Ed Gein

• 1. Introduction

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  Ed Gein was a quiet handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, and the last receipt Bernice Worden ever wrote was for him. It was a sales slip for a gallon of antifreeze, written on the morning of the 16th of November 1957. By that evening, the town's hardware store owner was missing, and the man on the slip was in custody. Gein would become known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul. He was an American murderer and body snatcher whose crimes reached the whole country in 1957. Yet the people who knew him had thought of him as reliable, honest and a little strange. He babysat for the neighbors. How does a man like that come to be remembered as a monster? What did investigators find when they searched his farm? Why did the courts never send him to prison? And why does his name keep turning up in stories that never mention him?

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• 2. Mother's Farm

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  Edward Theodore Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on the 27th of August 1906, the younger of two sons. His father was George Philip Gein, who lived from 1873 to 1940. His mother was Augusta Wilhelmine, born Lehrke, who lived from 1878 to 1945. Both parents were of German descent, and Ed's only sibling was his older brother Henry.

  Augusta was fervently religious and nominally Lutheran. She lectured her sons about the immorality of the world and the evils of drinking. She also taught that all women were naturally promiscuous and instruments of the Devil. Every afternoon she read to the boys from the Bible. She favored passages from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation about death, murder and divine retribution. Ed idolized her, and the devotion grew into an obsession.

  George Gein had worked in La Crosse as a carpenter, a tanner and a firefighter. He also owned a grocery store, which he soon sold. The family then moved to a 155 acre farm in Plainfield, and they never left. George was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat both sons. Blows to the head left Ed's ears ringing. Augusta used the farm's isolation to keep outsiders away from her boys.

  School was the only reason Ed left the farm. Otherwise he did chores. Classmates and teachers remembered a shy boy who laughed at random, as if enjoying a private joke. According to family acquaintances, Augusta punished him whenever he tried to make friends. Even so, he did fairly well in school, and he was best at reading.

  On the 1st of April 1940, George died of heart failure at the age of 66. Ed and Henry took odd jobs around town to pay the bills. The community generally thought of them as reliable and honest. Ed often babysat for neighbors and seemed to relate more easily to children than to adults. Henry began dating a divorced mother of two and planned to move in with her. He worried about his brother's attachment to their mother and spoke ill of her in front of Ed. Ed responded with shock and hurt.

  On the 16th of May 1944, Henry was burning vegetation on the property when the fire got out of control. The local fire department came and put it out. After the firefighters left, Ed reported his brother missing. A search party with lanterns and flashlights found 43-year-old Henry lying face down, dead. He had not been burned or otherwise injured, so heart failure seemed the likely cause.

  Biographer Harold Schechter later reported that Henry had bruises on his head. The county coroner listed asphyxiation as the cause of death. Police dismissed foul play, no autopsy was performed, and no official investigation followed. In 1957, state investigator Joe Wilimovsky raised Henry's death with Ed while questioning him about Bernice Worden. George Arndt, who studied the case, wrote that it was "possible and likely" that Henry's death was "the 'Cain and Abel' aspect of this case."

  Augusta suffered a paralyzing stroke soon after Henry died, and Ed devoted himself to her care. Sometime in 1945, he later recalled, they visited a neighbor named Smith to buy straw. Augusta watched Smith beat a dog, and a woman came out of the house and yelled at him to stop. Smith beat the dog to death anyway. Augusta was upset, but not by the cruelty. She was upset by the woman, who was not married to Smith. She called her "Smith's harlot." A second stroke followed, and her health failed fast.

  Augusta died on the 29th of December 1945, at the age of 67. Ed was devastated. In Schechter's words, he had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world".

  Gein kept the farm and lived on odd jobs. He boarded up his mother's rooms, including the upstairs, the downstairs parlor and the living room, and left them untouched. They stayed pristine while the rest of the house sank into squalor. He lived in a small room next to the kitchen. He read pulp magazines and adventure stories, especially ones about cannibals or Nazi atrocities. One subject was Ilse Koch, accused of choosing tattooed prisoners to be killed so that lampshades could be made from their skins.

  In 1951 Gein began to receive a federal farm subsidy. He also worked for the municipal road crew and on crop-threshing crews around Plainfield. At some point between 1946 and 1956, he sold an 80 acre parcel that had belonged to Henry. A visitor to that farmhouse would not have guessed what it held.

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• 3. The Farmhouse Search

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  At about 9:30 on the morning of the 16th of November 1957, someone saw the Plainfield hardware store's truck pull out from the rear of the building. Bernice Worden, the 58-year-old owner, had disappeared. The store saw almost no customers all day. Some residents blamed deer hunting season.

  Around 5:00 in the afternoon, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, her son, walked into the store. The cash register was open, and there were bloodstains on the floor. He told investigators that Gein had been in the store the evening before. That night Gein was arrested at a grocery store in West Plainfield. The Waushara County Sheriff's Department then searched his farm.

  A deputy found Bernice Worden's decapitated body in a shed. It hung upside down by the legs from a crossbar at the ankles, with ropes at the wrists. The torso had been "dressed out like a deer". She had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations came after her death.

  The house held far worse. Searchers found whole human bones and fragments, and a wastebasket made of human skin. Several chairs were covered in skin. Human skulls were mounted on bedposts, and bowls had been made from others. They found a corset made from a female torso, leggings from leg skin and masks made from the skin of female heads. There was a lampshade made from the skin of a human face.

  Some finds could be named. Mary Hogan's face mask was in a paper bag, and her skull was in a box. Bernice Worden's head was in a burlap sack. Her heart lay "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbelly stove". Other items came from victims never identified, including nine vulvas in a shoebox. The state crime laboratory photographed all of it, and the remains were then "decently disposed of."

  A 16-year-old whose parents were friends of Gein had spent time with him at baseball games and movies. He told police that Gein kept shrunken heads at home. Gein had explained them as relics sent by a cousin who served in the Philippines during World War II. Police found they were human facial skins, carefully peeled from corpses and used as masks.

  During questioning, Sheriff Art Schley reportedly slammed Gein's head and face into a brick wall. For that reason, Gein's first confession was ruled inadmissible. Schley died of heart failure in 1968, aged 43, before the trial. People who knew him said the horror of the case and the dread of testifying about the assault had worn him down. That left the confessions made later, and the graves that backed them up.

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• 4. Graveyard Confessions

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  Between 1947 and 1952, Gein told investigators, he made as many as forty night visits to three local graveyards. He said he was in a "daze-like" state each time. On about thirty of those visits, he claimed, the daze lifted while he stood in the cemetery. He left the grave in good order and went home empty-handed.

  On the other occasions, he dug up recently buried middle-aged women who he thought looked like his mother. He carried the bodies home and tanned their skins to make the objects police later found. He admitted to taking from nine graves and led investigators to them.

  Allan Wilimovsky of the state crime laboratory helped open three test graves that Gein identified. Officials wanted to know whether a slight man could really dig up a grave alone in one night. The caskets sat inside wooden boxes, with the top boards running crossways. The box lids lay about 2 feet below the surface, in sandy soil. Gein had robbed each grave soon after the funeral, while it was still unsettled.

  The results matched his account. One casket was empty. Another was empty except for a few bones and Gein's own crowbar. In the third, most of the body was gone, though Gein had put back some rings and body parts. His confession was largely corroborated.

  Soon after his mother died, Gein began making what he called a woman suit. The goal, as he put it, was to become his mother, "to literally crawl into her skin." Asked whether he had sex with the bodies, he denied it. His explanation was brief: "They smelled too bad."

  In the state crime laboratory interrogation, he admitted shooting Mary Hogan, a 51-year-old tavern owner. She had been missing since the 8th of December 1954. Her head was later found in his house. He said he could not remember the details of her death. Investigators wondered how many other names belonged on the list.

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• 5. Other Disappearances

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  Georgia Jean Weckler was 8 when she vanished near Fort Atkinson on the 1st of May 1947. A neighbor drove her home from grade school in Jefferson and left her at the lane from U.S. Highway 12 to the family farm. She was last seen stopping to open the family mailbox. Witnesses reported a dark, possibly black 1936 Ford sedan with a gray plastic spotlight nearby. Gein owned a black 1937 Ford.

  Evelyn Grace Hartley, 14, went missing on the evening of the 24th of October 1953 while babysitting a 20-month-old girl. The house belonged to La Crosse State College professor Viggo Rasmussen. When she failed to check in at 8:30, her father Richard phoned repeatedly and got no answer. He drove over and found the doors locked, with the lights and radio on. Furniture and schoolbooks had been moved, one of her shoes was upstairs and one downstairs, and her glasses lay broken upstairs.

  Gein denied involvement in her disappearance and passed two lie detector tests. Police found no trace of her on his property.

  Victor Harold Travis, 42, of Adams County, went deer hunting on the 1st of November 1952 with an acquaintance, Raymond Burgess. They stopped for hours at Mac's Bar in Plainfield. Around 7 p.m. they got into Burgess' car and drove away. Neither man nor the car was ever seen again. The two had been hunting on the land next to Gein's farm, despite his objections that day.

  Gein has also been tentatively linked to the disappearance of his neighbor James Walsh, 32, in June 1954. After Walsh went missing, Gein did chores for Walsh's wife.

  In November 1957, authorities confronted Gein with the missing persons cases from the years after his mother's death. Lie detector tests failed to tie him to any other killings. His psychiatrists concluded that his violence was aimed only at women who physically resembled his mother. Those cases remain unsolved, and what a court could prove was far narrower than what Plainfield feared.

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• 6. The Courtroom

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  On the 21st of November 1957, Gein stood in Waushara County Court, charged with one count of first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Doctors diagnosed schizophrenia and found him mentally incompetent, so he was unfit for trial. He was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, now Dodge Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility in Waupun. Later he was transferred to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison.

  In 1968, doctors decided that Gein was "mentally able to confer with counsel and participate in his defense". His trial began on the 7th of November 1968 and lasted one week. A psychiatrist testified about what Gein had said of the shooting. By that account, Gein did not know whether Bernice Worden's death was intentional or accidental. He said a gun he was examining in her store had gone off. He claimed he never aimed it at her and remembered nothing else of that morning.

  The defense asked for no jury, so Judge Robert H. Gollmar heard the case alone. On the 14th of November, Gollmar found Gein guilty. A second trial then took up his sanity. After doctors for both sides testified, Gollmar ruled him "not guilty by reason of insanity" and committed him to Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Gein spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital.

  Gollmar noted in writing that Gein was tried for only one murder, that of Mrs. Worden, because of prohibitive costs. He added that Gein had also admitted killing Mary Hogan. Meanwhile the farm that had made Gein notorious was already gone.

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• 7. Fire and Gravestone

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  Gein's house, outbuildings and land were appraised at $4,700. His possessions were due to be auctioned on the 30th of March 1958, and rumors said the site might become a tourist attraction. Early on the morning of the 20th of March, the house burned to the ground. A deputy fire marshal reported that a cleaning crew had lit a garbage fire 75 ft from the house. Hot coals were found at that spot, but the flames had not crept along the ground to the house. Arson was suspected. The cause was never officially determined.

  The fire chief that day was Frank Worden, son of Gein's victim, and it is possible he did not treat the blaze as urgent. Told about it in detention, Gein shrugged and said, "Just as well."

  Gein's Ford sedan, which he used to haul bodies, sold at public auction for $760. The buyer was Bunny Gibbons, a carnival sideshow operator, who charged carnival-goers 25 cents to see it. Where the car is now is unknown.

  Gein died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute on the 26th of July 1984, aged 77. The cause was respiratory failure secondary to lung cancer. He was buried in Plainfield Cemetery between his parents and his brother. Souvenir seekers chipped at his gravestone over the years, and in 2000 the whole stone was stolen. It was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle, Washington, and placed in storage at the Waushara County Sheriff's Department. His grave has stayed unmarked since.

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• 8. Shadow in Fiction

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  In 1959, writer Robert Bloch published a suspense novel, Psycho, in a fictionalized version of the story. It brought the tale to wide public attention. Alfred Hitchcock adapted the book in 1960. After that, Gein's story was loosely adapted in many films, including Deranged and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both in 1974. Others include In the Light of the Moon in 2000, released in the United States and Australia as Ed Gein in 2001, and Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield in 2007. Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, along with Ed Gein, the Musical in 2010, followed.

  Gein inspired many fictional killers. The best known are Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Garland Greene in Con Air and Dr. Oliver Thredson in American Horror Story: Asylum are also counted among them.

  From 1975 to 1976, filmmaker Errol Morris and German director Werner Herzog tried to make a film about Gein together. Morris said he interviewed Gein several times and spent almost a year in Plainfield talking to dozens of locals. The pair secretly planned to exhume Gein's mother to test a theory but never went through with it. Their collaboration ended, and a 1989 New Yorker profile of Morris described the aborted project.

  Musicians took up the story too. The grunge band Tad wrote "Nipple Belt" for the 1989 album God's Balls. Slayer wrote "Dead Skin Mask" for the 1990 album Seasons in the Abyss. Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon said that "Skinned" on their 1995 album Soup was about Gein. Mudvayne named a song after him, "Nothing to Gein", on the 2000 album L.D. 50.

  In the 1991 novel American Psycho and its 2000 film, Patrick Bateman credits Gein with a chilling remark about women. The remark actually came from Edmund Kemper, so Bateman has it wrong. According to George W. Arndt, news reports at the time of the crimes also spawned a subgenre of black humor called "Geiners."

  German director Jörg Buttgereit staged a play about the case in 2012, Kannibale und Liebe, at Theater Dortmund, with Uwe Rohbeck as Gein. Michael Wincott played Gein in flashbacks in the 2012 film Hitchcock. The NCIS episode "One Last Score" in Season 8 mentions him. In 2022, Shane Kerwin played Gein in the first season of Netflix's Monster, which suggested him as a possible inspiration for Jeffrey Dahmer. Any direct link between the two remains speculative. The third season, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, centered on his life and crimes, with Charlie Hunnam in the lead role. Netflix released it on the 3rd of October 2025.

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