Ed Gein

 

Ed Gein has gone down in history as one of the most fiendish killers of all time. This is despite the fact that, unlike many of those remembered for their savagery as serial killers, he was only actually responsible for murdering two of the corpses that were found in his home when police raided it. What was shocking and horrifying about the case was that he was a bizarre necrophiliac, who liked to decorate his house with human body parts. Items such as severed heads made into bedposts in the bedroom, human skin used as lampshades and upholstery for chair seats, skulls fashioned into soup bowls, a necklace of human lips, a face mask made out of facial human skin, a belt made from human nipples and a waistcoat made up of a vagina and breasts stitched together, which he called a ‘mammary vest’. In addition to these atrocities, the police were said to have found a human heart bubbling on the stove.

It was hard to believe that anyone could be so depraved as to fashion such ghoulish items from human remains, but the evidence was all around the house, for all to see. It appeared that his activities had been going on for years and that, because he was a recluse, nobody knew anything about it. No wonder Ed Gein became the inspiration for many horror stories and films, including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Buffalo Bill character in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.

 

The making of a psycho

 

Ed Gein was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on August 28, 1906, the second son of Augusta and George Gein, both natives of the area. His older brother was named Henry. George Gein was a violent alcoholic and was seldom able to hold down a job, but sometimes worked as a tanner and carpenter. His wife Augusta was an extremely religious woman who felt nothing but contempt for her husband but who never considered divorcing him, because of her religious beliefs. To earn the family an income, Augusta ran a small grocery store, in addition to bringing up the two children. Soon after Ed was born, Augusta purchased a small farm in the remote country outside Plainfield, and this became the family’s permanent residence.

Augusta had moved to the farm to keep her children away from the rest of society, believing that the influence of others would corrupt her sons. She made sure that they never had other children home to play, and that they only left the house to go to school. As well as making sure they worked hard at their studies, Augusta made them do many chores around the farm. As a fanatically religious Lutheran, she drilled into young Ed and his older brother Henry that drink was evil, and that all women, other than herself, were sinful whores who would corrupt them and give them horrifying diseases. She taught them that the only justifiable sexual activity was for making babies. Each afternoon, the boys were subjected to long readings from the bible, the passages selected from the Old Testament, to show them how God’s wrath would descend on them if they sinned in any way, particularly following any sexual urges.

 

Sexually confused loner

 

Not surprisingly, Ed grew up with little confidence, and was bullied at school because of his girlish demeanour and the fact that he had a small growth over one eye. His behaviour was strange, and he would laugh at random, which further alienated his fellow pupils. However, although he was not popular at school, he did well at his studies. As he grew up, he began to become critical of his mother, especially when she caught him, as an adolescent, masturbating in the bath and poured scalding water over him. However, he remained working on the farm and grew up as an adult to be a sexually confused loner, with a liking for escapist books and magazines. His existence became extremely isolated and the only human beings he regularly came into contact with were family members. At this stage of his life, he appeared to be strange, yet harmless; it was only when the family members began to die that his behaviour changed.

In 1940 George died, and his sons began to take on odd jobs in town to help make ends meet. Ed worked as a handyman and even as a babysitter, and townspeople found him likeable and trustworthy. Then, in 1944, Ed’s brother Henry died under what seemed, with the benefit of hindsight, to be suspicious circumstances. What apparently happened was that Ed and Henry were fighting a fire in the nearby marshes. Then the two got separated and when the fire cleared Henry was found dead. What was strange was that his body was lying in an unburnt area and that there was bruising to his head. The cause of death, though, was listed as asphyxiation.

 

Grave-robbing sprees

 

With George and Henry gone, Ed was left to keep the farm going with his mother Augusta. But little more than a year later, Augusta died as well. She died of a series of strokes on December 29, 1945, following an argument with a neighbour. Her son’s reaction was to nail her bedroom door shut, leaving the room inside just as it was the day she died. He then began to show signs of serious mental disturbance, and it was then that he took up grave robbing. He became fascinated with human anatomy. He was particularly interested in reading about the first sex change operation, undertaken by Christine Jorgensen, and even considered having a sex change himself. Then, together with another disturbed man named Gus, he started visiting graveyards and taking souvenirs – sometimes whole bodies, more often selected body parts. He would scour the obituary column of the local newspaper in order to learn of freshly buried female corpses and, later, at night, pay them a visit.

During these years, Gein started to manufacture his macabre household decorations from the corpses he dug up on his grave-robbing sprees. Eventually, his grave-robbing expeditions failed to satisfy his strange obsession, and in December 1954, he committed murder.

 

The murders begin

 

The police were called when a fifty-one-year-old woman called Mary Hogan disappeared from the bar she ran in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. As became clear later, the victim had a distinct resemblance to Ed Gein’s mother. There was blood on the floor and a spent cartridge was found at the scene. Ed Gein was among the potential suspects but there was no hard evidence to connect him, and the police saw no reason to visit his home.

This was the first of only two murders that can definitely be credited to Gein. The next was three years later. Once again the victim was a woman in her fifties, and once again she looked like Ed’s mother. Her name was Bernice Worden and on November 16, 1957, she was abducted from her hardware store in Plainfield. Again, there was blood on the floor. This time, however, the police had a pretty good clue as to who was responsible. The victim’s son told them that Ed Gein had asked their mother for a date, and another local resident recalled Ed saying he needed to buy some antifreeze from her store on the day she died. A receipt for antifreeze was found lying in the store and this time the police decided to pay Ed Gein a visit.

 

Macabre home decoration

 

What confronted them there shocked even the most hardened of the officers. First there were the macabre ornaments in the house, such as the lampshades made of human skin and the skulls made into soup bowls. Worse was to follow when they went into the yard. Bernice Worden’s corpse was hanging from the rafters. She had had her head cut off, her genitalia removed and her torso was slit open and gutted. On further investigation they found her head turned into a makeshift ornament, and her heart sitting in a saucepan on the stove. They also discovered a pistol which matched the cartridge found at the scene of the Mary Hogan murder.

On his arrest, Gein immediately confessed to the murders of Worden and Hogan as well as to his grave-robbing activities. His necrophiliac behaviour was so extreme that he was immediately deemed to be insane. For example, he explained the ‘mammary vest’ that he had stitched together as an attempt to change sex; wearing it, he felt as though he had turned into his mother. A judge found him incompetent for trial and he was committed to a secure mental hospital. Meanwhile, his house was burned to the ground to prevent it from becoming the focus of a macabre cult.

Soon after, Ed Gein’s immortality was ensured when local writer Robert Bloch wrote a book called Psycho, inspired by the case, and Alfred Hitchcock picked it up for the movies. In 1968, Gein was once more submitted for trial but was once again found insane. He ended his days in the mental hospital, dying of respiratory failure on July 26, 1984. His last words on his deathbed were to curse his mother.