Gein’s primary desire was to be a woman, to replace his mother in the mirror, to become mOther in order not to be, to castrate himself, replacing the fatherly Gein for the gynaecological, transferring Gein to Gyne. A bachelor and probably a virgin, Gein had long considered penile amputation as a step towards becoming a woman. On the 1st of December 1952 the New York Daily News ran the headline ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,’ regarding Christine Jorgenson (once George Williams Jorgenson, Jr.), famous for undergoing hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Gein read the reports avidly. However, he had found alternative (and less costly) ways to live out his fantasy. Using obituary notices as his guide, in the years after his mother’s death, Gein broke into over 40 local graves and tombs, stole female corpses (the majority of women the same age as his mother at her death), or parts of the bodies. He would then take them back to the farm to make household objects from them—turning them into fetishes—and he would use them or wear them. He would scalp a corpse and wear the hair on his head, or peel off the facial skin and wear it as a mask. After carefully cutting away the breasts and attaching them to his chest, he would sit in front of a mirror looking at his transformation. Genitalia excised from the corpses would be worn with his penis and testicles tucked out of sight between his thighs.
Gein’s transvestite/transsexual necrophilia escalated but he found bodies harder to find. On the 8th of December 1954, 51-year-old Mary Hogan went missing from a tavern she ran in Pine Grove. A trail of blood and a cartridge from a .32-caliber pistol were found in the bar but, although Gein was suspected, no evidence could be found to arrest him for the woman’s disappearance. Three years later, Gein’s .32 pistol would be found by police investigating the death of Bernice Worden.
Technically, Gein was not a serial killer, having been charged with only two killings—Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. Found by psychologists and psychiatrists to be a sexual psychopath, mentally unfit to stand trial, on the 16th of January 1958, he was moved to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Waupun, Wisconsin. Ten years later, Gein—judged sufficiently sane by the hospital authorities—stood trial for the two murders. Found guilty but legally insane, the judge sent him to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, where he remained until dying there on 26 July 1984.
Gein denied that he had had sex with the corpses, saying that he used them only to satisfy his desire to be a woman. He did, however, sexually mutilate the bodies, cutting off their breasts and genitalia and caressing the skin. Gein’s necrophilia shares common areas of paraphilia with Bertrand—mutilation and possible incestuous, mother-dominated sexuality. But, whereas Bertrand revelled in the decomposition and viscera of the bodies, Gein was repulsed by their smell. He was more fascinated with the surface appearance of the skin as a means to replace his mother. He enjoyed the sensation of flaying the dead bodies. Maybe this had something to do with his father’s work as a tanner. Where Bertrand had sex with the internal organs, Gein pickled them or kept them in the refrigerator. Where Bertrand enacted a power over the dead bodies, Gein attempted to cloak himself in a woman’s power. Both men claimed to be dazed or ‘not themselves’ when defiling the graves and bodies, and both men related their crimes without emotion or remorse. Police found the body parts of ten different women on the farm, eight of these taken from graves and made into fetishes. When his farm and belongings were put up for auction, his car, furniture and other objects became macabre-crime fetish objects,
“Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?”
“Ed Gein?” one of them asks. “Maitre d’ at Canal Bar?”
“No,” I say, “Serial killer, Wisconsin in the fifties. He was an interesting guy.”
“You’ve always been interested in stuff like that, Bateman,” Reeves says, and then to Hamlin, “Bateman reads these biographies all the time: Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and Fatal Vision and Charlie Manson. All of them.”
“So what did Ed say?” Hamlin asks, interested.
‘“When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.”’ I stop finish my J&B in one swallow.
“What does the other part of him think?” Hamlin asks tentatively.
“What her head would look like on a stick.”[141]
For Bertrand, West, Gein, Kürten, and co., women’s bodies, in differing stages of peri-mortal being, became desiring machines, autonoma, tools, revivified objects of control even within and beyond the acts of desecration, defilement, and murder. To Bertrand, women’s bodies were organ bundles, linked signifying chains of desire; devoid of a self, a conscious, they became partial objects. For Bertrand, ‘repulsion is the condition of the machine’s functioning, but attraction is the functioning itself.’[142] When West took the phalanges, metacarpals, patellas, the scapulas of his victims as trophies (these have never been found), he was taking the tool organism/machine of a human being, its ratchet and screwdriver, its hammer and nails, its hinge and joists. Once Gein had peeled the body to make his mOther costume, he felt the potential of ‘becoming–another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc.’[143] All necro-agents were ‘forming zones of intensity on the body without organs,’ for ‘every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.’ In Bertrand’s flight to the hospital, West’s suicide, Gein’s acceptance, and Kürten’s capture ‘it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death.’[144]
Bertrand’s bodies with organs without, West’s bodies as organs, Gein’s bodies without organs, and Kürten’s body as an organ of society, conglomerate into a compacted alien-organsism, something close to the being in John Carpenter’s The Thing, beyond life and yet inclusive of everything it touches, a being irrepresentable in the imagination, ‘a notion of Thing as an Id-Machine, a mechanism that directly materializes our unacknowledged fantasies.’[145]
Where Bertrand was fascinated by human organs, Gein made objects out of them, and West manipulated them into organami, de-articulatung bodies to fit a set space. Where Bertrand and Gein deterritorialized bodies from their places of internment, West and another probable necrophile—John Reginald Halliday Christie—interritorialized in their family’s living space, a house, a ‘“group of organic habits,” or even something deeper, the shelter of the imagination itself.’[146]
8
NecroBritannia
In June 1937, seven years after the execution of Peter Kürten, and seven years before the death of Ed Gein’s mother, John Reginald Halliday Christie and his wife moved to North Kensington, London. Their home—a prototypical 25 Cromwell Street—comprised the ground-floor flat and garden at 10 Rillington Place, an end-terrace Victorian property in a cul-de-sac surrounded by factories and train lines. The three-storey house contained two more apartments (they originally moved into the top-floor flat, later home to the Evanses), basic sanitation, and an outdoor toilet. John Christie was born in 1898 in Halifax, Yorkshire. His father physically abused him as a child (see Kürten and Gein), his mother mollycoddled him (see Gein), and his four sisters taunted and bullied him for his effeminacy, hypochondria, and fear of dirt—he suffered from automysophobia (fear of being dirty) and mysophobia (fear of dirt). And it was his sisters that formed his first erotic memories (see Kürten), these may also have stemmed from memories of his maternal grandfather’s funeral (another man whom he feared) at which he felt release at the sight of the dead body. He later invented games in which he would explore children’s tombs in the local graveyard (Gein and Bertrand).
146
Gaston Bachelard,