Deviant (26 page)

40

Proverbs 14:11

“
The house of the wicked shall be overthrown
.”

E
ddie Gein’s nearest neighbors were the Johnson family. On Thursday, March 20, the Johnson’s youngest son, Roger, was stirred from his sleep by a brilliant light blazing through his bedroom window. Sunup, Roger thought drowsily as he struggled into full consciousness. But even in his half-awake state, he realized that there was something funny about this particular dawn. For one thing, it didn’t seem as if he’d been asleep very long. But there was something else, too, something strange about it …

All at once, his head cleared, and he leaped for the window, realizing what was wrong.

The intense brightness was coming from the west. From the direction of Eddie Gein’s farmhouse.

It was two-thirty in the morning when Burt Carlson, Plainfield’s police chief, spotted the blaze. He immediately notified the town fire marshal, who roused the fifteen members of the volunteer fire department. By the time the men drove the seven miles to the Gein place, however, there was little they could do. The conflagration was out of control. Though they managed to save the outbuildings, they could only look on as the blaze reduced Eddie’s two-story white frame house to a blackened heap of smoldering ashes.

Of course, it’s doubtful that the destruction they were witnessing could have been anything but a heart-gladdening sight to the growing crowd of onlookers who gathered to watch Gein’s home burn. As for the feelings of the fire marshal himself, they can easily be imagined. The fire marshal’s name was Frank Worden.

With the coming of daylight, Sheriff Schley—who had headed for the Gein farm the moment he got word of the fire—contacted the state fire marshal in Madison, who immediately dispatched a deputy, John E. Hassler, to Plainfield. The assumption, not only of Hassler and his boss but of most of the townspeople, too, was that the fire had been set. Its timing, three days before the scheduled inspection date, was clearly suspicious. Moreover, for weeks, there had been talk among certain members of the community, talk about doing something drastic to prevent the Palm Sunday auction. And there certainly didn’t seem to be any other likely explanation for the blaze. As Gein’s trustee, Harvey Polzin, put it, “there was no electrical wiring, and there was no electrical storm, and we know of nothing in the house that could have started a fire. But it did start.”

The presumption of arson, however, would remain just that. Neither Hassler’s probe nor any subsequent investigation ever turned up a suspect or, indeed, a single shred of evidence that Gein’s house had been put to the torch.

However the fire had started, the citizens of Plainfield were delighted to see the abominated dwelling go up in smoke. Even people with less stake in its destruction seemed to derive gratification from the fire, to see it as a perfect climax to the Gein affair—“a fittingly grotesque finish,” in the words of one prominent criminologist, “to the most bizarre case in criminal records since medieval times.” Indeed, even Gein himself seemed relieved at the burning of his home.

Eddie learned about it from Darold Strege, the psychiatric officer in charge of his unit at Central State, who had heard the news early that morning on the radio as he was getting ready to leave for work. Strege’s shift began at six
A.M.
, and Gein was still asleep when Strege arrived at the hospital. Unsure about how the little man would react, Strege waited until Gein had risen, dressed, and finished his breakfast before informing him of the news.

For the rest of his days, Strege would remember Eddie’s response. It consisted of only three words, but they suggested to Strege that perhaps there might have been some truth after all to the stories that other, greater horrors had been hidden away in the walls of Eddie’s house, horrors that were now forever safe from discovery.

Strege took Gein aside. “Your house has burned down, Eddie,” he said as gently as possible.

Eddie paused for a moment and then answered quietly.

“Just as well,” he said.

41

BUNNY GIBBONS, exhibitor of the Ed Gein “ghoul car”

“
People want to see this kind of thing
.”

T
hursday’s fire took care of one of Plainfield’s concerns. No one was going to make Eddie Gein’s home into a “museum for the morbid.” But anyone who hoped that the incineration of the house would put a stop to the auction was in for a severe disappointment. That event, Harvey Polzin announced on Friday morning, would go on as scheduled. Indeed, he said, though the loss of Eddie’s home and its contents would undoubtedly keep “a lot of souvenir hunters” from attending the sale, he still expected “quite a crowd.”

Polzin was right. March 23, the date of the inspection, was a crisp, sunny Sunday, a perfect day for a family outing—and to the residents of Plainfield, it must have seemed as if every family in Wisconsin had decided to take a drive to their little town. Between noon and sunset, an estimated twenty thousand sightseers descended on the village—an astonishing turnout, considering that the entire population of Waushara County at that time numbered just over thirteen thousand people.

On the dirt roads leading to the farm, Sheriff Schley and a handful of deputies did their best to keep the endless procession moving. Eddie’s neighbor, Milton Johnson, had posted a sign on his property, offering parking at twenty cents per car, but most of the tourists simply pulled their cars onto Gein’s land. A snow fence had been set up around the ruins, and throughout the day, there were never any fewer than three hundred people pressed up against it, straining for a better look at the ash heap that had once been the home of the killer-ghoul, Eddie Gein.

The auction itself—conducted, as scheduled, on Palm Sunday, March 30—brought out a far smaller, though still significant, crowd. Two thousand people showed up on that crisp, brilliantly clear Sunday, although only a few were there to bid. Most were curiosity seekers, come to witness the final disposal of Ed Gein’s few remaining possessions.

Walter Golla, a Plainfield junk dealer, bought much of Eddie’s rusty old farming equipment, including a plow for fourteen dollars, a disk and mower for nine dollars apiece, and a manure spreader for thirty-five dollars. The remaining pieces of scrap iron went to Chet Scales of Chet’s Auto Wreckers, who hauled them away in his other major purchase, Eddie’s 1940 Chevy pickup truck, which Scales acquired for two hundred fifteen dollars. Wayne Heinke of Neshkoro bought a pile of lumber for ten dollars, and a man named William Smith picked up two old plowshares for two and a half dollars. Also sold were eight wagon wheels (seven dollars), an old iron range (fifteen-fifty), a keg of nails (seven dollars), and an old violin (seven-fifty).

The farm itself—all one hundred ninety-five acres of scrub pine and sandy soil, plus the charred homestead site and the five tumbledown outbuildings unharmed by the fire—was sold for $3,883 to a Sun Prairie real estate developer named Emden Schey. Within months, Schey would undertake a major reforestation of the property, razing the remaining buildings and planting more than sixty thousand trees on the land.

The only surprise of the afternoon involved the sale of Eddie’s 1949 maroon Ford sedan, the car he had been driving on the day of Bernice Worden’s murder. It was the single item that set off a bidding war, with fourteen people competing. In the end, the car was sold for the remarkable sum of seven hundred sixty dollars to a mysterious buyer identified variously as “Koch Brothers,” “Cook Brothers,” or “Kook Brothers” of Rothschild, Wisconsin. Why anyone would pay such a hefty sum for a beaten-up nine-year-old automobile was a puzzling and troubling matter to the townsfolk of Plainfield, who were praying that with Eddie locked away for good and his property disposed of, the lingering morbidity of the Gein affair had finally been purged from their lives.

It didn’t take long for the puzzle to be cleared up, and when the answer came, it set off one last firestorm of protest, not only in Eddie’s hometown but throughout Wisconsin.

“Koch/Cook/Kook Brothers” turned out to be the fictitious identity of an enterprising fifty-year-old sideshow exhibitor named Bunny Gibbons of Rockford, Illinois. Though his specialty was trick mice, Gibbons had a friend who, as he put it, “had done pretty good with the Dillinger car. So I got a bright idea when I read about Gein.” After acquiring Gein’s Ford at the auction, Gibbons had spruced it up a bit, then equipped it with a pair of wax dummies—one in the driver’s seat simulating Eddie Gein and another lying in back, representing one of his mutilated, blood-soaked female victims.

The “Ed Gein ghoul car” made its first public appearance in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin, where it was displayed for three days inside a large canvas tent covered with blaring signs—“S
EE THE
C
AR
T
HAT
H
AULED THE
D
EAD FROM
T
HEIR
G
RAVES
! Y
OU
R
EAD
I
T IN
‘L
IFE
’ M
AGAZINE
! I
T’S
H
ERE
! E
D
G
EIN’S
C
RIME
C
AR
! $1,000 R
EWARD IF
N
OT
T
RUE
!” One crudely painted sign showed a man lifting a casket from a grave. Another depicted a woman about to be clobbered on the head with a plank. At the top of the tent, three skull-and-crossbones flags waved in the summer breeze.

Two thousand people paid twenty-five cents each for a peek at the death car. Within days, however, news of the exhibit had spread throughout the state, setting off a major controversy. Plainfield, whose citizens had feared just such a possibility when the car fetched an inordinately high price at auction, was up in arms over the Gein exhibit. In Outgamie County, local parents made angry phone calls to fair officials, charging that their children were being emotionally damaged by the display. And representatives of the Wisconsin Association for Mental Health complained that, while the fair directors had been able to find space for Gibbons’s grisly exhibit, their own organization, dedicated to the promotion of public awareness in matters of mental health, had been denied permission to set up a booth because, according to those same directors, there was not enough room.

Gibbons—tickled, no doubt, by all the free publicity—remained unperturbed by the uproar. “People want to see this kind of thing,” he cheerfully explained. He even promised that one day he would “play Plainfield.” In spite of his vow, however, he decided to skip the Columbia County Fair in neighboring Portage for fear of stirring up the local populace. But even in other parts of the state, Gibbons’s exhibit began to run into trouble. At the Washington County 4-H Club Fair in Slinger, Wisconsin, the death car had been on display only a few hours before the sheriff arrived and ordered Gibbons to pack up his tent. Soon, county fairs all across the state were barring the display. Gibbons, grumbling about this unforeseen turn of events, had no choice but to head south for the fairgrounds of Illinois, where the folks, he hoped, would be a little less touchy on the subject of Eddie Gein.

With Gibbons and his “ghoul car” driven from the state, Eddie Gein’s story seemed to have run its course. There was, however, one final bit of news still to come. It appeared in the papers toward the end of July, just as the commotion over the car exhibit was dying down. The story, headlined “$300 S
ET
A
SIDE FOR
G
EIN
F
UNERAL
,” concerned the distribution of the money that had been netted through the auction of Gein’s property. Most of the money—$5,375—was to be distributed on a prorated basis among the people who had filed claims against the Gein estate. Another eight hundred dollars was to go to the state for its care of Gein. That left a total of three hundred dollars, which, by order of Waushara County Judge Boyd Clark, was to “be placed in the county treasury and released only to pay Gein’s burial expenses.”

Clark’s ruling was the final word on the Gein affair that the public would hear for many years. That the word had to do with graveyard matters made it a particularly fitting ending.