Deviant (14 page)

20

CORONER RUSSELL DARBY, after viewing Edward Gein’s home

“
It’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen
.”

A
brutal storm, one of the worst November blizzards Wisconsin had suffered in years, dumped more than a foot of snow onto parts of the state before tapering off on Tuesday. Three people died of heart attacks while shoveling their front walks, another was crushed to death when the ice-laden roof of his carport collapsed on him. Several hunters were lost in the woods; others were stranded in snow-bound camps. The hunting itself came to a virtual halt, the three-day kill figure standing at 28,675 deer.

The savage weather, however, did not deter a crowd of newsmen from making their way out to the Gein farm Tuesday morning. The press had finally received permission to enter Eddie’s house.

By then, the State Crime Lab had removed the ghastliest of Gein’s possessions from the premises. But even so, the house conveyed an intense impression of madness and morbidity, and, as one reporter noted, the newsmen—after days of clamoring for a peek inside the killer’s home—did not seem particularly eager to stay once they found themselves there.

They did, however, remain long enough for a tour of the already infamous “death house,” conducted by Deputy Dave Sharkey, who pointed out the spot in the summer kitchen where Mrs. Worden’s butchered carcass had dangled from the rafters, the pile of old clothes in Eddie’s bedroom under which investigators had found a box full of human skulls, and the kitchen table that held one of Eddie’s cranial-cap soup bowls.

News photographers were finally allowed to take pictures of Eddie’s living quarters. The grainy black-and-white photos, which caught the heart-sickening gloom of Gein’s household, appeared that evening in papers throughout the Midwest. For the first time, the public got a close inside look at Eddie’s madhouse. The papers also printed shots of various crime lab investigators sifting through the remaining contents of the rooms. Since nothing of Eddie’s graveyard gleanings was left in the house, the caption writers had to rely on lurid speculations to create the necessary titillation. One typical photograph showed a couple of investigators shining a flashlight on a perfectly ordinary-looking woman’s handbag, presumably “in an attempt to determine whether it is made of leather or human skin.”

The most vivid description of Gein’s dwelling, however, was provided by a
Milwaukee Journal
staff writer named Robert W. Wells in a lengthy piece headlined “I
NCREDIBLY
D
IRTY
H
OUSE
W
AS
H
OME OF
S
LAYER
.” The article captured both the unimaginable filthiness of the house and the crazy incongruity of its contents. Wells evoked a place where a picture of Christ gazing skyward at an angel might hang on one wall and the eyeless face of a female corpse on another. Where a stack of old children’s books with titles like
Dorothy Dale, A Girl of Today
might lie on a table alongside a book on embalming. Where a pile of Crackerjack premiums—plastic whistles, toy airplanes—might share shelf space with a section of human skull. Though Wells’s piece conjured up the overpowering creepiness of the ghoul’s abode, it ended on a distinctly poignant note, one that called attention not to Gein’s derangement but to his terrifying isolation:

The little man who lived here amid his mad collections, in a state of disorder that few of the animals who were his closest neighbors would have tolerated, had most of the doors and windows sealed with heavy tarpaper or thick, dirty draperies.

Inside the decaying house the four rooms which he used were so filled with junk that even so slight a man as Gein must have had difficulty moving about.

There was plenty of space that could have been his for the taking, however—the nearly empty upstairs with its five uncluttered rooms; and the two downstairs rooms which he had sealed up securely and dedicated to the dead past when Ed Gein was not alone in the world.

Someone else visited the Gein home on Tuesday—William Belter, a thirty-year-old former state assemblyman from Wautoma who had accepted Gein’s request to serve as his defense attorney. A Wood County deputy sheriff gave Belter a guided tour of the house, complete with a graphic description of Eddie’s death-mask collection, which Belter later shared with the press.

The officer explained how the masks had been made by separating the faces from the skulls, then stuffing the skins with newspapers. According to the deputy, investigators had found “more noses than faces,” which had led them to revise their estimate of the number of Eddie’s victims. Originally, the officer explained, the police believed there was a total of ten or eleven women involved—“depending on whether Mrs. Worden’s head was counted.” The sum now stood at fifteen, a figure based on the recovery of ten masks, Mrs. Worden’s severed head, and four “extra noses.”

Gein had spent the previous night being questioned by a pair of police officers from the Chicago Homicide Bureau, who had traveled to Wautoma in the hope of shedding light on three highly publicized unsolved murder cases: the butchering of a woman named Judith Anderson, the mysterious deaths of two sisters named Grimes, and the slaying of three young boys whose mutilated bodies had been discovered in an Illinois forest preserve in 1955.

Gein insisted that he had never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and then only once, for his army physical in 1942. After an interrogation that lasted until three in the morning, the Chicago detectives announced to the press that they believed Gein was telling the truth.

Still, there were those who felt that Gein, for all his apparent meekness and simplicity, was actually a shrewd and calculating individual—a “smart cookie,” in the words of one observer—whose cagey replies to his questioners revealed the workings of a diabolically cunning mind. The best way to check the validity of his claims, Kileen and others felt, was to administer a lie detector test. Plans had been made to transport Eddie to Madison on Tuesday morning, where he would be questioned by the crime lab’s polygraph expert, Joe Wilimovsky.

There was, of course, another, though far more controversial, way of checking out at least one of Gein’s assertions—namely by digging up some of the graves he claimed to have violated. The issue of exhumation was already generating heated arguments in the village of Plainfield and would give rise to many more before it was finally settled. The matter was first raised publicly on Tuesday morning, when reporters asked both Sheriff Schley and Crime Lab Director Charles Wilson if plans were afoot to open any burial plots in the local cemeteries.

Schley had intended to drive Gein to Madison early that morning, but the snow and icy roads forced him to delay the trip. Reporters spoke to him at the country jailhouse, where Gein was now the sole occupant, the other prisoners having been summarily released for “good behavior.” Even now that his news blackout had been lifted, Schley continued to be wary of reporters and extremely tight-lipped in his comments to the press. When the newsmen asked him if he and Kileen had visited any cemeteries on Monday, the sheriff replied with a sardonic “I don’t remember.” Was he aware of any plans to check the grave sites today? Schley stared out a window at the falling snow and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

Wilson, who was interviewed in Madison where he was making preparations for the impending polygraph test, was more forthcoming. “There’s no sense going out with a pick and shovel to check the graveyards near Plainfield until we have exhausted the possibilities of evidence we already have,” he explained. He acknowledged that some of the body parts recovered from Gein’s house contained formaldehyde—“Our noses tell us,” he said. But he insisted that the presence of embalming fluid did not in itself prove that Gein was a grave robber. After all, Wilson told the reporters, Gein could have put the fluid there himself. “We don’t know. Maybe he’s an amateur taxidermist.”

Like so many speculations regarding Gein, Wilson’s off-the-cuff conjecture was soon widely reported as fact. It didn’t matter that not a single stuffed animal had been found on Eddie’s farm. From that moment on, amateur taxidermy became a permanent feature of the Gein legend. Eventually, it would find its way into pop mythology, as the hobby of Eddie’s most famous fictional descendant.

Back in Plainfield, the search of Eddie’s farmhouse was nearing its conclusion. “Our case is pretty well cleaned up,” Kileen told reporters. “We have no missing persons in our county. The only thing here is the murder rap.”

There were still some loose ends to be tied up in the Worden case, and, early on Tuesday, the investigation moved to the hardware store, where crime lab technicians spent the morning shooting photographs of the murder scene. Barred from entering the building, newsmen clustered around the windows. There wasn’t much to see inside—just a neatly organized, well-stocked country establishment, offering a wide selection of merchandise, from housewares to farming tools, small appliances to sporting goods. One detail, however, did catch the newsmen’s attention. A gun rack stood against one wall of the store, and, peering through the windows, reporters could clearly see that one of the rifles was missing.

Schley had told the reporters gathered at the jailhouse that the trip to Madison might have to be put off for a day, but late in the morning, the snow let up enough for him to reconsider. At eleven thirty-five
A.M.
, with Schley on one side and Deputy Leon Murty on the other, Gein was escorted through a jostling crowd of journalists and cameramen and led into a waiting police car. Several hours later, at around one-thirty
P.M.
, he arrived at the capital and was immediately taken to the State Crime Laboratory at 917 University Avenue for the first of several lie detector tests—tests that would extend into the following day and would end up confirming that in the case of Eddie Gein, no fantasy, fiction, or fabrication could possibly be as unbelievable as the truth.

While Eddie was being prepped for his polygraph test, Herbert Wanerski, the Portage County sheriff involved in the investigation of Mary Hogan’s murder, dropped a bombshell that would explode across the front pages of the evening papers.

Wanerski, along with the Portage County DA, John Haka, had driven to Madison that morning in a car behind the one carrying Gein. While he waited for Eddie’s lie test to begin, Wanerski was asked by reporters if the Hogan investigation was “a case of divided jurisdiction.”

“Yes, definitely,” Wanerski said. Then, wholly unexpectedly, he made a startling announcement. Referring to the missing tavern keeper, Wanerski said, “We’ve got a head and face that is hers without question.” As the newsmen scribbled excitedly in their notepads, Wanerski explained that the head in question was actually a woman’s “facial skin and hair peeled back from the skull.” There was no doubt, he asserted, that it was Mary Hogan’s.

Though rumors regarding Hogan—including one that her skull was part of Gein’s private collection—had been buzzing around Plainfield for the past few days, this was a sensational disclosure. But Wanerski wasn’t through. The sheriff said that he had “strong doubts” that Gein could have spent much time in the house where Mrs. Worden’s carcass and the other human-flesh trophies had been found. There was too much undisturbed dust in the place—not just in the boarded-off rooms that had belonged to Eddie’s mother but throughout the house. “You couldn’t walk by without knocking the dust off,” Wanerski said.

He then told the newsmen that authorities were checking into stories that Gein had a habit of sleeping in barns and abandoned houses throughout the countryside. If that were the case, then Eddie’s farm might not be the only body-part storehouse in the area. As one newspaper later put it, “the grim thought behind the rumor was that more heads or bodies might be discovered.”

Wanerski had one last shocker in store. Referring back to the Hogan death mask, he insisted that it smelled unmistakably of embalming fluid. Since Mary Hogan had been very much alive at the time of her disappearance, the implication was clear, though the sheriff took the trouble to spell it out anyway.

“Eddie Gein never robbed a grave in his life,” Wanerski said bitterly.

That evening, something else arrived in Madison from Plainfield: the State Crime Laboratory’s Mobile Field Unit van containing the mountain of items collected from Eddie’s home. The crime lab was located directly across from the University of Wisconsin campus, and as Jan Beck and James Halligan—the two technicians who had brought the truck down from Plainfield—began to unload the piles of evidence, a crowd of students joined newsmen on the sidewalk to gawk.

As the two topcoated technicians moved back and forth between the van and the crime lab building, reporters kept a painstaking inventory of the items, while the undergraduates craned their necks in the hope of catching a glimpse of something truly gruesome.

Most of the evidence, however, was packed in cardboard boxes; the rest seemed disappointingly mundane. As a result, the onlookers were forced to rely heavily on wishful thinking in order to satisfy their morbid curiosity.