Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  There was, of course, another, though far more controversial, way of checking out at least one of Gein’s assertions—namely by digging up some of the graves he claimed to have violated. The issue of exhumation was already generating heated arguments in the village of Plainfield and would give rise to many more before it was finally settled. The matter was first raised publicly on Tuesday morning, when reporters asked both Sheriff Schley and Crime Lab Director Charles Wilson if plans were afoot to open any burial plots in the local cemeteries.

  Schley had intended to drive Gein to Madison early that morning, but the snow and icy roads forced him to delay the trip. Reporters spoke to him at the country jailhouse, where Gein was now the sole occupant, the other prisoners having been summarily released for “good behavior.” Even now that his news blackout had been lifted, Schley continued to be wary of reporters and extremely tight-lipped in his comments to the press. When the newsmen asked him if he and Kileen had visited any cemeteries on Monday, the sheriff replied with a sardonic “I don’t remember.” Was he aware of any plans to check the grave sites today? Schley stared out a window at the falling snow and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  Wilson, who was interviewed in Madison where he was making preparations for the impending polygraph test, was more forthcoming. “There’s no sense going out with a pick and shovel to check the graveyards near Plainfield until we have exhausted the possibilities of evidence we already have,” he explained. He acknowledged that some of the body parts recovered from Gein’s house contained formaldehyde—“Our noses tell us,” he said. But he insisted that the presence of embalming fluid did not in itself prove that Gein was a grave robber. After all, Wilson told the reporters, Gein could have put the fluid there himself. “We don’t know. Maybe he’s an amateur taxidermist.”

  Like so many speculations regarding Gein, Wilson’s off-the-cuff conjecture was soon widely reported as fact. It didn’t matter that not a single stuffed animal had been found on Eddie’s farm. From that moment on, amateur taxidermy became a permanent feature of the Gein legend. Eventually, it would find its way into pop mythology, as the hobby of Eddie’s most famous fictional descendant.

  Back in Plainfield, the search of Eddie’s farmhouse was nearing its conclusion. “Our case is pretty well cleaned up,” Kileen told reporters. “We have no missing persons in our county. The only thing here is the murder rap.”

  There were still some loose ends to be tied up in the Worden case, and, early on Tuesday, the investigation moved to the hardware store, where crime lab technicians spent the morning shooting photographs of the murder scene. Barred from entering the building, newsmen clustered around the windows. There wasn’t much to see inside—just a neatly organized, well-stocked country establishment, offering a wide selection of merchandise, from housewares to farming tools, small appliances to sporting goods. One detail, however, did catch the newsmen’s attention. A gun rack stood against one wall of the store, and, peering through the windows, reporters could clearly see that one of the rifles was missing.

  Schley had told the reporters gathered at the jailhouse that the trip to Madison might have to be put off for a day, but late in the morning, the snow let up enough for him to reconsider. At eleven thirty-five A.M., with Schley on one side and Deputy Leon Murty on the other, Gein was escorted through a jostling crowd of journalists and cameramen and led into a waiting police car. Several hours later, at around one-thirty P.M., he arrived at the capital and was immediately taken to the State Crime Laboratory at 917 University Avenue for the first of several lie detector tests—tests that would extend into the following day and would end up confirming that in the case of Eddie Gein, no fantasy, fiction, or fabrication could possibly be as unbelievable as the truth.

  While Eddie was being prepped for his polygraph test, Herbert Wanerski, the Portage County sheriff involved in the investigation of Mary Hogan’s murder, dropped a bombshell that would explode across the front pages of the evening papers.

  Wanerski, along with the Portage County DA, John Haka, had driven to Madison that morning in a car behind the one carrying Gein. While he waited for Eddie’s lie test to begin, Wanerski was asked by reporters if the Hogan investigation was “a case of divided jurisdiction.”

  “Yes, definitely,” Wanerski said. Then, wholly unexpectedly, he made a startling announcement. Referring to the missing tavern keeper, Wanerski said, “We’ve got a head and face that is hers without question.” As the newsmen scribbled excitedly in their notepads, Wanerski explained that the head in question was actually a woman’s “facial skin and hair peeled back from the skull.” There was no doubt, he asserted, that it was Mary Hogan’s.

  Though rumors regarding Hogan—including one that her skull was part of Gein’s private collection—had been buzzing around Plainfield for the past few days, this was a sensational disclosure. But Wanerski wasn’t through. The sheriff said that he had “strong doubts” that Gein could have spent much time in the house where Mrs. Worden’s carcass and the other human-flesh trophies had been found. There was too much undisturbed dust in the place—not just in the boarded-off rooms that had belonged to Eddie’s mother but throughout the house. “You couldn’t walk by without knocking the dust off,” Wanerski said.

  He then told the newsmen that authorities were checking into stories that Gein had a habit of sleeping in barns and abandoned houses throughout the countryside. If that were the case, then Eddie’s farm might not be the only body-part storehouse in the area. As one newspaper later put it, “the grim thought behind the rumor was that more heads or bodies might be discovered.”

  Wanerski had one last shocker in store. Referring back to the Hogan death mask, he insisted that it smelled unmistakably of embalming fluid. Since Mary Hogan had been very much alive at the time of her disappearance, the implication was clear, though the sheriff took the trouble to spell it out anyway.

  “Eddie Gein never robbed a grave in his life,” Wanerski said bitterly.

  That evening, something else arrived in Madison from Plainfield: the State Crime Laboratory’s Mobile Field Unit van containing the mountain of items collected from Eddie’s home. The crime lab was located directly across from the University of Wisconsin campus, and as Jan Beck and James Halligan—the two technicians who had brought the truck down from Plainfield—began to unload the piles of evidence, a crowd of students joined newsmen on the sidewalk to gawk.

  As the two topcoated technicians moved back and forth between the van and the crime lab building, reporters kept a painstaking inventory of the items, while the undergraduates craned their necks in the hope of catching a glimpse of something truly gruesome.

  Most of the evidence, however, was packed in cardboard boxes; the rest seemed disappointingly mundane. As a result, the onlookers were forced to rely heavily on wishful thinking in order to satisfy their morbid curiosity.

  Spotting a bunch of “cellophane wrapped objects” inside a cardboard box, for instance, one reporter concluded that they “may have been human heads.” A few moments later, after several straightbacked chairs with “saffron colored seats” had been removed from the van, the same reporter was accosted by a coed—“a cute little brunette with an Italian haircut,” in the words of the writer. “Did those chairs have skin bottoms?” she asked hopefully.

  The sheer quantity of stuff was staggering. There were firearms and an old oak barrel, quart jars full of thick brown liquid, a metal tub, a bunch of wood-handled tools, a bucksaw, a strongbox, an old medical volume, a cash register (presumably the one taken from Bernice Worden’s store), and countless cardboard boxes and brown paper grocery bags, whose contents were hidden from view. One of the last items removed from the van was a three-foot length of barbed wire.

  It took the two officials thirty trips and a full half-hour to empty the truck. When the job was finished at ten that night, crime lab director Charles Wilson met with a mob of newspaper, radio, and television reporters. The newsmen had been begging for precise infor
mation about the contents of Eddie Gein’s home. Indicating the “avalanche” of evidence that had just been unloaded, Wilson told the reporters that they could now see for themselves “what an impossible question that was.” One of the technicians who helped empty the van elaborated on Wilson’s remark. “Even Eddie Gein doesn’t know what’s all here,” he said.

  21

  From an editorial in the Stevens Point Daily Journal

  “Plainfield and its citizens will in time live down the notoriety that was inevitable after the story ‘broke.’ It was a peaceful community unaccustomed to violence or crime, and because it was, it may be more difficult to adjust back to the normal pattern of living. It took the terrifying actions of one individual to leave a lasting scar.”

  For the good folk of Plainfield, the horrible murder of one of their most respected citizens was, of course, an unpardonable crime. But even more unforgivable, perhaps—at least to the townspeople at large—was the offense Eddie Gein had committed against the community. For the hundred-odd years since its founding, the minuscule farming town was a place that enjoyed the peacefulness of absolute obscurity. Even within Wisconsin, few people had ever heard of Plainfield. All at once, their quiet little community was the focus of nationwide attention—and for the most dismaying of reasons. Other small towns across the U.S.A. could boast of being the birthplace of politicians, athletes, and movie stars. Plainfield suddenly found itself famous as the home of America’s most demented murderer.

  If Gein was ultimately responsible for all the unwanted attention, it was the news media that, at least in the eyes of some local residents, had turned their hometown into the societal equivalent of a sideshow freak, an object of morbid fascination and curiosity. Plainfield was overrun by reporters, so avid for lurid tidbits that they would print the most flagrant kinds of hearsay as unimpeachable truth. And the reporters had no trouble finding local sources to supply them with juicy quotes. For every person like Sheriff Schley or Frank Worden who refused to cooperate with the press, there were a half-dozen who couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing their names in the papers or, even better, their pictures in Life magazine. And some of those people were willing to tell the newsmen just what they wanted to hear.

  One early and wholly erroneous story, for example—widely reported in newspapers, over the radio, and on TV—was that lynch mobs were forming in the streets of Plainfield. “We’re all at a real pitch here,” one unnamed townsman was quoted as saying. “There’s no use monkeying around. If the town got a hold of that guy, the town’d know what to do about him, all right.” Ed Marolla, editor of the local weekly the Plainfield Sun, found himself expending a good deal of ink in an effort to refute this and similar rumors of mounting vigilantism—rumors whose spread he blamed directly on “big city reporters,” who didn’t hesitate to exaggerate the truth for the sake of a more sensational story.

  Of course, members of the news media weren’t the only ones prone to exaggeration. Though Gein was a notoriously reclusive individual, he suddenly seemed to have acquired a wide circle of intimates, who were only too eager to share their knowledge of the killer with the press.

  A former Plainfield resident named Turner, for example, told newsmen that he “knew Ed Gein better than any living man.” Turner explained that he had grown up on a farm a half-mile south of the Gein place and, though he had moved to Milwaukee many years before, had remained in close touch with his childhood buddy.

  “Ed was the best friend I had,” Turner said. “As a boy, the Gein farm was my second home. I stopped there practically every day after school. And I ate as many meals there as I did at my own home. Ed taught me to hunt, fish, and play the accordion and the flute. We went hunting together lots of times. Ed was a very nice fellow. He would do anything for you.”

  Turner allowed that there was one aspect of the Gein affair that puzzled him: Eddie’s claim that he had been in a “daze” while performing his gruesome deeds. In all the years he had known the man, Turner said, Eddie “never suffered from dazes.”

  “When I first found out about the murder,” Turner told his interviewer, “I was shocked. At first I figured they had the wrong man. Later the sheriff told me the whole story. I just couldn’t understand what came into that man’s mind.”

  An even more remarkable testimonial to Ed’s character came from a Plainfield woman named Adeline Watkins, who achieved instant, if exceptionally short-lived, celebrity by announcing that she was Ed Gein’s sweetheart.

  Described in the papers as a “severely plain woman” (in fact, she bore an uncanny resemblance to actress Margaret Hamilton in the role of Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz), Watkins revealed her twenty-year romance with Gein in an interview that appeared on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune under the headline “I LOVED KIND, SWEET MAN, STILL DO, SAYS CONFESSED KILLER’S ‘FIANCEE.’”

  The fifty-year-old spinster, who shared a small apartment in Plainfield with her widowed mother, described her “last date” with Eddie on February 6, 1955. “That night, he proposed to me,” Watkins told the reporter. “Not in so many words, but I knew what he meant. I turned him down, but not because there was anything wrong with him. It was something wrong with me. I guess I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live up to what he expected of me.”

  When asked about the specifics of their relationship, Watkins described the activities she and her suitor enjoyed. “Eddie and I discussed books,” Watkins replied. “We never read the same ones, but we liked to talk about them anyway. Eddie liked books about lions and tigers and Africa and India. I never read that kind of books.”

  During the six-month period leading up to Eddie’s proposal, the couple went out “an average of twice a week,” usually to a movie theater in Wautoma. Watkins’s mother, who sat quietly in a nearby rocker during her daughter’s interview, confirmed that Gein was the soul of politeness, always having her daughter home by ten P.M.

  Occasionally, Watkins said, the couple would stop off at a tavern. “I liked to drink beer sometimes,” she confessed, “but I would almost have to drag Eddie into a tavern. He would much rather have gone into a drugstore for a milkshake.”

  Watkins concluded the interview by indicating once again that the failure of their relationship reflected her own shortcomings, not Gein’s. “Eddie was so nice about doing things I wanted to do,” said Watkins, “that sometimes I felt I was taking advantage of him.”

  Adeline Watkins’s revelations made quite a splash, particularly in Plainfield, where no one could remember Eddie Gein’s ever having been involved with a woman. And indeed, within days of the interview’s appearance, Watkins contacted Ed Marolla of the Sun to offer a radically different version of her relationship to Gein.

  According to Marolla, Watkins had fallen victim to the wiles of the big-city press. “The city papers,” he claimed, “hungry for ‘human interest’ news, played up the innocent enough relations,” and Watkins—much to her distress—found herself “in the national spotlight,” her “photo on the front pages of every daily in the country.”

  Watkins’s revised account of her friendship with Gein amounted to a complete retraction. She declared that she was not Ed Gein’s “sweetheart” and had never used that word in the presence of reporters.

  Moreover, she insisted that—although Eddie had “called on her” every now and again, stopping by her apartment and occasionally accompanying her to the Plainfield Theatre—“there was no twenty-year romance.”

  Though Miss Watkins conceded that she had described Gein as “quiet and polite,” she denied ever having referred to him as “sweet.” And she was “quite emphatic in stating that she had never ‘practically dragged him into a tavern,’ as was reported.”

  In short, Adeline Watkins wanted the public to know that there was not a shred of truth to the highly sensationalized account of her love affair with the little man who stood accused of the grisliest crimes in Wisconsin history. “She says that she kind of felt sorry for him,” Marolla explained
, “and that mostly they just sat at her house.”

  To the editor of the Sun, the Watkins case was yet another illustration of the media’s flagrant manipulation of the facts. Marolla accused the reporters of “plying people for interviews,” then “putting words in their mouths” or seriously misrepresenting what they had actually said. Whatever the truth of this allegation, it was certainly the case that in the days immediately following Eddie’s arrest, newsmen roamed the streets of Plainfield, pouncing on anyone who was willing to speak for the record.

  Given the tininess and tightly knit character of the town, most of its citizens had at least a passing acquaintance with Gein. Some of them, like Eddie’s neighbor Stanley Gerlovic, had kindly words to say about the accused, describing Gein as “always happy, smiling, congenial—a good worker,” who “never said a dirty word or cussed.” Others emphasized Eddie’s social backwardness—his “shyness,” “meekness,” and awkwardness around women. And a few prided themselves on having been sharp enough to detect all along that there was something distinctly unsettling—even creepy—about the man. “He had a sly sort of grin when he would talk to you,” one of Ed’s neighbors told reporters, and a local storekeeper who preferred to remain anonymous admitted that whenever he gave change to Gein, “I put it on the counter rather than touch his hand.”

  No one, however, not even the people who claimed to have sensed that the little bachelor wasn’t as harmless as he seemed, imagined that Eddie Gein was actually a murderer (let alone a defiler of the dead). The general reaction to Gein’s arrest among the populace of Plainfield was bewilderment and disbelief. “When I first heard what they were saying he had done,” one of Eddie’s neighbors told reporters, “I couldn’t believe it. Now, of course, I know it’s true—but I still can’t believe it. You know what I mean? I mean, I believe it, but at the same time I don’t believe it—it’s just too fantastic.” Another of Gein’s acquaintances concurred. “Before this happened, if you asked me who could be capable of something like this, the last man in the world I’d have named would’ve been Eddie Gein.”