EP. 26 WISCONSIN - Ed Gein: A True American Horror Story
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He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America,

because hadn't thought he was Jesus Christ. Born Evil, the Serial Killer and the Savior, an ID true crime event. Premieres Monday, September 2nd at 9. Watch on ID or stream on Max. Set your DVR. Warning, the following podcast is not suitable for all audiences. We go into great detail with every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing disturbing audio and sound effects. Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape,

murder, and offenses against children. This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned. What's your favorite horror movie? Friday the 13th? Halloween? Dawn of the Dead?

Thankfully, there's a sort of comfort that comes along with watching a horror movie, because at the end of the day, what you're watching on screen never really happened. It's all make-believe, the invention of a geeked out Hollywood screenwriter who, for a couple of months, had too much coffee and too little sleep. But what if those on-screen monsters, those bloodthirsty demons, those sadistic killers, what if they had some sort of real-life roots?

There have been a lot of movies that bore the words "based on a true story" on their posters. But what if one story, one gruesome tale was so depraved that in fact it inspired a plethora of films? And not just any films, depraved movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, and The Silence of the Lambs. Well, in fact, one single story did indeed inspire the stories of all of these killers in all three of these movies, and many, many more.

It's the story of one man, two confirmed victims, and an unending supply of skinned and dried human flesh. This is the true story of Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield, the real psycho. I'm Courtney Shannon. I'm Colin Brown, and you're listening to Murder in America. ♪♪

November 16, 1957, Plainfield, Wisconsin. For a town with such an unassuming name, the history of this community is one marred with bizarre and unthinkable darkness.

Following the disappearance of a local woman named Bernice Warden and the discovery of bloodstains on the floor of the shop she was working at earlier that day, Deputy Sheriff Frank Warden, her son, who had taken over ownership of the store from his mother in recent years, informs local investigators that a man named Ed Gein had stopped by the store the night before.

and told his mother that he was to return the next morning to purchase antifreeze. Following this tip, investigators search the hardware store, discover a sales slip written on the morning of Bernice's disappearance for a gallon of antifreeze, and immediately begin their attempt to locate the whereabouts of Ed Gein. It's a cold night.

The sun sets early in Wisconsin in the winter, and the darkness that sets in on the small town is thick and penetrating. It was getting late in Plainfield at this point, and dusk was approaching. At first, in an attempt to find Ed, two deputies are dispatched out to the Gein residence. The large, white, dilapidating farmhouse sat five miles out of town on a large spat of farmland.

isolated from the rest of Plainfield. The home had no power and was surrounded almost entirely by barren trees and snow. The deputies exited their vehicle, and all they could hear was the moaning of the Wisconsin winter winds and

Silence. The two approach the farmhouse with their flashlights on and perform a superficial search of the exterior of the home. They crunch through the snow, attempting to find anything out of the ordinary. But after knocking on the door and asking for Mr. Gein, the two came out empty-handed. Nothing seemed out of place. What they were looking at was simply an old, empty farmhouse with no power and no residents.

They listened intently into the silence, hoping to hear a muffled cry for help from Bernice or some sort of movement inside from Ed, but they heard nothing. The two deputies then got back into their vehicle and drove back to Plainfield to report what they had found.

Meanwhile, Ed Gein is enjoying dinner at the home of two of his friends, Lester and Irene Hill. That night, they dined on pork chops, boiled potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and pickles, with coffee and cookies for dessert. The dinner was normal. Ed seemed happy. And after supper, Ed was playing with one of the Hills' young children.

when a man named Jen Vroman, Irene's son-in-law, arrived at the house and burst through the door. According to the author Harold Schechter, in his highly regarded book about Ed Gein titled Deviant, the interaction went something like this. There's quite a bit of commotion downtown. Seems like Bernice Worden's gone missing. I heard they found some sort of bloodstains or something inside the store. Whole town's out looking for her, says Jim.

Ed listened to Jim intently, processed what he had heard for a moment, then bewildered, says, "Must have been somebody pretty cold-blooded." Irene, shocked, glanced around the room before landing her stare on Ed. And suddenly, a memory pops into her head. A few years ago, when the news of the disappearance of another local woman, Mary Hogan, had reached her household, Ed had also been dining with her family.

Strange, she thought to herself, before saying to Ed, How come every time someone gets banged on the head and hauled away, you're always around? Ed smiled a somewhat innocuous little grin and shrugged. Bob Hill, Irene and Lester's son, was eager to see what was going on downtown and asked Ed if he would drive him into town to check out all of the action, and Ed obliged. The two then got up and got dressed for their departure into the cold night.

The grocery store that Irene and Lester owned and operated was located only a couple hundred feet from the couple's home, and Irene, ready to go work the store until closing, exited the home with Bob and Ed to go grab her husband, Lester, from the store to send him back to the house to eat his dinner before his food got cold. Ed and Bob got into Ed's car, and they started it up and allowed the engine to idle for a moment so that the heater could warm up the car and make their drive a little more comfortable.

Irene then entered the grocery store, sent Lester back to the house and removed her jacket. She was only behind the counter for a couple of minutes before the door opened and two men entered. Slowly, the men approached Irene. - Irene, do you know where Ed Gein is tonight?

He's sitting in his car right there, in my driveway, unless he's taken off. He's driving my son downtown to see what's going on. The two men were officials from the local police department, Officer Dan Chase and Deputy Poke Spees. After hearing this from Irene, the two left the store and headed over to the house where, sure enough, they found Ed Gein still sitting in the driveway with Bob Hill. Officer Chase leaned down and tapped on the window, and Ed rolled it down.

Ed, I'd like to talk to you. Ed then exited his car and headed with the two officers back to their squad car. Once inside the vehicle, Chase leaned back towards the back seat where Ed sat.

with a soft smile on his face, and he asked Ed to tell him what he had been up to that day. Ed told him, and he was then asked to repeat those events one more time. After listening to Ed's repeated account on what happened that day, the officers processed this information for a second. Chase then stated, "Now, Eddie, you didn't tell me the same story come through there that second time." "Somebody framed me." "Framed you for what?"

Well, Mrs. Warden? Chase, taken aback, thought for a moment, then leaned in closer to Ed, getting right up to his suspect's face. What about Mrs. Warden? Well, she's dead, ain't she? Dead? How do you know she's dead? Ed, still smiling, remained silent for a moment.

before continuing the conversation by saying, "Well, I heard it." "Where'd you hear it?" "I heard them talking about it." At this point, the officers knew that they had their man. They knew that they hadn't found Bernice Warden yet,

and they also knew for a fact that they hadn't found her dead body. So Chase radios in to his superior, Sheriff Art Schlee, and tells him that he's got Gein in custody, and then he takes off into the cold night with the wanted man. The Hill family, whom Ed was just dining with, had no idea at the time

the gruesome and shocking details that they would soon find out about their family friend the very next day. After being booked into the Waukesha County Jail, Ed Gein begins to grow extremely nervous. He knows that the investigators are going to find Bernice Warden's dead body in his farmhouse, but that's not all that he's nervous about. He's nervous about the other things that they're going to find: his arts, his crafts, and his suit.

And as he waits in custody, twiddling his thumbs, investigators in Plainfield, Wisconsin are about to make one of the most shocking discoveries in American criminal history.

Now that Ed was in custody, the search then became focused exclusively on locating Bernice. Weshara County Sheriff Arch Lee and Plainfield Police Captain Lloyd Schoforster decide that there has to be some sort of clue as to where Bernice was located at Ed Gein's residence. So they load up into a squad car and head out to the Gein family farmhouse together. It was almost 8 o'clock at this point.

But time was about to stand still for the two officers. Hey everybody, thank you again for listening to this episode of our little podcast, Murder in America. But before you go any further, we've got to stop. We want to tell you about an amazing new immersive podcast app, Vodacast, that will allow you to experience this podcast and others that you listen to daily in a way that you haven't been

able to until now. Vodacast will provide you a deeper version of the show and allow you to view photos of the people and places we're talking about in this episode. For example, you could be seeing the Ed Gein house when we're talking about it, photos of the victims, photos of the cemeteries we're discussing, etc. You'll also get links for articles about the cases. When you experience a podcast on Vodacast, you will not only be listening to your favorite podcast, but you'll be getting stories that come alive with supplemental digital content.

that allows you to have everything being discussed in the episode available at your fingertips. If you're like me, after you listen to a podcast, I always search for more details or photos of the people and events discussed in the episode. It's honestly like an obsession to me. Whenever I finish listening to a case, I always spend like hours researching it, finding out every little detail that I can and looking up a photo of like everything that I just heard about. With Vodacast, it's

all right there for you. No need to waste time searching yourself. So try Vodacast out today. Click the link in our show notes to learn more about Vodacast or download the app today in the app store and change the way you experience podcasts forever. That's Vodacast. Vodacast. Starting with a V. This episode will be available on there with some images and additional information when it's posted, so go check it out and gain an even deeper perspective of the Ed Gein case with us.

Now, back to the story. As they pulled up to Ed Gein's farmhouse, a chill filled the squad car. The darkness was thick around the home and the trees were bending and crackling in the winter wind, filling the air with faint ghoulish sounds. Art and Lloyd exited their vehicle, turned on their flashlights, and approached the home on foot.

After jiggling on the door handles and discovering that the house was locked up tight, the two headed towards the attached shed or summer kitchen to give their search one final try. And what they discover next will forever change the history of Plainfield, Wisconsin. It's quiet, too quiet. But the two are determined to discover some sort of clue as to where Bernice Worden is. So they approach the summer kitchen.

and noticed that it's secure only with a weak latch. Lloyd places his boot on the door and gives it a push. And it gives way, swinging open with a loud, eerie creak. As the two enter the room, they notice that there's junk everywhere. Bottles, knives, paper. The place was filthy. Ed was no clean freak.

There's also a foul odor permeating the air. It's the scent of rot and decay. They stumble through the room, and Lloyd heads towards the next door, so that the two can make entry into Ed's house. As Lloyd approaches the door, Art takes a step back and bumps into something hanging from the ceiling. He whips around, and his flashlight illuminates the object. It's something long, white, and bloody, strung up, suspended from the roof with rope.

It takes a second for Art to process exactly what he's looking at. He can tell that it's a carcass, dangling in the air, upside down with its head sliced clean off. The body had been cleaned like a deer, sliced open and gutted, leaving a large, dark crevice in its center. It was the opening day of deer season that day in Plainfield, and everyone was out hunting. Maybe, he thought, Ed had gone out and gotten himself a buck.

But to Art's horror, as he stares at this corpse, he realizes this was no deer he was looking at. This was no animal. They had just discovered Bernice Warden, or at least what was left of her.

Art stumbles outside into the dark night in shock. He can't believe what he just saw. Immediately, Art falls to his knees and begins to vomit profusely. He's joined quickly by Lloyd, who also is in a daze. They quickly radio in to their fellow officers their discovery and walk back into the summer kitchen to get a better look at Bernice Worden's corpse.

A wooden bar had been sharpened and inserted through the tendons of one of her ankles, and the other foot had been slit above the heel and secured to the bar with a cord. The bar had then been hoisted up towards the ceiling.

pulling her body off the ground and allowing it to dangle freely in the air. Her arms were bound tightly at her sides and, once again, she had been decapitated and gutted from her vagina to her throat. The 58-year-old grandmother had been butchered like an animal. This was a gruesome discovery for the two to find, but it was far from the last.

As soon as the other officers and officials began to arrive, the investigators, led by Lloyd, entered Ed's house. The farmhouse was pitch black and without power, so the group had to light their search using flashlights, oil lamps, and lanterns. Immediately, they noticed the trash.

The place was practically a garbage dump, filled to the brim with all sorts of filth like food scraps, dirty dishes, empty cans, moldy cartons, and old newspapers. And it stank. Horribly. There were also a number of strange trash items that investigators discovered. A coffee tin filled with old pieces of chewing gum. A wash basin filled with sand.

Yellow dentures displayed on a shelf. But it was when officials really began to take a closer look at what they had discovered that they began to grow extremely concerned. It turns out that Ed considered himself to be some sort of artist, or at least at minimum, a creative person. Because not only did he have a collection of human body parts and flesh inside of his house, but he actually fashioned most of his human skin into usable products.

or in some cases, as Ed would probably consider them to be, conversation pieces.

We could continue to describe the process during which investigators discovered all of the gruesome items that they found. But instead, we're going to take a pause and just list off the things that they found in his house. This is a long, disturbing list, and we're not going to skip out on listing any of the objects. In Ed Gein's house, investigators found whole human bones and bone fragments, a wastebasket made out of human skin,

In addition, there were elements of a suit, a skin suit.

that Ed Gein had fashioned from human flesh. A suit that was obviously meant to be worn by Ed in some sort of strange ritual or practice. Elements of the suit included a corset made from a female torso, skinned from shoulders to waist.

The corset was meant to be worn around one's chest, sort of like a vest. Ed had inserted a cord through the back of the skin so that it could be tied tightly around himself, and he had left the breast of the woman attached. There were also leggings meant to be pulled up onto one's legs, made purely from human leg skin. Officials also located a belt made from human nipples,

And then there were the masks. Investigators inside of Ed's house found nine full face masks crafted from human skin.

The faces had been skinned from the skulls of women's corpses, dried out and preserved. Some of these masks appeared almost mummified, while others looked to have been more carefully prepared and preserved, almost as if they were treated regularly with some sort of oil to keep the skin smooth. Some of the masks, in fact, even had lipstick on their lips and appeared very lifelike. It should be noted that the masks also still had the dead woman's hair attached to them.

Four of these face masks had been stuffed with paper and hung upon Ed's bedroom walls like twisted hunting mounts. Investigators also found nine vulvae that had been sliced off and placed in a shoebox. One vulva had been painted with silver paint and trimmed with a red ribbon, and another, more fresher specimen, which contained a vulva, an anus, and the skin that connected them,

sprinkled with salt. In addition, officials located a young girl's dress and, quote, the vulvas of two females judged to have been about 15 years old, four noses, a pair of lips on a window shade drawstring, a lampshade made from the skin of a human face, and a large amount of fingernails clipped or

or ripped from female fingers. But shockingly, this wasn't all that investigators found. They also discovered Bernice Warden's entire head in a burlap sack, along with her heart in a plastic bag in front of the stove and her intestines, still warm, folded up and wrapped in some newspaper. And remember those face masks? Well, one of them was in a paper bag. And when investigators opened this bag and pulled out the face mask, they recognized the face.

It was Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner who had gone missing years before.

Later on, they also found Mary Hogan's skull in a box. After all of these objects had been found, investigators had no clue how many people Ed Gein had killed. After all, they had just stumbled upon an absolute slaughterhouse, a death farm. Skulls, skin suits, human face lamps, skin chairs, you name it. The Gein farmhouse was a place straight out of a nightmare.

But the case was far from over. In fact, it had really just begun. Back at the Washara County Jail, Ed had been being interrogated for hours. He was never informed of his right to an attorney or his right to remain silent. But nonetheless, he had given investigators no information and no confession. At one point during the night, Sheriff Art arrived back at the jail from the crime scene.

This was back in the day when sheriffs would actually live inside of the jail houses that they managed with their families. And remember, Art was the first one to discover Bernice Warden's body hanging from the rafters, and he had been deeply impacted by this discovery. As soon as Art came face to face with Gein and discovered that he hadn't confessed to anything yet, he began to savagely beat him, slamming his head and face into the cement walls. Art was angry. Nobody would ever get away with crimes like this in his town.

Or at least, I'm sure that's what he was thinking when he assaulted Ed. A short while later, Ed Gein requested a slice of apple pie with cheddar cheese on top and announced to investigators working on the case that he was prepared to cooperate fully with the investigation and make a full confession. So officials hurried and brought Ed his dessert.

And suddenly, the story of Ed Gein, the butcher of Plainfield, began to unravel and reveal its dark, twisted secrets. Now, let's go back in time.

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 22, 1906, in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, to parents George Philip Gein and Augusta Wellamine. Ed had only one sibling, an older brother named Henry, who was born five years earlier on January 8, 1901. And Ed's life was troubled from the very moment he was brought into it.

Ed's father, George, was a local grocery store owner and a hardcore alcoholic who constantly fought with his mother and worked a series of odd jobs. His father held jobs as a tanner, preserving dead skin, as a carpenter, mending homes and working with his hands.

and even an insurance salesman. Ed's mother, Augusta, hated his father, George. With George being such a fervent alcoholic, he was barely able to keep a job, and Augusta, being a religious fanatic, despised her husband's alcoholic tendencies.

Augusta realized at one point that she had made a mistake in marrying her husband. But due to her increasingly fanatical religious beliefs, she decided that she could never leave him and instead began to develop a general hatred of all men. At one point, the family had reached a breaking point and they decided to sell their grocery store, pick up, and move to a large 155-acre farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin.

This would be where the Gein's would plant their permanent roots and where Ed would eventually go on to carry out his gruesome crimes. Augusta, the matriarch of the Gein family, was an overbearing, overprotective, and at times extremely verbally abusive mother. She identified as an old Lutheran in the Christian faith.

And Old Lutherans were in fact a group of conservative Lutherans who had split from the Lutheran Church and the reforms that they had made to their set of beliefs. Because they believed, as opposed to being more lax in their views, that they needed to be more strict. Old Lutherans teach that every human thought and action is infected with sin.

Augusta strived to instill in her children the values of old Lutherans. For example, Augusta taught her children Henry and Ed that all women were evil, that women were out to get them.

that all women, besides herself of course, were born with an innate desire to be promiscuous, and that girls were the instruments used to lure men to hell by the devil himself. Obviously, these were some pretty crazy views, but when your mother is the one teaching them to you, one can see why Ed found them pretty easy to believe as a child.

The Gein farmhouse, as we discussed already earlier in the story, was extremely isolated. And it was here where Augusta was allowed to influence her sons with her flawed religious teachings to her heart's content. The children were only allowed to leave the house for school. And when they returned home every day, they would be sat down by their mother and read verses from the Bible.

Augusta preferred to read her children verses from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation, verses concerning divine retribution, murder, and death.

At school, Ed was described as being very shy and socially awkward.

He had a slight lazy eye and a growth on his tongue which impeded his speech, two features that kids would regularly bully him for. And he would allegedly also burst into laughter at random while in class, almost as if he was laughing at his own jokes that he was telling in his head. This could be interpreted as early symptoms of schizophrenia, which Ed would be diagnosed with later on in life. But the real motive for his laughter remains somewhat of a mystery.

Interestingly though, Ed was considered by his teachers to be a very smart kid. His instructors said he was a very good reader and that he was good at solving problems and had a lot of promise. But regardless, every day Ed would return home from school back to the isolated Gein family farmhouse and the verbal abuse from his mother would begin. If Augusta heard that Ed made a friend, he would be punished. She attempted to instill in Ed that all others, even people he considered friends,

came from bad families and that they were already cursed to eternal damnation.

And every day after school, Augusta would remind Ed and his brother Henry that women and drinking were bad. Often times bad mouthing their own father, telling them that they don't want to end up being a loser like their dad. And in a creepy twist of events, Augusta also told Ed that in order to remain loyal to her, he was to remain a virgin. Because having sex was a sin, an action of the devil.

and that if he were to have sex, he would be damned to hell. Experts who have studied the case of Ed Gein believe that he doubted his own masculinity at a young age, as he was taught by his mother that all men were weak, and that his own mother, a very powerful woman,

was practically a god. This is probably what Ed later in life wanted to become, a woman like his mother, although he would go about it in a very gruesome manner. But although Ed would reportedly die a virgin later on in life, that didn't mean that he didn't ever experience sexual pleasure.

In fact, one sexual encounter that Ed had early in his childhood is pretty disturbing. Apparently, one day Ed decided to defy his mother's rules and he snuck out of the main house to the family's slaughterhouse to see what was happening inside of the bloody shack. When he peered into the structure, he saw his father, George, and his mother, Augusta, butchering a pig. And as Ed watched his mother cut out the pig's intestines with a slice down its center, he experienced sexual pleasure and ejaculated.

Ed dropped out of school in the 8th grade to work on the family farm.

and he and his brother Henry became full-time farmhands, working for their own parents. The two also worked as handymen around town, doing odd jobs for local Plainfield residents.

like fixing roofs, hanging windows, and repairing fences. The brothers had a good reputation in town, and although Henry was a lot more sociable than his brother Ed, the two were relatively liked and viewed as harmless by those who they interacted with. But Ed and Henry's relationship was far from perfect. At times, as they grew older, Henry would stand up to his mother, Augusta, when he had had too much of her fanatical preaching or he felt like she was wrong.

And the two would get into brutal, nasty, loud verbal altercations, yelling and screaming. Ed, viewing his mother practically as a god, always took Augusta's side. And Henry knew whose side Ed was on. In 1940, George Gein died from complications stemming from years of alcohol abuse. And Henry, Ed, and Augusta were left alone to tend to the family farm and keep each other afloat. It's now the year 1944.

Both Henry and Ed are fully grown men at this point and still working on the family farm. Henry had been dating a divorced mother of two and was planning on moving out soon to live with her and begin a new life. Ed, on the other hand, was still deeply attached to his mother. He worked on the farm and even babysat for local residents when he had free time. Henry was growing concerned about how attached Ed was to their mother.

And he was more and more frequently talking ill about Augusta behind her back to Ed, in an attempt to break the almost magical hold she had over him. But Ed didn't like this. When Henry would talk bad about Augusta, Ed would respond in disappointment and shock. And all of this negativity would seemingly reach a boil point on May 16th, 1944.

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On that day, Ed and his brother Henry were out burning some excess vegetation on the property to prepare the land for another season of crops. And as the two were burning these dry plants and straw, the fire grew large and was soon out of control. The flames were raging so high in fact that the fire drew the attention of the local fire department who rushed out to the Gein farm to provide assistance. Strangely though, as the flames subsided,

Ed, who had been working with firefighters the entire time, reported that his brother Henry was missing. So, the officials grabbed lanterns and flashlights and set out into the night in an attempt to locate Henry. Soon enough, they found him.

but he wasn't alive. Henry's body was discovered lying face down in the grass, and firefighters and other officials concluded that he had died of heart failure, as he had suffered no burns or visible injuries. An official investigation was never opened into Henry's death, and his death was ruled an accident. Henry was never even given an autopsy.

It was reported years later that Henry was found with bruises and injuries on his head, and many believe now that Ed murdered him. Could Ed have reacted violently to some especially harsh comments about Augusta that his brother made to him? Or did Ed feel like he was protecting his mother, or even keeping the family together in death?

as Henry was planning on moving out soon. I guess we will never know." After Henry's death, it was just Ed and Augusta living at that farmhouse. Augusta soon suffered a stroke which paralyzed her and Ed assumed the role of her full-time caretaker. At that point, it was just an adoring son and his mother, whom he so adored, living alone together in an isolated home. During this time, Ed later recounted that he and his mother visited a man named Smith who lived nearby in order to purchase some straw.

Upon arriving to make the purchase, Ed and Augusta witnessed Smith brutally beating a dog in the front yard. A woman yelled out from inside for Smith to stop his beating, but Smith continued the assault and proceeded to beat the dog to death. Augusta, reportedly, was extremely upset, but she wasn't upset by the fact that she had just watched a man beat a dog to death.

She was upset because the woman who was at the farm was not married to Smith and that she had no business being there on the farm with him. She angrily told Ed that the woman was Smith's harlot and the two bought their straw and proceeded to head back to the Gein farm. It wasn't long after this incident when Augusta suffered from another stroke. Her health then began to deteriorate rapidly.

and she died shortly afterwards on December 29th, 1945. Ed was devastated. Augusta, his mother, was his entire world. His only friend.

and in some ways his true love. Ed was Augusta's special boy, and without her he was lost in the world. And this was when his descent into his madness began. Ed was obsessed with his mother, and after her death, this obsession only continued to grow and grow.

Immediately upon his mother's passing, Ed went room to room in the farmhouse and boarded up all of the spaces that Augusta once inhabited, preserving them exactly as they were on the day on which she died. This was one of the discoveries made in the farmhouse by investigators later on in the wake of Bernice Warden's murder and the discovery of her mutilated corpse that really sent a chill down their spines.

It was jaw-droppingly bizarre to find these rooms in the home in such pristine condition, not a stain or a pile of trash anywhere within them, while the rest of the house that Ed inhabited was coated from floor to ceiling in filth and trash.

It was almost as if Ed sealed these rooms up to create a museum to his mother, a shrine of sorts to preserve her memory and keep her alive within the dark, moldy, and deteriorating home. Ed continued to work as a handyman and babysitter in Plainfield, but after he began receiving farmwork subsidies from the government in 1951,

He ceased work as a farmer. But at this point, Ed had already begun another nocturnal career of some sorts. A career that he told no one about.

and from which he didn't profit. According to his confession, between the years 1947 and 1952, Ed told investigators that he visited local cemeteries under the veil of darkness as many as 40 separate times. But why was he visiting these graveyards? Well, in a gruesome twist, he had taken up the morbid hobby of digging up graves and desecrating recently buried corpses. His trips would go something like this...

On dark, moonlit nights, while in some sort of psychotic daze,

Ed would drive his car to one of three local cemeteries: the Plainfield Cemetery, the Spiritland Cemetery, or the Hancock Cemetery. Once there, he would test the freshness of a grave by inserting a metal rod into the soil. If the dirt was soft enough, he would then dig until he reached the casket. After digging up the coffin, he would use a pry bar and

Sometimes, Ed would load the woman's body up in his car, drive it back to his farmhouse, and then butcher it at his leisure, taking his sweet time to retrieve his grisly relics.

On other occasions, feeling rushed, Ed would chop off or remove the body parts which he intended to take home with him right there in the moonlit cemetery and would then slide the body back into the coffin and rebury it, being careful to leave the grave looking exactly as he had found it. Sometimes, he would only take decapitated heads home with him. Other times, he would bring home full corpses.

And strangely, sometimes, after bringing a body home with him from the cemetery to his farm, he would feel remorse and bring the corpse back to the cemetery to give it a proper reburial.

Either way, at some point, the bodies or body parts of these women would end up at Ed's farmhouse, where he would turn them into wearable articles of clothing, chairs, and even lampshades. Other body parts would simply be preserved by Ed in whole, and kept in storage around the home. And Ed would only dig up the bodies of women.

women who he thought could possibly replace the hole in his heart that his mother, Augusta, had left. The women whose graves he desecrated were typically heavy-set and middle-aged, just like his mother, and the graves that Ed robbed were not desecrated at random. Ed would in fact scour local obituaries in search of women that fit a specific description.

women who bore some sort of resemblance to his mother Augusta. He would pick a target, then head out to the cemetery before the bodies became too rotted. But Ed wasn't just content with keeping these morbid keepsakes in his home, skulls, skin, genitalia, that reminded him of his mom. He, in fact, desperately wanted to become her, to become a powerful woman.

to become his dead mother, to step into her skin. Remember the corset made of human skin, the skin masks, the human skin leggings that investigators found in Ed Gein's home? Well, Ed told officials later on in his confession that, in fact, he would don all of these articles of homemade clothing and

dance. He told him that he would prance about his home throughout the trash and the cobwebs, swaying back and forth while wearing the skin of the dead, and that on specific nights, under the right conditions, when the sky was dark and the moon was bright, he would head outside of his house and dance alone in the moonlight.

all while wearing his makeshift human skin suit. At one point though, digging up the graves wasn't satisfying enough. The body parts were too deteriorated. They weren't fresh enough.

And that was when he decided that in order to fulfill his desires, he was going to bring his mother back from the dead. And he needed to kill. At this point, it's December of 1954, and Ed had become utterly obsessed with a local woman who somewhat resembled his mother, named Mary Hogan.

She owned a tavern called Mary's Tavern. Mary had earned herself the nickname Bloody Mary in town because of her crude, foul-mouthed, and somewhat offensive demeanor. She was a tough woman, but I'm sure that she had no idea that her nickname, Bloody Mary, in a way, would one day soon become her reality. On one particularly cold December night, Ed sat in Mary's Tavern, drinking with Mary until it was time for her to close the establishment. It was just the two of them.

and Ed had had quite a bit to drink. At one point, Ed got up from his seat, closed all the blinds in the tavern, pulled out a .32 Mauser pistol, put it to Mary's head, and he murdered her right there in her own business. Ed then dragged her body out to his pickup, loaded the corpse in the back,

and drove it to his farmhouse, where he would proceed to dismember, skin, and gut her. For years, nobody knew what happened to Mary Hogan. She had simply vanished. All that was found in her tavern the next day were some spattered blood on the tavern floor,

Ed was losing his mind at this point if he hadn't fully already, and he began to give people in the community subtle clues that he was up to no good. The day after he murdered Mary Hogan, Ed found himself working a job for a local farmer and sawmill owner named Elmo Yuck. A

Allegedly, at one point during the day while the two were sitting talking after discussing the disappearance of Mary Hogan, Elmo turned to Ed and told him, in a joking tone, that if he had spent more time courting Mary Hogan, she would have been cooking for him instead of missing. And eerily, as Elmo would recount years later, Ed rolled his eyes and looked Elmo in the eyes and told him, smiling, that "she's not missing."

She's down at the house now. Elmo shrugged this little comment off, but years later, after they found Mary Hogan's face in the paper sack at Ed's farmhouse, the sly remark would take on a much darker meaning. It was around this time when rumors about Ed started to spread throughout Plainfield.

According to some of the young townsfolk, they had seen shrunken heads inside of Gein's house. According to Bob Hill, who Ed was going to bring downtown to check out the commotion at Warden's Hardware Store on the night of his arrest,

Ed had, at one point, shown him these heads. While visiting Ed at his house one day, apparently Bob was sitting down in the kitchen area when Ed brought out a pair of preserved human heads. Ed told Bob that these shrunken heads were from the South Seas, sent to him from a cousin who had fought in the Philippines during World War II. Bob was a little creeped out at the time.

but he thought nothing of it. A few neighbors of Ed's would also tell a similar story later on. Apparently, while two young neighbor boys were visiting Ed playing cards with him, the younger of the two brothers asked Ed where he could get a piece of paper inside of the home. Ed told him to search inside of the bedroom. So, the young boy walks over to Ed's room, creaks open the door, and is met with a disturbing sight.

There, adorning the walls and door, were three dried-out human heads. The kid later told his older brother about what he had seen inside of Ed Gein's house, but his older brother assured him that the heads had to be some sort of Halloween gag. It was also around this time when kids in town began to call the Gein home the haunted house. And it really did look haunted. The house was deteriorated.

The paint on the exterior was chipping, and the curtains were almost always drawn. And almost everyone who had once lived there had died. Robert Johnson, the son of Ed's closest neighbor, recounted years earlier that they would often have to walk by the Gein house. He stated, quote, I would save up all of my energy for the last 100 yards and run like hell. He also stated that, quote,

It wasn't that I feared Eddie. I feared the house, end quote. It seems like there was always a dark energy brewing inside of Ed's home. And the truth that Plainfield residents would discover about their seemingly innocent neighbor would be darker than they could have ever imagined.

So obviously you guys love listening to stuff, listening to podcasts, books, comedy shows, you know, audio programming. Obviously, yes, we do. I'm more of a podcast person myself. I'm actually the one that got Colin into podcasting and I've been listening to podcasts for years now.

And I have to say that I genuinely do not love a service more than Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment, and it's all in one place. At Audible, you can find the largest selection of audiobooks and thousands of popular podcasts like Murder in America. Yes, even our show is available on Audible now.

And as an Audible member, you get one credit every month good for any title in the entire premium selection. And those titles are yours to keep forever in your Audible library. You will also get full access to the Popular Plus catalog. It's filled with thousands and thousands of audiobooks and even ad-free versions forever.

of your favorite shows and exclusive series. Yeah, I actually used Audible while researching for this episode. I listened to the audiobook version of the book Deviant by author Harold Schechter. The narrator was super easy to listen to. The information was presented really well and even though I was finished writing the episode at one point, I was already so intrigued and invested in the story that I kept on listening and I finished the whole damn thing. Colin and I are so happy to partner with Audible because

We use it really frequently, especially when doing research for the cases that we cover. There have been so many times where there's a book about a killer that I really want to read, but I don't have a ton of time to sit down and read it all. So I will play it through Audible and it's super convenient. And if you guys use our custom code to sign up, you get 30 days of Audible for free. And you get that free premium audiobook. Head to audible.com slash state.

to sign up and begin your free trial or text state to the number 500500. When you sign up, you help out our show and you help us get more sponsorships so that we can produce more episodes. Just head to audible.com slash state or text state to 500500. Anyways, everybody, thanks for listening. Now let's get back to today's story.

The year is now 1957. Mary Hogan has been missing for years, loads of graves have been robbed, and Ed Gein is still out in Plainfield living a normal life, trying to blend in with his neighbors and friends as well as he can.

But on the morning of November 16th, 1957, Ed's out-of-sight terror spree would reach a fever pitch and both begin and come to a cataclysmic end. On that morning, Ed walked into Warden's hardware store where he was greeted by Bernice Warden. Bernice was a 58-year-old woman who at one point owned the store.

but now just worked there and kept the shop up for her son, who now owned it. When Ed entered the store that morning, it was no surprise to Bernice. After all, he had just told her the night before that he planned on stopping by to pick up some antifreeze. But she had no idea that when Ed walked into the front doors of Warden's that morning, that he had silently locked them behind him.

In the weeks leading up to Bernice's murder, Ed had been a bit of a pest around Warden's hardware store. He was always coming in, chatting up Bernice when she was working alone, and one night he had even invited her to go out roller skating. People around town knew that Ed was a bit of an oddball, but they all agreed that he wasn't a bad person. In fact, most people believed that Ed Gein couldn't hurt a fly, that he was a great guy, a stand-up fella.

But boy, they were very wrong. - Once inside of the hardware store, Ed chatted up Bernice Warren for a moment before grabbing a .22 caliber rifle from one of the racks in the store. He acted like he was inspecting it for a moment, as if he was considering purchasing the firearm that morning. But what Bernice didn't know was that Ed had brought a single bullet with him that morning.

Ed also stole the cash register from Wardens, which only had around $40 in it that day.

He would later go on to state that he didn't steal the cash register for money, but rather he wanted to steal it so that he could figure out how it worked, and he fully intended on returning it later on. This little fact is practically a window into the madness that constantly swirled around within Ed's brain. And now we're back to the very beginning of the story. Ed's in jail, he confessed to the murders and his grave robbing, and the story seems to be over. Or is it?

One story that emerged after Ed's arrest came from Irene Hill, whose house Ed was dining at on the night that he was taken into custody.

She stated that one day when she was alone with Ed in the grocery store that she owned and worked at, Ed picked up a butcher knife and ran his finger along the blade and gave her a strange, out-of-character look, almost as if something was taking over him. Filled with terror, she told him to put it down because it was sharp and he might cut himself, and Ed immediately dropped the knife to the floor. Ed may have been considering the pros and cons of murdering Irene at the time,

but we'll never really know what his intentions were at that moment. Effie Binks, another one of Ed's neighbors, stated to the press that in the time after Augusta's death, her daughter kept telling her stories that she was hearing rustling noises outside of the house at night. One afternoon, shortly after her daughter told her this, Effie heard some knocks on her door. It was Ed. He asked if he could come inside and look at her home.

He said that he was considering building a new one himself. And she was alone at this time. So Effie told Ed to come back later. And she might have saved her own life by telling him this.

Another neighbor claimed that Ed had stopped by randomly one afternoon while she was home alone setting her dinner table for supper. The woman, as she was setting out the cutlery, had a funny feeling and turned around to see Ed standing right behind her, brandishing a large kitchen knife. He claimed that he had noticed a string hanging down from her apron and he wanted to help her by cutting it off. Unfortunately, the woman's husband and sons returned from work shortly afterwards and

and Ed left the building. Finally, on the day before Ed would go on to murder Bernice Worden, a young woman who worked at the local bakery claimed that Ed came into the bake shop while she was working alone. She didn't think anything of it at first, but suddenly, Ed stepped out behind the counter, ran his hands through her hair, and said, quote, "'You look like my mother.'"

But before this creepy interaction could progress any further, a group of customers entered the bakery. And Ed left in a hurry. All of these people that showed up at just the right time probably saved the storytellers' lives.

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to Facebook, to any social media and tag us. Every bit of promotion helps. So if you really are enjoying our show, help us out. It's free. And just give us a shout out on some of your social media. It helps so much. Thank you to everybody that has already done that for us. And yeah, we got some exciting episodes coming up soon. Glad you guys are enjoying this. And let's get back to the show.

But before we proceed to the aftermath of the murders, let's take a step back in time for a second. Did you know that there were a few other victims that Ed was suspected of killing? I personally didn't, until now. Remember when we said that there were pieces of female genitalia that supposedly belonged to teenaged girls found in Ed's home, and that he exclusively dug up the corpses of middle-aged women?

Well, in 1953, 15-year-old Evelyn Hartley was abducted while babysitting in La Crosse, Wisconsin. There were signs of a struggle at her house and pry marks on the windows. Hartley's body was never found, and Ed, at the time of the abduction, was visiting a relative in La Crosse only blocks from the house where the young girl disappeared from.

But when he was confronted about the girl, he denied involvement and passed two lie detector tests. There was also another girl, Georgia Weckler, who was abducted years earlier in 1947 from a nearby community.

Her body was never found either. The judge that ruled on Ed Gein's case claimed that these two disappearances could easily be connected to Ed because there was no explanation as to the young female's genitalia that was found in his house. But neither of these cases have ever been solved. Then there were two hunters who disappeared after drinking at a tavern one night in Plainfield.

They simply vanished into thin air. Strangely enough though, one of their jackets was found suspiciously close to Gein's residence. And in the day or two after they went missing, neighbors reported an extremely foul stench emanating from Ed's house. Neither of the two hunters' bodies were ever found and their cases still are unsolved. - In January of 1958, following a speedy trial, Ed was found to be insane and sent to an insane asylum.

Nurses there reported that he was a pretty good patient, but that he would become delusional around the time of a full moon. Ten years later, he was finally found fit to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Warden, and even though he was quickly found guilty, he was ultimately declared not guilty by reason of insanity. He was then sent back to another state-sponsored mental institution, where he lived out the rest of his days.

He lived there in the asylum for a number of years before he developed dementia, cancer, and respiratory failure. And, uh, eerily enough, he ended up dying on July 26th, 1984. And what day did I start writing this podcast? July 26th, of course. Yes, that's right, I literally completely unknowingly began writing the Ed Gein episode on July 26th, the day that Ed Gein died.

But what happened to the house?

to Ed's possessions, to his car. Well, the town of Plainfield auctioned off most of Ed's belongings at a largely attended auction, and the skin and bone relics that he had collected and crafted were quote-unquote disposed of by authorities. No one knows exactly what happened to them.

Ed Gein's car was purchased and hauled around to various state fairs in Wisconsin in the years after the murder. Many people even named it the ghoul's car. The carnival workers offered people a chance to sit in the same vehicle

that Ed had used to haul the bodies of the dead to and from the cemeteries. People protested this attraction and got it removed from the carnival circuit. And no one knows where it ended up after that. And now we get to the house. There were rumors in town that someone planned on purchasing the Gein farmhouse and turning it into an attraction called the House of Horrors. And a few days before the house was set to be auctioned off, a fire somehow started on the property.

No one really knows how this fire started, but it did, and soon the flames were raging throughout the entire home. It's said that the fire department took an extra long drive while they were headed out to put out the fire at the Geinhaus, that they took back roads and drove under the speed limit with their lights off. And why would the fire department care if the house burned down or not?

Well, the fire chief at the time was no one other than Frank Warden, owner of Warden's Hardware Store, son of Bernice Warden, who Ed Gein had murdered and butchered in that very house. Ed Gein's memory stretched much farther than I'm sure he ever imagined it would.

Not only is the story of his crimes become one of the staples in the true crime world due to its depravity and bizarre details, but his tale also had an impact on the realm of pop culture. In 1959, famous horror author Robert Block wrote his magnum opus Psycho, which was based largely on the case of Gein and his attachment to his mother. In Psycho, a man named Norman Bates keeps his mother's corpse preserved in his house while he embarks on a murder spree against women.

Whenever Norman Bates felt attracted to a woman, his mother, whom Norman called "Mother", took over him and insisted that the woman must be killed. Just like Ed Gein's mother, Augusta, in real life, Norman Bates' mom was a domineering religious woman who insisted on dominating his life up until her death.

When Alfred Hitchcock developed Psycho into a movie in 1960, Ed Gein's legacy would forever be ingrained in the minds of moviegoers across the globe. Other films influenced by Ed Gein's crimes include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, made in 1974, a group of young adults stumble across a house filled with all sorts of macabre items.

like skinned flesh and skulls. The house in that film obviously was based on the real-life house of Ed Gein. The family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre also keeps the mummified body of their mother in the house. Ed reportedly wanted to keep his mother's body, but it's never been confirmed if he was able to actually dig it up. And the killer in the movie wears a mask made of human skin.

Just like Ed did. In The Silence of the Lambs, a serial killer named Buffalo Bill embarks on a murder spree, taking the lives of a number of women. Buffalo Bill skins his victims and fashions himself a skin suit. He also expresses his desire to become, to be reborn as a woman.

Does this all sound familiar yet? Ed Gein's murder influenced all facets of American culture. There were episodes of TV crime shows that took influence from his murders. There were songs written about Bernice Worden and Ed Gein's obsession with human flesh. And there was even a band at one point that called themselves Ed Gein. This story...

This one story really captured the attention of people across the planet. And that morbid fascination doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Think of the scariest movie you've ever seen. The most disturbing film you've ever watched. A movie that stuck with you, that stayed with you. Now, that movie wasn't real. But what if the events dramatized in the film were based in reality? Such is the case with The Butcher of Plainfield, Ed Gein.

These crimes were so notorious, so shocking, that they transcended the normal influence that murders and murderers typically carry and have managed to keep scaring people across the world for generations. It's a story about a loner living in a creepy farmhouse surrounded by human skin masks and chairs made from upholstered flesh. The story of a killer who robbed graves and oftentimes danced around in dead women's skin in the pale moonlight. You know, let's end with this.

One of the doctors that interviewed Ed in the mental institution in which he was kept wrote later on in life that Ed told him he believed that, through concentration and willpower, he felt like he could bring the dead back to life. Ed claimed that he felt like he could bring his mother, Augusta, back, that he just wanted to hear her voice one more time, even though she was dead.

And it's strange to me, for a guy so obsessed with pleasing his religious mother, you'd think that just one time he would have stopped to think about what she would have told him, her thoughts about his actions. Surely, she would not have been pleased. It makes me wonder what Augusta would have to say about her son's crimes. If only she could come back and tell us. Either way, Augusta is dead, and so is Ed.

I wonder if his energy is still around on that farm. It's just an empty lot now, just the trees and grass. Locals in the area claim that the old Gein farmland is haunted, but I don't know. I do wonder though if, on a cold November night, when the moon is full above, if you were to head out to the land where the Gein family farmhouse once stood, if you could see something, a figure,

twirling through the darkness, a lonesome man in a suit crafted from human flesh, dancing alone in the pale moonlight. Well, thank you everybody so much for listening to another episode of Murder in America. I've actually been to Plainfield, Wisconsin in the past. I've been to Ed Gein's farm. I've been to Warden's hardware store. And let me tell you,

The town definitely has a sort of gloom to it. It's beautiful. I highly recommend you guys go give it a visit. We're going to be back next week with another full-length, very long episode about a brutal series of murders. Actually, a night of annihilation that occurred in Oklahoma just a few years ago. It's a very sad story. If you want to become a patron and listen to bonus episodes, just look up Murder in America on Patreon. You can also follow us on Instagram at Murder in America. And this is truly...

See you on the next one, everybody. Sleep tight.