Kelly: “If Norman did indeed have a sort of dissociative amnesia, would you consider that he would or would not be to blame for the crimes he committed? Could you tell us a little about legal culpability for people suffering from any sort of similar disorder or affliction as Norman?”
Dr. Leasure: “Forensic psychiatry is an area I have only limited knowledge of. In his case, if he was determined to be in a dissociated state at the time of the crime with little or no volitional control over his actions, then I think not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) would be a reasonable outcome of a trial. I can’t really speak to the question of legal culpability other than to say it is variable and often up to the jury or a judge to decide. Forensic psychiatrists or psychologists may provide expert testimony, but I believe there are restrictions on how far they can go in making determinations about what should happen as a result of a trial. If someone is found NGRI they are almost always committed to a psychiatric facility for treatment, often with the idea of restoring them to a state in which they are no longer a danger to society. Often they are kept there longer than might clinically be thought necessary because judges are reluctant to release them for fear the patient might commit a crime and the judges receive blame.”
Meg: “And lastly, what do you think of the depiction of mentally unstable, violent people in film? Are there any that stand out to you as chilling in their accuracy? Or upsetting in their generalization?”
Dr. Leasure: “Mental illness is often portrayed in terrible ways in film that perpetuate stereotypes, such as that people with mental illness are dangerous or crazy. They also sometimes portray purely illegal or psychopathic behavior as due to a mental illness. I would view Psycho as potentially guilty of that. Treatments are also sometimes portrayed in a negative light, such as ECT in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). A couple of examples that, while perhaps not fully capturing the mental illness, at least highlight the challenges of dealing with it for individuals or families are A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012).”
It was fascinating to see Norman Bates through the eyes of a professional. We had heard that DID was a rare and controversial diagnosis, but hearing Dr. Leasure’s thoughts solidified how few people suffer from this (possibly bogus) condition. If Norman had had the opportunity to be treated by a psychiatrist like Dr. Leasure, his story may have ended very differently.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
Year of Release: 1974
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writer: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
Starring: Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen
Budget: $80,000
Box Office: $30.9 million
Ed Gein died the year I (Meg) was born. As a teenager I happened across a paperback about Gein at a library sale. This book, yellowed and full of black and white, glossy photographs, sparked my interest in true crime. It revealed the monster behind the movies I loved. Ed Gein’s story, wholly true and wholly awful, is often described as the igniter of nearly every modern serial killer movie.
For the shaping of Psycho, Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Anthony Perkins worked to mold Norman Bates from the proverbial clump of Ed Gein clay. They focused on the duality of Gein’s life and his fixation on his dead mother. Psycho, while groundbreaking, was a film of its era. In the 1960s, Hitchcock and his film contemporaries simply could not delve any deeper into the truly horrific reality of Ed Gein’s crimes, but fourteen years after the iconic film’s release, American moviegoers were becoming more conditioned to watch and discuss violence due to the brutality of the Vietnam War being splashed across the nightly news. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) premiered to the children of those who had watched Psycho in the theater, providing this next generation with a cinematic yet starkly authentic look at what had been discovered in that farmhouse in Wisconsin in 1957.
It was on the chilly November evening when Bernice Worden, proprietor of the local hardware store, went missing. Bernice’s son, Frank, discovered Worden’s Hardware store unattended. A telltale streak of blood on the linoleum spoke of a violent end. In mere hours an unlikely suspect formed in the minds of the Plainfield police. Witnesses had seen local bachelor, Ed Gein, nervously enter and reenter the hardware store more than once that day. Intrigued by this peculiar behavior, Frank, a deputy sheriff, had Gein rounded up by fellow police. Gein had been enjoying supper with another local family when the cops came calling.
What followed, the subsequent investigation of Gein’s house, lives on as one of America’s most macabre true legends. “Police found the headless, gutted body of [Bernice Worden] at Gein’s farmhouse.” The unfortunate woman had been treated like a deer. Gein had used his hunting expertise to “dress” her body. “Upon further investigation, authorities discovered a collection of human skulls along with furniture and clothing, including a suit, made from human body parts and skin. Gein told police he had dug up the graves of recently buried women who reminded him of his mother.”1 The search of the house of horrors continued to unnerve the seasoned investigators “yield[ing] more shocking discoveries, including organs in jars and skulls used as soup bowls.”2 While several of these body parts were found to be that of another missing local, Mary Hogan, most had been stolen from the nearby Plainfield Cemetery.
While we watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the full knowledge of Ed Gein’s influence on the birth of Leatherface, it was easy to see the comparison of that house in Wisconsin with the film’s fictional lair. When Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) bears witness to the haunting rooms full of both human and animal parts, it harkens back to how Gein’s house must have appeared to those sifting through the horrific finds.
“[Hooper] had heard of Ed Gein, the man in Plainfield, Wisconsin, who was arrested in the late 1950s for killing his neighbor and on whom the movie Psycho was based. So when they set out to write this movie, they decided to have a family of killers who had some of the characteristics of Gein: the skin masks, the furniture made from bones, the possibility of cannibalism.”3 Gunnar Hansen, the actor who donned the mask of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, explained that the late Hooper had indeed taken facts from the Gein case to develop the frightening family who kills and tortures the innocent teens.