Deviant (27 page)

C
ONCLUSION

The Psycho

42

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT,
Hitchcock

Truffaut:
I’ve read the novel from which Psycho was take…. I believe [it] was based on a newspaper story
.
Hitchcock:
It was the story of a man who kept his mother’s body in his house, somewhere in Wisconsin
.

I
t would be ten years before “Ghastly Gein”(as he had come to be called in the press) was back in the spotlight. But during that decade, something interesting happened to Eddie. He achieved immortality.

An entire generation of Wisconsinites grew up swapping jokes and scary stories about the “Mad Butcher of Plainfield.” Eddie became a local legend, a creature who prowled the night, preying on unwary teenage lovers and disobedient children. To the youngsters of Wisconsin, the knowledge that Gein was safely immured in a state mental institution might have been reassuring in daylight. But locked doors and barred windows can’t hold the bogeyman, and when darkness fell, all it took was a single threat from an exasperated parent—“If you don’t quiet down and get to sleep right now, Eddie Gein will come to get you!”—to subdue the most obstreperous child.

To the kids who came of age exchanging horror stories about him, old Eddie Gein would always be a larger-than-life figure, their homegrown Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy. A peculiar fondness for “Crazy Ed” developed among them—similar to the popularity that Alferd Packer, the nineteenth-century cannibal, enjoys in Colorado, where the student cafeteria at the state university is named the “Alferd Packer Grill.”(A member of a six-man gold-hunting party that became snowbound in the Uncompaghre Mountains, Packer butchered and lived off the flesh of his companions. The legend goes that at his 1883 trial, the judge who sentenced him to hang declared in indignation, “Packer, there were only seven Democrats in all of Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you son-of-a-bitch.”) Like the Colorado cannibal, Eddie Gein, the Plainfield ghoul, became a permanent part of the lore of his state.

But the event that truly immortalized Eddie was, of course, the appearance in 1960 of Alfred Hitchcock’s consummate terror film,
Psycho
, based on the novel that Robert Bloch had fashioned out of the raw materials of the Gein affair. Though there is no indication that Eddie ever saw—or, indeed, even heard of—the cinematic classic that his crimes had inspired, Hitchcock’s film transformed him from a local legend into an undying part of American popular mythology. Thanks to Robert Bloch’s initial conception and the cinematic genius of Alfred Hitchcock, who took a clever but minor pulp chiller and transmuted it into a masterwork which left a lasting mark on the dream life of a nation, Eddie Gein had become—and would always be famous as—the original “Psycho” killer, the “real Norman Bates.”

Meanwhile, inside the walls of Central State Hospital, Eddie was adjusting nicely to institutional living, completely unaware of the fascination he continued to exert on the outside world. Hospital administrators had instituted a firm policy of forbidding outsiders from interviewing Eddie, so he had no way of knowing that from the moment he had been admitted to Central State, its directors had been bombarded with requests from newspapermen, magazine writers, sociologists, and others seeking permission to talk to Eddie. Bizarrely enough, he did receive an occasional piece of fan mail, but what he made of this macabre correspondence, particularly the letters from certain female admirers, imploring him for a lock of his hair, is anybody’s guess.

Over the years, small news items relating to Gein would appear from time to time in the papers. In May 1960, workmen planting trees on Gein’s former property spotted several dogs furiously scrabbling at the soil. Curious, the men left their work and traipsed across a field to investigate. In the spot where the dogs had been digging, the men discovered a pile of human bones—ribs, legs, arms, and a pelvis. Though all the buildings on the property had been razed by that time, the bones had been buried near the place where Eddie’s barn had stood. These skeletal scraps were immediately shipped off to the Crime Lab to be analyzed and added to the rest of Gein’s collection.

The final disposition of that gruesome stockpile was decided on several years later. In December 1962, Crime Lab director Charles Wilson appeared before the State Board of Government Operations to ask for funds to purchase a plot for the burial of Gein’s graveyard remains, which, by that time, had been stored in the Crime Lab for five years. The relics, Wilson explained, could simply be cremated, but he had received a request from Bishop William O’Connor of the Madison archdiocese, urging that they be reburied in hallowed ground. The board unhesitatingly approved the request, alloting $125 for a cemetery plot. Shortly thereafter, a decade or more since they had been plucked from their graves, the remains of Eddie Gein’s victims were quietly returned to the earth.

It was shortly before the reinterment of the Gein relics that Governor-elect John Reynolds visited the state mental hospital at Waupun to conduct a budget hearing before assuming office. During his tour of the institution, Reynolds, who was accompanied by a crowd of reporters, was taken to the crafts workshop, where a small gray-haired man was hunched over a table, polishing stones for costume jewelry. The governor-elect walked over to the little man, shook hands, and introduced himself, asking the patient what he thought of the hospital.

“I’m happy here,” the little man replied pleasantly. “It’s a good place.” Then, lowering his voice a bit, he added, “Some of the people here are pretty disturbed, though.”

The governor-elect nodded understandingly, told the man that it had been nice to meet him, and moved on. It was only then that one of the reporters informed him that he had just shaken hands with Edward Gein.

And, indeed, Eddie was happy at the hospital—happier, perhaps, than he’d ever been in his life. He got along well enough with the other patients, though for the most part he kept to himself. He was eating three square meals a day (the newsmen accompanying Reynolds were struck by how much heavier Eddie looked since his arrest five years before). He continued to be an avid reader (though he’d had to turn to new subjects, the hospital library being ill provided with Nazi atrocity stories and books about South Seas headhunters). He liked his regular chats with the staff psychologists and enjoyed the handicraft work he was assigned—stone polishing, rug making, and other forms of occupational therapy. He had even developed an interest in ham radios and had been permitted to use the money he had earned to order an inexpensive receiver from the Sears catalogue.

All in all, he was a perfectly amiable, even docile patient, one of the few in the hospital who had never required tranquilizing medications to keep his craziness under control. Indeed, apart from certain peculiarities—the disconcerting way he would stare fixedly at nurses or any other female staff members who wandered into his line of vision, for example—it was hard to tell that he was particularly crazy at all.

Not that Eddie’s underlying condition had improved much. “I doubt if Mr. Gein will ever change,” Superintendent Schubert told the reporters at the conclusion of Reynolds’s hearing. But, he added, Gein was a model patient. “If all our patients were like him,” Schubert said, “we’d have no trouble at all.”

Every six months, the doctor explained, Gein’s mental condition was evaluated by staff psychiatrists to determine whether he was fit to stand trial. Not that Gein would ever go free, the doctor hastened to add. “If he is brought to trial, he will either be found insane and returned to the hospital or be found guilty and sent to prison.” Nevertheless, Judge Bunde had committed Gein to Central State only until such time as he was deemed competent to stand trial, and though there were those who believed that that time would never come (Bunde himself, in a speech to the Elks Club at around this time, announced that there was “less than no possibility” of Gein’s ever being brought to trial), Dr. Schubert wasn’t so sure.

43

JUDGE ROBERT GOLLMAR

“
The court does not accept the defendant’s story. It just does not ring true to me
.”

I
n January 1968, precisely ten years after Eddie Gein had been shipped off to Central State, Circuit Judge Robert Gollmar received a letter from Dr. Schubert notifying him that in the opinion of the hospital’s psychiatric staff, Gein had recovered sufficiently to understand the charges against him and to aid in his own defense. In short, he was competent to stand trial.

Gollmar, however, could only shake his head at Schubert’s concluding sentence. Gein, it said, continued to suffer from a chronic schizophrenic psychosis. From a clinical point of view, he was still insane. Years later, the judge would describe this situation as an example of what he called “the
Alice in Wonderland
labyrinth of American jurisprudence,” which could lead, as in this case, to a long and costly legal proceeding with a “predetermined end.” Whatever the final outcome of his trial, Gein would end up back in Central State.

Nevertheless, Eddie Gein, who had been put away without ever having stood trial for his crimes, was entitled to his day in court, and a decade after he had disappeared from public view, he would finally get it.

The reopening of the Gein case brought the predictable reactions—feverish excitement in the news media, angry protests in Plainfield. In Eddie’s hometown, the question on everyone’s lips was the one posed in the headline of a local newspaper editorial: “The Gein Case: Why Dig It Up?” Around Wisconsin, Gein might have evolved into a semilegendary character, a fairy-tale ogre come to life, whose story provided titillating, half-pleasurable chills to children and adolescents. But among Eddie’s former townspeople, feelings continued to run high toward the deranged little handyman, who had slaughtered one of their dearest neighbors and, for years, preyed upon their dead.

Sitting in a Wautoma restaurant shortly before Eddie’s preliminary hearing was to begin, a reporter for the Madison Capital Times overheard a couple of men kibitzing at the bar. “Charley,” one of them asked, “are you going to contribute to the Gein defense fund we’re getting up? We’re buying him a new suit, new shoes, and a shovel.”

“Sure,” the other man added. “I’ll contribute a thirty-aught-six bullet.”

The courtroom was jammed to overflowing with spectators (most of them women), as well as newspapermen, photographers, and TV crews—all of them present for the first day of the proceedings, January 22, 1968. While flashbulbs popped and newsreel cameras whirred, Gein, surrounded by deputies, was escorted into the Wautoma County Courthouse and led to the defense table.

The familiar image of Eddie Gein—hollow-cheeked, unshaven, with his lopsided cap and rumpled work clothes—was so deeply imprinted on the popular imagination that his appearance on this day, the first time he had been seen in public in ten years, came as a shock. In spite of his prisoner’s pallor, he had clearly thrived in Central State. Everyone was struck by the pounds he had added to his formerly slight frame. Even more remarkable was his style of dress—blue suit, crisp white shirt, red-and-blue-striped tie, and brightly polished black shoes. With his neatly clipped gray hair and his face freshly shaved, he looked positively distinguished.

For all his dapperness, however, he seemed profoundly ill at ease, painfully embarrassed by the stares of the spectators and the clamorings of the press. Judge Gollmar—a courtly, good-humored gentleman whose small white goatee made him look more like a Kentucky colonel than a country judge—permitted the newsmen to remain in the room, seated in the jurors’ box, but cautioned them against taking pictures of Gein while court was in session.

As soon as a recess was called, however, the journalists swarmed around the defense table, thrusting microphones and cameras into Eddie’s face and bombarding him with questions. Eddie seemed dazed by all the attention. He managed to stammer out an answer when asked about the correct pronunciation of his name—“Some people say ‘Gine,’ but we—I—always said ‘Geen.’ It’s about half-and-half. I don’t know.”

When the newsmen continued to assail him with questions, however, his custodian, Sheriff Virgil “Buck” Batterman, half rose from the table and ordered them away. Gein popped a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and began chewing nervously, his gaze fixed straight ahead. Shy, quiet-spoken, and elderly, he seemed so unlike the mad ghoul of legend that, seeing his discomfiture, some of the spectators were astonished to find themselves pitying him. “I don’t believe it,” one middle-aged woman remarked, turning to a friend. “I actually almost feel sorry for that lonely old guy. But then I start to think back …”

In the end, once the initial excitement attending Gein’s reemergence had faded, the trial turned out to be, as Judge Gollmar had foreseen, a protracted but rather anticlimactic affair, with a predictable outcome and very little drama. By the time the preliminary matters had been disposed of—appointment of counsel, motions to suppress evidence and dismiss the case, the filing of briefs, a state supreme court ruling on the validity of the original complaint and warrant against Gein, and miscellaneous legal maneuverings—more than nine months had passed. It was early November before the trial itself finally got under way.

It lasted only a week. Eddie’s defense team consisted of his 1958 counsel, William Belter (who resigned his position as assistant district attorney of Waushara County in order to represent his former client), a lawyer named Nicholas Catania, and chief defense attorney Dominic Frinzi of Milwaukee. Prosecuting the case were Milwaukee attorney Robert E. Sutton and Waushara County District Attorney Howard Dutcher.

At the request of the defense, which had entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, the trial was conducted without a jury before Judge Gollmar. It was to be a “bifurcated” or split trial. First, Gein would be tried for the first-degree murder of Bernice Worden. Then, should he be found guilty, a second trial would be held immediately to determine if he was sane at the time of the killing.

The trial began on Thursday, November 7, 1968. By the next afternoon, the prosecution had rested its case. Altogether, seven witnesses were called to the stand, including Leon “Specks” Murty, the former deputy sheriff who described the trail of blood that had been found in Mrs. Worden’s empty store on the night of November 16, 1957; Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster, whose graphic account of his discovery of Mrs. Worden’s headless and disembowelled body brought gasps from the spectators; and several crime lab technicians who testified that the bullet extracted from Mrs. Worden’s head had been fired from a .22-caliber rifle in her store and that prints found on the weapon matched those of Gein’s left middle finger and upper right palm.

One major witness was missing from the trial: former Sheriff Arthur Schley, whose manhandling of Gein on the night of his arrest had been an issue at an earlier stage of the proceedings. In March 1968, just months before the trial was to begin, Schley—by then one of Waushara’s most prominent citizens, the owner of numerous lakefront properties in the area and the head of the county highway commission—suffered a fatal heart attack, following a Friday-night fish fry with his wife and some friends. He was forty-three years old at the time, and there were those who felt that anxiety over being subpoenaed to testify at the upcoming trial might have contributed to his early death.

On Friday afternoon, special prosecutor Sutton wound up his case. Arguing that the circumstantial evidence submitted during his two-day presentation constituted “conclusive proof” of the defendant’s guilt, Sutton ended with a flourish by quoting from Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, Part II
:

Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an ax,
But will suspect ’twas he that made the slaughter?

After hearing and rejecting a motion by defense attorney Frinzi that the murder charge against Gein be dismissed on the ground of insufficient evidence, Judge Gollmar recessed the trial until the following Tuesday morning, November 12, when the defense would present its case.

Gein himself was the key defense witness on Tuesday when the trial resumed. Throughout his testimony, he stoutly maintained that he had shot Mrs. Worden inadvertently, when the rifle he was examining accidentally discharged after he had inserted a .22-short bullet into the magazine to make sure that the weapon could accommodate a shell of that caliber. As for subsequent events—the removal of Mrs. Worden’s body from the store and the butchering of the corpse—Gein insisted he didn’t remember anything about them. He theorized that it was the sight of Mrs. Worden lying dead on the floor of her hardware store that must have caused him to lose his memory. Ever since he was a little boy, he explained, whenever he saw blood he would “either faint or black out. That is why I cannot remember.”

One of the few dramatic moments of the day occurred during Eddie’s cross-examination by Sutton, when the prosecutor asked Eddie to look at the police photographs of Mrs. Worden’s split-open carcass dangling from the roof beams of the shed. Sutton asked Gein if he remembered “what those pictures portray.” Once again, Gein denied any knowledge of the butchery. “I know what they portray,” he answered. “But I don’t remember seeing anything like this.” What made the moment so disturbing, however, was not what Gein said but the way he examined the photographs. He held them in his hands for nearly five minutes, gazing at them, Sutton would later say, the way another man might savor a
Playboy
centerfold.

On Thursday, November 14, 1968—just one week after the trial began and eleven years, almost to the day, since Frank Worden returned from a luckless day of deer hunting to find his mother missing from her store—Edward Gein was found guilty of first-degree murder for the shooting of Bernice Worden. In delivering his decision, Judge Gollmar rejected Gein’s contention that the killing was accidental, noting, among other things, that Gein’s actions “immediately after the shooting” cast a certain degree of doubt on that particular excuse. Instead of behaving the way “most people would have if the shooting were accidental”—by rushing “into the street to seek the immediate aid of a doctor”—Gein, Gollmar explained, “loaded the body into a truck and then into his car. And while he testified that he had no personal recollection of dissecting the body, I think there can be no question that this was done by the defendant, and that he hung her in his woodshed.”

“This line of conduct,” Gollmar concluded, “does not fit with an accidental shooting.”

Immediately after the judge handed down his verdict, the second phase of the trial—to determine if Gein was sane at the time of the killing—began. It took only a few hours to complete this part of the proceeding. Two witnesses were called to the stand: Dr. E. F. Schubert and Dr. William Crowley, director of the north division of the Milwaukee County Mental Health Center. Both psychiatrists reconfirmed that Gein was a long-term schizophrenic. After listening to their testimony, Judge Gollmar delivered his decision: “The court does find that on November 16, 1957, the defendant, Edward Gein, was suffering from a mental disease. The court does further find that as a result of this mental disease he lacked substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. The court does therefore find the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Thus, by means of the bifurcated trial procedure, Eddie Gein was both convicted and acquitted—found guilty of first-degree murder for the murder of Bernice Worden and not guilty by reason of insanity—on the same day. He was recommitted to Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The trial of the man who had committed the must gruesome set of crimes in Wisconsin history had reached its predetermined end.

Before Gein was returned to the mental institution, the press was given a brief opportunity to meet with him. The ten-minute interview was conducted in a book-lined conference room in the courthouse. Eddie sat at a small table, answering questions in a voice so quiet that the reporters in the back of the room had trouble hearing him.

He was dressed in the same blue suit he had worn throughout the proceedings. It was the only one he owned, and by now it looked as baggy and wrinkled as his work clothes once had. Like the other spectators at the trial, it was hard for the newsmen to envision the shy little figure who sat before them as a monster. He seemed, as one of them later wrote, like “a plaintive, almost pathetic looking old man.”

Asked how he felt about the verdict, Eddie replied that he was mostly relieved that the trial was over. He hadn’t counted on being set free and was, in fact, looking forward to getting back to the hospital. “They treat you pretty good there.”

As he had in the past, he blamed his troubles on external circumstances. “Locality has an awful lot to do with a person’s life,” he mused. “I believe if we’d have stayed in La Crosse, this thing would never have happened. I believe it was just my bad luck to go to a locality where the people were just not as friendly as they should have been.”