Eat Thy Neighbour (19 page)

Eventually, Ed admitted to killing Mary Hogan, explaining that both she and Mrs Worden had reminded him of his mother. It seemed that slightly overweight, middle-aged women were the only type he was interested in – and only because they looked like Augusta Gein. The question of how, exactly, his brother Henry had died cropped up again, but Ed staunchly denied any involvement. Finally, investigators gave up trying to connect Ed Gein with the disappearance of the two schoolgirls or his brother’s death and turned him over to the Wisconsin mental health authorities who placed him in the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Waupun, for further examination.

It did not take long before everyone in Plainfield, and the surrounding territory, knew what kind of awful things had been going on at the old Gein place, but it was not until the story broke a few days later in the local press, the
Shawano Evening Ledger
, that it became really big news. In a matter of days Plainfield was swamped with reporters, photographers and television and radio people. Nothing like this had ever happened anywhere, and the stunned people of Eisenhower-era
America were both fascinated and repelled by the horrific tale. In December 1957, only weeks after the event, two of America’s three biggest magazines,
Life
and
Time
, ran the story of Ed Gein’s ‘House of Horrors’.

While the people of Plainfield tried to be patient with the onslaught of the paparazzi, they also wished they would just go away and leave them alone. It was mostly the kids, with their ‘I-told-you-so’ attitude, who made the most of their tiny town’s notoriety. They started telling tasteless ‘Geiner’ jokes that soon swept the country. The Geiners ran something like this.

Q. What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him?

A. Have a heart!

Q. Why did they let Ed Gein out of jail on New Year’s Eve?

A. So he could dig up a date.

There were even limericks, one of which ran as follows:

There once was an old man named Ed

Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed

When he wanted to fiddle

He cut out her middle

And hung up the rest in his shed.

It was all too sick, but to children who could not understand the very real implications of what was happening, it was just great fun. What was not so much fun for the people of Plainfield was the announced auction of the Gein farm and its contents, particularly when the auctioneers announced they would charge 50 cents for anyone to look around the place before the auction. The townspeople were outraged. The last thing they needed were throngs of morbid curiosity seekers ploughing through their town, gawping at the ‘murder house’. Although Sheriff Schley
refused the auction company permission to charge admission, there was nothing he could do to stop the sale.

Somehow, when the local volunteer fire brigade was called to the Gein farm in the early hours of 20 March 1958, people were far more relieved than surprised. A lot of head-nodding went on over the next few days, but not a great deal could be done to find the vandals who had started the fire. When Ed’s doctors told him his house had burned down his only comment was ‘Just as well’.

Not to be deterred by the loss of the house and its filthy contents, the auctioneers went ahead with the sale as planned. The land and outbuildings were sold to a local developer for use as a Christmas tree farm and most of the old farm equipment was sold for scrap. But Ed’s 1949 Ford sedan was another matter altogether – this was the vehicle in which he had carried off the bodies of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. The first round of bidding involved no fewer than fourteen prospective buyers and by the time the bidding ended the car had brought $760. The buyer was a carnival sideshow operator named Bunny Gibbons from Rockford, Illinois.

Bunny first put the ‘Ed Gein Ghoul Car’ on display in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin. A huge placard outside the tent screamed ‘See the Car that Hauled the Dead from Their Graves! Ed Gein’s Crime Car!’ The first weekend more than 2,000 people paid 25 cents each to look at the dilapidated old Ford. Local authorities shut the show down at one location after another and the car finally vanished from sight. Ed, however, was still being poked and prodded at Central State Hospital.

The eventual findings of the psychiatric evaluation board was that Ed Gein was both schizophrenic and a sexual psychopath, suffering from conflicting emotions about women that had been engendered by his love–hate relationship with his mother. Ed Gein was the most curious case of necrophilia, transvestism, cannibalism and fetishism that any of the doctors had ever
heard of, let alone encountered. In short, Ed was not, at this time, mentally competent to stand trial.

It was not until January 1968, just over ten years after his arrest, that Ed Gein was declared legally sane enough to be tried for the murder of Bernice Worden. On the advice of his psychiatrists and lawyers he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

The trial itself did not take place until November of that year and only seven witnesses took the stand to testify, most of them psychiatrists and members of the forensic team who had been charged with the grisly job of identifying the body parts found in Gein’s house. Despite the small number of witnesses, their testimony was long, involved and almost entirely scientific in nature, and it took a week for them to deliver their findings. To no one’s surprise, Ed Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity and escorted back to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Ed seemed to have improved a lot over the years. The hospital administrator, Dr Schechter, always described him as a model patient who never required antipsychotics or tranquillisers to remain calm. He always appeared at ease during his therapy sessions with the doctors and enjoyed working in the craft centre where he learned stone polishing, rug weaving and other forms of occupational therapy. It is unlikely that he was ever allowed to do leatherwork. By and large, he kept to himself, but when he mingled he got along well with the other patients and staff, except for the disconcerting way he would occasionally stare at the female patients and nurses – especially the ones who were plump and middle aged.

In 1978, at the age of seventy-two, Ed Gein was transferred to the Mendota Mental Health Institute where he died in the geriatric ward six years later.

Even though the world at large had long since forgotten about Ed Gein, there were a few who remained fascinated by America’s
most famously twisted killer. Only months after his arrest in 1957 internationally famous horror writer, Robert Bloch, began work on a novel based on the Gein case. Because the world was still not ready for all the gory details, the tale was toned down and made more psychological than graphic. When the book, entitled
Psycho
, came out in 1959, master film producer, Alfred Hitchcock, immediately picked up the movie rights. The following year Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of the mother-fixated killer, Norman Bates, made audiences shiver all over the world.

In 1967 Ed became the model for the lead character in the film
It
, in which Roddy McDowall portrays a psychopathic museum curator who keeps his mother’s decaying body at home in her bed. Gein again surfaced on celluloid in 1974 as Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s splatter classic
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. But Hollywood was still not done with poor Ed. In yet another, and probably not final, appearance, Ed was transformed into the transvestite killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ who, like Ed, wore a suit made from women’s skin. The book
Silence of the Lambs
was written by Thomas Harris in 1988 and three years later the story brought to the screen by Jonathan Demme. We can probably assume that Ed Gein, like his victims, will be dug up again at some point in the future.

Twelve

From Russia with Hate: André Chikatilo (1978–90)

L
ife has always been hard in the Russian states and it was especially true in 1936 when André Chikatilo was born in the Ukrainian village of Yablochnoye. The peasants who worked the land in the once fertile expanses of the Ukrainian steppes were suffering through their fifth year of famine. Unlike most famines this one was man-made; it was dictator Josef Stalin’s personal revenge for the Ukrainian people’s resistance to handing over their farms to the Soviet collective system. Year after year the Russian soldiers confiscated the livestock and the harvest, including the seed grain needed to replant the fields. Sometimes they cleaned out the peasants’ cupboards and larders too for good measure. By 1936 an estimated ten million had starved to death. One of the side-effects of the famine was an epidemic of cannibalism as hunger-crazed people were forced to choose between eating their dead relatives or watching while their children wasted away. The Chikatilo family had already lost an elder son, Stephan, to a band of cut-throats who had probably kidnapped him to be sold as meat at a local market.

As if this were not enough to ensure that little André Chikatilo was off to a less than hopeful start, he was born with hydrocephalus – a condition once known as ‘water on the brain’ – which can cause damage to the frontal cortex along with a variety of physical impairments. One of the immediate effects of André’s condition was an inability to control his bladder
at night. In a peasant culture where the entire family slept on a single, raised platform the presence of a bed-wetter was immediately noticed by the entire family. While André’s father and sister tried to make light of the problem, his foul-tempered mother, Anna, constantly humiliated him. Years later, André’s sister, Tatyana, would remember her mother as ‘very harsh and rude. She only yelled at us and bawled us out. She never had a kind word.’

By the time André reached the age of five, in 1940, the already intolerable situation in the Ukraine became even worse when the armies of Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. One entire army was dedicated to subduing the Ukraine in an effort to seize its vast oilfields to fuel the German war machine. As with almost everywhere the Nazis invaded, the killing and terror was beyond belief. Along with everyone else, André was constantly exposed to the sight of dead, mutilated bodies littering the streets and mass executions carried out in reprisal for the smallest infractions of German rule. For unknown reasons, André’s father was arrested by the Germans and sent to a forced labour camp, leaving an increasingly embittered Anna to bring the children up alone.

When the Germans were finally driven out of the Soviet Union, André’s father returned home, but there were new problems. By the time he reached puberty André was no longer wetting the bed, but he had begun experiencing uncontrollable ejaculations. Unlike most boys, who occasionally experience night-time emissions, André’s were almost constant and seldom accompanied by an erection.

Bullied at home, he received the same treatment at school because he was so shy and awkward. As a defence mechanism, André increasingly withdrew into a fantasy world filled with sadism and violence. To a boy who had seen so much suffering and cruelty, and felt such intense humiliation and inadequacy because of his physical problems, these nasty fantasies were the
only thing which allowed him to feel he had any control over his world. On one occasion, when a friend of his sister came to the Chikatilo home, he tried to act out one of his fantasies. André was now sixteen and his younger sister’s friend was ten or eleven. Grabbing the child, he tried to tear her clothes off as a prelude to rape, but found that although the sheer excitement of the violence caused him to ejaculate, he could not achieve an erection. The girl was terrified and he was completely humiliated.

Although André was a fairly bright student he failed the entrance exam that would have allowed him to enter the state university in Moscow, and escape his life in the Ukraine. Like most boys who did not qualify for higher education, André Chikatilo served his time in the Soviet armed forces. Again, every time he attempted to have sexual relations with a girl he met on leave he was incapable of the sex act, embarrassing himself with his impotence and nearly instantaneous ejaculation.

By 1960 Chikatilo was again a civilian and had taken a job with the Ukrainian telephone company. Desperate to live as normal a life as possible, he enlisted the help of his sympathetic sister in finding a girlfriend who would tolerate his shyness and sexual problems. Amazingly, she found one for him. The girl’s name was Feodosia and in 1963 she became Mrs André Chikatilo. How they accomplished it can only be guessed at, but together they produced two children, a boy and a girl who, in the fullness of time, would make them grandparents. Determined to make the most of what he had, André took a correspondence course in Russian literature and by 1971 had not only graduated but obtained a position teaching in a boarding school at Novo Shatinsk near the city of Rostov-on-Don.

To his family, neighbours, friends and colleagues at school, André Chikatilo appeared perfectly normal, if a little withdrawn. Like most Russians he was an avid chess player, he seemed to get on well with his family and enjoyed the theatre. But inside
André’s head something was terribly wrong. The first sign came when school administrators heard rumours that Chikatilo had attempted to molest some of the girls in his class. They may have dismissed the tales the first time, but in 1978 André was quietly asked to leave. As a member in good standing in the Communist Party, the school authorities must have provided him with a letter of recommendation because he soon found another teaching position in the mining village of Shakhty a few miles away.

While waiting for the government to provide him with suitable accommodation for his family, Chikatilo stayed in a rundown shack he had purchased in a Shakhty slum. When the new apartment came through and the Chikatilo family moved to Shakhty, André kept the shack but failed to tell anyone about it. It was to this place that, on 22 December 1978, he lured nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova. Later, he would recall every minute of Yelena’s ordeal. ‘As soon as I turned on the lights and closed the door, I fell on her. The girl was frightened and cried out. I shut her mouth with my hands. I couldn’t get an erection and I couldn’t get my penis into her vagina. The desire to have an orgasm overwhelmed all else and I wanted to do it by any means. Her cries excited me further. Lying on her and moving in imitation of the sex act, I pulled out my knife and started to stab her. I climaxed as if it had happened during a natural sex act.’ Chikatilo must have realised that this was as close as he had ever come to experiencing the tense excitement of intercourse; and all it had cost was the life of one small child.