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Edward Theodore Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin on August 27, 1906. He was the second second son of George Philip and Augusta Wilhelmine. Augusta despised her husband, and considered him a failure for being an alcoholic who was unable to keep a job; he had worked at various times as a carpenter, tanner, and insurance salesman. Augusta owned a local grocery shop and sold the location in 1914 for a farm to purposely live in isolation near Plainfield, Wisconsin, which became the Gein family's permanent residence.
Augusta took advantage of the farm's isolation by turning away outsiders from influencing her sons. Edw
Edward Theodore Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin on August 27, 1906. He was the second second son of George Philip and Augusta Wilhelmine. Augusta despised her husband, and considered him a failure for being an alcoholic who was unable to keep a job; he had worked at various times as a carpenter, tanner, and insurance salesman. Augusta owned a local grocery shop and sold the location in 1914 for a farm to purposely live in isolation near Plainfield, Wisconsin, which became the Gein family's permanent residence.
Augusta took advantage of the farm's isolation by turning away outsiders from influencing her sons. Edward left the farm only to attend school. Outside of school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Augusta, a fervent Lutheran, preached to her boys about the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drinking, and the belief that all women were naturally prostitutes and instruments of the devil. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament concerning death, murder, and divine retribution.
Edward was shy, and classmates and teachers remembered him as having strange mannerisms, such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal jokes. He was sometimes bullied. To make matters worse, his mother punished him whenever he tried to make friends. Despite his poor social development, he did fairly well in school, particularly in reading.
George Phillip Gein died of heart failure caused by his alcoholism on April 1, 1940, aged 66. Subsequently, Ed and his brother began doing odd jobs around town to help cover living expenses. Both brothers were considered reliable and honest by residents of the community. While both worked as handymen, Ed also frequently babysat for neighbors. He enjoyed babysitting, seeming to relate more easily to children than adults. Henry began dating a divorced, single mother of two and planned on moving in with her; Ed's brother, Henry, worried about Ed's affection for their mother and often spoke ill of her around Ed, who responded with shock and hurt.
On May 16, 1944, Henry and Ed were burning away marsh vegetation on the property; the fire got out of control, drawing the attention of the local fire department. By the end of the day — the fire having been extinguished and the firefighters gone — Ed reported his brother missing. With lanterns and flashlights, a search party searched for Henry, whose dead body was found lying face down. Apparently he had been dead for some time, and it appeared that death was result of heart failure, since he had not been burned or injured otherwise. It was later reported, in Harold Schechter's biography of Gein, Deviant, that Henry had bruises on his head. The police dismissed the possibility of foul play and the county coroner later officially listed asphyxiation as the cause of death. The authorities accepted the accident theory but there was no official investigation and an autopsy was not performed. Some suspected that Ed Gein killed his brother. Questioning Gein about the death of Bernice Worden in 1957, state investigator Joe Wilimovsky brought up questions about Henry's death. Dr. George W. Arndt who studied the case wrote that, in retrospect, it was "possible and likely" that Henry's death was "the "Cain and Abel" aspect of this case".
Gein and his mother were now alone. Augusta suffered a paralyzing stroke shortly after Henry's death, and Gein devoted himself to taking care of her. Sometime in 1945, Gein later recounted, he and his mother visited a man named Smith who lived nearby to purchase straw. According to Gein, Augusta witnessed Smith beating a dog. A woman inside the Smith home came outside and yelled to stop. Smith beat the dog to death. Augusta was extremely upset by this scene. What bothered her did not appear to be the brutality toward the dog but the presence of the woman. Augusta told Ed that the woman was not married to Smith and so had no business being there. "Smith's harlot," Augusta angrily called her. She suffered a second stroke soon after, and her health deteriorated rapidly. She died on December 29, 1945, at the age of 67. Ed was devastated by her death; in the words of author Harold Schechter, he had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world."
Soon after his mother's death, Gein began to create a "woman suit" so that "...he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin". Gein's practice of donning the tanned skins of women was described as an "insane transvestite ritual." Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining: "They smelled too bad." During state crime laboratory interrogation, Gein also admitted to the shooting death of Mary Hogan, a tavern owner missing since 1954 whose head was found in his house, but he later denied memory of details of her death.
According to Gein, he made 40 nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a "daze-like" state between 1947 and 1957. On about 30 of those visits, he said he came out of the daze while in the cemetery, left the grave in good order, and returned home emptyhanded. On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home, where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.
On November 16, 1957, Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared, and police had reason to suspect Gein. Worden's son told investigators that Gein had been in the store the evening before the disappearance, saying he would return the next morning for a gallon of anti-freeze. A sales slip for a gallon of anti-freeze was the last receipt written by Worden on the morning she disappeared. Upon searching Gein's property, investigators discovered Worden's decapitated body in a shed, hung upside down by ropes at her wrists, with a crossbar at her ankles. The torso was "dressed out like a deer". She had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations were made after her death.
Searching Gein's house, authorities found whole human bones and fragments, wastebasket made of human skin, human skin covering several chair seats, skulls on his bedposts, female skulls (some with the tops sawn off), bowls made from human skulls, a corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist, leggings made from human leg skin, masks made from the skin from female heads, Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag, Mary Hogan's skull in a box, Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack, Bernice Worden's heart "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbellied stove", nine vulvae in a shoebox, a young girl's dress and "the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old", a belt made from female human nipples, four noses, a pair of lips on a window shade drawstring, a lampshade made from the skin of a human face and fingernails from female fingers. These artifacts were photographed at the state crime laboratory and then destroyed.
On November 21, 1957, Gein was arraigned on one count of first degree murder in Waushara County Court, where he pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Found mentally incompetent and thus unfit for trial, Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (now the Dodge Correctional Institution), a maximum-security facility in Waupun, Wisconsin, and later transferred to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1968, doctors determined Gein was "mentally able to confer with counsel and participate in his defense." The trial began on November 7, 1968 and lasted one week. A psychiatrist testified that Gein had told him that he didn't know whether the killing of Bernice Worden was intentional or accidental. Gein had told him that while he examined a gun in Worden's store, the gun went off, killing Worden. Gein testified that after trying to load a slug into the rifle, it discharged. He said he had not aimed the rifle at Worden, and did not remember anything else that happened that morning. Gein was found guilty of first-degree murder by Judge Robert H. Gollmar on November 14. A second trial dealt with Gein's sanity; after testimony by doctors for the prosecution and defense, Gollmar ruled Gein "not guilty by reason of insanity" and ordered him committed to Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Gein spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. "Due to prohibitive costs," Judge Gollmar wrote, "Gein was tried for only one murder—that of Mrs. Worden. He also admitted to killing Mary Hogan."
Gein's house and property were scheduled to be auctioned March 30, 1958, amid rumors the house was to become a tourist attraction. On March 27, the house was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected, but the cause of the blaze was never officially solved. When Gein learned of the incident while in detention, he shrugged and said, "Just as well." Gein's car, which he used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at public auction for $760 to carnival sideshow operator Bunny Gibbons. Gibbons later charged carnival goers 25¢ admission to see it.
On July 26, 1984, Gein died of respiratory failure due to lung cancer at the age of 77 in Stovall Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. His grave site in the Plainfield Cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers chipped off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is now in storage at the Waushara County Sheriff's Department.
The story of Ed Gein has had a lasting effect on American popular culture as evidenced by its numerous appearances in film, music and literature. The tale first came to widespread public attention in the fictionalized version presented by Robert Bloch in his 1959 suspense novel Psycho. In addition to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film of Bloch's novel, Gein's story was loosely adapted into a number of movies, including Deranged (1974), In the Light of the Moon (2000) (released in the U.S. as Ed Gein (2001)), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Hitchcock (2012), and the Rob Zombie movies House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil's Rejects. Gein served as a model for several book and film characters, most notably such fictional serial killers as Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs). American filmmaker Errol Morris and German filmmaker Werner Herzog attempted unsuccessfully to collaborate on a film project about Gein in 1975-76. Morris interviewed Gein several times and ended up spending almost a year in Plainfield interviewing dozens of locals. The pair planned secretly to exhume Gein's mother from her grave to test a theory, but never followed through on the scheme and eventually ended their collaboration. The aborted project was described in a 1989 New Yorker profile of Morris. At the time, the news reports of Gein's crimes spawned a subgenre of "black humor". Since the 1950s, Gein has frequently been exploited by transgressive art or "shock rock", often without association with his life or crimes beyond the shock value of his name. Examples of this include the song titled "Dead Skin Mask" (1990) from the Slayer album Seasons in the Abyss, "Nothing To Gein" (2001) from Mudvayne's album L.D. 50, and "Ed Gein" (1992) from The Ziggens' album Rusty Never Sleeps. Ed Gein's atrocities were also satirized in Blind Melon's "Skinned" off the 1995 album Soup which juxtaposed cheery instrumentation with semi-factual representations of Gein's crimes, arguably towards a comedic end.
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Tags: Serial Killer (3), White (2), Wisconsin (2), American (2), Male (2), Insane (2), Murderer (2), Body Snatcher (1), The Ghoul Of Plainfield (1), Necrophiliac (1), Norman Bates (1), Not Actually A Serial Killer (1), Only Killed Two People (1), The Plainfield Butcher (1), Grandfather Of Gore (1), The Plainfield Ghoul (1), Killer (1), Grave Robber (1), Died 1984 (1), Born 1906 (1)
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