Clark’s decision clearly pleased the community. But there was something else about the auction that many local people objected to—indeed, that called forth even stronger expressions of protest than the matter of the admission fee. The Reverend Wendell Bennetts, former pastor of the Plainfield Methodist Church, was the first to raise the new issue, pointing out in a letter to the Plainfield Sun that March 30, the proposed date of the auction, was Palm Sunday.
Holding the Gein auction on that date, the reverend admonished, “is not very wise.” Indeed, such an act, he implied, bordered on the blasphemous. “God has blest our nation above all nations of the earth,” Rev. Bennetts wrote, “and if we wish to be blest we ought to honor God and keep his laws. In keeping his laws we honor Him, and to have the State allow an auction is not conducive to good form and rule. Great nations have grown up and disappeared and practically in every case it was because the people ignored the laws of God. This nation would be no exception in the sight of God, for any nation that forgets God, that nation will God destroy.”
The moral of Rev. Bennetts’s sermon was clear. To conduct the Gein auction on Palm Sunday—“a holy-day, not a holiday,” in his words—was to fly in the face of God’s laws. It was an open invitation to divine retribution. Disaster was certain to follow.
Other ministers—including Gerald Tanquist of the Methodist Church, David Wisthoff of the Baptist Church, and Irving Bow of the Assembly of God Church, all of Plainfield—joined Rev. Bennetts in voicing an objection to the auction date. Their protests did produce one immediate result. Several community groups, which had intended to sell postcards and sandwiches on the days of the inspection and the auction, abandoned their plans. But according to Judge Clark, there was nothing to be done about the date. The auction had already been too widely advertised around the state.
The sale of Eddie Gein’s property and personal belongings would take place as announced on Sunday, March 30, and there was nothing that the community—smoldering with anger and bitterness—could do to stop it.
Or so it seemed.
40
Proverbs 14:11
“The house of the wicked shall be overthrown.”
Eddie Gein’s nearest neighbors were the Johnson family. On Thursday, March 20, the Johnson’s youngest son, Roger, was stirred from his sleep by a brilliant light blazing through his bedroom window. Sunup, Roger thought drowsily as he struggled into full consciousness. But even in his half-awake state, he realized that there was something funny about this particular dawn. For one thing, it didn’t seem as if he’d been asleep very long. But there was something else, too, something strange about it …
All at once, his head cleared, and he leaped for the window, realizing what was wrong.
The intense brightness was coming from the west. From the direction of Eddie Gein’s farmhouse.
It was two-thirty in the morning when Burt Carlson, Plainfield’s police chief, spotted the blaze. He immediately notified the town fire marshal, who roused the fifteen members of the volunteer fire department. By the time the men drove the seven miles to the Gein place, however, there was little they could do. The conflagration was out of control. Though they managed to save the outbuildings, they could only look on as the blaze reduced Eddie’s two-story white frame house to a blackened heap of smoldering ashes.
Of course, it’s doubtful that the destruction they were witnessing could have been anything but a heart-gladdening sight to the growing crowd of onlookers who gathered to watch Gein’s home burn. As for the feelings of the fire marshal himself, they can easily be imagined. The fire marshal’s name was Frank Worden.
With the coming of daylight, Sheriff Schley—who had headed for the Gein farm the moment he got word of the fire—contacted the state fire marshal in Madison, who immediately dispatched a deputy, John E. Hassler, to Plainfield. The assumption, not only of Hassler and his boss but of most of the townspeople, too, was that the fire had been set. Its timing, three days before the scheduled inspection date, was clearly suspicious. Moreover, for weeks, there had been talk among certain members of the community, talk about doing something drastic to prevent the Palm Sunday auction. And there certainly didn’t seem to be any other likely explanation for the blaze. As Gein’s trustee, Harvey Polzin, put it, “there was no electrical wiring, and there was no electrical storm, and we know of nothing in the house that could have started a fire. But it did start.”
The presumption of arson, however, would remain just that. Neither Hassler’s probe nor any subsequent investigation ever turned up a suspect or, indeed, a single shred of evidence that Gein’s house had been put to the torch.
However the fire had started, the citizens of Plainfield were delighted to see the abominated dwelling go up in smoke. Even people with less stake in its destruction seemed to derive gratification from the fire, to see it as a perfect climax to the Gein affair—“a fittingly grotesque finish,” in the words of one prominent criminologist, “to the most bizarre case in criminal records since medieval times.” Indeed, even Gein himself seemed relieved at the burning of his home.
Eddie learned about it from Darold Strege, the psychiatric officer in charge of his unit at Central State, who had heard the news early that morning on the radio as he was getting ready to leave for work. Strege’s shift began at six A.M., and Gein was still asleep when Strege arrived at the hospital. Unsure about how the little man would react, Strege waited until Gein had risen, dressed, and finished his breakfast before informing him of the news.
For the rest of his days, Strege would remember Eddie’s response. It consisted of only three words, but they suggested to Strege that perhaps there might have been some truth after all to the stories that other, greater horrors had been hidden away in the walls of Eddie’s house, horrors that were now forever safe from discovery.
Strege took Gein aside. “Your house has burned down, Eddie,” he said as gently as possible.
Eddie paused for a moment and then answered quietly.
“Just as well,” he said.
41
BUNNY GIBBONS, exhibitor of the Ed Gein “ghoul car”
“People want to see this kind of thing.”
Thursday’s fire took care of one of Plainfield’s concerns. No one was going to make Eddie Gein’s home into a “museum for the morbid.” But anyone who hoped that the incineration of the house would put a stop to the auction was in for a severe disappointment. That event, Harvey Polzin announced on Friday morning, would go on as scheduled. Indeed, he said, though the loss of Eddie’s home and its contents would undoubtedly keep “a lot of souvenir hunters” from attending the sale, he still expected “quite a crowd.”
Polzin was right. March 23, the date of the inspection, was a crisp, sunny Sunday, a perfect day for a family outing—and to the residents of Plainfield, it must have seemed as if every family in Wisconsin had decided to take a drive to their little town. Between noon and sunset, an estimated twenty thousand sightseers descended on the village—an astonishing turnout, considering that the entire population of Waushara County at that time numbered just over thirteen thousand people.
On the dirt roads leading to the farm, Sheriff Schley and a handful of deputies did their best to keep the endless procession moving. Eddie’s neighbor, Milton Johnson, had posted a sign on his property, offering parking at twenty cents per car, but most of the tourists simply pulled their cars onto Gein’s land. A snow fence had been set up around the ruins, and throughout the day, there were never any fewer than three hundred people pressed up against it, straining for a better look at the ash heap that had once been the home of the killer-ghoul, Eddie Gein.
The auction itself—conducted, as scheduled, on Palm Sunday, March 30—brought out a far smaller, though still significant, crowd. Two thousand people showed up on that crisp, brilliantly clear Sunday, although only a few were there to bid. Most were curiosity seekers, come to witness the final disposal of Ed Gein’s few remaining possessions.
Walter Golla,
a Plainfield junk dealer, bought much of Eddie’s rusty old farming equipment, including a plow for fourteen dollars, a disk and mower for nine dollars apiece, and a manure spreader for thirty-five dollars. The remaining pieces of scrap iron went to Chet Scales of Chet’s Auto Wreckers, who hauled them away in his other major purchase, Eddie’s 1940 Chevy pickup truck, which Scales acquired for two hundred fifteen dollars. Wayne Heinke of Neshkoro bought a pile of lumber for ten dollars, and a man named William Smith picked up two old plowshares for two and a half dollars. Also sold were eight wagon wheels (seven dollars), an old iron range (fifteen-fifty), a keg of nails (seven dollars), and an old violin (seven-fifty).
The farm itself—all one hundred ninety-five acres of scrub pine and sandy soil, plus the charred homestead site and the five tumbledown outbuildings unharmed by the fire—was sold for $3,883 to a Sun Prairie real estate developer named Emden Schey. Within months, Schey would undertake a major reforestation of the property, razing the remaining buildings and planting more than sixty thousand trees on the land.
The only surprise of the afternoon involved the sale of Eddie’s 1949 maroon Ford sedan, the car he had been driving on the day of Bernice Worden’s murder. It was the single item that set off a bidding war, with fourteen people competing. In the end, the car was sold for the remarkable sum of seven hundred sixty dollars to a mysterious buyer identified variously as “Koch Brothers,” “Cook Brothers,” or “Kook Brothers” of Rothschild, Wisconsin. Why anyone would pay such a hefty sum for a beaten-up nine-year-old automobile was a puzzling and troubling matter to the townsfolk of Plainfield, who were praying that with Eddie locked away for good and his property disposed of, the lingering morbidity of the Gein affair had finally been purged from their lives.
It didn’t take long for the puzzle to be cleared up, and when the answer came, it set off one last firestorm of protest, not only in Eddie’s hometown but throughout Wisconsin.
“Koch/Cook/Kook Brothers” turned out to be the fictitious identity of an enterprising fifty-year-old sideshow exhibitor named Bunny Gibbons of Rockford, Illinois. Though his specialty was trick mice, Gibbons had a friend who, as he put it, “had done pretty good with the Dillinger car. So I got a bright idea when I read about Gein.” After acquiring Gein’s Ford at the auction, Gibbons had spruced it up a bit, then equipped it with a pair of wax dummies—one in the driver’s seat simulating Eddie Gein and another lying in back, representing one of his mutilated, blood-soaked female victims.
The “Ed Gein ghoul car” made its first public appearance in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin, where it was displayed for three days inside a large canvas tent covered with blaring signs—“SEE THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES! YOU READ IT IN ‘LIFE’ MAGAZINE! IT’S HERE! ED GEIN’S CRIME CAR! $1,000 REWARD IF NOT TRUE!” One crudely painted sign showed a man lifting a casket from a grave. Another depicted a woman about to be clobbered on the head with a plank. At the top of the tent, three skull-and-crossbones flags waved in the summer breeze.
Two thousand people paid twenty-five cents each for a peek at the death car. Within days, however, news of the exhibit had spread throughout the state, setting off a major controversy. Plainfield, whose citizens had feared just such a possibility when the car fetched an inordinately high price at auction, was up in arms over the Gein exhibit. In Outgamie County, local parents made angry phone calls to fair officials, charging that their children were being emotionally damaged by the display. And representatives of the Wisconsin Association for Mental Health complained that, while the fair directors had been able to find space for Gibbons’s grisly exhibit, their own organization, dedicated to the promotion of public awareness in matters of mental health, had been denied permission to set up a booth because, according to those same directors, there was not enough room.
Gibbons—tickled, no doubt, by all the free publicity—remained unperturbed by the uproar. “People want to see this kind of thing,” he cheerfully explained. He even promised that one day he would “play Plainfield.” In spite of his vow, however, he decided to skip the Columbia County Fair in neighboring Portage for fear of stirring up the local populace. But even in other parts of the state, Gibbons’s exhibit began to run into trouble. At the Washington County 4-H Club Fair in Slinger, Wisconsin, the death car had been on display only a few hours before the sheriff arrived and ordered Gibbons to pack up his tent. Soon, county fairs all across the state were barring the display. Gibbons, grumbling about this unforeseen turn of events, had no choice but to head south for the fairgrounds of Illinois, where the folks, he hoped, would be a little less touchy on the subject of Eddie Gein.
With Gibbons and his “ghoul car” driven from the state, Eddie Gein’s story seemed to have run its course. There was, however, one final bit of news still to come. It appeared in the papers toward the end of July, just as the commotion over the car exhibit was dying down. The story, headlined “$300 SET ASIDE FOR GEIN FUNERAL,” concerned the distribution of the money that had been netted through the auction of Gein’s property. Most of the money—$5,375—was to be distributed on a prorated basis among the people who had filed claims against the Gein estate. Another eight hundred dollars was to go to the state for its care of Gein. That left a total of three hundred dollars, which, by order of Waushara County Judge Boyd Clark, was to “be placed in the county treasury and released only to pay Gein’s burial expenses.”
Clark’s ruling was the final word on the Gein affair that the public would hear for many years. That the word had to do with graveyard matters made it a particularly fitting ending.
CONCLUSION
The Psycho
42
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, Hitchcock
Truffaut: I’ve read the novel from which Psycho was take…. I believe [it] was based on a newspaper story.
Hitchcock: It was the story of a man who kept his mother’s body in his house, somewhere in Wisconsin.
It would be ten years before “Ghastly Gein”(as he had come to be called in the press) was back in the spotlight. But during that decade, something interesting happened to Eddie. He achieved immortality.
An entire generation of Wisconsinites grew up swapping jokes and scary stories about the “Mad Butcher of Plainfield.” Eddie became a local legend, a creature who prowled the night, preying on unwary teenage lovers and disobedient children. To the youngsters of Wisconsin, the knowledge that Gein was safely immured in a state mental institution might have been reassuring in daylight. But locked doors and barred windows can’t hold the bogeyman, and when darkness fell, all it took was a single threat from an exasperated parent—“If you don’t quiet down and get to sleep right now, Eddie Gein will come to get you!”—to subdue the most obstreperous child.
To the kids who came of age exchanging horror stories about him, old Eddie Gein would always be a larger-than-life figure, their homegrown Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy. A peculiar fondness for “Crazy Ed” developed among them—similar to the popularity that Alferd Packer, the nineteenth-century cannibal, enjoys in Colorado, where the student cafeteria at the state university is named the “Alferd Packer Grill.”(A member of a six-man gold-hunting party that became snowbound in the Uncompaghre Mountains, Packer butchered and lived off the flesh of his companions. The legend goes that at his 1883 trial, the judge who sentenced him to hang declared in indignation, “Packer, there were only seven Democrats in all of Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you son-of-a-bitch.”) Like the Colorado cannibal, Eddie Gein, the Plainfield ghoul, became a permanent part of the lore of his state.
But the event that truly immortalized Eddie was, of course, the appearance in 1960 of Alfred Hitchcock’s consummate terror film, Psycho, based on the novel that Robert Bloch had fashioned out of the raw materials of the Gein affair. Though there is no indication that Eddie ever saw—or, indeed, even heard of—the cinematic classic that his crimes had inspired, Hitchcock’s film transformed him from a local legend into an undying part o
f American popular mythology. Thanks to Robert Bloch’s initial conception and the cinematic genius of Alfred Hitchcock, who took a clever but minor pulp chiller and transmuted it into a masterwork which left a lasting mark on the dream life of a nation, Eddie Gein had become—and would always be famous as—the original “Psycho” killer, the “real Norman Bates.”
Meanwhile, inside the walls of Central State Hospital, Eddie was adjusting nicely to institutional living, completely unaware of the fascination he continued to exert on the outside world. Hospital administrators had instituted a firm policy of forbidding outsiders from interviewing Eddie, so he had no way of knowing that from the moment he had been admitted to Central State, its directors had been bombarded with requests from newspapermen, magazine writers, sociologists, and others seeking permission to talk to Eddie. Bizarrely enough, he did receive an occasional piece of fan mail, but what he made of this macabre correspondence, particularly the letters from certain female admirers, imploring him for a lock of his hair, is anybody’s guess.
Over the years, small news items relating to Gein would appear from time to time in the papers. In May 1960, workmen planting trees on Gein’s former property spotted several dogs furiously scrabbling at the soil. Curious, the men left their work and traipsed across a field to investigate. In the spot where the dogs had been digging, the men discovered a pile of human bones—ribs, legs, arms, and a pelvis. Though all the buildings on the property had been razed by that time, the bones had been buried near the place where Eddie’s barn had stood. These skeletal scraps were immediately shipped off to the Crime Lab to be analyzed and added to the rest of Gein’s collection.
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