Ed Gein: The butcher of Plainfield

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Ed Gein, the butcher of Plainfield, was a disturbed individual. His bowls were made out of skulls. All of his eating utensils were fashioned from bones. The handle on the drawstring of his living room curtains was a pair of womens lips. Every lamp shade was created using stretched human skin. Next to his potbelly stove lied a pile of human remains waiting to be prepared for consumption. Meet Ed Gein, possibly one of the most disturbed individuals to ever walk the earth.

Ed Gein's Early Life

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August

27th, 1906, is La Crosse Country, Wisconsin. He was the second of two boys of George Philip and Augusta Wilhelmine Gein. Ed had an older brother, named Henry George Gein.

Augusta, Gein's mother, grew to resent her husband, George. She felt he had become an alcoholic. He also had trouble maintaining employment. Throughout his life, he worked in various fields, including carpentry, a tanner, and an insurance salesman.

Augusta herself, owned and operated a small local grocery shop. In 1914 Augusta sold the grocery store. She used that money to purchase a farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin. She bought the farm with the intention of living in isolation. This farm became the family's permanent residence.

Augusta leveraged the isolation that came with living on the farm. She used it to her advantage to drive away outside forces that could potentially influence her children in ways that she saw unfit. Ed was only allowed to leave the farm to attend school. Outside of school, Ed spent the bulk of his time working on the farm.

His mother was a fervent Lutheran. She spent much time preaching to the boys about the loose morals and corruption of the outside world, the evil of drinking, and the belief that all women were born prostitutes and were used as instruments in the devil's work. Augusta spent her afternoons reading to the boys from the bible. The verses she chose were from the old testament and usually focused on death, murder, and Divine Retribution themes.

Ed was considered to be a very shy child. His Teachers recalled him having very strange habits, such as spontaneous laughter as if he were laughing at his own jokes. Augusta was known to punish her sons for any attempt at making friends. Despite his very poor social development, he was exceptional in school, most particularly in reading.

Deaths in the Family

George Philip Gein, the father to Ed and Henry, died on April 1st, 1940 at the age of 66. The cause of death was heart failure, likely caused by his alcoholism. After his death, Ed and Henry began to work odd jobs around town in an effort to help cover living expenses.

Residents of the community considered Henry and Ed to be reliable and honest workers. Both Henry and Ed worked as handymen, but Ed also did babysitting for neighbors. He enjoyed babysitting. His social mannerisms probably allowed him to relate much more easily to children, rather than men and women his own age.

Henry met, and began dating divorced women. The woman was a single mother of two. Henry planned to move in with her. Henry was bothered by Ed's affection for their mother. He often spoke ill of her towards Ed, whose responses were filled with shock, and hurt.

On May 16, 1944, Ed and Henry were burning marsh vegetation on the farm. The fire quickly became out of control, drawing the attention of local firefighters. At the end of the day, after the raging fire had been extinguished, Ed reported Henry missing.

By lantern and flashlight, a search party scoured the area looking for Henry. His dead body was later found, face down. He had apparently been dead for some time. The suspected cause of death was heart failure, which had been derived based on the fact that he was not burned, or otherwise injured. In Ed  Geins biography, Deviant, written by author Harold Schechter, it is reported that Henry had bruises on his head. Police dismissed any possibility of foul play. The official cause of death was later listed as asphyxiation.

The police accepted the theory of Henry's death being accidental, despite the fact that there was no investigation, and a proper autopsy had not been conducted. Many people in the area suspected that Ed had killed his brother. While being questioned about the murder of Bernice Worden in 1957,  a state investigator by the name of Joe Wilimovsky brought up Henry's death. Dr. George W. Arndt, who studied the case, wrote that in retrospect it was "possible and likely" that Henry's death was "the Cain and Abel aspect of this case".

Ed could finally be alone with his beloved mother. Shortly after Henry's death, Augusta had a debilitating stroke. Ed devoted himself to taking care of his ill mother.

Gein later recounted an event in which he and his mother visited a local man named Smith. They met him to purchase straw. According to gein, while visiting this man, Augusta was witness to Smith brutally beating a dog. A woman came out of Smith's home, yelling at him to stop hitting the dog. Smith apparently beat the dog to death.

Augusta was horrified by this scene, not because of the beating of the dog, but because of the presence of the woman. Augusta had told Ed that this woman was not married to Smith, and therefor had no business being at his home with him. Augusta angrily called her "Smith's Harlot".

Soon after this incident, Augusta had a second stroke, causing her health to deteriorate rapidly. On December 29, 1945, Augusta passed away at the age of 67. This was utterly traumatic to Ed. Author Harold Schechter wrote he had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world".

Career

After Augusta's death, Ed stayed at the farm alone. He maintained it by earning money from odd jobs around town. He began boarding up all of the areas of the house that were previously used by his mother. This included the entire upstairs, downstairs parlor, and living room. These rooms remained untouched, while the rest of the house became increasingly unkempt.

Gein moved into a small room off of the kitchen. Soon after this, he became increasingly interested in occult novels, most of which contained themes of cannibalism and nazi atrocities.

Gein was a handyman. He also received a farm subsidy, provided by the United States government, beginning in 1957. It is also believed that sometime between 1946 and 1956, gein sold an 80 acre lot of land, previously owned by his now-deceased brother, Henry.

Ed Gein's Crimes

In 1957, on the date of November 16th, a Plainfield hardware store owner by the name of Bernice Worden vanished from her place of business. Worden's son told investigators that Gein had been in the store the night before. As he left the store he told Bernice that he would be back in the morning to pick up a gallon of antifreeze. The last receipt Worden wrote the morning of her disappearance was for one item only; a gallon of antifreeze. The police began to suspect that Gein may know something about the disappearance.

While searching Gein's property, Bernice Worden was found decapitated. They found her in Gein's shed, hung upside down by ropes tied to her wrists, with a crossbar at her ankles. It was reported that the torso was "dressed out like a deer". The cause of death was a .22 caliber bullet wound. All mutilations to her body were made postmortem.

Upon searching Gein's house, there were several grim discoveries. These included:

1. Whole human bones and fragments
2. A wastebasket made of human skin
3. Human skin used as seat covers on several of Gein's chairs
4. Skulls on his bedposts
5. Female skulls, some with the tops cut off
6. Bowls made from human skulls
7. A corset made from a female torso, skinned from shoulders to waist
8. Leggings made from the skin of female heads
9. Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag
10. Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack
  11. Bernice Worden's heart "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbellied stove
12. Nine Vulvae in a shoe box
13. A young girl's dress and "the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old.
14. A belt made from human, female nipples
15. Four noses
16. A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring
17. A lampshade made from the skin of a human face
18. Fingernails from female fingers

All of these discoveries found in Gein's house were taken to the state crime lab where they were photographed before being destroyed.

While being questioned, Gein told police, that between 1947 and 1952, he made upwards of 40 late night visits to three different graveyards in the area. While there he exhumed recent burials while he was in a "daze like" state. On roughly 30 of those visits, he claimed to have come out of his daze, left the graves alone, and come home empty-handed. On the other occasions, he dug up middle-aged women who had recently been buried that he thought resembled his mother. He then took the bodies home, tanning their skins to make his bizarre items.

Gein had admitted to robbing at least nine graves. He later led investigators to their locations. With the authorities being uncertain as to whether or not Gein was telling the truth about the grave robberies, two test graves were exhumed to examine the contents. Both graves were found to be empty with the exception of a crowbar being placed in one. The graves being empty corroborated Gein's confession.

Allan Wilimovsky of the state crime lab was present during the opening of three graves identified by Gein. The caskets were placed inside wooden boxes, with the top boards running cross-ways, instead of lengthwise. The tops of the boxes were roughly two feet below the surface in sandy soil.

Gein robbed the graves soon after the funeral. This meant that the graves were not fully completed. They were found just as Gein had described them. One casket was completely empty, one Gein could not open on account of him losing his pry bar, and in the third, most of the body was gone but Gein had returned rings and a few body parts.

Shortly after the passing of his mother,  Ed Gein

started work on a "woman suit" so that "...he could become his mother-to literally crawl into her skin". Gein's practice of wearing the removed skins of women was later described as an "insane transvestite ritual." Gein denied any sexual activity with corpses, stating that "they smelled too bad".

During an interrogation at the state crime laboratory, Gein admitted to the shooting death of Mary Hogan. Mary Hogan was a tavern owner, missing since 1954. Her head was found in Gein's house, but he later denied memory of any details relating to her death.

Initially, Gein was found unfit for trial in the murder of Bernice Worden. Following confinement in a mental health facility, Gein was found guilty but legally insane in the murder of Bernice Worden. This led to him being confined in psychiatric institutions until he died on July 26, 1984, at Mendota Mental Health Institute. The cause of death was cancer-induced liver and respiratory failure. He is buried in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave.