Schechter suggests that you couldn't ask for a nicer serial necrophile than Ed Gein.
He wasn't really sadistic in the way that [Chicago crawlspace killer] John Wayne Gacy was-somehow you don't feel the same level of evil that you feel with Gacy," Schechter says. Eddie dispatched the women very quickly-he basically just shot them through the back of the head with a bullet. It wasn't as if he were inflicting torture on people-that wasn't his style at all. This is not to redeem him, but it does make it harder to imagine someone like Gacy attracting a fan club of anyone but serious perverts."
Since Schechter's Gein bio hit the racks three years ago, he reports receiving mail from dozens of Ed enthusiasts. Those correspondents have included everyone from routine autograph seekers to serious Gein academicians. One sent in detailed sketches based on Schechter's book. Another correspondent advanced a theory suggesting that Gein's fascination with wearing skin represented some sort of primitive ritual.
Schechter claims he has never felt that he's dealing with potentially homicidal pen pals.
There is a quality to this case that is very much like old horror folk tales like Hansel and Gretel," Schechter says. In every small town there's always a haunted house, and the kids always believe that the person who lives there is an ogre or a monster. But the thing about Eddie was that the stories were true. To many people, Eddie Gein is like a character out of myth or folk tales."
People in Eddie's hometown don't have quite the same detachment.
Of course," says Schechter, there are many people still living in Plainfield to whom Eddie was all too realÏpeople whose relatives' graves were violated."
Back in the Valley, Gein aficionado Charles Merbs makes no bones about his own interest in the case. A University of Wisconsin student in 1957, Merbs was part of the forensics team assigned to unscramble the skeletal remains scattered throughout the Gein farmhouse and elsewhere around the property. This was the first forensics case I'd ever worked on, and it was bizarre in the extreme," says Merbs, now a professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. As I recall, there were about a dozen skeletons, and our job was to identify them and get them back to the proper graves."
While macabre, the chore was not nearly as grisly-or, depending on your Gein threshold, as interesting-as it may sound. Merbs conducted his work in a crime lab miles from the death farm. Some of the bones had been used for decorative purposes," he recalls, but most were just buried around the farm." Thirty-five years later, Merbs still dredges up details of the Gein investigation as a case study in his ASU classes.
Merbs says he finds it strange" that people would want to adorn their cars with Ed Gein bumper stickers, but Merbs can appreciate the attraction the case still holds. He himself continues to clip Gein articles out of magazines and newspapers.
There's certainly a fascination there," he says. What he had done was so horrible and so unbelievable that it led to this weird humor. Everybody had their Gein jokes-even my mother. But it certainly wasn't funny to anyone who lived in the area where it actually happened."
Even Damon Fox concedes that point-right after he's reeled off his own favorite Geiner."
(Q: Why did Ed Gein keep his house so warm?" A: So the furniture wouldn't get goose bumps.")
I can see where people who were personally involved with this might not appreciate Eddie the way I do," says Fox. He grudgingly admits that even he might have been ticked off if Gein had turned a deceased loved one into a buckskin miniskirt.
Asked what he'd do if he were ever approached by a relative of a Gein victim-say, Bernice Worden's son-Fox grins and says, I'd say, `Cool! Can I have your autograph?'"
THE SELLING OF ANNIE LEIBOVITZ... v1-15-92
