Харлан Эллисон: Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

“Good old Ed, kind of a loner and maybe a little bit odd with that sense of humor of his, but just the guy to call in to sit with the kiddies when me and the old lady want to go to the show...”

Yes, good old Ed, slipping off his mask of human skin, stowing the warm, fresh entrails in the refrigerator, and coming over to spend the evening with the youngsters; he always brought them bubble gum...

A pity Grace Metalious wasn’t aware of our graying, shy little-town handyman when she wrote Peyton Place! But, of course, nobody would have believed her. New England or Wisconsin are hardly the proper settings for such characters; we might accept them in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania — never!

And yet, he lived. And women died.

As near as can be determined, on the basis of investigation and his own somewhat disordered recollections, Gein led a “normal” childhood as the son of a widowed mother. He and his brother, Henry, assisted in the operation of their 160-acre farm.

Mrs. Gein was a devout, religious woman with a protective attitude toward her boys and a definite conviction of sin. She discouraged them from marrying and kept them busy with farm work; Ed was already a middle-aged man when his mother suffered her first stroke in 1944. Shortly thereafter, brother Henry died, trapped while fighting a forest fire. Mrs. Gein had a second stroke from which she never recovered; she went to her grave in 1945 and Ed was left alone.

It was then that he sealed off the upstairs, the parlor, and his mother’s bedroom and set up his own quarters in the remaining bedroom, kitchen, and shed of the big farmhouse. He stopped working the farm, too; a government soil-conservation program offered him subsidy, which he augmented by his work as a handyman in the area.

In his spare time he studied anatomy. First books, and then—

Then he enlisted the aid of an old friend named Gus. Gus was kind of a loner, too, and quite definitely odd — he went to the asylum a few years later. But he was Ed Gein’s trusted buddy, and when Ed asked for assistance in opening a grave to secure a corpse for “medical experiments,” Gus lent a hand, with a shovel in it.

That first cadaver came from a grave less than a dozen feet away from the last resting place of Gein’s mother.

Gein dissected it. Wisconsin farm folk are handy at dressing-out beef, pork, and venison.

What Ed Gein didn’t reveal to Gus was his own growing desire to become a woman himself; it was for this reason he’d studied anatomy, brooded about the possibilities of an “operation” which would result in the change of sex, desired to dissect a female corpse and familiarize himself with its anatomical structure.

Nor did he tell Gus about the peculiar thrill he experienced when he donned the grisly accoutrement of human skin stripped from the cadaver. At least, there’s no evidence he did.

He burned the flesh bit by bit in the stove, buried the bones. And with Gus’s assistance, repeated his ghoulish depredations. Sometimes he merely opened the graves and took certain parts of the bodies — perhaps just the heads and some strips of skin. Then he carefully covered up traces of his work. His collection of trophies grew, and so did the range of his experimentation and obsession.

Then Gus was taken away, and Gein turned to murder.

The first victim, in 1954, was Mary Hogan, a buxom 51-year-old divorcee who operated a tavern at Pine Grove, six miles from home. She was alone when he came to her one cold winter’s evening; he shot her in the head with his .32-caliber revolver, placed her body in his pickup truck, and took her to the shed where he’d butchered pigs, dressed-out deer.

There may have been other victims in the years that followed. But nothing definite is known about Gein’s murderous activities until that day in November 1957, when he shot and killed Mrs. Bernice Worden in her hardware store on Plainfield’s Main Street. He used a .22 rifle from a display rack in the store itself, inserting his own bullet which he carried with him in his pocket. Locking the store on that Saturday morning, he’d taken the body home in the store truck. Gein also removed the cash register, which contained $41 in cash — not with the intention of committing robbery, he later explained in righteous indignation, but merely because he wished to study the mechanism. He wanted to see how a cash register worked, and fully intended to return it later.

Mrs. Worden’s son Frank often assisted her in the store, but on this particular Saturday morning he’d gone deer hunting. On his return in later afternoon he discovered the establishment closed, his mother missing, the cash register gone. There was blood on the floor. Frank Worden served as a deputy sheriff in the area and knew what to do. He immediately alerted his superior officer, reported the circumstances, and began to check for clues. He established that the store had been closed since early that morning, but noted a record of the two sales transactions made before closing. One of them was for a half gallon of antifreeze.

Worden remembered that Ed Gein, the previous evening at closing time, had stopped by the store and said he’d be back the next morning for antifreeze. He’d also asked Worden if he intended to go hunting the next day. Worden further recalled that Gein had been in and out of the store quite frequently during the previous week.

Since the cash register was missing, it appeared as if Gein had planned a robbery after determining a time when the coast was clear.

Worden conveyed his suspicions to the sheriff, who sent officers to the farm, seven miles outside Plainfield. The house was dark and the handyman absent; acting on a hunch, they drove to a store in West Plainfield where Gein usually purchased groceries. He was there — had been visiting casually with the proprietor and his wife. In fact, he’d just eaten dinner with them.

The officers spoke of Mrs. Worden’s disappearance. The 51-year-old, 140-pound little handyman joked about it in his usual offhand fashion; he was just leaving for home in his truck and was quite surprised that anyone wanted to question him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he told them. “I just heard about it while I was eating supper.” It seems someone had come in with the news.

Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, the sheriff and the captain had driven up, entered the shed, and made their gruesome discovery.

Gein was taken into custody, and he talked.

Unfortunately for the “searchers after horror,” his talk shed little illumination on the dark corners of his mind. He appeared to have only a dim recollection of his activities; he was “in a daze” much of the time during the murders. He did recall that he’d visited about 40 graves through the years, though he insisted he hadn’t opened all of them, and denied he’d committed more than two murders. He named only nine women whose bodies he’d molested, but revealed he selected them after careful inspections of the death notices in the local newspapers.

There was a lie-detector test, a murder charge, an arraignment, a series of examinations at the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He remains there to this day.

The case created a sensation in the Midwest. Thousands of “epicures of the terrible” — and their snotty-nosed brats — made the devout pilgrimage to Plainfield, driving bumper-to-bumper on wintry Sunday afternoons as they gawked at the “murder farm.” Until one night the residence of the “mad butcher” went up in smoke.

I was not among the epicures. At that time I resided less than fifty miles away, but had no automobile to add to the bumper crop; nor did I subscribe to a daily newspaper. Inevitably, however, I heard the mumbled mixture of gossip and rumor concerning the “fiend” and his activities. Curiously enough, there was no mention of his relationship with his mother, nor of his transvestism; the accent was entirely on proven murder and presumed cannibalism.