EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (13 page)

It was proving difficult to find recruits for his new gang. He was just too hot and certainly too dangerous to become involved with, most criminals thought. They were right. The police were looking for him round the clock. All main and connecting roads were being watched. They eventually found him on Highway 14 on 27 September 1934. Agents William Ryan and Thomas McDade followed his car but were forced to stop when bullets were fired into their radiator. A second federal car, containing agents Herman Hollis and Samuel Cowley, took up the chase. Baby Face’s car was damaged by FBI bullets. He crashed it into a ditch where he and Chase clambered out of the car and took up position with their machine guns.

Suddenly, however, Baby Face stood up and started walking up the road, carrying his machine gun. When Chase asked him what he was doing, he replied that he had had enough – he was angry and was going to kill the agents. Gunfire erupted but Nelson kept walking, bullets ripping through his body. He continued firing and Hollis fell to the ground dead. Then Cowley also slumped to the ground, dying.

Baby Face Nelson had been hit by seventeen bullets. He crawled to the agents’ car but was not able to lift himself into it. Chase and Helen picked him up and laid him on the car’s back seat before driving him to a priest so that he could at least have the last rites said over him. He died at eight o’clock that night, having lost his temper one time too many.

Ed Gein

On 17 November 1957, following a robbery at the hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in which she worked, Bernice Worden had disappeared. Police discovered that the last customer in the store had been Ed Gein, a local man who lived alone in a ramshackle, dilapidated old farmhouse in a desolated location on the outskirts of the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. They travelled out to the gloomy farm to interview Gein. What they found when they arrived would shock and horrify the nation.

The first thing they noticed was the stench. Decomposing rubbish and rotten junk covered every space and work-surface and littered the floor to the extent that it was difficult to walk. The local sheriff, Arthur Schley was making his way gingerly through the room with a torch when he felt something brush against him, something hanging from the ceiling beams. He shone his torch upwards into the dark to see a large carcass, hanging upside down, decapitated, the ribcage sliced open and the insides gutted, just like you would a deer, something common to this area where hunting was a popular activity. But this was no deer, the policeman quickly realised to his horror. It was the body of the missing woman, Bernice Worden, who had been shot dead at close range with a .22 calibre rifle. That was not all they found in this charnel house, however.

In Gein’s small bedroom the bed had a bizarre decoration on each of the four corner posts − human skulls; skin had been used to make a lampshade and to upholster the seats of chairs; sliced off women’s breasts were being used as cup holders; human skullcaps were being used as soup bowls; a human heart lay in a saucepan on the cooker; the pull of a window shade was a pair of human lips. There was a mammary vest made of woman’s skin; a belt made from human nipples; socks made from human flesh and a box of human vulvas that Gein later admitted to wearing. Finally, they found a suit made entirely of human skin.

Thirty-nine-year-old Edward Theodore Gein had taken the death of his mother, Augusta, in 1945 pretty badly. His late father, George, was a violent alcoholic who rarely worked and whom his mother and the two boys essentially ignored. Divorce was not an option for Augusta due to her strict religious convictions – she was a strict Lutheran who read Ed and his brother passages from the Old Testament every afternoon to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Augusta had run a successful small family grocery store that allowed the family to live comfortably, despite her husband’s inadequacies, before buying a remote farm located just outside the small town of Plainfield. She moved there to remove any undue outside influences from her precious sons. She lectured them on the evils of the opposite sex – women were wicked, no more than prostitutes and to be avoided at all costs. The only reason for sex, she told them, was for reproduction. But there was little chance of Ed being led astray. He had always been a strange boy, laughing randomly at his own private jokes and being bullied for his slightly effeminate manner and for a minor growth that he had over one eye. He was a loner – he had to be, as Augusta would not permit him to make friends – leaving home only to attend the local school. The rest of his time was spent working on the farm.

She was a hard woman to please and often berated them for their shortcomings, fearing they would end up like their no-good father. Nonetheless, when George died in 1940, they tried to help out by taking odd jobs and the people of Plainfield considered them to be reliable and trustworthy. Interestingly, while both boys were employed as handymen, young Eddie Gein liked nothing better than to baby-sit for neighbours. He seemed to get on better with younger kids than those his own age.

Ed’s brother, Henry, however, was less fond of the life that his mother was trying to mould for the two boys. He thought Ed’s relationship with his mother was unhealthy and began to be critical of her in front Ed. But Ed thought his mother was the embodiment of all that was good and was deeply shocked to hear Henry talk like this. It may have led to Henry’s death.

In May 1944, the two boys were fighting a forest fire that was threatening the farm. They had separated in order to fight the fire from two different directions. According to Ed, he lost sight of his brother and as night approached, there was still no sign of him. Ed informed the police and when they arrived at the farm led them straight to his brother’s body. A couple of things did not seem right. For a start, he was lying on a piece of ground that had not been burned. He also had bruises to his head. Foul play was at no point suspected – the police officers just did not believe that Ed was capable of murder, let alone the murder of his brother. The cause of death was later recorded by the coroner as asphyxiation.

It was two years later that Augusta suffered a series of strokes and died, leaving thirty-nine-year-old Ed on his own at the farm for the first time in his life. He boarded up his mother’s rooms − the upstairs rooms, downstairs parlour and living room − keeping them as a shrine to her memory. He took up residence in the kitchen and a small room off it, that became his bedroom. Here, he spent his time reading about Nazi atrocities, south sea cannibals and, eerily, anatomy. His neighbours, for some of whom he did odd jobs, spread nasty rumours about him. Some young boys who visited the farm, saw shrunken heads, but their parents dismissed the story as childish fantasy. Nonetheless, he was known as ‘Weird Ed’.

His favourite hobby, however, was visiting the local cemetery. There, he would dig up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women who looked like his mother. He would drag the bodies home, skin them and tan the skin from which he would make the macabre objects that littered his rooms.

Following Augusta’s death, Ed had decided that he wanted to have a sex change. It was for this reason that he wore the suit made of women’s skin, so that he could pretend to be his mother rather than have to go through with the operation a sex change necessitated.

They estimated that Ed had carved up fifteen bodies at the farmhouse.

Coincidentally, Wisconsin Police had noticed an increase in the 1940s and 1950s in the number of people who had disappeared. An eight-year-old girl, Georgia Weckler had vanished on her way home from school in 1947. A huge search of a ten square mile area was launched involving hundreds of locals. However, no evidence was found apart from a set of tyre tracks made by a Ford. She was never seen alive again. In 1952, two hunters had stopped for a drink in Plainfield − no sign of Victor Travis and Ray Burgess or their car was found after they left the bar in spite of a huge search. In 1953, fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley, was babysitting in the town of La Crosse when she disappeared. Her father had phoned to check that she was alright but receiving no reply, went to the house where she was. When there was no answer to his knocking at the door, he looked through the window. All he could see was her shoes and her glasses on the floor along with some bloodstains. There had obviously been a struggle and the police found bloodstains on the grass outside

the house. Again a massive search was launched but not a trace of the girl was found apart from some items of clothing with blood on them near to a highway. Then, in the winter of 1954, Plainfield tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan disappeared from her bar − again a trail of blood was left behind in the car park. There was also an empty bullet cartridge on the floor of the tavern.

It seemed that Ed Gein had killed them all and maybe more.

The gruesome discoveries at the farm had a devastating effect on the men who found them. One officer, Art Schley had been so upset that during his interrogation of Gein, he banged the killer’s head and face against the wall, rendering his initial confession inadmissible. Schley became a tragic figure, so mortified by Gein’s crimes and his fear of having to testify, that he died before the case came to court, aged only forty-three.

Schley’s frustration was understandable because for the first day, while exhaustive searches were being made of his farm and the surrounding area, Gein said nothing. After twenty-four hours, however, he opened up, explaining in graphic detail how he had killed Bernice Worden and how he had plundered many of the body parts in his house from the local cemetery. Bernice Worden, he claimed was the only person he had killed. The others had been already dead.

The eeriest thing about his confession was the lack of remorse or emotion he displayed, the true sign of the psychopath. In actual fact, he had no conception of the crimes he had committed. It was thought that he was almost certainly insane and that he should plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. They had done tests and psychiatrists had interviewed him. They concluded that he was both schizophrenic and a ‘sexual psychopath’. The reason, they added was the unhealthy relationship that he had enjoyed with his mother. She had given him unnatural and conflicting feelings about women, both loving and hating them. This conflict eventually manifested itself as a psychosis.

The remains of ten women were discovered on the farm and the difficult and controversial decision was taken to exhume the bodies of the women at the cemetery whose graves he had said he had plundered. All the coffins showed signs of having been tampered with and parts had undoubtedly been stolen from them.

Gein was found to be mentally incompetent and unfit to be tried for first degree murder and was committed to the Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin. Ten years later, however, he was deemed competent to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden and was, finally, found guilty of first-degree murder. However, he was judged to have been insane at the time of the crime and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. They sent him back to hospital where he happily spent the remainder of his life. On 26 July 1984, he lost a long battle with cancer and died. They laid him to rest in his favourite place – next his mother in Plainfield cemetery. He was also tantalisingly close to the graves he had plundered all those years previously.

After he was convicted, Ed Gein’s farm went up in flames, probably as a result of arson – the townspeople were tired of the ghoulish curiosity of morbid out-of-towners. Plainfield fire department took the call and attended the fire, but it was too late. Perhaps they failed to deal with the incident with a great deal of urgency, given who the fire chief was. His name was Frank Worden and he was the son of Bernice Worden, one of Weird Ed’s unfortunate victims.

Harvey Glatman

Harvey had been different from birth. He was slow and never had any friends. He behaved oddly from an early age. His mother, Ophelia, first discovered there was something not quite right with her son was when he was just four years old. She walked into his room to find that he had tied a length of string around his penis, put the other end in a drawer and had then leaned back against the tugging string. The parents dismissed this as a bit of childish experimentation, but it was a lot more than that and, later, rope would replace string and become his means of conquest.

At school, Harvey was called names on account of his large ears and buck teeth. But, above all, he was afraid of girls and never joined in activities and games after school. He would rather go home and play his own game which involved his beloved rope. He would tie it round his neck, throw it over a pipe or rafter and pull on it while masturbating. He had discovered auto-erotic asphyxiation at an extraordinarily early age. When he was eleven, his parents found out about the game and took him to a doctor who just put it down to growing pains.

He did well at school, but girls were still an alien life form; he stammered and blushed whenever any came near him. Moreover, his confidence was not helped by a very bad case of acne. So, to get his thrills, he started to break into houses. But, unlike other everyday burglars, he did not do it for gain; he broke into houses simply for the excitement.

His breaking and entering soon graduated into something different. He would follow a woman home from the centre of Denver, break into her house, force her into her bedroom and tie her with the rope he carried everywhere with him. He would also gag her with a piece of cloth. He had stolen a .25 pistol during one of his burglaries and it came in handy. The woman was at his mercy and he was free to touch her as he pleased. He would unbutton clothes and fondle their bodies as he pleased, doing the same to himself. He never fully undressed them or raped them. However, it made him feel like a real man and not the loser he really was.

In May 1945, however, when he was seventeen, he was finally caught breaking into a house and the police discovered the rope and the gun on him. He confessed to some of the burglaries he had committed, but was careful to leave out the ones that had involved the women. Seeming not to have learned his lesson, although perhaps not able to control his desires even if he had, while awaiting trial, he abducted a woman called Norene Laurel, tied her up and drove her to Sunshine Canyon. He performed his usual acts and then let her go. At the police station, she recognised his face in an album of mugshots and he was arrested again, this time without bail. He was sentenced to a year in Colorado State Prison but was paroled after eight months.

Ophelia, Harvey’s mother wanted him to make a fresh start and set him up in a flat in Yonkers. He got a job as a TV repairman, a trade he had learned in prison and she returned to Denver. Harvey, meanwhile, was on the lookout for excitement. He bought a toy gun – possession of a real one would mean a long prison-stretch if he was caught with it – and he carried his pocket-knife and his trusty length of rope, made of the finest hemp.

At midnight on 17 August 1946, Thomas Staro and Doris Thorn were accosted by a man with a gun. They were marched into a grove of trees and the man tied Staro’s legs together and made him lie down. The man with the gun began to touch Thorn’s breasts. However, unknown to Glatman, Staro had worked himself free of his ropes and was tiptoeing up behind him. There was a struggle and Glatman slashed Staro’s shoulder with the knife before running away into the night.

He fled to Albany where he rented a flat and prepared for his next attack. It came on the night of 22 August. He pushed off-duty nurse, Florence Hayden into a yard where he bound her wrists together. As he did this, however, she screamed and Glatman fled. The next evening, he tried it on with two women walking together, but lost his nerve, eventually just taking their purses.

The Albany Police Department was, by this time, becoming interested in this man who targeted women. The descriptions given by the women all matched; so they knew the crimes were being perpetrated by the same man.

Within two days, he was arrested and he confessed. In spite of the pleas of his mother who all this time had believed him to be leading a quiet life in Yonkers, he was sentenced to five to ten years in prison; he was in the big league now. At Elmira, where he spent the first two years of his sentence, he was diagnosed as a ‘psychopathic personality – schizophrenic type’. He was then moved to maximum security at Sing Sing. As is reported to often be the case with sociopaths like Glatman, he played the system well and got time off for good behaviour, being released after serving only two years and eight months. There were conditions though; he had to return to the care of his mother, get a job and be under court supervision for four and a half years.

He behaved himself and in 1956, he was free of all restrictions. He moved to Los Angeles and went crazy.

Harvey had enjoyed photography in his art classes at high school and now he took it up again, but with a more sinister purpose. He intended to use it to photograph girls from the modelling studios that had sprung up everywhere in LA. Girls who had arrived in Hollywood dreaming of being stars like Marilyn Monroe offered themselves to be snapped clothed, semi-clothed, or naked, according to how much they were paid.

He worked as a TV repairman again and rented a small apartment on Melrose Avenue, saving enough to buy a used 1951 Dodge Cornet and some expensive photography equipment. He invented a name, Johnny Glenn, for his photographer identity and spent months hanging around the modelling studios, taking thousands of photographs.

But, it was not quite enough for Harvey.

Judith Ann Dull was a nineteen-year-old divorcee working to fund a child custody battle she was waging with her ex-husband. Glatman called her on the morning of 1 August 1957, and asked if she would be interested in posing for a true crime magazine layout. She was wary, but agreed to pose for him at her own apartment at two o’clock that afternoon. He asked her to wear a tight skirt and sweater.

Arriving at her apartment, he told her the light was not good enough and suggested they go to his studio. Once there, he explained that the pictures were to illustrate a story about bondage and she would have to be tied up. Innocently, she allowed him to tie her wrists and ankles, at which point he pulled a .32 Browning automatic pistol from his pocket. He undid the ties on her wrists and ordered the now terrified Judith to strip off, slowly. He photographed her all the while, barking out instructions as to how he wanted her to pose.

He then raped her several times and forced her to sit beside him while he watched television. He said he would take her home afterwards.

Of course, he had no intention of taking her home.

When he told her he would drop her on the outskirts of town, she presumed that was to allow him to make his escape. They got in the car and he drove a hundred miles out of town before stopping the car. He made as if to untie her and for a moment she must have thought it was going to be alright, but quickly he put the rope round her neck, pushed her down onto her knees and ran the other loop of rope around her ankles. Pulling up on the rope, her neck snapped and she was dead. He finished the evening off by using his flash attachment to take photos of the dead girl, arranging her body in a variety of poses.

He stuck the photos all over his bedroom walls.

It was seven months before he killed again.

He met twenty-four-year-old Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a divorced mother of two children, through the Patty Sullivan Lonely Hearts Club. ‘George Williams’ promised to take her square dancing on 7 March 1958. Williams – in reality Harvey Glatman – picked her up at her home where, to his surprise and concern, a houseful of people greeted him. He suggested to her that rather than go dancing, they go for a drive in the country and get some dinner somewhere en route. She agreed and they stopped in Oceanside.

After dinner they drove on. Somewhere near Anza State Park he stopped the car and pulled his gun out, ordering Shirley to undress. He raped her and then took photographs of her. He then waited until the sun came up to take pictures of her in daylight before garotting her. As with Judith Dull, he then photographed the corpse in different poses.

Four months later, it was the turn of Ruth Mercado, her body photographed and dumped near to Shirley Bridgeford’s remains.

In the summer of 1958, Glatman went to the Diane Studio, one of the better agencies on Sunset Boulevard. It was arranged for him to work with Lorraine Virgil, a woman who had signed on with the agency only the previous week. He was to pick her up at eight that evening

But the owner, of the studio, Diane, was suspicious of the man with the big ears, unkempt hair and smelly body odour. She phoned Lorraine and told her to

be careful.

As soon as Lorraine got into his car and he started heading in the wrong direction alarm bells began to ring in her head. When she questioned him, he told her someone had already booked the studio and they were actually going to his own private studio.

As they sped down the freeway, she became even more anxious. Again she asked him where they were going. He said ‘Annaheim’. However, she knew that they had already sped past the Annaheim turn-off. As she became more and more concerned, he began to shout at her to shut up. He swung the car dangerously into an exit ramp, crossing two lanes to get to it. Off the freeway, he stopped the car and asked her to put her arms out. He told her he was going to tie her up to keep her quiet and to emphasise his point, he pulled out his gun. Lorrraine reached for the door handle, trying to escape, but he grabbed her and they struggled. He tried desperately to wrap a coil of rope around her, but, unlike the other women, Lorraine fought back.

She grabbed the gun barrel and the gun went off, the bullet burning her thigh as it skimmed past. Suddenly, Glatman released his hold on her and she wrenched open the car door and fell out. He climbed out behind her, trying to haul her back into the car, but just as he grabbed her sweater, the pair were bathed in a pool of light. It came from the headlights of a patrol car.

She stumbled towards them, still holding the gun and fell at their feet. Glatman, meanwhile cowered

by his car, sobbing and whimpering that it was not

his fault.

When Glatman’s mother left the prison after visiting her son, she said to the assembled press: ‘He is not a vicious man – he is sick.’ And that was his only hope of escaping the gas chamber; to prove that he was not of sane mind. Harvey did not want to be examined, though; he wanted to die. However, he was persuaded to undergo psychiatric tests. There was no point. The report said: ‘he shows no evidence of a psychosis. He knows right from wrong, the nature and quality of his acts and he can keep from doing wrong if he so desires.’

Harvey pleaded guilty and on 15 December 1958, he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

On 18 September 1959, he entered San Quentin’s notorious ‘green room’. The chamber door was locked shut at a minute past ten. He was strapped in by two minutes past ten. The cyanide pellets were released a minute later and by twelve minutes past ten, Harvey Glatman was dead.

He might have enjoyed it a bit more if he had been hung on the end of a rope of the finest quality hemp.