Deviant (24 page)

36

ROBERT E. SUTTON

“
lf anybody was ever crazy, it was him.
”

H
is mental tests completed, Eddie was set to be returned to the Waushara County jailhouse on Monday, December 23—a depressing prospect to Arthur Schley, who wasn’t eager to regain custody of Gein until the holidays were over. “I’d rather they keep him past next week,” the sheriff explained to reporters. “After all, I’ve got a family, and I like to put a little Christmas into my family. But still, I’ll do what they tell me to do.”

Hoping to postpone Gein’s return, Schley contacted Dr. Schubert, requesting an extension of the killer’s commitment period until December 26. Schubert had no objections. Gein, Schubert told newsmen, had been a model patient—“cooperative, no source of difficulty.” During Gein’s free hours at the institution, when he wasn’t undergoing one examination or another, he had been “permitted out in the rear yard and allowed to walk around.” He had adjusted nicely to institutional life and “been accepted very well by the other patients.”

Still, Schubert explained, it would require an official order from Judge Bunde to keep Gein at the mental hospital beyond December 22. As it turned out, the judge had no objections to prolonging Eddie’s stay at Central State, either. In fact, after reviewing Schubert’ s report, he issued an order extending Gein’s commitment for an indefinite period. He also released a statement which—though withholding any details of the psychiatric findings—summed up the major recommendations of the psychiatric staff.

“The court has received the report relative to Edward Gein from the Central State Hospital,” the judge’s statement began, “and has given it careful reading and study.

“There exists, based upon the report of experts at the Central State Hospital, definite opinion to the effect that Edward Gein is not mentally competent to stand trial…. Further summary hearings will be held at a date suitable to all parties when the defendant is available for such hearings. At that time, both the defense and the prosecution will have opportunity to produce expert testimony to aid the court in arriving at a determination. The court has no alternative but to depend upon the testimony of such experts, and such opinions must be the basis of the court’s finding. Mental competency is a matter on which we require the opinions of experts to make a finding.

“Notice of the time and place of such further summary inquiry will be made in the near future, perhaps within a week or ten days. Setting of a trial date must necessarily await the outcome of the inquiry.”

The announcement that Gein had been deemed mentally incompetent provoked renewed outcries of anger and protest in his home community. From the very beginning, the townsfolk of Plainfield had been afraid that Eddie would evade punishment by pleading insanity, a legal defense they regarded as especially outrageous in Gein’s case. They had known Eddie nearly all his life—gone to school with him, labored alongside him at threshing time, shot the breeze with him at local cafés, teased him about women, listened to his latest crime stories from
Startling Detective
magazine, approached him for favors, hired him for assorted odd jobs—house painting, snowplowing, and even, on occasion, babysitting. Gein might have been an oddball—someone, as Ed Marolla put it, with “a quirk in his mind.” But as far as his neighbors were concerned, he certainly wasn’t crazy. And he wasn’t nearly as simpleminded as he sometimes seemed, either. In the eyes of many of those who knew Eddie Gein, that little “Night Before Christmas” poem all the school kids were reciting said it best. “He took out his crowbar and pried open the box/He was not only clever, but sly as a fox.”

Sly enough, anyway, to fool the so-called experts into thinking he was insane.

December 25 turned out to be a happy day for Sheriff Schley. His Christmas wish had come true. The two-story brick building that served as both his living quarters and the county jailhouse was empty of everyone except himself and his family. Eddie Gein remained locked up in Central State, fifty long miles away.

As the year died away, the Associated Press conducted its annual poll of Wisconsin newspaper editors to determine the state’s top ten news stories of 1957. The results of the poll were published on Saturday, December 28.

By unanimous vote, the Edward Gein case was selected as “Story of the Year,” beating out (in descending order of significance) the Milwaukee Braves pennant win and World Series championship, the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the election of William Proxmire (the first Democrat in twenty-five years to represent Wisconsin in the senate) to complete McCarthy’s unexpired term, and various instances of tragic fires, traffic fatalities, and local corruption.

Runners-up included the adoption of daylight savings time, an outbreak of Asian flu, and federal court action in which seven leading food companies sought an order to prevent the return of windfall profits on cheese sales to the government.

37

DR. EDWARD F. SCHUBERT

“I think you have to look at what Gein did as a mark that he was mentally disturbed. The fact that he killed one person or perhaps two or more persons, in itself, I do not think is anything of great import regarding Gein’s mental disorder. But … how he lived, how he thought, how he wanted to return to being a child in his mother’s arms, and how he tried to recreate his mother with the bodies that he dug up—these are signs of mental disorder. Very unusual signs of mental disorder.”

T
he courtroom was filled to capacity, mostly with the grimfaced neighbors of the accused. Journalists and photographers from the major news services were there, and television cameramen milled in the corridors outside the packed courtroom.

It was the morning of Monday, January 6, and Eddie Gein’s sanity hearing, a proceeding that would occupy most of the day, was about to get under way in the city of Wisconsin Rapids.

His hands manacled before him, the prisoner was escorted before the bench by Sheriff Schley and Wood County Sheriff Tom Forsyth. For once, Eddie was not wearing his plaid cap and work clothes. Indeed, in keeping with the importance of the occasion, all three men were formally dressed—Eddie in brown trousers, a white shirt, and a tie and the two lawmen in business suits.

As the officers led Gein to the front of the courtroom, most of the spectators rose slightly from their seats, craning their necks for a better view of their former neighbor, the little nonentity who had, virtually overnight, become a figure of near-legendary proportions—their homegrown Jack the Ripper or Lizzie Borden. Staring at him, they couldn’t help but notice another, far less remarkable but still striking change that, in the few months since they had last laid eyes on him, had taken place in Eddie Gein. He had put on weight. In fact, the once frail and hollow-cheeked little man was beginning to look distinctly pudgy. Clearly, institutional living—“three hots and a cot,” as one of Eddie’s attendants put it—agreed with him.

In the state of Wisconsin, at the time of Gein’s hearing, the question of a defendant’s legal sanity was decided on the basis of a principle known as the M’Naghton Rule. According to this rule, a medical diagnosis of mental illness was not, in itself, enough to prevent an accused person from standing trial. A defendant could only be ruled legally insane if—as Attorney General Honeck explained in his opening statement at the hearing—“two facts are found by the court: (1) that the accused is incapable of conferring with counsel and assisting in his own defense; and (2) that the accused does not know the difference between right and wrong.”

To determine if these criteria applied in Gein’s case, the court relied largely on the testimony of three psychiatrists, who were questioned closely by Judge Bunde and cross-examined by Honeck, as well as by Eddie’s attorney, William Belter.

Dr. Schubert took the stand first. He summed up the results of the various psychological tests Gein had undergone at Central State. He clarified, in answer to questions posed by Judge Bunde, the precise nature of Gein’s mental illness. And he concluded by repeating the “considered opinion” of the hospital’s staff, namely that Gein was a chronic schizophrenic who had been lost in “his own little world” of fantasy and delusion since the death of his mother twelve years before.

Schubert was then questioned by Attorney General Honeck, who did his best to raise doubts about the doctor’s diagnosis. Honeck, who had made a trip out to Central State Hospital on the previous Thursday to examine Eddie’s medical and psychiatric records, begin his cross-examination by pointing out that nowhere in the hour-by-hour log of Gein’s behavior during his stay at Central State was there any indication of “destructiveness, disturbance, shock, confusion, or other untoward behavior.”

“’You would say, then, I take it,” Honeck asked Schubert, “that his sojourn during that period of time down to the present has been uneventful?”

“That’s right,” Schubert answered.

“His behavior generally, in the broad sense, is no different than an average person without a mental illness as far as these entries on this record are concerned?”

“Yes,” said Schubert.

Honeck then questioned the doctor about Gein’s actions immediately after he slew Mrs. Worden in her store, particularly his efforts to get rid of the truck he had used to haul away her body. Didn’t such behavior suggest that Gein knew perfectly well that he had done something wrong and that “the law frowned on murder”?

While conceding the point, Schubert remained firm in his insistence that Gein could not be held criminally responsible for his deeds. The fact that he could function rationally for a period of time, even a prolonged one, was not in itself a sign of sanity, since schizophrenics can be actively psychotic at times and in reasonable touch with their environment at others. Judged by the two criteria that Honeck had set forth at the start of the hearing, Gein was legally insane, Schubert asserted, and the chances of his ever recovering from his disorder were “minimal.”

It was time to break for lunch. Judge Bunde complimented the spectators—“and particularly the reporters”—for their good behavior, then offered a gentle warning. “You have done very well this morning,” he said. “If, however, it should happen that you don’t do very well, why I suppose we will find that we will have to ask you to leave. Bear that in mind. Recess until two o’clock.”

Throughout the morning, Eddie had sat silently on his bench, chewing gum and gazing on impassively. Shortly after the hearing reconvened, however, a sickly look crossed his face, and he began complaining to Belter that he “couldn’t hold out.” Another recess was called, this one for fifteen minutes, while Eddie was taken to the bathroom. Then he returned to his seat, shoved a fresh stick of Black Jack into his mouth, and (except for one other occasion, when he told his attorney that he needed to go to the toilet again) sat there with jaws working slowly and his expression a perfect blank.

The first witness of the afternoon was Dr. Milton Miller, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, who had been retained by Gein’s attorney, William Belter. On two occasions, December 14 and 21, Miller had traveled to Central State Hospital, spending a total of six hours examining Gein in Schubert’s office.

Miller concurred with Schubert’s diagnosis. Gein, he testified, was “suffering from a long standing schizophrenia.” He acknowledged that, in certain areas, Gein might well “know right from wrong.” “I think,” Miller explained, “he would know the right side of a plate on which to put a knife and fork. I think he would know to stand up when the judge comes in. I think he would know to be respectful to an older person.” Indeed, if asked about his own criminal activities, Gein might well say that “it is wrong to kill people; it is wrong to uncover graves.”

Nevertheless, Miller continued, “to say that he knows these things in the way that a normal person would know them, that they are meaningful to him, is not accurate.” The fact that Gein could live such a radically divided life for more than ten years—appearing “superficially normal and rational” to the community while “carrying out grossly insane activities”—was a sign not (as many of Eddie’s neighbors believed) of the little man’s fiendish cunning but of his extreme madness. In the end, though Miller acknowledged that there was much about the defendant’s mind that he didn’t understand, he was convinced, like Schubert, that Gein was legally insane. His emotional responses were “grossly inappropriate.” His behavior was, in many ways, “beyond comprehension.” And “judgment-wise, there were many, many examples of defects in his thinking.”

The third and final psychiatrist, Dr. Edward M. Burns, was called to testify by the state. Though Burns agreed that Gein was “chronically mentally ill” and subject to “delusions that his role was predestined,” he took issue with the shared opinion of Schubert and Miller regarding Gein’s criminal responsibility. According to Burns, Gein was capable of cooperating “with his counsel and is therefore legally sane.”

Judge Bunde wanted clarification. “Are you trying to say, Doctor, that you believe he is medically insane but legally sane? Is that what you are trying to say?”

“Yes,” Burns answered, though he acknowledged that, in saying so, he was making an extremely tight call—that Gein was very “close to the border” of legal insanity.

In the end, Burns’s “borderline” judgment, added to the unequivocal verdicts of both Schubert and Miller, left Bunde little choice. “In a matter of this kind, I must rely on the opinion of experts,” he began, his words resounding in the taut silence of the courtroom. “I have no illusions, delusions, or hallucinations of the criticisms of the court’s decision, no matter what it would be.” The decision now before him, he confessed, was the hardest he had ever faced. Nevertheless, he said, “I can’t see how my opinion can be anything other than to find this defendant insane. I so find him and do hereby recommit him to the Central State Hospital in Waupun for an indeterminate term of commitment. From the opinions of various experts, I think it is adequate for me to say that it does not appear that he will ever be at liberty again. Perhaps that is a desirable conclusion.

“That closes the hearing, and the court is adjourned.”