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September 2 - October 20, 2019
“Only a mother could love you.”
How to turn your kid into a serial killer
If their lusts became too pressing to resist, she would say, even the sin of Onan was preferable to the vileness of fornication.
Since childhood, he has often daydreamed about becoming a girl and imagined what it would feel like to have female sex parts instead of a penis.
In 2019, maybe he could have been a trans woman instead of a murderer... or maybe Ed would have been a murderer either way, who knows 🤷🏽♂️
“It is wild country,” the article concluded. “Country that could hide violence for years and perhaps never give up its secret.”
We tend to mythicize the fifties, to remember them as a golden age of simplicity and innocence—the era of sock hops, after-school milkshakes at Pop’s Sweet Shoppe, and Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Happy Days. But in many ways, the Eisenhower era was an anxious time, fraught with A-bomb fears and haunted by the still recent nightmare of the death-camp horrors.
One of the chairs by the kitchen table had a distinctly peculiar look to it. When Captain Schoephoerster bent to examine it, he discovered that the woven cane seat had been replaced by smooth strips of human skin. The underside was lumpy with fat. Four such chairs were eventually found.
Mrs. Worden’s heart, for example, which had actually been discovered in a plastic bag near Eddie’s stove, was suddenly reported to have been found in a frying pan on one of the burners.
Weber concluded by offering his personal assessment of Gein. “He is a very sincere, very meek fellow. You’d never believe he’d be the kind of guy to do such a thing. You feel like he needs help awful bad.”
Gein insisted that he had never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and then only once, for his army physical in 1942.
“Before this happened, if you asked me who could be capable of something like this, the last man in the world I’d have named would’ve been Eddie Gein.”
Eddie’s neighbors recalled his various quirks—his refusal, “with rare exceptions,” to “allow anyone in his house”; the way he would smile and nod in agreement “when people kidded him about what a dangerous fellow he was—a joke that was only funny because he seemed so harmless.”
lettuce salad,
I have never seen the phrase ‘lettuce salad’ ever in my life
As Belter, displaying a real skill for understatement, later said of his client, “I don’t think he has a full appreciation of what he has done.”
“They’ve got the skulls,” Schley told reporters in an uncharacteristic burst of communicativeness. “Let them find out if they’re embalmed. That’s what they’re for.”
where advanced automation would lead to a four-hour work week;
Robots take our jobs
Gein “wished that he had been a woman instead of a man.
If he grew up today he could have just been a woman, but there’s no telling if that would have made Gein any less murderous.
This is certainly the principal function of the creation of humor, and certainly of the accepting of things as humorous, such as cuckoldry, seduction, impotence, homosexuality, castration, death, disease, and the Devil, which are obviously not humorous at all. [Such] humor is a sort of whistling in the dark, like Beaumarchais’ Figaro, who laughs so that he may not cry.”
But, in essence, all the jokes were the same—grisly quips of varying degrees of cleverness and wit whose purpose was to ward off terror with levity, in the way that children will whistle a cheerful tune while walking past a graveyard.
Why did they have to keep the heat on in Ed Gein’s house? So the furniture wouldn’t get goose bumps.
Every person is liable to error, he insisted, and any of us “could have made the same mistakes” as Ed Gein did.
...uh, no?
also, he ‘didn’t hurt anybody.’”
I am of the opinion that crime on the dead isn’t crime 🤷🏽♂️
For Gein, cutting up women who reminded him of his mother and preserving parts of them satisfied two contradictory urges: to bring her back to life and to destroy her as the source of his frustration.”
“The overall picture is not that of a well person.” From the psychological profile of Edward Gein
Big understatement of the century
Often during his examinations, he would begin to whine like a sickly old woman, insisting that his head hurt or that he was feeling sick to his stomach and needed a wheelchair to take him back to his ward. And then there was the matter of the smells. Eddie was always complaining of smelling “bad odors.”
This sounds like migraine symptoms 🤔
Eddie, as always, was extremely cooperative. Indeed, he seemed deeply—almost touchingly—appreciative of all the attention he was receiving at the hospital.
He states that the second victim wooed her husband away from another girl and married him shortly after the other girl committed suicide. (He became tearful when describing his sorrow for the other girl.) He went on to describe the husband’s death as his just punishment and then relates that his victim broke up another marriage.
He wants to feel that the parent is good. If the parent is punitive and anxiety-arousing, it is not because she is malevolent but because he, the child, is bad: Mother is right in being harsh and strict with him and showing how bad he is….
Mental competency is a matter on which we require the opinions of experts to make a finding.
The farm itself—all one hundred ninety-five acres of scrub pine and sandy soil, plus the charred homestead site and the five tumbledown outbuildings unharmed by the fire—was sold for $3,883
obstreperous
Whenever Malueg had asked Eddie direct questions about his crimes, for example, Gein would become highly agitated. “I don’t want to rake up the past,” he would say angrily. “If you stir up the past you might get burned up in your own fire. Psychiatrists are probably responsible for a lot of trouble in the world because of making people dig up the past. I think a lot of the prisoners from here might go out and kill ’em, rob ’em, club ’em because of digging up the past.”
The suspect arrested for the crime turned out to be a former mental patient named Pervis Smith,
What a name
