The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (28 page)

Outside the prison walls, Tony Cimo, the son of the victims murdered by Tyner, was hatching a plan to accelerate Tyner’s execution. Through prison contacts, he negotiated for a contract to be put out on Tyner. The word finally got to Gaskins, who agreed to kill Tyner for the right price.

In his work in the prison, Gaskins had free access to condemned inmates, mending broken pipes, toilets, light fixtures; anything at all. Unknown to Cimo, Gaskins also had a tape recorder, capturing their conversations for posterity; a blackmail tool as good as money in the bank if he should ever manage to escape from custody.

Gaskins decided poison was the way to go. Befriending Tyner on his visits to death row, Gaskins began to slip Tyner junk food, marijuana, pills and heroin. Tyner received the gifts, unquestioning, and begged for more. Cimo supplied a box of candy laced with poison ‘strong enough to kill a horse’, but Tyner merely suffered stomach pains. Over the following 12 months, Gaskins repeated the experiment five times, spiking his target’s food and drugs with ever-larger toxic doses, all in vain. Tyner lived on, oblivious to the ‘coincidences’ linking the gifts and with stomach-churning trips to the hospital.

Gaskins gave up on poison and decided to construct a bomb. Cimo supplied the wiring, hardware and C-4 plastic explosive (smuggled past distracted guards in the hollowed-out heels of cowboy boots). Tyner agreed to let Gaskins connect a homemade intercom between their cells. Gaskins strung wire through prison heating ducts, constructed a ‘receiver’ for his target from a plastic cup and packed it with C-4. The two men synchronised their watches for a test run on the evening of 12 September 1982. At the appointed hour, Tyner pressed the loaded plastic cup against his ear and spoke to Gaskins, on the
far side of the wall between their cells. ‘The last thing he heard through that speaker cup before it blew his head off,’ Gaskins later said, ‘was me laughing.’

Press reports initially described Tyner’s death as suicide, but there are no real secrets in prison. Prisoners started talking, and Tony Cimo was arrested and soon confessed his role in the plot. A grand jury was empanelled, indicting Gaskins and Cimo with two inmate accessories for murder and conspiracy. The state of South Carolina had failed to execute Donald Gaskins for his previous murders. Now, it was prepared to try again.

Tony Cimo received a 25-year prison sentence with parole eligibility after 30 months. He served the minimum and returned to the seaside town of Murrell’s Inlet, where he died from a prescription drug overdose on 10 June 2001.

Gaskins, meanwhile, spent the first three years of his new sentence not on death row, but in a rat-infested isolation unit. His attorneys appealed the confinement in 1985, but the authorities cited ‘reliable information’ that Gaskins planned to have accomplices kidnap the prosecutor’s child and bargain for his release. Only after his petition for release from solitary was rejected did police ‘determine the report was an empty threat’. A year later, freed from solitary after the isolation unit was condemned as not fit for human habitation, Gaskins found death row ‘a lot nicer’ than his previous quarters. In 1990, Gaskins and the state’s electric chair were moved again, this time to the Broad River Correctional Institute outside Columbia.

Gaskins filled his last months with an art scam, tracing cartoon characters for sale to collectors of death row memorabilia, and dictating his memoirs on tape for author Wilton Earl to publish in 1993. As death approached, Gaskins became philosophical. ‘I truly don’t mind dying,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve lived a damned full and good life.’ In fact, he decided, it was even better than that. ‘I have walked the same path as God,’ Gaskins raved. ‘By taking lives and making others afraid, I became God’s equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through
my own power I come to my own redemption.’ He was even optimistic about his date with the chair, saying, ‘When they put me to death, I’ll die remembering the freedom and pleasure of my life. I’ll die knowing that there are others coming along to take my place, and that most of them won’t never get caught.’

There was no escape this time for Gaskins. The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in June 1991, clearing the way for Gaskins to be executed in September. Hours before his date with ‘Old Sparky’, Gaskins slashed his arms from wrists to elbows with a razor blade he had swallowed days earlier then regurgitated, in a futile effort to postpone death. Prison medics stitched his wounds in time for Gaskins to be executed at 1.05am on 6 September 1991.

The exact number of victims murdered by Gaskins was never known. Police believed that the number may have been as high as 200. Gaskins went on record as suggesting that the total may be around 90.

Ed Gein (b. 1906) lived with his parents, who ran a small family shop in Wisconsin. They eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, also in Wisconsin. Gein’s mother was very religious and drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evils of drink and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were whores. According to his mother, the only acceptable form of sex was for biological reproduction. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder and divine retribution.

When Gein reached puberty, his mother became increasingly strict, once dousing him in scalding water after she caught him masturbating in the bath, grabbing his genitals and calling them the ‘curse of man’. With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanour, the young Gein became a target for bullies. Despite this, he did reasonably well at school. His father
died in 1940 and by then he had begun to reject his mother’s views on life. His brother died mysteriously in a fire at the farm, also in 1940. In 1945 his mother died, leaving him all alone at the farmhouse.

During the late 1940s and 1950s, police began to notice an increase in missing person cases. There were four cases in particular they took an interest in. The first was that of an
eight-year
-old girl named Georgia Weckler, who had disappeared while coming home from school on 1 May 1947. Hundreds of residents and police searched an area of 10 square miles around her home address, hoping to find the young girl. Unfortunately, Georgia was never seen or heard of again.

Another girl disappeared six years later in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley was babysitting at the time she disappeared. The girl’s father immediately drove to where she had been, but nobody answered the door. When he peered through a window, he could see one of his daughter’s shoes and her glasses on the floor. He tried to enter the house, but all the doors and windows were locked, except for one, the back basement window. It was at that window where he discovered bloodstains. Petrified, he entered the house and discovered signs of a struggle.

Immediately he contacted the police. When they arrived at the house, they found more evidence of a struggle, including bloodstains on the grass leading away from the house, a bloody handprint on a neighbouring house, footprints and the girl’s other shoe on the basement floor. A larger area was searched but Evelyn was nowhere to be found. A few days later, police discovered some bloodied articles of clothing that belonged to Evelyn near a highway outside La Crosse. The worst was suspected.

In November 1952, two men stopped for a drink at a bar in Plainfield, Wisconsin, before heading out to hunt deer. Victor Travis and Ray Burgess spent several hours at the bar before leaving. The two men and their car were never seen again. A
massive search was conducted but there was no trace of them. They had simply vanished.

In winter 1954, a Plainfield tavern-keeper by the name of Mary Hogan mysteriously disappeared. Police suspected foul play when they discovered blood on the tavern floor that trailed into the car park.

In mid-November 1957, a robbery took place at a local shop where the female owner, Bernice Worden, was abducted. The police had reason to believe Gein was involved and went to his farmhouse to talk to him. When they arrived at the farmhouse, there was no sign of Gein. They went inside the dimly lit room and noticed the stench that immediately hit them. The smell of filth and decomposition was overwhelming. One of the officers went into the kitchen. It was dark and he felt something brush against his jacket. He flashed his torch to see what it was and saw a dangling carcass hanging upside down from the beams. The carcass had been decapitated, slit open and gutted. He initially thought it was a deer carcass. However, after a few moments the officer realised that it wasn’t a deer at all; it was the headless body of the missing woman, Bernice Worden. She had been shot and killed before being butchered.

The officers started a search and soon uncovered more grisly secrets. There were severed heads acting as bedposts in the bedroom. Human skin had been used to upholster the chair seats. Several human skulls had been made into soup bowls. A single human heart was in a saucepan on the stove. A facemask made out of facial skin was found in a paper bag. There was a necklace made out of human lips. In the wardrobe they found a waistcoat made up of vaginas and breasts sewn together. In addition there was a belt made solely from nipples. In another wardrobe was an entire wardrobe made from human skin consisting of leggings, a gutted torso (including breasts) and an array of tanned, dead-skin masks.

Gein was later arrested and interviewed and initially remained silent. However, the following day he confessed in
detail how he had murdered Bernice Worden and how he had acquired all the body parts found at the farm, which he stated he had dug up from the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother. He would take the bodies home, where he skinned them, subjecting the skin to a tanning process, then using it to make his macabre possessions. Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, saying that they smelt too bad. During interrogation, Gein also admitted to the shooting of Mary Hogan, the local tavern-owner missing since 1954.

Gein told police that shortly after his mother’s death he had decided he wanted a sex change, hence the female ‘attire’ manufactured from body parts – he could wear it and pretend to be his mother, rather than change his sex. Gein showed no signs of remorse and he appeared to have no concept of the enormity of his crimes. The police continued to search the land around his farm. They discovered within Gein’s farmhouse the remains of 10 women. Although Gein swore that the remaining body parts of eight women were taken from local graveyards, the police had their doubts. They believed that it was highly possible that the remains came from other women he had murdered. The only way to ascertain whether the remains came from women’s corpses was to examine the graves that Gein claimed he had robbed. Following much controversy over the morality of exhuming the bodies, police were finally permitted to dig up the graves of the women he claimed to have desecrated. All of the coffins showed clear signs of having been tampered with. In most cases, the bodies or parts of the bodies were missing.

A further discovery on the farm would again raise the issue of whether Gein did, in fact, murder others. On 29 November, police unearthed more skeletal human remains, suspected to be Victor Travis, who had disappeared years earlier. The remains were immediately taken to a crime lab and examined. Tests showed that the body was not that of a male but of a large, middle-aged woman, another victim of Gein’s grave-robbing.
Police tried desperately to implicate Gein in the disappearance of Victor Travis and the three other people who had vanished years earlier in the Plainfield area. The only murders Gein could be held accountable for were Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan.

Gein was deemed not competent to stand trial and was confined to a mental hospital. However, after spending 10 years in the mental institution, the courts finally decided he was competent to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden. The proceedings began on 22 January 1968, to determine whether he was guilty of the murder of Bernice Worden. The actual trial began on 7 November 1968. However, Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a mental institution, where he came to be regarded as a model patient. On 26 July 1984, he died after a long battle with cancer. He was buried in Plainfield cemetery next to his mother, not far from the graves that he had robbed years earlier. His gravestone in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalised; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is presently displayed in a museum in Wautoma, Wisconsin.

Born at Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1940, in his youth, Robert Hansen (b. 1940) was skinny and painfully shy, afflicted with a stammer and a severe case of acne that left him permanently scarred. Shunned by the attractive girls in school, he grew up hating them and nursing fantasies of cruel revenge. Hansen spent much of his early life as a loner and was a victim of bullying by his peers and his strict, domineering father.

Hansen married in 1960. On 7 December that year, he was arrested for burning down a local school bus garage, a crime for which he served 20 months in prison. His wife divorced him while he was incarcerated. Over the next few years, he was jailed several more times for petty theft and drifted through a series of
menial jobs. In 1967, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, seeking a fresh start with his second wife, whom he had married in 1963. While he was well liked by his neighbours and was famed as a local hunting champion, his life eventually fell into disarray.

In 1972, Hansen was arrested and charged with the abduction and attempted rape of a housewife and the rape of a prostitute. Serving less than six months on a reduced charge, he was again arrested for shoplifting a chainsaw. In 1976, he was convicted of theft and was sentenced to five years in prison, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, the Alaska Supreme Court regarding his sentence as ‘too harsh’. In 1977, he was imprisoned for theft and diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder.