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Real Stories Tapes True Crime is your new true crime
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podcast fix. In our first season, we'll explore suspicious deaths
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at a California hospital and a skydiver landing dead on
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a suburban driveway with a bag containing guns, drugs, and
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night vision goggles. To join our investigation, search and subscribe
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to Real Stories Tapes True Crime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
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or wherever you find your podcasts.
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In November 1957, police in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin,
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were searching for a missing woman named Bernice Warden. They
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were about to make one of the most gruesome discoveries
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in U.S. criminal history.
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One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it
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around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
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which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
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They realized to their incredible horror that it was a
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woman's corpse. that was hanging by its heels.
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The twisted killer was a quiet loner named Ed Gein.
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Hidden inside the 51-year-old's rural farmhouse was a ghoulish treasure
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trove of human remains.
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There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found
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the remains of 12 human heads, gloves made out of
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the skin from a corpse's fingers.
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You think of this happening, you know, now, it's doubly shocking.
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But back then, in a small, tiny rural community, it
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was breathtaking.
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America had woken up inside the nightmare of Ed Gein,
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one of the world's most evil killers. The gruesome crimes
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of Ed Gein horrified 50s America. When his rural home
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was searched on the 16th of November, 1957, the police
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uncovered a gothic house of horrors. As well as the
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remains of two missing local women, they found an array
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of human bones, skulls, and skin that had been fashioned
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into furniture and clothing. The town of Plainfield was in
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complete shock. One of the residents who remembers the effect
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Gein had on Plainfield is Max Harrington.
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I think shock would be the biggest thing that we
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could use to describe the atmosphere in the community. We
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were still pretty much a clannish community at that time
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when a lot of the families that were here had
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always been here. It took your breath away. It was shocking.
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It still is. People don't do things like that in
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a small town on a normal day. That's just not
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part of what we grew up with.
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The story of this twisted killer begins over a century ago.
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Ed Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on
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the 27th of August, 1906. By the time he was
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eight years old, his parents moved Ed and his older
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brother Henry to Plainfield.
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Well, the Gein family moved... to Plainfield from La Crosse, Wisconsin,
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partly because the mother of the family, the matriarch, Augusta,
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had decided that La Crosse was a kind of Sodom
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and Gomorrah-like hellhole, and she didn't want her children to
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be corrupted by all the immoral influences of the big city.
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Needless to say, La Crosse was not a particularly big city,
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but they moved to a remote farmhouse about six miles
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west of, you wouldn't necessarily say downtown Plainfield, because there
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was no uptown Plainfield.
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It's not the largest city in the state of Wisconsin,
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but it's plenty big enough for those of us that
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live here.
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Plainfield was a very remote, isolated area. featureless little village.
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A state guidebook at the time described it as totally nondescript.
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The population was very small, never more in its history,
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I think, than 700 or 800 people. You know, probably
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the entire population of the village could have fit into
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a New York City apartment building.
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The Geens' 150-acre farm was located on the corner of
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Archer and Second Avenue. Ed rarely got to leave the
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property and socialize with other children.
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His mother, Augusta, is a very domineering character indeed. She
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is a devout Christian, and she has some very extreme
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ideas about sin and about morality. And she drums into
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her sons that they're not to socialize with anybody outside
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of the family because all of the people around them
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in the local town are sinners, they're evil, all the
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women are whores. And so she creates this very insular
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family environment where they're quite isolated from the rest of
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the community and that has a really significant impact on them.
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Gein seemed to have been very friendless whenever he would
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make some kind of friend. On those rare occasions, when
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he would try to make a school friend and bring
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home a school friend, the mother would immediately find some
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reason to disapprove of the other child and forbid Ed
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from ever bringing him home. So he grew up again
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in a state of complete social isolation.
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And Gein's relationship with his father was also far from perfect.
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Well, the father, George, was an alcoholic. He appeared to
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have been somewhat free in his use of physical punishment.
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But mostly the picture that emerges of George is of,
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you know, kind of a hapless individual who was, as
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all three male members of the family were, under the
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thumb of his wife. And again, who was regarded as
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much as anything else as a sort of or impediment
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to the household.
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As Ed entered adolescence, his life became even more insular.
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He dropped out of school when he was around about
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12 or 13 to work on the family's farm, and
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he was considered to be a bit of an oddball.
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He was quite a loner, and he enjoyed quite solitary pursuits,
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so he really quite liked reading and was quite a
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prolific reader. So he was somebody who didn't really fit
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in but worked incredibly hard to keep the family farm going.
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On April 1st, 1940, Ed's father George died of heart failure,
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leaving 33-year-old Ed, his brother Henry, and Augusta alone on
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the family farm.
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Ed's older brother Henry seemed to have freed himself a
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little more emotionally and psychologically from Augusta's dominance. and even
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apparently on a couple of occasions expressed some criticism of
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their mother and the hold she was exerting over both
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of them. So Ed, who at least on a conscious
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level worshipped his mother and saw her as a kind
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of goddess who could do no wrong, appears to have
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been both a little shocked that Henry would find any
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cause to criticize Augusta, and possibly built up some kind
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of animosity toward Henry for that attitude.
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Ed became a handyman, doing odd jobs around Plainfield to
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help with living expenses on the farm.
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We used to see Ed occasionally. I'd see him around town,
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and then he was always a friendly person, quiet, friendly,
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usually had a joke to tell. He always had time
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to say hello and ask after how you were. A
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person who you would never suspect of anything other than
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being a decent sort of person.
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In May 1944, death would hit the Gein family once again,
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but this time in more suspicious circumstances after a brush
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fire on their farmland got out of control.
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Ed and Henry were out there trying to put out
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the fire and they got separated and and Ed could
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not locate Henry, and he went and got help. But
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then after getting this help, he led the other people
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directly to where Henry's body lay, and there were some
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mysterious bruises on Henry's head. Anyway, the official verdict of
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the medical examiner was that Henry had died of a
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heart attack while fighting this fire and had injured his
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head when he fell and hit a rock. But afterwards,
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when Gein's crimes were uncovered, There was a lot of
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talk that perhaps Henry had been a victim of Ed's,
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that Ed in fact had killed Henry partly because of
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Henry's criticism of Augusta.
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The impact upon their mother Augusta was phenomenal. She really
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broke down about Henry's death and she had a stroke.
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But of course by then, you know, the psychic bond
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between Augusta and Ed was so incredibly intense already. Evidence
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seems to suggest that with the other two men out
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of the.
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Way, Ed reveled.
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in having his mommy alone to himself.
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But Gein's mother never really recovered from her stroke, and
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their time alone only lasted for 19 months.
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Ed nursed her very, very diligently, even apparently would get
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into bed with her on occasion and stroke her and
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comfort her, and then she seemed to recover, but then
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she suffered another, this time fatal, stroke.
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Augusta Gein died on December 29, 1945. 39-year-old Ed was
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completely devastated.
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Because his mother was so domineering, I think she really
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did stunt his development, and he almost got stuck at
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a kind of teenage, adolescent phase in his life. Looking
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at how he behaved at the funeral, he was in
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his 30s at this time, and he was reported to
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be wailing like a small child. So he hasn't got
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that kind of emotional control that's associated with 30-something men.
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The death of his mother left him completely, completely isolated,
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you know, living in this increasingly ramshackle, dilapidated farmhouse that
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he ceased to take care of whatsoever. Augusta was his
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only real human contact. So it was at that point,
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you know, that Gein embarked on these various outrages that
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would ultimately make him this notorious figure in American crime.
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Alone and isolated from the rest of society, Gein spiraled
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out of control. Over the next 12 years, he became
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obsessed with recreating the world he'd shared with his mother.
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it would lead him to a series of dark and
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disturbing crimes that would eventually culminate in murder.
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One of my summer jobs when I was a student
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in high school was mowing the cemetery. And two of
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my buddies and I, that was about a four-day job
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for us to mow that. And we would see Ed
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out there on occasion. He'd come out, and if he
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saw us working, he'd always come over and say hello.
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And again, sometimes have this little story to tell. And
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he was very good about stopping to see his mother's grave.
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I think neighbors saw him as an odd, very meek,
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somewhat simple-minded person, but one who was always willing to
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pitch in when some farm work needed to be done
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or Some chore needed to be run for them. But they,
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of course, had no sense of the life that he
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was pursuing inside that incredibly creepy, dismal world of his
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own farm.
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It was a world that 51-year-old Gein had managed to
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keep hidden away until the winter of 1957. November 16th, 1957,
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was the first.
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Day of deer hunting season that year. and it was
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a day when basically the entire male population of the
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town would have been out in the woods hunting deer,
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as Ed knew. Ed drove into town to the Warden
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Hardware Store. The Warden Hardware Store was owned by a
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woman named Bernice Warden.
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I knew Mrs. Warden quite well. She and her family
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ran the hardware store here for many years, and almost
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everybody in the community knew Mrs.
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Warden. Ed had kind of been hanging around the store
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for a couple of weeks previously. He had developed something
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of an obsession with Bernie Swarton.
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He would talk to her, he would ask her out,
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and it was quite clear that she really wasn't that
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interested in him.
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Ed came in, asked to buy half a gallon of antifreeze,
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which Bernie Swarton poured out for him and wrote out
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a receipt. He went back out to his truck, then
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came back inside, and asked her to see a rifle
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that was in the window. When Bernie Swarden turned her
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back to him, he shot her in the back of
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the head and then loaded her corpse in his truck
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and drove back to his farm.
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Gein had murdered the 58-year-old woman in broad daylight.
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It was deer season, so deer season, it's like a
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ghost town around here. Everybody, in those days especially, everybody
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was out hunting, and she wasn't even missed for quite a,
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for some hours. And when someone reported that she wasn't
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at the store, well, that was her son.
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Of course. Later that day, Frank Warden returned from the
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woods and found the store empty. His mother wasn't there.
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He was very perplexed by that. And then he saw
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a trail of blood across the floor of the hardware
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store and not only realized that some foul play had occurred,
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but immediately suspected Ed Gein. because Gein had been kind
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of bothering his mother for the past few weeks.
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And there was one piece of evidence that confirmed Frank
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Warden's suspicions to the police.
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When they went to search the place, they found the
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receipt for the antifreeze that was in Ed's name. And
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they just worked backwards, saying that he was probably the
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last person to see her alive, but they didn't suspect that.
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He was as deranged as he was.
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One set of lawmen went out in search of Gein.
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They found him having dinner at a neighbor's house, and
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they arrested him. And then another set of lawmen went
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out to Gein's farmhouse, and that's where they made these
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discoveries that really sent shockwaves around the world.
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On a dark winter's night, officers from the Plainfield Police
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Department began to search the Gein farm for Bernice Wharton.
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They couldn't get into the house. So they went around
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00:15:53.750 --> 00:15:58.139
back and entered into what was called the summer kitchen,
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00:15:58.200 --> 00:15:59.700
which was a little shed outside.
245
00:16:00.220 --> 00:16:04.059
This property didn't have any electricity, so they were pretty
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00:16:04.100 --> 00:16:07.399
much fumbling around in the dark with flashlights. But I
247
00:16:07.440 --> 00:16:10.659
don't think they expected to find what they did find there.
248
00:16:11.080 --> 00:16:13.690
One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it
249
00:16:13.730 --> 00:16:18.110
around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
250
00:16:18.889 --> 00:16:21.549
which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
251
00:16:22.889 --> 00:16:25.610
Although it didn't look like a deer, they realized to
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00:16:25.669 --> 00:16:29.700
their incredible horror that it was a woman's corpse that
253
00:16:29.750 --> 00:16:33.220
was hanging by its heels and been completely gutted.
254
00:16:33.720 --> 00:16:37.899
She'd been strung up, essentially, and she was slit from
255
00:16:38.100 --> 00:16:43.059
her sternum to her pelvis. So she'd essentially been butchered
256
00:16:43.240 --> 00:16:47.350
by Ed. It really was the most grotesque thing that
257
00:16:47.590 --> 00:16:49.210
these officers had ever come across.
258
00:16:49.610 --> 00:16:53.190
And they realized they had found the body of Bernie's warden, And,
259
00:16:53.220 --> 00:16:56.320
of course, both of them just stumbled out in horror
260
00:16:56.580 --> 00:16:59.220
and vomited, you know, at the sight of this thing.
261
00:17:00.759 --> 00:17:03.799
When the news spread across the town, the residents of
262
00:17:03.879 --> 00:17:05.890
Plainfield were in complete shock.
263
00:17:06.210 --> 00:17:10.359
When I heard of his arrest, I couldn't believe it.
264
00:17:10.390 --> 00:17:12.450
I was sure they had the wrong person because it
265
00:17:12.509 --> 00:17:16.019
just didn't seem like anything that they were telling us
266
00:17:16.759 --> 00:17:22.170
was the Ed that we all knew. It was a
267
00:17:22.230 --> 00:17:25.410
Saturday night. We were at a dance, and the story
268
00:17:25.430 --> 00:17:28.150
went through there, and everybody said, I don't believe it,
269
00:17:28.849 --> 00:17:29.630
but it was true.
270
00:17:31.960 --> 00:17:35.299
After finding the butchered body of Bernice Warden in a
271
00:17:35.380 --> 00:17:39.119
shed at Ed Gein's farm, the police officers moved their
272
00:17:39.180 --> 00:17:40.880
search into the main house.
273
00:17:41.680 --> 00:17:44.789
He boarded up some areas of the family's home to
274
00:17:44.849 --> 00:17:48.170
maintain the rooms as his mother had left them, and
275
00:17:48.269 --> 00:17:51.750
in other parts of the property, He just started hoarding things.
276
00:17:51.809 --> 00:17:54.890
You know, you would have trash and rubbish filled up,
277
00:17:54.950 --> 00:17:58.019
and it really became a complete hovel.
278
00:17:58.220 --> 00:18:02.839
He'd reverse the normal process of trash disposal, you know,
279
00:18:02.920 --> 00:18:05.420
and instead of taking all his garbage to the dump,
280
00:18:05.460 --> 00:18:07.599
would go to the dump and bring it into his house.
281
00:18:08.180 --> 00:18:12.289
It was just this incredible chaos of trash and garbage.
282
00:18:12.730 --> 00:18:15.170
But there was more than just household waste.
283
00:18:15.769 --> 00:18:23.269
Amid all that wreckage, they discovered... these incomprehensible, unspeakably awful
284
00:18:23.490 --> 00:18:26.430
objects that had been fashioned out of human body parts.
285
00:18:26.890 --> 00:18:29.809
There were chairs that were upholstered in human flesh.
286
00:18:30.410 --> 00:18:33.630
There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found
287
00:18:33.930 --> 00:18:37.950
the remains of 12 human heads, gloves made out of
288
00:18:38.259 --> 00:18:40.410
the skin from a corpse's fingers.
289
00:18:40.490 --> 00:18:44.019
There was a jar containing human noses. There was a
290
00:18:44.079 --> 00:18:48.279
box full of female genitalia, some of which had been painted.
291
00:18:49.480 --> 00:18:53.740
and tied with ribbons. There was a belt fashioned out
292
00:18:53.779 --> 00:18:57.390
of female nipples. There was a shade pull made of
293
00:18:57.450 --> 00:18:58.130
human lips.
294
00:18:58.769 --> 00:19:02.289
They found all types of things that belonged to people
295
00:19:02.730 --> 00:19:06.430
that were no longer people. And it was shocking. I mean,
296
00:19:06.890 --> 00:19:10.500
you think of this happening, you know, now, it's still
297
00:19:10.519 --> 00:19:14.740
pretty shocking. But back then, in a small, tiny rural community,
298
00:19:15.539 --> 00:19:19.400
it was absolutely shocking. It was breathtaking.
299
00:19:19.839 --> 00:19:24.440
Ed Skeen's farmhouse was the habitation of a literal ghoul,
300
00:19:24.460 --> 00:19:28.720
you know, somebody who had been living amidst these horrific
301
00:19:28.980 --> 00:19:32.299
relics of human dismemberment. It was a madhouse.
302
00:19:32.319 --> 00:19:38.390
Skeen's fascination with death and corpses had been growing ever
303
00:19:38.430 --> 00:19:41.470
since his mother had died 12 years previously.
304
00:19:41.490 --> 00:19:45.130
Ed had always enjoyed reading. It was quite a solitary pursuit,
305
00:19:45.170 --> 00:19:47.940
so that's not particularly surprising, but After the death of
306
00:19:47.980 --> 00:19:50.579
his mother and his brother, he started to read an
307
00:19:50.799 --> 00:19:54.759
awful lot more. And his tastes in literature really did
308
00:19:54.799 --> 00:19:59.829
span quite a wide spectrum. He read pornographic magazines. He
309
00:19:59.890 --> 00:20:03.869
read medical textbooks. And he developed a particular interest in
310
00:20:04.029 --> 00:20:07.910
Ilse Koch, who worked at one of the Nazi concentration
311
00:20:07.950 --> 00:20:11.670
camps and collected patches of skin of the prisoners who
312
00:20:11.710 --> 00:20:15.470
were detained there. And I think all of this was
313
00:20:15.569 --> 00:20:20.589
fueling a very active imagination. So he's developing these obsessions
314
00:20:20.630 --> 00:20:23.910
and these interests, and he's quite skilled as a farmhand
315
00:20:23.970 --> 00:20:26.589
at this point in time. He knows how to slaughter animals.
316
00:20:26.670 --> 00:20:29.769
He knows how to prepare carcasses. He's from a community
317
00:20:29.809 --> 00:20:32.730
that's very much into its hunting and its fishing. So
318
00:20:32.970 --> 00:20:36.069
at some point, reality and fantasy are going to collide.
319
00:20:37.119 --> 00:20:40.740
As the search of the farmhouse progressed, officers found that
320
00:20:40.779 --> 00:20:44.990
the grotesque collection of body parts became even more disturbing.
321
00:20:45.430 --> 00:20:49.369
Among the most hideous of all the items were human
322
00:20:49.509 --> 00:20:52.990
skin masks that were hanging from the wall of his bedroom,
323
00:20:53.589 --> 00:20:56.390
the faces of women that had been flayed from the
324
00:20:56.470 --> 00:21:00.150
skulls and that had been preserved. Some of them had
325
00:21:00.230 --> 00:21:02.900
lipstick applied to them and that had been hung on
326
00:21:02.940 --> 00:21:08.240
the walls as decorations. And then, most notoriously, there was
327
00:21:08.259 --> 00:21:12.680
a skin suit that Ed had crafted out of the
328
00:21:13.369 --> 00:21:16.390
upper torso of a woman and the leggings of a woman.
329
00:21:17.049 --> 00:21:20.670
And apparently, as he later confessed, he would put on
330
00:21:20.730 --> 00:21:23.569
this skin suit and put on one of the female
331
00:21:23.630 --> 00:21:28.250
skin masks and caper around in his yard, pretending to
332
00:21:28.309 --> 00:21:29.009
be his mother.
333
00:21:31.059 --> 00:21:34.900
Gein's macabre collection had been acquired from the very same
334
00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:37.460
cemetery where his mother's body lay.
335
00:21:38.150 --> 00:21:41.589
Two years after the death of his mother in 1947,
336
00:21:41.589 --> 00:21:46.509
he starts grave robbing. So he's going into a local
337
00:21:46.589 --> 00:21:50.490
burial ground, he's digging up bodies, and he's taking things
338
00:21:50.670 --> 00:21:54.279
from the bodies. Now, he's not taking jewellery or items
339
00:21:54.440 --> 00:21:57.859
of any value, he's actually taking body parts. It really
340
00:21:57.940 --> 00:22:01.599
is an absolute house of horrors, so... What started off
341
00:22:01.680 --> 00:22:04.220
as an interest, which was confined to the pages of
342
00:22:04.279 --> 00:22:07.200
a book has now become a reality behind the doors
343
00:22:07.240 --> 00:22:10.559
of this rather bizarre house. So what he's doing in
344
00:22:10.599 --> 00:22:13.900
a really grotesque way is trying to bring his mother
345
00:22:14.180 --> 00:22:17.009
back to life in some way, shape or form, because
346
00:22:17.049 --> 00:22:19.809
he was just so dependent upon her for a sense
347
00:22:19.849 --> 00:22:20.849
of his own identity.
348
00:22:21.779 --> 00:22:25.859
And the search wasn't over yet. Officers would soon discover
349
00:22:26.220 --> 00:22:30.099
inside a paper bag in Gein's home the severed head
350
00:22:30.160 --> 00:22:33.480
of a woman who'd been missing from Plainfield for over
351
00:22:33.579 --> 00:22:34.240
two years.
352
00:22:35.880 --> 00:22:37.940
I think that the real tipping point for Ed Gein
353
00:22:37.980 --> 00:22:41.480
was when his mother and his brother died because even
354
00:22:41.529 --> 00:22:44.390
though this family was very intense and rather extreme in
355
00:22:44.430 --> 00:22:47.329
its beliefs, it was still a check on his behavior.
356
00:22:47.670 --> 00:22:51.849
There was still that informal surveillance over him and I
357
00:22:51.869 --> 00:22:54.710
think that kept him contained. But once he was on
358
00:22:54.750 --> 00:22:58.450
his own, he was free to ruminate and fantasize, and
359
00:22:58.509 --> 00:23:00.609
his behavior was only going to escalate.
360
00:23:00.630 --> 00:23:04.150
You know, it's like some crack opened up, you know,
361
00:23:04.210 --> 00:23:08.019
in the civilized part of his head, and all this weird,
362
00:23:08.099 --> 00:23:11.960
archaic stuff going back to the days, you know, when
363
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:18.480
our species did engage in these bizarre, unspeakable rituals, you know,
364
00:23:18.680 --> 00:23:20.539
flooded out and took possession of him.
365
00:23:21.259 --> 00:23:25.500
With Gein in custody, officers continued to scour his home,
366
00:23:25.900 --> 00:23:29.700
and they were about to make another startling discovery, a
367
00:23:29.779 --> 00:23:33.029
local woman who'd been missing for almost three years.
368
00:23:33.490 --> 00:23:36.789
There had been a female tavern keeper named Mary Hogan
369
00:23:37.549 --> 00:23:42.170
who ran this roadside tavern outside of Plainfield who had
370
00:23:42.210 --> 00:23:43.950
disappeared very, very mysteriously.
371
00:23:44.289 --> 00:23:48.099
In those days, we had 18-year-old bars where teenagers could
372
00:23:48.119 --> 00:23:52.759
go and have beer in. And she ran one of those.
373
00:23:52.839 --> 00:23:56.690
It was kind of a modest place, to be very kind.
374
00:23:58.150 --> 00:24:01.829
But she disappeared before I was old enough to frequent
375
00:24:02.450 --> 00:24:03.430
those establishments.
376
00:24:03.750 --> 00:24:07.049
When she went missing, he'd said some rather bizarre things.
377
00:24:07.650 --> 00:24:10.359
He said to one of the townspeople, oh, she's not missing.
378
00:24:10.430 --> 00:24:12.859
She's up at the house. But because he was a
379
00:24:12.880 --> 00:24:14.819
bit of a misfit and because he was a bit weird,
380
00:24:15.339 --> 00:24:18.839
People didn't really take what he said very seriously at all,
381
00:24:19.119 --> 00:24:21.700
so that one was allowed to slip under the radar
382
00:24:21.819 --> 00:24:24.240
until this grisly discovery a few years later.
383
00:24:24.859 --> 00:24:30.670
In searching through Gein's house of horrors, the investigators opened
384
00:24:30.769 --> 00:24:36.269
up some receptacle and saw this face and pulled it
385
00:24:36.390 --> 00:24:39.099
out and realized it was Mary Hogan's, that she had
386
00:24:39.130 --> 00:24:41.180
been another one of these victims.
387
00:24:43.049 --> 00:24:48.049
Had murdered Mary Hogan on December the 8th, 1954, three
388
00:24:48.109 --> 00:24:50.769
years previous to killing Bernice Worden.
389
00:24:51.329 --> 00:24:55.349
I think there was some sense in which he associated
390
00:24:55.470 --> 00:25:00.210
her with his mother. You know, she almost seemed to be, like,
391
00:25:00.289 --> 00:25:03.690
the shadow side of his mother, and I think in
392
00:25:03.799 --> 00:25:07.119
killing her, again, he was both enacting some kind of
393
00:25:07.180 --> 00:25:11.099
homicidal rage toward his mother, But I think also there
394
00:25:11.140 --> 00:25:14.940
were times when he just ran out of suitable female
395
00:25:15.059 --> 00:25:17.369
corpses and had to make his own.
396
00:25:18.289 --> 00:25:21.369
Back at the local police station, it was time for
397
00:25:21.509 --> 00:25:23.170
Ed Gein to start talking.
398
00:25:24.289 --> 00:25:27.170
Well, for the first day after his arrest, I think
399
00:25:27.289 --> 00:25:29.410
Ed felt like a bit of a fish out of water.
400
00:25:29.430 --> 00:25:32.640
He didn't quite know how to react, but he did
401
00:25:32.700 --> 00:25:35.970
start talking after about 24 hours and The first thing
402
00:25:36.029 --> 00:25:38.309
he said was that he wanted an apple pie with
403
00:25:38.349 --> 00:25:41.109
a slice of cheese on it. And that really does
404
00:25:41.349 --> 00:25:44.430
show the emotional immaturity.
405
00:25:43.789 --> 00:25:44.450
Of this guy.
406
00:25:44.670 --> 00:25:47.039
And when you've got somebody whose development stops at a
407
00:25:47.079 --> 00:25:51.920
particular point, they don't develop those complex emotions that enable
408
00:25:51.940 --> 00:25:54.660
them to empathize with other people or just think through
409
00:25:54.680 --> 00:25:58.440
the consequences of their actions. What you've got here is
410
00:25:58.740 --> 00:26:01.019
a teenage boy in a man's body, and he was
411
00:26:01.059 --> 00:26:03.059
capable of some really terrible things.
412
00:26:03.480 --> 00:26:06.789
He was subjected to a very lengthy interrogation. He freely
413
00:26:06.869 --> 00:26:10.250
confessed to the murders of Bernie Swarton and Mary Hogan.
414
00:26:10.910 --> 00:26:14.869
When the police first broke into Gein's house and discovered
415
00:26:14.990 --> 00:26:18.529
this crazy mass of body parts, their first assumption was
416
00:26:18.569 --> 00:26:21.880
Gein was a serial killer. It was only during his
417
00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:27.089
interrogation that he revealed that they were taken from the
418
00:26:27.150 --> 00:26:30.809
corpses he had dug up from these local cemeteries. And people,
419
00:26:31.109 --> 00:26:33.789
in a way, had a harder time believing that than
420
00:26:33.809 --> 00:26:37.089
that he was a serial killer. That seemed like totally
421
00:26:37.190 --> 00:26:39.880
beyond the bounds of belief for a whole variety of reasons.
422
00:26:40.240 --> 00:26:44.839
Human bodies are traditionally buried six feet underground. That's a
423
00:26:44.880 --> 00:26:46.940
lot of digging, that's a lot of work to get
424
00:26:47.059 --> 00:26:52.250
to them through packed earth. He'd need spades, picks. He'd
425
00:26:52.289 --> 00:26:55.109
need to be strong and he'd need... One assumes to
426
00:26:55.150 --> 00:26:57.930
do it at night because he'd need to be undisturbed.
427
00:26:58.569 --> 00:27:01.650
I'm not sure he did recognize that what he was
428
00:27:01.670 --> 00:27:05.529
doing was wrong. You know, there are some necrophiles who think, well,
429
00:27:05.549 --> 00:27:08.769
I wasn't really hurting anybody. You know, they were dead anyway.
430
00:27:10.170 --> 00:27:16.559
Gein confessed to investigators that between 1947 and 1952, he'd
431
00:27:16.700 --> 00:27:20.019
regularly visited the local cemetery after dark.
432
00:27:20.460 --> 00:27:23.660
He would often follow the local newspapers and read the obituaries.
433
00:27:24.769 --> 00:27:28.950
And when some middle-aged or elderly woman who bore some
434
00:27:29.150 --> 00:27:33.950
vague resemblance to his departed mother died and was buried,
435
00:27:34.410 --> 00:27:36.849
he would apparently go out to the cemetery at night
436
00:27:37.670 --> 00:27:40.089
while the soil was still fresh and easily dug up
437
00:27:40.730 --> 00:27:45.849
and exhume these coffins and remove the bodies and sometimes
438
00:27:45.950 --> 00:27:49.450
take the entire corpse back to his farmhouse. Sometimes just
439
00:27:49.470 --> 00:27:51.690
take parts of the corpse back to the farmhouse and
440
00:27:51.730 --> 00:27:52.490
leave the rest there.
441
00:27:53.559 --> 00:27:57.019
Investigators decided to dig up some of the graves to
442
00:27:57.059 --> 00:27:58.740
see if Gein was telling the truth.
443
00:27:59.259 --> 00:28:02.599
When they uncovered them, they discovered that the coffins had
444
00:28:02.640 --> 00:28:07.339
been broken into and the bodies were missing or, you know,
445
00:28:07.380 --> 00:28:09.880
there were just parts of the skeleton remaining there.
446
00:28:10.140 --> 00:28:14.269
He admitted to grave robbing nine corpses, but the maths
447
00:28:14.309 --> 00:28:18.009
didn't quite add up because the police had found 12
448
00:28:18.009 --> 00:28:23.069
human heads in Gein's property. And he'd only admitted to
449
00:28:23.069 --> 00:28:27.589
11 offences against separate people. So the numbers never really
450
00:28:27.710 --> 00:28:30.650
added up properly. So there's always been questions over that.
451
00:28:30.990 --> 00:28:36.710
Ed Gein's crimes were in the late 50s, 1957. The
452
00:28:36.750 --> 00:28:41.490
state of forensic science in those days was far less.
453
00:28:41.359 --> 00:28:42.890
Than we have now.
454
00:28:43.519 --> 00:28:48.339
Things like DNA simply didn't exist as a tool. So
455
00:28:48.660 --> 00:28:52.000
identification could potentially be very difficult, and I would suspect
456
00:28:52.099 --> 00:28:54.609
in certainly some of the body parts, simply impossible.
457
00:28:55.480 --> 00:29:00.289
There was no doubt that Gein specifically targeted females. All
458
00:29:00.349 --> 00:29:03.109
the graves he desecrated belonged to women.
459
00:29:03.410 --> 00:29:06.230
I think he was both trying to rebuild his mother,
460
00:29:08.150 --> 00:29:12.069
but I also think that he was taking revenge on
461
00:29:12.109 --> 00:29:15.549
his mother, that kind of love and hate of mommy.
462
00:29:17.059 --> 00:29:21.859
were manifested both by his attempting to bring her back
463
00:29:21.920 --> 00:29:26.589
from the dead, but also perpetrating these atrocities on the
464
00:29:26.680 --> 00:29:28.130
corpses of female bodies.
465
00:29:29.390 --> 00:29:32.369
It's been reported that Gein did in fact try to
466
00:29:32.430 --> 00:29:36.069
return Augusta to the family home after her funeral.
467
00:29:36.509 --> 00:29:40.539
There's some indication that he initially tried to exhume his mothers, corpse.
468
00:29:41.059 --> 00:29:44.599
You know, apparently, Ed missed the presence of his mother
469
00:29:44.680 --> 00:29:48.119
so much, you know, he wanted to bring her back
470
00:29:48.720 --> 00:29:53.650
and somehow, in his madness, you know, reconstitute her in
471
00:29:53.710 --> 00:29:57.710
his household. He couldn't get to his mother's grave because
472
00:29:57.970 --> 00:30:00.849
the soil And that part of Wisconsin is very sandy,
473
00:30:01.869 --> 00:30:06.559
and many coffins are buried within concrete vaults to prevent
474
00:30:06.599 --> 00:30:09.599
the sand from collapsing on them. And that was apparently
475
00:30:09.720 --> 00:30:11.880
true of Augusta Gein.
476
00:30:13.279 --> 00:30:17.859
In November 1957, Ed Gein was charged with the murder
477
00:30:17.920 --> 00:30:22.319
of Bernice Warden. The media descended on the tiny town
478
00:30:22.359 --> 00:30:23.789
of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
479
00:30:25.009 --> 00:30:27.269
What kind of a man did you know him as? Well,
480
00:30:27.349 --> 00:30:31.349
a man who's a nice man, just like anybody else.
481
00:30:32.349 --> 00:30:36.619
The only difference, I'd say, in a man, he seems
482
00:30:36.630 --> 00:30:37.799
to be a little odd.
483
00:30:39.940 --> 00:30:42.799
Well, the cultural context of the Gein case is quite
484
00:30:42.839 --> 00:30:45.980
an interesting one because I think this was one of
485
00:30:46.200 --> 00:30:49.900
the first cases that gathered an awful lot of attention.
486
00:30:49.920 --> 00:30:52.839
There was a media circus that developed around this because
487
00:30:53.650 --> 00:30:56.130
Nothing like this had ever really happened before. It was
488
00:30:56.150 --> 00:30:57.230
something completely new.
489
00:30:57.650 --> 00:31:02.259
It spread very quickly through the local newspapers and, you know,
490
00:31:02.299 --> 00:31:05.180
and then through the Associated Press and so on to
491
00:31:05.200 --> 00:31:09.940
the national media. You know, Plainfield, which, you know, had
492
00:31:10.119 --> 00:31:14.420
always existed from the time of its founding in happy obscurity,
493
00:31:15.160 --> 00:31:18.359
you know, suddenly found itself to be the center of
494
00:31:18.480 --> 00:31:21.039
national and even international attention.
495
00:31:21.339 --> 00:31:25.789
It was just a an exasperating time. And then we
496
00:31:25.829 --> 00:31:30.690
were inundated by nosy Nellies that all thought that, boy,
497
00:31:30.750 --> 00:31:34.450
I gotta go drive by that old farmhouse. And then
498
00:31:34.470 --> 00:31:37.349
we became a, I don't like to use the word chaotic,
499
00:31:37.390 --> 00:31:41.710
but a very unsettled community for a while.
500
00:31:41.930 --> 00:31:46.700
Plainfield was suddenly famous, and famous for the most horrifying
501
00:31:46.740 --> 00:31:49.259
of reasons. You know, that it was the home of
502
00:31:49.380 --> 00:31:52.119
America's most notorious psychopath.
503
00:31:53.210 --> 00:31:57.579
The entire community was stunned. For the previous decade, they'd
504
00:31:57.619 --> 00:32:01.460
been living in the same town as a real-life bogeyman.
505
00:32:02.019 --> 00:32:04.339
It would now be down to the courts to decide
506
00:32:04.420 --> 00:32:12.170
whether or not Ed Gein was insane. On November the 21st, 1957,
507
00:32:12.170 --> 00:32:18.099
the 51-year-old pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at
508
00:32:18.160 --> 00:32:22.109
his arraignment at Washara County Court. and it was declared
509
00:32:22.150 --> 00:32:24.250
that he was unfit to stand trial.
510
00:32:24.269 --> 00:32:29.559
There were indications that Ed was clinically psychotic, that he
511
00:32:29.640 --> 00:32:35.119
had hallucinations, that he heard voices, or the trees would
512
00:32:35.200 --> 00:32:39.170
start talking to him. Most serial murderers are not psychotic,
513
00:32:39.549 --> 00:32:42.230
but Ed seemed to have the symptoms of some form
514
00:32:42.269 --> 00:32:43.309
of psychosis.
515
00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:47.039
Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital for the
516
00:32:47.119 --> 00:32:51.440
Criminally Insane in Warpen, Wisconsin, which is now a maximum
517
00:32:51.480 --> 00:32:56.500
security prison. 70 miles away in Plainfield, the community was
518
00:32:56.559 --> 00:32:59.200
trying to get back on its feet, but the shadow
519
00:32:59.240 --> 00:33:02.430
of Ed Gein lingered over the town.
520
00:33:02.869 --> 00:33:05.609
In 1958, the property that Gein had lived in was
521
00:33:05.829 --> 00:33:08.210
due to be auctioned off, and I think the last
522
00:33:08.250 --> 00:33:10.829
thing that local people wanted was for this to become
523
00:33:11.089 --> 00:33:14.670
some kind of shrine, some kind of, attraction for people
524
00:33:14.710 --> 00:33:18.099
who were morbidly fascinated so a few days before the
525
00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:22.279
auction the property was burned to the ground essentially a.
526
00:33:22.539 --> 00:33:28.200
Lot of talk of arson the um they had been
527
00:33:28.220 --> 00:33:31.500
cleaning up around there had been burning trash up around
528
00:33:31.539 --> 00:33:35.559
the um that that particular day too so then that
529
00:33:35.599 --> 00:33:39.420
was Or anyway, that was an excuse of a possible
530
00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:42.970
cause that maybe the wind got something in the evening
531
00:33:43.029 --> 00:33:46.430
and got some live embers in there. A lot of
532
00:33:46.470 --> 00:33:48.809
the neighbors weren't too happy with having talk of it
533
00:33:48.910 --> 00:33:55.759
being turned into a museum of sorts. But there were
534
00:33:55.839 --> 00:33:59.980
a lot of stories. Anyway, it's gone. People still kept coming, though,
535
00:34:00.819 --> 00:34:03.730
even after the house was gone. for a year, still
536
00:34:03.769 --> 00:34:06.619
had people coming to drive by the empty lot where
537
00:34:06.640 --> 00:34:07.720
the house used to stand.
538
00:34:08.860 --> 00:34:13.000
In March 1958, the car which Gein used to transport
539
00:34:13.039 --> 00:34:15.940
the bodies of his victims was bought at an auction
540
00:34:15.980 --> 00:34:20.909
for over $ 700 by a carnival operator who charged fascinated
541
00:34:20.989 --> 00:34:25.409
Americans 25 cents for a photograph at a macabre sideshow.
542
00:34:25.869 --> 00:34:27.809
I think what we're seeing here is the rise of
543
00:34:27.849 --> 00:34:32.789
the serial killer consumer culture. People are fascinated in these
544
00:34:32.849 --> 00:34:36.329
kind of cases, and some criminologists refer to this as
545
00:34:36.369 --> 00:34:39.710
wound culture, that we're essentially drawn to the trauma and
546
00:34:39.730 --> 00:34:42.219
the suffering of other people, and we're drawn to the
547
00:34:42.380 --> 00:34:45.400
artifacts that exist around these cases.
548
00:34:46.300 --> 00:34:49.940
Gein remained in the Central State Hospital for 11 years
549
00:34:50.360 --> 00:34:53.860
until doctors determined that he was finally fit to stand
550
00:34:53.920 --> 00:34:58.550
trial for the first-degree murder of Bernice Warden. The hearing
551
00:34:58.610 --> 00:35:03.070
lasted for a week, and on November the 14th, 1968,
552
00:35:03.070 --> 00:35:05.750
Judge Robert Golmar had reached a verdict.
553
00:35:06.190 --> 00:35:08.530
He was tried and found guilty of the murder of
554
00:35:08.570 --> 00:35:10.880
Bernice Worden, but then he was judged insane and stuck
555
00:35:10.909 --> 00:35:12.159
back in the mental institution.
556
00:35:12.420 --> 00:35:16.280
I think that was possibly somewhere where he may have thrived,
557
00:35:16.300 --> 00:35:19.320
because he had structure, he had a routine, he had
558
00:35:19.360 --> 00:35:22.440
people watching over him and looking after his needs.
559
00:35:23.590 --> 00:35:28.750
Forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Morrison interviewed Gein during his time
560
00:35:28.889 --> 00:35:29.570
in hospital.
561
00:35:30.110 --> 00:35:33.070
I was working at that time as a staff psychiatrist
562
00:35:33.989 --> 00:35:38.659
and I was covering all the units. And when I
563
00:35:38.719 --> 00:35:42.219
was asked to go over to see this person, I
564
00:35:43.380 --> 00:35:45.760
went over to see it and I saw Ed Gein.
565
00:35:46.599 --> 00:35:50.199
He was not at all coherent. He was such a
566
00:35:50.280 --> 00:35:55.670
little person. that I found it hard to picture him
567
00:35:56.489 --> 00:36:00.989
as the person who'd committed all these homicides. He lived
568
00:36:01.110 --> 00:36:05.340
there very peacefully. He never caused any problems, never had
569
00:36:05.559 --> 00:36:11.219
any type of behavioral thing, no type of, I guess
570
00:36:11.239 --> 00:36:13.739
you could say, consequence for bad behavior.
571
00:36:15.719 --> 00:36:19.360
Gein's quiet nature in hospital was in stark contrast to
572
00:36:19.400 --> 00:36:21.719
the monster Helen had heard so much about.
573
00:36:21.739 --> 00:36:25.019
I received a letter from one of his neighbours who
574
00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:28.409
used to be a friend of his. She was a
575
00:36:28.449 --> 00:36:32.369
little girl and she remembers going over to his house
576
00:36:33.329 --> 00:36:36.690
and he would serve soup and everything. What turned out,
577
00:36:36.730 --> 00:36:39.710
the soup bowls were the skulls of many of his
578
00:36:39.750 --> 00:36:42.449
victims and people never knew it.
579
00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:48.980
On July the 26th, 1984, Ed Gein died of lung cancer,
580
00:36:49.099 --> 00:36:53.219
age 77. He was buried next to his mother on
581
00:36:53.260 --> 00:36:56.650
the Gein family plot at the same cemetery which he
582
00:36:56.710 --> 00:37:01.530
so often desecrated during his career of horror. Gein has
583
00:37:01.610 --> 00:37:04.889
left a lasting impact on the small community where he
584
00:37:04.949 --> 00:37:06.710
committed his ghoulish crimes.
585
00:37:07.489 --> 00:37:10.340
We really wouldn't care to have that be our claim
586
00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:16.269
to fame. We've turned out lots of doctors and architects
587
00:37:16.610 --> 00:37:18.989
and some really good people out of our schools here.
588
00:37:19.030 --> 00:37:21.389
We're very proud of them. We'd rather be known for
589
00:37:21.409 --> 00:37:29.800
a tremendously good population than to be credited for only one.
590
00:37:31.300 --> 00:37:31.639
Issue.
591
00:37:32.860 --> 00:37:36.900
But just like the carnival operators of the 1950s, people
592
00:37:36.960 --> 00:37:40.400
continue to try and get their hands on grisly souvenirs
593
00:37:40.679 --> 00:37:41.579
related to Gein.
594
00:37:42.269 --> 00:37:45.590
In the year 2000, somebody was found to be selling
595
00:37:45.710 --> 00:37:50.150
parts of the gravestone that had been erected at Ed
596
00:37:50.210 --> 00:37:53.909
Gein's grave. For people who are fans of the serial
597
00:37:53.949 --> 00:37:57.130
killer cult, this was just the gift that kept on giving.
598
00:37:57.469 --> 00:38:00.269
They keep putting up headstones, and the headstones keep disappearing.
599
00:38:00.909 --> 00:38:04.590
There's a whole category of collectible that has come to
600
00:38:04.630 --> 00:38:11.050
be known as murderabilia, and Gein relics are particularly prized.
601
00:38:11.820 --> 00:38:14.539
among people who collect that kind of morbid relic.
602
00:38:15.400 --> 00:38:19.360
Over 60 years since the horrific crimes, Gein has grown
603
00:38:19.429 --> 00:38:23.429
into a notorious figure in American folklore, a killer of
604
00:38:23.510 --> 00:38:25.230
almost mythic proportions.
605
00:38:25.909 --> 00:38:29.489
The two things that are fascinating about Ed Gein is
606
00:38:29.570 --> 00:38:33.210
the fact that he only, as far as we know,
607
00:38:33.309 --> 00:38:36.590
murdered two people, which is a lot less than many
608
00:38:36.710 --> 00:38:44.489
infamous killers, but he's had such a huge legacy in... films, books, music.
609
00:38:44.949 --> 00:38:48.489
He seems to have become a sort of pop culture murderer.
610
00:38:49.010 --> 00:38:53.250
At the time the Gein crimes were being revealed in
611
00:38:53.269 --> 00:38:57.150
the press, there was a writer of pulp horror named
612
00:38:57.190 --> 00:39:01.250
Robert Block who had moved to Wisconsin to be with
613
00:39:01.289 --> 00:39:04.570
his wife's family. And at some point, when Gein was
614
00:39:04.650 --> 00:39:08.760
being interviewed by various psychiatrists, all these headlines in the
615
00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:12.889
papers were trumpeting the fact that Gein had been motivated
616
00:39:13.510 --> 00:39:19.739
by these deranged, Oedipal conflicts, that he was this desperately
617
00:39:19.860 --> 00:39:25.309
sick mama's boy who was perpetrating these atrocities on middle-aged
618
00:39:25.409 --> 00:39:29.449
women who reminded him of his mother. And this caught
619
00:39:29.489 --> 00:39:32.900
the attention of Robert Block, who decided this could potentially
620
00:39:33.039 --> 00:39:35.739
make the basis of a good horror novel. And that
621
00:39:35.800 --> 00:39:40.510
became the book Psycho. In the book Psycho, Norman Bates, actually,
622
00:39:40.610 --> 00:39:43.349
after he's arrested, compares himself at the end of the
623
00:39:43.369 --> 00:39:46.269
book to Ed Gein. So the connection is made very,
624
00:39:46.309 --> 00:39:50.829
very explicit there in the book. Anyway, Psycho, as we know, became,
625
00:39:51.210 --> 00:39:55.059
turned into one of the great classic horror movies of
626
00:39:55.119 --> 00:39:57.880
American cinema. You know, if you look at horror movies
627
00:39:58.019 --> 00:40:03.219
before then, there were all these Eastern European monsters, Frankenstein
628
00:40:03.260 --> 00:40:06.420
and Dracula and the Wolfman, you know, or else they
629
00:40:06.440 --> 00:40:11.050
were aliens from outer space. You know, with Psycho, Psycho
630
00:40:11.110 --> 00:40:14.550
establishes and, you know, Ed Gein establishes, you know, this
631
00:40:14.670 --> 00:40:20.989
quintessentially American figure of horror. the ordinary middle American guy
632
00:40:21.250 --> 00:40:24.389
who turns out to be this monster in disguise. And then,
633
00:40:24.409 --> 00:40:28.389
of course, Gein becomes the basis for Toby Hooper's Texas
634
00:40:28.409 --> 00:40:33.079
Chainsaw Massacre, and later on for Thomas Harris' character Buffalo
635
00:40:33.099 --> 00:40:36.300
Bill in Silence of the Lambs. You know, so Gein
636
00:40:36.340 --> 00:40:40.159
has this very, very direct influence on American horror cinema.
637
00:40:41.219 --> 00:40:44.639
But Gein's crimes were not fictional, they were very real,
638
00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:48.840
and he remains one of the most infamous murderers in U.S. history.
639
00:40:49.389 --> 00:40:55.050
We think of Gein as this notorious American serial murderer,
640
00:40:55.989 --> 00:40:59.190
but in many ways he doesn't really fit that profile.
641
00:40:59.829 --> 00:41:03.210
You know, for example, he wasn't a sexual sadist in
642
00:41:03.250 --> 00:41:06.650
the way John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy were or
643
00:41:06.690 --> 00:41:10.630
Jeffrey Dahmer. You know, he wasn't driven by that particular profile.
644
00:41:11.380 --> 00:41:12.460
form of deviance.
645
00:41:12.940 --> 00:41:15.949
I think he was brought up in a vacuum that
646
00:41:16.010 --> 00:41:18.869
created the conditions for someone who would go on to
647
00:41:18.929 --> 00:41:23.670
do evil things. So whilst most people are shocked and
648
00:41:23.730 --> 00:41:29.449
repulsed and absolutely horrified at some of the things he's done,
649
00:41:29.889 --> 00:41:32.670
because he didn't have that filter and that check on
650
00:41:32.710 --> 00:41:36.309
his behavior, he was able to escalate to a level
651
00:41:36.449 --> 00:41:37.349
of evil, I think.
652
00:41:37.829 --> 00:41:42.539
Evil is something that You know, professionally, people don't believe
653
00:41:42.599 --> 00:41:46.920
in evil, but I truly believe that he was evil.
654
00:41:47.900 --> 00:41:50.900
I think there are people who would like to say
655
00:41:51.019 --> 00:41:54.530
that the devil got into him and made him do
656
00:41:54.590 --> 00:41:58.670
these awful things, but I think he was born evil.
657
00:41:59.090 --> 00:42:01.469
The Ed I knew was not an evil person. He
658
00:42:01.750 --> 00:42:05.940
did things that normal people do not do. And there's
659
00:42:06.159 --> 00:42:09.940
just no doubt about that. And to kill two people
660
00:42:09.960 --> 00:42:13.719
is certainly not a person who you would really like
661
00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:21.230
to invite to your neighborhood party. But, yeah, there was
662
00:42:21.269 --> 00:42:24.929
something in his head that didn't click right.
663
00:42:25.869 --> 00:42:29.590
Ed Gein's crimes are the stuff of genuine nightmares. The
664
00:42:29.610 --> 00:42:33.940
man with an unhealthy obsession with his mother brazenly murdered
665
00:42:34.019 --> 00:42:37.820
two women and kept a bizarre collection of gruesome keepsakes
666
00:42:38.179 --> 00:42:41.829
inside his house of horrors. He truly deserves to be
667
00:42:41.869 --> 00:42:45.110
remembered as one of the world's most evil killers.
1
00:00:01.070 --> 00:00:04.660
Real Stories Tapes True Crime is your new true crime
2
00:00:04.750 --> 00:00:09.220
podcast fix. In our first season, we'll explore suspicious deaths
3
00:00:09.279 --> 00:00:12.679
at a California hospital and a skydiver landing dead on
4
00:00:12.699 --> 00:00:16.059
a suburban driveway with a bag containing guns, drugs, and
5
00:00:16.140 --> 00:00:20.359
night vision goggles. To join our investigation, search and subscribe
6
00:00:20.440 --> 00:00:24.530
to Real Stories Tapes True Crime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
7
00:00:24.690 --> 00:00:26.730
or wherever you find your podcasts.
8
00:00:36.429 --> 00:00:42.070
In November 1957, police in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin,
9
00:00:42.409 --> 00:00:46.750
were searching for a missing woman named Bernice Warden. They
10
00:00:46.770 --> 00:00:49.990
were about to make one of the most gruesome discoveries
11
00:00:50.390 --> 00:00:52.030
in U.S. criminal history.
12
00:00:52.490 --> 00:00:55.079
One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it
13
00:00:55.130 --> 00:00:58.640
around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
14
00:00:58.960 --> 00:01:01.700
which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
15
00:01:02.200 --> 00:01:05.120
They realized to their incredible horror that it was a
16
00:01:05.239 --> 00:01:08.030
woman's corpse. that was hanging by its heels.
17
00:01:08.730 --> 00:01:12.170
The twisted killer was a quiet loner named Ed Gein.
18
00:01:12.810 --> 00:01:17.739
Hidden inside the 51-year-old's rural farmhouse was a ghoulish treasure
19
00:01:17.780 --> 00:01:19.640
trove of human remains.
20
00:01:20.040 --> 00:01:23.200
There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found
21
00:01:23.500 --> 00:01:27.519
the remains of 12 human heads, gloves made out of
22
00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:29.980
the skin from a corpse's fingers.
23
00:01:30.359 --> 00:01:34.540
You think of this happening, you know, now, it's doubly shocking.
24
00:01:34.980 --> 00:01:39.079
But back then, in a small, tiny rural community, it
25
00:01:39.159 --> 00:01:40.269
was breathtaking.
26
00:01:41.189 --> 00:01:44.930
America had woken up inside the nightmare of Ed Gein,
27
00:01:45.370 --> 00:02:12.389
one of the world's most evil killers. The gruesome crimes
28
00:02:12.449 --> 00:02:17.460
of Ed Gein horrified 50s America. When his rural home
29
00:02:17.509 --> 00:02:22.300
was searched on the 16th of November, 1957, the police
30
00:02:22.379 --> 00:02:26.479
uncovered a gothic house of horrors. As well as the
31
00:02:26.539 --> 00:02:30.580
remains of two missing local women, they found an array
32
00:02:30.639 --> 00:02:34.979
of human bones, skulls, and skin that had been fashioned
33
00:02:35.020 --> 00:02:39.960
into furniture and clothing. The town of Plainfield was in
34
00:02:40.039 --> 00:02:44.199
complete shock. One of the residents who remembers the effect
35
00:02:44.259 --> 00:02:47.169
Gein had on Plainfield is Max Harrington.
36
00:02:47.530 --> 00:02:49.449
I think shock would be the biggest thing that we
37
00:02:49.490 --> 00:02:53.189
could use to describe the atmosphere in the community. We
38
00:02:53.210 --> 00:02:56.849
were still pretty much a clannish community at that time
39
00:02:56.889 --> 00:02:59.189
when a lot of the families that were here had
40
00:02:59.439 --> 00:03:04.539
always been here. It took your breath away. It was shocking.
41
00:03:06.080 --> 00:03:08.780
It still is. People don't do things like that in
42
00:03:08.879 --> 00:03:12.099
a small town on a normal day. That's just not
43
00:03:12.219 --> 00:03:13.460
part of what we grew up with.
44
00:03:14.919 --> 00:03:19.000
The story of this twisted killer begins over a century ago.
45
00:03:20.020 --> 00:03:23.340
Ed Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on
46
00:03:23.379 --> 00:03:27.659
the 27th of August, 1906. By the time he was
47
00:03:27.810 --> 00:03:31.150
eight years old, his parents moved Ed and his older
48
00:03:31.210 --> 00:03:33.169
brother Henry to Plainfield.
49
00:03:33.810 --> 00:03:40.129
Well, the Gein family moved... to Plainfield from La Crosse, Wisconsin,
50
00:03:42.050 --> 00:03:47.229
partly because the mother of the family, the matriarch, Augusta,
51
00:03:47.490 --> 00:03:51.629
had decided that La Crosse was a kind of Sodom
52
00:03:51.930 --> 00:03:57.490
and Gomorrah-like hellhole, and she didn't want her children to
53
00:03:57.550 --> 00:04:02.219
be corrupted by all the immoral influences of the big city.
54
00:04:03.849 --> 00:04:06.810
Needless to say, La Crosse was not a particularly big city,
55
00:04:06.849 --> 00:04:11.669
but they moved to a remote farmhouse about six miles
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west of, you wouldn't necessarily say downtown Plainfield, because there
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was no uptown Plainfield.
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It's not the largest city in the state of Wisconsin,
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but it's plenty big enough for those of us that
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live here.
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Plainfield was a very remote, isolated area. featureless little village.
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A state guidebook at the time described it as totally nondescript.
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The population was very small, never more in its history,
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I think, than 700 or 800 people. You know, probably
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the entire population of the village could have fit into
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a New York City apartment building.
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The Geens' 150-acre farm was located on the corner of
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Archer and Second Avenue. Ed rarely got to leave the
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property and socialize with other children.
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His mother, Augusta, is a very domineering character indeed. She
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is a devout Christian, and she has some very extreme
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ideas about sin and about morality. And she drums into
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her sons that they're not to socialize with anybody outside
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of the family because all of the people around them
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in the local town are sinners, they're evil, all the
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women are whores. And so she creates this very insular
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family environment where they're quite isolated from the rest of
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the community and that has a really significant impact on them.
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Gein seemed to have been very friendless whenever he would
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make some kind of friend. On those rare occasions, when
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he would try to make a school friend and bring
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home a school friend, the mother would immediately find some
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reason to disapprove of the other child and forbid Ed
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from ever bringing him home. So he grew up again
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in a state of complete social isolation.
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00:06:03.870 --> 00:06:08.250
And Gein's relationship with his father was also far from perfect.
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Well, the father, George, was an alcoholic. He appeared to
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have been somewhat free in his use of physical punishment.
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But mostly the picture that emerges of George is of,
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you know, kind of a hapless individual who was, as
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all three male members of the family were, under the
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thumb of his wife. And again, who was regarded as
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much as anything else as a sort of or impediment
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to the household.
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As Ed entered adolescence, his life became even more insular.
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He dropped out of school when he was around about
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12 or 13 to work on the family's farm, and
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he was considered to be a bit of an oddball.
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He was quite a loner, and he enjoyed quite solitary pursuits,
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so he really quite liked reading and was quite a
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prolific reader. So he was somebody who didn't really fit
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in but worked incredibly hard to keep the family farm going.
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On April 1st, 1940, Ed's father George died of heart failure,
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leaving 33-year-old Ed, his brother Henry, and Augusta alone on
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the family farm.
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Ed's older brother Henry seemed to have freed himself a
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little more emotionally and psychologically from Augusta's dominance. and even
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apparently on a couple of occasions expressed some criticism of
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their mother and the hold she was exerting over both
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of them. So Ed, who at least on a conscious
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level worshipped his mother and saw her as a kind
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of goddess who could do no wrong, appears to have
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been both a little shocked that Henry would find any
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cause to criticize Augusta, and possibly built up some kind
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of animosity toward Henry for that attitude.
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Ed became a handyman, doing odd jobs around Plainfield to
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help with living expenses on the farm.
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We used to see Ed occasionally. I'd see him around town,
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and then he was always a friendly person, quiet, friendly,
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usually had a joke to tell. He always had time
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to say hello and ask after how you were. A
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person who you would never suspect of anything other than
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being a decent sort of person.
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In May 1944, death would hit the Gein family once again,
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but this time in more suspicious circumstances after a brush
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fire on their farmland got out of control.
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Ed and Henry were out there trying to put out
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the fire and they got separated and and Ed could
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not locate Henry, and he went and got help. But
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then after getting this help, he led the other people
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directly to where Henry's body lay, and there were some
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mysterious bruises on Henry's head. Anyway, the official verdict of
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the medical examiner was that Henry had died of a
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heart attack while fighting this fire and had injured his
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head when he fell and hit a rock. But afterwards,
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when Gein's crimes were uncovered, There was a lot of
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talk that perhaps Henry had been a victim of Ed's,
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that Ed in fact had killed Henry partly because of
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Henry's criticism of Augusta.
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The impact upon their mother Augusta was phenomenal. She really
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broke down about Henry's death and she had a stroke.
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But of course by then, you know, the psychic bond
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between Augusta and Ed was so incredibly intense already. Evidence
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seems to suggest that with the other two men out
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of the.
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Way, Ed reveled.
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in having his mommy alone to himself.
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But Gein's mother never really recovered from her stroke, and
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their time alone only lasted for 19 months.
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Ed nursed her very, very diligently, even apparently would get
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into bed with her on occasion and stroke her and
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comfort her, and then she seemed to recover, but then
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she suffered another, this time fatal, stroke.
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Augusta Gein died on December 29, 1945. 39-year-old Ed was
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completely devastated.
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Because his mother was so domineering, I think she really
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did stunt his development, and he almost got stuck at
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a kind of teenage, adolescent phase in his life. Looking
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at how he behaved at the funeral, he was in
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his 30s at this time, and he was reported to
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be wailing like a small child. So he hasn't got
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that kind of emotional control that's associated with 30-something men.
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The death of his mother left him completely, completely isolated,
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you know, living in this increasingly ramshackle, dilapidated farmhouse that
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he ceased to take care of whatsoever. Augusta was his
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only real human contact. So it was at that point,
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you know, that Gein embarked on these various outrages that
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would ultimately make him this notorious figure in American crime.
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Alone and isolated from the rest of society, Gein spiraled
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out of control. Over the next 12 years, he became
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obsessed with recreating the world he'd shared with his mother.
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it would lead him to a series of dark and
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disturbing crimes that would eventually culminate in murder.
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One of my summer jobs when I was a student
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in high school was mowing the cemetery. And two of
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my buddies and I, that was about a four-day job
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for us to mow that. And we would see Ed
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out there on occasion. He'd come out, and if he
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saw us working, he'd always come over and say hello.
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And again, sometimes have this little story to tell. And
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he was very good about stopping to see his mother's grave.
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I think neighbors saw him as an odd, very meek,
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somewhat simple-minded person, but one who was always willing to
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pitch in when some farm work needed to be done
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or Some chore needed to be run for them. But they,
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of course, had no sense of the life that he
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was pursuing inside that incredibly creepy, dismal world of his
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own farm.
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It was a world that 51-year-old Gein had managed to
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keep hidden away until the winter of 1957. November 16th, 1957,
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was the first.
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Day of deer hunting season that year. and it was
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a day when basically the entire male population of the
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town would have been out in the woods hunting deer,
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as Ed knew. Ed drove into town to the Warden
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Hardware Store. The Warden Hardware Store was owned by a
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woman named Bernice Warden.
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I knew Mrs. Warden quite well. She and her family
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ran the hardware store here for many years, and almost
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everybody in the community knew Mrs.
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Warden. Ed had kind of been hanging around the store
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for a couple of weeks previously. He had developed something
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of an obsession with Bernie Swarton.
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He would talk to her, he would ask her out,
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and it was quite clear that she really wasn't that
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interested in him.
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Ed came in, asked to buy half a gallon of antifreeze,
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which Bernie Swarton poured out for him and wrote out
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a receipt. He went back out to his truck, then
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came back inside, and asked her to see a rifle
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that was in the window. When Bernie Swarden turned her
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back to him, he shot her in the back of
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the head and then loaded her corpse in his truck
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and drove back to his farm.
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Gein had murdered the 58-year-old woman in broad daylight.
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It was deer season, so deer season, it's like a
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ghost town around here. Everybody, in those days especially, everybody
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was out hunting, and she wasn't even missed for quite a,
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for some hours. And when someone reported that she wasn't
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at the store, well, that was her son.
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Of course. Later that day, Frank Warden returned from the
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woods and found the store empty. His mother wasn't there.
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He was very perplexed by that. And then he saw
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a trail of blood across the floor of the hardware
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store and not only realized that some foul play had occurred,
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but immediately suspected Ed Gein. because Gein had been kind
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of bothering his mother for the past few weeks.
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And there was one piece of evidence that confirmed Frank
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Warden's suspicions to the police.
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When they went to search the place, they found the
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receipt for the antifreeze that was in Ed's name. And
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they just worked backwards, saying that he was probably the
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last person to see her alive, but they didn't suspect that.
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He was as deranged as he was.
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One set of lawmen went out in search of Gein.
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They found him having dinner at a neighbor's house, and
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they arrested him. And then another set of lawmen went
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out to Gein's farmhouse, and that's where they made these
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discoveries that really sent shockwaves around the world.
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On a dark winter's night, officers from the Plainfield Police
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Department began to search the Gein farm for Bernice Wharton.
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They couldn't get into the house. So they went around
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back and entered into what was called the summer kitchen,
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which was a little shed outside.
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This property didn't have any electricity, so they were pretty
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much fumbling around in the dark with flashlights. But I
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don't think they expected to find what they did find there.
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One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it
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around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
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which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
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Although it didn't look like a deer, they realized to
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their incredible horror that it was a woman's corpse that
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was hanging by its heels and been completely gutted.
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She'd been strung up, essentially, and she was slit from
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her sternum to her pelvis. So she'd essentially been butchered
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by Ed. It really was the most grotesque thing that
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these officers had ever come across.
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And they realized they had found the body of Bernie's warden, And,
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of course, both of them just stumbled out in horror
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and vomited, you know, at the sight of this thing.
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When the news spread across the town, the residents of
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Plainfield were in complete shock.
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When I heard of his arrest, I couldn't believe it.
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I was sure they had the wrong person because it
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just didn't seem like anything that they were telling us
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was the Ed that we all knew. It was a
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Saturday night. We were at a dance, and the story
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went through there, and everybody said, I don't believe it,
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but it was true.
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After finding the butchered body of Bernice Warden in a
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shed at Ed Gein's farm, the police officers moved their
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search into the main house.
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He boarded up some areas of the family's home to
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maintain the rooms as his mother had left them, and
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in other parts of the property, He just started hoarding things.
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You know, you would have trash and rubbish filled up,
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and it really became a complete hovel.
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He'd reverse the normal process of trash disposal, you know,
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and instead of taking all his garbage to the dump,
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would go to the dump and bring it into his house.
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It was just this incredible chaos of trash and garbage.
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But there was more than just household waste.
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Amid all that wreckage, they discovered... these incomprehensible, unspeakably awful
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objects that had been fashioned out of human body parts.
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There were chairs that were upholstered in human flesh.
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There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found
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the remains of 12 human heads, gloves made out of
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the skin from a corpse's fingers.
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There was a jar containing human noses. There was a
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box full of female genitalia, some of which had been painted.
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and tied with ribbons. There was a belt fashioned out
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of female nipples. There was a shade pull made of
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human lips.
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They found all types of things that belonged to people
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that were no longer people. And it was shocking. I mean,
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you think of this happening, you know, now, it's still
297
00:19:10.519 --> 00:19:14.740
pretty shocking. But back then, in a small, tiny rural community,
298
00:19:15.539 --> 00:19:19.400
it was absolutely shocking. It was breathtaking.
299
00:19:19.839 --> 00:19:24.440
Ed Skeen's farmhouse was the habitation of a literal ghoul,
300
00:19:24.460 --> 00:19:28.720
you know, somebody who had been living amidst these horrific
301
00:19:28.980 --> 00:19:32.299
relics of human dismemberment. It was a madhouse.
302
00:19:32.319 --> 00:19:38.390
Skeen's fascination with death and corpses had been growing ever
303
00:19:38.430 --> 00:19:41.470
since his mother had died 12 years previously.
304
00:19:41.490 --> 00:19:45.130
Ed had always enjoyed reading. It was quite a solitary pursuit,
305
00:19:45.170 --> 00:19:47.940
so that's not particularly surprising, but After the death of
306
00:19:47.980 --> 00:19:50.579
his mother and his brother, he started to read an
307
00:19:50.799 --> 00:19:54.759
awful lot more. And his tastes in literature really did
308
00:19:54.799 --> 00:19:59.829
span quite a wide spectrum. He read pornographic magazines. He
309
00:19:59.890 --> 00:20:03.869
read medical textbooks. And he developed a particular interest in
310
00:20:04.029 --> 00:20:07.910
Ilse Koch, who worked at one of the Nazi concentration
311
00:20:07.950 --> 00:20:11.670
camps and collected patches of skin of the prisoners who
312
00:20:11.710 --> 00:20:15.470
were detained there. And I think all of this was
313
00:20:15.569 --> 00:20:20.589
fueling a very active imagination. So he's developing these obsessions
314
00:20:20.630 --> 00:20:23.910
and these interests, and he's quite skilled as a farmhand
315
00:20:23.970 --> 00:20:26.589
at this point in time. He knows how to slaughter animals.
316
00:20:26.670 --> 00:20:29.769
He knows how to prepare carcasses. He's from a community
317
00:20:29.809 --> 00:20:32.730
that's very much into its hunting and its fishing. So
318
00:20:32.970 --> 00:20:36.069
at some point, reality and fantasy are going to collide.
319
00:20:37.119 --> 00:20:40.740
As the search of the farmhouse progressed, officers found that
320
00:20:40.779 --> 00:20:44.990
the grotesque collection of body parts became even more disturbing.
321
00:20:45.430 --> 00:20:49.369
Among the most hideous of all the items were human
322
00:20:49.509 --> 00:20:52.990
skin masks that were hanging from the wall of his bedroom,
323
00:20:53.589 --> 00:20:56.390
the faces of women that had been flayed from the
324
00:20:56.470 --> 00:21:00.150
skulls and that had been preserved. Some of them had
325
00:21:00.230 --> 00:21:02.900
lipstick applied to them and that had been hung on
326
00:21:02.940 --> 00:21:08.240
the walls as decorations. And then, most notoriously, there was
327
00:21:08.259 --> 00:21:12.680
a skin suit that Ed had crafted out of the
328
00:21:13.369 --> 00:21:16.390
upper torso of a woman and the leggings of a woman.
329
00:21:17.049 --> 00:21:20.670
And apparently, as he later confessed, he would put on
330
00:21:20.730 --> 00:21:23.569
this skin suit and put on one of the female
331
00:21:23.630 --> 00:21:28.250
skin masks and caper around in his yard, pretending to
332
00:21:28.309 --> 00:21:29.009
be his mother.
333
00:21:31.059 --> 00:21:34.900
Gein's macabre collection had been acquired from the very same
334
00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:37.460
cemetery where his mother's body lay.
335
00:21:38.150 --> 00:21:41.589
Two years after the death of his mother in 1947,
336
00:21:41.589 --> 00:21:46.509
he starts grave robbing. So he's going into a local
337
00:21:46.589 --> 00:21:50.490
burial ground, he's digging up bodies, and he's taking things
338
00:21:50.670 --> 00:21:54.279
from the bodies. Now, he's not taking jewellery or items
339
00:21:54.440 --> 00:21:57.859
of any value, he's actually taking body parts. It really
340
00:21:57.940 --> 00:22:01.599
is an absolute house of horrors, so... What started off
341
00:22:01.680 --> 00:22:04.220
as an interest, which was confined to the pages of
342
00:22:04.279 --> 00:22:07.200
a book has now become a reality behind the doors
343
00:22:07.240 --> 00:22:10.559
of this rather bizarre house. So what he's doing in
344
00:22:10.599 --> 00:22:13.900
a really grotesque way is trying to bring his mother
345
00:22:14.180 --> 00:22:17.009
back to life in some way, shape or form, because
346
00:22:17.049 --> 00:22:19.809
he was just so dependent upon her for a sense
347
00:22:19.849 --> 00:22:20.849
of his own identity.
348
00:22:21.779 --> 00:22:25.859
And the search wasn't over yet. Officers would soon discover
349
00:22:26.220 --> 00:22:30.099
inside a paper bag in Gein's home the severed head
350
00:22:30.160 --> 00:22:33.480
of a woman who'd been missing from Plainfield for over
351
00:22:33.579 --> 00:22:34.240
two years.
352
00:22:35.880 --> 00:22:37.940
I think that the real tipping point for Ed Gein
353
00:22:37.980 --> 00:22:41.480
was when his mother and his brother died because even
354
00:22:41.529 --> 00:22:44.390
though this family was very intense and rather extreme in
355
00:22:44.430 --> 00:22:47.329
its beliefs, it was still a check on his behavior.
356
00:22:47.670 --> 00:22:51.849
There was still that informal surveillance over him and I
357
00:22:51.869 --> 00:22:54.710
think that kept him contained. But once he was on
358
00:22:54.750 --> 00:22:58.450
his own, he was free to ruminate and fantasize, and
359
00:22:58.509 --> 00:23:00.609
his behavior was only going to escalate.
360
00:23:00.630 --> 00:23:04.150
You know, it's like some crack opened up, you know,
361
00:23:04.210 --> 00:23:08.019
in the civilized part of his head, and all this weird,
362
00:23:08.099 --> 00:23:11.960
archaic stuff going back to the days, you know, when
363
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:18.480
our species did engage in these bizarre, unspeakable rituals, you know,
364
00:23:18.680 --> 00:23:20.539
flooded out and took possession of him.
365
00:23:21.259 --> 00:23:25.500
With Gein in custody, officers continued to scour his home,
366
00:23:25.900 --> 00:23:29.700
and they were about to make another startling discovery, a
367
00:23:29.779 --> 00:23:33.029
local woman who'd been missing for almost three years.
368
00:23:33.490 --> 00:23:36.789
There had been a female tavern keeper named Mary Hogan
369
00:23:37.549 --> 00:23:42.170
who ran this roadside tavern outside of Plainfield who had
370
00:23:42.210 --> 00:23:43.950
disappeared very, very mysteriously.
371
00:23:44.289 --> 00:23:48.099
In those days, we had 18-year-old bars where teenagers could
372
00:23:48.119 --> 00:23:52.759
go and have beer in. And she ran one of those.
373
00:23:52.839 --> 00:23:56.690
It was kind of a modest place, to be very kind.
374
00:23:58.150 --> 00:24:01.829
But she disappeared before I was old enough to frequent
375
00:24:02.450 --> 00:24:03.430
those establishments.
376
00:24:03.750 --> 00:24:07.049
When she went missing, he'd said some rather bizarre things.
377
00:24:07.650 --> 00:24:10.359
He said to one of the townspeople, oh, she's not missing.
378
00:24:10.430 --> 00:24:12.859
She's up at the house. But because he was a
379
00:24:12.880 --> 00:24:14.819
bit of a misfit and because he was a bit weird,
380
00:24:15.339 --> 00:24:18.839
People didn't really take what he said very seriously at all,
381
00:24:19.119 --> 00:24:21.700
so that one was allowed to slip under the radar
382
00:24:21.819 --> 00:24:24.240
until this grisly discovery a few years later.
383
00:24:24.859 --> 00:24:30.670
In searching through Gein's house of horrors, the investigators opened
384
00:24:30.769 --> 00:24:36.269
up some receptacle and saw this face and pulled it
385
00:24:36.390 --> 00:24:39.099
out and realized it was Mary Hogan's, that she had
386
00:24:39.130 --> 00:24:41.180
been another one of these victims.
387
00:24:43.049 --> 00:24:48.049
Had murdered Mary Hogan on December the 8th, 1954, three
388
00:24:48.109 --> 00:24:50.769
years previous to killing Bernice Worden.
389
00:24:51.329 --> 00:24:55.349
I think there was some sense in which he associated
390
00:24:55.470 --> 00:25:00.210
her with his mother. You know, she almost seemed to be, like,
391
00:25:00.289 --> 00:25:03.690
the shadow side of his mother, and I think in
392
00:25:03.799 --> 00:25:07.119
killing her, again, he was both enacting some kind of
393
00:25:07.180 --> 00:25:11.099
homicidal rage toward his mother, But I think also there
394
00:25:11.140 --> 00:25:14.940
were times when he just ran out of suitable female
395
00:25:15.059 --> 00:25:17.369
corpses and had to make his own.
396
00:25:18.289 --> 00:25:21.369
Back at the local police station, it was time for
397
00:25:21.509 --> 00:25:23.170
Ed Gein to start talking.
398
00:25:24.289 --> 00:25:27.170
Well, for the first day after his arrest, I think
399
00:25:27.289 --> 00:25:29.410
Ed felt like a bit of a fish out of water.
400
00:25:29.430 --> 00:25:32.640
He didn't quite know how to react, but he did
401
00:25:32.700 --> 00:25:35.970
start talking after about 24 hours and The first thing
402
00:25:36.029 --> 00:25:38.309
he said was that he wanted an apple pie with
403
00:25:38.349 --> 00:25:41.109
a slice of cheese on it. And that really does
404
00:25:41.349 --> 00:25:44.430
show the emotional immaturity.
405
00:25:43.789 --> 00:25:44.450
Of this guy.
406
00:25:44.670 --> 00:25:47.039
And when you've got somebody whose development stops at a
407
00:25:47.079 --> 00:25:51.920
particular point, they don't develop those complex emotions that enable
408
00:25:51.940 --> 00:25:54.660
them to empathize with other people or just think through
409
00:25:54.680 --> 00:25:58.440
the consequences of their actions. What you've got here is
410
00:25:58.740 --> 00:26:01.019
a teenage boy in a man's body, and he was
411
00:26:01.059 --> 00:26:03.059
capable of some really terrible things.
412
00:26:03.480 --> 00:26:06.789
He was subjected to a very lengthy interrogation. He freely
413
00:26:06.869 --> 00:26:10.250
confessed to the murders of Bernie Swarton and Mary Hogan.
414
00:26:10.910 --> 00:26:14.869
When the police first broke into Gein's house and discovered
415
00:26:14.990 --> 00:26:18.529
this crazy mass of body parts, their first assumption was
416
00:26:18.569 --> 00:26:21.880
Gein was a serial killer. It was only during his
417
00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:27.089
interrogation that he revealed that they were taken from the
418
00:26:27.150 --> 00:26:30.809
corpses he had dug up from these local cemeteries. And people,
419
00:26:31.109 --> 00:26:33.789
in a way, had a harder time believing that than
420
00:26:33.809 --> 00:26:37.089
that he was a serial killer. That seemed like totally
421
00:26:37.190 --> 00:26:39.880
beyond the bounds of belief for a whole variety of reasons.
422
00:26:40.240 --> 00:26:44.839
Human bodies are traditionally buried six feet underground. That's a
423
00:26:44.880 --> 00:26:46.940
lot of digging, that's a lot of work to get
424
00:26:47.059 --> 00:26:52.250
to them through packed earth. He'd need spades, picks. He'd
425
00:26:52.289 --> 00:26:55.109
need to be strong and he'd need... One assumes to
426
00:26:55.150 --> 00:26:57.930
do it at night because he'd need to be undisturbed.
427
00:26:58.569 --> 00:27:01.650
I'm not sure he did recognize that what he was
428
00:27:01.670 --> 00:27:05.529
doing was wrong. You know, there are some necrophiles who think, well,
429
00:27:05.549 --> 00:27:08.769
I wasn't really hurting anybody. You know, they were dead anyway.
430
00:27:10.170 --> 00:27:16.559
Gein confessed to investigators that between 1947 and 1952, he'd
431
00:27:16.700 --> 00:27:20.019
regularly visited the local cemetery after dark.
432
00:27:20.460 --> 00:27:23.660
He would often follow the local newspapers and read the obituaries.
433
00:27:24.769 --> 00:27:28.950
And when some middle-aged or elderly woman who bore some
434
00:27:29.150 --> 00:27:33.950
vague resemblance to his departed mother died and was buried,
435
00:27:34.410 --> 00:27:36.849
he would apparently go out to the cemetery at night
436
00:27:37.670 --> 00:27:40.089
while the soil was still fresh and easily dug up
437
00:27:40.730 --> 00:27:45.849
and exhume these coffins and remove the bodies and sometimes
438
00:27:45.950 --> 00:27:49.450
take the entire corpse back to his farmhouse. Sometimes just
439
00:27:49.470 --> 00:27:51.690
take parts of the corpse back to the farmhouse and
440
00:27:51.730 --> 00:27:52.490
leave the rest there.
441
00:27:53.559 --> 00:27:57.019
Investigators decided to dig up some of the graves to
442
00:27:57.059 --> 00:27:58.740
see if Gein was telling the truth.
443
00:27:59.259 --> 00:28:02.599
When they uncovered them, they discovered that the coffins had
444
00:28:02.640 --> 00:28:07.339
been broken into and the bodies were missing or, you know,
445
00:28:07.380 --> 00:28:09.880
there were just parts of the skeleton remaining there.
446
00:28:10.140 --> 00:28:14.269
He admitted to grave robbing nine corpses, but the maths
447
00:28:14.309 --> 00:28:18.009
didn't quite add up because the police had found 12
448
00:28:18.009 --> 00:28:23.069
human heads in Gein's property. And he'd only admitted to
449
00:28:23.069 --> 00:28:27.589
11 offences against separate people. So the numbers never really
450
00:28:27.710 --> 00:28:30.650
added up properly. So there's always been questions over that.
451
00:28:30.990 --> 00:28:36.710
Ed Gein's crimes were in the late 50s, 1957. The
452
00:28:36.750 --> 00:28:41.490
state of forensic science in those days was far less.
453
00:28:41.359 --> 00:28:42.890
Than we have now.
454
00:28:43.519 --> 00:28:48.339
Things like DNA simply didn't exist as a tool. So
455
00:28:48.660 --> 00:28:52.000
identification could potentially be very difficult, and I would suspect
456
00:28:52.099 --> 00:28:54.609
in certainly some of the body parts, simply impossible.
457
00:28:55.480 --> 00:29:00.289
There was no doubt that Gein specifically targeted females. All
458
00:29:00.349 --> 00:29:03.109
the graves he desecrated belonged to women.
459
00:29:03.410 --> 00:29:06.230
I think he was both trying to rebuild his mother,
460
00:29:08.150 --> 00:29:12.069
but I also think that he was taking revenge on
461
00:29:12.109 --> 00:29:15.549
his mother, that kind of love and hate of mommy.
462
00:29:17.059 --> 00:29:21.859
were manifested both by his attempting to bring her back
463
00:29:21.920 --> 00:29:26.589
from the dead, but also perpetrating these atrocities on the
464
00:29:26.680 --> 00:29:28.130
corpses of female bodies.
465
00:29:29.390 --> 00:29:32.369
It's been reported that Gein did in fact try to
466
00:29:32.430 --> 00:29:36.069
return Augusta to the family home after her funeral.
467
00:29:36.509 --> 00:29:40.539
There's some indication that he initially tried to exhume his mothers, corpse.
468
00:29:41.059 --> 00:29:44.599
You know, apparently, Ed missed the presence of his mother
469
00:29:44.680 --> 00:29:48.119
so much, you know, he wanted to bring her back
470
00:29:48.720 --> 00:29:53.650
and somehow, in his madness, you know, reconstitute her in
471
00:29:53.710 --> 00:29:57.710
his household. He couldn't get to his mother's grave because
472
00:29:57.970 --> 00:30:00.849
the soil And that part of Wisconsin is very sandy,
473
00:30:01.869 --> 00:30:06.559
and many coffins are buried within concrete vaults to prevent
474
00:30:06.599 --> 00:30:09.599
the sand from collapsing on them. And that was apparently
475
00:30:09.720 --> 00:30:11.880
true of Augusta Gein.
476
00:30:13.279 --> 00:30:17.859
In November 1957, Ed Gein was charged with the murder
477
00:30:17.920 --> 00:30:22.319
of Bernice Warden. The media descended on the tiny town
478
00:30:22.359 --> 00:30:23.789
of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
479
00:30:25.009 --> 00:30:27.269
What kind of a man did you know him as? Well,
480
00:30:27.349 --> 00:30:31.349
a man who's a nice man, just like anybody else.
481
00:30:32.349 --> 00:30:36.619
The only difference, I'd say, in a man, he seems
482
00:30:36.630 --> 00:30:37.799
to be a little odd.
483
00:30:39.940 --> 00:30:42.799
Well, the cultural context of the Gein case is quite
484
00:30:42.839 --> 00:30:45.980
an interesting one because I think this was one of
485
00:30:46.200 --> 00:30:49.900
the first cases that gathered an awful lot of attention.
486
00:30:49.920 --> 00:30:52.839
There was a media circus that developed around this because
487
00:30:53.650 --> 00:30:56.130
Nothing like this had ever really happened before. It was
488
00:30:56.150 --> 00:30:57.230
something completely new.
489
00:30:57.650 --> 00:31:02.259
It spread very quickly through the local newspapers and, you know,
490
00:31:02.299 --> 00:31:05.180
and then through the Associated Press and so on to
491
00:31:05.200 --> 00:31:09.940
the national media. You know, Plainfield, which, you know, had
492
00:31:10.119 --> 00:31:14.420
always existed from the time of its founding in happy obscurity,
493
00:31:15.160 --> 00:31:18.359
you know, suddenly found itself to be the center of
494
00:31:18.480 --> 00:31:21.039
national and even international attention.
495
00:31:21.339 --> 00:31:25.789
It was just a an exasperating time. And then we
496
00:31:25.829 --> 00:31:30.690
were inundated by nosy Nellies that all thought that, boy,
497
00:31:30.750 --> 00:31:34.450
I gotta go drive by that old farmhouse. And then
498
00:31:34.470 --> 00:31:37.349
we became a, I don't like to use the word chaotic,
499
00:31:37.390 --> 00:31:41.710
but a very unsettled community for a while.
500
00:31:41.930 --> 00:31:46.700
Plainfield was suddenly famous, and famous for the most horrifying
501
00:31:46.740 --> 00:31:49.259
of reasons. You know, that it was the home of
502
00:31:49.380 --> 00:31:52.119
America's most notorious psychopath.
503
00:31:53.210 --> 00:31:57.579
The entire community was stunned. For the previous decade, they'd
504
00:31:57.619 --> 00:32:01.460
been living in the same town as a real-life bogeyman.
505
00:32:02.019 --> 00:32:04.339
It would now be down to the courts to decide
506
00:32:04.420 --> 00:32:12.170
whether or not Ed Gein was insane. On November the 21st, 1957,
507
00:32:12.170 --> 00:32:18.099
the 51-year-old pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at
508
00:32:18.160 --> 00:32:22.109
his arraignment at Washara County Court. and it was declared
509
00:32:22.150 --> 00:32:24.250
that he was unfit to stand trial.
510
00:32:24.269 --> 00:32:29.559
There were indications that Ed was clinically psychotic, that he
511
00:32:29.640 --> 00:32:35.119
had hallucinations, that he heard voices, or the trees would
512
00:32:35.200 --> 00:32:39.170
start talking to him. Most serial murderers are not psychotic,
513
00:32:39.549 --> 00:32:42.230
but Ed seemed to have the symptoms of some form
514
00:32:42.269 --> 00:32:43.309
of psychosis.
515
00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:47.039
Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital for the
516
00:32:47.119 --> 00:32:51.440
Criminally Insane in Warpen, Wisconsin, which is now a maximum
517
00:32:51.480 --> 00:32:56.500
security prison. 70 miles away in Plainfield, the community was
518
00:32:56.559 --> 00:32:59.200
trying to get back on its feet, but the shadow
519
00:32:59.240 --> 00:33:02.430
of Ed Gein lingered over the town.
520
00:33:02.869 --> 00:33:05.609
In 1958, the property that Gein had lived in was
521
00:33:05.829 --> 00:33:08.210
due to be auctioned off, and I think the last
522
00:33:08.250 --> 00:33:10.829
thing that local people wanted was for this to become
523
00:33:11.089 --> 00:33:14.670
some kind of shrine, some kind of, attraction for people
524
00:33:14.710 --> 00:33:18.099
who were morbidly fascinated so a few days before the
525
00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:22.279
auction the property was burned to the ground essentially a.
526
00:33:22.539 --> 00:33:28.200
Lot of talk of arson the um they had been
527
00:33:28.220 --> 00:33:31.500
cleaning up around there had been burning trash up around
528
00:33:31.539 --> 00:33:35.559
the um that that particular day too so then that
529
00:33:35.599 --> 00:33:39.420
was Or anyway, that was an excuse of a possible
530
00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:42.970
cause that maybe the wind got something in the evening
531
00:33:43.029 --> 00:33:46.430
and got some live embers in there. A lot of
532
00:33:46.470 --> 00:33:48.809
the neighbors weren't too happy with having talk of it
533
00:33:48.910 --> 00:33:55.759
being turned into a museum of sorts. But there were
534
00:33:55.839 --> 00:33:59.980
a lot of stories. Anyway, it's gone. People still kept coming, though,
535
00:34:00.819 --> 00:34:03.730
even after the house was gone. for a year, still
536
00:34:03.769 --> 00:34:06.619
had people coming to drive by the empty lot where
537
00:34:06.640 --> 00:34:07.720
the house used to stand.
538
00:34:08.860 --> 00:34:13.000
In March 1958, the car which Gein used to transport
539
00:34:13.039 --> 00:34:15.940
the bodies of his victims was bought at an auction
540
00:34:15.980 --> 00:34:20.909
for over $ 700 by a carnival operator who charged fascinated
541
00:34:20.989 --> 00:34:25.409
Americans 25 cents for a photograph at a macabre sideshow.
542
00:34:25.869 --> 00:34:27.809
I think what we're seeing here is the rise of
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00:34:27.849 --> 00:34:32.789
the serial killer consumer culture. People are fascinated in these
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00:34:32.849 --> 00:34:36.329
kind of cases, and some criminologists refer to this as
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00:34:36.369 --> 00:34:39.710
wound culture, that we're essentially drawn to the trauma and
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00:34:39.730 --> 00:34:42.219
the suffering of other people, and we're drawn to the
547
00:34:42.380 --> 00:34:45.400
artifacts that exist around these cases.
548
00:34:46.300 --> 00:34:49.940
Gein remained in the Central State Hospital for 11 years
549
00:34:50.360 --> 00:34:53.860
until doctors determined that he was finally fit to stand
550
00:34:53.920 --> 00:34:58.550
trial for the first-degree murder of Bernice Warden. The hearing
551
00:34:58.610 --> 00:35:03.070
lasted for a week, and on November the 14th, 1968,
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00:35:03.070 --> 00:35:05.750
Judge Robert Golmar had reached a verdict.
553
00:35:06.190 --> 00:35:08.530
He was tried and found guilty of the murder of
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00:35:08.570 --> 00:35:10.880
Bernice Worden, but then he was judged insane and stuck
555
00:35:10.909 --> 00:35:12.159
back in the mental institution.
556
00:35:12.420 --> 00:35:16.280
I think that was possibly somewhere where he may have thrived,
557
00:35:16.300 --> 00:35:19.320
because he had structure, he had a routine, he had
558
00:35:19.360 --> 00:35:22.440
people watching over him and looking after his needs.
559
00:35:23.590 --> 00:35:28.750
Forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Morrison interviewed Gein during his time
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00:35:28.889 --> 00:35:29.570
in hospital.
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00:35:30.110 --> 00:35:33.070
I was working at that time as a staff psychiatrist
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00:35:33.989 --> 00:35:38.659
and I was covering all the units. And when I
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00:35:38.719 --> 00:35:42.219
was asked to go over to see this person, I
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00:35:43.380 --> 00:35:45.760
went over to see it and I saw Ed Gein.
565
00:35:46.599 --> 00:35:50.199
He was not at all coherent. He was such a
566
00:35:50.280 --> 00:35:55.670
little person. that I found it hard to picture him
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00:35:56.489 --> 00:36:00.989
as the person who'd committed all these homicides. He lived
568
00:36:01.110 --> 00:36:05.340
there very peacefully. He never caused any problems, never had
569
00:36:05.559 --> 00:36:11.219
any type of behavioral thing, no type of, I guess
570
00:36:11.239 --> 00:36:13.739
you could say, consequence for bad behavior.
571
00:36:15.719 --> 00:36:19.360
Gein's quiet nature in hospital was in stark contrast to
572
00:36:19.400 --> 00:36:21.719
the monster Helen had heard so much about.
573
00:36:21.739 --> 00:36:25.019
I received a letter from one of his neighbours who
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00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:28.409
used to be a friend of his. She was a
575
00:36:28.449 --> 00:36:32.369
little girl and she remembers going over to his house
576
00:36:33.329 --> 00:36:36.690
and he would serve soup and everything. What turned out,
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00:36:36.730 --> 00:36:39.710
the soup bowls were the skulls of many of his
578
00:36:39.750 --> 00:36:42.449
victims and people never knew it.
579
00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:48.980
On July the 26th, 1984, Ed Gein died of lung cancer,
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00:36:49.099 --> 00:36:53.219
age 77. He was buried next to his mother on
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00:36:53.260 --> 00:36:56.650
the Gein family plot at the same cemetery which he
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00:36:56.710 --> 00:37:01.530
so often desecrated during his career of horror. Gein has
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00:37:01.610 --> 00:37:04.889
left a lasting impact on the small community where he
584
00:37:04.949 --> 00:37:06.710
committed his ghoulish crimes.
585
00:37:07.489 --> 00:37:10.340
We really wouldn't care to have that be our claim
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00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:16.269
to fame. We've turned out lots of doctors and architects
587
00:37:16.610 --> 00:37:18.989
and some really good people out of our schools here.
588
00:37:19.030 --> 00:37:21.389
We're very proud of them. We'd rather be known for
589
00:37:21.409 --> 00:37:29.800
a tremendously good population than to be credited for only one.
590
00:37:31.300 --> 00:37:31.639
Issue.
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00:37:32.860 --> 00:37:36.900
But just like the carnival operators of the 1950s, people
592
00:37:36.960 --> 00:37:40.400
continue to try and get their hands on grisly souvenirs
593
00:37:40.679 --> 00:37:41.579
related to Gein.
594
00:37:42.269 --> 00:37:45.590
In the year 2000, somebody was found to be selling
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00:37:45.710 --> 00:37:50.150
parts of the gravestone that had been erected at Ed
596
00:37:50.210 --> 00:37:53.909
Gein's grave. For people who are fans of the serial
597
00:37:53.949 --> 00:37:57.130
killer cult, this was just the gift that kept on giving.
598
00:37:57.469 --> 00:38:00.269
They keep putting up headstones, and the headstones keep disappearing.
599
00:38:00.909 --> 00:38:04.590
There's a whole category of collectible that has come to
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00:38:04.630 --> 00:38:11.050
be known as murderabilia, and Gein relics are particularly prized.
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00:38:11.820 --> 00:38:14.539
among people who collect that kind of morbid relic.
602
00:38:15.400 --> 00:38:19.360
Over 60 years since the horrific crimes, Gein has grown
603
00:38:19.429 --> 00:38:23.429
into a notorious figure in American folklore, a killer of
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00:38:23.510 --> 00:38:25.230
almost mythic proportions.
605
00:38:25.909 --> 00:38:29.489
The two things that are fascinating about Ed Gein is
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00:38:29.570 --> 00:38:33.210
the fact that he only, as far as we know,
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00:38:33.309 --> 00:38:36.590
murdered two people, which is a lot less than many
608
00:38:36.710 --> 00:38:44.489
infamous killers, but he's had such a huge legacy in... films, books, music.
609
00:38:44.949 --> 00:38:48.489
He seems to have become a sort of pop culture murderer.
610
00:38:49.010 --> 00:38:53.250
At the time the Gein crimes were being revealed in
611
00:38:53.269 --> 00:38:57.150
the press, there was a writer of pulp horror named
612
00:38:57.190 --> 00:39:01.250
Robert Block who had moved to Wisconsin to be with
613
00:39:01.289 --> 00:39:04.570
his wife's family. And at some point, when Gein was
614
00:39:04.650 --> 00:39:08.760
being interviewed by various psychiatrists, all these headlines in the
615
00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:12.889
papers were trumpeting the fact that Gein had been motivated
616
00:39:13.510 --> 00:39:19.739
by these deranged, Oedipal conflicts, that he was this desperately
617
00:39:19.860 --> 00:39:25.309
sick mama's boy who was perpetrating these atrocities on middle-aged
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00:39:25.409 --> 00:39:29.449
women who reminded him of his mother. And this caught
619
00:39:29.489 --> 00:39:32.900
the attention of Robert Block, who decided this could potentially
620
00:39:33.039 --> 00:39:35.739
make the basis of a good horror novel. And that
621
00:39:35.800 --> 00:39:40.510
became the book Psycho. In the book Psycho, Norman Bates, actually,
622
00:39:40.610 --> 00:39:43.349
after he's arrested, compares himself at the end of the
623
00:39:43.369 --> 00:39:46.269
book to Ed Gein. So the connection is made very,
624
00:39:46.309 --> 00:39:50.829
very explicit there in the book. Anyway, Psycho, as we know, became,
625
00:39:51.210 --> 00:39:55.059
turned into one of the great classic horror movies of
626
00:39:55.119 --> 00:39:57.880
American cinema. You know, if you look at horror movies
627
00:39:58.019 --> 00:40:03.219
before then, there were all these Eastern European monsters, Frankenstein
628
00:40:03.260 --> 00:40:06.420
and Dracula and the Wolfman, you know, or else they
629
00:40:06.440 --> 00:40:11.050
were aliens from outer space. You know, with Psycho, Psycho
630
00:40:11.110 --> 00:40:14.550
establishes and, you know, Ed Gein establishes, you know, this
631
00:40:14.670 --> 00:40:20.989
quintessentially American figure of horror. the ordinary middle American guy
632
00:40:21.250 --> 00:40:24.389
who turns out to be this monster in disguise. And then,
633
00:40:24.409 --> 00:40:28.389
of course, Gein becomes the basis for Toby Hooper's Texas
634
00:40:28.409 --> 00:40:33.079
Chainsaw Massacre, and later on for Thomas Harris' character Buffalo
635
00:40:33.099 --> 00:40:36.300
Bill in Silence of the Lambs. You know, so Gein
636
00:40:36.340 --> 00:40:40.159
has this very, very direct influence on American horror cinema.
637
00:40:41.219 --> 00:40:44.639
But Gein's crimes were not fictional, they were very real,
638
00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:48.840
and he remains one of the most infamous murderers in U.S. history.
639
00:40:49.389 --> 00:40:55.050
We think of Gein as this notorious American serial murderer,
640
00:40:55.989 --> 00:40:59.190
but in many ways he doesn't really fit that profile.
641
00:40:59.829 --> 00:41:03.210
You know, for example, he wasn't a sexual sadist in
642
00:41:03.250 --> 00:41:06.650
the way John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy were or
643
00:41:06.690 --> 00:41:10.630
Jeffrey Dahmer. You know, he wasn't driven by that particular profile.
644
00:41:11.380 --> 00:41:12.460
form of deviance.
645
00:41:12.940 --> 00:41:15.949
I think he was brought up in a vacuum that
646
00:41:16.010 --> 00:41:18.869
created the conditions for someone who would go on to
647
00:41:18.929 --> 00:41:23.670
do evil things. So whilst most people are shocked and
648
00:41:23.730 --> 00:41:29.449
repulsed and absolutely horrified at some of the things he's done,
649
00:41:29.889 --> 00:41:32.670
because he didn't have that filter and that check on
650
00:41:32.710 --> 00:41:36.309
his behavior, he was able to escalate to a level
651
00:41:36.449 --> 00:41:37.349
of evil, I think.
652
00:41:37.829 --> 00:41:42.539
Evil is something that You know, professionally, people don't believe
653
00:41:42.599 --> 00:41:46.920
in evil, but I truly believe that he was evil.
654
00:41:47.900 --> 00:41:50.900
I think there are people who would like to say
655
00:41:51.019 --> 00:41:54.530
that the devil got into him and made him do
656
00:41:54.590 --> 00:41:58.670
these awful things, but I think he was born evil.
657
00:41:59.090 --> 00:42:01.469
The Ed I knew was not an evil person. He
658
00:42:01.750 --> 00:42:05.940
did things that normal people do not do. And there's
659
00:42:06.159 --> 00:42:09.940
just no doubt about that. And to kill two people
660
00:42:09.960 --> 00:42:13.719
is certainly not a person who you would really like
661
00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:21.230
to invite to your neighborhood party. But, yeah, there was
662
00:42:21.269 --> 00:42:24.929
something in his head that didn't click right.
663
00:42:25.869 --> 00:42:29.590
Ed Gein's crimes are the stuff of genuine nightmares. The
664
00:42:29.610 --> 00:42:33.940
man with an unhealthy obsession with his mother brazenly murdered
665
00:42:34.019 --> 00:42:37.820
two women and kept a bizarre collection of gruesome keepsakes
666
00:42:38.179 --> 00:42:41.829
inside his house of horrors. He truly deserves to be
667
00:42:41.869 --> 00:42:45.110
remembered as one of the world's most evil killers.
