Deviant (11 page)

14

SHAKESPEARE,
Othello

“On horror’s head horrors accumulate.”

S
choephoerster 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.

Led by Schoephoerster, the officers moved from the summer kitchen into the main part of the house. It was the first time in years that anyone besides its owner had set foot inside the place. At first, they conducted their investigation by flashlight and kerosene lamp. And in that dim and fitful glow, they discovered that Gein’s decaying old farmhouse was the habitation of a creature who could truly be called, without sensationalism or overstatement, a ghoul.

It was clearly a madhouse. The sheer disorder of the place—the sprawling heaps of rubbish, old cartons, tin cans, bottles, tools, newspapers, magazines, food scraps, rags, and much more—was profoundly disconcerting. It was as if Gein had reversed the usual process of garbage disposal and made weekly runs to the town dump to pick up a load of trash for his living quarters. Such chaos was clearly the product of an equally chaotic mind—mental derangement expressed as decor. It quickly became apparent to the explorers that, in the whole rambling house, only a couple of rooms were actually used by its inhabitant. But it was hard to imagine anyone really living—cooking, eating, sleeping—amid such filth and debris.

And then there were the particular items that spoke so plainly of insanity—the coffee can stuffed with lumps of used chewing gum, the cracked and yellowed dentures displayed on a shelf like Fabergé eggs, the wash basin full of sand. But these, of course, were the least disturbing objects in Eddie’s crazed collection.

There was, to begin with, the funny-looking soup bowl one of the officers saw sitting on the kitchen table and picked up for closer inspection. The soup bowl turned out to be the sawed-off top of a human skull.

There were other skullcaps scattered around the place. And there were several complete skulls, too, including a pair that had been stuck on Eddie’s bedposts as a decoration.

One of the chairs by the kitchen table had a distinctly peculiar look to it. When Captain Schoephoerster bent to examine it, he discovered that the woven cane seat had been replaced by smooth strips of human skin. The underside was lumpy with fat. Four such chairs were eventually found.

These grotesque furnishings were not the only evidence of Gein’s insane handiwork. Indeed, as the investigators quickly discovered, Gein’s farm functioned not just as a human slaughterhouse but as the workshop of a fiend. His diseased imagination fed by accounts of Ilse Koch and her human-skin artifacts, Gein had busied himself with the production of similarly abhorrent objects.

As the stunned and disbelieving lawmen poked through the wreckage of the house, they uncovered a variety of articles fabricated from human skin—lampshades, bracelets, a wastebasket, a tom-tom, the sheath of a hunting knife.

Later, they found a belt fashioned out of female nipples and a shade-pull decorated with a pair of woman’s lips.

A portable generator was secured, flood lamps were brought in, and the deathly gloom that Gein had inhabited for the past dozen years was finally dissolved in the glare of electric light. Meanwhile, in the bitter darkness outside, a huddling crowd of newsmen was being kept at bay by the police, who had blocked off Gein’s house and refused to issue any statements, other than to say that Mrs. Worden’s body had been found and that Gein was being held as a suspect.

The reporters could tell, of course, that something extraordinary was going on inside the house. But the only comment that Sheriff Schley would make was that the situation was “just too horrible. Horrible beyond belief.”

And indeed, even the investigators working their way through the shambles inside and seeing the newly illuminated horrors with their own eyes were having difficulty crediting their senses.

At one point, for example, Allan Wilimovsky, a crime lab specialist, picked up an old shoebox, glanced inside, and realized with a start that—as inconceivable as it seemed—he had just discovered a sizable collection of female genitalia.

There were nine vulvas altogether. Most were dried and shriveled, though one had been daubed with silver paint and trimmed with a red ribbon. Another—the top-most one—seemed quite fresh. It consisted of a portion of mons veneris with the vagina and anus attached. Looking closely at this specimen, Wilimovsky noticed small crystals clinging to its surface. The recently excised vulva, he realized, had been sprinkled with salt.

Another box contained four human noses. And there was a cardboard Quaker Oats container filled with scraps of human head integument.

Insane as it seemed, some of Gein’s loathsome creations were obviously meant to be worn. There were, for example, several pairs of skin puttees—leggings made from actual human legs. Even more ghastly was a garment fashioned from the upper torso of a middle-aged woman. Gein had carefully skinned the top part of her body—breasts included—tanned it, and attached a cord to it so that it could be donned as a kind of vest.

Perhaps the most shocking discovery of all, however, was Eddie’s mask collection.

The masks were actually human facial skins that had been painstakingly peeled from the skulls of nine women. They had no eyes, of course, just holes where the eyes had been. But the hair was still attached to the scalps. A few of the masks looked dried out, almost mummified. Others seemed more carefully preserved, as though they had been treated with oil to keep the skin smooth. Some of them still had lipstick on their mouths and looked quite lifelike. For those who knew their faces, it would not have been hard to tell the identities of the victims.

Four of these face-skins had been stuffed with paper and hung on a wall of Eddie’s bedroom like hunting trophies. These, as it turned out, were the “shrunken heads” that several of Eddie’s young neighbors had glimpsed years earlier, before he had permanently shut the doors of his house to visitors.

Other masks were stored inside plastic or paper bags. One of the officers—Deputy Arnie Fritz—discovered a moth-eaten horsehide robe lying in a heap behind the kitchen door. When he picked it up, he found a brown paper bag stuck within its folds. Opening the bag, he aimed his flashlight inside and saw a mass of dry hair attached to a desiccated skin. Much later, looking back on that moment, Fritz would say that he didn’t know what possessed him to do what he did next. Perhaps, like most of the men who went through Eddie’s house that first terrible night, the horrors of the place had simply put him into a kind of daze. In any event, what he did at that moment was reach into the bag, take hold of the grisly thing it contained, and raise that thing up to the light. And as he did so, Specks Murty, who was standing nearby, looked over and gasped, “By God. It’s Mary Hogan.”

The three-year-old mystery of the tavern owner’s disappearance had finally been solved.

For the dozens of local lawmen involved, the investigation of Bernice Worden’s murder had turned into a macabre form of excavation. Sifting through the rubble of Gein’s house was like conducting an archeological dig in hell. Throughout the night, so many body parts were uncovered—shin bones, scalps, scraps of skin, withered breasts, vaginas, lips, noses, heads, and more—that it was impossible to tell how many victims had supplied them. And all these human bits and pieces were contained in a very confined area—the kitchen and downstairs bedroom that Eddie inhabited.

Faced with the boarded-off part of the first floor that lay beyond Gein’s living space, the searchers couldn’t help but feel a twinge of apprehension. After the things they had turned up in his bedroom and kitchen, it was hard to imagine what horrors he had felt compelled to seal away from view.

The nails were removed. The boards were taken down. And the sight that confronted the investigators did indeed provide a shock, though of a very different kind from any they had yet experienced during that long, punishing night.

What the investigators saw when they removed the boards was a bedroom and parlor in a state of absolute tidiness. Everything was in perfect order—the bed, the bureaus, the rugs, the bookcases, the chairs and side tables and curtains. After the unholy squalor of the rest of the house, the very neatness of these rooms was intensely unsettling.

The nature of the furnishings as well as the clothes that the investigators found meticulously folded away in the dresser drawers made it clear that the rooms had been inhabited by a woman. And the thick coating of dust that lay over everything indicated that this part of the house had not been used—or even entered—in years.

In fact, the lovingly preserved rooms had belonged to Eddie’s long-dead mother. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the searchers had stumbled upon a shrine. Like Egyptologists breaking into the burial chamber of a pharaoh, the men who entered Augusta Gein’s living quarters that night were the first humans to set foot inside that sanctum since it had been sealed off many years before by a worshipper who regarded it as the dwelling place of a god.

Out in the summer kitchen, Allan Wilimovsky of the crime lab had set up a camera and photographed Bernice Worden’s remains—still hanging upside down from the rafters—from various angles. By this time, early Sunday morning, other parts of her butchered body had been discovered—her heart in a plastic bag in front of Gein’s potbellied stove, a pile of entrails (still warm) wrapped in a newspaper and folded inside an old suit of men’s clothes.

As yet, however, no one had located the corpse’s head.

Wilimovsky and a crime lab colleague named Halligan began poking through the heaps of trash scattered around the floor of the summer kitchen. In a corner of the shed lay a pair of stained and tattered mattresses. Lifting the top one by a corner, Halligan saw an old burlap feed sack sandwiched between them. Steam rose from the sack.

Wilimovsky picked up the bag, reached inside, and removed Mrs. Worden’s head.

It was smeared with dirt, and there was blood in both nostrils, but the expression on the face looked peaceful. But Eddie had done something to the decapitated head that would have defied belief, except that nothing seemed unbelievable to the investigators anymore. Not after the endless succession of horrors they had witnessed that night.

What Eddie had done was take two ten-penny nails, bend them into hooks, connect them with a two-foot length of twine and stick one nail into each of Bernice Worden’s ears. In this way, the head could be hung in Eddie’s bedroom as a trophy or wall ornament—the latest acquisition in his collection of monstrous
objets d’art
.

Bernice Worden’s body was unhooked from the pulley and placed inside a plastic bag. Along with the severed head, which had been photographed by Wilimovsky and then replaced in the burlap sack, the corpse was transported back to Plainfield, where a postmortem examination was to be conducted at Goult’s Funeral Home.

It was five in the morning, Sunday, November 17—twelve hours since Frank Worden had returned from the woods to discover that his mother was missing.

15

CHARLES WILSON, director of the Wisconsin Crime Laboratory

“
I’ve never worked on a case quite like this one
.”

F
ollowing his arrest on Saturday night, Eddie was transported to the town of Wautoma and locked in a cell in the rear of the county jailhouse. The front of the building served as living quarters for Sheriff Schley, his wife, and their three daughters.

A trio of deputies stood guard outside Gein’s cell—Arden Spees, Specks Murty, and Dan Chase. Suddenly, around two-thirty in the morning, Sheriff Schley burst into the jail. After having spent six hours stuck inside the living nightmare of Gein’s horror house, he was visibly agitated.

Schley looked at Chase. “Has he come clean?” he demanded.

“Not too much,” said Chase.

The night of nerve-rending discoveries finally got the better of Schley. He grabbed the fifty-one-year-old bachelor by the shoulders and started slamming him up against the wall of the jail.

Instantly, the three deputies sprang at the men and separated Eddie from Schley’s powerful grasp.

The little man was shaken up a bit, but Schley’s outburst didn’t manage to dislodge a confession from him. In fact, it produced the opposite effect. Eddie clammed up even tighter than before.

At four-thirty
A.M.
, Joe Wilimovsky—Allan’s brother and the crime lab’s polygraph specialist—arrived at the jail to question the suspect, an interrogation that would continue, on and off, for more than twelve hours. At no point during this period did Gein have an attorney present, nor was he ever advised of his right to counsel. But Gein admitted to nothing.

That Sunday morning, the citizens of Plainfield went off to church knowing only that something horrific had happened in their little village. By then, everyone had heard a few basic facts: that Mrs. Worden had been abducted from her store on Saturday morning; that her truck—its floor and front seat spattered with blood—had been discovered just east of the village by Sheriff Frank Searles of Adams County, in a pine grove that served as the local lovers’ lane; that Mrs. Worden’s corpse had later been found at the old Gein farmstead; and (though some of them refused to believe it) that meek little Eddie Gein stood accused of the murder.

That was all they knew for sure. But as awful as Mrs. Worden’s murder was, something even more enormous had clearly taken place. Police from as far away as Chicago were pouring into Plainfield on their way out to the Gein farm. And the town was under virtual siege by a growing army of reporters, who were camped out at the farm and had set up their headquarters in the offices of the local weekly, the
Plainfield Sun
.

Bizarre and unbelievable stories—whispered talk of unspeakable crimes and unthinkable depravities—circulated among the citizens of Plainfield as they milled on the streets after their Sunday services. As one paper reported, the news blackout imposed by Sheriff Schley had turned the town into a “hothouse of rumor.”

The first account of the Plainfield horrors to reach the world outside the isolated little farming community appeared in the Sunday edition of the
Milwaukee Journal
. “M
ISSING FROM
S
TORE
, W
IDOW
F
OUND
D
EAD
,” read the headline. The story itself contained only a few bare details. It described Frank Worden’s discovery of his mother’s abduction, the subsequent discovery of the body “on a farm seven miles away,” and the arrest of a suspect. The article reported that Sheriff Schley “would not identify the suspect,” though it mentioned that the victim’s corpse had been found on the farm of one Edward Gein.

As the day progressed, there were increasing indications from the officers that a story of extraordinary magnitude was about to break. And one of the officers who indicated as much was the dead woman’s son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden. Though Worden refused to divulge any details, he admitted to reporters that something even worse than his mother’s murder was involved. “It’s a case that will shock the state of Wisconsin,” Worden claimed.

As it turned out, his remark would prove to be a significant understatement.