The Jeffrey Dahmer Story by Donald A. Davis

Author:Donald A. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Killers

Plainfield, Wisconsin, is a little country town that huddles in the upper left-hand corner of rural Waushara County, about 115 miles straight northwest of Milwaukee. It is a pleasant community, a very quiet place. But when the news broadcasts in the summer of 1991 began talking about the slaughter in Milwaukee, memories awakened in Plainfield, memories of 1957, memories of Edward Gein.

For in that quiet, halcyon year when Dwight Eisenhower was still in the White House, just as deer season was opening, Gein went on the kind of rampage that would in later years strike fear in the nation, even when the term serial killer had become part of the everyday lexicon. Back in Ike’s day, things like that just didn’t happen. America, particularly rural America, wasn’t that kind of place. Or when such gruesome business did happen, the instant television services that we know today were not around and the pictures of the blood and the bodies were not instantly hurled around the country.

TV and newspapers, however, had done a splendidly sensationalist job the previous year when nineteen-year-old Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, went on a rampage that killed ten people in eight days, including her baby sister. Their escapade captured the attention of the nation, since it stood out as a most unusual crime spree. Starkweather eventually was executed in the electric chair, but Fugate, who once even wrote personally to the White House, asking Ike himself to help her get out, was released from prison in 1976, without any help or even attention from the president. Starkweather, feeling romantic to the last, had said he wanted to have her sitting on his lap when he was electrocuted.

But Starkweather was simply a little thug, leaving a “bang, you’re dead” trail across a couple of western states. People didn’t quake in their boots at the thought that Charlie Starkweather might be out there somewhere.

Gein was different. A quiet, ordinary man who lived in an old farmhouse in an old farming community, it would be discovered that he was a prototypical mass murderer, a quiet guy who committed unspeakable acts of barbarism upon defenseless and vulnerable women. The idea that an Edward Gein might come tapping at your door some night is the stuff of nightmares.

Gein admitted that he killed and dismembered two women around Plainfield in the fall of 1957. He also admitted digging up the graves of the beloved dead of Plainfield, the corpses of women, and mutilating them. He used the flesh of his victims and the body parts gathered in his grave robbing as sewing material, fashioning vests, belts, and even a face mask made from a real face. He would wear the gory outfit when he tried to summon the spirit of his dead mother, waltzing around in his bizarre home filled with furniture covered in human skin.

Gein was more than a killer. He was insane and committed the worst kind of atrocities, leaving Plainfield in a state of shock when his house of horror was finally discovered.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.