Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  It came as a shock to most people, then, when in February 1974, Eddie Gein filed a petition with the Waushara County clerk of courts, claiming that he had “now fully recovered his mental health and is fully competent and there is no reason why he should remain in any hospital.”

  In discussions with newsmen, Dr. Schubert continued to portray Gein as well adjusted to life in Central State. During the past few years, Eddie had been working as a carpenter’s helper, mason, and hospital attendant, earning a dollar fifty a week. He had opened a savings account and accumulated nearly three hundred dollars. During his spare time, he watched TV (he was especially fond of ball games), listened to his shortwave radio, read books and magazines. He was free to roam the building and the grounds. Though he continued to be a loner and had little to do with other patients (who regarded him as “strange”), he had never caused a moment’s trouble.

  Nevertheless, after spending seventeen years locked up in the mental hospital, Eddie had begun to feel trapped. “I doubt that anybody would be happy there,” he would later say to newsmen who asked if he was content at Central State. “If you want to go someplace, you can’t go. It is human nature to want to go someplace.” Eddie wasn’t exactly sure where he would go if he gained his release. But one thing was certain—he wanted out.

  Eddie’s petition was reviewed by Judge Gollmar, who ordered several psychiatrists to reexamine Eddie and scheduled a hearing for June 27. On the day of the hearing, a hot, sunny Thursday, Eddie showed up at the Waushara County Courthouse in his blue suit, striped tie, and white shirt, looking considerably older than he had six years earlier. Before the hearing began, he met with the press, smiling for the television cameras, joking with a TV artist who dashed off a quick sketch (“You could have made it a little more handsome,” Eddie said with a grin), and quietly answering questions.

  What, asked one reporter, did Eddie regard as an important issue in the world today?

  “Work,” said Eddie. “In some places more fellows want to work than there is work, and other places it’s the other way around.”

  Where would he go if he were released?

  Eddie said he would probably move to a big city, where there were better job opportunities. “I know several trades. I can do most anything.”

  When one newsman asked if he would consider moving back to Waushara County, Eddie shook his head. There was no reason to go back there, he said, though he believed that if he did, he “wouldn’t have trouble from the people.”

  What about his relationships with women? one reporter wanted to know. What were they like these days?

  Eddie smiled shyly. The only women he had contact with were the nurses at the hospital, he explained, and his relationships with them were completely normal. After all, he said with a wink, “they are all married.”

  As far as the reporters could tell, the most remarkable thing about the white-haired little man was how ordinary he seemed. He was amiable, polite, soft-spoken—a little nervous, perhaps, but perfectly lucid. He certainly didn’t look or sound like a madman. Maybe (unlikely as it seemed) he had recovered his sanity after all.

  Then the doctors’ testimony began.

  The first psychiatrist to testify was Dr. Thomas Malueg. Earlier in the year, after completing his examination of Eddie, Malueg had forwarded a report to Judge Gollmar in which he confirmed that “to any casual observer” Gein “would present no obvious evidence of serious mental disorder.” He was “friendly” and “willing to talk openly”(at least “when discussing relatively non-threatening material”). His “thought processes were generally intact and reasonably well organized.”

  Nevertheless, Malueg reported, there were unmistakable indications that Gein’s psychosis was simmering just below the surface, ready to be reactivated under the right conditions. Whenever Malueg had asked Eddie direct questions about his crimes, for example, Gein would become highly agitated. “I don’t want to rake up the past,” he would say angrily. “If you stir up the past you might get burned up in your own fire. Psychiatrists are probably responsible for a lot of trouble in the world because of making people dig up the past. I think a lot of the prisoners from here might go out and kill ’em, rob ’em, club ’em because of digging up the past.”

  Eddie’s interpretations of common proverbs were also, in Dr. Malueg’s words, “very personalized.” Malueg had presented Eddie with a few well-known sayings and asked what he thought they meant.

  Malueg began with “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Gein answered without hesitation: “Everybody has something he wants covered up.”

  “Don’t cry over spilt milk,” said Malueg.

  “Don’t dig up the past—what’s done is done,” Eddie replied.

  “Still waters run deep,” said Malueg.

  Eddie thought for a moment, then answered, “Some people are calm on the surface and hotheads underneath.”

  Malueg had one more: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

  For some reason, Eddie seemed amused by this proverb. He laughed, Malueg wrote in his report, “somewhat inappropriately” before giving his interpretation. “If you have a bird in your hand,” said Eddie, “you might squeeze him too much and kill him.”

  Clearly, Gein was still a sick man, a conceivable threat to himself and others. Nevertheless, it was Malueg’s belief that—though Gein should certainly not be released or even transferred to a halfway house—he might do well in a different hospital and suggested that he be moved to the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, a “less restricted facility” than Central State.

  The remaining three witnesses, however, didn’t share Dr. Malueg’s belief. Dr. Leigh M. Roberts, head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, testified that Gein’s condition—specifically his “tolerance of stress”—had actually deteriorated in recent years and advised against a transfer to Winnebago because of the “accessibility of women” there. Dr. Schubert and Dr. George Arndt (who, years earlier, had researched and written about the phenomenon of “Gein humor”) agreed that Central State was still the best place for Gein. Sending him out into the world—or even into a less closely supervised institution—would be a mistake. “I don’t think he has the strength to cope with society now,” Schubert said, “and I don’t think he ever had the strength to cope with society.” Gein, he asserted, was absolutely alone in the world. In all the years of his confinement, he had never had a single visitor. Left to his own devices, he “would be a pathetic, confused, out of place person,” a social outcast and potential victim of exploitation.

  In the end, after a long day of testimony in the small, overcrowded, sweltering courtroom, Judge Gollmar had no choice but to reject Gein’s petition. Noting that, had Eddie been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Mrs. Worden, he would already have been eligible for parole, Gollmar said he wished he knew of a way to give Gein a little freedom. But it was not in his power to transfer Eddie to Winnebago.

  As for “plucking” him from Central State and “putting him back on the street,” Gollmar agreed with the experts. “I don’t know whether it would be dangerous to Mr. Gein to release him. I do know that it would be horribly frustrating to him. This is a Rip Van Winkle situation. The simple day-by-day concerns would be impossible for him to handle. Simply crossing the street or getting food and a place to sleep would be very difficult for Mr. Gein after his many years in an institution.

  “People might not treat him very well. Some people might even try to exhibit him.”

  After announcing his decision to return Gein to Central State, Gollmar adjourned court. Eddie, who accepted the ruling with his usual equanimity, got up and shuffled toward the exit. As he passed the spectators in the front row of benches, he noticed a little girl sitting beside her mother and smiled broadly. “It sure is awful warm,” he remarked softly.

  The next morning, Eddie was driven back to Central State Hospital, where he quietly returned to the pursu
its that made up his life—putting his handyman skills to work around the hospital, listening to the news on his shortwave radio, and dreaming of the round-the-world trip he planned to take someday, once he had saved enough money.

  Eventually, Eddie did make it out of Central State—but only by being transferred to another institution. In 1978, when Central State was converted into a “correctional facility,” Gein, along with nine other patients, was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. According to a spokesman for the State Health and Social Services Department, Gein had been deemed eligible for the transfer “by virtue of a stable condition and a low security status.” By then, he was seventy-two years old, frail, in declining health, and beginning to show the first signs of senility.

  He immediately became the hospital’s resident celebrity. New employees—nurses, orderlies, administrative staffers—could hardly wait to get their first glimpse of the notorious Edward Gein. And they could hardly believe, when he was pointed out to them, that the gentle little man, shuffling slowly down the hallways or around the sprawling grounds of the institution, was the monster who had haunted their childhood dreams.

  He still had ways of making news. A year after Eddie’s transfer to Mendota, a particularly gruesome murder took place in Milwaukee. An eighty-six-year-old woman named Helen Lows was found bludgeoned to death in her bedroom. Her eyes had been gouged out, and slits had been cut into her face, apparently in an attempt to peel the skin off her skull.

  The suspect arrested for the crime turned out to be a former mental patient named Pervis Smith, who, in 1974, had been committed to the Central State Hospital. There, he told police, he’d learned all kinds of interesting things about murder, mutilation, and the manufacture of human face masks from his best friend at the hospital, “Little Eddie” Gein.

  Gein was seventy-eight years old, senile, and suffering from cancer when he died of respiratory failure in the geriatric ward at Mendota on July 26, 1984. Newspapers around the world printed the obituary of the man whose crimes had been the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, by then long recognized as a classic of the American cinema.

  The following night, sometime between three and six A.M., Gein was buried in an unmarked plot in the Plainfield Cemetery. Only a few employees of the Gasperic Funeral Home were present to witness the interment.

  A woman who lived nearby, however, noticed some lights coming from the cemetery at that ungodly hour and, the next morning, notified her friend, a news correspondent named Linda Akin, who drove out to the graveyard to investigate. It took her a while, but Akin finally located the spot. “They had it look like there was no new grave,” she later explained. “After the next time it rains, nobody will know there is a grave there.” But there was a fresh grave, and it had been dug in the only appropriate spot.

  Eddie had been laid to rest directly beside his mother.

  Among the mysteries left unresolved at the time of Gein’s death was the exact number and identity of his victims. From the time of his arrest to the present day, many people have believed that Gein committed far more murders than the pair he confessed to. They seem especially convinced that he was responsible for the disappearances of the two young girls, Georgia Weckler and Evelyn Hartley.

  Others, however, feel that Gein was, as he claimed, innocent of these crimes. Clearly, he was capable of the most deranged and horrifying acts—grave robbing, necrophilia, sexual mutilation, and more. But child snatching, according to many people who knew him, simply wasn’t his style. Eddie, they argue, wasn’t interested in children. As the cases of both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden show, his particular dementia involved the abduction and slaughter of mothers.

  Besides the unsolved questions, Eddie left behind something else—a legacy of horror. By now, he is only a bad memory to the older citizens of Plainfield. But he’s a memory that won’t go away. Even today, most of the townspeople would prefer not to talk about him or even hear his name mentioned. Indeed, their most ardent hope is that one day, his name will be entirely forgotten and their community will no longer be instantly identified in the public’s mind as the hometown of Wisconsin’s most notorious and perverted killer.

  Increasingly, however, that hope seems unrealistic. Indeed, in the thirty years since his crimes first became known to an appalled and disbelieving public, Gein’s notoriety has actually increased, thanks largely to his impact on American popular culture. In 1975, a young Austin filmmaker named Tobe Hooper—who, as a child, had heard tales of the Wisconsin ghoul from visiting relatives—transformed his childhood recollections of the Gein horrors into one of the most harrowing movies ever made, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A triumph of drive-in Grand Guignol, Hooper’s film let loose a flood of teenage slice-’em-ups known collectively as “splatter” movies—movies with titles like Driller Killer, The Tool Box Murders, and Motel Hell. Besides Hooper’s exploitation classic, two more of these films were based directly on the Gein legend: a low-budget shocker called Deranged and an even lower-budget gore fest with the improbably perky title Three on a Meathook.

  Indeed, it can be argued that insofar as Hitchcock’s Psycho was the prototype for every “slasher” film that followed, the figure of Eddie Gein stands behind all the knife- and ax- and chainsaw-wielding psychos who have stalked the screen during the past decade, preying on oversexed adolescents in films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and all their imitators and sequels. If there can be such a thing as a seminal psychotic, that dubious honor must surely belong to Eddie Gein—the patron saint of splatter, the grandfather of gore.

  Even today, public fascination with his case continues. As recently as November 1987, the Madison Capital Times ran an article about one of the psychiatrists who had interviewed Gein at the time of his arrest. Headlined “INFAMOUS KILLER ED GEIN WAS ‘SENSITIVE,’ PSYCHIATRIST SAYS,” the article quoted Dr. Leonard Ganser, a retired psychiatrist for the State Department of Health and Social Services, who described Eddie as “always considerate and courteous,” a “sensitive man” who “did not want to give offense.”

  In October 1987, Judge Robert Gollmar died at age eighty-four after a long and illustrious career, during which he had presided over scores of sensational murder trials. But, as his obituaries made clear, it was for his role as judge in “the ‘Psycho’ trial”(as the New York Times called it) that he would forever be remembered.

  During the past few years, Eddie has been the subject of a play, a documentary, even a comic book. In the early 1980s, a Minnesota filmmaker announced his plans to make a movie called “A Nice Quiet Man,” based on the story of Gein. It would not, the producer insisted, be a “guts and gore film” but rather a “message movie”(the message being “that it is society’s responsibility to detect bizarre behavior and help those who need it”). The producer did not expect to land a big-name star for the role of Eddie Gein. For the part of Bernice Worden, he hoped to secure the services of Joanne Woodward.

  Perhaps the most succinct and eloquent proof of Gein’s ongoing fascination, however—of his status as a contemporary cult figure and pop immortal—was a classified advertisement that appeared not long ago in an issue of a publication called Fangoria, a monthly newsstand magazine devoted exclusively to “horror in entertainment.” The ad (from a company called Bates Enterprises) was for a silk-screened T-shirt created in tribute to “the guy who got it all started.”

  The message on the T-shirt, printed in letters of blood, bones, and body parts, reads “Ed Gein Lives.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the support and encouragement of many people, the writing of this book proved to be a much pleasanter experience than it might have been, given the grimness of the subject matter.

  My researcher, Catharine Ostlind, provided invaluable assistance at every stage of the project. Her professionalism, energy, and generosity were enormously sustaining. Without the enthusiasm of Stacy Prince and Elizabeth Beier, this book would never have been more than an inte
resting idea, and I am grateful to them both, as I am to my agent, Jonathan Dolger, who offered the kind of advice, aid, and comfort I’ve come to depend on.

  During the time I spent in Wisconsin, I was treated with unfailing kindness by everyone I met. Among the people whose thoughtfulness I will always be grateful for are Michael Bemis of the Wisconsin Department of Justice Law Library; Joan and Fred Reid of Plainfield, who opened their home to me; Irene Hill Bailey, who, in spite of the evident pain they are still capable of causing, spent an afternoon recalling the memories of three decades ago; the late Judge Robert Gollmar, a thoroughly gracious gentleman, and his equally gracious wife, Mildred. I would also like to thank Roger Johnson, Floyd and Lyle Reid, Dr. George Arndt, and the Honorable Jon P. Wilcox.

  Many other people offered me various kinds of assistance during the researching and writing of this book, among them Nancy Alquist, Howard Bjorklund, Robert Bloch, Mindy Clay, Debra Cohen, Jim Donna, Daniel Dowd, Dominic Frinzi, Jim Hansen, Georgina Harring, Sid Harring, Dawn Hass, Mark Hasskarl, Rick Hayman, Jack Holzheuter, Andrea Kirchmeier, Peggy Klimke, Ann Lund, Dennis McCormick, Linda Merrill, Sally Munger, Roberta Otis, Eugene Perry, John Reid, Jo Reitman, David Schreiner, Darold Strege, Robert E. Sutton, and Myrna Williamson. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all.

  As always, Jonna Semeiks provided the most constant and crucial support. Without her, this book simply couldn’t and wouldn’t have been written.

  HAROLD SCHECHTER is a professor at Queens College, the City University of New York, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture. He is the author of the novel Outcry, a chilling tale inspired by the legacy of killer Ed Gein, and five nonfiction books: Bestial, Depraved, Deranged, Deviant and, with David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. A previous novel, Dying Breath, was written with his wife with his wife under the pseudonym Jon A. Harrald. They live in New York State.