Deviant (13 page)

18

From the trial testimony of the necrophile Henri Blot

“
Everyone to his own taste. Mine is for corpses
.”

B
y Monday morning, the land lay under a four-inch blanket of snow. But the frigid conditions didn’t deter the investigators, who continued to sift through the squalor of Gein’s farm buildings. They also launched a search of his one-hundred-ninety-five-acre property, an undertaking that would end up lasting a week.

The chaos of Gein’s house was such that new pieces of evidence were constantly turning up in the clutter. The number of body parts buried amid the debris seemed endless. On Sunday, for example, Kileen had told the press that four human heads had been found inside Gein’s house. On Monday, he announced the discovery of six more, some wrapped carefully in plastic bags, others tossed casually under furniture.

Kileen’s revelations set off a media blitz. By Monday, the influx of newsmen into Plainfield had turned into a full-fledged invasion. Journalists descended on the stunned little town in droves. There were reporters from all the big regional dailies—the
Milwaukee Journal
, the
Milwaukee Sentinel
, the
Madison Capital Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Chicago Sun-Times
, the
Minneapolis Star
, the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, and others. Some of these papers assigned as many as five reporters to cover various angles of the rapidly unfolding story. Writers and photographers arrived from
Life, Time
, and
Look
magazines. Television and radio stations sent news teams, and the Associated Press set up a portable wire service in the Local Union Telephone Company office to transmit photographs from Plainfield. Within a day or so, there would even be correspondents from overseas newspapers.

The intense media interest in the horrors coming to light on Gein’s farmstead had as much to do with the locale of the case as with its gruesome nature. By early Monday, it was already evident that the village of Plainfield—a quiet little town in the heart of America’s dairyland—was the scene of one of the most sensational crimes in Wisconsin, if not American, history. As yet, no one could say how many murders had actually been committed, but investigators were inclined to believe that the number was substantial. “We know we have at least eleven dead,” Deputy Sharkey told reporters. “There might be fifty for that matter.”

Indeed, among the many rumors circulating through Waushara County that morning were reports connecting Eddie to every unexplained disappearance that had occurred in Wisconsin during the past ten years. And it was true that a virtual army of investigators from throughout the Midwest—more than one hundred fifty officers, according to one estimate—visited Gein’s premises during a forty-eight-hour period to check it for clues to various missing-persons cases. Heading the list of crimes they were hoping to solve were those involving Georgia Weckler, the eight-year-old girl who had vanished in 1947; Victor “Bunk” Travis, the local man missing since 1952; the La Crosse teenager Evelyn Hartley, carried off while babysitting in 1953; and Mary Hogan, the Portage County tavern keeper whose mysterious disappearance in 1954 bore a striking similarity, as more than one local newspaper noted, to the details of Be mice Worden’s abduction.

Shortly before eleven o’clock that Monday morning, a major development occurred in the case when prosecutor Kileen told a mob of reporters that Gein had finally broken his thirty-hour silence.

In a statement to Kileen, Gein had acknowledged killing Mrs. Worden, though he insisted he couldn’t remember any details of the crime because it all happened while he was in a “daze.” A stenographic record of Gein’s admission was later released to the press. The section relating to Mrs. Worden’s murder reads as follows:

KILEEN
: Now you start from the time you went into the Worden implement store. Tell us exactly what happened the best you can recall.

GEIN
: When I went into Mrs. Worden’s, I took a glass jug for permanent antifreeze. When I entered the hardware store she came toward me and said, “Do you want a gallon of antifreeze?” and I said, “No, a half gallon.” She got out the antifreeze and pumped it out, and I held the jug for her to pour it in and then she pumped out another quart, and I was still holding the jar while she pumped that. Then I paid her with a dollar bill. She gave me back one cent because it was 99 cents.

This is what I can’t remember from now on because I don’t know just what happened from now on, you see.

She glanced out of the window towards the filling station across the street and said, “They are checking deer there.” Then she looked towards the west, out of the west and north windows, and said, “There are more people up town than I thought there would be.” She might have said something about the opening of the season, she might have said that.

KILEEN
: Do you remember striking her or shooting her?

GEIN
: No. This is what got me—whether I took my antifreeze out. That is what I can’t remember. It is hard for me to say from now on. My memory is a little vague, but I do remember dragging her across the floor. I remember loading her body in the truck. Then I drove the truck out on the east road at the intersection where 51 and 73 separate east of Plainfield. I drove the truck up in the pine trees. Then I walked to town and got in my car and drove it out there and loaded her body in the back of the car, and also the cash register. I loaded the cash register in the truck when I put her body in there.

Then I drove out to my farm and took the body out of the car and hung it up by the heels in my wood shed.

KILEEN
: Tell how you took the blood out and buried it. You used the knife you made from the file to cut her up?

GEIN
: That is as close as I can remember. I was in a regular daze like, and I can’t swear to it.

KILEEN
: Then you said that you took the blood from the body and put that out—buried it out by the toilet house where you pointed out.

GEIN
: East of the toilet.

KILEEN
: Do you remember what you had the blood in? Was it a pail, bucket, or jar?

GEIN
: It must have been a pail.

KILEEN
: What kind of pail?

GEIN
: Probably galvanized. Probably a 10-quart pail.

KILEEN
: Then you proceeded to dress out the body? You told me that you thought you were dressing out a deer.

GEIN
: That is the only explanation I can think was in my mind.

Kileen had also raised the question of cannibalism, asking Eddie if he had butchered Mrs. Worden with the intention of eating her. But the little man had been evasive. “On that point,” Kileen told reporters, “he still has a lapse of memory.”

But the confession of Mrs. Worden’s killing was not in itself the most sensational part of Gein’s statement to Kileen. After all, Eddie’s guilt had never been in doubt, not since Friday evening when Frank Worden searched through his mother’s store and turned up the receipt for the antifreeze Gein had purchased that morning. The real shocker had to do with Gein’s revelation regarding his unholy collection of human scraps and tatters.

Gein denied that his “trophies”—the faces and heads, vulvas and breasts, noses and lips, skin and bones which littered his hell-house—were the remnants of murder victims. He wasn’t a crazed killer at all. In fact, Eddie claimed, Mrs. Worden’s murder was an aberration, an accident. When Kileen asked if Gein had ever killed anyone else besides the shopkeeper, Eddie shook his head. “Not to my knowledge,” he said.

Then where, Kileen wanted to know, did all the body parts come from?

The answer was simple. From graveyards, said Eddie.

As the lawmen listened in astonishment, Gein explained that for a five-year period, beginning in 1947, he had made a large number of nocturnal visits—as many as forty—to area cemeteries. Most of the time, he had returned home without committing any offense. But on at least nine of those occasions, he had dug up and opened caskets, removed what he wanted, then covered over the coffins again, leaving the violated graves, he assured Kileen, “in apple pie order.”

The cadavers were all newly dead women, middle-aged or older, whose obituaries Gein had read in local papers. Eddie had known a number of them while they were alive. Beyond these few facts, Eddie had little to say. All of his grave robbing, he insisted—like the murder of Mrs. Worden—had taken place while he was in a “daze.”

*   *   *

Immediately after Kileen’s announcement, at eleven
A.M.
, the fifty-one-year-old suspect, looking frail and wearing what was to become his trademark outfit—rubber boots, red cloth gloves, workshirt buttoned to the neck, woolen jacket, plaid deerhunter’s cap—was hustled from the jail to a waiting automobile. Accompanying him were Kileen, Sheriff Schley, and County Judge Boyd Clark.

“He has something he wants to show us,” said Kileen.

It was the first time Eddie had appeared in public since his arrest, and as he moved through the throng of reporters, flashbulbs popping all around him, he buried his face behind his shackled hands.

Gein was driven out to his farm, where he took a group of officials on a tour of the premises, pointing out various locations around the property, including the spot behind his outhouse where he had emptied the pail full of blood drained from Mrs. Worden. A crowd of journalists followed close behind. Already, Eddie seemed much more at ease with the news photographers, making no efforts to hide his face from their lenses. On the contrary, he gazed directly at the cameras, smiling for them with his shy little grin.

The pictures taken that morning show a slight, perfectly ordinary-looking, middle-aged rustic who seems about as threatening as a Salvation Army Santa Claus. For the newsmen who snapped those pictures, as well as for the millions of people who would see them that evening on the front pages of papers across the Midwest, it was almost impossible to believe that such a meek-looking fellow was—by his own admission and in the strict sense of the term—a ghoul.

Eddie was returned to the jail at around one
P.M.
, but less than two hours later, he was taken from his cell again and brought to the Waushara County Courthouse, an imposing edifice adorned with a row of Ionic columns and fronted by a handsome pair of statues honoring the heroes who died for the Union and on the battlefields of World War I. There he was arraigned before Judge Clark on a charge of armed robbery, stemming from the theft of Bernice Worden’s cash register (containing forty-one dollars), which had been found in Gein’s home.

Kileen had told reporters earlier that Gein would be charged with first-degree murder “in a day or two.” In the meantime, he was filing the larceny charge at the request of Charles Wilson, director of the State Crime Laboratory, who wanted to hold off on the murder charge until his staff had finished going through the gruesome mass of evidence on Gein’s farm.

Brought before the bench, Gein told Judge Clark that he wanted a lawyer and could afford to hire one. The arraignment was adjourned for a week to permit the prisoner to obtain counsel. Bail was set at ten thousand dollars, and Eddie was returned to his cell.

19

JUDGE ROBERT H. GOLLMAR

“
Mostly, Gein liked older, more well-developed women—dead that is
.”

L
ate Monday, Lieutenant Vern Weber, chief of detectives of the La Crosse Police Department, arrived in Plainfield to check out the purported uncovering of clues linking Gein to the abduction of Evelyn Hartley. Reports issuing from the farm were scattered and often contradictory, but, according to some accounts, one of the vulvas found among Eddie’s genitalia collection was that of a young girl. There were also rumors that clippings on the Hartley case had turned up among the mountainous piles of old newspapers inside Gein’s home. When reporters asked Weber if a solution to the four-year-old case was finally at hand, the lieutenant was hopeful but noncommittal. “It looks good, and then again it doesn’t look good,” he replied.

After spending some time examining the evidence inside Gein’s home and interviewing Eddie twice at the Waushara County jailhouse, Weber met once again with the press.

Like every other person who had actually been inside the house or talked directly to Gein, Weber was subjected to an interrogation himself, grilled by a news-hungry mob of reporters who were desperate for any eyewitness descriptions of the contents of the “death farm” or of the man they had dubbed “the mad butcher of Plainfield.”

Weber told the journalists that much of Eddie’s macabre collection had already been transferred to the crime lab’s truck. There he had seen “ten women’s heads, some with eyes and some without.” A few of the heads “were complete with skulls, others were merely skin.” The heads—some of which had been found behind chairs and other pieces of furniture—“were in a very good state of preservation.” Weber had asked Eddie about that, and Eddie had replied that he had cured the heads in brine.

Weber said that he had beheld with his own eyes “a chair with a seat which appeared to be made of human skin.” The chair, he explained, was “a typical kitchen chair which probably once had a rattan seat.” He had also seen “a knife with a handle that appeared to have skin covering.”

Weber went on to describe his conversations with Gein. The detective said he was “inclined to believe” Gein’s story about being in a daze during his body-snatching expeditions. The little man had told Weber that whenever he felt one of his “grave-robbing spells coming on,” he “would pray and that sometimes the prayers would snap him out of it.” According to Gein, he had “come out of a spell one time while he was digging up a grave and had stopped” and immediately returned home.

At the same time, he suggested to Weber that his interest in the cadavers was purely scientific. All during his youth, Gein told the detective, “he had wanted to be a doctor.” The grave robbing, he implied, was motivated by his intellectual curiosity. He wanted bodies to dissect in order to learn about human anatomy firsthand.

In any event, he insisted he hadn’t looted a grave since 1954. “He said maybe his prayers had been answered,” Weber told the reporters. Weber discounted the stories of cannibalism. “That’s out,” he told the reporters. He had asked Gein “strong questions” on that subject. Gein had sworn that “he never ate a bit of that stuff and I don’t believe that he did,” Weber said.

As for the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, the lieutenant was inclined to believe that Gein was not, after all, involved. Though one of the cellophane-wrapped heads in Eddie’s collection seemed to have come from a younger woman, the face “bore no resemblance whatever” to Evelyn Hartley’s. Moreover, Weber said, a pair of tennis shoes which had been recovered at the time of the crime and were believed to belong to the kidnapper were much too large for Gein. “The shoes we found are size eleven-and-a-half,” the detective explained. “Gein wears about an eight.”

There was, Weber stated, another piece of physical evidence that might conceivably be linked to Gein—a denim jacket which had been discovered just off a highway near La Crosse and was presumed to have been worn by the kidnapper. The jacket had a faded stripe running across its back, as though it had been worn under a harness or suspension belt, the kind used by painters and ironworkers. Since Gein had occasionally worked as a logger, he himself might have used a harness while trimming branches from treetops. But “on the whole,” Weber conceded, “I’m not too encouraged about developing anything along that line.”

Weber also said that, though Gein had been born in La Crosse and lived there until he was seven, “he claims he hasn’t been back since.” Gein still had relatives who resided in La Crosse, Weber told the reporters, “and we’re going to check with them.” Gein’s alibi—that on the day of the girl’s disappearance he had been doing some odd jobs for a neighbor—would also be checked out.

In the meantime, the heads and skulls discovered in Gein’s home were being examined against Evelyn Hartley’s dental charts, which had been forwarded to District Attorney Kileen by La Crosse County Criminal Investigator A. M. Josephson.

Weber concluded by offering his personal assessment of Gein. “He is a very sincere, very meek fellow. You’d never believe he’d be the kind of guy to do such a thing. You feel like he needs help awful bad.”

This level-headed—even sympathetic—description differed markedly from the picture of Gein as a fiendishly depraved sex-butcher that was being promulgated by the popular press. But it was, in fact, consistent with the reactions of many professionals—lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, nurses, and others—who would have contact with Eddie Gein in the years to come.

Although a link between Gein and Evelyn Hartley was coming to seem increasingly unlikely, there were signs that Eddie’s farmhouse might, in fact, contain an answer to the three-year-old mystery of Mary Hogan’s disappearance. Gein’s possible connection to the apparent murder of the middle-aged tavern keeper was a subject of open speculation by the press. Monday’s newspapers ran front-page stories suggesting that a major break in the Hogan case was imminent. Though the information filtering out of the farmhouse was spotty, there were reports that investigators had uncovered a large cache of firearms inside Gein’s home and that one of the weapons was a .32 automatic pistol. One of the major clues in the Hogan case was a spent .32-caliber cartridge, which had been found next to a dried puddle of blood on the floor of her tavern the day she disappeared.

It was also known that Portage County authorities, including Sheriff Herbert Wanerski, Undersheriff Myron Groshek, and District Attorney John Haka, had spent several hours questioning Gein, who had steadfastly denied knowing Mrs. Hogan, though he did concede that he had been inside her tavern—located just six miles north of his farm—on several occasions.

Wanerski and his colleagues, however, had no intention of letting up on Gein until they had extracted a confession, since, unbeknownst to the press, they already had in their possession a piece of evidence that left no doubt about his guilt.

What they had was the grisly relic discovered in Eddie’s charnel house by Deputy Sheriff Arnold Fritz—Mary Hogan’s face, skinned from her skull, softened with oil, and stuffed inside a paper sack.