The motivation is elusive and uncertain but several factors come to mind—hostility, sex, and a desire for a substitute for his mother in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely. He has spoken of the bodies as being like dolls and a certain comfort was received from their presence, although ambivalent feelings in this regard probably occurred. When questioned regarding the reasons for his bizarre conduct, no explanation is given but sex relations with the bodies has been denied several times. This does not seem to check with hearsay in which he admitted having sex activities with the cadavers.
He has been a lonely man, particularly since the death of his mother, and some drive, uncertain at this time, may have arisen in this area to account for his misconduct.
By December 18, Eddie’s term at Central State was drawing to a close. On that date, Gein was brought before a board of specialists for a final round of questioning. Six doctors took part in the session—Schubert, Warmington, a psychiatrist named Larimore, a physician named Goetsch, Dr. Leonard Ganser of the Department of Health and Social Services, and Dr. H. J. Colgan, clinical director of the Winnebago State Hospital. Also present were the hospital’s psychologist, Robert Ellsworth, and Kenneth Colwell, the social worker who had researched Gein’s family background.
The purpose of the meeting, which lasted several hours, was to arrive at a consensus regarding Gein’s mental condition. As a result, the record of this session represents perhaps the single most significant feature of the Central State psychiatric report, since the highly charged issue of Gein’s legal sanity would largely be determined on the basis of the board’s diagnosis.
A lengthy period of questioning was conducted in which each of the staff members took part. It was determined through this questioning that the patient had been living a withdrawn and solitary existence for a number of years and, since the death of his mother in 1945, has had little social contact with the people in his community. His description of his mother was that she was as good a woman as it was possible for anyone to be, and through her teachings he developed a rigid moralistic attitude regarding women and the use of alcoholic beverages. He claimed that women in general were tainted with evil and should be shunned as much as possible….
There was a very marked sexual preoccupation throughout most of his answers to questions. When asked what was responsible for his activities, he stated that it was all due to “a force built up in me.” He feels that this force was in the nature of an evil spirit which influenced him to dig up graves.
With respect to the charge which brought him to the institution, namely, the death of Mrs. Worden, he stated that he had been chosen as an instrument of God in carrying out what fate had ordained should happen to this woman….
There were numerous complaints of physical illness. He complained of headaches, sore throat, chest pains, abdominal distress, and constipation. It was felt by the staff that this symptomatology could best be classified as a pseudoneurotic schizophrenic process.
He readily admitted that he had heard his mother’s voice telling him to be good several years after her death and that, on one occasion, he had experienced what was probably an olfactory hallucination, in that he smelled what he thought was decaying flesh in the surrounding environment of his property. Upon occasion, he stated that he has seen faces in piles of leaves.
It was the consensus of the staff’s opinion that this man is best diagnosed as a “schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type.” Because his judgment is so influenced by his envelopment in a world of fantasy, he is not considered to know the difference between right and wrong. His concept of the nature of his acts is markedly influenced by the existence of the delusional material concerned in particular with the idea that outside forces are responsible for what occurred. Because of his extreme suggestibility, he is not completely or fully capable of acting in his own behalf or in consultation with his attorney.
This man, in the opinion of the staff, is legally insane and not competent to stand trial at this time.
Eddie’s thirty-day observation period was officially over on December 22, but, for all practical purposes, the staff meeting on the eighteenth marked the real end of the examination and evaluation process. On December 19, Eddie’s medical and psychiatric records were assembled into a package and forwarded to the Honorable Herbert A. Bunde with a cover letter by Schubert, which summed up the final opinion of the staff.
“Mr. Gein,” Schubert wrote, “has been suffering from a schizophrenic process for an undetermined number of years.” As a result, “although Mr. Gein might voice knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, his ability to make such judgment would always be influenced by the existent mental illness. He would not be capable of fully realizing the consequence of any act because he would not be a free agent to determine either the nature or the consequence of acts which resulted from disturbed and abnormal thinking.”
“Because of these findings,” Schubert concluded, “I must recommend his commitment to Central State Hospital as insane.”
35
DR. MILTON MILLER
“In many ways, this patient has lived a psychotic life for many years. He has substituted human parts for the companionship of human beings and at the same time has gone through the superficial existence so that in the eyes of people around him he appeared quite rational. This can happen with chronic schizophrenic people.”
Voyeurism, fetishism, transvestism, and necrophilia weren’t the only concepts from the field of psychopathology that the Gein case introduced to a wider public. Another was schizophrenia. For the most part, however, that term tended to be used very loosely in various press accounts of Gein’s mental condition. As a result, the public received an extremely oversimplified, even distorted, idea of the nature of Eddie’s disorder.
As early as November 22, in quoting the views of the Chicago psychiatrist Edward Kelleher, the Milwaukee Journal defined schizophrenia as a “split personality”—a popular misconception perpetuated by the work that ensured the Gein crimes a permanent place in American popular mythology, Psycho. (In Robert Bloch’s original novel, the protagonist actually possesses three separate personalities; Norman, “the little boy who needed his mother”; Norma, “the mother who could not be allowed to die”; and Normal, “the adult Norman Bates.”)
Though certain psychotics do, in fact, suffer from what is known as “multiple personality disorder,” the schizophrenic personality isn’t so much split as shattered. Among the main symptoms of this disorder (all of which were manifested by Gein) are hallucinations and delusions (such as the sense that one’s impulses and actions “are not one’s own but are imposed by some external force”); bizarre beliefs (such as the conviction that one can raise the dead through willpower); extreme social isolation; “marked impairment” of functioning in “such areas as work, social relations, and self-care”; and gender confusion, uncertainty about one’s sexual identity.
There is one way, however, in which schizophrenics often do experience a pathologically severe “split,” and that is in relation to their parents, most often their mothers. According to psychoanalytic theory, people who are raised by severely disturbed, unloving mothers often deal with that situation by removing from their consciousness the memory of their painful childhood experiences. Dr. Silvano Arieti, one of the leading authorities on schizophrenia, has written: “The child who suffers on account of his contacts with the rejecting parent, generally the mother, tries desperately to preserve a good image of the parent. He wants to feel that the parent is good. If the parent is punitive and anxiety-arousing, it is not because she is malevolent but because he, the child, is bad: Mother is right in being harsh and strict with him and showing how bad he is…. The preservation of the good image of the parent is made possible by the removal from consciousness of the most unpleasant traits of the parent. Thus, the child will have two images of the parent: the good image, which is conscious, and the bad image, which will remain unconscious.”
To a certain extent, of course, all people experience a certain amount of ambivalence—of both love and anger—toward their mothers. But the schizophrenic is often someone who experiences these mixed feelings in a particularly acute form—who, even as a grownup, possesses the radically split perception of a little child. Consciously, he views his mother as “all-gratifying, supreme, sublime, and perfect.” But at a much deeper level of his mind, he sees her as the exact opposite—a figure of utter evil.
Eddie Gein represents a classic case of such a split. In his conscious mind, Augusta was a paragon of maternal virtue—“as good a woman as it was possible for a person to be.” All the hatred he felt for her—all the fury at the terrible mistreatment he had suffered at her hands—he shoved away from his awareness, projecting it onto other women who reminded him of his mother. (It is significant that both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden not only bore a vague physical likeness to Augusta Gein but also resembled her in another crucial respect: they were no-nonsense businesswomen, as Augusta had been during Eddie’s childhood in La Crosse.) And on those two women—the innocent, unwitting surrogates for Eddie’s malevolent mother—the little man wreaked his revenge.
Even his grave-robbing activities were prompted to a large extent by this deeply psychotic split. On the one hand, digging up the corpses of middle-aged mother-substitutes represented Gein’s demented effort to rescue Augusta from death. At the same time, the atrocities he performed on the bodies of his victims was a deranged form of retribution, a crazed attempt to get back at his mother for the lifetime’s worth of torture she had inflicted on him.
36
ROBERT E. SUTTON
“lf anybody was ever crazy, it was him.”
His mental tests completed, Eddie was set to be returned to the Waushara County jailhouse on Monday, December 23—a depressing prospect to Arthur Schley, who wasn’t eager to regain custody of Gein until the holidays were over. “I’d rather they keep him past next week,” the sheriff explained to reporters. “After all, I’ve got a family, and I like to put a little Christmas into my family. But still, I’ll do what they tell me to do.”
Hoping to postpone Gein’s return, Schley contacted Dr. Schubert, requesting an extension of the killer’s commitment period until December 26. Schubert had no objections. Gein, Schubert told newsmen, had been a model patient—“cooperative, no source of difficulty.” During Gein’s free hours at the institution, when he wasn’t undergoing one examination or another, he had been “permitted out in the rear yard and allowed to walk around.” He had adjusted nicely to institutional life and “been accepted very well by the other patients.”
Still, Schubert explained, it would require an official order from Judge Bunde to keep Gein at the mental hospital beyond December 22. As it turned out, the judge had no objections to prolonging Eddie’s stay at Central State, either. In fact, after reviewing Schubert’ s report, he issued an order extending Gein’s commitment for an indefinite period. He also released a statement which—though withholding any details of the psychiatric findings—summed up the major recommendations of the psychiatric staff.
“The court has received the report relative to Edward Gein from the Central State Hospital,” the judge’s statement began, “and has given it careful reading and study.
“There exists, based upon the report of experts at the Central State Hospital, definite opinion to the effect that Edward Gein is not mentally competent to stand trial…. Further summary hearings will be held at a date suitable to all parties when the defendant is available for such hearings. At that time, both the defense and the prosecution will have opportunity to produce expert testimony to aid the court in arriving at a determination. The court has no alternative but to depend upon the testimony of such experts, and such opinions must be the basis of the court’s finding. Mental competency is a matter on which we require the opinions of experts to make a finding.
“Notice of the time and place of such further summary inquiry will be made in the near future, perhaps within a week or ten days. Setting of a trial date must necessarily await the outcome of the inquiry.”
The announcement that Gein had been deemed mentally incompetent provoked renewed outcries of anger and protest in his home community. From the very beginning, the townsfolk of Plainfield had been afraid that Eddie would evade punishment by pleading insanity, a legal defense they regarded as especially outrageous in Gein’s case. They had known Eddie nearly all his life—gone to school with him, labored alongside him at threshing time, shot the breeze with him at local cafés, teased him about women, listened to his latest crime stories from Startling Detective magazine, approached him for favors, hired him for assorted odd jobs—house painting, snowplowing, and even, on occasion, babysitting. Gein might have been an oddball—someone, as Ed Marolla put it, with “a quirk in his mind.” But as far as his neighbors were concerned, he certainly wasn’t crazy. And he wasn’t nearly as simpleminded as he sometimes seemed, either. In the eyes of many of those who knew Eddie Gein, that little “Night Before Christmas” poem all the school kids were reciting said it best. “He took out his crowbar and pried open the box/He was not only clever, but sly as a fox.”
Sly enough, anyway, to fool the so-called experts into thinking he was insane.
December 25 turned out to be a happy day for Sheriff Schley. His Christmas wish had come true. The two-story brick building that served as both his living quarters and the county jailhouse was empty of everyone except himself and his family. Eddie Gein remained locked up in Central State, fifty long miles away.
As the year died away, the Associated Press conducted its annual poll of Wisconsin newspaper editors to determine the state’s top ten news stories of 1957. The results of the poll were published on Saturday, December 28.
By unanimous vote, the Edward Gein case was selected as “Story of the Year,” beating out (in descending order of significance) the Milwaukee Braves pennant win and World Series championship, the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the election of William Proxmire (the first Democrat in twenty-five years to represent Wisconsin in the senate) to complete McCarthy’s unexpired term, and various instances of tragic fires, traffic fatalities, and local corruption.
Runners-up included the adoption of daylight savings time, an outbreak of Asian flu, and federal court action in which seven leading food companies sought an order to prevent the return of windfall profits on cheese sales to the government.
37
DR. EDWARD F. SCHUBERT
“I think you have to look at what Gein did as a mark that he was mentally disturbed. The fact that he killed one person or perhaps two or more persons, in itself, I do not think is anything of great import regarding Gein’s mental disorder. But … how he lived, how he thought, how he wanted to return to being a child in his mother’s arms, and how he tried to recreate his mother with the bodies that he dug up—these are signs of mental disorder. Very unusual signs of mental disorder.”
The courtroom was filled to capacity, mostly with the grimfaced neighbors of the accused. Journalists and photographers from the major news services were there, and television cameramen milled in the corridors outside the packed courtroom.
It was the morning of Monday, January 6, and Eddie Gein’s sanity hearing, a proceeding that would occupy most of the day, was about to get under way in the city of Wisconsin Rapids.
His hands manacled before him, the prisoner was escorted before the bench by Sheriff Schley and Wood County Sheriff Tom Forsyth. For once, Eddie was not wearing his plaid cap and work clothes. Indeed, in keeping with the importance of the occasion, all three men were formally dressed—Eddie in brown trousers, a white shirt, and a tie and the two lawmen in business suits.
As the officers led Gein to the front of the courtroom, most of the spectators rose slightly from their seats, craning their necks for a better view of their former neighbor, the little nonentity who had, virtually overnight, become a figure of near-legendary proportions—their homegro
wn Jack the Ripper or Lizzie Borden. Staring at him, they couldn’t help but notice another, far less remarkable but still striking change that, in the few months since they had last laid eyes on him, had taken place in Eddie Gein. He had put on weight. In fact, the once frail and hollow-cheeked little man was beginning to look distinctly pudgy. Clearly, institutional living—“three hots and a cot,” as one of Eddie’s attendants put it—agreed with him.
In the state of Wisconsin, at the time of Gein’s hearing, the question of a defendant’s legal sanity was decided on the basis of a principle known as the M’Naghton Rule. According to this rule, a medical diagnosis of mental illness was not, in itself, enough to prevent an accused person from standing trial. A defendant could only be ruled legally insane if—as Attorney General Honeck explained in his opening statement at the hearing—“two facts are found by the court: (1) that the accused is incapable of conferring with counsel and assisting in his own defense; and (2) that the accused does not know the difference between right and wrong.”
To determine if these criteria applied in Gein’s case, the court relied largely on the testimony of three psychiatrists, who were questioned closely by Judge Bunde and cross-examined by Honeck, as well as by Eddie’s attorney, William Belter.
Dr. Schubert took the stand first. He summed up the results of the various psychological tests Gein had undergone at Central State. He clarified, in answer to questions posed by Judge Bunde, the precise nature of Gein’s mental illness. And he concluded by repeating the “considered opinion” of the hospital’s staff, namely that Gein was a chronic schizophrenic who had been lost in “his own little world” of fantasy and delusion since the death of his mother twelve years before.
Deviant Page 21