Deviant (25 page)

38

ED GEIN

“
I’m glad it came out this way. I think it? better for me
.”

E
ddie Gein’s connections to normal human society were so tenuous that he hardly seemed to care that he was leaving it behind, perhaps forever. If anything, he seemed relieved, glad to depart from the bitter isolation of the outside world into the sheltering walls of the mental institution.

That departure took place on the night of January 6, just hours after his sanity hearing had ended. It was the last time, for many years, that Gein would be seen outside the walls of Central State.

As soon as Judge Bunde had announced his decision, Gein was hurried out of the courthouse and into Sheriff Schley’s waiting car—not his squad car but his own, bright new ’57 Plymouth. The choice of the vehicle seemed consistent with Schley’s own mood, which was considerably brighter now that he was finally getting free of the burden that had dominated his life since that terrible day back in November when he and Captain Schoephoerster had broken into Gein’s summer kitchen. Or perhaps he just wanted the fastest car available to take Gein to the hospital. Certainly, he and his companions couldn’t seem to get to Waupun fast enough. Schley, sitting in the passenger seat, let Deputy Virgil “Buck” Batterman do the driving, and though the road conditions were far from ideal, with a powdery snow making visibility poor and icy patches glazing the blacktop, Batterman kept his foot low on the accelerator, maintaining an even speed of eighty miles per hour for most of the ninety-five-mile trip.

Meanwhile, Undersheriff Arthur Schwandt sat in the back beside Eddie, who remained slumped in the corner, his manacled hands lying slack in his lap and a faraway look in his eyes.

The hospital corridors were jaundice-yellow and reeked of disinfectant. A pack of newsmen—reporters and photographers—waited by the barred doorway that separated the administration area from the wards. At precisely 8:02
P.M.
, Eddie Gein, still wearing his dress shirt and tie, emerged from one of the admissions offices and approached the doorway. He was flanked by two staff members—hospital supervisor Norman Popham and a khaki-clad guard who held a ring full of big brass keys in one hand.

As Eddie stood there, waiting for the guard to unlock the door, the photographers pointed their cameras at him.

“Oh, not anymore,” he said impatiently. The reporters were struck by the sharpness of his tone. They had never heard the mild-mannered little man—the “shy ghoul,” as he was sometimes called in the papers—speak that way before.

“Just this one last time, Ed,” one of the photographers beseeched.

Eddie smiled slightly. “I just didn’t want you to spend any more money,” he said, his voice softening a bit. But he remained adamant about the photographs. Turning away from the newsmen, he refused to look at them again, in spite of their entreaties.

The instant the steel door swung open, Popham took Eddie by the elbow and led him briskly down the hallway, leaving the cameramen to snap photos of Eddie’s receding back. They were the last glimpses of Gein that the public would have for many years.

After Gein disappeared down the ward, several of the newsmen approached Dr. Schubert to ask what Gein’s life would be like in the hospital. Henceforward, said Schubert, there would be “little variety in Gein’s existence.” His living quarters would consist of a small, Spartan room, containing a cot, dresser, and bedside table. He would be assigned a menial job—“mopping, cleaning, laundry or something similar”—for which he would be paid ten cents a day up to a maximum of fifty cents a week, a sum he would be allowed to spend on candy and chewing gum at the hospital canteen. When he wasn’t performing his chores, he would be free to spend time in the day room he would share with a dozen other inmates. There, he could read a newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. Apart from these sources, he would have no contact with the outside world. Only close relatives were allowed to visit inmates. But Gein had no relatives, close or otherwise.

*   *   *

Gein’s commitment to the mental institution seemed to mark the end of the case that had obsessed Wisconsin for months. “The sordid, sad story of Ed Gein closed with the clang of the hospital door,” wrote Harry S. Pease, one of the reporters who was there to witness Gein’s incarceration. “There can be little doubt that the world will be a better place for his absence.”

But though the ghoul himself might be safely shut away, the nightmares he aroused and the furies he provoked weren’t so easily laid to rest.

Pease was wrong. Eddie Gein’s return to Central State might have ended another chapter in his terrible saga. But the story wasn’t over yet.

39

ED MAROLLA

“
Resentment ran up and down Main Street
.”

I
n spite of Judge Bunde’s assurances that Gein would never walk the streets again, the citizens of Plainfield were deeply embittered by the outcome of the case. There had been no protests at the sanity hearing itself. The townspeople in attendance had remained composed and undemonstrative throughout the proceedings. By the next morning, however, the community’s outcries against the judge’s decision had grown loud and intense.

Many of the townspeople continued to scoff at the idea that Gein was crazy. In their eyes, Gein had escaped a trial through a combination of his own cunning and the bias of the witnesses, particularly Dr. Miller, whose testimony, they felt, couldn’t be trusted because he had been hired by Eddie’s attorney. Others, though willing to accept that Gein was insane, nevertheless believed that the issue of his innocence or guilt should have been resolved by a jury, that “the normal path of justice had been detoured,” as Village President Harold Collins put it.

And then, of course, there were others, particularly the relatives of Eddie’s victims, whose very human desire for vengeance had been thwarted by Judge Bunde’s decision. Understandably enough, they wanted to see Gein punished, and punished severely, for the horrors he had perpetrated on their loved ones. Far from suffering for his deeds, however, Gein was actually—in their eyes—benefiting from them. Compared to the conditions he was used to—cut off from the world, subsisting on canned food in an indescribably filthy farmhouse with no electricity or indoor plumbing—his life in Central State, where he would be provided with a clean room, three meals a day, clothes, medical care, even a television set, sounded like a permanent vacation with all expenses paid by the state. To these people, Eddie’s incarceration in a mental institution was more than a miscarriage of justice. It was an outrage almost too painful to bear.

Even the passing of the months failed to assuage that sense of outrage. In early March, the citizens of Plainfield held a town meeting to discuss the possibility of appealing Judge Bunde’s decision—to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Portage County District Attorney John Haka was prevailed upon to contact Attorney General Honeck to ask if the state was considering an appeal. The residents of Plainfield, Haka informed the attorney general in a letter, were firm in their belief that Gein “should have been found legally sane.”

Honeck’s response was not encouraging. The fact that Eddie “appeared perfectly sane” to the “people who knew” him did not prove anything about his mental condition. After all, he wrote in his reply to Honeck, “the psychiatrists who examined him and testified at the hearing indicated that the defendant’s mental illness was such that it would not be apparent to lay persons in the ordinary transactions and affairs of life.” An appeal of Judge Bunde’s order, Honeck was convinced, would “quite obviously be futile.”

The attorney general did, however, have a bit of reassurance to offer. those who believed that Gein should stand trial for his crimes. Bunde’s order, he stressed, “did not result in a final disposition of the case. The order merely holds that the defendant Gein is not competent to stand trial at the present time.”

Thus, Honeck declared, “upon his recovery, if that should occur, the defendant may still be brought to trial.”

The possibility of a trial at some indeterminate point in the future, however, offered little comfort to those who believed that Gein had gotten away with murder. Indeed, the community’s anger and bitterness grew more intense as the winter wore on, inflamed by the approach of an event that brought renewed media attention and an enormous influx of sightseers to the traumatized town. That event was the auction of Ed Gein’s farm and personal property, scheduled for Sunday, March 30, 1958.

At the request of William Belter, who had been serving as the special guardian of the Gein estate, Judge Boyd Clark appointed Harvey Polzin, a retired district manager for the Wisconsin Power and Light Company, to act as the general guardian of Gein’s property. Specifically, Polzin was mandated “to take possession of all the Gein property, prepare an inventory, and sell whatever is necessary to meet any claims against Gein.” Eddie was already being sued by Floyd Adams, widower of Eleanor Adams, one of the women whose empty coffin had been exhumed in the Plainfield cemetery and whose remains had subsequently been identified among Gein’s ghoulish trophies. Mr. Adams’s suit charged Gein with “wantonly disturbing” his wife’s grave and causing the plaintiff “mental suffering … in the amount of $5,000.” Other lawsuits would soon follow, including a $57,800 claim against the Gein estate filed by Frank Worden and his sister, Miriam.

A company named Farm Sales Service of Reedsburg, Wisconsin, was chosen to handle the auction. By early March, a notice had been printed up and distributed around the state, announcing the sale of the farm and personal property of Edward Gein, to begin promptly at noon on Sunday, March 30, 1958. The notice also contained an inventory of Gein’s belongings. Without Eddie’s graveyard souvenirs, the contents of his household seemed perfectly unexceptional, the kind of goods that might have been offered for sale at almost any country auction.

There were stoves, cupboards, pots and pans, dishes, beds, a sewing machine, a couch, a hand-cranked phonograph, lamps, vases, three battery-operated radios, musical instruments (a violin, zither, harmonica, and accordion), rockers, a family album, a “bookcase and desk combination,” a dictionary and a stand, rugs, a carpet sweeper, commodes, and several “antique” pieces of furniture, including a table, love seat, and chest of drawers.

In addition, there were various pieces of farming equipment and machinery—a fanning mill, several plows, a dump rake, a manure spreader, a mower, and more. Eddie’s 1949 Ford sedan and 1940 Chevy pickup truck were also being put up for sale.

The farm itself was being offered either in its entirety or in two separate parcels, the first consisting of the buildings (the nine-room house, barn, granary, chicken coop, corn crib, and machine shed) plus forty acres of level land, “nearly all under plow.” The second parcel consisted of the remaining one hundred fifty-five acres of land without the buildings.

Prospective bidders were advised that the household goods and property could be inspected the week before the auction, on the afternoon of Sunday, March 23. The notice concluded with the name of the individual under whose authorization the sale was taking place: Harvey Polzin, “Guardian of Edward Gein, Insane.”

At a glance, there was nothing at all inflammatory about the notice. On the contrary, it seemed like a perfectly straightforward document, detailing the items that were to be auctioned and the terms of the sale. But like everything else connected with the Gein case, its appearance immediately set off a furor in Eddie’s hometown. Two things in particular offended the residents of Plainfield. The first was a statement printed in small type near the bottom of the notice. The line immediately following the information about the inspection date read: “An inspection fee of fifty cents per person will be charged to all persons going through the dwelling.”

To the townsfolk of Plainfield, and particularly to the Worden family, the idea of charging a fee for a look inside the Gein house was deeply repugnant. It seemed to confirm their worst fears, that the hated place was being turned into a tourist attraction, a “museum for the morbid” in the words of one outraged local. No sooner had the auction notice been publicized than the town sent a formal protest to Judge Boyd Clark, who had approved guardian Polzin’s petition for the March 30 sale. Clark responded without delay. Though Polzin insisted that the only purpose of the fee was to “discourage and limit the number of curiosity seekers,” the judge forbade the auction service from charging admission to the house.

Clark’s decision clearly pleased the community. But there was something else about the auction that many local people objected to—indeed, that called forth even stronger expressions of protest than the matter of the admission fee. The Reverend Wendell Bennetts, former pastor of the Plainfield Methodist Church, was the first to raise the new issue, pointing out in a letter to the
Plainfield Sun
that March 30, the proposed date of the auction, was Palm Sunday.

Holding the Gein auction on that date, the reverend admonished, “is not very wise.” Indeed, such an act, he implied, bordered on the blasphemous. “God has blest our nation above all nations of the earth,” Rev. Bennetts wrote, “and if we wish to be blest we ought to honor God and keep his laws. In keeping his laws we honor Him, and to have the State allow an auction is not conducive to good form and rule. Great nations have grown up and disappeared and practically in every case it was because the people ignored the laws of God. This nation would be no exception in the sight of God, for any nation that forgets God, that nation will God destroy.”

The moral of Rev. Bennetts’s sermon was clear. To conduct the Gein auction on Palm Sunday—“a holy-day, not a holiday,” in his words—was to fly in the face of God’s laws. It was an open invitation to divine retribution. Disaster was certain to follow.

Other ministers—including Gerald Tanquist of the Methodist Church, David Wisthoff of the Baptist Church, and Irving Bow of the Assembly of God Church, all of Plainfield—joined Rev. Bennetts in voicing an objection to the auction date. Their protests did produce one immediate result. Several community groups, which had intended to sell postcards and sandwiches on the days of the inspection and the auction, abandoned their plans. But according to Judge Clark, there was nothing to be done about the date. The auction had already been too widely advertised around the state.

The sale of Eddie Gein’s property and personal belongings would take place as announced on Sunday, March 30, and there was nothing that the community—smoldering with anger and bitterness—could do to stop it.

Or so it seemed.