SHOCKING: The Real-Life “Psycho” Who Wore His Victims’ Skin as a Sunday Suit!
This program contains graphic violence and sexual situations. Viewer discretion is advised. “No.” Two bloody crime scenes. Dozens of empty graves. Someone was going in and digging up corpses. A sick obsession with mother and a suit of human skin. “He starts putting on female skin. Female breasts. Actual breasts.”
A plot from a Hollywood horror film. This is a terrifying true story. Monsters are real. And the scary thing is they look just like you and I. The actual events that inspired the movie Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and many more stories of terror behind the screams. Small town America, 1954.
It’s a time of peace and prosperity in rural Plainfield, Wisconsin, a town of less than 800 people. By early evening, most of the locals have settled in for the night, but a dim light still shines inside one local tavern. The owner, Mary Hogan, is busy cleaning up after a long day of work. She’s a tough, outspoken woman who can hold her own against drunk and disorderly patrons. There’s just one person left in her bar.
As he quietly sips his coffee, she goes about her routine. “You have enough coffee over there.” What she doesn’t realize inside this man, a flame of cruelty and hatred is burning, slowly growing more intense and more deadly. Watching Mary intently, the man reaches inside his jacket for a cold metal object, an instrument of death.
The next morning, the middle-aged bar owner is nowhere to be found. The peace of Plainfield is shattered. It’s a crime that will one day inspire countless horror films. A violent attack that sends waves of terror throughout the entire community. Why would anyone want to hurt Mary Hogan? And is the assailant someone living here in Plainfield? “I think when you look at individuals and small communities, they tend to believe that they know everybody, that they know everything that’s going on.”
“They’re typically long-term families that have lived there, and they see the big city as that place where crime happens and there’s a lot of violence, very, very different from the location in which they live. So anytime you have violent crime in a small community like that, it’s going and especially really aberrant violent crime, it’s going to have a huge impact on the public there.”
The job of finding Mary Hogan falls on Sheriff Harold S. Thompson, nicknamed Topper. He’s a tough, serious man. A father of 12 children. Although he’s a veteran peacekeeper, he’s only been assigned as sheriff temporarily. Used to settling misdemeanors and local disputes, violent crime is something entirely new for Topper.
“Most of these investigators and police officers were appointed. They have very little training, so they don’t have any experience working cases like this. It becomes a daunting task when they’re faced with a disappearance of an individual.” Arriving at the scene, Sheriff Thompson pushes open the door to Mary’s Tavern and immediately sees the bloody signs of a violent struggle.
He scans for anything out of place. A cash box lays empty on the counter. But something tells him this is something far more sinister than a robbery. “In every crime scene, you have something that is being targeted by the suspect. The problem with this crime scene is that you’ve got missing cash from the scene, but you also have a missing body from the scene.”
“Typically, in a robbery, we’re looking for the thing that’s being taken. It’s going to be cash. It’s going to be some sense of valuables, some object perhaps. But when a body is missing, it’s clear that the target is not just property. It’s a person.” Thompson finds a single bullet casing resting ominously on the floor.
Clear evidence. The pool of blood is from a gunshot wound. On the bar, a spilled coffee mug sits upright, marked with a bloody fingerprint. Thompson wonders, “Does this print belong to the killer?” “A bloody fingerprint at the scene is really important to us because it indicates it’s probably been left at the time of the crime.”
“But remember, in the 50s, we don’t have the same kind of database as we have today. A fingerprint database is going to be very, very thin, if at all. Without a known suspect with fingerprints in custody, there’s nothing to match.” Bloody drag marks lead from the bar through the red puddle on the floor toward a door. Outside the trail ends at a set of tire tracks. “Every crime scene hopefully leaves you with some form of forensic evidence. In this particular situation, inside you’ve got blood smears from the body being dragged and outside you’ve got tire tracks.”
“The problem, of course, is you’re going to have to have a series of tires to match the tracks to. So, it may have some investigative value for you along the way, but more importantly, it’ll have value once you find the guy who has the tires.” Sheriff Thompson is baffled by the senseless crime. Without a body, he has no way of knowing if this is a kidnapping or a killing. Witnesses who left the bar the previous day say that Mary locked up at around 4:30 in the afternoon.
But the evidence suggests that sometime later she let her attacker inside and made him a cup of coffee. The assailant was probably someone she knew very well. Recognizing his lack of experience and need for help, Sheriff Thompson calls the crime lab in nearby Madison to inspect the scene. “Yeah. Hey, Ron. This is Sheriff Thompson down here at the sheriff station. If you don’t have expertise and you haven’t worked a ton of these scenes, there’s probably going to be something you miss. And that’s why smaller agencies will sometimes call a larger agency that has experience doing a number of homicides. You have a better chance of catching that missing detail.”
Thompson also starts a list of potential suspects. Mary Hogan had no known enemies, but her past is shrouded in mystery. Twice divorced, she moved to Plainfield from Chicago. Some locals believe she may have managed a big city brothel. There’s even talk around town that Mary had ties to the mob. Was Mary in trouble with the mafia? And if so, did they follow her all the way to Plainfield to take her out? “There’s a kind of a history and a period of time in America when the mob, loosely referred to organized crime, was seen as more influential by investigating agencies. So, at this point, we’re looking at the potential that a mob hit could be in place here at this scene.”
“But there’s a problem with this theory of a mob assassin. Unlike Chicago, Plainfield is a small, close-knit community. People tend to notice when sharply dressed city folk drive into town. Even an average looking stranger couldn’t pass through without being noticed by someone. If it’s a mob-style execution, I would either expect there to be a body still at the scene, executed in a particular fashion, or no body at all. What you have here is a kind of a combination of both, which really doesn’t make sense from the perspective of a mob execution.”
If the mob isn’t responsible for Mary’s disappearance, maybe someone living in Plainfield is to blame. Mary’s outspoken manner could have rubbed a bar patron the wrong way. One possible suspect is a tavern regular, town oddball Ed Gein. It’s common knowledge in Plainfield that the 48-year-old man had a tough upbringing. His father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother, Augusta, was an obsessively puritanical woman. She railed against the pleasures of the flesh. “You can’t trust any of them,” and kept her sons at arms length. A behavior that only made Ed crave her attention more.
It also made him very awkward when it came to women. Ed had made comments about Mary in the past. “So when people are focusing on like who could have done this, why is she gone? What happened to her? Ed’s name sort of surfaces, comes up to the top.” While Ed is considered harmless by everyone in town, he was involved in another bizarre incident. A decade before the Mary Hogan investigation, Ed and his brother Henry Gein were heading out to clear some dry overgrowth from an area close to their home.
The men set a patch of grass ablaze. And as the winds kick up, things quickly get out of hand. They fight to get the blaze under control. And when the flames finally go out, Ed walks out of the field. Alone, he goes straight to a neighbor asking for help to find his brother Henry. But then, strangely, at the scene of the fire, he guides the neighbor directly to his brother’s motionless body.
“As an investigator, if I’m watching Ed bring this group to look for his brother, and he seems to know exactly where to go immediately, is it a coincidence? I’d want to at least eliminate the possibility that he knew where his brother was because he was the last person to see his brother alive. If you’re assembling the most reasonable inference from evidence, this seems very suspicious.”
And there are other puzzling details. Henry’s body and clothing show no sign of burns, and there are mysterious bruises on his head. Ed suggests his brother probably fell and hit his head on a rock. The whole incident is strange, but without proof, the locals accept Ed’s story. A medical examiner says his brother must have died from smoke inhalation. “They’ve talked to Ed and although he’s a bit odd, they don’t really have anything else to go on.”
The reason town folk are so quick to dismiss Gein, even though his behavior is strange, is that he’s known throughout Plainfield for his willingness to help. He works odd jobs, whatever it takes to lend a hand. “People would come to Ed and say, ‘Hey, Ed, can you help me load this? Hey, Ed, can you help me fix this fence?’ And Ed would accommodate them. He would go and do these things sometimes for money, sometimes just because, you know, he was living in this community.”
“He did babysit for a couple of families because Ed is really more comfortable with children than he is with adults. He’s socially undeveloped because he’s lived on this farm his whole life. He’s small. He’s very diminutive stature. He doesn’t appear to be threatening to anybody.” For these same reasons, Sheriff Thompson can’t see Gein as a suspect in Mary Hogan’s disappearance. He turns his attention to other missing person’s cases in the area.
“Sheriff Thompson, this is the file you’re looking for.” “Thanks, Daisy.” “When you have those types of incidents in a small geographic location, the likelihood that they are not connected is small. When investigators are looking at this particular case, there are several people at the time who are missing within a time frame relatively similar.”
“And what you’re doing when you have a number of people who are missing of this nature is you’re trying to find the common thread. Is there something about each victim that’s so common that you could attribute them to the same suspect? Do they seem like they could be actually connected to one another in some way? Are they connected geographically? Are they connected because of the same age, the same sex?” The sheriff uncovers three missing person’s cases that have all gone unsolved. And they all happened within 2 hours of Plainfield.
Case number one, an 8-year-old girl, Georgia Weckler, went missing walking less than a half mile home from school. She disappeared in broad daylight. Case number two, 42-year-old Victor Travis and his friend Ray Burgess went off into the woods near Plainfield to hunt deer. No trace of the men or their car was ever found. Finally, case number three, just one year before Mary Hogan’s disappearance, teen Evelyn Hartley was babysitting a small child when she vanished.
Just one of her tennis shoes was left at the scene of the crime. “There is blood found at the scene where she disappears. There’s apparent drag marks. It looks like she was injured at that location and removed from the location. It’s very similar to Mary Hogan. Injured at the location and removed.” Thompson notes that in each case, huge search parties combed nearly every inch of the surrounding landscape, looking for any sign of what happened to these missing girls and men. But after days and weeks of searching, nothing.
There’s only one lead in the Georgia Weckler case. A dark Ford sedan seen once on the road leading to Georgia’s home and again later in town. But is this enough to catch a criminal? “At best, a description of a Ford, especially if it’s very generic in its description, is only going to give you a piece of circumstantial evidence you could later put in part of a cumulative case. But it’s not going to be like that one ‘aha’ moment where you say, ‘Wow, only one person in town owns a Ford.’ In a community like this where so many Fords are present, there’s no way to connect the Ford to any one particular individual in that community. It’s just going to be one piece of a larger puzzle.”
One witness claimed he saw a young girl in the back seat pleading to go home and a man shoving her down out of sight. Then the car was gone. But was Georgia the young girl in the back seat? Was this a drifter kidnapping people for ransom or for some other evil purpose? And has the drifter returned? Thompson pursues the evidence and it just doesn’t add up: young Georgia Weckler, teen Evelyn Hartley, the male hunters, and middle-aged Mary Hogan.
If one man committed all these crimes, he has no clear method or motive. “In this case, you’ve got a middle-aged woman, you’ve got two young girls, and you’ve got two hunters that are part of the potential missings that people are looking at, and you’re trying to say to yourself, well, what is it about these five different missing people that is similar or dissimilar?”
“There’s a lot of differences here between these five missing persons. I think if we were to look at these crimes in present day, of course, we might say that there may be some connection, especially in these small communities. We’re talking hundreds of people. They might refer to this as sort of a serial crime. Again, we don’t have any bodies, so we don’t even know that there’s homicides. All we have are disappearances of individuals. We suspect there’s been foul play because there’s blood at a couple of these scenes, but all we have is that they’ve disappeared.”
With no strong suspects in the latest disappearance of tavern owner Mary Hogan, Sheriff Topper Thompson sets his sights on hunting down the assailant’s vehicle. He used it to transport his victim. Matching the tracks found at the scene is the best lead he has. “It’s not unusual to have a crime scene where you don’t have a lot of physical evidence, just a few small things, and you do the best you can with what you have. And in this particular case, we’ve got tire tracks.”
“Unfortunately, it’s a lot of work to go from tire track to specific suspect with that tire. In some ways, all evidence can be divided into two categories: evidence that leads you directly to a suspect and evidence that once you have a suspect can connect you to a crime. Tire tracks are more in the second category. I can’t use a tire track and immediately tell you who the suspect is. But if you can give me the suspect who’s got a car, I can match the car in reverse to the tire track.”
Thompson goes farm by farm looking for any suspicious cars, trucks, or people. But each location leads to a new dead end. Either the assailant left town or he’s very good at covering his tracks. “If we’re going to start with the tire track, we got to ask the question, am I looking for a local suspect? This is a huge county and there are dozens, hundreds of cars. If it’s somebody who drove through, all of that work could be for nothing.”
Adding to the challenge in this small farming community, Sheriff Thompson has limited resources and manpower. The properties are spread out over acres. Covering every inch is nearly impossible. “In any murder investigation, you’re asking a question: Is this a single event or is this a connected series of events? Is this part of a series of murders or just one particular murder? If it’s part of a series, you’re trying to ask yourself the question, what’s driving the killer?”
What the sheriff doesn’t know is that right here in once peaceful Plainfield, a place of honest labor and holy worship, a deviant mind is committing acts even more twisted than murder. Under cover of darkness, the predator stalks not only the living, but the dead in local cemeteries. Armed with a shovel and lantern, this deviant mind is searching for something inside human graves. Digging up a freshly buried coffin, he opens the lid, takes what he needs, then fills the hole again, leaving no sign that anything ever happened, and he does it over and over.
The most chilling part: this thief isn’t looking for hidden treasure. He wants the corpses themselves, especially the females. “Every theft scene has a target, something that the suspect is interested in, which is why the theft is occurring. In grave robbing, you have to ask the question, what is being targeted? Is it property? Is it jewelry? Is it clothing? Or is it something more sinister? Is it the actual body that’s in the grave? In this particular case, it doesn’t appear that property is the target. Instead, it’s the bodies.”
He’s a selective thief. He’s stolen whole bodies before, but sometimes he takes just an arm, a leg, or even a head. What macabre purpose could all these dead bodies possibly serve? “Digging up corpses suggests some kind of paraphilic behavior. Whether it’s necrophilia, having sex with the bodies, whether it’s voyeurism, wanting to look at the dead bodies. In this case, the bodies that were being dug up were basically middle-aged women. So, we’ve got a certain type of individual that’s being dug up.”
These nightly activities have gone unnoticed for years. The thief only visits fresh graves, leaving them just as he found them. It’s an act no one could possibly believe is happening in Plainfield. But things will never be the same in this town ever again. Three years after the disappearance of Mary Hogan, Sheriff Topper Thompson has moved on. And there’s a new sheriff in charge. His name is Art Schley.
Schley is as baffled by Mary’s case as his predecessor. But all that is about to change. Late one morning, hardware store owner Bernice Worden is checking inventory with her son, Frank, when Ed Gein shows up. “Morning, Frank. Hi, Bernice.” “Morning, Ed. How are you today?” “Oh, can’t complain. Say Bernice, would you?” Gein invites Bernice to go out roller skating. “Oh, I don’t know, Ed. Store’s keeping me pretty busy these days.”
He’s asked before and she’s always said no. When she declines, “Yeah, Ed, we’re pretty busy stocking up here.” He turns to Frank. “Bet you’re still going deer hunting tomorrow, right, Frank?” “Crack of dawn. Couldn’t miss that.” “Bernice, I need a gallon of antifreeze. I’ll come by tomorrow and get it.” “Okay, Ed. I’ll make a note of that. See you tomorrow.”
Around 4:00 the next day. “Sheriff Schley, Art, it’s Frank. I need you to come down to the store right now.” “Well, Frank, calm down. What’s going on?” Sheriff Schley gets a panic phone call from Frank. He asks the sheriff to rush over to the store, that something has happened to his mother, and he thinks he knows who’s responsible. “Ed Gein, I need you to get down here right now, Art.” “All right. All right, Frank. Calm down. I’ll be there in a sec.”
Entering the store, Sheriff Schley is immediately struck by how similar it looks to the Mary Hogan crime scene three years earlier. “Something’s wrong, Art. Look, there’s blood on the floor.” Frank tells Schley when he got back from deer hunting, his mother was gone. The cash register was missing and one of the rifles for sale had a spent cartridge still inside the chamber. “Okay. Well, it could have been a robbery.” “I don’t think so. I think it was Ed Gein.”
Sheriff Schley scans the scene. He sees bloody streaks on the shop floor. It indicates Bernice was dragged away, but this clue won’t help to identify the assailant. “In the 1950s, we don’t have the technology that’s available to us today and the technology to collect certain forms of evidence for DNA or blood typing or any other forensic comparisons.”
Luckily, that’s not the only clue. “Look right here.” Frank shows Sheriff Schley the most critical piece of evidence: a sales receipt for antifreeze, the same item Gein had inquired about the day before. “Bernice’s son, although he’s not a homicide detective, not trained that way, he’s got a real motivation. He’s got an avid interest, number one, in this kind of a crime scene, but number two, this is his mom that’s missing. He’s motivated in a way that most homicide detectives aren’t.”
Immediately, Sheriff Schley’s mind starts racing. He reviews the evidence left in the store and a vision of the horrible attack starts to take shape. With Frank out hunting all morning, Bernice would have been all alone when Ed returned to Worden’s hardware store. “Hi, Bernice.” “Hey, Ed. I’ve got that antifreeze you wanted.” Bernice keeps rifles behind the counter for sale. All Ed needs to do is find a way to get Bernice to the back. “Here you go.” “Hey.” “Almost forgot.” He could make his move. “Um, I have to do some work on the shed today. So, I need some four penny nails.” “Oh, okay. I have those in back, so just hang on a minute.”
Slipping behind the counter, he could quickly grab an unloaded rifle off the wall and quietly step back into the front of the store. His next step is proof this attack must have been premeditated. With no ammo on display, he must have brought his own cartridge. Pulling the bullet from his jacket pocket, he could silently load the weapon and wait for his victim to return. “Okay, Ed, I got the nails you wanted. How many of them you—” As Bernice made her way to the front of the store, she had no way to know. Ed was seething with anger. “You should have gone roller skating with me, Bernice.” “Ed. No.”
Schley speculates Gein could have removed the cash register to disguise the true nature of his crime, the same trick used before when Mary Hogan vanished. But are the two crimes truly related? And is Gein really a monster living in plain sight? “So, here we have another scene. A missing female, gunshot wound, blood at the scene, the body is missing. Very interesting and very distinct MO and it’s very similar to what happened to Mary earlier. These two crimes appear to be connected.”
Immediately, Sheriff Schley picks up his partner, Dan Chase, and the hunt is on. The officers quickly locate Gein outside a neighbor’s home. They approach carefully. He could be armed and dangerous. “So, as a detective, when you’re approaching somebody you think may be a suspect in their crime, is this guy going to be armed? You’ve really planned these things out in your mind. So, as you make the approach, you’re making it safely and you’re making it tactically.”
“I want you to slow down for a sec.” One of the officers asks Gein to tell him where he’s been all day. “What did you do today?” Gein says he’s just been doing chores and “I found some wood at um Al Grady’s ranch.” “Okay.” And then that’s when they use a common law enforcement trick to get to the truth. “I was walking here.” “Hey, why don’t you start from the top again?” They ask Gein to repeat what he said. “And um I found some wood at um this this Smith ranch.”
“The best tactic to use if you’re trying to determine if someone is telling the truth is simply to have them tell you the same story over and over again.” “The Owen place.” “Ask the question from a slightly different angle.” “Smith place.” “And as you listen to the response, you’re listening for the slight variation.” “The place. Smith place would indicate that this person’s not telling you the truth.” Gein can’t remember the lies he’s told. His story changes. He’s up to no good then. “No, no. I’ve been framed.” Gein’s mind collapses. After years of murder and mayhem, perhaps the guilt, perhaps the sheer evil must come out. “Calm down, Ed. All right. What have you been framed for?” “Mrs. Worden.” “You say Mrs. Worden, Ed.” “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
At this point, not even the police know for sure what happened to Bernice. They arrest Gein on the spot and take him to jail. With Gein in custody, Sheriff Schley and Officer Chase race to search the Gein family farm. There’s no time to lose. This secluded property 9 miles from town stretches over 95 acres and Bernice could be anywhere. They begin just a short drive off the road at Ed Gein’s very dark and forbidding home. Many of the local children believe it’s haunted by an evil spirit. They have no idea how right they are.
The officers slowly move toward the building looking for a way in. “They can actually enter the residence if they have a sense there’s a possibility that somebody’s still alive, is injured, is in dire need of help. It’s exigent circumstances. That’s the motivation they have to actually enter the house.” They notice a shed in the back of the home. Schley can see the door only has a rickety latch. He lifts his foot up and kicks hard. “Get ready.”
“Anytime you walk into a scene like this, you have a kind of a tension between discovery and danger. You know, you have a sense that I’m going to discover something that’s powerful that’s going to make this case. Maybe I’ll even discover Bernice alive. That would be great. There’s always a sense of danger, too. You don’t know that Ed Gein is acting alone. You don’t know what’s going to be in there, who’s going to be in there. You can walk in and get ambushed. So, as you’re walking into a scene like this, you’re always on the edge of your seat. You’re always on guard.”
The officer’s flashlight beams reveal trash everywhere. But what they’re about to see, they could never imagine and will never forget. As Schley turns to search the corner, he feels something heavy brush against him, something hanging from the ceiling. It’s a human body. “Oh god.” Bernice Worden, loving mother, widow, and respected business owner, hangs upside down, beheaded, and split down the middle. The way a deer is butchered after a hunt. “Jesus.” It’s the revolting act of a sick, perverted mind.
“No matter how tough you think you are as a cop, and most of us when we train, we think we’re pretty tough about these kinds of things, especially if you’re working homicides. Some scenes are worse than others. And here you have the most horrific scene, one of the worst scenes in the history of homicides.” He reacts like probably most of us would, runs out of the room and throws up. “When you look at it, it’s not a crime of passion. There clearly is a plan here. It’s done in a very methodical way.”
“Her feet are spread apart on a bar. She’s been hoisted up by a block and tackle. Her hands have been tied to her sides. She has been essentially eviscerated, opened up from her sternum all the way up to her pubic bone and all of her internal organs are gone. And of course, we’re talking about police officers who have never seen anything like this. They look at Bernice and they’re not even sure if it’s Bernice or not because the corpse doesn’t have a head.”
It’s clear that he had done this kind of activity before. Clearly, he was skilled at it. And Bernice isn’t Ed Gein’s only trophy. Inside the main home, his demented decorations are everywhere: parts of bodies, women’s skulls, and hidden under a burlap sack, the face of Mary Hogan turned into a horrifying mask. “You were wondering, well, why would he do this? Why is he collecting all of these different body parts? I mean, this really goes to this psychosis that Ed has.”
But Ed Gein’s greatest prize is the one that truly gives a glimpse into the psyche of a madman. Propped up in a dusty, cluttered room, Schley finds a full body garment Gein had sewn from human skin. He wore this suit to become female. “Ed has still got this fixation on his mother. At some point fairly shortly after her death, Ed is actually believing that he has the power to will her back to life, bring her back from the dead. And when he can’t do that, he essentially recreates her in himself.”
“He starts putting on female skin, female breasts, actual breasts. Starts wearing a vagina and actually dancing around out at night in the moonlight. I mean, it’s a very macabre kind of very creepy scene, but from a psychotic standpoint, what you really see is Ed trying to become his mother.” Seeing this house of horrors, Sheriff Schley comes up with a possible motive in the murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. To Ed Gein, his mother Augusta was a saintly figure, incorruptible and free of sin.
And though Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden reminded him of his mother, in his eyes, they were the opposite. They brought out something inside him that Augusta fought all her life to suppress: Gein’s manly lust. “I can’t believe you looked at that horrible girl, Cindy. You have to learn.” He wanted these women. And this urge went against everything he’d been raised to believe. It drove him to insane violence. “When his mother died, it was devastating for Ed. He lost not only his very best friend, but he lost his support structure. Ed, I think, essentially was socially and emotionally lost at that point.”
Gein’s clothing made of human flesh, his bloody crimes, and his childish simpleton’s grin horrify and mystify the public. How could a man like this exist? “The psychology of Ed Gein is fascinating to me. What drove him to take these two victims when he did years apart and what he did in the middle of all those years? It really seems that Ed is far more fascinated with the parts he got from the murders than the actual victims themselves. Clearly Ed is psychotic. He has serious mental health problems.”
“And it’s the mental illnesses. It’s the way he perceived his thinking patterns about his mother and his activities that drives his crimes. And we can see you have an individual who’s digging up corpses. He’s cutting out vaginas. He’s cutting off breasts. He’s cutting off the skin. He’s cutting off the skull and taking off the hair on the skull. He’s wearing it. He’s making clothing out of a woman’s skin. This is incredibly aberrant behavior, but his crimes are driven by this severe mental illness.”
Sheriff Art Schley, overcome by the atrocities he witnessed inside Gein’s home, can’t contain his anger. “What are you doing?” “I don’t know.” He attacks Gein in his jail cell, repeatedly slamming him against a wall. Hoping he can force Gein to confess to murder. He never does. Gein maintained his innocence throughout the murder trial. In court, he claimed he killed Bernice Worden by accident, that the sight of blood made him faint. He couldn’t recall how she came to be hanging in his home.
So where did he get the huge array of human body parts police found in his home? He says he pulled them from local graves. “He’s admitting to the police that he has engaged in digging up corpses from local cemeteries. Some he took with him, some he returned, some he removed body parts from, some he was skinning, but he’s engaged with these dead individuals, all women. And it’s so unusual for people because for the time in 1957, the baseline of behavior isn’t what we have today. We don’t have 24-hour, 7-day a week news. And it was so unusual, so bizarre that it just captured the national audience.”
Although he was ultimately found guilty of murder, he never saw the inside of a prison cell. Labeled insane, he spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. “There are only three things that motivate any homicide: financial greed, sexual or relational lust, and the pursuit of power. But there’s a fourth category we have to assess and that is: is just crazy. Is somebody so insane that they’re not even motivated by anything. They’re just doing it without a motivation because they’re crazy.”
“This is something we have to assess especially when we come to trial. Were they able to make free choices and they were driven by one of these three things they could have resisted or are they just so crazy they couldn’t make a free choice? I think that he was very mentally disturbed and there’s no question when he is interviewed by a number of psychiatrists and psychologists that they all are in agreement that he is psychotic and they describe him as schizophrenic which is clearly I think the case when you look at Ed Gein’s history.”
“I think that the delusions that he had and perhaps some of the auditory hallucinations, this severe mental illness, had him acting in ways that we might characterize them as evil. But I would say that when you’re talking about psychopaths, people who understand the difference between right and wrong and simply choose to do wrong, that is probably an individual that I would describe as more evil.”
It was an unsatisfying end for the people of Plainfield. With no way to strike out at Gein the man, they wreaked their vengeance on Gein’s family home, burning it to the ground. But even after he died in a mental hospital 27 years after his arrest, the memory of his horrible crimes lived on. Buried in his family plot, Gein’s tombstone was vandalized repeatedly. Authorities finally placed it in storage for safekeeping.
Ed Gein turned life in Plainfield, Wisconsin on its head. Media poured in for the trials, for all the attention in these very aberrant homicide cases. National attention, international attention. The world had its eye focused on Plainfield, Wisconsin, and the residents there. They were never going to be the same because in their minds and in their hearts they realized, “Can I really know if there’s not another Ed Gein out here? Someone that I know who could be doing the same thing.”
“The attention from 1957 to present day never left Plainfield, Wisconsin. It always has that moniker as the city that grew the monster Ed Gein, the psychotic monster that was digging up graves and cutting up women and wearing women’s clothing and, you know, a house full of vaginas and breasts and lamps and chairs made out of human skin. That community will always be known for that and not for the people that were in the community. And I think that was very difficult for them to deal with. They never wanted that focus.”
But the legacy of Ed Gein will never die. He put a face on true horror. And the most shocking thing is how plain and simple that face of terror truly is. Monsters are real. And the scary thing is they look just like you and I. In 1959, just 2 years after Gein’s arrest, Wisconsin native Robert Bloch published the book Psycho. In it, the main character Norman Bates, obsessed with his late mother, kills victim after victim in the small town of Fairvale.
The film adaptation of Bloch’s novel is one of the most famous horror films of all time. And behind it all is Ed Gein. A man who could have gone unnoticed by the world if it weren’t for his sick appetite for female flesh and a bizarre obsession with his mother. “In many ways, Ed Gein was a very ordinary guy. He lived alongside his victims for years before they became his victims. I think that’s what’s so shocking about Ed Gein’s case is it’s horrifying to think that there’s somebody who could be just like us, looks like us, lives with us, interacts with us, and in the end becomes a predator of us. And that’s why I think Ed Gein has lived on in infamy as the face of evil.”
Two bloody murders, a grave robber that steals human bodies, and a suit sewn from female flesh. These things shouldn’t be real, but they are. It’s the true story of Ed Gein, a psycho, the ghoul of Plainfield, behind the screams.
