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Once again, we are going to take a walk on the dark side of the human psyche. So far,
we’ve covered perhaps the most well-known serial killer in Jack the Ripper, the most
beastly in Ted Bundy, and now we are about to enter the realm of perhaps the weirdest
savage ever to hold a place in the serial killer Hall of Infamy. He was the inspiration
behind the Hitchcock classic movie, “Psycho”, as well as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,”
and, to some extent, “The Silence of the Lambs”. There hasn’t really been anyone
that shocked the world as much as this guy, just ask the cops that discovered his house
of horrors – the ones that didn’t succumb to a nervous breakdown, anyway. If you haven’t
heard of him, you’re in for a surprise, so welcome to this episode of the Infographics
Show, America's strangest serial killer - Ed Gein.
First of all we should say that Mr. Gein was not close to someone like Ted Bundy on the
nasty scale, nor was he as brutal as Jack the Ripper or as despicable as H. H. Holmes.
If anything, the man was warped beyond comprehension. Also known as, “The Butcher of Plainfield”,
Gein was no doubt mentally ill to an unfathomable degree.
So, many of you will have heard of the movie Psycho. It’s rather old and most likely
older than most of you watching. You might have heard of the series The Bates Motel,
which is based on that movie.
Well, the main character in the movie was based on Ed Gein, and indeed Gein was said
to have been brought up in an abusive family with a very oppressive and hyper-religious
mother. He was born on August 27, 1906, in a place called La Crosse, Wisconsin. According
to serial killer websites, Gein had a beleaguered childhood, having to listen to his mother’s
frantic preaching regarding sin and lust and the inevitable hell that they lead to. It’s
said his childhood was very isolated and he had few friends. He had a brother, who died
in an accident when Gein was still young (some people have conjectured that Gein killed him,
but there’s no proof). People have ventured that Gein, being the shy and weaker brother,
killed his sibling and this could be compared to the Old Testament thriller, Cain and Abel.
But let’s stick with what we know.
One bio tells us at school he rarely socialized, although we are told, “His teachers remembered
that he had demonstrated queer mannerisms, such as laughing randomly.” Later in life,
his family moved to a farm, and there Gein became even more isolated. His mother may
have been strict, but it’s said Gein was obsessed with her; he adored her. She told
him that having relationships with women was a sin, and that all other women besides herself
were prostitutes, and dating them essentially meant being in league with Satan himself.
This was not a good start for young Ed, especially if you’ve read Freud on overbearing mothers.
Gein’s father died, and so it was just him and the zealous mother. But then she had a
stroke and Gein ended up having to look after her. He took odd jobs around town and was
known as a quiet, decent guy who was reliable when you wanted something fixed. Apparently,
he was quite a capable handyman.
His devotion to his mother was unerring, but it’s said that Gein had become fascinated
with stories about Nazis and cannibals, which he read in various books and death-cult magazines.
His mother then passed away in 1945, leaving Ed alone on the farm. It’s said he kept
the rooms where she had stayed in the same condition, and locked them so they would stay
that way. He continued working his odd jobs and doing work on the farm, but a few years
after his mother’s death, Gein took up a new hobby. To some extent, that hobby was
trying to become her. Now for the gruesome part.
As we said, Gein was not a prolific serial killer, but what he did do makes up for the
low body count. In 1957, a woman that worked at a local hardware store went missing. Her
name was Bernice Worden. Her son told police that one of the last people to be seen in
the store with her was none other than the habitual hat-wearing Mr. Gein. He was arrested
shortly after and police received a warrant to check-out the Gein farm.
This is not one of those serial killer stories with twists and turns, because the cops found
what they were looking for immediately upon searching the farm. That was Mrs. Worden’s
dead body – shot with a .22-caliber rifle – hung upside down in a shed like an animal.
The torso had been what’s called in hunting “dressed out”, meaning it was opened and
the organs had been taken out. The body was also mutilated from head to toe. Captain Lloyd
Schoephoester, who saw this grizzly sight said, “Tendons in the ankles had been cut
and a rod had been placed through them. The body was drawn up in the air by a block and
tackle. The body was dressed out and the head was missing.” Her head was later found in
a burlap sack. Ed had a thing for heads, as you shall see.
This was obviously a sickening sight for the deputy that found the body, but inside the
house police got the shock of their lives. As we said, he liked to keep the heads of
his victims. Police found 5 heads inside plastic bags, as well as four skulls. But more stomach
churning, they also found masks, whereby Gein had carefully cut off the faces and kept them
in tact so he could wear them. One police officer told the press, “Some of them have
lipstick on and look perfectly natural…If you knew them, you’d be able to recognize
them.” In fact, Gein was a handyman in many ways, and we are not talking about fixing
creaking doors.
Police found all sorts of things, and not just human remains. Gein had made lamp shades,
chair covers and wastebaskets out of human skin. He had human skulls sitting atop bed
posts, and in the kitchen you could find bowls made from skulls. A la Psycho, he’d made
a skin corset that he could get into, and thereby be a woman, or more specifically,
his mother. He didn’t leave out the bottom half, having made leggings out of skin as
well as skin socks. Perhaps his piece de resistance in terms of fashionable items was a belt made
from women’s nipples. He also had a collection of noses and vulvas. If Ed wanted, he could
become a woman by wearing all of this. But it wasn’t all about dressing up; he even
had lips he could grab hold of on the end of curtain draw strings. According to one
website, Gein would wear a death mask and the skin clothes and then go and dance around
in the garden with his costume on. We cannot confirm this, though. It doesn’t really
matter, because Gein admitted he liked to wear the suit to become his mother, so just
the thought of him watching TV in his face mask and skin suit is horrifying enough.
Now, Gein didn’t kill people for all of his handy work. He told police that much of
his raw material was gathered by robbing local graves. He did, however, admit to at least
one more murder, and he was suspected of having killed more women. A famous quote of Gein
was this: “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part
wants to be real nice and sweet, and the other part wonders what her head would look like
on a stick.” Well, some websites, and even the movie American Psycho, attribute this
to Gein, but other websites tell us it was another strange killer named Ed Kemper that
said it.
Such strangeness and brutality left its mark on Plainfield, which would never be plain
again. Many people say the sheriff of the town died fairly young as a direct result
of the trauma from investigating this case. In fact, one of the sheriff’s friends said,
“He was a victim of Ed Gein as surely as if he had butchered him.”
Gein was unsurprisingly found by the courts to be insane; he was diagnosed with schizophrenia
and a severe Oedipus complex. He died in 1984 from lung cancer in Mendota Mental Health
Institute. It’s thought he said this about his time in one mental institution, “I like
this place, everybody treats me nice, some of them are a little crazy though.”
He was buried in Plainfield, although it’s said parts of his grave are now missing because
people wanted to take a souvenir home with them when they visited.
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