Deviant (23 page)

He stated that he had violated nine graves and when questioned as to his reasons for doing this, he stated he thought it was because he wanted a remembrance of his mother. He denied any sexual relations with any of these bodies and gave as his reason for this that “they smelled too bad.” He again admitted that, for a period of time after his mother’s death, he felt he could arouse the dead by an act of will power. He claimed to have tried to arouse his dead mother by an act of will power and was disappointed when he was unsuccessful. He also admitted this sort of thing with some of the bodies which he had exhumed….

There is ample reason to believe that his violation of the graves was in response to the demands of his fantasy life, which was motivated by his abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.

On December 13, the day after Schubert’s second interview, Eddie was examined by the hospital’s chief of medical services, Dr. R. Warmington. The record of that meeting sheds additional light on the bizarre operations of Gein’s profoundly disordered mind.

After a brief review of the patient’s family background, Dr. Warmington’s report goes on to consider three major aspects of Gein’s psychological condition—his personality makeup, mental status, and criminal motivation:

The subject is an introverted, odd, withdrawn personality that has had difficulty relating closely to other people. He also has shown some paranoid trends but on the other hand may have been duped and unfairly used on some occasions as he speaks of doing work for other farmers and failing to be paid for his labor. He is passive, inhibited, and somewhat evasive when questioned about the offense and may harbor deep-seated feelings of hostility.

He denies ever having had sexual experience and declares that in this connection he was taught the moral code by his mother that sexual experience before marriage was wrong—“If a woman is good enough for intercourse, she is good enough for marriage.” …

Since coming here, the patient has been very tractable, cooperative and readily abides by the institution rules. Consciousness is clear, there is no history of epileptic seizures, orientation is correct in all fields and the train of thought is coherent and relevant but sometimes somewhat illogical. Faces have been seen by him in leaves and he spoke of hearing his mother’s voice while in a twilight sleep, but it is uncertain if these should be designated as overt hallucinations.

No delusional material has been elicited but his behavior has been very unusual as he admits to excavating several bodies. During interviews he talked of using a rod to determine the nature of the rough box by its sound upon tapping and he also knew some of the exhumed people in life. They were all women of varying ages. The bodies were removed from three cemeteries—Plainfield, Spiritland, and Hancock—but some were returned after a short time because he became remorseful.

In other instances, he made the so-called masks from the head by removing the skin and separating it from the bones. The tissue in the back of the neck was cut and the cavity stuffed with papers or sawdust. One of these was placed in a cellophane bag but others were kept throughout the house. The unused parts of bodies were burned or buried and eating is denied. He also denied having sex relations with the bodies or parts of them as he declares the odor was offensive.

His memory is intact for most subjects but when emotionally charged situations are encountered there is a suggestion of a self-serving amnesia or vagueness. At times the remark was made—“It seems like a dream, impossible.”

Mrs. Worden, in one interview, was described as being short, inconsiderate, and brusque, but during a later interview was declared to be a friendly, pleasant woman. Physical attraction for either woman was not admitted and he denied seriously attempting to escort Mrs. Worden to a roller skating rink. Mrs. Hogan was a tavern operator. It is gathered that she was regarded by the patient as being a rather poor representative of womankind and that he could have felt justified in shooting her because of his self-righteous, rigid attitude.

The motivation is elusive and uncertain but several factors come to mind—hostility, sex, and a desire for a substitute for his mother in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely. He has spoken of the bodies as being like dolls and a certain comfort was received from their presence, although ambivalent feelings in this regard probably occurred. When questioned regarding the reasons for his bizarre conduct, no explanation is given but sex relations with the bodies has been denied several times. This does not seem to check with hearsay in which he admitted having sex activities with the cadavers.

He has been a lonely man, particularly since the death of his mother, and some drive, uncertain at this time, may have arisen in this area to account for his misconduct.

By December 18, Eddie’s term at Central State was drawing to a close. On that date, Gein was brought before a board of specialists for a final round of questioning. Six doctors took part in the session—Schubert, Warmington, a psychiatrist named Larimore, a physician named Goetsch, Dr. Leonard Ganser of the Department of Health and Social Services, and Dr. H. J. Colgan, clinical director of the Winnebago State Hospital. Also present were the hospital’s psychologist, Robert Ellsworth, and Kenneth Colwell, the social worker who had researched Gein’s family background.

The purpose of the meeting, which lasted several hours, was to arrive at a consensus regarding Gein’s mental condition. As a result, the record of this session represents perhaps the single most significant feature of the Central State psychiatric report, since the highly charged issue of Gein’s legal sanity would largely be determined on the basis of the board’s diagnosis.

A lengthy period of questioning was conducted in which each of the staff members took part. It was determined through this questioning that the patient had been living a withdrawn and solitary existence for a number of years and, since the death of his mother in 1945, has had little social contact with the people in his community. His description of his mother was that she was as good a woman as it was possible for anyone to be, and through her teachings he developed a rigid moralistic attitude regarding women and the use of alcoholic beverages. He claimed that women in general were tainted with evil and should be shunned as much as possible….

There was a very marked sexual preoccupation throughout most of his answers to questions. When asked what was responsible for his activities, he stated that it was all due to “a force built up in me.” He feels that this force was in the nature of an evil spirit which influenced him to dig up graves.

With respect to the charge which brought him to the institution, namely, the death of Mrs. Worden, he stated that he had been chosen as an instrument of God in carrying out what fate had ordained should happen to this woman….

There were numerous complaints of physical illness. He complained of headaches, sore throat, chest pains, abdominal distress, and constipation. It was felt by the staff that this symptomatology could best be classified as a pseudoneurotic schizophrenic process.

He readily admitted that he had heard his mother’s voice telling him to be good several years after her death and that, on one occasion, he had experienced what was probably an olfactory hallucination, in that he smelled what he thought was decaying flesh in the surrounding environment of his property. Upon occasion, he stated that he has seen faces in piles of leaves.

It was the consensus of the staff’s opinion that this man is best diagnosed as a “schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type.” Because his judgment is so influenced by his envelopment in a world of fantasy, he is not considered to know the difference between right and wrong. His concept of the nature of his acts is markedly influenced by the existence of the delusional material concerned in particular with the idea that outside forces are responsible for what occurred. Because of his extreme suggestibility, he is not completely or fully capable of acting in his own behalf or in consultation with his attorney.

This man, in the opinion of the staff, is legally insane and not competent to stand trial at this time.

Eddie’s thirty-day observation period was officially over on December 22, but, for all practical purposes, the staff meeting on the eighteenth marked the real end of the examination and evaluation process. On December 19, Eddie’s medical and psychiatric records were assembled into a package and forwarded to the Honorable Herbert A. Bunde with a cover letter by Schubert, which summed up the final opinion of the staff.

“Mr. Gein,” Schubert wrote, “has been suffering from a schizophrenic process for an undetermined number of years.” As a result, “although Mr. Gein might voice knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, his ability to make such judgment would always be influenced by the existent mental illness. He would not be capable of fully realizing the consequence of any act because he would not be a free agent to determine either the nature or the consequence of acts which resulted from disturbed and abnormal thinking.”

“Because of these findings,” Schubert concluded, “I must recommend his commitment to Central State Hospital as insane.”

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DR. MILTON MILLER

“In many ways, this patient has lived a psychotic life for many years. He has substituted human parts for the companionship of human beings and at the same time has gone through the superficial existence so that in the eyes of people around him he appeared quite rational. This can happen with chronic schizophrenic people.”

V
oyeurism, fetishism, transvestism, and necrophilia weren’t the only concepts from the field of psychopathology that the Gein case introduced to a wider public. Another was schizophrenia. For the most part, however, that term tended to be used very loosely in various press accounts of Gein’s mental condition. As a result, the public received an extremely oversimplified, even distorted, idea of the nature of Eddie’s disorder.

As early as November 22, in quoting the views of the Chicago psychiatrist Edward Kelleher, the
Milwaukee Journal
defined schizophrenia as a “split personality”—a popular misconception perpetuated by the work that ensured the Gein crimes a permanent place in American popular mythology,
Psycho
. (In Robert Bloch’s original novel, the protagonist actually possesses three separate personalities; Norman, “the little boy who needed his mother”; Norma, “the mother who could not be allowed to die”; and Normal, “the adult Norman Bates.”)

Though certain psychotics do, in fact, suffer from what is known as “multiple personality disorder,” the schizophrenic personality isn’t so much split as shattered. Among the main symptoms of this disorder (all of which were manifested by Gein) are hallucinations and delusions (such as the sense that one’s impulses and actions “are not one’s own but are imposed by some external force”); bizarre beliefs (such as the conviction that one can raise the dead through willpower); extreme social isolation; “marked impairment” of functioning in “such areas as work, social relations, and self-care”; and gender confusion, uncertainty about one’s sexual identity.

There is one way, however, in which schizophrenics often do experience a pathologically severe “split,” and that is in relation to their parents, most often their mothers. According to psychoanalytic theory, people who are raised by severely disturbed, unloving mothers often deal with that situation by removing from their consciousness the memory of their painful childhood experiences. Dr. Silvano Arieti, one of the leading authorities on schizophrenia, has written: “The child who suffers on account of his contacts with the rejecting parent, generally the mother, tries desperately to preserve a good image of the parent. He wants to feel that the parent is good. If the parent is punitive and anxiety-arousing, it is not because she is malevolent but because he, the child, is bad: Mother is right in being harsh and strict with him and showing how bad he is…. The preservation of the good image of the parent is made possible by the removal from consciousness of the most unpleasant traits of the parent. Thus, the child will have two images of the parent: the good image, which is conscious, and the bad image, which will remain unconscious.”

To a certain extent, of course, all people experience a certain amount of ambivalence—of both love and anger—toward their mothers. But the schizophrenic is often someone who experiences these mixed feelings in a particularly acute form—who, even as a grownup, possesses the radically split perception of a little child. Consciously, he views his mother as “all-gratifying, supreme, sublime, and perfect.” But at a much deeper level of his mind, he sees her as the exact opposite—a figure of utter evil.

Eddie Gein represents a classic case of such a split. In his conscious mind, Augusta was a paragon of maternal virtue—“as good a woman as it was possible for a person to be.” All the hatred he felt for her—all the fury at the terrible mistreatment he had suffered at her hands—he shoved away from his awareness, projecting it onto other women who reminded him of his mother. (It is significant that both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden not only bore a vague physical likeness to Augusta Gein but also resembled her in another crucial respect: they were no-nonsense businesswomen, as Augusta had been during Eddie’s childhood in La Crosse.) And on those two women—the innocent, unwitting surrogates for Eddie’s malevolent mother—the little man wreaked his revenge.

Even his grave-robbing activities were prompted to a large extent by this deeply psychotic split. On the one hand, digging up the corpses of middle-aged mother-substitutes represented Gein’s demented effort to rescue Augusta from death. At the same time, the atrocities he performed on the bodies of his victims was a deranged form of retribution, a crazed attempt to get back at his mother for the lifetime’s worth of torture she had inflicted on him.