In 1958, Ed Gein - who had murdered two women and mutilated 15 corpses, yet appeared to be nothing more than a harmless odd job man - was committed to Wisconsin State insane asylum. His horrifying deeds had shocked America and provided the factual basis for Hitchcock's classic spine-chiller, Psycho and other terrifying horror movies.
PART FOUR – EXHUMATION
Digging for the Dead
Gein confessed to a catalogue of fiendish crimes. Apart from murder, he had dug up corpses and put them to unspeakable uses. At the snowed-under Plainfield cemetery, police investigations were able to confirm his desecrations.
While the gruesome discoveries were being made at his farmhouse, Edward Gein sat quietly in the Wautoma County jail guarded by the arresting officers, Chase and Spees. At 2.30 a.m. on Sunday, 17 November, Sheriff Schley returned from the nightmare scene in Plainfield.
Over the next 12 hours, Gein was questioned almost continuously, without an attorney present, but continued to stay silent. In the meantime, the initial autopsy report on Bernice Worden confirmed that she had died from a .22 calibre gunshot wound to the head.
The following morning, Monday, 18 November, Gein broke his silence. He said he had shot Mrs Worden, loaded her corpse into her truck and driven it out to a nearby pine forest. Leaving the truck there, he had walked back to town to fetch his car, then driven back to the forest. The corpse was transferred from the truck to the car and then taken to Gein's farmhouse, where it was trussed up and butchered.
Cannibalism
All these details were included in a statement District Attorney Earl Kileen issued to the press that morning. He then added one or two more speculative details of his own, specifically that some of the victims' body parts found at the farmhouse appeared to belong to 'young people', and the way Mrs Worden’s corpse had been mutilated, it had 'looked like cannibalism'.
Soon the reporters were filing the most lurid details of the case back to newspapers as far away as Chicago. In the meantime, Kileen himself went to interview Gein, who said he could remember none of the details of Bernice Worden’s killing because he had been in a daze at the time’.
Under further questioning, Gein said he thought it had all been an accident. Why then, asked Kileen. had he stolen the cash register? Gein said that he ‘hoped to strip it down and examine the mechanism’ to see how the machine worked.
Kileen pressed him on what he had done with the body. Gein began describing how he had trussed it up and bled it into a bucket, then buried the fresh blood in a hole in the ground.
Asked if he thought he had been dressing out a deer, Gein replied 'That is the only explanation I can think was in my mind.'
Gein was asked to account for the numerous skulls, pieces of skin and other human remains found at the farm. Adamant that, to his knowledge, he had murdered no one else besides Bernice Worden. Gein told astonished detectives that he had obtained the bodies from graveyards.
He explained that over the last few years he had on occasion been gripped by a sudden compulsion to rob graves. In many cases he had known the victims while they were still alive and had read about their deaths in the local paper. He would drive to the cemetery on the night of the burial, remove the body from the freshly dug grave, and fill the grave in again to leave it in what he cheerfully described as ‘apple pie order'.
Gein admitted that on many of these nocturnal expeditions he panicked on reaching the grave and drove straight home again. He could not remember how many bodies he had actually obtained, and once more offered the excuse that he was ‘in a daze’. When asked if he had ever enjoyed any kind of sexual relations with the stolen corpses — a question already foremost in the minds of his interrogators — he shook his head and cried, ‘No! No!', before adding that they ‘smelt too bad'. Gein also strenuously denied charges of cannibalism.
On Monday afternoon, Ed Gein appeared in court charged only with armed robbery of the cash register from Worden's store. The DA’s office wished to postpone any murder charges until the forensic evidence was completed and the prisoner had been subjected to a lie detector test. Afterwards he was driven out to the farm, where he showed the police and a posse of accompanying reporters the spot where he had buried Bernice Worden’s blood.
That afternoon Gein was also interviewed by detectives from La Crosse — his home town — about the disappearance four years previously of a 15 year-old girl named Evelyn Hartley. The results proved inconclusive. Gein was also questioned by sheriffs from neighbouring Portage County on the subject of Mary Hogan, whose head they already knew had been discovered at the farm. Lapsing into confusion and frequent bouts of silence, the prisoner denied knowing her at all, though he did concede he had visited her bar for a drink once or twice.
The following day, the press contingent, which had by now taken up more or less permanent residence in town, were finally allowed inside Gein’s farm to see for themselves the squalor in which the ‘Butcher of Plainfield’ had been living.
Though now confronted by hard fact, imaginations ran riot and a fresh flood of horror stories appeared on front pages all over the country. Some reports suggested there were as many as 50 bodies buried around the farm. Others claimed that Gein had handed out packages of human flesh to unsuspecting neighbours, and most linked his name with every' disappearance in Wisconsin over the last ten years.
Meanwhile Gein himself was taken to the State Central Crime Laboratory in the state capital. Madison, to be interviewed while connected to a lie detector. In the nine or so hours of questioning which followed, he confessed to having worn the ‘clothes’ he had made out of human skin. He also caved in on the subject of Mary Hogan, admitting that he thought he had murdered her, while remaining 'very hazy' about the precise details. As far as the death of Bernice Worden was concerned, he continued to maintain that it had been an accident, and would do so for the rest of his life.
Later in the interview, the questions turned to Gein’s grave-robbing exploits. If the soil was soft enough, he would remove it by hand and prise open the lid of the burial casket with a crowbar to expose the body. Sometimes Gein only removed the head — by sawing across the neck and then snapping the spinal cord. On other occasions, he would remove other parts as well. A few times he had removed the entire body, then replaced the casket lid and refilled the grave.
Throughout the interrogation, Gein remained his usual quiet, co-operative self. He described his deeds without any apparent remorse, and only became flustered and reticent when the questioning returned to Mary Hogan’s or Bernice Worden’s murder. Joe Wilimovsky, who operated the lie detector, was sure that what he was hearing was the truth. He was also struck by the calm way Gein described how he had sawed through skulls or disembowelled bodies.
Afterwards, DA Kileen made a statement in which he said that Gein would be charged with the first degree murder of Hogan and Worden 'in a day or two', but that his office was satisfied he had had nothing to do with other disappearances. He then informed reporters, much to their fury, that the State Attorney General had ordered a news blackout of the entire case.
Committed
Thereafter, events began to move more swiftly. On Thursday, 21 November, Gein was formally charged, and the news embargo temporarily lifted to allow three reporters into his cell for an interview. On the following day, at the preliminary trial hearing, Gein’s attorney entered a plea of insanity, and the judge committed Gein to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun pending psychological tests. The focus of the case now shifted to his grave-robbing exploits.
Kileen announced at the hearing that Gein had given police a list of the victims whose resting places he had violated. Subject to the permission of relatives, the authorities hoped to exhume a number of graves the following week. One of the people on the list was a Mrs Eleanor Adams, who had died six years before, in 1951.
Rumours
Pat Danna, the sexton of Plainfield Town Cemetery, insisted, however, that it was simply not possible for a single man to do what Gein had alleged. And in any case he was sure none of the graves in his charge had been disturbed. As the mystery deepened a rumour spread that someone had assisted Gein in his grave-robbing activities.
On Saturday, a rumour spread that Gein was taken back to the farm a second time, where he showed the police a trench which he said contained the cremated remains of Mary Hogan's body. The trench was duly excavated, and the remains of considerably more than one corpse removed for examination. By the following Monday, under mounting pressure from all sides to find out where the bodies had come from, Kileen ordered Eleanor Adams’ grave to be opened.
The ground in the cemetery was frozen that day, and it took Danna and his assistant more than an hour to dig down as far as the burial casket. As the earth was scraped away from the casket, the cover was seen to be split in two. Having removed the pieces, Danna and his assistant reached in and lifted off the lid of Mrs Adams’ coffin. It was empty, save for the rotting burial shroud, and something else — a 12 inch steel crowbar.
The assembled group then moved to another grave named on Gein’s list, some 30 yards away from the first, and began a second excavation. Before they had even dug a few feet, the workmen began to uncover what were unmistakably human remains. When the coffin was finally reached and opened, it came as no surprise to find it empty. Gein’s story was confirmed. In the case of Mrs Adams he had removed the body in its entirety. At the second grave, he had apparently removed what he wanted, then hurriedly covered up the evidence.
What no one could even begin to guess at this stage was how many more graves had been violated.
PART FIVE - THE TRIAL
Asylum for the Psycho
Following further grisly discoveries on his land, Gein was committed to mental hospital. When his trial took place ten years later, the result was inevitable. He was returned to the ward permanently, for his own and society’s sake.
On Wednesday, 27 November, police were directed by Gein’s neighbours to a rubbish pit on his property, some way from the farmhouse. Gein, they said, was often to be seen digging there, though they had always assumed that he was simply burying rubbish.
Excavation of the site uncovered another near-complete skeleton, the skull of which seemed rather large for a woman and contained a gold tooth. This in turn gave rise to speculation that the body was that of local farmer Ray Burgess, who had disappeared with a friend while on a hunting expedition back in 1952.
After the discoveries of the past two weeks, the people of Plainfield were convinced that the monster who had been living undetected in their midst for so long was capable of anything. However, forensic tests proved that the body was that of a woman.
Gein, meanwhile, was subjected to exhaustive psychological tests by doctors at the Central State Hospital. A second lie detector test appeared to confirm that apart from Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, Gein had confined his butchery and mutilation activities to the bodies of women who were already dead. He finally admitted to stealing nine corpses, all of middle-aged women.
Once again he calmly described what he had done with the dismembered heads, limbs and other body parts. It appeared that on occasions he had donned the human skin vest and leggings and proceeded to pace around his farm. The thought of this butcher-transvestite, trampling by nightfall through the stinking debris and rotting remains that littered his living quarters, disgusted his interrogators. Yet Gein himself appeared to see little wrong with mutilating bodies that were already dead, and seemed proud of the anatomical knowledge his handiwork displayed.
The psychological tests, which included the standard Wechsler adult intelligence test, showed that Eddie Gein was in many ways 'quite bright' — even above-average — but that he had great difficulty expressing himself or communicating with people in anything other than the simplest terms. The psychologists at the hospital put this down to some previous ‘severe emotional disturbance’, stating that it prompted Gein into fits of irrational behaviour followed by extended periods of calm and remorse.
They also discovered that his sexual-emotional development was severely retarded, causing him to retreat into a bizarre fantasy world in which his feelings towards women became confused with grief over the death of his mother, and fear of transgressing his own peculiarly straight-laced moral code. Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, Gein claimed, were not good women’. He did not go so far as to suggest they deserved to die, but rather that they were fated to meet violent ends, and that he was merely acting as the instrument of their deaths.
On the subject of the mutilated corpses, Gein conceded that he had once entertained the idea of bringing his mother back to life through the body of another woman. He had been disappointed when the plan he tried had failed.
He said that in the years since his mother's death he had seen ‘faces in the leaves’ and 'smelt strange odours'. In fact, the odours continued to trouble him even as he sat in the Central State Hospital, facing interrogation. When asked what the odours smelt like, he replied chillingly. They smell like flesh.'
Insane conclusion
On 18 December, the doctors who had questioned Gein held a final meeting to review the evidence, under the chairmanship of Dr Edward F. Schubert, Director of the hospital. Their conclusion was that he was insane, and therefore not mentally competent to stand trial. The decision was taken to remand Gein in hospital until after Christmas, and psychologists’ recommendations were forwarded to the State Attorney General.
Gein was brought before presiding judge Bunde on the morning of 6 January 1958 and sat impassively in the dock chewing gum while three psychologists — including Schubert — gave expert evidence. After listening to their opinions, Bunde had no hesitation in endorsing the hospital recommendations, and Gein was committed indefinitely to the State mental hospital.
The decision raised a storm of protest among the residents of Plainfield, many of whom were infuriated that the man who had made their town a byword for murder and grave-robbing would not be standing trial. In an effort to placate them, Attorney General Walter Honeck wrote a letter stating that Gein’s incarceration did not automatically rule out a trial at some time in the future, and that he would be examined at regular intervals to see if his mental condition showed any signs of improvement.
In March, just as the dust was beginning to settle, a fresh row erupted over the announcement that Gein’s farm and its content were to be sold by auction, and that potential purchasers could inspect the property for a fee of 50 cents - a charge necessary, it was claimed, to discourage ‘casual sightseers’. Quite apart from the thought that others stood to gain where Plainfield had so evidently lost, the date of the auction — 30 March, Palm Sunday — was seen by the more religious people of the town as a direct affront.
As it turned out, the auction never took place. On the evening of 20 March, the sky was illuminated by the sight of Gein’s farm in flames, while the residents of Plainfield stood by and witnessed what many believed was devine retribution. Among their number was the town’s fire officer. Bernice Worden’s son, Frank. The cause of the fire was never discovered, and Gein’s own comment on hearing the news was, 'Just as well.'
More remains
But the Gein story was not over. In May 1960, dogs scrabbling in a trench on what had once been Gein farmland discovered a fresh pile of human bones, including arms, leg bones and a pelvis. The mad little handyman’s eventual tally, once all the remains had been analysed, catalogued and accounted for, came to 15 bodies, including the two murder victims Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan.
Gein flourished in his new 'home' and was a model prisoner. He got along well with the warders, and, in marked contrast to the other inmates, never showed signs of requiring sedation. He also demonstrated considerable skill at handicrafts in the prison workshops, and with the small salary he was paid he bought a short-wave radio, becoming something of a 'radio ham'.
Fit for trial
In January 1968, however, District Judge Robert Gollmar received a letter from the hospital authorities stating that in their opinion Gein was now mentally fit to stand trial. Though Gollmar, on reviewing the case, thought that such a trial would be a waste of time and money, he felt that the assurances given by Attorney General Honeck to the people of Plainfield had to be honoured. Gollmar, therefore, authorized the proceedings to go ahead.
The trial, which took place the following November and lasted just a week, was, on a point of American law, bifurcated — in other words, it would simultaneously establish whether or not Gein had committed murder, and if he had, whether or not he was sane enough to know what he was doing.
For the first time, a jury and public gallery were to bear witness to the gruesome findings at the Gein farmhouse.
Split decision
The jury heard numerous psychologists recall for the second time their interviews with Gein, and how — on the subject of grave-robbing at least — the little man seemed hardly aware that he had done anything wrong.
When the verdict came, it was a surprise to no one — though Gein had the strange distinction of being found guilty and not guilty on the same day: guilty of murder, not guilty because of his obvious insanity.
Gein himself remained, as always, quiet and docile throughout. After Judge Gollmar had ordered him to be returned to hospital and declared the case finally closed, he rose from the dock and shuffled through the assembled ranks of reporters and photographers. The Plainfield Butcher was on his way home to the Central State Hospital in Waupun.
EARLY DAYS
Mothered into Madness
Gein's childhood is a tale of an innocent mind crushed by the puritanism of an unloving mother. Yet his reliance on her was so total that, when she died, he seemed unable to accept it and sealed off her room as a shrine to her.
Haunted by this rocking chair spectre, Gein found it impossible ever to have a healthy relationship with a living woman.
Augusta Gein gave birth to her second son on 27 August 1906. She had prayed it would be a girl — her stern Lutheran upbringing and her marriage to drunken George Gein had developed in her a loathing of men. Their loveless union had already produced a son. Henry, in 1902.
Augusta vowed that this son, Edward Theodore, would never be like the lustful, godless men she saw around her. From the first, Eddie’s life was to be totally dominated by his mother.
Augusta ran the family grocery store in La Crosse, Wisconsin, virtually single-handedly. Her husband spent most of his time and money in local bars. She was a harsh disciplinarian, quick to punish, slow to give comfort, and unable to provide her sons with a mother’s love.
In 1913, the Geins started a new life as farmers. After spending a year on a dairy farm some 40 miles east of La Crosse, the family finally settled at an isolated farmstead just outside the small town of Plainfield.
Mother’s shadow
For the first 16 years of his life, school was Gein’s only real contact with the outside world. But as fast as Eddie found a friend, Augusta would object to the boy’s family. In her eyes, everyone was a threat to the moral purity of her son. She would quote endlessly from the scriptures, reminding Gein that boys were sinners in the image of their fathers.
Gein withdrew from contact with other children. Contemporaries later recalled him as being shy and feeble.
He also professed an aversion to blood or killing — common sights in a rural community where hunting and livestock farming were a way of life. Yet he devoured horror comics and books about violence. It was the one subject that would get him talking, though often the conversation would end abruptly when Gein came out with one of his macabre comments.
Gein’s father died in 1940. By the mid-1940s, the family farm business was struggling, and Eddie and Henry took on extra work to supplement the family income. Gein admired his brother, but tension grew between them after Henry suggested that Gein’s closeness to their mother might not be healthy.
Fire fighters
In the spring of 1944. Henry died in mysterious circumstances. He and Eddie had been fighting a fire near their farm when they became separated. Eddie led a search party straight to the spot where Henry lay dead. Though there was bruising on Henry's forehead, his death was attributed to asphyxiation by smoke.
Shortly after her elder son’s death. Augusta Gein collapsed with a stroke. Over the next 12 months Eddie nursed her lovingly back to health, only to see her die a few weeks later in December 1945.
At the age of 39, Gein was alone in a world he barely understood. Within five years, he would retreat into another — a world in which the coldness, violence and repression of his childhood would become hideously twisted in his mind.
IN TWO MINDS
The case of Edward Gein is, from a medical point of view, one of the most complex in criminological history. Voyeurism, fetishism, transvesticism and necrophilia all reared their ugly heads.
Yet as the true story emerged, it became clear that these perversions were merely manifestations of a deeper psychosis — a disorder of the mind which had its roots in Gein’s extraordinary relationship with his mother.
Mother love
When psychiatrists first began to speculate about what dark inner force had driven Gein, the phrase Oedipus complex’ was frequently mentioned. Gein, they supposed, was in love with his mother, and that following her death he became obsessed with finding a substitute for the only person to whom he had ever been able to show affection.
At first he experimented with dead bodies, mutilating them hideously in his efforts to gain sexual and emotional satisfaction. Later, claimed the theorists, the striking similarities between his mother and the two murder victims (both were heavily built, middle-aged businesswomen with strong personalities) moved Gein to murder as his desire to possess both women totally took control.
However, the official psychiatric reports on Gein demonstrate that the 'mother love' theory is in fact an over-simplification of what really took place in his mind, especially when read in the light of recent medical findings.
Shattered mind
Edward Gein, the reports state, was a schizophrenic, a man whose mind was shattered by the inner turmoil of conflicting personalities. Research suggests that schizophrenia begins in childhood, when the young mind is confronted by something so terrible, so unbearable, that it buries it away in the sub-conscious and replaces it with a personality, or personalities, better able to deal with the situation. So it was in the case of the shy little boy whose every waking moment was dominated by the rigid discipline and religious fanaticism of his cold, unloving mother.
As a child, Gein craved his mother’s love, yet time and again it was refused. Worse, his mother despised men, holding up Gein’s father as an example of male inadequacy. If Augusta Gein loathed men, the inference drawn by her son’s impressionable mind was that she hated him too. Try as he might, he could never please her, never gain her love.
Thus Gein's mind developed a new personality to explain this sorry state of affairs. ‘Edward number two’ could not be loved by his mother, or by any woman, because he was unworthy. He could only worship the person who tolerated this unworthiness — his mother.
Mother hate
But what about ‘Edward number one’, the normal, healthy personality whose only crime was to seek a love that was not there? It began to fester in Gein’s subconscious, nurturing the anger it felt towards the person who had repressed it. ‘Edward number one’ hated his mother.
As the years went by and Gein became steadily more isolated from the outside world, the blind worship and feelings of inadequacy engendered by personality number two were reinforced with every scolding that Augusta Gein gave her son. But at the same time, the frustration felt by personality number one continued to see the inside Gein’s mind. He wanted to love women, yet it was they, in the shape of his mother, who prevented him from doing so.
Inner conflict
After Augusta Gein’s death, it seems likely that her son’s mind was thrown into fresh turmoil. With his mother gone, reasoned personality number two, who was there left to love him? Simultaneously, personality number one began to stir from its resting place deep in Gein’s subconscious, sensing that the time for freedom had now arrived.
With all the normal channels for expressing love still blocked, Gein began by finding solace in the graveyard. Personality number two was still very much in control at this stage, so it was ‘natural' that he should seek out the bodies of women who resembled his mother, the only woman he could ever love. Sex in any normal sense was out of the question, so Gein resorted to other fetishistic and necrophile practices as alternative outlets for the physical urges he felt inside him.
Unfortunately the sight of living women, specifically Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, then began to arouse him, and as it did so the anger felt by personality number one became inflamed. The closer he got to Hogan and Worden, the angrier he began to feel. These women were evil, he told himself, because a part of him sought to love them while another never could.
The exact truth can, of course, never be established. But in all probability, when Edward Gein murdered Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, he was really murdering his mother.
KEY DATES
17.11.57 - Gein questioned in Wautoma County Jail
18.11.57 - Gein confesses to the murder of Bernice Worden, and is charged with armed robbery
19.11.57 - Gein undergoes polygraph test
21.11.57 - Gein charged with murder of Hogan and Worden
23.11.57 - Mary Hogan’s remains found on Gein farmland
25.11.57 - Eleanor Adams’s grave exhumed
27.11.57 - More human remains found on Gein farmland
18.12.57 - Doctors at Central State Hospital conclude Gein unfit to stand trial
6.1.58 - Gein committed indefinitely to Central State Hospital
20.3.58 - Gein’s farmhouse burned down
5.60 - Last human remains found on Gein farmland
14.11.68 - After a week-long trial, Gein found guilty of murder but not guilty by reason of insanity, and is recommitted
VICTIMS
Mary Hogan. Born in 1900 to German parents, little is known of the life she led before Plainfield, other than that much of it was spent in Chicago. She left few relatives to mourn for her.
Bernice Worden. Her father, Frank Canover, had been part owner of the hardware store she later ran. She had married his business partner, Leon Worden. Worden’s was one of the oldest and most successful businesses in Plainfield. A comfortable retirement beckoned for Bernice. Then Eddie Gein walked through the door.
MURDER SNIPPETS
INTO THIN AIR
Before the Gein case, there were a number of unexplained disappearances in Plainfield and the surrounding area.
In May 1947, eight year-old Georgia Weckler vanished in Jefferson after being given a lift home from school by a neighbour. She was never seen again.
In November 1952, a farmer named Victor ‘Bunk’ Travis set off on a deer hunting expedition with a friend from Milwaukee named Ray Burgess. Neither man was seen again.
A year later, 15 year-old Evelyn Hartley disappeared while babysitting for a neighbour. Police called to the scene found evidence of a scuffle and bloodstains leading away from the house. Later, an intensive search of the area turned up some of Evelyn’s bloodstained clothes near a main highway. The body, however, was never found.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Around the time of Mary Hogan’s disappearance, rumours began to circulate among the children of Plainfield that Gein’s farmhouse was ‘haunted’. They were started by Gein’s cousin, Bob Hill, who claimed that on a visit to the farmhouse, Gein had shown him three shrunken heads. Gein said they had been sent to him by a friend who had fought in the Philippines during World War II.
Soon local children became obsessed with stories of ‘Eddie’s haunted house’. Their parents dismissed these rumours as ‘kids’ stuff’, the product of overly fertile and ghoulish juvenile imaginations.
DRINK AND RELIGION
Ed Gein’s father, George, was orphaned at the age of five in 1879 and was brought up by his stern and god-fearing grandparents on a farm near La Crosse. In his early 20s he moved to the city, drifted through a series of jobs, and began drinking heavily. In 1899, he married.
It was an unlikely match. Augusta Gein, from a strict German immigrant family, was a fanatically religious and austere woman. She soon came to despise her feckless, drunken husband. George reacted by withdrawing into himself, though occasionally, when she goaded him beyond endurance, he would get drunk and lash out at her as Eddie and his brother Henry looked on helplessly. After suffering these attacks, Augusta would get down on her knees and pray for her husband’s death.
Her prayers were answered in 1940 when George Gein died, a broken invalid, aged 66.
DEER HUNTERS
Hunting for deer during Wisconsin’s nine-day November season can be a dangerous business. Tourists flood into the central plains and woodlands, and the fact that many of them have little idea of how to use a gun is reflected in the accident statistics - in 1957, for example, 13 hunters were accidentally shot dead.
For those not interested in blood sports the deer hunting season can also be extremely distressing. When a kill is made the deer is ‘dressed’ - hoisted up into a tree and gutted - then lashed to the front of the hunter’s car and driven to a designated checkpoint for weighing. There is evidence of butchery all around - in the fields, beneath trees, on cars, and even in the local filling stations where the checkpoints are commonly situated. It is enough to turn many people’s stomachs. Was it also enough to turn Edward Gein’s mind?
‘PSYCHO’ AUTHOR
Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho on which Alfred Hitchcock based his film of the same name, was resident at the time of the Gein case in the town of Weyauwega, less than 30 miles east of Plainfield. As reports of the nightmare discoveries at the Gein farmhouse began to circulate, Bloch was struck by the fact that here was a true story more sickening, more horrific than any work of fiction he had come across. The idea that a man could be driven to commit such atrocities through the influence of his long-dead mother fired Bloch’s imagination enough for him to start the book.
But what intrigued him even more was the fact ‘that a ghoulish killer with perverted appetites could flourish almost openly in a small rural community where everybody prides himself on knowing everybody else’s business.’ After Ed Gein and Psycho, America’s mid-west was never quite the same again.
BLOODY MEMORY
One of Gein’s earliest and most disturbing boyhood memories was of the time he peered through the open door of the slaughtering shed behind his parents’ store in La Crosse. He watched mesmerized as his father held up a trussed pig while his mother skilfully slit open its belly and drew out the entrails with a long sharp knife.
On many occasions throughout his life Gein would claim that he was sickened by butchery, and that the sight of blood made him feel faint. Yet under questioning by the police years later he could recall the incident in La Crosse in vivid detail. He remembered that his mother wore ‘a long leather apron spattered with blood and slime.’
SICK JOKES
In common with many highly publicized crimes and disasters, the Gein case spawned a number of sick jokes. These were known in Wisconsin as ‘Geiners’ (example: why did Eddie keep the heating turned up in his house? So the furniture wouldn’t get goose-bumps).
While the residents of Plainfield found such jokes deeply offensive and upsetting, a psychiatrist called George Arndt concluded that such grim humour fulfilled a necessary function. In a scientific paper entitled ‘Community Reactions to a Horrifying Event’, he said that ‘Geiners’ and similar jokes were society’s way of dealing with the unthinkable, and for this reason should be tolerated more readily.
SHERIFF UNDER STRAIN
Sheriff Art Schley, the man who discovered Gein’s grisly secrets at the Plainfield farmhouse, suffered increasing stress as the case against Gein unfolded.
On the night Bernice Worden’s body was found, he could not stop himself roughing up Gein at the County jail. And when he returned to the farm with Gein, he was furious at having to call off the hunt for more remains due to the enormous number of reporters following and pestering them.
Matters between the Sheriff and the press came to a head when Schley tried to limit the number of reporters allowed in to interview the now infamous ‘Plainfield Butcher’.
Only the intervention of Gein’s attorney, William Belter, prevented Schley and angered members of the press from exchanging blows.
When the Gein case had died down, Schley returned to being a simple County Sheriff. In March 1968, a month after giving evidence at Gein’s trial, he died of a heart attack at the age of 43.
GEIN’S SWEETHEART
After Gein’s arrest, a 50 year-old Plainfield spinster called Adeline Watkins became an overnight celebrity by claiming to have been the killer’s girlfriend. ‘I loved kind, sweet man, still do, says confessed killer’s fiancée,’ ran a Milwaukee Journal headline. Miss Watkins, said the report, had received a proposal of marriage from Gein on their ‘last date together’ in February 1955, but had turned him down. No sooner had the story appeared, than the woman retracted her claim. She also denied that she had ever called Gein ‘sweet’.
‘PSYCHO’
In 1960, two years after the story of Ed Gein had horrified the world, the cinema’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, brought out arguably his most powerful thriller. Psycho tells the story of a woman on the run who is stabbed to death while taking a shower at a lonely motel. Chief suspects are the owner of the motel, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins), and his crippled old mother.
As the film reaches its terrifying climax, it becomes clear that Bates and his mother are one and the same person and that he assumes her voice, wears her clothes and, grisliest of all, continues to nurse her rotting corpse.
Norman Bates was not a product of Hitchcock’s dark imagination - nor of author Robert Bloch’s, on whose novel the screenplay was based. He was inspired by Edward Gein. Both Gein and Bates lived alone in a remote American community, both had a mild-mannered exterior - and both nursed a deep-rooted obsession with their dead mother that would lead to savage murder.
That few, if any, filmgoers made the connection between the two was because the exploits of Gein made Bates seem positively harmless by comparison.
GEIN’S DEATH CAR
At an auction of Gein’s property, a mystery bidder paid the exorbitant sum of $760 for his dilapidated 1949 Ford car. The explanation for this strange purchase was revealed two months later in Seymour, Wisconsin. Visitors to the annual county fair were confronted by a tent bearing a sign: ‘See the car that hauled the dead from their graves... It’s here - Ed Gein’s crime car!’
Those curious enough to pay 25c were treated to the sight of Gein’s cleaned-up Ford with a blood-spattered dummy in the back seat. The brainchild of one Bunny Gibbons, this particular travelling attraction was soon banned by the authorities.
COPYCAT KILLING
In 1979, a year after Gein had been transferred from the now-defunct Central State Hospital to Mendota Institute; a particularly vicious killing took place in Milwaukee. An 86 year-old woman, Helen Lows, was found battered to death in her bedroom. Her eyes were gouged out and slits cut in her face which looked as if the murderer had tried to scalp her.
A few weeks later a man called Pervis Smith was arrested for the crime. In 1974 he had been admitted as a mental patient to the Central State Hospital in Madison.
Smith told the police that while he was there he had often talked about murder, mutilation and the making of death masks to his best friend - ‘little Eddie Gein’.
AFTERMATH
■ In February 1974, a petition was filed on behalf of Gein with the Waushara County Court claiming that after some 16 years of incarceration, he had now ‘fully recovered his mental health’ and should be kept in hospital no longer. After reviewing the petition, District Judge Gollmar duly instructed the State mental hospital to carry out a fresh series of psychiatric tests, the findings of which would be heard in court the following day.
■ Prior to the hearing, Gein chatted amiably with reporters outside the courthouse, telling them that he was now keen to see something of life, and was planning a round-the-world trip. But the four doctors who gave evidence in front of Judge Gollmar were overwhelmingly of the opinion that the ageing psychopath should not be released.
■ Significantly, one stated that although Gein’s ‘thought process seemed generally well organized’ when discussing ‘non-threatening material’, the psychosis which had afflicted his mind for so long remained simmering just below the surface, ‘ready to be reactivated under the right conditions’. Judge Gollmar had no choice but to reject Gein’s petition.
■ Edward Gein died of respiratory failure on 26 July 1984, in a geriatric ward of Mendota Mental Health Institute, where he had been cared for since 1978. He was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Plainfield cemetery - beside his mother.
YOU CAN READ PARTS 1, 2 AND 3 ON THIS BLOG HERE OR THE FULL STORY (AND OTHERS) CAN BE FOUND IN MY BOOK: MURDER FILES - TRUE CRIME INVESTIGATIONS - COLLECTION #1 - JUST CLICK ON THE BOOK IMAGE BELOW FOR MORE DETAILS
Blog written by Guy Hadleigh, author of Crimes That Time Forgot, the Macabre True Crimes & Mysteries Series, the Murder and Mayhem Series, the British Killers Series, the Infamous True Crimes and Trials Series - and many more!