Edward Theodore Gein August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American serial killer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned keepsakes from their bones and skin. He also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957.
Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. By 1968 he was judged competent to stand trial; he was found guilty of the murder of Worden, but was found legally insane and thus was remanded to a psychiatric institution.
Augusta, who was fervently religious and nominally Lutheran, frequently preached to her sons about the innate immorality of the world, the evils of drinking and her belief that all women were naturally promiscuous and instruments of the devil. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting verses from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation concerning death, murder and divine retribution. Gein idolized and eventually became obsessed with his mother
Gein's father was also known to be a violent alcoholic who regularly beat both of his sons; this would cause Ed's ears to ring when his father beat him on the head. Augusta took advantage of the farm's isolation by turning away outsiders who could have influenced her sons.
Gein left the farm only to attend school. Outside of school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Gein was shy; classmates and teachers remembered him as having strange mannerisms, such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal jokes. Augusta punished Gein whenever he tried to make friends, according to family acquaintances. Despite his poor social development, Gein did fairly well in school, particularly in reading
On May 16, 1944, Gein was burning away marsh vegetation on the property. The fire got out of control, drawing the attention of the local fire department. By the end of the day—the fire having been extinguished and the firefighters gone—Gein reported Henry missing. With lanterns and flashlights, a search party searched for 43-year-old Henry, whose dead body was found lying face down. Apparently, Henry had been dead for some time, and it appeared that the cause of death was heart failure since he had not been burned or injured otherwise.
It was later reported by biographer Harold Schechter that Henry had bruises on his head. Police dismissed the possibility of foul play and the county coroner later officially listed asphyxiation as the cause of death.The authorities accepted the accident theory, but no official investigation was conducted and an autopsy was not performed
With Henry deceased, Gein and his mother were now alone. Augusta suffered a paralyzing stroke shortly after Henry's death, and Gein devoted himself to her care. Sometime in 1945, he later recounted, he and his mother visited a man named Smith, who lived nearby, to purchase straw. According to Gein, Augusta witnessed Smith beating a dog. A woman inside the Smith residence came outside and yelled for him to stop, but Smith beat the dog to death. Augusta was extremely upset by this scene; however, what bothered her did not appear to be the brutality toward the dog but, rather, the presence of the woman. Augusta told Gein that the woman was not married to Smith and so had no business being there, angrily calling her "Smith's harlot." She suffered a second stroke soon after, and her health deteriorated rapidly.Augusta died on December 29, 1945, at the age of 67. Gein was devastated by his mother's death; in the words of Schechter, he had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world"
he became interested in reading pulp magazines and adventure stories, particularly those involving cannibals or Nazi atrocities, specifically concerning Ilse Koch, who had been accused of selecting tattooed prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades and other items from their skins.
. During the search authorities also discovered the head of Mary Hogan, a tavern operator who had disappeared in 1954.
During state crime laboratory interrogation, Gein also admitted to shooting 51-year-old Mary Hogan, a tavern owner missing since December 8, 1954, whose head was found in his house, but he later denied memory of details of her death.
On the morning of November 16, 1957, 58-year-old Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared. The hardware store's truck was seen driving out from the rear of the building at around 9:30 a.m. The store saw few customers the entire day; some area residents believed that this was because of deer hunting season. Worden's son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, entered the store around 5:00 p.m. to find the cash register open and blood stains on the floor.
Frank Worden told investigators that on the evening before his mother's disappearance, Gein had been in the store and was expected to return the next morning for a gallon of antifreeze. A sales slip for the antifreeze was the last receipt written by Bernice Worden on the morning that she disappeared. That evening, Gein was arrested at a West Plainfield grocery store, and the Waushara County Sheriff's Department searched the Gein farm.
A sheriff's deputy discovered Worden's decapitated body in a shed on Gein's property, hung upside down by her legs with a crossbar at her ankles and ropes at her wrists. The torso had been "dressed out like a deer".Worden had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations were made after her death. Searching Gein's house, authorities found:
- Whole human bones and fragments[29]
- A wastebasket made of human skin[30]
- Human skin covering several chairs[31]
- Human skulls mounted on bedposts[32]
- Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off[30][31][33]
- Bowls made from human skulls[30]
- A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist[31]
- Leggings made from human leg skin[30]
- Masks made from the skin of female heads[31][32][33]
- Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag[32]
- Mary Hogan's skull in a box[34]
- Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack[35]
- Bernice Worden's heart "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbelly stove"[36]
- Nine vulvas in a shoebox[37]
- A young girl's dress and "the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old"[38]
- A belt made from female human nipples[39]
- Four noses[28]
- A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring[28]
- A lampshade made from the skin of a human face[28]
These artifacts were photographed at the state crime laboratory and then "decently disposed of." When questioned, Gein told investigators that between 1947 and 1952, he had made as many as forty nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a "daze-like" state. On about thirty of those visits, he said that he came out of the daze while in the cemetery, left the grave in good order and returned home emptyhanded.[ On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home, where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.
Gein admitted to stealing from nine graves and led investigators to their locations.
Gein had robbed the graves soon after the funerals while the graves were not completed. The test graves were exhumed because authorities were uncertain as to whether the slight Gein was capable of single-handedly digging up a grave during a single evening. They were found as Gein described: one casket was empty; another casket was empty but contained a few bones and Gein's crowbar; and the final casket saw most of the body missing, yet Gein had returned rings and some body parts. Thus, Gein's confession was largely corroborated.
Soon after his mother's death, Gein began to create a "woman suit" so that "he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin." He denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining: "They smelled too bad."
A 16-year-old youth, whose parents were friends of Gein and who attended baseball games and movies with him, reported that Gein kept shrunken heads in his house, which he had described as relics sent by a cousin who had served in the Philippines during World War II. Upon investigation by police, these were determined to be human facial skins, carefully peeled from corpses and used by Gein as masks.
