Evil Psychopaths, page 12
It all went wrong in January 1931 when he was arrested in the course of a robbery. He was sentenced to one year to life and went to Joliet penitentiary. He was also charged with the robbery at Wheaton and when that came to court, his lawyers reckoned, he would be looking at twenty-five years inside, at least.
He was married now and Helen visited often but he was not inside for very long. On 17 February 1932 he was taken to a pre-trial hearing at the Wheaton Civic Building, handcuffed to a plain-clothes detective. On the way back to Joliet he pretended to be ill and was freed from his handcuffs to use the toilet. He immediately launched himself on the detective, sending him sprawling. Nelson sped out of the carriage and jumped onto the station platform before running down an embankment and onto the running board of a waiting car which sped away.
From Chicago, he travelled with Helen to Reno, Nevada, working there for a while in a succession of odd jobs. From Reno, he moved on to California, one step ahead of the cops who followed his footsteps to Reno, but arrived too late.
In California he came under the protection of Sicilian gangland boss, Joe Parente who employed him as a jack of all trades. He was a bodyguard, barman and sometimes a parking valet, a lowly job that he hated. Nonetheless, he kept his nose clean, got on with the job and gained the respect of Parente who promoted him to bootlegger.
It was at this time that Lester Gillis changed his name to Baby Face Nelson, or rather, George Nelson, a name borrowed from a boxer of the time. It was Parente who added the epithet ‘Baby face’, the nickname that Nelson loathed but which stuck with him.
His job was now to get local speakeasies to sell Parente’s illegal alcohol. With numerous villains ploughing the same furrow, it took a special skill to force a bar-owner to change allegiance. Baby Face Nelson possessed that skill in spades and if not-so-gentle persuasion did not work, there was always the machine gun or the pipe bomb to fall back on.
He gained a reputation as a man that was crossed at your peril, a man for whom ruthless violence was an easy option.
Around this time, Nelson met John Paul Chase, another of Parente’s men. Chase would become Baby Face’s right-hand man – he worshipped the pint-size terror. The two of them planned and schemed, linking up with another couple of Parente’s men: Tommy Carroll, a former boxer and Eddie Green, a bank marker or ‘jug maker’. A jug maker was a man who scouted banks to find out which was most suitable for robbery. Green was one of the best. They were both highly experienced bank robbers who had hit numerous banks across the Midwest states.
Tired of Parente and his bootlegging work, Nelson, Helen and Chase left Chicago and drove to the Midwest, stopping at Long Beach in Indiana, a favourite place for bad guys in search of easy work. Nelson sought out Homer Van Meter, John Dillinger’s top man, asking to enlist in Dillinger’s gang. Van Meter gave him short shrift, however, despite Baby Face’s glowing CV. Not long after, however, he bumped into Green and Carroll again and they decided to get together to rob banks.
They hit lots of small town banks in Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska, stealing piles of cash. They would run in, spray the ceiling with bullets, overcome the guards, gather the customers and tellers into a corner, get the cash drawers and the vault open and roar off in their getaway car. If anyone tried to stop them, Baby Face would do what he did best with his machine gun. Chase would drive the car and Helen would sometimes be hiding in the back seat.
He loved the publicity he garnered. It became his gang in newspapers that had somehow found his nickname. Baby Face Nelson became famous. The only thing that really annoyed him was when one of his robberies was credited to another gangster – to pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger.
He lived in the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco, hanging out in its speakeasy with stars and celebrities such as Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Harry Houdini and Charlie Chaplin. He was having a ball and it got even better when Homer Van Meter invited him, at last, to join the Dillinger gang. Van Meter and John Hamilton were the only members of the gang still at large. The others, including Dillinger, himself, were locked up, but they were planning on getting Dillinger out of Crown Point Jail in Indiana soon.
A couple of weeks after Van Meter’s approach, Dillinger did, indeed, break out, being introduced to Baby Face Nelson in St. Paul. Their partnership got off to a bad start, however, Nelson trying to lay down the law to Dillinger. ‘Before we go any further,’ he snarled, ‘I want you all to know I don't take no orders; I walk into a bank, open fire, kill anything that moves, I grab the money and am outta there! If you don't like it, find yourself another patsy!’ Apparently, Van Meter, sick of this aggressive little man, went for his gun at this point, as did Baby Face. They both had to be restrained.
Their first job was to rob the Security National Bank at Sioux Falls. When they entered the premises, however, announcing their intentions, someone set off the alarm. Nelson went ballistic, screaming at the assembled customers and tellers, threatening to kill them all. Dillinger reminded him that he was the lookout and ordered him over to the window. Outside he saw a police car arrive. Climbing onto a desk, he opened fire through the plate glass window and a police officer just getting out of the car, fell to the ground, badly wounded. Nelson was excited and Dillinger began to wonder what he had got himself into. He had always avoided shooting policemen, realising the trouble it brought down on you.
Eight days later, they hit a bank in Mason City, Iowa. This time Dillinger kept Nelson outside, in the getaway car. The robbery did not go well. The bank manager locked himself in his office with the keys to the vault and there was a guard in a steel cage taking pot-shots at them and dropping teargas canisters on them. A police officer in a building across the road shot Dillinger in the arm and they only just escaped, surrounded by hostages, one of whom Baby Face would have shot for swearing at him if Dillinger had not nudged the hand in which he was holding his gun.
The authorities were clamping down on them, however. J. Edgar Hoover headed up a department dedicated to taking gangsters such as Dillinger, Floyd and Nelson out of circulation. They almost got Dillinger in St. Paul but he escaped after a gun battle. Baby Face and Helen, meanwhile, hid out in a rented cabin in the wooded area of Iron County, Wisconsin. The others disappeared for a while, but Eddie Green died in a gunfight in St. Paul in April after agents located him at his girlfriend’s apartment.
Dillinger was now Public Enemy Number one with a reward of $20,000 on his head. This was much to Baby Face’s annoyance. He was only Public Enemy Number Two with a reward of only $10,000 on his head.
When they got together again to plan their next move, in April 1934 at a lodge in northern Wisconsin, they came under the scrutiny of the local police, curious as to why a group of smooth, suited city slickers would be spending time there in the off-season. They passed their suspicions to the FBI and they had soon worked out that the men at the lodge were the Dillinger gang.
On the evening of 22 April, a convoy of vehicles rolled towards the lodge with their lights extinguished. It began badly when three innocent men, emerging from the lodge, were shot, one fatally. Hearing the gunshots, Dillinger, Van Meter, Carroll and Hamilton fled into the woods behind the lodge. Nelson had been asleep with Helen in a cabin outside the main building. Characteristically, he emerged from the building, gun in each hand blazing. He then slipped into the cover provided by the forest. The agents followed. Dillinger, Hamilton, Van Meter and Carroll escaped in stolen cars. Nelson found himself in a clearing on the edge of which were small fishing cabins. There was a car in which the keys had fortunately been left in the ignition. As he climbed in, however, ready to make his escape, another car drove into the clearing. He hunched down, realising immediately that the three men in the car were FBI agents looking for him. He jumped out, pointed his guns at the three men and opened fire, emptying his weapons into them. One died instantly and the others were seriously wounded. He pulled them from the vehicle and sped off into the night.
He finally made it to Public Enemy Number One a short while later when Dillinger was killed by a gang of agents as he left a cinema in Chicago. He had been hiding out at an Indian reservation near lake Flambeaux in Wisconsin but returned to Chicago where he was reunited with Helen. It was his intention to put together a new gang and to that end he met up with Chase. However, Eddie Green was dead and Tommy Carroll had been gunned down by police officers in Waterloo, Iowa. The authorities were beginning to win the war against crime. John Hamilton was killed, as was Homer Van Meter, dying in a hail of bullets in St. Paul. Baby Face moved back to the west coast.
It was proving difficult to find recruits for his new gang. He was just too hot and certainly too dangerous to become involved with, most criminals thought. They were right. The police were looking for him round the clock. All main and connecting roads were being watched. They eventually found him on Highway 14 on 27 September 1934. Agents William Ryan and Thomas McDade followed his car but were forced to stop when bullets were fired into their radiator. A second federal car, containing agents Herman Hollis and Samuel Cowley, took up the chase. Baby Face’s car was damaged by FBI bullets. He crashed it into a ditch where he and Chase clambered out of the car and took up position with their machine guns.
Suddenly, however, Baby Face stood up and started walking up the road, carrying his machine gun. When Chase asked him what he was doing, he replied that he had had enough – he was angry and was going to kill the agents. Gunfire erupted but Nelson kept walking, bullets ripping through his body. He continued firing and Hollis fell to the ground dead. Then Cowley also slumped to the ground, dying.
Baby Face Nelson had been hit by seventeen bullets. He crawled to the agents’ car but was not able to lift himself into it. Chase and Helen picked him up and laid him on the car’s back seat before driving him to a priest so that he could at least have the last rites said over him. He died at eight o’clock that night, having lost his temper one time too many.
Ed Gein
On 17 November 1957, following a robbery at the hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in which she worked, Bernice Worden had disappeared. Police discovered that the last customer in the store had been Ed Gein, a local man who lived alone in a ramshackle, dilapidated old farmhouse in a desolated location on the outskirts of the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. They travelled out to the gloomy farm to interview Gein. What they found when they arrived would shock and horrify the nation.
The first thing they noticed was the stench. Decomposing rubbish and rotten junk covered every space and work-surface and littered the floor to the extent that it was difficult to walk. The local sheriff, Arthur Schley was making his way gingerly through the room with a torch when he felt something brush against him, something hanging from the ceiling beams. He shone his torch upwards into the dark to see a large carcass, hanging upside down, decapitated, the ribcage sliced open and the insides gutted, just like you would a deer, something common to this area where hunting was a popular activity. But this was no deer, the policeman quickly realised to his horror. It was the body of the missing woman, Bernice Worden, who had been shot dead at close range with a .22 calibre rifle. That was not all they found in this charnel house, however.
In Gein’s small bedroom the bed had a bizarre decoration on each of the four corner posts − human skulls; skin had been used to make a lampshade and to upholster the seats of chairs; sliced off women’s breasts were being used as cup holders; human skullcaps were being used as soup bowls; a human heart lay in a saucepan on the cooker; the pull of a window shade was a pair of human lips. There was a mammary vest made of woman’s skin; a belt made from human nipples; socks made from human flesh and a box of human vulvas that Gein later admitted to wearing. Finally, they found a suit made entirely of human skin.
Thirty-nine-year-old Edward Theodore Gein had taken the death of his mother, Augusta, in 1945 pretty badly. His late father, George, was a violent alcoholic who rarely worked and whom his mother and the two boys essentially ignored. Divorce was not an option for Augusta due to her strict religious convictions – she was a strict Lutheran who read Ed and his brother passages from the Old Testament every afternoon to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Augusta had run a successful small family grocery store that allowed the family to live comfortably, despite her husband’s inadequacies, before buying a remote farm located just outside the small town of Plainfield. She moved there to remove any undue outside influences from her precious sons. She lectured them on the evils of the opposite sex – women were wicked, no more than prostitutes and to be avoided at all costs. The only reason for sex, she told them, was for reproduction. But there was little chance of Ed being led astray. He had always been a strange boy, laughing randomly at his own private jokes and being bullied for his slightly effeminate manner and for a minor growth that he had over one eye. He was a loner – he had to be, as Augusta would not permit him to make friends – leaving home only to attend the local school. The rest of his time was spent working on the farm.
She was a hard woman to please and often berated them for their shortcomings, fearing they would end up like their no-good father. Nonetheless, when George died in 1940, they tried to help out by taking odd jobs and the people of Plainfield considered them to be reliable and trustworthy. Interestingly, while both boys were employed as handymen, young Eddie Gein liked nothing better than to baby-sit for neighbours. He seemed to get on better with younger kids than those his own age.
Ed’s brother, Henry, however, was less fond of the life that his mother was trying to mould for the two boys. He thought Ed’s relationship with his mother was unhealthy and began to be critical of her in front Ed. But Ed thought his mother was the embodiment of all that was good and was deeply shocked to hear Henry talk like this. It may have led to Henry’s death.
In May 1944, the two boys were fighting a forest fire that was threatening the farm. They had separated in order to fight the fire from two different directions. According to Ed, he lost sight of his brother and as night approached, there was still no sign of him. Ed informed the police and when they arrived at the farm led them straight to his brother’s body. A couple of things did not seem right. For a start, he was lying on a piece of ground that had not been burned. He also had bruises to his head. Foul play was at no point suspected – the police officers just did not believe that Ed was capable of murder, let alone the murder of his brother. The cause of death was later recorded by the coroner as asphyxiation.
It was two years later that Augusta suffered a series of strokes and died, leaving thirty-nine-year-old Ed on his own at the farm for the first time in his life. He boarded up his mother’s rooms − the upstairs rooms, downstairs parlour and living room − keeping them as a shrine to her memory. He took up residence in the kitchen and a small room off it, that became his bedroom. Here, he spent his time reading about Nazi atrocities, south sea cannibals and, eerily, anatomy. His neighbours, for some of whom he did odd jobs, spread nasty rumours about him. Some young boys who visited the farm, saw shrunken heads, but their parents dismissed the story as childish fantasy. Nonetheless, he was known as ‘Weird Ed’.
His favourite hobby, however, was visiting the local cemetery. There, he would dig up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women who looked like his mother. He would drag the bodies home, skin them and tan the skin from which he would make the macabre objects that littered his rooms.
Following Augusta’s death, Ed had decided that he wanted to have a sex change. It was for this reason that he wore the suit made of women’s skin, so that he could pretend to be his mother rather than have to go through with the operation a sex change necessitated.
They estimated that Ed had carved up fifteen bodies at the farmhouse.
Coincidentally, Wisconsin Police had noticed an increase in the 1940s and 1950s in the number of people who had disappeared. An eight-year-old girl, Georgia Weckler had vanished on her way home from school in 1947. A huge search of a ten square mile area was launched involving hundreds of locals. However, no evidence was found apart from a set of tyre tracks made by a Ford. She was never seen alive again. In 1952, two hunters had stopped for a drink in Plainfield − no sign of Victor Travis and Ray Burgess or their car was found after they left the bar in spite of a huge search. In 1953, fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley, was babysitting in the town of La Crosse when she disappeared. Her father had phoned to check that she was alright but receiving no reply, went to the house where she was. When there was no answer to his knocking at the door, he looked through the window. All he could see was her shoes and her glasses on the floor along with some bloodstains. There had obviously been a struggle and the police found bloodstains on the grass outside
the house. Again a massive search was launched but not a trace of the girl was found apart from some items of clothing with blood on them near to a highway. Then, in the winter of 1954, Plainfield tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan disappeared from her bar − again a trail of blood was left behind in the car park. There was also an empty bullet cartridge on the floor of the tavern.
It seemed that Ed Gein had killed them all and maybe more.
The gruesome discoveries at the farm had a devastating effect on the men who found them. One officer, Art Schley had been so upset that during his interrogation of Gein, he banged the killer’s head and face against the wall, rendering his initial confession inadmissible. Schley became a tragic figure, so mortified by Gein’s crimes and his fear of having to testify, that he died before the case came to court, aged only forty-three.
Schley’s frustration was understandable because for the first day, while exhaustive searches were being made of his farm and the surrounding area, Gein said nothing. After twenty-four hours, however, he opened up, explaining in graphic detail how he had killed Bernice Worden and how he had plundered many of the body parts in his house from the local cemetery. Bernice Worden, he claimed was the only person he had killed. The others had been already dead.
