One of my dad’s favorite keepsakes was a bureau handcrafted by Ed Gein in the woodworking shops at Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where my dad met the soft-spoken but infamous Wisconsin murderer. The bureau drawers provided perfect storage for my dad’s ties, rolled into little polyester wreaths. Waushara County, adjacent to our home county, will never escape the legacy of Ed Gein. Fanatics still lurk around the courthouse, more than fifty years later, pestering cops and lawyers. According to the district attorney in Wautoma, the no-man’s-land where Ryan ventured to expand his criminal-defense practice, the Gein file has been completely pilfered, winnowed down to nothing, “scholars” chewing away at its literal and moral fiber. Of course, Ed Gein stories revolved around his mother, Augusta, a religious fanatic who kept Ed isolated from worldly influences and convinced him that all women, except a boy’s mother, were impure. After she died, he tailored costumes from women’s corpses, believing his corset of rib bones and flesh leggings might bring Augusta back to life. But even without celebrity-level crimes, there were plenty of real women in and around Oshkosh who gave Ed Gein a run for his money. Several of my dad’s female patients at Winnebago Mental Health Institute experienced motherhood-induced madness that landed them in courts of law in the 1980s and ’90s, decades before Ryan would build his career.
Brenda Lund was the most famous, at home and in the Oshkosh Northwestern. The oldest of four children, Lund went by “Granny,” for she nurtured her siblings with the firm hand of an old matriarch. But when she became unexpectedly pregnant in college, she hid the truth, admitting to her “condition” only after making adoption arrangements. In an unexpected reversal, however, after she gave birth, Lund’s attachment to her baby blossomed and she canceled the adoption. Her daughter’s cues, through skin-to-skin contact and spikes in oxytocin, obviously triggered a neurological response, nudging her toward nurture.
But when Lund conceived a second baby, three months later, she mysteriously decided to hide this new pregnancy also, restarting the same tight-lipped cycle. When her boyfriend, Nilus Walker, arrived home one day to find Lund bleeding through her clothes as she shuffled, hunched over, from their bathroom to the living room sofa, he had no reason to believe she was expecting. “Just a heavy period,” she told him, and he believed her, but when Lund tried to rise from the couch later, she fainted, was revived, and fainted again. She was more than pale, her face blanched to match the color of her veins. Walker drove Lund to the ER, where doctors discovered, protruding from her insides, a placenta and the remains of an umbilical cord.
Suffering from dehydration and blood loss, Lund was in a disoriented and anemic state, but she was alert enough to speak. She denied giving birth but was admitted to the hospital for blood loss. When Walker returned to their house later that day, he investigated the scene more closely, this time around discovering bloody towels wadded up in the sink and red splotches leading from the hallway to their basement, where he found an old five-gallon bucket stained with runnels of purple blood. A towel had been carefully laid over the opening as if it merely contained bread dough rising.
“I couldn’t bring myself to look inside,” Walker told police after driving the bucket back to the hospital and submitting it as evidence. A baby was swaddled inside.
With no further way to deny the existence of her second child, Lund claimed the baby was stillborn, cord wrapped around her neck, but doctors still suspected she was withholding the truth. A test on the contents of the pail—that is, an autopsy report—would quickly confirm that Lund’s baby was born alive. The baby’s lungs showed evidence of having drawn air, and the bleeding of her wounds was consistent with a live birth.
As it turned out, Lund’s baby had been stabbed four times with a sewing scissors, puncturing her soft skull. Although she arrived two months early, she had probably been kicking, alerting Mama to her existence. Bruising to the baby’s body was not consistent with childbirth but with some other less sacred struggle. A revelation of this evidence led Lund to revise her statement. “I must have did it, didn’t I?” she said to the investigator. “I was the only one there.” She relayed a tale of fear, not unlike stories told by Linda Duffy or Lucy Vasquez. “What if Walker became furious about the baby?” she said. Brenda Lund feared abandonment. She could never support a family on her own. Her version of events, late in coming, was either truthful but troubling or faulty and fabricated.
Did Brenda Lund truly forget butchering her newborn baby, or was she a heathen? We think of infanticide as pathological rather than adaptive behavior. Any mother who kills her baby must be uncivilized—a savage, but was she really? Historians have shown that most of the earliest Christian mothers abandoned at least one child, either to avoid shame or to avoid stretching their families too thin. By the fifteenth century, foundling homes in Europe were accepting thousands of infants per year, abandoned by their mothers. Most of these babies died before their first birthday. Until as late as the early nineteenth century, infant mortality rates in Europe were as high as one in every three babies, in part because they were deserted. One must wonder, how many of these same women bashed their abdomens, bathed in boiling water, or heaved weights beyond measure to extract their babies before reaching this point of no return?
On the front lines of modern mommy wars, mothers engage in bloodthirsty battles over vaccinations, breast- or bottle-feeding, and organic foods, but I must have been assigned to the fringe wars, comparing myself more often to
