gein. The question of how, exactly, his brother Henry had died cropped up again, but Ed staunchly denied any involvement. Finally, investigators gave up trying to connect Ed Gein with the disappearance of the two schoolgirls or his brother’s death and turned him over to the Wisconsin mental health authorities who placed him in the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Waupun, for further examination.

  It did not take long before everyone in Plainfield, and the surrounding territory, knew what kind of awful things had been going on at the old Gein place, but it was not until the story broke a few days later in the local press, the Shawano Evening Ledger, that it became really big news. In a matter of days Plainfield was swamped with reporters, photographers and television and radio people. Nothing like this had ever happened anywhere, and the stunned people of Eisenhower-era America were both fascinated and repelled by the horrific tale. In December 1957, only weeks after the event, two of America’s three biggest magazines, Life and Time, ran the story of Ed Gein’s ‘House of Horrors’.

  While the people of Plainfield tried to be patient with the onslaught of the paparazzi, they also wished they would just go away and leave them alone. It was mostly the kids, with their ‘I-told-you-so’ attitude, who made the most of their tiny town’s notoriety. They started telling tasteless ‘Geiner’ jokes that soon swept the country. The Geiners ran something like this.

  Q. What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him?

  A. Have a heart!

  Q. Why did they let Ed Gein out of jail on New Year’s Eve?

  A. So he could dig up a date.

  There were even limericks, one of which ran as follows:

  There once was an old man named Ed

  Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed

  When he wanted to fiddle

  He cut out her middle

  And hung up the rest in his shed.

  It was all too sick, but to children who could not understand the very real implications of what was happening, it was just great fun. What was not so much fun for the people of Plainfield was the announced auction of the Gein farm and its contents, particularly when the auctioneers announced they would charge 50 cents for anyone to look around the place before the auction. The townspeople were outraged. The last thing they needed were throngs of morbid curiosity seekers ploughing through their town, gawping at the ‘murder house’. Although Sheriff Schley refused the auction company permission to charge admission, there was nothing he could do to stop the sale.

  Somehow, when the local volunteer fire brigade was called to the Gein farm in the early hours of 20 March 1958, people were far more relieved than surprised. A lot of head-nodding went on over the next few days, but not a great deal could be done to find the vandals who had started the fire. When Ed’s doctors told him his house had burned down his only comment was ‘Just as well’.

  Not to be deterred by the loss of the house and its filthy contents, the auctioneers went ahead with the sale as planned. The land and outbuildings were sold to a local developer for use as a Christmas tree farm and most of the old farm equipment was sold
for scrap. But Ed’s 1949 Ford sedan was another matter altogether – this was the vehicle in which he had carried off the bodies of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. The first round of bidding involved no fewer than fourteen prospective buyers and by the time the bidding ended the car had brought $760. The buyer was a carnival sideshow operator named Bunny Gibbons from Rockford, Illinois.

  Bunny first put the ‘Ed Gein Ghoul Car’ on display in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin. A huge placard outside the tent screamed ‘See the Car that Hauled the Dead from Their Graves! Ed Gein’s Crime Car!’ The first weekend more than 2,000 people paid 25 cents each to look at the dilapidated old Ford. Local authorities shut the show down at one location after another and the car finally vanished from sight. Ed, however, was still being poked and prodded at Central State Hospital.

  The eventual findings of the psychiatric evaluation board was that Ed Gein was both schizophrenic and a sexual psychopath, suffering from conflicting emotions about women that had been engendered by his love–hate relationship with his mother. Ed Gein was the most curious case of necrophilia, transvestism, cannibalism and fetishism that any of the doctors had ever heard of, let alone encountered. In short, Ed was not, at this time, mentally competent to stand trial.

  It was not until January 1968, just over ten years after his arrest, that Ed Gein was declared legally sane enough to be tried for the murder of Bernice Worden. On the advice of his psychiatrists and lawyers he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

  The trial itself did not take place until November of that year and only seven witnesses took the stand to testify, most of them psychiatrists and members of the forensic team who had been charged with the grisly job of identifying the body parts found in Gein’s house. Despite the small number of witnesses, their testimony was long, involved and almost entirely scientific in nature, and it took a week for them to deliver their findings. To no one’s surprise, Ed Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity and escorted back to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.