Cannibals (16 page)

On November 20 Chikatilo left work to get treatment for a broken finger which, unbeknown to the doctor, had been bitten by one of his victims. Then he picked up his briefcase and went off in the search for a young boy. He spotted one but was distracted when the boy’s mother called him away. Annoyed at being interrupted, Chikatilo carried on further down the street and was promptly approached by three men who identified themselves as police officers. They demanded that he opened up his briefcase and again the contents were a knife, a length of rope, a jar of Vaseline, and a few dirty rags. Andrei was searched and they found there was a cut on his finger and abrasions on his genitals, but he denied any knowledge of how they had got there. He was arrested and the police arranged for a search of his home. Here they found another 23 knives, a hammer and a pair of shoes that matched a footprint found at one of the crime scenes.

A leading Russian psychologist was called in and, after eight days of interrogation, Chikatilo confessed to a total of 55 murders. He led the police to several corpses that had not yet been discovered. Chikatilo told the psychologist that he got sexual gratification from murdering and mutilation, and he also told him how he reached an even higher level of satisfaction from cannibalism. He seemed to delight in recounting his stories and played the part of a lunatic with an enormous bloodlust.

Chikatilo faced trial in April 1992, throughout which he was transported to and from the court in a large metal cage. This was for two reasons, firstly to keep the revenge-seeking public out but also to keep Chikatilo in. He remained locked inside the cage during the trial and he lived up to the image of a caged animal. He rattled the bars, beat himself against them and ranted and raved like a madman. He screamed insults and obscenities at the judge and his poor wife, Fayina, was understandably both shocked and horrified by her husband’s behaviour.

The court was not convinced by his lunatic ravings and he was found legally sane and sentenced to die for the 53 murders he was known to have committed. To loud cheers from the public section of the courtroom, the judge pronounced 52 death sentences – one of the charges had been dropped due to insufficient evidence.

After losing an appeal, on February 21, 1994, Chikatilo was taken from his prison and marched to the execution room. He was made to kneel while his sentence was read, and then the executioner drew a gun and fired a single shot into the back of the serial killer’s head. Unlike his victims, many of whom were still alive when they were mutilated, Andrei Chikatilo was killed quickly and compassionately.

‘Weird old Eddie’ as the local community knew him, told the police that he just had a compulsion to do it!

Ed Gein is seen as one of the most weird and bizarre serial killers of the 20th century. He became a grave robber, a necrophiliac, a cannibal and his crimes were such that he inspired movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.

Ed Gein was born in August 1906 into the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Gein lived a solitary life on his family’s 160-acre farm with his ineffectual brother, Henry, his alcoholic father, George, and his very domineering mother, Augusta. Augusta was a powerful woman with a puritanical view of life, and she drummed into her two sons the immorality of sex. This view clashed with with Ed’s natural attraction towards girls and probably contributed to his sexual confusion in adolescence. Augusta discouraged her sons from having any contact with women and kept them busy with work on the farm.

Ed’s father, George, died in 1940 and a few years later in 1944, his brother, Henry, died whilst fighting a forest fire. Shortly after Henry’s death Augusta suffered a stroke, followed by another one in 1945, from which she never recovered. This left Ed, who was now 39 years old, traumatized and alone and still very much enslaved to the mother-figure who had dominated his life. Left to his own devices Ed did his own sort of house decorating. He started off by sealing off the upstairs, the parlour and his mother’s bedroom by boarding it up and decided to make his own living quarters in the remaining bedroom, the kitchen and a shed in grounds of the farmhouse. He was able to stop working the farm due to a subsidy provided by a government soil-conservation programme, and so he left the farmland untouched and did odd jobs for the residents of Plainfield, to earn a little extra cash.

Ed remained on his own in the big old rambling farmhouse, uncertain about his masculinity and even considering amputation of his penis from time to time. He also considered having transsexual surgery because he had read so much about it in the newspapers, but he realized that the operation would not only be costly but it also frightened him. He tried to think of other ways in which he could turn himself into a woman. He began to develop a very unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body – an interest which he fed by reading books and pornographic magazines. He became interested in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War and in particular the experiments they carried out on the Jewish people contained in their concentration camps. All alone, with hardly any friends, Ed thought endlessly about sex and then one day he knew what he had to do when he read about a woman who had been buried that very day.

Ed decided to enlist the help of an old friend named Gus, who, like Ed, was a very weird loner. However, Gus was Ed’s trusted buddy and he agreed to help his friend open up a newly-dug grave to obtain a body for experimental purposes. The first corpse came from the cemetery where Ed’s own mother was buried and over the next ten years Ed would do the same thing again and again. First he checked the newspaper for fresh bodies, then always visiting the graveyard during a full moon, would dig up a female corpse or just the parts he wanted, fill in the grave and take his pickings home with him.

The experiments he carried out on these corpses were bizarre to say the least. He would dissect the body, and keep some parts like the head, sex organs, liver, heart and intestines. Next he would remove the skin from the body, draping it over a tailor’s dummy. On some occasions he would actually wear the skin himself and dance around the farm, a practice which apparently gave him intense satisfaction. On other occasions Ed would simply take the body parts that particularly interested him, especially the excised female genitalia. He loved to fondle them and would sometimes stuff them into a pair of women’s panties which he would wear around the house. This was the closest he could get to being a woman, and soon he made a full body suit from human skin, complete with a mask and breasts. Soon, and not surprisingly, he became a total recluse, discouraging anyone from calling on him at the farm.

As his collection of trophies grew, so did his range of experiments and obsessions. Then his trusted friend Gus was taken away to an asylum and once more Ed was on his own.

Ed started to tire of his lifeless corpses and he decided he needed much fresher flesh, and this is when he turned to murder. Mary Hogan was a 51-year-old divorcee who ran the local Hogan’s Tavern at Pine Grove, around six miles from the farm. Ed liked women who were around his deceased mother’s age, and Mary fitted the description of what he needed. She was on her own at the tavern when Ed turned up on cold afternoon in December 1954. He shot her in the head with his revolver, placed her body in the back of his truck and then took her back to his lair.

Mary’s disappearance was discovered when a customer dropped into the tavern and found the place deserted. When they saw a large bloodstain on the floor and a spent cartridge beside it, they realized that something was very wrong. The bloodstains ran all across the floor and out of the back door into the parking lot where they stopped beside some tyre tracks. The police were unable to find any clues as to Mary’s disappearance, but a few weeks later when a sawmill owner named Elmo Ueeck was talking to Ed about the missing woman, Ed replied that she wasn’t missing, she was up at his farm right now. Ueeck, realizing that Ed was an oddball, didn’t even bother to ask him what he meant. Even thought the police considered Ed Gein to be a suspect in the case, no charges were ever made and the files were left open.

There may have been other victims between the years 1954 and 1957, but there is no definite evidence – that is until November 16, 1957. Bernice Worden was a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store. Ed shot Bernice with a .22 rifle that he stole from a display rack within the store, and then he drove the body home in the store’s own truck. Ed also took the cash register containing $41, but not because he wanted the money, he later explained, but because he wanted to see how it worked.

Bernice’s son, Frank, was a deputy sheriff who also often helped his mother out in the store. On the Saturday morning his mother was shot, Frank had gone deer hunting. When he got back to the store in the afternoon, he found the place closed with the lights still on, his mother missing and blood on the floor. He also noticed that the cash register was missing. When he asked the neighbours if they had seen anything, somebody mentioned that they had seen the store truck drive away at around 9.30 that morning. Frank immediately called the Sheriff, Art Schley, and told him what had happened. They checked the record of sales that had been made that morning, and one of them was for a half gallon of antifreeze. Frank remembered that Ed Gein had stopped by the previous evening just before they were closing and said that he would be back in the morning to pick up some antifreeze. Frank also remembered that Ed had taken an interest in the fact that he was going hunting in the morning.

Very suspicious that the peculiar Ed Gein had been spotted in the town that morning, the sheriff and his deputy decided to go and check the farmhouse, which the local children had nicknamed the ‘Haunted House’.

The farmhouse was in darkness when they arrived, and Ed Gein was nowhere to be found. Acting on a hunch, they drove to a store in West Plainfield where Ed normally did his grocery shopping and it paid off. Ed had just had lunch with the proprietor and his wife and as Frank and the Sheriff arrived Ed was about to leave in his truck. The sheriff called him over and asked if he would mind sitting in the police car while they asked him a few questions. Ed told the Sheriff that he thought someone was trying to frame him for Bernice Worden’s death. The Sheriff decided immediately to take Ed Gein into custody – he hadn’t even mentioned the death of Bernice!

With Ed safely locked up, Sheriff Schley and Captain Schoephoester returned to the house with some other officers. The doors to the farmhouse itself were locked, but the door to the side shed at the rear of the house opened when Schley pushed it with his foot. By now it was dark, and as the farmhouse had no electricity, so they had to carry out their search by torchlight. It was then that the gruesome evidence of Gein’s bizarre obsessions was uncovered. In the woodshed they found a naked, headless body hanging upside down from a meat hook, the legs spread wide apart and a long slit running from the genitals up to the throat. Like the head, the genitals and anus were missing – Bernice Worden had been disembowelled just like a deer.

Already sickened by what they had seen, the sheriff and his men moved on to the main house. Again they had to use torches and oil lamps to light the rooms. As they broke into the farmhouse they noticed that it obviously hadn’t been cleaned for years, there were piles of rubbish everywhere and the stench was overpowering. The few remaining rooms that hadn’t been nailed up were littered with books and magazines, various utensils, old tin cans and loads of other old junk. But the mess was nothing compared to what else they found in the jumbled old farmhouse – two shin bones, four human noses, a quart can converted into a drum by human skin stretched over both the top and bottom, a bowl made from the inverted half of a human skull, nine ‘death masks’, ten female heads with the tops sawn off above the eyebrows, bracelets made from human skin, a purse with a handle made from human skin, a sheath for a knife made from human skin, a pair of leggings made from human skin, four chairs with the seats being replaced by strips of human skin, a shoe box containing nine salted vulvas of which his mother’s was painted silver, a hanging human head, a lampshade made from human skin, a shirt made of human skin, a number of shrunken heads, two skulls for Ed Gein’s bedposts, a pair of human lips hanging from string, Ed’s full woman body suit constructed with human skin and complete with mask and breasts, Bernice Worden’s heart in a pan on the stove, and a refrigerator full of human internal organs.

The scattered remains of an estimated 15 bodies were discovered at the Gein farmhouse, but Ed himself was unable to remember how many murders he had actually committed. Neighbours reported to the Sheriff that Ed had often bought them gifts of fresh venison and yet he had never been hunting or indeed shot a deer in his life.

On January 16, 1958, a judge found Ed Gein insane and had him committed to the Central State Hospital at Waupon. After ten years Ed was considered to be competent to stand trial and although he was found guilty he was also pronounced to be criminally insane. He was returned to the Central State Hospital and then moved in 1978 to the Mendota Mental Health Institute. Ed Gein died of cancer on July 26 1984, at the age of 78.

Gein was considered to be a model prisoner, always polite, gentle and discreet, spending his long, lonely hours doing occupational therapy, rug making and stone polishing.

Ed Gein ended up achieving immortality thanks to a horror writer named Robert Bloch. Ed Gein had inspired the fictional character Norman Bates, originally in a book and then it was transformed into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 called Psycho. But it didn’t stop there because Ed Gein is often considered to have been the inspiration of quite a few other spine-chilling masterpieces.

When Ed was committed to the mental hospital, the people of Plainfield were able to take out their revenge on the Gein farmhouse. They had come to think of it as a monument of evil in their community. On the morning of March 20, 1958, firefighters were called out to a blaze at the farm but they were unable to save it from being razed to the ground. It had almost certainly been started on purpose and when Ed was told about it, he simply said: ‘Just as well.’

Some of the possessions which survived the fire, like his 1949 Ford sedan, were later sold off at auction. The car was bought by a businessman who showed if off at state fairs with a banner attached to it saying:

Come and see the Ghoul Car in which Ed Gein transported his victims

We will end this story with the mystery surrounding Ed’s brother, Henry. It has been rumoured that Ed killed his own brother so that he could have the sole attention of his mother. Some reports say that he was found dead in the Gein barn and others say that he was killed whilst trying to put out a forest fire. There is nothing to substantiate the story that Ed killed Henry, but it does seem feasible seeing as Ed was totally obsessed with his mother. He killed women who were around her age and who had similar looks, so why indeed wouldn’t he kill his brother to get all the attention himself?