Ed Gein was the real-life Norman Bates. Obsessed with contacting his deceased mother, he was driven to kill, mutilate, dismember and bodysnatch his way through the small agricultural community of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Having ended his life confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, he will go down in history as one of the most twisted minds of the 20th century.
Plainfield, Wisconsin, is a small rural town with a population of about a thousand people – much the same now as it was in the 1950s. One day in the winter of 1952, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess stopped at the one bar in the town for a drink before they headed off to go deer hunting, a popular sport in the area. It was the last time either of them were seen. The state police had already noticed an increase in the number of missing persons from rural areas of Wisconsin, and these were two more to add to the list. Two years later, in December 1954, Mary Hogan, the owner of the bar, disappeared. Deputies from the sheriff’s office found a rifle shell in the bar and a trail of blood leading out to the car park at the back. The trail led up to where a pickup truck had been parked, the tyre marks of which were left in the snow.
On 16 November 1957 Bernice Worden went missing from the hardware store she ran in town. As with Mary Hogan, there was a trail of blood leading out through the back door of the store. The last person seen in the store was Ed Gein, and a receipt for antifreeze in his name was found on the counter. He lived alone on a farm on the outskirts of town and was often seen around doing odd jobs. He was quiet and mostly kept himself to himself, he was thought of as being a little strange, but entirely harmless.
Deputies headed out to the farm to ask Gein if he had any information about the disappearance and stumbled across a scene of unimaginable horror. In a shed adjoining the house they found the headless body of a woman. She had been strung up by the heels to a beam, gutted and butchered in the same way as a deer would have been. Horrendous as it was, this was only the beginning. The inside of the house was in a terrible state and the stench was almost unbearable. They found Bernice Worden’s head in the kitchen, prepared as if it was going to be mounted on the wall as a trophy, and there was a heart in a pan on the cooker. Tanned human skin had been used to make seat covers and lampshades, and the top part of a skull was shaped into a soup bowl. In the bedroom there was a row of nine shrunken heads on the wall, including Mary Hogan’s, and there were skulls on the bedposts. As if this was not horrific enough, they found an apron made from the gutted torso of a woman, with the breasts still attached, several pairs of leggings fashioned from skin and a mask made from a human face. The basement looked like a slaughterhouse. There were decaying body parts and entrails all over the place.
Forensic investigators found the remains of what they believed were at least 15 different women in the house. At first Gein denied everything, but, when confronted with such overwhelming evidence, admitted killing Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, but said he had stolen the other bodies from the local cemetery. When asked if he’d had sex with the bodies, he is said to have recoiled at the thought, saying they smelled far too bad for that. He was found to be mentally incompetent and was committed to a secure institution. Ten years later he was considered to have recovered sufficiently to stand trial, but the judge again ruled him to be insane. He spent the rest of his life in the Mendota Mental Health Institute where, according to the staff there, he was a model patient. He died there at the age of 77 from a heart attack.
Gein moved to the farm in Plainfield with his family in 1913. His mother, Augusta Gein, was a domineering woman with extremely strict religious views. She considered everyone else, particularly other women, to be evil and, as much as she could, prevented her two sons, Henry and Ed, from having anything to do with the outside world. She was married to George Gein, a chronic alcoholic who would regularly become violent. Augusta Gein despised him, but her religion prevented her from leaving him. It didn’t prevent her praying for his death in front of her two sons. George Gein died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1940, and Henry Gein died fighting a brush fire a few years later. He was found dead with bruises on his face, but the exact circumstances of his death were not investigated, the coroner recording it as death by asphyxiation.
Augusta Gein suffered a stroke in 1945 and was looked after by her surviving son until she had a further stroke and died. After the funeral Ed Gein closed up the rooms in the house she had used, leaving everything as it had been when she was alive. His subsequent actions appear to have involved acting out ghoulish rituals to try and bring his mother back by pretending to be her. By digging up the corpses of middle-aged women in the graveyard and making items of clothing from their bodies he was, in his twisted mind, trying to find a connection to her. The women he killed reminded him of his mother and, by killing them, he felt as if he possessed them. He had developed a very bizarre and gruesome mother fixation.
In 1959 Robert Bloch wrote the novel Psycho, which Alfred Hitchcock would film in the following year. Bloch claimed he only noticed the similarities between his Norman Bates character and Ed Gein after he had finished the book, but, as he lived in Wisconsin, this seems a little unlikely. Elements of Ed Gein have cropped up a number of other times in writing and the cinema. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are two notable examples. Anyone needing a mother-obsessed madman for a character, it seems, need look no further than Ed Gein.