Obsession (47 page)

Sickened, the sheriff’s men forced their way into the adjoining house where, if possible, their shock was even greater. The interior was a mess of clutter and trash. There were human skulls affixed to the posts of Ed’s bed. Bernice Worden’s heart was in a saucepan on the stove. Her head, eyes closed peacefully as if she were sleeping and already prepared with hooks
through her ear sockets so it could be hung on display, was found in a corner in a burlap bag. Her other internal organs were in a box.

Capt. Lloyd Schoephoerster of the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Department recalled it this way for the record:

I had a feeling I never had before in my life because I had never seen anything like this. It was so horrible. We found skulls and masks; that is, the skin portion of the head that had been stripped from the skull and preserved and put in plastic bags. There were several of those skulls. We found a box that had women’s organs in it and I noticed one small one was gilded a gold color with a ribbon tied on it; I believe a red ribbon. We found leg bones and discovered the chair seats were made out of human skin. They were crudely made. The outside portion would be smooth and if you looked underneath you could see strips of fat. It wasn’t a good job.

There was a knife handle made of bone and lamp shades from skin and there was one upper portion of a woman’s torso from the shoulders, cut down both sides to the waist, with her breasts and everything completely tanned. It was stiff. You could set it up and it had everything attached.

This wasn’t all. There were bowls made of the tops of human skulls, wastebaskets of stretched human skin, and a belt of female nipples.

They also found the “mask” of another woman, fully tanned and her face and hair preserved. Arnie Fritz noticed another bag, this one paper, behind the kitchen door. He opened it and shone his flashlight inside. Former sheriff Leon “Specks” Murty, who had
come over to help his successor, gasped as he said, “By God, it’s Mary Hogan.”

Mary Hogan had disappeared nearly three years earlier—on December 8, 1954—from the tavern she managed in nearby Pine Grove. As with Bernice Worden’s murder, there was a pool of blood on the tavern floor. And like Mrs. Worden, Mary Hogan was also in her fifties.

Sheriff Schley found Gein, arrested him, and subjected him to a brutal interrogation, at times grabbing the suspect and throwing him against the wall. Gein confessed to the two murders, having shot both women, but not to three other unsolved deaths the investigators thought could be related. He also admitted having robbed three cemeteries—Plainfield, Spiritland, and Hancock—taking all or parts of at least fifteen recently buried bodies, all women. He said he had known some of them in life. He might have killed others, however, since two preserved vaginas found on his premises did not match up with any cemetery records of recently buried bodies. He didn’t recall much about the killings themselves, claiming he had been “in a daze.” But he did allow as how both women reminded him of his mother.

That was the key to this bizarre predator. He was not a sexual sadist. He did not kill for the raw pleasure of it. He was not in search of power or manipulation, although he did admit that opening the graves gave him a thrill. What he was doing, it seems, was “recreating” his mother out of random parts, many of which he could wear in an effort to “become” Augusta. Gein told another former sheriff, Dan Chase, that he used to put on the female torso with breasts attached that he had constructed and parade around his yard at night under the moonlight. He had begun killing when his grave-robbing wasn’t sufficient to produce the “raw material” he needed.

As the psychiatrist who evaluated him upon his commitment, a Dr. Warmington, wrote, “The motivation is elusive and uncertain but several factors come to mind—hostility, sex, and a desire for a substitute for his mother in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely.”

Dr. Warmington also noted that “since the death of his mother he has had feelings that things were unreal.” Gein stated that he had heard his mother talking to him several times about a year after she died.

Other psychiatrists who examined the mild-mannered Gein for the state readily concluded that he was suffering from a severe psychosis, possibly schizophrenia. Within a week of Bernice Worden’s murder, he had been committed to the Central State Hospital at Waupun and confined to a ward for the criminally insane, where he began living a quiet and uneventful life, always behaving cordially and amiably and giving the authorities no trouble.

But before long, his story had seized the popular imagination. He was proclaimed in the press the “Butcher of Plainfield.” The car he had used in his grave-robbing expeditions was sold at auction and displayed at county fairs and carnivals throughout the Midwest. And novelist Robert Bloch wrote a thriller about a quiet, unassuming man who kept his late, domineering mother’s remains intact and took on her persona, killing a woman who threatened to come between them. He called his book, simply,
Psycho
. The subsequent feature film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, quickly became a classic of its genre.

Ten years after Gein’s commitment, psychiatrists at Central State Hospital declared him sufficiently lucid to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden. By mutual consent of the prosecution and the defense, a jury trial was waived in favor of a decision by Judge
Robert H. Gollmar. After hearing all the evidence, Judge Gollmar concluded that while the murder was intentional (Gein claimed a shotgun he was looking at in the store and that he had loaded with his own ammunition had gone off accidentally), the defendant was legally insane.

This is not a decision I would disagree with. Though I don’t believe that many repeat killers are actually insane in the legal sense, Gein certainly was. Like Richard Trenton Chase, the young man from Sacramento, California, who killed people in the late 1970s because he believed he needed their blood to keep his insides from turning to powder (he had previously experimented with injecting himself with rabbit blood but found it insufficient), Ed Gein was certifiably off his nut, a genuine psychotic who, I believe, committed the crimes as a direct result of his psychosis.

After the 1968 trial, Gein was returned to Central State Hospital. He died peacefully due to natural causes in the geriatric ward of the Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984.

I first became interested in the Ed Gein case as a young special agent while working in the Milwaukee Field Office, my second assignment in the Bureau. Special Agent Jerry Southworth had dabbled in profiling, largely on his own, without resources or the research to back up his conclusions. This was the early 1970s and the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover was still long over operations. Hoover thought of profiling and other behavioral manifestations as voodoo and witchcraft.

But I saw what Jerry was doing and was fascinated by it. It dovetailed with my own early profiling efforts, which mainly involved debriefing bank robbers and other felons about why they committed the crimes they did, how they picked a particular target, what was going through their minds at the time, and the
like. Gein seemed like a fascinating study of what seemed to be the strangest possible sexual predator. So in my spare time, I went to the state attorney general’s office in Madison and petitioned to have the crime-scene photos and the rest of the records unsealed so that we in law enforcement could study them. I was successful, and we began teaching the Gein case when I was assigned to Quantico. I was never able to interview Gein in person as I wished, but I did speak at length with the psychiatrist who was supervising him at the time.

When we study a case like this, one of the things we do is try to figure out how we would have analyzed it if it had been brought to us as an UNSUB. In this instance, I think the two murder scenes—Hogan and Worden—would have told us a lot about the offender. In both cases, the body had been removed but no attempt had been made to clean up the blood or hide that a crime had been committed. Since it was obvious from the amount of blood that the victim had probably died on the spot, why would you remove the body? Normally, it’s to prevent detection. But since that clearly wasn’t the motivation in this setting, there had to be another reason. And when you start getting into removing bodies for purposes other than preventing detection of the crime, you’re quickly moving into the realm of disorganized, perverse, and aberrational offenders.

I first taught the Gein case in 1976 as a special presentation to the FBI National Academy Class, made up of law enforcement officers from around the country. Though I have seen a lot worse crime scenes in terms of the sheer suffering of the victim, these shots of headless, naked bodies, human face masks, and other body parts are about as creepy as they come.

And this, I suspect, is what prompted Thomas Harris to build his own predator character around a recluse of
ambiguous sexuality whose obsession was fashioning a female suit for himself out of pieces of real women.

While I will concede that Edward Gein was legally insane by any reasonable definition of the term, this is rare, and I would not make such a concession for the second model for Buffalo Bill, Theodore Robert Bundy. By the time Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke on January 24, 1989, law enforcement authorities had tied him to more than thirty murders of young women across the length of the United States.

At first glance, Ted Bundy was almost a cliché, a poster boy for classic American middle-class success and happiness. He was good-looking and reasonably bright. He seemed to have an easy way with women, could turn on the charm, knew and appreciated the finer things in life, was active in politics, and enrolled in law school. Crime writer and former police officer Ann Rule worked next to him in a rape crisis center in Seattle.

But underlying that veneer was a much darker and more troubled existence. He was born on November 24, 1946, to twenty-one-year-old Louise Cowell in the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. Louise had left her home in Philadelphia to avoid the scandal of the out-of-wedlock pregnancy. After considering putting the baby up for adoption, Louise and her parents, Sam and Eleanor Cowell, agreed that the parents would say the boy was adopted by them, making Louise his older sister. Though young Ted apparently knew the domestic situation wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be, he adored his father/grandfather Sam, a landscape gardener by trade who many others remember for a bad temper, bigotry, cruelty, and intolerance for the weaknesses and shortcomings of others.

Though the family photos of Ted with tricycle and red wagon or sled and snowman, building sand castles at the beach, or trimming the Christmas tree seem typically idyllic and middle American, there were other warnings that things were not all okay with the youngster. When Louise’s sister, Julia, was fifteen, she awoke on more than one occasion to find her three-year-old nephew placing kitchen knives in the bed next to her. Ted, she said, “just stood there and grinned.”

The next year, again wanting to avoid scandal as Ted got older, Louise took him and moved from Philadelphia across the country to Tacoma, Washington. There she got a job as a secretary and met a cook named John Culpepper Bundy, whom she married in 1951, giving Ted his last name.

Ted grew into a handsome young man, joined the Boy Scouts, and did well in school, though several times Louise and John received notes from teachers about the boy’s fierce temper. Louise might have thought he merely took after her father and apparently did nothing about it. She probably did not know that by the time Ted was in high school, he was clan-destinely watching women through their windows as they undressed at night. He would also steal expensive clothing and other items, telling his mother they were given to him by the department store where he had a full-time job. From all evidence, Ted was acutely aware of his family’s inability to afford a lifestyle he aspired to, and stealing was an easy and effective way to acquire it. This was a habit he maintained throughout his life.

Now clearly, not every young boy who has difficulty controlling his temper is going to grow up into a murderer—not even the ones who also get their kicks out of surreptitiously watching through windows as women take off their clothes or steal repeatedly to get
the material things they want. None of these actions, on its own, is remarkably significant. But you’ll note that we’re starting to see a pattern here, and it’s not one that offers a lot of confidence for the future.

We don’t know exactly where antisocial behavior comes from, but such experts in child development as Stanton Samenow have observed that you can begin making it out at an early age. “I don’t think that somebody wakes up one day and says, ‘Gee, I’m going to become a criminal,’” he comments. “It’s not a choice in the simple sense. But it is a choice in that the world presents to any child a number of options of what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, what you can do, what you might do—all from a very early age. Children make choices in terms of what they internalize, what they heed, what they listen to.”

Was his environment or upbringing a factor in the way Ted turned out? I’ve often said, as a result of all of my own research with serial killers, that they all come from inadequate or dysfunctional homes of one sort or another, many with physical and/or sexual abuse. In Bundy’s case, while there is no evidence he was physically abused, he certainly had an abnormal and stressful childhood of dislocation and even name changing. What we also have is a family that was clearly ambivalent about the boy and his origins, and other family members, such as some contemporary cousins, who rubbed it in about his illegitimacy. Combine this with his aspiration for things he couldn’t afford and his personality and inability to feel for or empathize with other people and, without intervention, you’ve got a recipe for a pretty dangerous character.

Which is exactly what he became. He graduated from high school in 1965, won a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound, then transferred to the University of Washington. He fell in love with a
wealthy Stanford University coed, and when she broke off with him, he went into a depression, began neglecting his schoolwork, and soon dropped out of college. He couldn’t stand the rejection and set about to recreate himself in the image he thought would be appealing to the likes of this rich and beautiful girl, just as obsessively as Ed Gein had tried to recreate himself as his own mother. This was one of the things that made Ted Bundy such an effective sexual predator: he could make himself over into whatever he needed to be.