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It was strange for Bernice Warden to not be in her hardware store on a Saturday. And it was even stranger that she left without locking the door. Her son Frank, a deputy sheriff, stopped by the store around 5 p.m. and searched for Bernice without any luck. Then he checked behind the counter and felt his stomach lurch. The cash register was open and there were dark pools of dried blood on the floor. Frank was worried but not panicked.
He was a career cop and, despite the personal nature of the crime, he immediately took on the perspective of an investigator. He checked the receipt pad next to the register and saw that the last sale was from that morning. A gallon of antifreeze sold to a Mr. Ed Gein, a Plainfield local. Frank knew the Gein family in passing,
Ed owned a farm outside of town. He was about 50 years old, lean from years of farm work and odd carpentry jobs. He was something of a recluse. Police officers found Gein in town that same evening, shopping at the local grocery store.
Washera County deputies immediately visited Gein's farm to search for any clues to Bernice's disappearance. The officers had no idea the horror show they were about to walk into. What they saw at the Gein farm was so disturbing that many of the deputies suffered nightmares, physical illness, and other signs of PTSD for the rest of their lives. One of the officers who visited Gein's farm that day would pass away a few years later.
The friends and family of the officer attributed his death to what he countered on the farm that night. For his part, Ed Gein made no attempt to hinder or hide anything from the investigation. Papers across the country would soon begin to refer to Gein as the butcher of the ghoul of Plainfield. The story was a sensation, but the man behind it was quiet, withdrawn, and deeply damaged. Part One: Alone on the Farm
Ed Gein was born in 1906 to George and Augusta Gein. His father, George, was an alcoholic who struggled to provide for the family. He would easily fly into a rage over perceived slights, beating Ed and his older brother Henry with belts, switches, and fists without warning. Augusta reportedly couldn't stand her husband, but stayed with him for a variety of reasons.
She was a deeply religious woman and tried persistently to shape her family into what she wanted. To Augusta, the world was a dangerous maze full of sin, vice, and worst of all, sly women who might tempt her sons. After George lost ownership of the family grocery store, the Geens moved to a farm outside of Plainfield. While the failure of his business further sunk George into a pit of depression and cheap liquor, Augusta was thrilled.
The isolation of the 155-acre farm made it easy for her to close the family off from outsiders. Augusta sheltered Ed and George as much as she could. She, reluctantly, allowed the brothers to attend school and forbade them from making friends. Ed Gein grew up in a vicious cycle of beatings, daily chores, afternoon Bible lessons, and lonely nights. It was a hard life on the farm, but at least Ed had Henry.
The Olderghine brother was everything Ed was not, charming, outgoing, and a natural rebel. The boys would spend hours exploring the forest around Plainfield or fishing in clear summer streams. They would ride into town during their teens and 20s, along with their father seeking whatever work was available. Ed showed tremendous talent when working with his hands. Whether he was building a deck or fixing a car, the man was creative and competent.
Ed could look at wood or leather or stone and see it as it could be, not as just what it was. The Geens lived an unusual, often abusive, but generally simple life. Ed seemed content to those who knew him, if not actually happy. He didn't care much for his father, but was a dutiful son. Ed was fond of his brother, though, and nearly worshipped his mother.
The four lived together in their farmhouse with little in the way of daily variation until 1940 when George Gein died from a sudden heart attack. He was only 66 years old, but decades of alcohol abuse had left him sick and weak. After his passing, the rest of the Gein family continued on with odd jobs and farm life, but the cracks were already forming. Soon after his father's death, Henry began dating a woman from town.
Augusta did not approve. Henry's paramour was a divorced mother of two young children. Mother and son clashed often about Henry's love life, with Augusta convinced that the man was being led astray into sinful things. Ed was caught in the middle, an unhappy ear for when Henry decided to vent. By 1944, the elder Gein brother was planning to leave the family farm to live with his girlfriend in Plainfield.
He was barely on speaking terms with Augusta and would speak critically about her whenever he was alone with Ed, something which made the younger man deeply uncomfortable. A fire broke out at the farm that spring, turning an overgrown field into a red-orange smear. When police and firefighters arrived, Ed told them that Henry was working near that field earlier in the day and was currently missing. A search party found the older Gein brother dead that night.
face down in a ditch, but unburned. The official cause of death was asphyxiation. However, reports of bruising all over Henry's head present the possibility that he was knocked unconscious before the fire was started. Ed Gein never confessed to the murder of his brother, though he did try often to avoid the question. Part two, becoming the ghoul. After Henry's death, Ed was left alone in the old sprawling farmhouse with his mother.
Nearing 40 years old, Ed was still under Augusta's thumb. She continued both her daily Bible lessons and her never-ending diatribes against all of the wicked women in the world. Augusta suffered the first of two massive strokes that year, leaving her nearly paralyzed. This ended up being a peaceful time for Ed. He was able to look after his farm and his mother in a dreamlike quiet state.
Ed might go days without hearing any voice other than his own as he read to Augusta from her Bible. Eventually, the Gein matriarch recovered enough to start helping with the farm again. Her renewed energy lasted less than a year. In 1945, during a trip to visit a business, Augusta encountered a woman living with a man who was not his wife.
For Augusta, there were few things on earth more sinful than a man and woman living together without being married. She railed against the situation in private to Ed, who could only smile and nod and agree. Her disgust at the moral decline of her community proved to be too much for the weakened woman to handle. Augusta suffered a second stroke and died soon after at the age of 67. Ed was now alone.
He spent years just rattling around the empty farmhouse. Occasionally, he'd work the fields or go into town looking for work. Despite being a recluse, Ed was reasonably well-liked in town. Folks found him shy, but remembered that he and his brother were hard workers. The younger Gein was even, for a time, a popular babysitter. Kids seemed to flock to the man and Ed, for his part, always indicated that he liked children.
They were simple, easy to please, and uncomplicated. As the years ran on, Gein withdrew further from society, cutting off green parcels of overgrown land from the farm to sell. This was the period when Ed began a new hobby, according to his eventual confession. He missed his mother fiercely, but also resented the walls she'd built around him to keep him away from other women.
Gein had no romantic prospects, no idea at all how to even speak to a woman that wasn't Augusta. Besides, his mother had taught him that women were evil, selfish things who would sooner tempt him into damnation than look at him. Ed, pulled in different directions like a man tied to anxious horses, thought long and hard on how he could find some measure of relief.
His solution, he told police, was to visit the only women in the world he knew without a doubt could not be sinful, the dead. How could a woman's corpse be wicked, he reckoned, when it was always so silent and still? He never did anything sexual with the bodies, Ed told investigators. Instead, he viewed grave robbing, the fresher the better, as a way to connect with women who would never judge or mislead him.
The bodies offered something else to Gein, raw material. Ed was a skilled carpenter and handyman, but he truly came into his own when working with leather. Part Three: Butcher, Baker, and Bodysuit Maker On the evening Ed Gein was arrested following the disappearance of Bernice Worden, officers found body parts inside of his farmhouse, barn, and property.
They also found the missing Bernice hanging upside down in his shed, tied at the ankles and wrists. The middle-aged woman was decapitated, gutted, and partially skinned. The cause of death was a gunshot wound with all of the other violence to her body happening post-mortem. Discovering Bernice strung up like a hunting trophy devastated many of the deputies who were searching the farm. However, every hour would reveal a new fresh horror.
Gein's ghoulish grave robberies filled his house. Besides stealing body parts, he'd also taken to modifying flesh and bone into useful items. Ed turned women's skulls into cups, their skin into leather, and their flayed faces into masks.
He had a shoebox full of women's genitalia, tied lips to drawstrings, placed skulls on bedposts, stretched a face into a lampshade, and even created a belt out of female nipples. In fact, Ed Gein's twisted tailoring resulted in him creating a number of clothing items out of recently deceased women from the Plainfield area. He sewed dried skin into pants and corsets and shirts and masks. So, so many masks.
His goal, Gein freely confessed to police, was to create the perfect female flesh suit, one that would literally allow him to emulate his much-missed mother. Just how many graves Gein robbed remains unknown. Estimates range from 9 to 40. When he couldn't find what he was looking for among the dead, Gein would consider the living like a scavenger forced to hunt during lean times.
Bernice's body was already being mutilated only hours after her disappearance. Ed had placed her head in a burlap sack and her heart in a plastic bag. Police found it warm and fresh in front of a wood stove. In addition to the murder of Bernice Worden, Gein claimed responsibility for the death of Mary Hogan, a bar owner who went missing in 1954. Gein couldn't recall any details of the case, but he did have Mary's decapitated head stored in his farmhouse.
Police suspected that Gein may have been involved in other local murders as well, including babysitter Evelyn Hartley in 1953. Gein, sitting slim and calm during the entire interrogation, struggled to answer many of the questions posed to him by Art Schley, the sheriff of Washera County. Given Gein's history and the extent of his crimes, it's possible that he didn't remember all of the details.
Schley grew increasingly frustrated over several hours of back and forth with Ed, especially after learning that Gein had murdered the mother of a Washera deputy. During a tense moment, Art snapped and grabbed the much smaller Gein by the collar, then proceeded to slam the killer's face over and over into the room's brick wall. While few could blame him, Schley's assault of Gein meant that the killer's original confession was inadmissible in court.
However, Gein never recounted or changed his story, and so he was arrested and examined to see if he was fit for trial. Ed exhibited traits of schizophrenia and doctors reported to the court that he was, in fact, insane and not criminally responsible for his actions. Gein was placed in a maximum security mental asylum in 1957 until 1968, where a new examination determined that he could indeed stand trial.
This resulted in a pair of trials in the late 60s. The first quickly determined that Gein was responsible for the death of Bernice Worden. The second trial, where Gein waived his right to a jury and instead allowed the judge to make the ruling, found that Ed was not guilty of murder due to criminal insanity. He was taken to a new mental hospital for continued observation and assessment. Arch Lay died in 1968, only a few months before Gein's trial began.
Schley had a heart attack at the age of 43, something most of his friends attributed to his immersion in the horrors of Ed Gein's case. Part 4: Robbing the Grave Robber It was a beautiful July day when Ed Gein took his last wheezing breath. He'd died from respiratory failure and lung cancer in 1984 at the age of 77. He had spent all of the years since his arrest in 1957 inside of one mental health facility or another.
Ed left very little in the world other than the scars from his disturbing crimes. His family farmhouse burned down a year after his arrest, almost certainly from arson, though there was no investigation. Coincidentally, Frank Warden, the son of Bernice Warden, was fire chief at the time. Gein's car, which he'd used to haul bodies from cemetery to farm, was sold to a carnival operator who added it to his slideshow.
Ed was buried in his family plot at a small plainfield graveyard between his parents and brother. In one final irony, morbid tourists eroded Ed Gein's headstone over the years by removing chips of the marker until, in 2000, someone stole the entire stone. It was eventually recovered and archived with the Washera County Sheriff's Department.
Ed Gein has been cited as the inspiration behind dozens of horror monsters and icons, including Leatherface, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill.
