Our inaugural podcast interview is with Harold Schechter, whose first true crime book came out in 1990. Back in the day, true crime was mass market paperback and hard to find. You had to sneak to the back of the bookstore, and a special order got you a long look. Today, true crime tops the charts in every format, every channel. We can’t get enough. How did that happen? Harold Schechter knows. He’s now written dozens of books and just retired after 40 years as a professor of American literature in New York City. His specialty is serial killers, and he’s written on the most challenging murder stories in the history of the United States.
You can find the audio here, and the transcript below.
HS: I sort of feel I was ahead of my time. Even when I started writing, which admittedly was a while ago – 30 years ago – true crime was still regarded as so sub-literary, sub-cultural, that I could not persuade my publisher at that time to publish my first book, the Ed Gein book, DEVIANT, in hardcover. You know, it seemed to them as though it was something more appropriate to the paperback rack at a Greyhound bus station or something. And even at that time I had a hard time persuading them that anybody would be interested in reading historical true crime. Because the received wisdom at that time in publishing was that people are only interested in contemporary stuff. So yeah, things have changed a great deal. Obviously, two things happened simultaneously, the HBO documentary THE JINX. and the podcast Serial. Those attracted such a large mainstream audience that I think it kind of sparked this fascination with true crime.
CLEWS: That makes me want to go on addall.com for a first edition paperback of DEVIANT. But even after becoming a best-selling author, he still had to put up with the self-appointed arbiters of literary taste, who don’t have taste in their mouth and actually believe that true crime was born in New York in 1965.
HS: When Wikipedia first started, for the entry for true crime, which has of course since been corrected, it said that it began with Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD. Which is basically off by about 300 years. Because true crime narrative predated the Gutenberg printing press with oral murder ballads and so on. But as soon as the printing press was invented, true crime literature, in the form of printed ballads and crime pamphlets and so on, began to be printed and disseminated. And even in our own country, one of the first pieces of literature to come off the press was what they called a gallows sermon, which is a description of a particular homicide accompanied by the sermon that the preacher preached on the gallows so there is a perennial fascination with true crime but again, it’s always been regarded as a kind of guilty pleasure.
CLEWS: Speaking of guilty, Harold recently wrote an essay on Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the former Green Beret still in the brig for killing his wife and little girls in 1979. The Chris Watts of the seventies, in terms of furious public interest. Jeffrey MacDonald is the subject of the next big budget true crime production on FX. Which leaves some of us wondering how in the sam hell they pick their cases. There’s no mystery in Jeffrey MacDonald.
HS: I think – I’ve always thought he was guilty. I never had much doubt about that. His story about the drug-crazed hippies chanting acid is groovy, kill the pigs, always seemed laughable to me.
CLEWS: But what do you think of Joe McGinnis, Fatal Vision and all that?
HS: That is a complicated situation. When I was writing my little thing on the MacDonald case, we read Janet Malcolm’s piece, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER. Very interesting. I myself do not feel that McGinnis betrayed MacDonald. I think he genuinely became convinced of his guilt. I mean, he did mislead him, to the extent that he allowed him to continue to think that he was his friend and his book was somehow gong to exonerate him. Which is an obviously an ethical issue. Part of Janet Malcom’s argument is that journalists are always engaged in unethical activity. And she herself as I’m sure you know got embroiled in that stuff.
CLEWS: Big fat mess but you brought up Truman Capote and the New Journalism. Truman Capote who fell out of bed and thought he invented something. I’m not a fan either. The whole New Yorker…
HS: I’m a big fan of IN COLD BLOOD but there were precursors to what Capote was doing going back to the 19th century. There was some questionable activity he was doing, like making stuff up. Part of the problem was his claim that he had perfectly photographic memory, and everything he put down was absolutely true. He was really inviting the kind of scrutiny that the book has received in the following decades, uncovering a lot of the fabrications in the book. But as a piece of literature, I think it’s brilliant.
CLEWS: Should it be in the fiction section?
HS: Well, there’s a lot of true crime that you read – I was just reading a book for my research – it was on the case from the 1930s, Anna Marie Hahn, you may know the case, she was supposedly a nurse – who was winning the hearts of these elderly German guys – and having them sign all their property over to her and poisoning them. And the book I was reading – Cincinnati? – Yes – the author of this book which is a well-researched book, but he begins by saying that there’s nothing in the book that he invented, everything is based off – and then he started and it’s like, Anna Marie Hahn breathes deeply as she saw the sunset over – and immediately there’s all this stuff he’s making up. It seems endemic. I was guilty of a little bit of that myself in the beginning but not anymore and I haven’t done so in a long time.
CLEWS I remember reading an Ann Rule book about a murder in Buffalo and she said, he could feel the salt spray on his face -- and in Buffalo that would be fresh water. We all make mistakes.
HS: I lived in Buffalo for four years, yep. The impulse to novelize or fictionalize or elaborate on certain things, I don’t think that should be part of true crime. It’s hard to resist that temptation. And I think a lot of readers kind of want and expect it. Some of the best-selling true crime books have always, in the way we were talking about, feeling the salt spray on the face. You read true crime books and they’ll say, it’s very likely that so and so is thinking this at that moment. Maybe they were feeling this. But again, you know the temptation to evoke this scene and pictorialize it, it’s hard to resist in your writing. To give you on instance of where I was guilty of that myself, in my second book DERANGED about Albert Fish, I knew that he had gone to have lunch with the family of the girl he ended up murdering. And I describe the contents of the lunch. Now. I did a lot of research into what kind of meal might have been served by a family of that social class in New York City in 1928. But I didn’t know for sure that that was exactly the menu. But to evoke the scene, I describe the meal. I can’t remember what I wrote. It wasn’t a huge thing, just a couple of sentences. It was very effective, and I’m sure it made it much more alive for the reader. But I’ve come to resist even that kind of thing. I take a good deal of pride. At least my last six or seven books, there’s literally nothing in it that I can’t cite a particular primary source document as the source of what I wrote.
CLEWS: How do you choose which case to write about because you have written about every kind of killer – the bomber, the poisoner, the serial killer and H.H. Holmes who covers the whole catalog. There’s so many thousands upon thousands of cases to choose from.
HS: Part of the reason I kept clippings for a while was just because I was interested in how on a daily basis there are all these horrific murders that take place all the time. But 99.9 percent of them become yesterday’s news instantly. The cases that I’m attracted to – A question that interests me a great deal and that I deal with explicitly in my last book MANIAC, about the Bath school disaster, is why certain crimes enter into our cultural mythology. They become these legendary crimes that everybody has heard of. Lizzie Borden, to take just one very obvious example. Whereas other crimes, that are equally heinous, sometimes way more heinous, fade into obscurity. They might make headlines for a few days, then everybody forgets about them.
HS: What it is about certain crimes that give them this lasting interest – what I have come to believe is that the crime has to tell a certain kind of story. It’s not just the actual gruesomeness of the homicide. There are some very famous cases where the murder hasn’t been particularly gruesome. Leopold and Loeb, the jazz-age thrill killers, really, murdered this one adolescent boy. But the story persists. People are constantly making movies about it, writing books about it. Another example, the case I just wrote a book about, the Bath school disaster, this guy blew up the whole school and killed 38 kids. Even in Michigan, many people haven’t heard of it. But there have to have a certain number of elements in the case that make it gripping and intriguing. In a way, they’re the same elements that make any kind of narrative gripping and intriguing to a mass audience. There has to be something about the characters, something about the motivation, something about the discovery and the whole plot as it were of the case. And there really aren’t that many crimes that have all those elements. It has to be a story worth telling, it has to be a story that can support an entire book, and also very importantly, I have to determine if there’s enough material for me to write a book about it. There’s a case that I was very, very interested in writing a book about, this guy named Carl Wanderer, in Chicago, you might have heard of him? Who orchestrated the murder of his wife. He enlisted some homeless guy who came to be known as the Ragged Stranger in the tabloids. Nobody really established his identity. And paid this guy to mug him and his wife. The whole thing was a setup so Wanderer could while supposedly defending his wife actually shoot her. It was a very sensational case and a case again with a lot of interesting elements, but I ultimately decided I couldn’t write the book because even though he was tried three separate times, there are no existing trial transcripts. And for a case like that, you can’t really write about it without that kind of information.
CLEWS: And do you think you have a bead on public taste at this point? It seems so fickle.
HS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Certainly, some of my books seem to have struck more of a chord than others. I wrote a book about Belle Gunness, the lady Bluebeard of LaPorte, Indiana a few books ago. That book has done very well. Suddenly there is this interest in women serial killers.
CLEWS: It seems to me that the renewed interest in female killers gets renewed about every six months, when there’s another good one.
HS: Yeah. When I first started writing true crime books, again the received wisdom was there’s no such thing as a woman serial killer. Not until maybe Wournos came along. Years ago, I wrote a book about Jane Toppan, who was this nurse who ultimately confessed to 31 murders and also confessed to experiencing what she called voluptuous delight in watching them die. It was clear she was a classic serial kinda lust murderer, the difference is that she, like other women serial killers, tend to poison their victims as opposed to the way male serial killers dispatch their victims. I also came to feel that her victims suffered a lot more, for example, than Jack the Ripper’s victims did. Jack the Ripper killed them pretty swiftly. So yes, I’ve long been interested in the female serial murderer.
CLEWS: Well Belle Gunness looms large in the Midwest to this day and I’m not surprised at all that the book is doing really well. She’s fascinating. Just the fact that she was so intentional and methodic in luring men to their deaths and feeding them to the pigs, my God.
HS: When you read her letters, the potential victims that she’s trying to lure to what they called her death farm – she was a scary character, no doubt about it. There were so many things about that case that are fascinating including the whole question of whether she ended up killing herself or surviving, it’s a mystery that has surrounded the case from the beginning. They exhumed the bones that are in Belle Gunness’ grave in Chicago and they ran these DNA tests on them and they came back very, very ambiguous, and unclear so, nothing was really resolved.
CLEWS: Maybe that’s why she’s still infamous. That’s the je ne sais quoi of Belle Gunness. We don’t know for sure.
HS: It’s certainly part of it. I think also as you were suggesting the fact that she lured all these guys to her farm, killed them and then butchered their bodies is another aspect to it because you don’t really find that many female serial killers that engage in that sort of butchery.
CLEWS: You made this remark that all works of literary or cultural analysis are autobiographical one way or another, why pretend otherwise? What did you mean by that? How does that apply to Herald Schechter?
HS: To some extent it was an observation out of my academic career. People, myself included write these analyses of whatever, I wrote articles about stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and Henry James and so on and I came to see to some extent I was writing about myself inevitably. It’s one of the reasons I – I wrote an article about Melville’s story, Bartleby the Scrivener, and I thought, this is it, this is the definitive explanation of what Melville intended to mean. I discovered that many, many people disagreed with me. In a way, you’re always writing about yourself. Your own perceptions, your own intuitions, your own obsessions. So that’s what I meant by that comment. And obviously in my true crime, when I first wrote my book about Ed Gein, I was drawn to that subject because of my own life long fascination and obsession with horror and psychopathology and so on, so it’s autobiographical – and you know there’s another aspect too which is, in order to write about some of these criminals convincingly, you have to understand them. And that means often going to some dark place in your own psyche which allows you not to sympathize with them but to empathize with them to the extent that you understand why they did what they’re doing, how they felt when they were doing it, what kind of gratifications they were deriving from it. There’s always a strong autobiographical element in stuff that is supposedly written very objectively.
HS: When I first started pitching the book to my editor, I didn’t know a lot about him. I knew, I was fascinated by him because I had been writing a book about the movies which is when I discovered that he was the inspiration for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which are my two favorite horror movies. Silence of the Lambs hadn’t come out yet. So I knew very little about him. So everything came as a surprise to me then. Every fact I turned up.
CLEWS: Ed Gein. Now he was a necrophile. He not only did some grave robbery he actually did commit some murders. As you point out in your book, he has a lot of fictional shadows. Why did he hit the public so hard? And his brother in necrophilia, also from Wisconsin, Dahmer. He hit the public hard. Why? I would think the instinct of a small community in the Midwest faced with an Ed Gein would be to burn the house down and forget about it.
HS: Well that was the instinct and that’s exactly what happened. They did burn his house down, they tried to forget about it, but of course the culture wouldn’t let them forget about it. The thing about Gein was, there’s something about this monstrous – Gein was himself on one level this sad, pathetic character, but he was performing these archaic rituals of sacrifice and skin-flaying and worship of the great mother in this little tiny farmhouse in the middle of the American heartland during the supposedly balmy Eisenhower era of the 1950s. It’s even now really hard to wrap your head around what was going on there. Very rarely do you get these again homicidal maniacs who seem to living out some kind of atavistic, ritualistic stuff that you associate with primitive tribes of headhunters and cannibals and so on. And again, doing it in this little small-town USA under the very noses of his neighbors. … Gein had this enormous cultural impact ultimately largely because the pulp horror writer Robert Bloch wrote Psycho. Psycho is not a great book. It’s an effective little pulp chiller. But it fell into the hands of Hitchcock, who created this great masterpiece out of it. And it set off the whole modern genre of the slasher movie. But it also, in a way, Americanized horror. Before Psycho, all the monsters populating the screen were imports - either from eastern Europe, Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Nosferatu, they emerged from the Black lagoon or came stomping from post-Hiroshima Japan. But suddenly you had this all-American monster, Norman Bates. Horror was never the same after that. So, there’s a sense in which Ed Gein was really responsible for the whole of modern American horror for – well, half a century now.
How do you turn Ed Gein – you can’t say comic can you, it’s graphic novel. You did a brilliant job. You did have to introduce elements of fiction in order to translate it into a graphic novel and I want to ask you about that. The artist you worked with, wow. I was surprised that the book – it’s not as gory as one might expect; it didn’t need to be to relay the horror. Well done. But, what a challenge.
HS: There have been a number – I was just looking at a graphic novel published some years ago about the Cleveland torso killer. There’s a famous graphic novel by this British writer Alan Moore, FROM HELL. I think they made it into a movie starring Johnny Depp, about Jack the Ripper. There definitely have been true crime graphic novels. There is a very good graphic novel called MY FRIEND DAHMER, I think they also made a movie of that. Made by a guy whose name I can’t quite remember, [ED. Note: John Backderf] who was a high school friend of Dahmer’s. So it’s not that DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE? is the first of the genre, it might arguably be the best.
HS: The way we worked was, I did a kind of script, well, Eric and I, this was all pre-pandemic, he was supposed to visit me, but that didn’t happen. So part of our interactions were on Zoom. But we spoke a lot. We had slightly different visions of what the book should be. But we worked very, very well together, a great collaboration. I wrote a narrative in the form of a movie script that Eric Powell – he’s one of the greatest comic book artists alive. He is very famous for his one comic called THE GOON. He turned it into comic book format and edited it and - I basically turned it over to him. We keep consulting during the process which took over a year. But obviously it’s Eric’s artwork that has made the thing into what I do not hesitate to call a masterpiece. We both agreed and Eric felt very strongly that he wanted to avoid any kind of sensationalism in terms of what he depicted, and we were both very interested in exploring what we speculate to have been going on in Gein’s head. I’m really proud of the graphic novel which is called DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE?
CLEWS: The book is quite affecting and I thought the most horrifying image in the book had no blood or violence in it, it was a family portrait. The Gein family. Mother, father, and the two little boys. That was chilling. Well done. What’s your favorite image in the book?
HS: I have a lot of favorites but the two that freaked me out the most are the close-up of Ed spooning beans into his mouth that he’s eating out of a human skull. And a scene where he is helping his ailing mother undress, preparing to get into bed. I’ve looked at the book many, many times because Eric’s artwork is so remarkable, and I’m a long-time comic book fan. So I am just studying almost every panel, seeing how beautiful and affective and powerful it is. It is a real source of pleasure for me.
CLEWS: Now in trying to avoid sensationalism was there anything you thought of doing and changed your mind? Or was there anything you decided not to put in the book to try to avoid that label and try to tell the story properly?
HS: For example, the discovery – when the sheriffs break into Gein’s summer kitchen and discover Bernice Worden’s disemboweled and beheaded and dressed out body, hanging by its heels from the rafters, Eric handled that as tastefully as he possibly could do. People can go online and see the actual horrific images of that, but that’s not the kind of book we wanted to produce. We were more interested in producing a book that explored Gein’s life and what influenced him and his relationship to the community. And also this other element that I gave a lot of thought to – having to do with these ritualistic fantasies that I think he was in the grip of.
CLEWS: It’s fascinating isn’t it that Ed Gein alone in the middle of the USA in his deepest psychopathy he comes up with these recognizable behaviors as you point out. Is this singular? Is he the only person who has psychopathy the way it was expressed with Gein.
HS: Ed Gein is singular, no question about that. That’s a large part of what makes him so fascinating. But the thing about Gein was, as you know, most serial killers, Bundy and Gacy and Richard Ramirez and Manson – they’re psychopaths, which is they’re intelligent people who are rational in their behavior but who put their intelligence and rationality to these malevolent uses to satisfy these sadistic drives and so on. Gein was one of the rare – first of all, I don’t consider Gein a serial killer in the way that the people I just mentioned were. He was not a sadistic lust murderer who derived this sick ecstatic pleasure from torturing and murdering villains. He was basically as you said before, a necrophile who needed women’s bodies to create these weird relics and try to reconstitute his own mother. He wasn’t a psychopath, he was a psychotic, he was a schizophrenic, and it’s not unusual for schizophrenics to live in this world of again archaic fantasies and so on. The psychologist Carl Jung, who treated a lot of psychotic patients, formed his own theories about the mythic unconscious from observing the kinds of fantasies they had. Which were fantasies which often paralleled these ancient myths and so on, but they couldn’t – they had no way of knowing about them. It seemed to arise spontaneously from the depths of their psyche. I think something similar happened with Gein. He lived in this -- part of the time, he lived in the actual world. And at other times, he lived in this world of archaic myth. The flaying of bodies and wearing the skin. You find that in Aztec religions and other religions. Aboriginal religions. Keeping the heads and faces and body parts -- that’s very, very common among what used to be called primitive tribes. So in that sense Gein is certainly singular in terms of the annals of American crime. But in terms of what was going on in his psychosis, I think there are other examples of that.
CLEWS: The Nazis influenced him. The journalism around the liberation of the death camps and some of the atrocities that were documented at Nuremberg. He read that didn’t he and that influenced what he did.
HS: Yes that is right. At the time Gein committed his crimes, from around 1947 until he was caught, yes, that was the time when news of death camps was coming out of the media and being disseminated. So yes he was very, very fascinated by the accounts of Nazi atrocities. They did find chairs upholstered in human skin and apparently he got the inspiration from accounts of the Nazis using human skin for lampshades and so on.
CLEWS: But many of his ideas were his own weren’t they?
HS: Oh absolutely, yeah. I don’t think he had read anything about digging up the corpses of middle-aged women who reminded him of his mother and trying to make a skin suit that he could put on and pretend he was his mother.
CLEWS: Let’s hope he remains singular.
HS: Yeah. Absolutely.
Thank you for listening. This is
THE END.
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