Deviant (15 page)

Spotting a bunch of “cellophane wrapped objects” inside a cardboard box, for instance, one reporter concluded that they “may have been human heads.” A few moments later, after several straightbacked chairs with “saffron colored seats” had been removed from the van, the same reporter was accosted by a coed—“a cute little brunette with an Italian haircut,” in the words of the writer. “Did those chairs have skin bottoms?” she asked hopefully.

The sheer quantity of stuff was staggering. There were firearms and an old oak barrel, quart jars full of thick brown liquid, a metal tub, a bunch of wood-handled tools, a bucksaw, a strongbox, an old medical volume, a cash register (presumably the one taken from Bernice Worden’s store), and countless cardboard boxes and brown paper grocery bags, whose contents were hidden from view. One of the last items removed from the van was a three-foot length of barbed wire.

It took the two officials thirty trips and a full half-hour to empty the truck. When the job was finished at ten that night, crime lab director Charles Wilson met with a mob of newspaper, radio, and television reporters. The newsmen had been begging for precise information about the contents of Eddie Gein’s home. Indicating the “avalanche” of evidence that had just been unloaded, Wilson told the reporters that they could now see for themselves “what an impossible question that was.” One of the technicians who helped empty the van elaborated on Wilson’s remark. “Even Eddie Gein doesn’t know what’s all here,” he said.

21

From an editorial in the
Stevens Point Daily Journal

“
Plainfield and its citizens will in time live down the notoriety that was inevitable after the story ‘broke.’ It was a peaceful community unaccustomed to violence or crime, and because it was, it may be more difficult to adjust back to the normal pattern of living. It took the terrifying actions of one individual to leave a lasting scar
.”

F
or the good folk of Plainfield, the horrible murder of one of their most respected citizens was, of course, an unpardonable crime. But even more unforgivable, perhaps—at least to the townspeople at large—was the offense Eddie Gein had committed against the community. For the hundred-odd years since its founding, the minuscule farming town was a place that enjoyed the peacefulness of absolute obscurity. Even within Wisconsin, few people had ever heard of Plainfield. All at once, their quiet little community was the focus of nationwide attention—and for the most dismaying of reasons. Other small towns across the U.S.A. could boast of being the birthplace of politicians, athletes, and movie stars. Plainfield suddenly found itself famous as the home of America’s most demented murderer.

If Gein was ultimately responsible for all the unwanted attention, it was the news media that, at least in the eyes of some local residents, had turned their hometown into the societal equivalent of a sideshow freak, an object of morbid fascination and curiosity. Plainfield was overrun by reporters, so avid for lurid tidbits that they would print the most flagrant kinds of hearsay as unimpeachable truth. And the reporters had no trouble finding local sources to supply them with juicy quotes. For every person like Sheriff Schley or Frank Worden who refused to cooperate with the press, there were a half-dozen who couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing their names in the papers or, even better, their pictures in Life magazine. And some of those people were willing to tell the newsmen just what they wanted to hear.

One early and wholly erroneous story, for example—widely reported in newspapers, over the radio, and on TV—was that lynch mobs were forming in the streets of Plainfield. “We’re all at a real pitch here,” one unnamed townsman was quoted as saying. “There’s no use monkeying around. If the town got a hold of that guy, the town’d know what to do about him, all right.” Ed Marolla, editor of the local weekly the
Plainfield Sun
, found himself expending a good deal of ink in an effort to refute this and similar rumors of mounting vigilantism—rumors whose spread he blamed directly on “big city reporters,” who didn’t hesitate to exaggerate the truth for the sake of a more sensational story.

Of course, members of the news media weren’t the only ones prone to exaggeration. Though Gein was a notoriously reclusive individual, he suddenly seemed to have acquired a wide circle of intimates, who were only too eager to share their knowledge of the killer with the press.

A former Plainfield resident named Turner, for example, told newsmen that he “knew Ed Gein better than any living man.” Turner explained that he had grown up on a farm a half-mile south of the Gein place and, though he had moved to Milwaukee many years before, had remained in close touch with his childhood buddy.

“Ed was the best friend I had,” Turner said. “As a boy, the Gein farm was my second home. I stopped there practically every day after school. And I ate as many meals there as I did at my own home. Ed taught me to hunt, fish, and play the accordion and the flute. We went hunting together lots of times. Ed was a very nice fellow. He would do anything for you.”

Turner allowed that there was one aspect of the Gein affair that puzzled him: Eddie’s claim that he had been in a “daze” while performing his gruesome deeds. In all the years he had known the man, Turner said, Eddie “never suffered from dazes.”

“When I first found out about the murder,” Turner told his interviewer, “I was shocked. At first I figured they had the wrong man. Later the sheriff told me the whole story. I just couldn’t understand what came into that man’s mind.”

An even more remarkable testimonial to Ed’s character came from a Plainfield woman named Adeline Watkins, who achieved instant, if exceptionally short-lived, celebrity by announcing that she was Ed Gein’s sweetheart.

Described in the papers as a “severely plain woman” (in fact, she bore an uncanny resemblance to actress Margaret Hamilton in the role of Miss Gulch in
The Wizard of Oz
), Watkins revealed her twenty-year romance with Gein in an interview that appeared on the front page of the
Minneapolis Tribune
under the headline “I L
OVED
K
IND
, S
WEET
M
AN
, S
TILL
D
O
, S
AYS
C
ONFESSED
K
ILLER’S
‘F
IANCEE
.’”

The fifty-year-old spinster, who shared a small apartment in Plainfield with her widowed mother, described her “last date” with Eddie on February 6, 1955. “That night, he proposed to me,” Watkins told the reporter. “Not in so many words, but I knew what he meant. I turned him down, but not because there was anything wrong with him. It was something wrong with me. I guess I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live up to what he expected of me.”

When asked about the specifics of their relationship, Watkins described the activities she and her suitor enjoyed. “Eddie and I discussed books,” Watkins replied. “We never read the same ones, but we liked to talk about them anyway. Eddie liked books about lions and tigers and Africa and India. I never read that kind of books.”

During the six-month period leading up to Eddie’s proposal, the couple went out “an average of twice a week,” usually to a movie theater in Wautoma. Watkins’s mother, who sat quietly in a nearby rocker during her daughter’s interview, confirmed that Gein was the soul of politeness, always having her daughter home by ten
P.M.

Occasionally, Watkins said, the couple would stop off at a tavern. “I liked to drink beer sometimes,” she confessed, “but I would almost have to drag Eddie into a tavern. He would much rather have gone into a drugstore for a milkshake.”

Watkins concluded the interview by indicating once again that the failure of their relationship reflected her own shortcomings, not Gein’s. “Eddie was so nice about doing things I wanted to do,” said Watkins, “that sometimes I felt I was taking advantage of him.”

Adeline Watkins’s revelations made quite a splash, particularly in Plainfield, where no one could remember Eddie Gein’s ever having been involved with a woman. And indeed, within days of the interview’s appearance, Watkins contacted Ed Marolla of the
Sun
to offer a radically different version of her relationship to Gein.

According to Marolla, Watkins had fallen victim to the wiles of the big-city press. “The city papers,” he claimed, “hungry for ‘human interest’ news, played up the innocent enough relations,” and Watkins—much to her distress—found herself “in the national spotlight,” her “photo on the front pages of every daily in the country.”

Watkins’s revised account of her friendship with Gein amounted to a complete retraction. She declared that she was not Ed Gein’s “sweetheart” and had never used that word in the presence of reporters.

Moreover, she insisted that—although Eddie had “called on her” every now and again, stopping by her apartment and occasionally accompanying her to the Plainfield Theatre—“there was no twenty-year romance.”

Though Miss Watkins conceded that she had described Gein as “quiet and polite,” she denied ever having referred to him as “sweet.” And she was “quite emphatic in stating that she had never ‘practically dragged him into a tavern,’ as was reported.”

In short, Adeline Watkins wanted the public to know that there was not a shred of truth to the highly sensationalized account of her love affair with the little man who stood accused of the grisliest crimes in Wisconsin history. “She says that she kind of felt sorry for him,” Marolla explained, “and that mostly they just sat at her house.”

To the editor of the
Sun
, the Watkins case was yet another illustration of the media’s flagrant manipulation of the facts. Marolla accused the reporters of “plying people for interviews,” then “putting words in their mouths” or seriously misrepresenting what they had actually said. Whatever the truth of this allegation, it was certainly the case that in the days immediately following Eddie’s arrest, newsmen roamed the streets of Plainfield, pouncing on anyone who was willing to speak for the record.

Given the tininess and tightly knit character of the town, most of its citizens had at least a passing acquaintance with Gein. Some of them, like Eddie’s neighbor Stanley Gerlovic, had kindly words to say about the accused, describing Gein as “always happy, smiling, congenial—a good worker,” who “never said a dirty word or cussed.” Others emphasized Eddie’s social backwardness—his “shyness,” “meekness,” and awkwardness around women. And a few prided themselves on having been sharp enough to detect all along that there was something distinctly unsettling—even creepy—about the man. “He had a sly sort of grin when he would talk to you,” one of Ed’s neighbors told reporters, and a local storekeeper who preferred to remain anonymous admitted that whenever he gave change to Gein, “I put it on the counter rather than touch his hand.”

No one, however, not even the people who claimed to have sensed that the little bachelor wasn’t as harmless as he seemed, imagined that Eddie Gein was actually a murderer (let alone a defiler of the dead). The general reaction to Gein’s arrest among the populace of Plainfield was bewilderment and disbelief. “When I first heard what they were saying he had done,” one of Eddie’s neighbors told reporters, “I couldn’t believe it. Now, of course, I know it’s true—but I still can’t believe it. You know what I mean? I mean, I believe it, but at the same time I don’t believe it—it’s just too fantastic.” Another of Gein’s acquaintances concurred. “Before this happened, if you asked me who could be capable of something like this, the last man in the world I’d have named would’ve been Eddie Gein.”

Robert Wells—the
Milwaukee Journal
reporter who had described the lunatic interior of Eddie’s farmhouse in such graphic detail—provided an equally vivid look at the local reaction to the crimes. In light of what had happened, Eddie’s oddball behavior—which had been dismissed as harmless, even amusing eccentricity—had taken on a terrible new significance. Eddie’s neighbors recalled his various quirks—his refusal, “with rare exceptions,” to “allow anyone in his house”; the way he would smile and nod in agreement “when people kidded him about what a dangerous fellow he was—a joke that was only funny because he seemed so harmless.”

“And did not the children, half believing it while they laughed, say his old house was haunted?” asked Wells. “And were there not tales, which seemed to have been fairly common knowledge among the youngsters, that he had a collection of ‘shrunken heads’? Did he not read detective stories avidly and exhibit more than the ordinary interest in talk of crimes and violence?”

There seemed to be some vaguely guilty sense among many of the townsfolk that the community should have taken these things more seriously. Looking back at Ed’s behavior—and at the strange stories and rumors that had clustered around him for so many years—his neighbors could see the warning signs, the symptoms of Gein’s growing derangement. But that perception was purely retrospective. At the time, there seemed no real cause for alarm. After all, as Wells pointed out, “every child knows of a haunted house, and you can buy shrunken heads made of plastic for $2.50, and every man, especially every little man, must learn to go along with a joke when he’s the butt of it.”

To be sure, many of Eddie’s neighbors regarded him as peculiar, but no more so than “any of dozens of other people they knew. Every small town knows a few lonely bachelors living out their bleak lives on remote farms, the objects of occasional pity and a little good-natured ridicule.” For all his adult life, Eddie was perceived as one of these poor, pathetic, slightly ludicrous souls—until the night, that is, when Bernice Worden’s headless body was found hanging by its heels in his summer kitchen.

Though the press may have had an enormous appetite for rumor, it was the townspeople themselves who kept that appetite fed, dishing up gossip as fast as the news media could gobble it down. “To reporters who spent the last week in the neighborhood,” Wells wrote, “it has sometimes seemed that everyone they met had a tale to tell of how Eddie peered in their bedroom window on some bygone night or how he sneaked around on tennis shoes, startling women.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was the female population of Waushara that had the most spine-tingling stories to tell. The county suddenly seemed to be populated by women who had just barely escaped death (or worse) at the hands of the mad butcher of Plainfield. Effie Banks, the wife of one of Eddie’s neighbors, told a reporter for
Life
magazine about the time, shortly after Eddie’s mother died, when her “daughter kept hearing rustling noises outside the house at night.” Her parents “thought she was imagining things.” One afternoon, “Gein knocked on the door and asked if he could come in.” He “said he might want to build a house and wanted to get a look at ours,” Mrs. Banks explained. “Nobody else was here and for some reason I decided not to let him in. I guess I can thank my lucky stars for that.”