Deviant (28 page)

One of the reporters asked what he would have done if he had been released. “I can’t say,” Eddie answered. One thing was certain, though—he wouldn’t have returned to Plainfield. “There’s nothing there anymore, nothing of interest.”

He concluded by stating that he held no grudge against society and, in general, did not feel bitter at all about the way things had turned out. During his stay at the hospital, he said, he had seen lots of “others worse off than me.”

“At least I have my health,” he declared.

A few moments later, the press conference was over, and Eddie was led to the patrol car that would drive him to the mental hospital. He was on his way back home.

44

Proverbs 28:17

“
A man that doeth violence to the blood of any person shall flee to the pit; let no man stay him
.”

J
udge Gollmar’s order recommitting Gein to Central State did not entirely preclude the possibility of Eddie’s eventual release, since it provided that Gein should only remain institutionalized until hospital officials deemed he was sane and that his discharge would not be a danger to society. Still, though Dr. Schubert wouldn’t rule out the remote possibility that a miracle cure for schizophrenia might be discovered in Eddie’s lifetime, the chances that Gein (who was by that time sixty-two years old) would ever recover his sanity seemed slim, to say the least.

It came as a shock to most people, then, when in February 1974, Eddie Gein filed a petition with the Waushara County clerk of courts, claiming that he had “now fully recovered his mental health and is fully competent and there is no reason why he should remain in any hospital.”

In discussions with newsmen, Dr. Schubert continued to portray Gein as well adjusted to life in Central State. During the past few years, Eddie had been working as a carpenter’s helper, mason, and hospital attendant, earning a dollar fifty a week. He had opened a savings account and accumulated nearly three hundred dollars. During his spare time, he watched TV (he was especially fond of ball games), listened to his shortwave radio, read books and magazines. He was free to roam the building and the grounds. Though he continued to be a loner and had little to do with other patients (who regarded him as “strange”), he had never caused a moment’s trouble.

Nevertheless, after spending seventeen years locked up in the mental hospital, Eddie had begun to feel trapped. “I doubt that anybody would be happy there,” he would later say to newsmen who asked if he was content at Central State. “If you want to go someplace, you can’t go. It is human nature to want to go someplace.” Eddie wasn’t exactly sure where he would go if he gained his release. But one thing was certain—he wanted out.

Eddie’s petition was reviewed by Judge Gollmar, who ordered several psychiatrists to reexamine Eddie and scheduled a hearing for June 27. On the day of the hearing, a hot, sunny Thursday, Eddie showed up at the Waushara County Courthouse in his blue suit, striped tie, and white shirt, looking considerably older than he had six years earlier. Before the hearing began, he met with the press, smiling for the television cameras, joking with a TV artist who dashed off a quick sketch (“You could have made it a little more handsome,” Eddie said with a grin), and quietly answering questions.

What, asked one reporter, did Eddie regard as an important issue in the world today?

“Work,” said Eddie. “In some places more fellows want to work than there is work, and other places it’s the other way around.”

Where would he go if he were released?

Eddie said he would probably move to a big city, where there were better job opportunities. “I know several trades. I can do most anything.”

When one newsman asked if he would consider moving back to Waushara County, Eddie shook his head. There was no reason to go back there, he said, though he believed that if he did, he “wouldn’t have trouble from the people.”

What about his relationships with women? one reporter wanted to know. What were they like these days?

Eddie smiled shyly. The only women he had contact with were the nurses at the hospital, he explained, and his relationships with them were completely normal. After all, he said with a wink, “they are all married.”

As far as the reporters could tell, the most remarkable thing about the white-haired little man was how ordinary he seemed. He was amiable, polite, soft-spoken—a little nervous, perhaps, but perfectly lucid. He certainly didn’t look or sound like a madman. Maybe (unlikely as it seemed) he had recovered his sanity after all.

Then the doctors’ testimony began.

The first psychiatrist to testify was Dr. Thomas Malueg. Earlier in the year, after completing his examination of Eddie, Malueg had forwarded a report to Judge Gollmar in which he confirmed that “to any casual observer” Gein “would present no obvious evidence of serious mental disorder.” He was “friendly” and “willing to talk openly”(at least “when discussing relatively non-threatening material”). His “thought processes were generally intact and reasonably well organized.”

Nevertheless, Malueg reported, there were unmistakable indications that Gein’s psychosis was simmering just below the surface, ready to be reactivated under the right conditions. Whenever Malueg had asked Eddie direct questions about his crimes, for example, Gein would become highly agitated. “I don’t want to rake up the past,” he would say angrily. “If you stir up the past you might get burned up in your own fire. Psychiatrists are probably responsible for a lot of trouble in the world because of making people dig up the past. I think a lot of the prisoners from here might go out and kill ’em, rob ’em, club ’em because of digging up the past.”

Eddie’s interpretations of common proverbs were also, in Dr. Malueg’s words, “very personalized.” Malueg had presented Eddie with a few well-known sayings and asked what he thought they meant.

Malueg began with “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Gein answered without hesitation: “Everybody has something he wants covered up.”

“Don’t cry over spilt milk,” said Malueg.

“Don’t dig up the past—what’s done is done,” Eddie replied.

“Still waters run deep,” said Malueg.

Eddie thought for a moment, then answered, “Some people are calm on the surface and hotheads underneath.”

Malueg had one more: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

For some reason, Eddie seemed amused by this proverb. He laughed, Malueg wrote in his report, “somewhat inappropriately” before giving his interpretation. “If you have a bird in your hand,” said Eddie, “you might squeeze him too much and kill him.”

Clearly, Gein was still a sick man, a conceivable threat to himself and others. Nevertheless, it was Malueg’s belief that—though Gein should certainly not be released or even transferred to a halfway house—he might do well in a different hospital and suggested that he be moved to the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, a “less restricted facility” than Central State.

The remaining three witnesses, however, didn’t share Dr. Malueg’s belief. Dr. Leigh M. Roberts, head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, testified that Gein’s condition—specifically his “tolerance of stress”—had actually deteriorated in recent years and advised against a transfer to Winnebago because of the “accessibility of women” there. Dr. Schubert and Dr. George Arndt (who, years earlier, had researched and written about the phenomenon of “Gein humor”) agreed that Central State was still the best place for Gein. Sending him out into the world—or even into a less closely supervised institution—would be a mistake. “I don’t think he has the strength to cope with society now,” Schubert said, “and I don’t think he ever had the strength to cope with society.” Gein, he asserted, was absolutely alone in the world. In all the years of his confinement, he had never had a single visitor. Left to his own devices, he “would be a pathetic, confused, out of place person,” a social outcast and potential victim of exploitation.

In the end, after a long day of testimony in the small, overcrowded, sweltering courtroom, Judge Gollmar had no choice but to reject Gein’s petition. Noting that, had Eddie been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Mrs. Worden, he would already have been eligible for parole, Gollmar said he wished he knew of a way to give Gein a little freedom. But it was not in his power to transfer Eddie to Winnebago.

As for “plucking” him from Central State and “putting him back on the street,” Gollmar agreed with the experts. “I don’t know whether it would be dangerous to Mr. Gein to release him. I do know that it would be horribly frustrating to him. This is a Rip Van Winkle situation. The simple day-by-day concerns would be impossible for him to handle. Simply crossing the street or getting food and a place to sleep would be very difficult for Mr. Gein after his many years in an institution.

“People might not treat him very well. Some people might even try to exhibit him.”

After announcing his decision to return Gein to Central State, Gollmar adjourned court. Eddie, who accepted the ruling with his usual equanimity, got up and shuffled toward the exit. As he passed the spectators in the front row of benches, he noticed a little girl sitting beside her mother and smiled broadly. “It sure is awful warm,” he remarked softly.

The next morning, Eddie was driven back to Central State Hospital, where he quietly returned to the pursuits that made up his life—putting his handyman skills to work around the hospital, listening to the news on his shortwave radio, and dreaming of the round-the-world trip he planned to take someday, once he had saved enough money.

Eventually, Eddie did make it out of Central State—but only by being transferred to another institution. In 1978, when Central State was converted into a “correctional facility,” Gein, along with nine other patients, was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. According to a spokesman for the State Health and Social Services Department, Gein had been deemed eligible for the transfer “by virtue of a stable condition and a low security status.” By then, he was seventy-two years old, frail, in declining health, and beginning to show the first signs of senility.

He immediately became the hospital’s resident celebrity. New employees—nurses, orderlies, administrative staffers—could hardly wait to get their first glimpse of the notorious Edward Gein. And they could hardly believe, when he was pointed out to them, that the gentle little man, shuffling slowly down the hallways or around the sprawling grounds of the institution, was the monster who had haunted their childhood dreams.

He still had ways of making news. A year after Eddie’s transfer to Mendota, a particularly gruesome murder took place in Milwaukee. An eighty-six-year-old woman named Helen Lows was found bludgeoned to death in her bedroom. Her eyes had been gouged out, and slits had been cut into her face, apparently in an attempt to peel the skin off her skull.

The suspect arrested for the crime turned out to be a former mental patient named Pervis Smith, who, in 1974, had been committed to the Central State Hospital. There, he told police, he’d learned all kinds of interesting things about murder, mutilation, and the manufacture of human face masks from his best friend at the hospital, “Little Eddie” Gein.

Gein was seventy-eight years old, senile, and suffering from cancer when he died of respiratory failure in the geriatric ward at Mendota on July 26, 1984. Newspapers around the world printed the obituary of the man whose crimes had been the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, by then long recognized as a classic of the American cinema.

The following night, sometime between three and six
A.M.
, Gein was buried in an unmarked plot in the Plainfield Cemetery. Only a few employees of the Gasperic Funeral Home were present to witness the interment.

A woman who lived nearby, however, noticed some lights coming from the cemetery at that ungodly hour and, the next morning, notified her friend, a news correspondent named Linda Akin, who drove out to the graveyard to investigate. It took her a while, but Akin finally located the spot. “They had it look like there was no new grave,” she later explained. “After the next time it rains, nobody will know there is a grave there.” But there was a fresh grave, and it had been dug in the only appropriate spot.

Eddie had been laid to rest directly beside his mother.

Among the mysteries left unresolved at the time of Gein’s death was the exact number and identity of his victims. From the time of his arrest to the present day, many people have believed that Gein committed far more murders than the pair he confessed to. They seem especially convinced that he was responsible for the disappearances of the two young girls, Georgia Weckler and Evelyn Hartley.

Others, however, feel that Gein was, as he claimed, innocent of these crimes. Clearly, he was capable of the most deranged and horrifying acts—grave robbing, necrophilia, sexual mutilation, and more. But child snatching, according to many people who knew him, simply wasn’t his style. Eddie, they argue, wasn’t interested in children. As the cases of both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden show, his particular dementia involved the abduction and slaughter of mothers.

Besides the unsolved questions, Eddie left behind something else—a legacy of horror. By now, he is only a bad memory to the older citizens of Plainfield. But he’s a memory that won’t go away. Even today, most of the townspeople would prefer not to talk about him or even hear his name mentioned. Indeed, their most ardent hope is that one day, his name will be entirely forgotten and their community will no longer be instantly identified in the public’s mind as the hometown of Wisconsin’s most notorious and perverted killer.