Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  Sometime between eight forty-five and nine-thirty, Muschinski saw the Worden’s Hardware panel truck pull out of the garage at the rear of the building and head east. Muschinski couldn’t tell who was behind the wheel, though he was sure the driver was a man. Still, there was nothing unusual about that. The Wordens often hired local help to haul freight and run deliveries, so Muschinski didn’t give the matter a second thought. And he wasn’t particularly surprised when, later in the day, he strolled across the street and found the front door locked. Like other people who passed by the store that Saturday and noticed it was empty, he figured that Mrs. Worden had simply decided to close up shop for the opening day of the hunting season, when so many of her customers would be out in the woods.

  There was one funny thing, though. The lights. It seemed strange to Muschinski that Mrs. Worden would lock up for the weekend and leave them burning.

  Elmo Ueeck—the Plainfield farmer who had joked with Eddie Gein about Mary Hogan’s disappearance—had gotten lucky that day, bagging a deer within a few hours of the opening of the season. He did feel a twinge of guilt for having nailed the buck in Eddie Gein’s woods. Elmo knew that Eddie hated anybody to hunt on his property without permission. But what Eddie didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and there was no particular reason why Eddie had to find out about Elmo’s little transgression.

  As luck would have it, Elmo was just driving away with his kill tied to his car when he spotted Eddie’s maroon Ford barreling down the road in his direction. Ueeck was surprised at how fast Gein’s car was traveling. Usually, Eddie drove so slowly you could almost outrun him. Well, there was no way for Ueeck to keep his crime a secret now, not with that fat spiked-horn buck hanging right there across his hood. Elmo figured he had some explaining to do.

  Much to his surprise—and relief—Eddie didn’t even bother to slow down. He just stuck his hand out the car window and waved merrily as he sped past. As the day wore on, though, Elmo felt increasingly uneasy about leaving matters where they stood, so in the middle of the afternoon, around three o’clock, he decided to pay a visit to Eddie’s place and apologize for shooting the buck on his land. Arriving at the Gein farmstead, he found Eddie on his knees beside his jacked-up Ford, changing tires. There was nothing unusual about that—except that as Elmo moved closer, he discovered that Eddie was replacing his snow treads with regular tires, a very peculiar thing to be doing with three inches of snow on the ground and winter just beginning. Still, Elmo didn’t attach too much significance to Eddie’s action.

  Now, if someone else removed his snow tires at that time of year, thought Elmo, you’d have to say he was crazy or maybe trying to cover up his tracks. But not Eddie Gein. He was always doing odd things like that.

  Elmo tried to say he was sorry, but Eddie seemed too preoccupied to care. And so, after hanging around and chewing the fat for a while, Elmo got back into his car and drove home.

  A couple of hours later, Eddie had two more visitors to his farm: his teenaged friend Bob Hill and Bob’s sister, Darlene. Eddie, who was happily occupied inside his house when the pair arrived, hurried out to meet them in the yard.

  The Hills’ car wouldn’t start, and Bob was wondering if Eddie would mind driving into town for a new battery.

  “Sure,” Eddie said. “Just let me wash up.” His hands were all bloody, he explained, from dressing out a deer.

  Eddie’s statement didn’t set off any alarm bells in young Bob’s head. The boy had shot rabbit and red squirrel with the older man many a time and apparently didn’t know that Eddie never hunted deer. Or that Gein claimed never to have butchered a large animal, since the sight of blood supposedly made him feel faint.

  By the time Eddie returned to the Hills’ place with the new battery and helped install it in the car, it was getting pretty late, so Irene invited the little bachelor to stay for supper.

  Eddie accepted gladly. Irene set out a hearty meal—pork chops, boiled potatoes, macaroni and cheese, pickles, coffee, and cookies—and the little man dug into it with gusto. He’d had a busy, productive, thoroughly exhilarating day, and he felt hungry as hell.

  12

  Stevens Points Daily Journal, November 25, 1957

  “Edward Gein had two faces. One he showed to the neighbors. The other he showed only to the dead.”

  During deer season, Muschinski’s filling station served as an official checking facility, where the huntsmen brought their kill to be weighed and tallied. By five in the evening on that gray, bitter Saturday, when Frank Worden returned—empty-handed—from the woods, a string of stiffening carcasses already hung in the gas-station yard. Though Worden hadn’t come home with a kill, the season still had eight days to go, and he wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he drove directly to Muschinski’s to ask a question about the town’s yearly big buck contest.

  Immediately, Muschinski mentioned that he had seen the Worden truck leave town early that morning and that the store had been closed ever since. Had Frank’s mother, Muschinski wondered, decided to go hunting, too?

  Worden was puzzled. As far as he knew, his mother had intended to keep the store open all day. Concerned, he went across the street to try the door and discovered that it was, in fact, locked. Since he wasn’t carrying a key, he hurried home to fetch one, then quickly returned to the store.

  As soon as he stepped inside, he saw that something was terribly wrong.

  The cash register was missing from its counter. And the floor was spattered with reddish-brown stains, which led in a trail to the back door and which Worden instantly recognized as blood. A great deal of blood.

  Running to the rear, he looked into the driveway. Muschinski was right. The store’s panel truck was gone.

  Worden was alarmed but didn’t panic. He’d been a deputy sheriff for nearly a year and knew how to proceed. He picked up the phone and dialed Sheriff Art Schley at his office in Wautoma, the county seat, about fifteen miles away. Schley could hear the agitation in his deputy’s voice as Worden reported what he’d discovered inside the store.

  Schley, who had been sheriff for just over a month, immediately phoned the home of his chief deputy, Arnie Fritz, and—in some distress himself—relayed the news. Within minutes, the pair were speeding down to Plainfield.

  By the time they arrived, Worden had had a chance to examine the store for clues. “He’s done something to her,” Worden blurted out as soon as he saw the two officers. When Fritz asked whom he meant, the missing woman’s son—by now deeply distraught—answered bitterly and without hesitation.

  “Eddie Gein,” he said.

  Keeping tight control of his emotions, Worden explained why he suspected Gein. “He’s been hanging around here a lot lately, bothering my mother to go roller skating and dancing and to movie shows.” Just the day before, Worden went on, Gein had come by the store around closing time to check on the price of antifreeze. While there, he had inquired very casually if Frank intended to go hunting on Saturday. Frank—not attaching any particular significance to the question—had confirmed that he meant to be out in the woods first thing in the morning.

  Frank then showed Schley and Fritz something he had discovered while awaiting the sheriff’s arrival—a slip of paper with his mother’s handwriting on it. She had made it out that morning. As far as Frank was concerned, it was a piece of evidence that pointed directly to Gein. It was a sales receipt for antifreeze.

  The three men decided that Gein should be located immediately. In the meantime, Fritz had put out a call for help. Before long, lawmen from throughout the region and as far away as Madison—sheriffs, former sheriffs, deputy sheriffs, town marshals, traffic officers, State Crime Lab investigators, and more—were converging on Plainfield. Among the first to arrive on the scene were Marshal Leon “Specks” Murty of the village of Wild Rose; sheriffs Wanerski, Searles, and Artie of Portage, Adams, and Marquette counties; traffic officer Dan Chase; deputies Arden “Poke” Spees and Virgil “Buck” Batterman; and Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster of the Gr
een Lake County Sheriff’s Department.

  By seven o’clock, the street in front of the hardware store was filling up with squad cars, their red revolving lights flashing on the gathering crowd of Bernice Worden’s neighbors. Uniformed officers and taut-faced farmers huddled in the frigid fall night, their breath rising in puffs as they talked bitterly about the fate of the widow—another woman snatched from their midst, just like Mary Hogan. Only this time, there was a name attached to the mysterious abductor. The name of Eddie Gein.

  Over at the Hills’, Gein was warming himself with the last few mouthfuls of Irene’s coffee. He had, in fact, seemed chilled all evening, and neither the warmth from the kitchen stove nor the Hills’ kerosene space heater seemed to make any difference. Irene wondered if the little bachelor was coming down with the flu.

  Eddie had moved over to the davenport and was horsing around with one of the Hills’ younger children when Jim Vroman, Irene’s son-in-law, rushed into the house and began talking excitedly about Bernice Worden’s disappearance and the commotion downtown. Eddie sat there listening intently until Vroman was finished, then shook his head and said, “Must have been somebody pretty cold-blooded.”

  Irene looked at Eddie and suddenly remembered how he had been dining at her house a few years before when the news of Mary Hogan’s abduction reached them. “Ed,” she said, “how come every time somebody gets banged on the head and hauled away, you’re always around?”

  Eddie just grinned the way he did and gave a little shrug.

  Like any teenager who has just heard the news of some big local trouble, Bob Hill was itching to see the excitement for himself and asked if Eddie would drive him downtown.

  Eddie, always obliging, agreed.

  The Hills kept their store open late, and it was time for Irene to relieve her husband, who had been taking care of business while the rest of the family ate. As Gein and Bob got ready to leave, Irene bid goodbye to her visitor, then hurried across the snow-encrusted yard to the little grocery. She removed her coat and sent Lester home for his meal.

  She hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when the front door swung open, letting in a blast of frozen air and two grim-faced men, Officer Dan Chase and Deputy Poke Spees.

  Chase had been dispatched to find the suspect and, after making a quick stop at the Gein farmstead and satisfying himself that no one was home, had proceeded to the Hills’, where Eddie was known to be a frequent visitor. As soon as the two officers stepped inside the store, they asked Irene if she knew where Eddie was.

  “He’s sitting in his car right there in my driveway, unless he’s taken off,” Irene told them. “He’s driving my son downtown to see what’s going on.”

  Sure enough, when Chase and Spees went around to the house, they found Gein’s car still there, engine idling, tail pipe spewing exhaust vapor into the cold. The Hills’ porch light was burning, and in its glow Chase could see Eddie sitting behind the wheel of his Ford with Bob Hill beside him.

  Chase tapped on the driver’s window, and Gein rolled it down. “Eddie,” said Chase, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  Obediently, Eddie stepped out into the yard and followed the two officers to their squad car, where he got into the back seat with Spees. Positioning himself up front, Chase swiveled to look at the stubble-cheeked little man, who sat there smiling weakly, his watery blue eyes peering out from beneath the peak of the plaid deerhunter’s cap planted sideways on his head.

  Chase asked Gein exactly how he’d spent the day, from the time he woke up to the present moment, and Eddie proceeded to tell him.

  When he finished, Chase asked him to run through the events of the clay one more time, beginning with his visit to Worden’s. Gein repeated his account.

  “Now, Eddie,” said Chase after a moment. “You didn’t tell the same story come through there that second time.”

  Eddie blinked once, then said, “Somebody framed me.”

  “Framed you for what?” asked Chase.

  “Well, Mrs. Worden.”

  Chase leaned closer to his suspect. “What about Mrs. Worden?”

  “Well, she’s dead, ain’t she?”

  “Dead!” Chase exclaimed. “How do you know she’s dead?”

  Eddie’s lopsided grin seemed frozen in place. “Well, I heard it.”

  “Where’d you hear it?”

  “I heard them talking about it,” Eddie said, straining to sound nonchalant.

  By then, whatever doubts Chase had been entertaining about Gein’s involvement had completely evaporated. He knew he had his man.

  Informing Eddie that he was a suspect in the robbery of Bernice Worden’s store, Chase radioed his superior, Sheriff Schley, that the suspect was in custody. Then he started the squad car and pulled out of the yard, leaving the Hills shaking their heads in bewilderment.

  They had no way of knowing, of course, that the next time they set eyes on their quiet little neighbor, his name would be known throughout the nation—indeed around the world. Or that they themselves were about to gain widespread and highly unwelcome celebrity as the last people to break bread with America’s most notorious maniac.

  13

  From the English fairy tale “Mr. Fox”

  “ ‘And then—and then I opened the door, and the room was filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead women, all stained with their blood.’

  “ ‘It is not so, nor was it so. And God forbid it should be so,’ said Mr. Fox.”

  At thirty-two years old, Arthur Schley was a big, imposing man, not overly tall but broad-chested and husky—the kind of small-town sheriff whose very bulk invests him with authority. On the night of November 17, however, Schley was feeling a little unsure of himself. A former employee of the Waushara County Highway Department, he was new on the job and nervous about heading up a murder investigation. Still, things were going well. He was surrounded by a large force of experienced officers, and, though it was not quite eight o’clock, only a couple of hours since he’d received Frank Worden’s call, the suspect had already been apprehended. The important thing now was to locate Frank’s mother.

  Gein’s house seemed like the logical place to start looking, and so, accompanied by Captain Schoephoerster, Schley got into his car and headed out of town, arriving a short while later at the lonely, decaying farmstead.

  Gein’s house looked grim even in broad daylight. On a frozen winter’s night, with icicles hanging from the porch roof and dead clumps of weeds poking up through the snow, its desolation was so extreme that even a brave man could be spooked by the sight of it. It was hard to believe that anything human could make its home in such a place.

  The two officers moved across the yard, boots crunching in the snow, breaths rising before them like wraiths. They made their way around the house, trying each door in turn, but all of them were tightly locked, except for one—the door leading into the summer kitchen, which was secured with a flimsy latch. Schoephoerster put his boot to the door, and it gave way with a crack. Aiming their flashlights at the junk-littered floor, the men moved carefully around the rotting cartons and rusted farm tools to the opposite side of the shed, where Schoephoerster tried the door that led into the main part of the house. Meanwhile, Schley stepped back and swept his beam around the room. He felt something touch his jacket from behind and turned to see what he had brushed up against.

  There, in the beam of his flashlight, dangled a large, dead-white carcass. It was hanging upside down by its feet. Its front had been split completely open, so that its trunk was little more than a dark, gaping hole. The carcass had been decapitated as though someone had sliced the head off for a trophy.

  The body had been butchered like a heifer or a dressed-out deer. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was the body of a human being, an adult woman. Bernice Worden’s body.

  The sight was so stupefying that it took a moment for Schley to understand what he was looking at. Then he managed to choke out a few words—“My God, there she is”—before stumbling
out of the shed and into the frozen night. He had sunk to his knees in the snow and was vomiting loudly when Schoephoerster came staggering after him.

  14

  SHAKESPEARE, Othello

  “On horror’s head horrors accumulate.”

  Schoephoerster ran to his squad car and radioed the news: Bernice Worden’s corpse had been located at Eddie Gein’s farm. Then, steeling themselves as best they could, he and Schley reentered the summer kitchen to confront the nightmare that waited inside.

  With unsteady hands, they trained their flashlights on the gutted, headless woman suspended by her heels from the ceiling. A crude wooden crossbar—three feet long, bark-covered, and sharpened to a point at both ends—had been shoved through the tendons of one ankle; the other foot had been slit above the heel and secured to the rod with a stout cord. Her arms were held taut at her sides by hemp ropes that ran from her wrists to the crossbar. The bar itself had been hooked to a block-and-tackle and hauled up toward the roof beams. And there—left to keep in the coldness of the shed like a side of beef in a butcher’s meat locker—the mutilated remains of the fifty-eight-year-old grandmother hung.

  By now, the other officers alerted by Schoephoerster had begun arriving at the farm. These were all individuals—county lawmen, state troopers, crime lab investigators—who were used to seeing harrowing sights, to witnessing the gruesome aftermaths of murders, hunting mishaps, and highway accidents. But, to a man, the sight of Mrs. Worden’s decapitated and disemboweled body stunned them into silence. None of them had ever set eyes on anything so appalling.

  At that moment, none of them would have believed that the hideously violated corpse of the woman was only the first—and by no means the most unspeakable—of the horrors that Eddie Gein’s death farm had in store.