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
