In 1958, the murderer of two women and mutilator of 15 corpses, a harmless looking 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.
PART ONE - MISSING
The Handyman
In 1954, amid every sign of foul play, the popular landlady of a small-town bar disappeared without trace. Then a strange local handyman said he knew exactly where she was.
The central region of Wisconsin, in the American Midwest, is so flat and featureless that even the official state guide-book calls it 'nondescript'. In a more evocative Wisconsin phrase, it is the State’s 'great dead heart' — bleak grassy plains scattered with lonely farmsteads and small towns. Raising a little livestock or growing patches of rye in the sandy, stony soil, farmers there in the 1950s could make only the barest of livings. For relief from this daily struggle, they would go hunting or meet in the town to drink beer.
In 1954, the aptly named town of Plainfield — no more than a group of clapboard stores and houses — had its own drinking den called Hogan’s Tavern. The owner of the bar, Mary Hogan, a large buxom woman who had twice been divorced and was well into middle age, was by all accounts a colourful character with a questionable past.
Illicit atmosphere
Some said she had connections with the Mob, others claimed that she had been a celebrated Chicago madam and had bought the business with her ill-gotten gains. Whatever the truth of the matter, Mary Hogan had made a big impression on the conservative God-fearing farming families of the area. While the men liked the warm but faintly illicit atmosphere of the tavern, it earned the outright disapproval of their wives and girlfriends.
On the afternoon of 8 December 1954, a freezing winter’s day, a local farmer named Seymour Lester stopped by at the tavern for a drink. He found it open but deserted, with all the lights left on. When his calls for service remained unanswered, he began to grow suspicious. Then he noticed a newspaper-sized bloodstain by the door leading through to the back room. Sensing that something was seriously wrong, he hurried to telephone for help. Soon County Sheriff Harold S. Thompson arrived, accompanied by a number of hastily assembled Deputies.
Trail of blood
Their quick search of the bar revealed that it was empty. Mary Hogan’s car was found parked at the back of the building in its usual place. The patch of blood, which by now had soaked into the bare pine floorboards and begun to dry, was streaked as if something had been dragged through it. Nearby lay a spent .32 calibre rifle cartridge.
Beyond the patch, a bloodstained trail led through the back door and out across to the customer’s parking area, where it ended abruptly beside deep, freshly-made tyre tracks, recognizable to the Sheriff as those of a pick-up truck. The conclusion was inescapable: someone, almost certainly Mary Hogan, had been shot where she stood, and the body dragged outside into a waiting vehicle.
Yet there was no other sign of a struggle and no evidence of a motive for the crime — the cash register was full and nothing else appeared to be missing. Thompson requested help from the State crime laboratory at Madison, some 60 miles away. But their forensic tests merely confirmed the Sheriff's conclusions as to the manner in which the crime had been committed, and could shed no further light on the case. Investigations in Chicago, Mary Hogan’s former home, and an extensive farm-to-farm search of Pine Grove and the surrounding area came up with nothing. Mary Hogan had completely disappeared.
News of the mystery travelled fast, and as the weeks went by without the authorities turning up a single shred of new evidence, the question of 'Whatever happened to Mary Hogan?' began to crop up in talk all over the area. A month or so after her disappearance, one such conversation took place between a respected Plainfield sawmill owner, Elmo Ueeck, and the shy little handyman he had called in to mend a couple of fences. The fence-mender’s name was Edward Gein.
Gein had lived on a farm six miles west of Plainfield since he was seven. Surrounded by nothing but woodland, fields and marsh, the farmhouse itself was a bare two-storey, L-plan white frame building where Gein lived alone. He was a shy, rather awkward figure who kept pretty much to himself. Following the death of his mother in 1945, he had received a subsidy from the US government for letting the land lie fallow. And as the farm began to fall into disrepair, Gein supplemented his income by doing odd jobs for his Plainfield neighbours.
It was in the capacity of handyman that the small, slightly built bachelor, in his early 50s with thinning fair hair and watery blue eyes, became well known to local residents. Though he was obliging, hard-working and trustworthy, most people regarded him as a little eccentric.
Strange comments
Ueeck did not bother with Gein much, even though he had known him for years. Along with the other residents of Plainfield, he found Gein extremely difficult to talk to — more often than not, Gein would look away nervously and lapse into an empty-headed lopsided grin, or else come out with some comment so strange and inappropriate that it would leave the other person lost for words.
On this occasion, however, Ueeck could not resist the temptation to tease Gein on the subject of Mary Hogan. Eddie was always particularly ill at ease when the talk turned to women, but Ueeck had seen Gein at Hogan’s Tavern on several occasions sitting alone at the back of the bar, clutching a glass of beer. He and his friends had noticed the way Gein just sat and stared at the bar owner, lost in a world of his own. They supposed, with barely concealed amusement, that Eddie was in love.
Ueeck began by suggesting to Gein that if he had made his intentions to Mary Hogan a little plainer, she might at this very moment be cooking supper for him back at his farmhouse, instead of being missing, presumed murdered. Later he would recall that ‘Eddie rolled his eyes and wiggled his nose like a dog sniffing a skunk, before shifting from one leg to the other and lapsing into one of his familiar grins.
'She isn’t missing,' Gein replied after a few seconds’ deliberation. She’s at the farm right now.
Ueeck shrugged off what seemed like yet another of Gein’s infrequent and rather pathetic attempts at humour, and although Gein was to repeat the claim to several other Plainfield residents in the weeks that followed, not one of them took it the least bit seriously. It was, after all, just the kind of crazy thing he would say.
PART 2 – MURDER
Shooting Season
Three years after Mary Hogan’s disappearance, on the day Wisconsin’s annual deer slaughter began, Ed Gein went on a hunt of his own. His quarry was not deer. Gein's victim was a citizen of Plainfield.
Like Mary Hogan, Bernice Worden was a plump, solidly built woman in her late 50s and a more than capable businesswoman. Unlike the bar owner, she was a devout Methodist who enjoyed an almost spotless reputation among her fellow Plainfield citizens.
Bernice had taken over as sole proprietor of Worden’s Hardware and Implement Store in 1931 following the death of her husband. In the intervening years, assisted by her son Frank, she had built it into a thriving business to which every farmer in the area would turn at some time or another, for everything from agricultural machinery to rifle cartridges. In 1956 she was nominated Plainfield’s first ‘Citizen of the Week' by the local newspaper, and on the rare occasions when she was not working she could generally be found with her grandchildren, whom she adored.
On the morning of Saturday, 16 November 1957, she opened the store as usual, expecting a slow start to the day’s trade. It was the first day of Wisconsin’s nine-day deer hunting season, and most of Plainfield’s male inhabitants - including her son Frank — were already out in the surrounding woodlands. The rest of the town was deserted and most of the shops closed, but Bernice Worden decided to keep her shop open, thinking that there would be a steady stream of visitors eager to replenish their supplies.
She soon had a customer. A little after 8.30 a.m. the small figure of Ed Gein shuffled up to the hardware store clutching an empty glass jug. Like everyone in Plainfield, Bernice found it hard to regard Gein as anything more than a simpleton, but lately he had taken to troubling her over the most trifling of details without actually buying anything. Only the night before, Gein had stopped off at the store to check on the price of antifreeze. On being given the answer he had stood there for several seconds with an idiot grin on his face before shuffling off into the dark.
Bernice had also been taken aback a few weeks before when Gein. out of the blue, turned up at the store and invited her to go ice-skating with him.
The offer had been blurted out in a nervous, half-joking way and she had simply shrugged it off. Yet she was sufficiently unnerved to relate the incident to her son, and to point out that since then, she had seen Gein staring at her from inside his pick-up or from the other side of the street.
Alone with Eddie
The whole scene at Worden’s on 16 November can only be pieced together from Gein’s later confused recollections. Besides Bernice and Gein there had not been a soul in sight. Mrs Worden apparently filled the jug, returned to the front of the store and wrote out a sales slip. Gein then paid and left. A few moments later, he returned.
Picking a hunting rifle off the rack in the corner, he explained to Mrs Worden that he was thinking of changing his old .22 rifle for a more up-to-date gun which would fire a choice of calibre lengths. She agreed that the weapon he held in his hands was a good buy, and carried on with her work. Suddenly, while her back was turned, Gein reached into his pocket and slipped a cartridge into the rifle while pretending to inspect the action. A moment later he took aim - and fired.
First witness
Between 8.45 and 9.30 that same morning, Bernard Muschinski, the pump attendant at the filling station a little way down and across the street from the store, noticed Mrs Worden's delivery van pull out of the garage behind the building and head off down the road. He thought little of it. But a few hours later he walked past the store and was surprised to see the lights on. The front door was locked and Muschinski assumed that Mrs Worden had forgotten to switch them off.
The next person to see Gein was the sawmill owner, Elmo Ueeck. He had just shot a deer on Gein farmland and was making a hasty exit from the property with the kill tied to the front of his car. Ueeck was dismayed to see Gein’s Ford sedan pounding down the road towards him - since he was sure that even Eddie would object to unauthorized hunting on his land. But as the two cars passed, Gein simply gave a friendly wave. Ueeck also remarked that Gein was driving at well above his usual speed.
Later, around noon, Ueeck’s conscience began to trouble him and he drove back to the Gein farm to explain and apologize about the deer. He found Gein with his car jacked up. changing the snow tyres back to summer treads - a sight which struck him as odd, since there were already a couple of inches of snow on the ground. Gein was friendly and did not seem unduly bothered about the deer.
In the afternoon, Gein had a visit from another of his neighbours, his teenage friend Bob Hill and his sister Darlene, who asked whether he would mind driving them into town to buy a new car battery. Gein stepped briskly out of the house to meet them, his hands covered in blood. He explained that he had been dressing a deer. This puzzled Bob Hill, since Gein had always professed a distaste for butchery and claimed the sight of blood made him feel faint. But Gein said he would be glad to help, and after returning to the house to wash, he ushered them to his car and they set off for town.
Last supper
When Gein and the Hills finally returned to the Hills’ nearby grocery store it was getting dark, and Bob Hills' mother, Irene, invited Gein to stay for supper. He accepted readily, little knowing it would be the last meal he would eat as a free man.
Some time earlier, shortly before dusk, Bernice Worden's son Frank had pulled into the Plainfield petrol station near the family store after an unsuccessful day’s hunting. He was mystified to hear from the attendant, Muschinski, that the delivery van had been seen leaving the store early that morning. Frank had expected to find his mother still behind the counter, about to shut up shop. The two men had then confirmed Muschinski’s earlier discovery that the door was locked but that the lights were still on. and Frank, who did not have a spare key with him, returned home to fetch one.
Among his other duties, Frank Worden was a Plainfield Deputy Sheriff, and like his mother, he was a steady, reliable person. But as he unlocked the door of Worden’s Store and stepped inside, he could barely keep control of himself. The cash register was gone, torn from its place on the counter, and towards the back of the shop was a large patch of blood.
Frank telephoned County Sheriff Art Schley in Wautoma, 15 miles away, then carried on searching the store for his mother. When the Sheriff and another Deputy arrived a quarter of an hour later, he had already made up his mind what had happened.
'He’s done something to her,' Worden told them confidently.
‘Who?’ they asked.
‘Ed Gein,' said Worden.
Frank Worden had not been idle during the time Schley and his Deputy took to drive from Wautoma to Plainfield. In his mind he replayed the conversations with his mother about Gein — how Eddie had been staring at her of late, how he had pestered her to go out with him and how as recently as the previous night he had stopped off at the store to inquire about the price of antifreeze. Worden also recalled that Gein had asked him if he intended to go hunting next day. Could it be that Gein had been checking to see if the coast would be clear?
What had clinched it for Worden was the discovery near the blood patch of a handwritten sales slip for two quarts of antifreeze. It was dated 17 November and made out to Ed Gein. Sheriff Schley put out a general alert on the radio to bring Gein in for questioning.
Gein himself, meanwhile, had just finished eating with the Hills when a neighbour burst in to report news of Bernice Worden’s disappearance. Eddie's only comment was, ‘it must have been someone pretty cold-blooded.'
Irene Hill would later recall that she joked with Gein saying. ‘How come every time someone gets banged on the head and hauled away, you’re always around.’ Gein, she remembered, had simply shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
Bob Hill suggested that Gein should drive the two of them into town to see what was going on. Gein happily complied, and the two men stepped out into the freezing snow-covered yard to start Gein's car. At that point, Traffic Officer Dan Chase and Deputy Poke Spees arrived looking for Gein.
Gein questioned
Chase and Spees had found the handyman’s farm locked and empty when they had driven there a few minutes previously. Since it was well known that Bob Hill was one of Ed Gein’s few friends, the Hills’ store was the next logical port of call. Officer Chase stepped smartly across the yard and rapped on the window of Gein’s car just as it was about to pull away.
Gein was ordered to get out and was escorted back to the squad car for questioning. Chase asked him to recount what he had been doing all day and where. Gein told him, and then Chase asked him to run through his story a second time. Immediately it became apparent that there were glaring inconsistencies between the two versions, and Chase told him so.
‘Somebody framed me,' Gein retorted.
‘Framed you for what?' Chase asked.
‘Well, about Mrs Worden,’ said Gein.
‘What about Mrs Worden?’
‘Well, she's dead, ain’t she,’ Gein replied.
‘Dead!’ exclaimed Chase. 'How d'you know she's dead?’
‘I heard it,' said Gein. 'They told me in there.’
As soon as Sheriff Schley heard over the radio that his chief suspect had been apprehended, he went to Gein’s farmhouse with Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster of the neighbouring Green Lake County Sheriff's office.
The door of the ground floor kitchen extension at the back of the house gave easily. Switching on their flashlights, the two men stepped inside. A moment later Art Schley felt something brush his right shoulder and wheeled round instinctively to see what it was. As his flashlight beam played across the object he gasped in horror.
There before him, hanging from the ceiling, was the headless corpse of a woman with a large, gaping hole where her stomach should have been. Schley's immediate thought was that the body had been trussed, dressed and skinned like an animal.
PART THREE - DISCOVERY
House of Horror
To investigating police, Gein’s farmhouse was a combination of sty, slaughterhouse and catacomb - the bolt-hole of a creature they could not recognize as a fellow human being.
It took some time for the two policemen to get a grip on themselves, and for the full horror of what they had just witnessed to sink in. Eventually, Schoephoerster made it to the car and managed to radio for help. Then both men braced themselves and prepared to set foot back in the house.
A second look at the body revealed that it was hanging from a branch which had been sharpened and driven through the tendons of one ankle, the other foot having been slit below the heel and secured to the pole with wire. The body itself had been slit from the breastbone to the base of the abdomen, and the innardless insides glistened as if they had been scraped and cleaned. There was no head.
Only once had Schley seen anything like it before, and that was in an abattoir. Whoever it was - and Schley had little doubt it was Bernice Worden - had been slaughtered and expertly dressed for butchery as if they were a side of beef.
The body aside, it was hard to believe that a human being could live in such conditions. Everywhere were piles of stinking, rotting rubbish, with furniture, kitchen utensils and dirty, ragged clothes strewn anyhow. Cardboard boxes, empty cans and rusting farm implements littered the floor, giving the impression that the room had been overrun by some beast which had left a trail of filth and excrement in its wake.
Shining their flashlights around, hardly daring to let their eyes follow the beams, Schley and Schoephoerster then became aware of stranger sights — detective magazines and horror comics piled into boxes or dropped on the floor, a sink filled with sand, spat-out chewing gum in an old coffee tin, rows of dentures displayed on the mantelpiece. Whoever had assembled this collection was evidently driven by some sickening force far beyond either man's comprehension.
Sickening search
It was not long before Gein’s farm was choked with squad cars, as the help which Schoephoerster had requested began to arrive. To start with, the search through the house continued by flashlight and paraffin lamp. But then a generator was brought in, and as the house was bathed in the glare of police arc lights, the full horror of what was inside became apparent.
Scattered about the kitchen were a number of skulls, some intact, others sawn in half and used as crude bowls. Two of them had even been used to adorn the posts at the foot of Gein’s festering, rag strewn bed in the adjoining sleeping area. One of the chairs by the kitchen table turned out on close inspection to have a seat consisting of strips of human skin. There were other hideous artifacts - lampshades, wastepaper baskets, a drum, a bracelet, the sheath of a hunting knife — all fashioned from human remains.
Even worse was to come. As the investigators poked around, they uncovered boxes containing various bodily parts, each one of which had been cut away from an unidentified corpse with the skill and precision of a surgeon. There was a kind of vest fashioned from the skin from the top portion of a woman’s body with a cord running through the back, and several pairs of human skin 'leggings’.
Most horrifying of all for the police searching the house was the discovery of a collection of death masks — genuine ‘shrunken heads’ of the kind more usually associated with only the most lurid tales of tribal cannibalism. Each of the nine masks consisted of the face and scalp of the victim, hair intact, which had been peeled from the skull and stuffed with rags or newspaper.
Silent witnesses
Four of these masks were found hanging on the walls around Gein’s bed, silent witnesses to whatever bizarre nocturnal fantasies he had indulged in. The others were found in bags, old cartons and sacks scattered there and in the kitchen. Some had been treated with oil to keep the skin smooth, and one still showed traces of lipstick. An-belonged to Mary Hogan, the bar owner who had vanished three years before.
By this time, the assembled company of policemen, forensic experts and detectives on the scene were stunned into silence, their faces white with horror. Many of them were long-serving officers who had seen all kinds of gruesome crimes in their time, yet nothing could have prepared them for the house of corpses, bones and other human remains now before them. Even in the harsh frost of a Wisconsin November night, the stench was unspeakable. Searchers found the heart of Bernice Worden left in a plastic bag in front of the kitchen stove, and her still-warm entrails wrapped in an old suit nearby. But still the police searched on, grimly determined to find the one piece of evidence which had so far eluded them - the head of the corpse hanging from the rafters.
Beyond the kitchen and the sleeping area which led off it was the ground floor of the house proper. The door was securely boarded up, but within minutes the investigators had prised away enough of the planks to gain entry into the main living room.
Their torch beams shone down on an orderly and perfectly normal family room, in which the only thing out of place was the thick layer of dust that encased everything from the furniture to the ornaments above the fireplace. It was a mausoleum — a tomb which had been closed up and left by Gein exactly the way it was the day his mother died 12 years before.
Back in the kitchen, a pathologist who had been attempting to catalogue the ghastly remains suddenly spotted steam rising from an old feed sack lying in a heap of rubbish in the corner of the room. Pulling the sack out into the middle of the floor, he opened it up and found what everyone had been looking for.
Ghoulish trophy
The head of Bernice Worden was covered in dirt, and blood was congealed around the nostrils, but otherwise it was perfectly intact. The expression on the face seemed reassuringly peaceful, but the two investigators were taken aback by the sight of hooks driven through the ears with a cord stretched between them. Gein had obviously intended to hang Worden's head on his wall, along with the other ghoulish bedroom trophies.
As the night wore on. the search of taken down from the rafters and labelled along with the other remains, which were then packed into plastic sacks and dispatched to Goult’s Funeral Home in Plainfield so that a proper post-mortem examination could be carried out. No one present had been able to guess how many bodies had contributed heads, skins, or other parts to the grisly cache, but it was clear that far more than just those of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were involved.
The big question still left in the minds of the stunned, sickened police officers as they left Gein's farm that night, was - who did the other corpses belong to?
PARTS 4, 5 AND 6 WILL BE PUBLISHED HERE SOON, OR IF YOU CAN'T WAIT, 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!