Years
before Jeffrey Dahmer, many in Wisconsin wondered if the state hadn’t
nurtured more than its normal share of demented killers. In the 1960s
the great Wisconsin writer August Derleth even devoted a book to the
subject. In Got Murder? local journalist Martin Hintz, a Shepherd Express contributor,
devotes a chapter apiece to several of the most infamous, including Ed
Gein, the body snatcher who inspired Hitchcock’s Psycho, and
Julian Carlton, the servant of Frank Lloyd Wright who axed seven people
to death at Taliesin. Hintz, who doesn’t buy the theory that Wisconsin
is especially prone to bizarre murder, surveys his killers in a tone
compounded of shock, social science and, inevitably for its subject,
titillation.
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