America's Most Famous Serial Killer That Most People Don't Know About
America's Most Famous Serial Killer That Most People Don't Know About
by Bill Knell
We live in a dangerous world and sometimes we need to be reminded of that for our own good and the good of our loved ones. The truth is that random murders committed by individuals with Anti-Social Personality Disorder
(sociopaths and psychopaths) are crimes that often go unconnected and unsolved for years. Most of these killers are very intelligent and possess the ability to hide their obsession to kill behind an innocent persona. Others are so driven that killing outweighs any concerns they might have about being exposed and apprehended.
I was twelve when the Sharon Tate murders occurred in 1969. That was the first multi-murder case I heard about. It would be another eight years
before the term “serial killer” became popular. FBI agent Robert Ressler is credited with popularizing the term, though its exact origin is still debated. Rather than dwell on Manson, BTK, Sam of Sam or Ted Bundy, I am going to introduce you to a guy who started it all, shocked law enforcement and inspired hundreds of books and movies.
Meet Edward Theodore Gein (1906 – 1984), also known as The Butcher of Plainfield. He was an American murderer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered that Gein exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. He confessed to killing two women – tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden in 1957.
Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. In 1968 he was found guilty, but legally insane, of the murder of Worden. Gein was remanded to a psychiatric
institution and died at Mendota Mental Health Institute of cancer-induced liver and respiratory failure at age 77 in 1984. He is buried next to his family in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave (thieves stole the marker).
Ed Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, in 1906. He was the second of two boys born to George Gein (1873–1940) and Augusta Gein (1878–1945). He had an older brother named Henry (1901–1944). Augusta despised her husband because he was an alcoholic who couldn't hold a job. He did own a local grocery shop for a few years, then sold the business. Henry began dating a divorced, single mother of two and planned on moving in with her. He worried about his brother's attachment to their mother and often spoke ill of her around Ed, who responded with shock and hurt.
Henry and Ed were burning away marsh vegetation on the property in May of 1944 when the fire got out of control and caused the local fire department to respond. The fire was extinguished by the end of the day. A short time later Ed reported his brother missing. A search party looking for Henry found his dead body lying face down. Apparently, he had been dead for some time. It appeared that the cause of death was heart failure since he had not been burned or otherwise injured. It was later reported that Henry had bruises on his head. The police dismissed the possibility of foul play and the county coroner officially listed asphyxiation as the cause of death. The authorities accepted the
accident theory, but no investigation was conducted and no autopsy was performed.
Some researchers later suspected that Ed Gein killed his brother because of the bad things that Henry said about their mother. When Gein was questioned 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".
The death of his brother meant that Ed Gein and his mother were now alone. Augusta had a paralyzing
stroke shortly after Henry's death, so Gein devoted himself to taking care of her. Gein and his mother visited a neighbor named Smith in 1945 to purchase straw. Augusta witnessed Smith beating a dog. A woman inside the Smith home came outside and told him to stop. Smith ignored her and 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 had no business being there. She angrily called her "Smith's harlot". Augusta had a second stroke soon after that and her health deteriorated rapidly. She died on December 29, 1945, at the age of 67. Ed was devastated by her death and later said he had "lost his only friend and one true love”. Ed felt he was “absolutely alone in the world”.
Gein held on to the farm and earned money from odd jobs. He boarded up rooms used by his mother leaving them untouched. The rest of the house became squalid. Gein lived in a small room next to the kitchen. Around that time, he became obsessed with death-cult magazines and adventure stories, particularly those involving cannibals or Nazi atrocities. Gein was a handyman and received a farm subsidy from the government starting in 1951. He occasionally worked for the local municipal road crew and crop-threshing crews in the area.
On the morning of November 16, 1957, Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared. A Plainfield resident reported that the hardware store truck had been driven away from the rear of the building around 9:30 am. The hardware store was closed the entire day. Bernice Worden's son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, entered the store around 5:00 pm to find the store's cash register open
and blood stains on the floor. Frank Worden told investigators that Ed Gein had been in the store the evening before his mother's disappearance, and that he
returned the next morning for antifreeze. A sales slip for a gallon of antifreeze was the last receipt written by Worden on the morning she disappeared.
On the evening of the same day, Gein was arrested at a West Plainfield grocery store, and the Waushara County Sheriff's Department searched the Gein farm. A Waushara County Sheriff's deputy discovered Worden's
decapitated body in a shed on Gein's property, hung upside down by her legs with a crossbar at her ankles and ropes on her wrists. 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.
While searching the 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
-Bowls made from skulls
-A female torso, skinned from shoulders to waist, used to make a corset
-Leggings made from human leg skin
-Masks made from the skin of female heads
-Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag and her skull in a box
-Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack and her heart in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbellied stove
-Nine vulvae in a shoe box
-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
-Fingernails from female fingers
These artifacts were photographed at the state crime laboratory and then destroyed. When questioned, Gein told investigators that between 1947 and 1952 he made as many as forty nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a "daze-like" state. On a few of those visits he said he came out of the daze while in the cemetery and left the graves in good order. On other occasions he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home. He tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.
Gein admitted to stealing from nine graves and led investigators to their locations. The state crime laboratory participated in opening three test graves identified by Gein. The caskets were inside wooden boxes. The tops of the boxes were about 2 feet below the surface in sandy soil. Gein robbed the graves soon after the funerals while the graves were fresh. All three test graves had been disturbed.
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 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.
A 16-year-old youth, whose parents were friends of Gein and who attended ball games and movies with him, reported that Gein kept shrunken heads in his house. He described them as relics from the Philippines sent by a cousin who had served on the islands during World War II. Police later determined them to be human facial skins that had been carefully peeled from corpses and used by Gein as masks. Gein was also considered a suspect in several other unsolved cases in Wisconsin, including the 1953 disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, a La Crosse babysitter.
Waushara County sheriff Art Schley assaulted Gein by banging his head and face against a brick wall. As a result, Gein's initial confession was ruled inadmissible. Schley died of heart failure at age 43 in 1968, before Gein's trial. Many who knew Schley said he was traumatized by the horror of Gein's crimes, and this, along with the fear of
having to testify (especially about assaulting Gein), caused his death. One of his friends said: "He was a victim of Ed Gein as surely as if he had butchered him."
On November 21, 1957, Gein was arraigned on one count of first degree murder in Waushara County Court and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Gein was diagnosed with schizophrenia, found mentally incompetent and unfit for trial. He was sent to the Central State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconsin, then later transferred to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. 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 told him that he did not know whether the killing of Bernice Worden was intentional or accidental. Gein said that while examining a gun in Worden's store, the gun went off killing Worden. Gein testified that after trying to load a bullet 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. At the request of the defense, Gein's trial was held without a jury, with Judge Robert H. Gollmar presiding. Gein was found guilty by Gollmar.
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. Gein's house and property were scheduled to be auctioned March 30.
The house was to become a tourist attraction. On March 27, the house was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected, but the cause was never officially determined. 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.
Gein died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute due to respiratory failure secondary to lung cancer on July 26, 1984, at the age of 77. Over the years, souvenir seekers chipped pieces from his gravestone at the
Plainfield Cemetery, until the stone itself was stolen in 2000. It was recovered in June 2001, near Seattle, and was placed in storage at the Waushara County Sheriff's Department. The gravesite itself is now unmarked, but not unknown; Gein is interred between his parents and brother in the cemetery.
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, Psycho, Gein's story was loosely adapted into a number of films, including Deranged (1974), In the Light of the Moon (2000) (released in the United States and Australia as Ed Gein (2001), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Hitchcock (2012), and the Rob Zombie films, House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil's Rejects. Gein served as a model for several book and film characters, most notably as Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) and the character Dr. Oliver Thredson from the TV series American Horror Story: Asylum.
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