The Serial Killer Files (33 page)

How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven.”

By dint of old-fashioned sleuthing, Detective King managed to trace the letter to its source. A trap was laid, and Fish was arrested. His confession stunned even the most hardened officers.

Fish revealed that Grace was not his intended victim at all. He had originally planned to kill her brother.

His intent was to lure Edward up to an abandoned house in suburban Westchester, overpower him, bind him with stout cords—and slice off his penis. Afterward, he planned to take the train back to the city, leaving the trussed and mutilated boy to bleed to death on the floor of the cottage.

The moment he saw little Grace, however, he changed his plan. It was she he wanted to sacrifice, not her brother. And so he made up the birthday party story on the spot.

After leading her out of the city to a place known locally as Wisteria Cottage, he left her out in the empty house’s front yard picking wildflowers. He then had made his way to an upstairs bedroom and stripped completely naked. Concealing himself behind a door, he called to Grace to come upstairs.

When she reached the landing, he leapt out at her and strangled her, kneeling on her chest and climaxing twice as she expired.

Then he cut her body into pieces and disposed of them in various places around the property. All except for a few pounds of her flesh, which he had carried back into the city with him, wrapped in newspaper.

Fish’s trial in 1935 held the nation riveted with its steady stream of shocking revelations—including Fish’s incredible disclosure that he had used the butchered chunks of the little girl’s body to make a human stew, cooking her flesh in a pot with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon, devouring the infernal concoction over a period of about a week.

Meanwhile, Fish took a liking to Dr. Fredric Wertham, senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, who had been retained by the defense to examine the madman. For the first time, Fish opened himself up to another human being, revealing the incredible story of his life and crimes—a history so appalling that, years later, after a long career of dealing with the criminally insane, Wertham would continue to regard Fish as the most wildly deranged human being he had ever encountered.

Among other incredible admissions, Fish explained that one of his favorite forms of sexual gratification consisted of shoving sewing needles up into his crotch, just behind the scrotum. Wertham had difficulty believing this claim until X-rays were taken which revealed twenty-seven sewing needles lodged around Fish’s pelvic region.

In the end, Fish was found guilty and sentenced to death. Even the jurors believed he was insane. But as one of them later explained, they felt he should be electrocuted anyway.

On Thursday, January 16, 1936, Albert Fish went to the chair—the oldest man ever to be electrocuted at Sing Sing.

1897–1928

Even as a baby, Earle Nelson had the ability to unsettle those who encountered him. According to one crime writer, the earliest surviving photograph of little Earle showed “a loose-mouthed degenerate infant with a vacant expression.” The picture was taken shortly after Earle was left an orphan, both his parents having died of syphilis. Less than a year old, he was taken into the home of his maternal grandmother, a Bible-thumping widow who instilled in him a lifelong fascination with Scripture.

In spite of her efforts to provide him with a stable home life, Earle’s behavior grew increasingly erratic as he matured. At the dinner table, he seemed barely socialized, devouring food with the ferocity of a caged beast. He routinely managed to lose his clothing whenever he left the house. When he wasn’t sunk into profound self-pitying depressions, he was gripped by uncontrollable rages. By the age of seven, he had already been expelled from grade school and earned a neighborhood reputation as a petty thief and shoplifter.

Earle Leonard Nelson in custody

In 1907, shortly after his tenth birthday, Earle suffered a serious head injury when he bicycled in front of an oncoming trolley car and was sent flying into the cobblestones. He remained in a coma for nearly a week before regaining consciousness. It is possible that the brain damage he sustained in this accident contributed to his future psychopathology. Or perhaps—given his family inheritance of instability and the bizarre behavioral symptoms he had manifested from infancy—his life would have turned out the same even if he hadn’t been hit by the trolley.

In any event, his formal education ended when he was fourteen. Dropping out of school, he took a succession of menial jobs, supplementing his meager earnings (most of which he spent in the brothels of the Barbary Coast) with burglary. By then he was residing with his aunt Lillian, his grandmother having died a few years earlier. Despite Earle’s increasingly erratic behavior—his Tourette’s-like tendency to spew obscenities at the dinner table, his brooding obsession with the Book of Revelation, his freakish habit of walking around on his hands whenever a guest dropped by for coffee—Lillian remained staunchly supportive of her bizarre nephew. When he was arrested for housebreaking in 1915, she made a tearful appeal on his behalf at his trial. Her plea was ignored, however, and Earle was sentenced to two years in San Quentin.

Released from prison during the height of the Great War, Earle enlisted in the military but spent a good part of his stint in a naval mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as a constitutional psychopath.

Discharged in 1919, the twenty-two-year-old Nelson took a job as a hospital janitor and soon fell in love with a grizzled fifty-eight-year-old spinster named Mary Martin. Before long, this very odd couple had married. The new Mrs. Nelson found herself living with a madman who continuously accused her of infidelity when he wasn’t ranting about the Great Beast of the Book of Revelation and proclaiming that he himself was Jesus Christ. Not long after Earle raped her in a hospital bed while she was recuperating from a serious illness, Mary decided to leave him. A year later, he attacked a twelve-year-old girl in the basement of an apartment building and landed back in a mental hospital.

He was discharged in June 1925. Less than one year later, he embarked on the rampage that would make him the most feared and prolific serial killer of his era.

On February 20, 1926, he showed up at the doorstep of Mrs. Clara Newman, a sixty-year-old spinster who ran a boardinghouse in San Francisco. There was a vacancy sign in her front window. Nelson, explaining that he was looking for a place to stay, asked to see the available room. Once he had the landlady alone, he strangled her with his bare hands, then raped her corpse.

During the next few months, Nelson ranged along the West Coast—from San Francisco to Seattle and back—on a monstrous spree of murder and sexual mayhem. Ten more women died at his hands between February and November 1926. All his victims were landladies. All were strangled, then raped after death. A number of the corpses were left stuffed in small spaces—inside a trunk, behind the basement furnace. By now, the press had dubbed the unknown maniac the “Dark Strangler.” A massive manhunt was launched all along the West Coast.

Nelson moved inland. On December 2, he murdered Mrs. John Brerard, forty-nine, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. On December 27, he strangled twenty-three-year-old Bonnie Pace of Kansas City, Missouri. The following day, he killed another Kansas City woman, twenty-eight-year-old Germania Harpin. He also choked to death Mrs. Harpin’s eight-month-old son by stuffing a rag down the infant’s throat.

A nationwide alert was now on for the monster. Witnesses had provided the police with a description of the suspect: dark hair, stocky build, sloping forehead, protruding lips, and grotesquely oversized hands.

There was something apelike about his appearance. The press hung a new tag on the phantom killer: the

“Gorilla Murderer.”

Nelson headed eastward. Between April and June he murdered four more women in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. Then he turned north into Canada, where he was finally captured after murdering two final victims in Winnipeg, a sixteen-year-old flower girl named Lola Cowan and a housewife named Emily Patterson, whose violated corpse he stuffed under a bed.

Tried and convicted in November 1927, Nelson was hanged the following January in Winnipeg. He went to his death clutching his Bible and proclaiming his innocence. His blood rampage had lasted for slightly more than a year, from February 1926 until June 1927. During that brief span of time, twenty-two victims met their death at the beastlike hands of the Gorilla Murderer.

1906–1984

A beautiful blonde slides out of her bathrobe, steps into the shower, and turns on the water. She pulls the plastic curtain closed. The water gushes down. She soaps herself, smiling. Suddenly, over her shoulder, a shadow appears on the other side of the curtain. It draws nearer. The curtain rips back. The shadow, shaped like an old woman, clutches a butcher knife. The big blade slashes downward, then slashes again.

And again. Screeching chords on the sound track match the dying shrieks of the victim. Her streaming blood whirlpools down the drain.

The sequence, of course, is the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho— the most frightening moment from the most influential horror movie of modern times. After Psycho, a new kind of monster began stalking the movie screens of America: the psychotic “slasher.” And showering was never the same again.

Ed Gein

The brilliance of Hitchcock’s film derives from his genius for drawing us into a world of total insanity—a nightmare realm where a bathroom becomes a chamber of horrors, a shy young man turns into a crazed transvestite, and a sweet little old lady turns out to be a mummified corpse. By the time the film is over, the shaken audience steps away from the screen saying, “Thank God it was only a movie.”

Perhaps the scariest thing about Psycho, then, is this—

It was based on the truth. There really was a maniac whose unspeakable deeds served as the inspiration for Psycho. His name wasn’t Norman Bates, however. It was Edward Gein.

Gein grew up on a hardscrabble farmstead a few miles outside of Plainfield, Wisconsin, a small, featureless town situated in an area that has been called the “Great Dead Heart” of the state. His father, George, was a hard-luck type with a weakness for alcohol. Though George could be brutal when drunk, he was no match for his domineering wife, Augusta.

But then, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have matched Augusta’s ferocious willpower. Or her all-consuming madness.

Raised in a fiercely religious atmosphere, she had gradually developed into a ranting fanatic who harped on a single theme: the loathsomeness of sex. Looking around the world, all she perceived was rottenness and filth. She had fled the city of LaCrosse—the place of Eddie’s birth—because she regarded it as modern-day Sodom, reeking of sin and perversion. But Plainfield, in her warped view, had turned out to be no better. The small, God-fearing town was, in her eyes, a hellhole of depravity. She kept her two boys—Ed and his older brother Henry—tightly bound to her apron strings and imbued them with her own twisted sense of universal wickedness, the whorish ways of women, and the vileness of carnal love.

When George Gein dropped dead of a heart attack in 1940, no one—not even his family—was sorry to see him go. Left alone with their mother, the two boys fell even more powerfully under her poisonous spell. Henry, at least, seems to have had some sense of Augusta’s destructive influence and tried to help his brother break away. But Eddie wouldn’t listen. He worshiped Augusta and did not take kindly to his brother’s criticisms.

In 1944, Henry was found dead on the Geins’ property—presumably from a heart attack while putting out a brush fire. No one ever came up with a convincing explanation for the strange bruises on the back of his head.

Now Eddie had his mother all to himself. But not for long. In 1945, Augusta suffered a stroke. Eddie tended to her day and night, though nothing he did ever seemed to be good enough. Sometimes—her voice slurred but still dripping with contempt—she would call him a weakling and a failure, just like his father. At other times, she would beckon him to her side and pat the mattress beside her. Eddie would crawl into her bed and cling to her, while she cooed in his ear: he was her own little man, her baby. At night, he wept himself to sleep, praying to God to spare his mother’s life. Eddie could never manage life without her; she had told him so herself.

But his prayers went unheeded.

A few months later, Augusta was stricken with another, even more devastating stroke. She died in December 1945. Eddie Gein, thirty-nine years old, was left all alone in his dark, empty, shut-off world.

It was then that he began his descent into the chaos of unutterable madness. For a long time, no one seemed to notice. A loner all his life, Ed started keeping more to himself—locked up behind the weather-beaten walls of his gloomy, ramshackle farmhouse. And even when he did venture out in public—to run an errand in town or perform some handyman chores or drink an occasional beer at Mary Hogan’s roadside tavern—he didn’t seem that much stranger than he had before. A little dirtier maybe, more in need of a bath. But he had always been a queer one, ever since childhood. Folks just accepted Eddie’s peculiarities.

True, he seemed to talk more and more about the magazine articles he was fascinated by: stories of Nazi atrocities, South Sea headhunters, and sex-change operations. And then there were the “jokes” he told.

When Mary Hogan, the big, foul-mouthed tavern keeper, suddenly disappeared from her place one afternoon, leaving nothing but a puddle of blood, Eddie began kidding that she was staying over at his house. But that kind of sick humor was just something you’d expect from a weirdo like Eddie Gein.

Even the stories about the creepy things at his farmhouse didn’t faze most folks. Some neighborhood kids who had visited his home claimed that they had seen shrunken heads hanging on the walls of Eddie’s bedroom. Eventually the rumors got back to Eddie, who had a plausible explanation. The heads, he said, were World War II souvenirs, sent to him by a cousin who had served in the South Seas. His neighbors shrugged. Trust Eddie to have weird souvenirs like that.