Deviant (6 page)

Eddie felt elated to see her on her feet again, though her failure to acknowledge the care he had provided during her long recuperation left him slightly crestfallen. But the important thing was to see her healthy, to have his mother back again.

Then something horrible happened.

It was the winter of 1945. The Gein farm still had some livestock, and Augusta announced that they must have straw for fodder. Eddie would go to a neighbor named Smith to arrange for a purchase, and she would accompany him to oversee the transaction.

Whenever Eddie told the story afterward, his voice would tremble with fury and grief.

As Eddie and Augusta drove into the yard, Smith—a sullen, quarrelsome fellow with a notoriously short temper—was laying into a mongrel puppy with a heavy stick. As the dog yowled in pain, the woman Smith lived with—out of wedlock, according to Augusta—appeared on the porch and began screeching at Smith, gesticulating wildly and begging him to stop. Smith continued beating the pup until it lay dead at his feet, while the woman wept and shrieked curses at him.

Augusta was shaken by the scene. Strangely, it was the sight of the woman—“Smith’s harlot,” Augusta called her—that seemed to upset her most.

Less than a week after the incident at Smith’s farm, Augusta suffered a second stroke. Eddie rushed her back to the hospital, but on December 29, 1945, at the age of sixty-seven, she died.

The curtness of her obituary in the
Plainfield Sun
suggests something about the community’s feelings toward Augusta. Henry’s death had been front-page news, and even George had received a respectful farewell. By contrast, the entire obituary for Augusta reads as follows: “Mrs. Augusta Gein died at the Wild Rose hospital on December 29th of cerebral brain hemorrhage. The body was brought to the Goult funeral home where services were held Dec. 31, Rev. C. H. Wiese officiating. She is survived by one son, Edward, who lives on the home farm southwest of here.”

Several of Augusta’s siblings attended the funeral, but otherwise no one besides Eddie showed up. Eddie was beyond caring. If anything, he was glad that so few people were present. He wept like a child—his face was smeared with tears and snot—and he would have been embarrassed to have his neighbors see him in such a miserable state. But he simply couldn’t control his grief. He had lost his only friend and one true love.

And he was absolutely alone in the world.

For millions of Eddie’s countrymen, it was a time of thanksgiving and celebration. Just a few months earlier, the long, terrible war had finally come to an end. Looking into the future, America saw nothing but bright days ahead, and, in fact, the coming years would be an especially sunny time in the life of the nation.

But for Eddie Gein—and for the little Wisconsin town that harbored him—darkness had just begun to descend.

2 The
Deadhouse

6

HERVEY CLECKLEY,
The Mask of Sanity

“
It is perhaps worthwhile to add here that not all those suffering from a typical psychosis, even when the disorder is serious in degree, give an obvious impression of derangement
.”

S
mall-town life is notorious for its lack of privacy. When you reside in a community whose entire population could easily be housed in a single New York City apartment building, you are likely to feel that every one of your neighbors is privy to the most intimate facts of your personal life and that you are on equally familiar terms with the details of theirs. Living in Plainfield, some folks would tell you, was like sharing a bed with every man, woman, and child in town. There aren’t many secrets that stay hidden for long.

This image of the intense, often oppressive intimacy of small-town living has a great deal of truth to it, of course. But it is also true that many people who really do share the same bed—men and women who have been married so long that even their faces have begun to look alike—manage to conceal major secrets from each other, often for the better part of a lifetime. It is also the case that, precisely because they live in such tight proximity, small-town dwellers retain a necessary measure of privacy by tacitly agreeing to avoid knowing certain things about each other. Denial, after all, is a basic psychological mechanism which operates even in the minds of the most dedicated busybodies and gossips. Like the parent who refuses to face the most disturbing signs of maladjustment in a favorite child, small-town dwellers will often manage to dismiss, explain away, or turn a blind eye to the extreme peculiarities of their neighbors.

Moreover, for all their very real friendliness and hospitality, Midwesterners tend to be a reticent bunch, regarding certain personal matters as inappropriate subjects for conversation or examination. They also have a pronounced—and very American—tendency to take people at face value and to pay as little attention as possible to the darker side of human nature.

All of this perhaps helps to explain how a middle-aged bachelor could live in a tightly knit community of just over six hundred people, all of whom knew him by name, and, for more than a decade, get away with murder—and worse.

There is another factor, too. Beginning in 1945, and for the dozen years that followed, Plainfield was only one of the places Eddie Gein inhabited. For much of that time, he dwelled in a world so utterly remote and nightmarish that no normal person could possibly have known of its existence or guessed at its terrible secrets.

As far as the citizens of Plainfield could see, Augusta Gein’s death hadn’t changed Eddie much. He was the same soft-spoken, mild-mannered individual he had always been—a little awkward around people but a polite and accommodating fellow, who would never say no to a neighbor who needed help sawing firewood, hauling grain, or repairing a barn. When Bob Hill’s car broke down or Georgia Foster had to go off on an errand and needed someone to sit with her children, Eddie could always be counted on to lend a hand. He’d go out of his way to do his fellow townsfolk a favor.

True, there were a few detectable differences in Eddie. His appearance, never exactly well groomed to begin with, had become noticeably more unkempt. His jaw was often covered with a full week’s growth of stubble, and it was clear to anyone who stood within an arm’s length of him that he could stand to bathe a good deal more often than he did. Indeed, some of the shopkeepers in town—who generally looked down their noses a bit at the “hayseeds” from the surrounding countryside—had very little use for Eddie Gein. James Severns, for one—the proprietor of the Plainfield barbershop—regarded Eddie with undisguised disdain. In the barber’s eyes, the little man with his salt-and-pepper stubble and ragged homemade haircut was a sorry sight, a “filthy thing.”

To anyone who had occasion to pass by Eddie’s property, it was evident that the Gein farmstead had also undergone a marked decline in appearance since Augusta’s death. Now that he was all alone, Eddie had simply stopped working the place. The front yard was overgrown with weeds, and the pastures were receding to woodland. The last few head of livestock were gone, sold off by Eddie to pay for his mother’s funeral. Unused pieces of farming equipment—cultivator, fanning mill, manure spreader—sat rusting in the barnyard.

Because Eddie had such minimal needs, he managed to support himself by leasing a few acres of land to neighboring farmers and hiring himself out as a handyman. For a while, he did work for the township, clearing brush from the roadsides in summer and plowing snow in winter. Since his land was lying fallow, he was also entitled to a small government subsidy through a state soil-conservation program.

Though a few of the townsfolk took his neglect of the farm as a sign of shiftlessness in Eddie, most of his neighbors considered him an able and hard-working hand. When threshing time came, Eddie was often hired on as one of the crew. Slight as he looked, he had the strength and endurance that come from a lifetime of manual labor. Floyd Reid—who worked alongside Eddie many a time, on threshing crews and at the local lumber mill—was one of those who regarded Gein as “the most dependable person in the county.” And unlike some of the other men, Eddie never used cuss words or spoke out of turn. He was always quiet and well mannered.

Take the way he behaved during dinnertime. When a farmer got together a threshing crew to help harvest his crops, it was his wife’s responsibility to provide the workers with a solid midday meal—roast beef, baked beans, mashed potatoes, pickles, relishes, hot bread and rolls, freshly churned butter, homemade cottage cheese, jellies, preserves, and assorted fruit pies and cakes, all washed down with fresh milk or iced tea or strong, steaming coffee. As the men filed into the house through the kitchen door, brushing the dust off their heavy bib overalls or mopping their faces with the faded red kerchiefs they kept knotted around their necks, Eddie would hang back, waiting until the last of the crew was seated before finding himself a place.

Often, when the meal was finished and the other men had all stepped back outside to stretch out in the grass for a while, relax, and have a smoke, Eddie would linger at the table, gazing fixedly at the farmer’s wife and daughters as they bustled about the kitchen. Many of the females—even the very young ones—felt a little disconcerted by the way Eddie sat there inspecting them, his lips twisted into that strange little leering half-smile of his. But they also couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him. His life was so terribly lonely. And he never seemed to mean any harm or disrespect by the looks he gave them. In fact, if one of the girls were to stare back at him, he would immediately jump up from his chair and carry his plate, utensils, and drinking glass over to the sink—a courtesy that none of the other men ever saw fit to perform. More than one farmer’s wife, touched by Eddie’s politeness and by the awful solitariness of his existence, resolved to bake an extra batch of holiday cookies for the forlorn little bachelor come Christmastime and deliver it herself to his home.

Not many of the farmers, though, shared their wives’ sentimental view of Eddie. Indeed, though they considered him a capable enough worker, some of the men treated Eddie as an outright chucklehead, the perfect patsy for a good practical joke. Generally, after the day’s harvesting was done, the crew would unwind with a tub of iced beer. On a few occasions, one of the fellows would hand Eddie a bottle that had been half filled with brandy. Eddie would guzzle it down without noticing the difference, and, before you knew it, his droopy eyelid would begin to sag even more.

Then there was the time someone planted a smoke bomb under the hood of Eddie’s pickup. Even those men who didn’t approve of such childish doings—men like Floyd Reid, who felt sorry for Gein and regarded his oddness as the inevitable consequence of his sadly disadvantaged upbringing—couldn’t help but smile at the look on Eddie’s face as he came tumbling out of his truck when the smoke bomb went off.

For all the stamina he displayed on the job, there was something distinctly, even gratingly, womanish about the shy little bachelor—“weak-acting,” Gyle Ellis called it, whereas Otto Frank tended to think of Eddie as “another Casper Milquetoast.” Eddie claimed, for instance, to be squeamish about blood, and—though he commonly hunted rabbit and squirrel, often in the company of Bob Hill and other local boys he had befriended—he would never kill a deer, he said, because he couldn’t stand to see it dressed out.

Eddie’s professed aversion to bloodshed was peculiar not only because he’d spent most of his life on a farm, where butchering animals was a standard part of his existence, but also because he seemed so preoccupied with violence. Eddie was a great one for reading and had a particular affection for true crime magazines, the kind with lurid covers of half-naked girls being assaulted by beefy men in trench coats and black leather masks. Eddie couldn’t get enough of these publications and was constantly recounting, for the benefit of anyone who would listen, some especially juicy lust killing he had just read about in the latest issue of
Inside Crime
or
Startling Detective
. Murder was one of his favorite topics of conversation. In the company of men, he also tended to talk about women, though his comments—how cute Irene Hill looked or how “nice and plump” Bernice Worden had become—sounded more like the utterances of a schoolboy than the responses of a forty-year-old man.

Of course, Eddie wasn’t found in the company of men very often. Though the people he came in contact with—the farmers, housewives, and merchants of Plainfield—couldn’t see it, Eddie was, by the early 1950s, in full retreat—from society, from reality, from sanity itself. More and more of his time was spent in the darkness of his decaying farmhouse. In the past, he would kill some time occasionally at the Plainfield ice cream parlor or at the big indoor roller-skating rink in the neighboring village of Hancock. Now, except to do an odd job or run an errand, he rarely went anywhere. In fact, there seemed to be only one place in the area he continued to visit with any regularity: Mary Hogan’s tavern.

Situated in the tiny town of Pine Grove, about seven miles from the village of Plainfield,, Hogan’s establishment was an odd-looking place. Built of concrete blocks with a semicylindrical roof of corrugated metal, it looked less like a roadside tavern than a warehouse topped with a Blatz Beer sign.

Having been raised by an abusive, alcoholic father and a fanatically moralistic mother who viewed liquor as only slightly less vile than sex, Eddie wasn’t much of a drinker. But he did indulge in a beer now and then. His real reason for visiting Mary Hogan’s place, though, was not to drink or socialize—he could have accomplished those goals in a number of taverns closer to home—but to observe the proprietress. Eddie was transfixed by her.

A formidable middle-aged woman who weighted nearly two hundred pounds and spoke with a heavy German accent, Mary Hogan bore—at least in Eddie’s eyes—an unmistakable resemblance to his own mother. What made her so fascinating to him, however, were not just the similarities but, even more, the glaring differences between the two. Augusta had been a saint on earth, the purest, most pious woman in the world. Hogan, by contrast, was a foul-mouthed tavern keeper with a shady, even sinister past. Few hard facts would ever be known about her, but according to rumor, she was twice divorced, had connections to the mob (she had moved to rural Wisconsin from Chicago some years before), and was even reputed to have been a big-city madam. To Eddie, she was like some kind of perverse mirror image of Augusta, as evil as his mother had been good.

Thinking about the two of them together that way made Eddie feel dizzy. How could God have allowed his mother to waste away and die, while suffering this Hogan creature to live? He couldn’t figure it out.

One thing was for sure, though. God couldn’t possibly permit such a flagrant injustice to go on for very long. Deep in his bones, Eddie just knew that was true.