Early Life of Ed Gein
Ed Gein was also known as “the Butcher of Plainfield” or Edward Theodore Gein was an American serial killer and also a body snatcher. Ed Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in a place called La Crosse, Wisconsin. Ed Gein was the second of two sons of George Philip Gein and Augusta Wilhelmine Gein. Gein had a beleaguered childhood, by the twin demons of alcohol and religious fanaticism. father George Philip was a crippling alcoholic whose tiny self-worth couldn’t even be detected by the most powerful electron microscope. Mother Augusta was a hardcore religious not who saw sin and filth everywhere. Alongside his older brother, Henry young Edward taught that the city of La Crosse was a haven of sodomites and harlots.
They were also taught that they were completely worthless when Augusta wasn’t verbally abusing the boys. She was bullying her drunken husband. Despite this saw, maybe perhaps because of it, Ed Gein came to idolize her. In 1915, Augusta moved the family from the leafy Sodom of La Crosse to the quiet Gomorrah of Plainfield Wisconsin. A tiny town in the heart of deer hunting country Plainfield can be summed up by three adjectives flat, empty, and anonymous.
Unless, of course, you’re Augusta again in which case those adjectives were sinful, sinful and even more sinful. From their secluded farmhouse on the edge of town, Augusta preached to the boys about evil. She taught them that women were creatures who corrupted men and defiled Christ. The only time Ed and Henry were let out of her sight was to go to school, although they were forbidden from making any friends. Not that this made much difference.
Ed Gein, he was an intelligent feminist and kind of weird-looking. In short, he was a bully’s dream come true. After teenage years marred by endless beatings, Ed graduated school and fled back to Augusta’s cold embrace. He never socialized again. On April 1st, 1940, God played his cruelest April Fool’s joke on all of the family. George Philip Gein was carried off by a heart attack, leaving his now 30 something sons all alone with that domineering mother. It was even worse than you probably imagining if pre-death dead husband Augusta was a fanatic post dead husband Augusta was a flaming lunatic.
She forced into Ed and Henry Skull’s that all women were evil incarnate, that the entire world was against them whenever he tried to escape her clutches, starting a relationship with a divorced mother of two in Plainfield. She denounced him as well. A good older brother to the ends. Henry tried to convince Ed to side with him against their mother. Sadly, though, it had already chosen his side in the winter of 1944. A fire broke out on the furthest reaches of the Gein farm.
The fire brigade went screaming over in their trucks to find Ed in a state of agitation, claiming his older brother had vanished in the blaze. After a long search through the smoke-filled woods, police found Henry lying face down a savage blow to the back of the head. The coroner recorded death by smoke inhalation, and Ed never even questioned. When news of Henry’s death reached Augusta, the old women suffered a massive stroke that left a badly disabled. Finally, after nearly four decades of existence Ed Gein’s, wish it had come true. He was now completely alone with his beloved and awful mother.
Ed Gein’s Best Friend is his Mother
The next year was one of almost complete isolation from late 1944 to the end of 1945. Hasn’t Augusta lived alone seeing almost no one? They were doing nothing except cultivating their already toxic relationship until it reached Chernobyl levels of radioactivity. It was a year of optimism in the rest of the country, though, a year in which a war was won on two continents and young men returned home to cheers. But out on their farm in Plainfield all of this passed Ed under rust by. Indeed, the only significant thing that happened to them that year was when Augusta made a rare trip outside with Ed to my straw from a man named Smith.
When they reached Smith’s house, the duo witnessed him beating a dog to death, while an unknown woman begged him to stop seeing this Augusta became livid. Not because she was watching an innocent creature suffer, but because the mystery woman was not Smith’s wife. Back home, Augusta stepped up to teachings Ed that all females were guilty of lust. Mother her teachings lasted much longer though. On December the 29th 1945, a second strike carried Augusta off to her eternal reward. Suddenly alone 39-year-old Ed did the only thing he knew how he sealed off Augusta’s room, preserving it exactly as his mother had left it.
Then he shut up and boarded all but two rooms in their creaking house, and slowly he descended into madness. As 1946, rumbled by Ed Gein became hooked on lurid horror novels and pornography, he mail-ordered books on Nazi medical experiments and female anatomy, and he began teaching himself taxidermy. Finally, in 1947, something in Ed gein’s snapped. He began robbing the graves of women who were buried in the Plainfield Cemetery, digging up the bodies by the dead of night, removing their hearts, heads, genitals, and intestines before returning them to their crypts.
Much later, after his arrest, Ed Gein would say that he went to the cemetery in a daze, that he had visions of grave robbing, but he never thought he went through with it. The record, though it says otherwise today is estimated. The Gein robbed the graves of over 40 women from cemeteries all across the state. By the 1950s, he was no longer even returning the bodies to their tombs instead. He drags the bodies of these unknown sisters, mothers, daughters, and wives back to his remote farmhouse and practices taxidermy on them, patiently learning his craft. Despite this, private madness, Gein still managed a semi function in public. He took old handyman jobs around Plainfield to survive and even occasionally got work as a babysitter to show his gratitude.
He would give his sometimes employers packages of meat that he called venison. Given what we know now, it does seem rather likely that what was in those parcels was probably not venison. As 1954 dawns, the nearly 50-year-old Gein was now a prolific grave robber, likely cannibal and taxidermist of human skin. As 1954 dawns, the nearly 50-year-old Gane was now a prolific grave robber, likely cannibal and taxidermist of human skin. Gein hadn’t graduated to the sort of cold-blooded, premeditated slaughter that made guys like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer so famous. Sadly, though, that last to be it was about to be broken.
We all go a little Mad Sometimes
No one knows for sure how many people Ed Gein killed. He never confessed and the state was unwilling to spend much money uncovering his gruesome crimes. As such, some think Gein may have begun his murder spree before 1954. Certainly, he’s been linked to many Wisconson missing person cases, although it’s also possible that he’s simply become a useful scapegoat for any unsolved murder. But there’s no ambiguity about what happens on the 8th of December 1954. That cold winter’s night Gein traveled to Pine Grove, some 10 miles north of Plainfield. He walked into the local tavern where Mary Hogan worked. She was a middle-aged woman who looked not unlike Augusta. Gein shot and killed Hogan and dragged her corpse out into the snow.
He loaded onto a sled and took it back to his farmhouse. There he dropped her off with an ax and turned her body parts into furniture. Hogan’s murder, it marked a major step for Gein, but it wasn’t the most truly disturbing thing that he had yet done. By the winter of 1954, Gein’s activities in his lonely farmhouse had crossed into the most demonic territory. The things Gein did to the bodies he stole. It almost defies comprehension. He sawed off the tops of women’s severed heads to turn their skulls into Soup Bowls. He stuffed their faces and hung them on walls like hunting trophies. Beneath his bed
There are also rumors that two of these severed vulvas appeared to belong to girls below the age of 15, perhaps even more perversely, Gein uses people’s bodies to tailor his own clothes. There are credible stories of police finding a belt made of human flesh, and Gein’s house buckles with human nipples. There are legs turned into tights and corsets that are fashion from the skin. Freakiest of all Ed Gein took the torso of one woman and turned it into a tan’s jacket, complete with a heavy pair of breasts. On a moonlit night. He would wear it alongside a mask of skin and dance around outside the cold blue night of the moon, casting strange shadows on his twirling and mutilated form.
After he was caught Gein would tell investigators that it always secretly wanted to be a woman. But judging from what we know of Gein’s crimes and his victims, it seems more likely that he secretly wanted to be one woman his mother. Over the next three years, Gein’s madness grew in silence, away from the eyes of Plainfield residents. In the cemetery, the corpses of large middle-aged women continued to disappear, their empty tombs unnoticed by their blissfully ignorant families. Finally, as winter settled over Wisconsin once more, Gein’s demons, got the better of him.
On November 16th, 1957, 58-year-old Bernice Worden was opening up her hardware store in Plainfield when Gein stepped inside and shot her dead. With the town nearly empty for the start of hunting season. Gein was able to sneak Worden’s body out his car and drive her back to his farm unnoticed he had big plans for his latest victim plans that would utilize all of his dubious skills. Little did he know that the woman’s body already cooling in the back of his car, would be the one that ended his reign of terror.
Ed Gein Arrested and his horror house
On November 15th, Frank Worden decided to drop by his mom’s hardware store in the center of Plainfield. A sheriff’s deputy, Frank was trained to notice people acting suspiciously and there were a few people in town who acted quite suspiciously as Plainfield resident weirdo Ed Gein’s. The day that Frank stopped him on his mom, he noticed Gein lurking around the store. At the time, Frank pushed it from his mind, but 24 hours later it was back at the forefront. It was 5 p.m. on November 16th, and Bernice Worden, she was missing, unlocking her store. Frank found a blonde slick of blood leading to the crisp snow outside.
The last name written in the register of sales was Ed Gein. It was now around eight hours since Gein had shot Bernice Worden dead and Carted her body away. But Frank was only acting on a justified hunch when he called up the station and asked them to investigate the killer. In the back of Frank’s minds, there doubtless must have been a flicker of hope that his mother was still alive. If that thought it ever existed, it was about to be extinguished in the most brutal way possible. Shortly after Frank’s call, Plainfield police arrested Ed Gein as he was coming out of a grocery store. Handyman acted confused like he didn’t know what was going on, but it was too late for games the play was over.
All that remains was its grisly denouement. That night, police carried out a raid on Gein’s farm in the freezing darkness they first searched the barn. What they found there would set the tenor for the rest of the night. Bernice Worden’s corpse was hanging upside down from a beam completely gutted and its head missing so badly it had been mutilated that many of the officers initially thought that her body was that of an animal. Inside the house, things only got worse. The farmhouse Ed once shared with Augusta and Henry had decayed into a toxic swamp refuge littered the floors while fat, bloated flies crawled across every surface.
On the stove Bernice Worden’s heart had sat on a metal pan, ready for cooking human organs. They filled the freezer in a paper bag the head of Mary Hogan grinned up at the investigators now little more than a rotting skull. They found that furniture made from human skin, the mounted heads, the female bodies chopped and torn apart with blind hatred. Finally, just past 4:00 a.m. on the morning of November 17th, someone found Bernice Worden’s head wrapped in a bloodied sack twine had been hammered into a skull. Gein later admitted that he’d intended to use it as a decoration.
After Gein was taken into custody, he remarked casually that he had no idea how many people had killed. It was only when police searched Plainfield Cemetery and found so many empty graves that they came to believe Warden and Hogan were the only victims.
Trial and Death of Ed Gein
On November 21st, 1957, Gein was hauled before Waushara County Court, where he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It didn’t take long for the state of Wisconsin to decide that the feeling was mutual. In January of 1958, Gein was judged mentally unfit to stand trial. He was detained at Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital for the criminally insane. This was the start of incarceration that would last for the rest of his life and perhaps his story would have ended there were not for a very American twist. At Central State Hospital, the countable serial killer gained a reputation for being mild-mannered. He worked as a carpenter, then as a medical orderly.
People found him polite and even kind. After 10 years, Gein was finally declared competent to stand trial. On November 7th, 1968, he was tried for the murder of Bernice Worden. Interestingly, the state didn’t bother to prosecute Gein for Mary Hogan’s death. It was thought that it would waste too much money and that one murder conviction would be enough. Still, Gein freely confessed to the crime. One week later, on November 14th, Gein was found guilty of first-degree murder.
It was almost exactly 11 years to the day that it shot Bernice Worden in cold blood and mutilated her body for his own gratification. Faced with such a crime, you might think that the jury recommended gain for the electric chair, but that didn’t happen. Gein was found to have been insane at the time of Worden’s death, and he was recommitted to Central State Hospital. And that was kind of that Ed Gein did almost nothing of consequence for the rest of his life.
On July 26, 1984, Ed Gein breathed his last in Mendota Mental Health Institute had been carried off by lung cancer aged 77. In a ghoulish twist, his body was interned in the very cemetery that had robbed so many times some 30 years earlier. In the year 2000, someone finally stole Ed Gein‘s tombstone from Plainfield Cemetery. As ironic as the idea is, it does get at something darker as the heart of human nature. Our fascination with the perpetrators of awful acts by simply doing something gruesome Gein managed to become famous in a way that thousands of doctors, scientists, and artists never will. More to the point, he became more famous than his victims.