Edward Gein was born
in 1906 and was raised on the family's farm near Plainfield, Wisconsin. A shy,
lonely boy, Gein grew to be a reclusive man. His alcoholic father died in 1940
and his domineering, religious mother, Augusta, sternly warned Gein and his
brother Henry against premarital sex. When Gein was 38, Henry was found dead
on a brush pile. The next year his mother died, and he tried to raise her from
the dead by " will power". Failing this, he became depressed. He claimed to
have heard her voice talking to him for about a year after she died, and felt
that "she was good in every way". In reality she had been a fearsome
bible-quoting tyrant who dominated his every waking hour, and warned him to
stay away from the women of the town, who were harlots and sinners.
Townspeople knew him
as shy Eddie Gein, the local handyman, who was always willing to help out fixing
a fence or doing a spot of babysitting. Older children would sit enthralled
as he told them morbid ghost stories and said his house was haunted. Most of
their parents just thought he was a little crazy, but about as harmless as they
come. Eventually, in the face of overwhelming evidence, they began to view him
as a cunning and devious killer. The police and psychiatrists questioning him,
on the other hand, felt that he hadn't really got the slightest idea what all
the fuss was about.
worden's
hardware store
Gein took to reading
texts on female anatomy and in 1947 he began opening he graves of local women
and taking portions of the corpses home, where he preserved them. This activity
went undetected for years. In 1954, a local woman vanished, but though he was
a suspect, Gein was not arrested. In 1957, the murder of a second middle-aged
woman, Bernice Worden, who ran the local hardware store in Plainfield, led to
his capture. Her son Frank had returned from a deer-hunting expedition to find
evidence of a violent break-in. It being the opening day of the hunting season,
most people were out shooting in the woods, but Frank specifically recalled
that Ed Gein had specifically asked Bernice if she would be open that day since
he'd be calling in to buy some anti-freeze.
Ed's
kitchen where Bernice Worden's body was found
Gein, then aged 51,
lacked the necessary intellect and fear of pursuit to cover his tracks, so police
soon followed the trail to his secluded farmhouse, where, amidst incredible
filth and clutter, they found the remains of many women, all put to various
utilitarian or decorative uses. The body of Bernice Worden hung in Ed's summer
kitchen at the rear of the farmhouse, hung up by the heels, dressed out as a
deer would have been. Her head was later found in a sack in the corner, her
heart in a bag in front of the stove, and a pile of entrails wrapped up in an
old suit on the floor.
bernice
worden's corpse
Inside the main house,
amid an incredible litter of decaying food, trashy magazines, collections of
used chewing gum, and a sink filled with sand were soup bowls made from the
sawn-off tops of skulls, a belt of nipples, a shoebox containing noses and another
of genitalia - indeed, so many body parts that it was impossible to tell how
many people's remains were there. Lampshades, a tom-tom, bracelets, and a wastebasket
were all covered in human skin, as were the seats of four straight-backed chairs.
By contrast, the rooms that had belonged to Ed's mother, who had been dead for
twelve years by then, were just as she'd left them since Gein had long since
boarded them shut.
inside
ed gein's house
In fact, Gein had
quite a fondness for corpses. So much so that he dug them up late at night from
local graveyards and took them home to play. Inspired by pulp magazines such
as Startling Detective and tales of cannibalism in the south seas, he
would strip the face and scalp from each skull, taking care to preserve the
skin with oils. Padding out the features with rolled up newspaper, he would
hang the faces up on the walls of his home, to be worn later as masks. He made
distinctive leggings from pieces of flayed legs,and wore the entire upper torso
of a woman as a kind of apron. Sometimes at night, he would venture outside
the door of his remote farmhouse dressed in the whole ensemble and dance in
the moonlight.
a
policeman outside gein's farmhouse
Several graves were
opened and found to be empty, and a 40f trench was discovered on Gein's property
filled with human remains, together with an ash heap where other body parts
had been cremated. The true extent of his activities will never be known.
Though he told psychiatrists
that could not remember any details of the murder that he was arrested for,
Gein confessed to killing the two women, who, it is rumored, had been selected
because they resembled his mother. He noted that, being unmarried, he had never
had sexual relations and that as a youth he had contemplated castrating himself.
Despite the evidence, he insisted he had not committed necrophilia or cannibalism
(due to the smell being "offensive"), but merely decorated himself
and his house with female body parts. Found clinically insane and unfit to stand
trial for murder, of which he was suspected on another five counts, Gein was
locked up for life in a secure institution until his death in 1984, at the age
of 78.
A
clean shaven Eddie at court
Measured
against the popular view of America in the '50s, in which grinning two-car families
enjoyed all the pleasures life had to offer and never ran out of petrol, these
events seem barely credible. How could a middle-aged bachelor live for years
in the middle of a tiny community in a house piled high with corpses, making
odd jokes about embalming to his fellow workers, without anyone noticing.
That was
the scariest thing about Ed Gein: His apparent ordinariness...