Introduction
Harold Schechter reveals the shocking true story of Ed Gein, the quiet Wisconsin bachelor whose grotesque crimes of grave robbing, cannibalism, and murder inspired modern horror cinema.
You often seek to understand the darkest impulses of the human mind through the true crime genre. Yet you might wonder how an unassuming rural neighbor transforms into a legendary monster. This book explores the disturbing reality behind iconic horror figures like Norman Bates and Leatherface. You will examine the precise forces that shaped a notorious killer and terrified a quiet farming community.
The book traces Gein's life through four distinct stages. You will investigate these key questions:
- How did a fanatically religious mother condition her son to commit atrocities?
- What horrors did investigators uncover inside the isolated farmhouse?
- How did psychiatric experts diagnose the quiet killer?
1. Family Background and Psychological Conditioning
Ed Gein grew up in a severely dysfunctional household dominated by an abusive, fanatically religious mother who instilled a deep terror of female sexuality.
Plainfield, Wisconsin, was an isolated, hardscrabble community with a history of violent and lawless frontier justice. The town of Plainfield was situated in a poor, desolate region of sandy soil known as Wisconsin's great dead heart. Early in its history, the community was the site of a brutal lynch mob murder involving a squatter named Firman and a settler named Cartwright, which went completely unpunished. In 1853, a violent feud over land ended when a lynch mob seized a settler named Cartwright, hanged him from a hay barn, and dragged his body behind a sleigh.
Ed Gein's parents formed a severely dysfunctional household defined by alcoholism, religious fanaticism, and domestic tyranny. George Gein was orphaned by a flash flood on the Mississippi River at age three, grew into a drifting alcoholic, and was subjugated by Augusta, a fanatically religious and domineering woman who viewed the modern world as a sink of corruption and treated her husband with open contempt. George Gein and Augusta married in December 1899, after which Augusta assumed total control of the household and business, frequently berating George as a weakling.
Augusta Gein subjected her sons to an intense, obsessive campaign of anti-female indoctrination and religious fear. Augusta used readings from the Bible, particularly passages from Genesis, Revelation, and Proverbs concerning harlots and wicked women, to instill in her sons a deep terror and hatred of female sexuality and modern society. Augusta would sit in her damp parlor with Henry and Ed at her feet, reading passages from the Book of Revelations and Proverbs to warn them against the evils of women.
In 1914, Augusta moved her family to an isolated farm in Plainfield to completely sever ties with the outside world. Seeking to escape the moral contamination of the city and profit from agriculture, Augusta purchased a 195-acre farm deeded entirely in her own name. Its extreme isolation allowed her to maintain complete control over her sons' lives while shunning the local community. The Gein family moved to a 195-acre farm in Plainfield known locally as the old John Greenfield place, located six miles west of the village.
Ed Gein grew up socially isolated, perceived as peculiar by his peers, and utterly dependent on his mother's approval. While attending a one-room country school, Ed struggled to fit in, displaying nervous gestures, a lopsided grin, and an effeminate demeanor. Whenever he attempted to make friends, Augusta intervened and forced him to break off contact. Ed completed his formal education at age sixteen after graduating from the eighth grade at the White School.
The death of George Gein in 1940 freed the household of an abusive invalid but left the family mired in extreme poverty. After decades of heavy drinking and physical decline, George Gein died as a helpless invalid, leaving his wife and sons behind. The family home remained dilapidated and lacked basic modern amenities like electricity or indoor plumbing. George Gein died on April 1, 1940, at the age of sixty-six, and his funeral was held at R. A. Goult’s combination furniture store and funeral home.
The sudden death of Ed's older brother Henry in 1944 under suspicious circumstances left Ed entirely alone with his mother. While fighting a marsh fire with Ed, Henry died of asphyxiation. Although investigators found no signs of burns or foul play, the circumstances were peculiar, including Ed's ability to guide searchers directly to the body and unexplained bruises on Henry's head. On May 16, 1944, Henry Gein died at age forty-three while righting a runaway fire on marshland near the family farm.
Following a series of debilitating strokes, Augusta Gein died in late 1945, leaving Ed isolated and utterly devastated. After suffering strokes brought on partly by shock from witnessing a neighbor brutally beat a puppy, Augusta died at the hospital. Ed was left completely alone, overwhelmed by grief for his only friend and true love. Augusta Gein died at the Wild Rose hospital on December 29, 1945, at the age of sixty-seven, following a second stroke.
2. The House of Horrors and Local Crimes
Living in total isolation following his mother's death, Gein indulged in grotesque obsessions with pulp atrocities, grave robbing, and the murder of local women.
You find that small-town dwellers rely on psychological denial to overlook extreme peculiarities and red flags in their neighbors. Despite the oppressive intimacy of communities like Plainfield, residents actively avoid knowing disturbing facts by practicing denial and taking people at face value. This defense mechanism allowed Gein to live undetected for over a decade. Residents viewed Gein as a harmless eccentric and a reliable, albeit unkempt and strange, handyman, completely dismissing his bizarre behavior. Only 600 people populated Plainfield, yet locals consistently regarded him as a quiet version of Casper Milquetoast.
Gein spent his time in total isolation reading true crime pulp magazines and accounts of Nazi atrocities. He specifically studied figures like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, the infamous Bitch of Buchenwald, while collecting items such as shrunken heads and human remains. His bedroom featured a 3-foot stack of tattered coveralls alongside piles of collected items. Teenagers like Bob Hill and a young neighborhood boy visited Gein's house and witnessed preserved human heads hanging on his door. They assumed the gruesome objects were mere theatrical props or cheap novelties rather than real human remains.
Gein viewed local tavern keeper Mary Hogan as a perverse mirror image of his mother Augusta, triggering homicidal delusions of divine justice. While Augusta Gein represented absolute purity, Mary Hogan was viewed by Gein through rumor as a sinister, Chicago-connected former madam. This intolerable cognitive dissonance fueled his violent intentions. When farmer Elmo Ueeck joked that Mary Hogan would be cooking for him if he spent more time courting her, Gein replied that she was down at his house because he picked her up in his truck. Hogan weighed approximately 200 pounds.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, rural Wisconsin was plagued by a series of baffling disappearances that confounded law enforcement. Cases involving young individuals and locals vanished without a trace, leaving behind bloodstains and abandoned vehicles, creating an atmosphere of dread across the region. Eight-year-old Georgia Weckler vanished in May 1947 after getting off a mail truck, prompting an 8000 dollar reward offered for her recovery. Fifteen-year-old honor student Evelyn Hartley disappeared from a babysitting job in October 1953, leaving behind her shoes, bloodstains, and a forced entry window while 1000 volunteers joined the search party.
The disappearance of tavern keeper Mary Hogan in December 1954 left local authorities with a bloody crime scene and no suspects. Farmer Seymour Lester discovered a silent tavern with a pool of blood and a 32-caliber spent cartridge on the floor, indicating a violent abduction. The case remained entirely unsolved for two full years with no leads by December 1956. Editor Ed Marolla published front-page columns in the Plainfield Sun on the anniversaries of the disappearance, asking what happened to Mary Hogan.
On the opening day of the 1957 deer-hunting season, Ed Gein targeted and murdered hardware store owner Bernice Worden in Plainfield.
Taking advantage of the town's depopulation due to the hunting season, Gein entered Worden's Hardware under the guise of buying antifreeze and testing a rifle. He then shot and abducted the fifty-eight-year-old proprietress. That hunting season resulted in a death toll of 40000 bucks and does and 13 hunters. Bernard Muschinski, Sr., running a gas station across the street, noticed the store lights left burning and the panel truck driven away, while Elmo Ueeck saw Gein hurriedly changing his car tires. Worden was celebrated locally as a Citizen of the Week before her tragic murder.
3. Discovery and Investigation of the Crimes
The murder of Bernice Worden led law enforcement to Gein's farmhouse, where they uncovered a horrifying collection of human remains and a shrine to his mother.
Frank Worden discovered his mother's hardware store locked with a missing cash register and a trail of blood leading to the back door, where the delivery truck was gone. He immediately suspected Ed Gein, who had been frequently visiting the store and had casually asked the day before if Frank was going deer hunting. Frank Worden told Sheriff Art Schley and Chief Deputy Arnie Fritz about Gein's persistent attentions toward his mother and his specific inquiry regarding the hunting schedule. These events occurred with a 15 miles distance between Plainfield and Wautoma where Sheriff Schley's office was located, and with 8 days remaining in the deer season.
Sheriff Art Schley and Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster discovered Bernice Worden's mutilated body hanging upside down inside Gein's summer kitchen. Upon breaking into the locked summer kitchen of Gein's decaying death farm, the officers used flashlights to reveal a human carcass hung by the feet, decapitated and split open down the trunk like a dressed-out deer. Sheriff Schley was so overcome by the sight of Bernice Worden's suspended body that she was a 58-year-old woman whose postmortem examination by pathologist F. Eigenberger established the exact mechanism of her death. Dr. Eigenberger dictated findings to his wife Cordelia, noting that the removal of the heart and liver conformed to a deer hunter's pattern. The autopsy report detailed that Mrs. Worden died from a single .22 caliber bullet fired into the back of her head, which lodged in her left orbit, and that all mutilations and disembowelments occurred post-mortem, leaving a 0.76 cm diameter hole in the scalp.
A search of Gein's farmhouse uncovered an extensive collection of grotesque artifacts manufactured from human remains. Investigators found that Gein's cluttered home contained human skulls used as bedpost decorations and soup bowls, chairs woven with human skin strips instead of cane, lampshades, a belt made of female nipples, and a vest crafted from a woman's upper torso. Crime lab specialist Allan Wilimovsky found a Quaker Oats container filled with scraps of head skin, and a shoebox containing 9 vulvas in a shoebox, along with 4 human noses in a container and 9 women's facial skin masks.
The search of Gein's house finally solved the three-year-old disappearance of tavern owner Mary Hogan. Deputy Arnie Fritz picked up a horsehide robe behind the kitchen door, found a paper bag inside it containing a desiccated skin with hair, and identified it as Mary Hogan's face. Specks Murty gasped upon seeing the bag's contents and confirmed that it was Mary Hogan, solving the mystery of her disappearance from her Portage County tavern during the 3-year-old mystery of the tavern owner's disappearance. Behind a boarded-up wall, investigators found a pristine, dust-coated shrine dedicated to Gein's long-dead mother. Removing the boards from part of the first floor revealed a bedroom and parlor kept in absolute tidiness, preserved exactly as Augusta Gein had left them years before. The searchers entered Augusta Gein's sealed living quarters, which were coated in a thick layer of dust and untouched for years by the devoted son.
The secrecy of local authorities and the gruesome discoveries fueled a massive media invasion and wild rumors of cannibalism. Journalists from regional newspapers, national magazines like Life and Time, and television stations flooded Plainfield, where a lack of official statements caused rumors to spread rapidly about cannibalism and hidden victims in a hothouse of rumor across the 195 acres property size after 150 officers visiting Gein's premises during a 48-hour period. William Senay, owner of Bill's Bar on North Street, described how people constantly repeated exaggerated stories until they believed them as facts.
Gein confessed to killing Bernice Worden while in a daze and claimed his human trophies came from robbing graves.
In a statement to prosecutor Earl Kileen, Gein admitted shooting Worden and loading her into a truck, but denied committing any other murders, asserting that his collection of body parts came from visiting local cemeteries about 40 nocturnal visits to area cemeteries over a five-year period, during 9 occasions where he opened caskets. Gein took officials on a tour of his property on Monday morning, pointing out the spot behind his outhouse where he buried the drained blood, leading to a $10,000 bail set at his arraignment.
Law enforcement checked Gein's property against numerous unsolved disappearances across Wisconsin. Investigators evaluated whether Gein was connected to past missing persons cases, including 8-year-old Georgia Weckler missing in 1947, Victor Travis in 1952, Evelyn Hartley in 1953, and Mary Hogan in 1954, though evidence like shoe sizes and dental charts made links to cases like Hartley's unlikely. Lieutenant Vern Weber of the La Crosse Police Department travelled to Plainfield to examine evidence and determined that the tennis shoes found during the Evelyn Hartley kidnapping were an 11-and-a-half tennis shoe size compared to Gein's size 8.
4. Interrogation and Psychiatric Evaluation
During police interrogations, Ed Gein exhibited a chilling lack of remorse while detailing his methods of grave robbing and corpse mutilation before being diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Polygraph specialist Joe Wilimovsky questioned Gein over a total time of 9 hours. Gein was hooked up to the polygraph for 19 minutes on Tuesday and 11 additional minutes on Wednesday. You see him calmly admit to grave robbing, flaying corpses, and using anatomical parts in bizarre ways without comprehending the enormity of his crimes. During a break in confessing to corpse flaying and wearing human skin, Gein calmly munched on a slice of apple pie and Wisconsin cheddar, complaining only about the dryness of the cheese.
Gein detailed his exact methods for violating graves and harvesting anatomical trophies from deceased women without the use of heavy tools:
- Test the freshness of a grave by inserting a metal rod into the soil.
- Work the casket cover open using a pry bar.
- Open just one half of the casket to extract the body parts.
- Remove the head by rocking it back and forth to break the bone without a saw.
When asked if he used a saw to remove heads from cemeteries, Gein replied that he never took a saw to a graveyard and described the snapping motion instead. He admitted to peeling facial skin and hair off skulls, stuffing them with paper to dry, and securing them to his own face with cord. He also fashioned a mammary vest, skin stockings, and covered his genitals with preserved vulvas. Gein confessed that he would sprinkle salt on harvested vulvas to preserve them, and when one turned green, he touched it up with silver paint to stop further decay.
Psychiatrists diagnosed Gein as severely schizophrenic with a profound Oedipus complex driven by his mother's abnormal teachings about women.
Dr. Edward J. Kelleher analyzed Gein's condition as schizophrenia marked by extreme ambivalence toward women, whom his mother Augusta branded as having the devil in them. This toxic psychological foundation led to a horrific cluster of transvestism, fetishism, and necrophilia, while Gein specifically targeted middle-aged women who resembled his mother. Eddie shot Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden because he thought they resembled his mother, subsequently butchering their bodies in his summer kitchen using a homemade knife fashioned from a file.
Crime Lab Director Charles Wilson announced that lie detector tests and evaluations eliminated Gein as a suspect in the disappearances of Evelyn Hartley, who vanished in La Crosse County on October 24, 1953, Georgia Jean Weckler, who vanished in Jefferson County on May 1, 1947, and Victor Travis, who disappeared in Adams County on November 1, 1952. State officials released joint concurrence statements to eliminate Gein from unnecessary suspicion regarding cold cases, while confirming his responsibility for the deaths of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden.
The sudden arrival of reporters in Plainfield led to an explosion of lurid speculation, exaggerated journalism, and fabricated personal accounts. Adeline Watkins, a local spinster at 50 years old, briefly gained national headlines by claiming she had a twenty-year romance and marriage proposal from Gein, a story she later retracted as an exaggeration fueled by pushy reporters. Wisconsin Attorney General Vernon Honeck imposed a news blackout on the Gein investigation to protect the integrity of future jury pools. District Attorney Kileen defended his prior disclosures to reporters before announcing he would strictly follow the attorney general's advice to prevent public prejudgment.
Neighbors who previously dismissed Gein's eccentricities as harmless oddities struggled to reconcile his polite, quiet demeanor with the horrifying reality of his crimes. Local storekeepers recalled giving Gein change and deliberately placing it on the counter rather than touching his hand because he had a sly, unsettling grin. Prior to the arrest, plastic shrunken heads were available to children for $2.50.
As the investigation wound down, the community of Plainfield paused to hold funeral services for Ed Gein's final victim, Bernice Worden. More than 200 relatives, friends, and neighbors filled the First Methodist Church for Worden's funeral before she was buried beside her husband in the snow-covered village cemetery. Rev. Gerald Tanquist addressed the grieving community, urging them to reaffirm their faith despite the darkness and trauma inflicted upon their town.
10 Key Ideas
- Ed Gein grew up in a severely dysfunctional household dominated by an abusive, fanatically religious mother who instilled a deep terror of female sexuality.
- The sudden death of Ed's older brother Henry in 1944 under suspicious circumstances left Ed entirely alone with his mother.
- Following a series of debilitating strokes, Augusta Gein died in late 1945, leaving Ed isolated and utterly devastated.
- Living in total isolation following his mother's death, Gein indulged in grotesque obsessions with pulp atrocities, grave robbing, and the murder of local women.
- On the opening day of the 1957 deer-hunting season, Ed Gein targeted and murdered hardware store owner Bernice Worden in Plainfield.
- The murder of Bernice Worden led law enforcement to Gein's farmhouse, where they uncovered a horrifying collection of human remains and a shrine to his mother.
- The secrecy of local authorities and the gruesome discoveries fueled a massive media invasion and wild rumors of cannibalism.
- Gein confessed to killing Bernice Worden while in a daze and claimed his human trophies came from robbing graves.
- During police interrogations, Ed Gein exhibited a chilling lack of remorse while detailing his methods of grave robbing and corpse mutilation before being diagnosed as schizophrenic.
- Psychiatrists diagnosed Gein as severely schizophrenic with a profound Oedipus complex driven by his mother's abnormal teachings about women.