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The Real-life Psycho: Ed Gein

Everything you’ve heard about Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho is true. It is a masterpiece of suspense. It was the first movie in the serial killer genre as we know it today; the music in the shower scene actually sounds like someone being stabbed to death. And yes, it was based on a real character. Well, sort of.

Truth be known, the ‘real life’ killer on whom Hitchcock modelled Norman Bates never owned a 12-room motel on a forgotten back road, complete with a big house on the hill. He was in fact a mild-mannered Wisconsin hillbilly named Ed Gein, who was as mad as a cut snake. On screen and in real life, the only thing that Psycho’s Norman Bates and Ed Gein had in common was their obsession with dead women.

Poor Norman had a problem with his dead mum sitting in the lounge room, who couldn’t help herself when it came to murdering the guests. In Ed’s case it was any dead woman he could dig up. And as if that wasn’t a touch unusual, Ed used the skin from the female corpses he exhumed from the local graveyard and women he murdered to make clothing for himself, which he wore at night when he danced around in the backyard doing hillbilly jigs under the full moon. Ed was definitely a few chops short of a barbecue.

It all came to light when local farmer Ed Gein was seen loitering around the local hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, on 17 November 1957, after it had been robbed and its owner, Bernice Worden, had gone missing. Police picked Ed up and decided to have a look at his farmhouse. Inside was like a rubbish tip, with rotting garbage and piles of junk almost up to the ceilings, making it all but impossible to walk through the house. The stench of rotting foodstuff was sickening.

In his torch beam in the darkened kitchen, sheriff Arthur Schley caught what he thought was a skinned deer hanging from a butcher’s hook in a beam in the ceiling. The head had been removed and the carcass had been gutted. It didn’t strike him as unusual, as it was deer season. But closer inspection revealed that the ‘deer’ was in fact the corpse of a woman. The missing woman, 50-year-old Bernice Worden, mother of his deputy Frank Worden, had been found.

But the body of Bernice Worden was merely the beginning. As dazed police fossicked through the grisly mess of Eddie Gein’s existence, they realised that they had stumbled into a chamber of horrors. Ed’s soup bowl was a human skull. His waste-paper basket was made with human parts covered with skin, as were the lampshades throughout the house. His favourite armchair was made of human remains, and scattered about the place were all manner of parts of the female anatomy. But the prize of them all was the suit made completely out of human skin.

It turned out that Ed Gein had grown up on the lonely farm with his domineering mother and older brother, who mysteriously died when beaten about the head in a bushfire that he was fighting beside his brother. The local police couldn’t find any suspicious circumstances and dismissed any foul play.

After his brother’s death, Ed became totally dependent on his mother’s love and when she died in 1945 he was so distraught that he boarded off the rooms his mother had used the most, mainly on the upstairs floor and the downstairs parlour and living room, and turned it into a macabre shrine. Eddie had lost his only true friend and his one true love. He was now alone in the world. Desperately lonely, Ed found his female company in the local graveyard, where he exhumed bodies and took them home, chatting away to them and reading them nice things that had been said about them in the obituary columns.

Ed was fascinated with women and the power they held over men and decided he wanted to become one, so he fashioned women’s clothing out of the remains, wearing them about the house and dancing about in the light of the moon. Fortunately for Ed, there were no close neighbours up there in Hillbillyville.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wisconsin police had noticed a sharp increase in missing persons, including two young women, in the district. On 17 November 1957, after the discovery of Bernice Worden’s body and the other gruesome artefacts in Eddie’s house, police began an exhaustive search of the remaining parts of the farm and surrounding land. They believed Ed may have been involved in five more murders and that the bodies might be buried on his land. They were eight-year-old Georgia Weckler, Evelyn Hartley, 15, local tavern keeper Mary Hogan, and deer hunters Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, who had all disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

At first Eddie Gein did not admit to any of the killings. However, after more than a day of silence he told the horrible story of how he had killed Mrs Worden and where he had acquired the other body parts that were found in his house. Ed said that he had stolen them from local graves, but insisted that he had not killed any of the people whose remains were found, with the exception of Mrs Worden. However, after days of intense interrogation he finally admitted to killing Mary Hogan.

Ed Gein showed no signs of remorse or emotion when he talked about the murders and his graverobbing escapades. He spoke very matter-of-factly, even cheerfully at times. He had no concept of the enormity of his crimes.

With investigators unable to prove that he killed the other missing persons, Ed Gein was convicted of the murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden but later found not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Ed’s nocturnal lifestyle inspired author Robert Bloch to write a book about the deranged motelier Norman Bates, a character based loosely on Ed, on which Hitchcock based his movie Psycho.

Until Ed Gein came along, the civilised world had never known of such depravities. Psycho made Ed a household name and he became a cult hero. He died behind bars in July 1984 and was buried alongside his mother, not far from the many graves he had robbed years earlier.

In 1991 Ed was the inspiration for another famous fictional serial killer, Buffalo Bill, in the screen adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, The Silence of the Lambs. But this time the serial killer didn’t have a passion for digging up dead women. Instead, Bill was inspired by Ed’s dressmaking techniques and preference for using freshly murdered women’s skin to make satin and silks for making garments for his winter dress collection.