The Serial Killer Files (34 page)

They never imagined that Eddie was capable of hurting anyone. Hell, the meek little man with the lopsided grin couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He wouldn’t even go deer hunting, like every other man in town.

That’s what folks said. Then Bernice Worden disappeared.

It happened on November 16, 1957—the first day of deer-hunting season. Late that afternoon, Frank Worden returned home from a fruitless day in the woods and proceeded directly to the corner hardware store owned and managed by his mother, Bernice. To his surprise, she wasn’t there. Searching the premises, Worden discovered a trail of dried blood leading from the storefront out the back door. He also discovered a sales receipt for a half gallon of antifreeze made out to Worden’s last customer: Eddie Gein.

When the police arrived at Eddie’s farmhouse to question him about Mrs. Worden’s whereabouts, they came upon the body of the fifty-eight-year-old grandmother in the summer kitchen behind the house.

Hanging by her heels from a pulley, she had been beheaded and disemboweled—strung up and dressed like a butchered deer.

The stunned and sickened officers called for reinforcements. Before long, a dozen or more lawmen showed up at the farm and began exploring the unspeakable contents of Ed Gein’s house of horrors.

What they found during that long, hellish night was appalling beyond belief.

Soup bowls made from the sawed-off tops of human heads. Chairs upholstered in human flesh.

Lampshades fashioned of skin. A boxful of noses. A shade pull decorated with a pair of women’s lips. A belt made of female nipples. A shoe box containing a collection of preserved female genitalia. The faces of nine women, carefully dried, stuffed with paper and mounted, like hunting trophies, on a wall. A skin vest, complete with breasts, which had been fashioned from the tanned upper torso of a middle-aged woman.

Later, Eddie confessed that, at night, he would lace the skin around himself and go mincing around the farmhouse, pretending to be his mother.

At around 4:30A.M., after much searching through the ghastly clutter of Gein’s home, an investigator discovered a bloody burlap sack shoved under a fetid mattress. Inside was a freshly severed head. Two tenpenny nails, each with a loop of twine tied to the end of it, had been inserted in the ears. The head was Bernice Worden’s. Eddie Gein was going to hang it on the wall as a decoration.

At first, everyone assumed that Eddie Gein had been running a murder factory. But during his confessions he made a claim that seemed, at first, almost too incredible to accept. He wasn’t a mass murderer at all, he insisted. Yes, he had killed two women—Bernice Worden and the tavern keeper Mary Hogan, whose preserved, peeled-off face had been found among Ed’s gruesome collection. But as for the rest of the body parts, Eddie revealed that he had gotten them from local cemeteries. For the past twelve years, ever since his mother’s death, he had been a grave robber, turning to the dead for the companionship he could not find among the living.

In the strict definition of the term, Eddie Gein was not a serial killer. He was a ghoul.

Gein spent the remainder of his days locked away in mental institutions. Long before his death from cancer at the age of seventy-eight, he had been immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on a novel whose author—Robert Bloch—had been inspired by the Gein affair. When Eddie died on July 26, 1984, they took his body back to Plainfield and buried it next to his mother. Eddie Gein was back where he belonged.

1928–1959

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Harvey Glatman moved to Denver with his parents, Albert and Ophelia, while in grade school. With his big nose, Dumbo ears, and horn-rimmed glasses, he grew up to resemble a flesh-and-blood version of the nerdy Milhouse from TV’s The Simpsons. His lifelong terror of the opposite sex was clear from the beginning. A socially maladroit loner, he couldn’t speak to a girl without turning beet red.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

He was also a precocious sex pervert, indulging in bizarre erotic practices at a shockingly early age.

Glatman was no older than four when his mother walked into his bedroom and found him naked, one end of a taut string tied around his penis, the other attached to a dresser drawer. It was the first manifestation of the rope fetish that would dominate Glatman’s life and ultimately lead to the terrible deaths of three women.

By the time Harvey was eleven, he was heavily into the perilous activity known as autoerotic asphyxiation: putting his head in a noose, throwing the rope over a rafter, and choking himself while he masturbated with his free hand. When his parents discovered him at this “game,” they consulted a doctor, who attributed it to “growing pains.” He assured the Glatmans that their boy would outgrow it.

Far from subsiding, Glatman’s perverse compulsions only grew worse. In high school, he began breaking into homes, coming away from one these forays with a stolen .26-caliber handgun. Soon he had progressed from thievery to sexual assault. Sneaking into the houses of attractive young women, he would tie them up at gunpoint and caress them while he masturbated.

In June 1945, while awaiting trial on a burglary charge, the seventeen-year-old Glatman abducted a Denver woman and subjected her to the usual molestation before driving her home. She immediately informed the police, and, before long, the teenager was behind bars in Colorado State Prison.

Paroled after less than a year, Glatman—at the urging of his parents, who hoped he could put his checkered past behind him—moved to Yonkers, New York, where he found a job as a TV repairman—a trade he had learned in prison. In the grip of his growing pathology, however, he managed to stay out of trouble for less than a month. In August 1946, brandishing a toy pistol, he accosted a pair of strolling young lovers at midnight, bound the man with a length of rope, then began fondling the woman.

Wriggling free of his bonds, the boyfriend attacked Glatman, who drew a pocketknife, slashed at the man’s shoulders, then fled into the shadows.

Boarding a train that night, he headed for Albany, where, a few days later, he made a botched assault on a nurse, then mugged two middle-aged women. The police—by then on the lookout for someone who was targeting women—spotted Glatman just two days later as he followed a potential victim along a darkened street. Searching him, they found his toy pistol, a pocketknife, and a length of stout rope. Two months later, Glatman—just nineteen years old—found himself back in prison, this time with a sentence of five to ten years.

During his incarceration, Glatman was evaluated by a prison psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a

“psychopathic personality—schizophrenic type” with “sexually perverted impulses as the basis for his criminality.” Despite this grim assessment, Glatman won parole after less than three years.

Released into parental custody, he returned to Denver, moved in with his mother, and spent the next four and a half years working at various odd jobs and checking in with his parole officer. Finally, in early 1957, having earned his full liberty, he moved to Los Angeles, where his dormant psychopathic cravings burst into full, deadly bloom.

Finding work as a TV repairman, Glatman began to frequent the seedy photography clubs where sex-starved creeps could shoot “art pictures” of naked young models. Many of these women were aspiring starlets, eking out a living any way they could. They also accepted jobs on the side. Glatman, using the pseudonym “Johnny Glenn,” approached a baby-faced nineteen-year-old named Judy Dull. He explained that he worked as a freelance photographer for a true detective magazine and asked if she would be interested in posing for him. The pay was twenty dollars an hour.

Judy Dull agreed.

Taking her to his apartment, Glatman explained that she would have to be bound and gagged and look convincingly frightened, as though she were about to be raped. Whatever apprehensions Judy Dull might have had, they were allayed by the innocuous appearance of the goofy-looking Glatman. Trussed up and placed in an armchair, the young woman threw herself into her part—assuming a terrified expression and twisting in her seat—while Glatman snapped away. All at once, the game turned terribly real.

Pulling out a gun, he undid her bonds, forced her to strip, and repeatedly raped her. When darkness fell, he drove her out to the desert, strangled her with a length of sash cord, took some photographs of her corpse, and left her there for the buzzards and coyotes.

Two more victims followed: a twenty-four-year-old divorcee he met at a lonely hearts club and a former striptease dancer who, like Judy Dull, posed for a seedy “modeling agency.” Both were killed in Glatman’s signature style: trussed, photographed, raped at gunpoint, garroted, then posed after death and photographed again before being dumped in the desert.

In the summer of 1958, a state patrolman cruising the Santa Ana freeway happened upon a man and a woman struggling beside a car parked on the shoulder. Stopping to investigate, the officer found Glatman grappling with a twenty-eight-year-old model named Lorraine Vigil, who had managed to wrestle the killer’s gun away from him as he was attempting to abduct her.

In custody, Glatman confessed to everything. Searching his apartment, police discovered a toolbox containing his horrifying photo collection. In some of the pictures, the women were fully clothed. In others, they were partly or completely nude. Bound and gagged, they wore terrified expressions. The most appalling photographs of all, however, were the ones he took of each victim after her death, the limbs carefully arranged, the corpses posed just so for his camera.

After pleading guilty, Glatman was sentenced to death. “It’s better this way,” he said when the judgment was handed down. He died in San Quentin’s gas chamber on September 18, 1959.

To understand Harvey Glatman is to understand the basic psychology of the serial killer.

—Colin Wilson

1942–1994

The cops had already paid one visit to John Wayne Gacy in 1978. Awakened in the middle of the night by shrill, continuous shrieks coming from the house behind her own, a neighbor had called the police. A squad car was dispatched to Gacy’s brick ranch house in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park. But the officers who questioned the owner came away convinced that nothing was wrong.

Then a fifteen-year-old boy named Robert Piest disappeared.

Piest was a bright, ambitious student who worked after school as a stockboy in a pharmacy. On the day of his disappearance—December 11, 1978—he told his mother that he was leaving the drugstore early to see a man about a summer job. The man was a local building contractor. His name was John Wayne Gacy.

When Piest’s parents reported that their son was missing, the cops put a tracer on Gacy and discovered that he’d done time in jail ten years earlier. The charge was sodomy. The victim had been a fifteen-year-old boy.

Before long, Gacy was under arrest and a team of investigators was headed for his house with a search warrant. As they combed the rooms for clues, they turned up suspicious and increasingly ominous bits of evidence—pornographic magazines featuring sex between older men and young boys. A vibrating dildo encrusted with fecal matter. And—stashed throughout the house and garage—personal items that clearly belonged to a number of teenage boys: jewelry, clothes, wallets.

They also found something else—a trapdoor in a living room closet that opened into a flooded crawl space.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

After draining the crawl space, the inspectors lowered themselves into the putrid muck. There they uncovered the sickening evidence of horrendous crimes: lardlike globs of decomposed human flesh and an assortment of human bones, some of them blackened with rot, others covered with dried, mummified flesh.

Confronted with these discoveries, Gacy immediately confessed to the atrocities that would mark him as one of America’s most monstrous serial killers: the torture-murder over a period of half dozen years of thirty-three young men.

The news seemed unbelievable at first, not only because of the enormity of the crimes—which set a new, nightmarish record—but also because of Gacy’s public persona. As far as the outside world was concerned, John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of the community—a successful, hard-driving businessman who still found time to devote himself to community affairs and charitable causes. One of his favorite activities was dressing himself up as “Pogo the Clown” and performing for sick children at the local hospital. He was also active in local politics and was a valued member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Hanging on the wall of his home office were photographs of him shaking hands with the mayor of Chicago and First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

But a very different picture emerged in the course of Gacy’s examination by court-appointed psychiatrists.

Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father—who spent much of his time deriding his son as a “sissy”—Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-loathing.

In an attempt to appear “normal,” he married early and settled down in Waterloo, Iowa, where he ran a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Even while cultivating this unimpeachable persona, however, he was leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of underage males. Arrested in 1968 for sodomy, he was hit with a ten-year jail term. His wife filed for divorce on the day of the sentencing.

Gacy proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after less than two years. Relocating to Chicago, he married again and started his contracting business. Before long, however, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves—in even ghastlier form. He became a human predator, a cunning, remorseless sadist who tortured and murdered for his own depraved pleasure.

Though some of his victims were acquaintances or employees, most were street hustlers and runaways.

Gacy—sometimes posing as a cop—would snare his prey at the bus station or the local gay district,

“Bughouse Square.” Back in his house, he would lock the young man in handcuffs, then spend hours sodomizing and torturing him before committing the final outrage—the “rope trick.” Looping a length of nylon rope around the victim’s neck, Gacy would insert a wooden hammer handle through the cord, then twist the handle slowly, reaching his own sexual climax as the victim strangled to death.