SERIAL MURDER: ED GEIN Q&A

Serial killing; cannibalism; evil; journalism; documentaries; literature; grave-robbery

A quick warning: there is some fairly disturbing material here today. Please don’t read on if you are easily upset.

Interviewer: You usually present your Crime & Psychology articles in essay format. This time you have opted for Q&A. It’s a radical change! Can you explain why?

Psychologist: With luck, that will become clear as we talk. Broadly, it’s because I have number of points to make and want to present them systematically. Of course, that gives you a chance to stop me if I say something stupid. Also, I liked the postmodern conceit of using a format that reflected the subject-matter.

Interviewer: Intriguing! If I understand correctly, your original plan was for a regular essay about Ed Gein. You changed your mind. Can you tell the readers a bit about Gein, and the doomed essay?

Psychologist: Is it doomed? Keep watching the Substack. I’ll probably write it one day.

Interviewer: So it’s just on hold?

Psychologist: It’s like a wild animal on a leash. But the more I thought about the essay, the more it transmogrified. I realised there was at least as much to be learnt from studying our reaction to Ed Gein as from studying Gein himself.

Interviewer: Why Ed Gein? Why should he interest Crime & Psychology readers?

Psychologist: Many reasons! I’m sure they’ll emerge as we talk. A compelling one is the fact that Gein has become, through his proxies, a minor but significant figure in popular culture.

Interviewer: What do you mean? Are there, for example, movies about him? I can’t bring one to mind right away.

Psychologist: Not Gein specifically, no, but he did provide inspiration for various Hollywood bogeymen. Any horror fan will know at least three. First came Psycho. Norman Bates was modelled on Ed Gein. If anything, the film toned him down a bit. Bates is weird enough - he has what appears to be a necrophiliac crush on his own mother and stores her corpse in the basement - but what Gein did was even more disturbing. And then you have Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs. Leatherface, you may remember, wears a creepy mask that looks like what it is – someone else’s face. His house is apparently designed to resemble Gein’s. Buffalo Bill keeps his victims in a pit while he sharpens the flaying knives. He’s after their skin, not their lives. Knowing that these horrifying characters are based on a real criminal only serves to make the films even more chilling.

Interviewer: We haven’t touched on his crimes yet, but Gein already sounds like an alarming fellow. What did he do, exactly?

Psychologist: Might we leave the details for later? I’d like to cover some other points first. They should help put Gein’s crimes into context. Besides, we need to work up to them. They’re very disturbing.

Interviewer: Sounds fair. Let’s start at the beginning, then. What was the focus of your original essay?

Psychologist: In some ways, Gein was like a paradigm or template serial killer. Many of the features that distinguish serial killers crop up in his biography. I thought I’d address the general via the individual, so to speak.

Interviewer: I see. That sounds interesting.

Psychologist: Would you read an article like that?

Interviewer: I would.

Psychologist: Then perhaps I will write it!

Interviewer: It still isn’t clear how this format reflects the subject-matter.

Psychologist: We’ll get to that in one moment... [Clears throat.] Take a few examples. Many male serial killers lose a father-figure during childhood, which was the case with Ed Gein. They commonly suffer physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. Gein’s father was notoriously violent. His mother was a religious fanatic and possibly psychotic. She taught him that women were vessels of sin. He appears to have shared a bed with her.

Interviewer: Creepy. Did they have a sexual relationship?

Psychologist: Who knows? Purveyors of the more spectacular kind of serial-killer literature would certainly like you to think so. Many serial killers have a family history of drug- or alcohol abuse. Gein’s father was an alcoholic. Many spend a lot of time alone, isolated from other people. They miss out on a psychological process called ‘reality checking’. Again, Gein illustrates the point. He lived in an isolated farmhouse with, at most, three others for company. You can see how an essay might work. Each point could be illustrated by an example from Gein’s life. We might learn something.

Interviewer: I thought we knew rather a lot about serial killers already. Was I mistaken?

Psychologist: In a sense we do, yes. Each one we catch seems to become the subject of endless study… Even so, individual serial killers are one thing. ‘Serial killers’ as a group are quite another.

Interviewer: I think I get the point…

Psychologist: I’m sure you do. Of course, we’re all fortunate that there are rather few serial killers around. But one consequence is that studying them is like studying a fatal disease that afflicts only a tiny number of patients. A researcher might learn a lot about each individual case, but to form the kind of scientific laws that we are after…well, that requires a great deal of data. Researchers are forced to look in great depth at tiny samples. That helps explain why such repulsive individuals as, say, Peter Sutcliffe or Ted Bundy turn into weird celebrities. Ed Gein almost belongs in their group – a serial killer with celebrity status.

Interviewer: Why ‘almost’?

Psychologist: In order to qualify as a serial killer, a criminal needs at least three victims. Ed Gein had killed only two before he was arrested. There may have been more, but we can’t be certain. Probably he would have gone on to kill again, but that way lies speculation.

Interviewer: Did you have any other motives for writing about Gein?

Psychologist: Yes I did! You always seem to know exactly the right question to ask.

Interviewer: Amazing, isn’t it?

Psychologist: Amazon is carrying a new documentary – relatively new - about Gein. They call it Psycho, which does not score them any points for imagination. The documentary’s Unique Selling Point is the recent discovery of tapes on which you can hear Gein speak. The investigators are interviewing him in Plainfield, Wisconsin, immediately after his arrest. Why did he do what he did? What could compel him? There’s a big Q&A session. Meanwhile, various experts keep assuring us that the sound of Gein’s voice provides unprecedented insight into his character.

Interviewer: Does it?

Psychologist: No.

Interviewer: So we can’t learn anything from it?

Psychologist: Well, I wouldn’t say that. For sure, it’s striking just how ordinary Gein sounds. You kind of expect there to be something special about the voice of a person who could commit those crimes. You want Gein to be conspicuous somehow. But he just isn’t. Archive footage shows a slightly-build regular Joe with a face like any other Wisconsin outdoorsman. He has girlish eyes and a rather sad expression. His voice is no more exceptional than his physique. Of course, this adds up to little more than that old cliché: ‘He was such a quiet man. He was the last one you’d suspect’.

Interviewer: You’ve heard the phrase about ‘the banality of evil’?

Psychologist: Gein embodied it. The phrase comes from the philosopher, Hannah Arendt. She was writing about the Nazi regime in general and its representative in the form of Adolf Eichmann. Her point was that Eichmann was little more than a mid-level jobsworth who was handy with timetables. Timetables, forms, bureaucracy, everything that kept the ‘corpse factories’ in business. Eichmann was small, like Gein, a bit pompous, a bit dim, altogether uninteresting.[i] An interview with Eichmann would probably reveal about as many profundities as one with Gein.

Interviewer: Do you think that, paradoxically, the uninteresting nature of Gein and Eichmann is itself interesting?

Psychologist: Everyone loves a paradox.

Interviewer: I wonder whether we can understand them.

Psychologist: I suspect not, for reasons that we’ll get to.

Interviewer: OK. May I ask a few more questions?

Psychologist: It’s what we’re here for.

Interviewer: What are the most important lessons we can learn from this case?

Psychologist: I have some thoughts. Before I get to them, it will make things clearer if I explain how I got to them. Last week, I was talking to a clinical psychologist. I mentioned this documentary and my idea for an essay. He wasn’t familiar with Gein, so I told him a little about his crimes. Do you know what his first question was?

Interviewer: Did he ask why Gein did it?

Psychologist: He did.

Interviewer: What did you tell him?

Psychologist: I told him that I’d had the exact same conversation with my wife the night before. Did he know, I asked him, what her first question was? He said, Did she ask why Gein did it?

Interviewer: Did she?

Psychologist: She did.

Interviewer: Excuse me. Would I be right in thinking that you’re answering my question by telling me what you told your friend you told your wife when she asked you the question? It’s almost as if you’re dodging my question.

Psychologist: You’re right. And what does that tell you?

Interviewer: Well. One of two things. Either you find Gein’s crimes so repellent you don’t want to talk about them, or you’re trying to place a psychological barrier between yourself and the topic in order to speak from what might seem a place of safety, like a journalist in a helicopter reporting on a flood.

Psychologist: Very good! Did you know that serial killers often place an actual physical barrier between the various crimes in a sequence?

Interviewer: I learn amazing things every time I visit the Crime & Psychology substack. Everyone should subscribe!

Psychologist: I agree.

Interviewer: Tell me more.

Psychologist: Jack the Ripper committed his third and fourth murders on the far side of two extremely busy roads. They formed a kind of barrier and helped shield him from the reality of the horrors he’d recently perpetrated.

Interviewer: I meant, tell me more about your reasons for evading my question. Repulsion or psychological barrier?

Psychologist: Maybe both. In the documentary, one expert accompanies us to the gate of the Gein property. He shows us the track Gein drove along after one of his murders, with the victim’s corpse cooling in the back. The expert says he finds it exciting to be there. I struggle to share that sentiment. I would not find it exciting to be there. When you get really close to cases like these, they lose whatever educational properties they may once have had. They become fine-grained, contingent, and, for want of a better word, sordid. To me, the interest doesn’t lie in any of that. It lies in what the crimes tell us about human psychology. And that’s where I was going with this. It's difficult to explain why Gein could have done what he did. When my wife asked about it, I replied with a question: ‘What kind of answer would satisfy you?’ We’re asking why a man committed depraved crimes and performed unspeakable acts on the corpses of his victims… What answer can we imagine? What would an answer even look like? What could possibly make us say, ‘Ah, yes, now I understand. Now I get it’.

Interviewer: There’s no such answer, of course.

Psychologist: Exactly. There is a point – and this is really important, I think – there is a point at which rationality simply does not serve us. We can reach an extremity of human behaviour beyond which reasoning can’t help. Did you notice I used the word ‘unspeakable’ back there? Another word that gets a lot of exercise in the documentary is ‘unthinkable’. In a sense, they mean the same thing. Language serves thinking and, once thinking breaks down, we flail for words to express our abrupt cognitive vacuum. There are no words, because there are no concepts left to attach them to.

Interviewer: Elaborate, please.

Psychologist: One compelling feature of human cognition is the search for reasons or causes. We notice, say, faces in the clouds and ask whether they are portents; we notice that it always rains on Thursdays and wonder whether there’s a pattern; we ask why bad things happen to good people. The word ‘why’ is inescapable. Have you heard of the Italian writer, Primo Levi?

Interviewer: Of course. He was a chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz only to die prematurely in what was ruled a suicide. Perhaps he had survivors’ guilt.

Psychologist: Maybe so. Notice how you immediately start looking for a why - a cause for Levi’s death? Perhaps it was an accident, and you know what the compelling feature of an accident is.

Interviewer: Accidents are, by some accounts, freaks of nature. They are things that ‘just happen’…

Psychologist: Hence the search for a cause would be a search in a vacuum. There is no why.

Interviewer: Didn’t Levi once use the phrase ‘Hier is kein warum’?

Psychologist: Exactly. The Nazis locked him into a barracks with other detainees. Because he was thirsty, he reached outside and broke off an icicle. A guard snatched it out of his hand: he was not allowed to quench his thirst. ‘Warum?’ Levi asked. ‘Hier is kein warum,’ the guard replied.[ii] This seems to be a feature of true evil. Our minds are not configured to understand it. In a very different context, in horror movies, what do kidnap or torture victims always seem to say to their tormentors?

Interviewer: ‘Why are you doing this?’

Psychologist: Exactly. It’s as if knowing the why of the event would somehow make it easier to bear. When there is no why, the misery becomes unbearable.

Interviewer: Are you saying that it forces us to come face to face with the essentially meaningless and random nature of the cosmos?

Psychologist: I wasn’t saying that, but the two ideas certainly seem to come, as it were, from the same set… Do you remember Dante’s account of Satan in Paradise Lost?

Interviewer: I fear not. It is some decades since I read it.

Psychologist: Me too. But the clinical psychologist remembered it: ‘the inhabitants of the infernal region,’ says Dante, ‘are those who have lost the good of intellect’. Satan sits right in the centre of Hell. He can’t move because he’s frozen in ice. All he can do is flap his wings. Not exactly how one usually thinks of Satan, is it, frozen and flapping? He’s essentially powerless. It’s poetical punishment for trying to usurp the power that is God’s alone.

Interviewer: So, practically speaking, the centre of all the evil in the universe is… Well, there’s nothing there.

Psychologist: Nothing very effective at any rate.

Interviewer: Perhaps that makes evil impossible to fight.

Psychologist: That’s one way of looking at it. Satan cannot even comprehend himself, because of that loss of intellect. You know the most striking adjective anyone in the Amazon series uses to describe Ed Gein?

Interviewer: I don’t know. Horrifying? Demonic? It should be something like that.

Psychologist: It should but it isn’t. It’s ‘bland’.

Interviewer: Via a circuitous route we have returned to Ed Gein. We began by saying we’d leave an account of his crimes until the end. Can you tell the readers now, what did he do?

Psychologist: His criminal career probably started with grave robbery in the years after his mother’s death. It seems he was trying to collect body parts to take home. Eventually – as you’d imagine – the cemetery ran out of suitable corpses and Gein set about making his own. He certainly murdered at least two women, although for a long time he was an all-purpose suspect in various unsolved cases. The first people inside the Gein house must have felt as if they’d walked through a looking-glass. A broken one at that, one that reflected Gein’s own disorders. They found a chair upholstered in human skin, a belt made from nipples, four noses, a lampshade made from a face, a skull in a box, a face mask in a bag… Gein had been collecting anatomical pieces in order, it seems, to tailor himself a suit of skin, something he could actually wear… He used to shamble around at night, dressed head to foot in other people’s skin.

Interviewer (pauses): My God. Why?

Psychologist: He seems to have thought that he might reincarnate his mother.

Interviewer: But why?

You can see the show here: Watch Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, Season 1 | Prime Video

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[i] Stonebridge, Lynsey: ‘Hannah Arendt's lessons for our times: The banality of evil, totalitarianism and statelessness’, The British Academy, 23 August, 2024,Available here.

[ii] Read more about the incident here.