While the rest of America ushered in rock n’ roll and just about everybody liked Ike, Ed Gein was busy in his Wisconsin farmhouse making his own little world…out of assorted body parts.
To say Ed Gein was a nut and leave it at that is like saying Adolf Hitler was a “bad man.” Ed Gein is the quintessential nut. In fact, almost every serial killer and necrophiliac in modern horror movies is based on Ed Gein to one degree or the other. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, Silence of the Lambs, and the film Psycho are only a few. Take a look at the horror section in the book store or in your Netflix account. Any time some psycho poses dead bodies or finds and improved uses for human skin, there’s a little bit of Ed Gein there.
As with every horror legend, people always wonder “Was he as bad as everyone says?” People believe media sensationalized it, exaggerating his deeds to sell some photos and copy to Life magazine. Nope. He did it all. Pretty much every dark thing your secret imagination can concoct, Ed Gein did. And the things your imagination refuses to come up with because they are so terrible…he did those too.
A Boy and His Mother
Ed Gein grew up under the righteous thumb of his mother, a Bible-thumping woman who preached from the Old Testament and loved to share graphic stories about the wrath of God. Little Eddie grew up with those stories, listening to them every afternoon in between farm chores and, like any future serial killer, rarely strayed far from his mother’s side. He had no real friends or relationships to speak of outside of his home and was the target of much teasing at school. He was a small boy and quite effeminate, something rarely shown in movies but noticed by people that knew him even as he grew up. Almost everyone that knew Ed said he seemed nice enough, but he had this unsettling stare and smirk that made many people keep their distance. Many people knew Ed, but almost no one would admit to being a friend of his. And as long as Ed had his mother, he seemed to be just fine with this.
After the loss of his father and brother, Ed and his mother lived in their own little world in a Plainsfield, Wisconsin farmhouse. Her presence seemed to keep his unsettled mind in check. For less than a year he lived alone with his mother, nursing her through illnesses, until she eventually died from a series of strokes. That last social link severed, Ed Gein proceeded to close off the entire farmhouse, leaving it as a deranged shrine to his mother, and took only the kitchen and another small room. For over ten years, these few hundred square feet would become his little deranged world.
Naughty, Naughty Ed
Ed supported himself through a series of small jobs. Strangely enough, he did not shy from the public when finding work. He was a school bus driver. He babysat kids, who loved when he would share true-life horror stories with them. He routinely dined in the home of others. Almost everyone had something good to say about him. He even had a young kid that came over to hang out with the affable Ed from time to time. Later on, this kid would tell police that Ed showed him his collection of shrunken heads from the Philippines. These shrunken heads would turn out to be from the nearby graveyard rather than the Pacific. Ed had become quite good at shrinking and stretching human skin over the years. Like everyone else this young boy had nothing but nice things to say about Ed. But, of course, he did not say Ed was exactly a friend.
The precise time that Ed started committing his unusual crimes is unclear, although Ed himself was very forthcoming with information when interviewed by police. He regularly made trips to a local graveyard and would dig up the bodies of recently deceased women, after spotting them in his favorite newspaper section: the obituaries. His trips to the graveyard sometimes resulted in him removing an entire body, sometimes just assorted parts. After taking these parts to his farmhouse, he would turn into a rather ingenious artist. He turned skulls into soup bowls and upholstered several chairs in human skin. Several of the heads he shrunk (just like in those cannibal stories he liked to read) and then decorated his home with them. A stylish new belt was decorated with a string of female nipples. His bed itself had four skulls on the bedposts…and a shoebox full of vulvae underneath.
When recounting these crimes, Ed was asked whether he performed any sexual acts with these body parts. After all, his entire set of crimes was a Freudian nightmare. Ed was adamant and said he never did anything like that with the bodies since they “smelled too bad.” Somehow, that makes it sound worse and doctors still considered this crimes to be sexual in nature, whether or not the man had intercourse with the dead or not.
But something in poor Ed was left unsatisfied. After all, dead bodies were no fun, even after he got all “Martha Stewart” on them. He wanted fresh meat and developed a fixation on a bar owner named Mary Hogan. She was big and middle-aged, the kind of woman Ed liked. In 1954, the woman disappeared from her bar, never to be seen again. That is, of course, until her head was found in a paper bag in Ed’s farmhouse. With her preserved skin and the skin of his other acquisitions, Ed Gein constructed what would be his dream object: a suit made entirely out of female skin. This “woman suit” allowed Ed to live his ultimate fantasy of wanting to be a woman. Even more disturbing, Ed told police officers how he used to go outside of his farmhouse and dance in the moonlight, donning his woman suit and banging on a drum. When he said it, he told them like he was reciting a grocery list.
Let me repeat, so you get the image burned into your head. This guy liked to put on the skin of dead women and dance in the moonlight, banging a drum.
Ed Gets Stupid
Just as disturbing as the crimes is the fact that Ed was able to get away with it for so long. In fact, he probably could have continued on indefinitely, but Ed Gein was no criminal mastermind. He might be creative when it came to body parts, but when it came to murder, he was pretty sloppy.
He had been eyeballing a middle-aged store owner named Bernice Worden for some time because she reminded him of his mother. Yikes. He went into the store, ordered some antifreeze and then promptly shot her with a rifle. After dragging her home, he promptly hung up her up like a deer, gutted her and removed her head. In fact, it was quite expertly done…if you were bringing home some venison. He stuck her head in a burlap sack and then went about his business.
His sloppiness is what did him in. He had stopped by her store the day before and witnesses heard him mention he would return for some of that fine antifreeze she had on sale the next day. When the store was examined after her disappearance, it was discovered that the last entry she made in her ledger was…an order of antifreeze.
Police soon searched his house and the horrors that they found became legendary, including the hanging and headless body of Bernice Worden. Ed was immediately arrested. In fact, one of the interrogating officers slammed Ed’s head into a wall and soon after died of a heart attack, largely because the crimes were so disturbing.
Although he admitted to Bernice Worden’s murder, it took some intense interrogation to get him to admit to Mary Hogan’s. Other disappearances around Plainfield in the last few years also seemed likely crimes for Ed, although no evidence was ever found and Ed never admitted to them. In fact, he only halfheartedly admitted to any crimes. He said he could not recollect most of his deeds, still with that smirk on his grizzled face. Whether this was true or stonewalling, it did not matter. Ed would never smell the air of freedom ever again.
Ed Judged “Nutso” by Courts
Eventually, he was found to be both guilty and, in official terms, a bull goose loony. He spent the rest of his days incarcerated in a mental institute, where he became a model inmate. Several of the female wards complained that while Ed was always polite, he also had this disquieting habit of staring at them for minutes at a time. And he never lost that little smirk on his face.
His home quickly became a media target and photographers constantly tried snapping photos, even after all the evidence and contents were cleaned out. Soon after, the property and Gein’s car were to be auctioned off and when a traveling showman purchased the car to become a sideshow curiosity, the Plainsfield police were afraid the same thing would happen to the home. This terrified them. Luckily, someone came in the dead of night and “accidentally” burned the house to the ground, leaving nothing but ashes.
For ten years after being caught, Ed Gein remained institutionalized. In 1968 he finally was brought to trial. Although the evidence was conclusive and indisputable, Ed Gein was found to have committed the crimes but also acquitted because he was insane at the time. So after ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the courts decided what anyone could have told you: Ed Gein was a freaking nut ball. He was placed in an institute for the criminally insane and that is where he stayed until his death in 1984.
Then he was buried next to his mother.
You had to have seen that one coming, huh?
If you enjoyed this story, like us!
Citations:
Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho
Ed Gein: The movie
TruTV