EDWARD THEODORE GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD

Article BY Chris Bartholomew - Art by ERICK DIAZ

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The Butcher of Plainfield, The Plainfield Butcher, The Mad Butcher, The Plainfield Ghoul.

On August 27, 1906 in Vernon County, Wisconsin Edward Theodore Gein was born, and his upbringing surely had a hand in making him infamous.

He 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, his brother Henry was found dead on a brush pile. (It is said that Ed killed Henry so he could be more alone with his mother. In some sources it says that Henry was found dead in the Gein barn or was killed trying to put out a fire that had got the barn; but in others it says that Henry died while fighting a forest fire, and got trapped and was either burned or died from smoke inhalation.) 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 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 really had no idea of what all the fuss was about.

Gein took to reading texts on female anatomy and in 1947 he began opening the graves of local women and taking portions of the corpse's 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.

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.

In his spare time Ed read books on human anatomy and Nazi concentration camp experiments. He was quite interested by it all, especially the female anatomy. Alone in the farmhouse he thought endlessly about sex, until one day he saw a newspaper report of a woman who had been buried that day.

He enlisted the help of an old friend named Gus. Gus was a weird loner too, and quite definitely odd - he went to the asylum a few years later. Gus was Ed Gein’s trusted buddy, and agreed to assist Ed in opening a grave to secure a corpse for ‘medical experiments’. Gus helped dig the graves.

The first corpse came from a grave less than a dozen feet away from the last resting place of Gein’s mother.

Over the next ten years Ed did the same, checked the newspaper for fresh bodies, always visiting the graveyard at the time of a full moon, got the whole female corpse or just the parts he wanted, filled in the grave and took his winnings home.

His experiments with dead bodies were bizarre. He would construct objects from the bones and skin and would store the organs in the fridge to eat later. He also committed acts of necrophilia on the bodies. He even dug up his own mother's corpse.

What Ed Gein didn’t reveal to Gus was his own growing desire to become a woman himself; it was for this reason he’d studied anatomy, thought about the possibilities of an ‘operation’ which would result in a change of sex, desired to dissect a female corpse and familiarize himself with its anatomy. The closest he would get to this is dressing up in his full woman bodysuit, complete with mask and breasts constructed entirely of human skin.

His collection of trophies grew, and so did the range of his experimentation and obsession.

Then Gus was taken away to the asylum, and Ed was all alone again. Ed thought that fresher bodies would be better for his collection so he turned to murder…

Mary Hogan was a 51-year-old divorcee who operated Hogan’s Tavern at Pine Grove, six miles from home. She was alone when he came to her on the cold afternoon of 8 December 1954. He shot her in the head with his 32-caliber revolver, placed her body in his pickup truck, and took her back to his shed.

A customer who dropped into the tavern found the place deserted, and a large bloodstain on the floor. A spent .32 cartridge lay near it. Bloodstains ran out the back door and into the parking lot, where they halted beside tire tracks that looked like those of a pickup truck. It looked as if Mary Hogan had been shot and taken away.

Police were unable to find any clues to the disappearance. But a few weeks later, when a sawmill owner named Elmo Ueeck spoke of the disappearance to Ed Gein, Gein replied: ‘She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.’ Ueeck could not even work up the interest to ask him what he meant.

There may have been other victims in the years that followed, but nothing definite is known about Gein’s murderous activities until that day on 16 November, 1957, when he shot and killed Bernice Worden in her hardware store on Plainfield’s Main Street. He used a .22 rifle from a display rack in the store, inserting his own bullet which he carried with him. Ed Gein shot and killed Bernice Worden, locked the store and took the body home in the store’s truck. Gein also removed the cash register, which contained $41 in cash, but not because he wanted to commit robbery, but he later explained that he wanted to see how it worked, and fully intended to return it later.

Bernice Worden’s son, Frank often assisted her in the store, but on this particular Saturday morning he’d gone deer hunting. When he returned in the late afternoon he discovered the store to be closed with the lights still on and his mother missing, also the cash register was gone. There was blood on the floor.

A local garage attendant told him that he had seen the store truck driving away at about 9.30 that morning.

Frank Worden served as deputy sheriff in the area and immediately alerted the sheriff, Art Schley, and reported the circumstances. He checked the record of sales transactions made that morning. One of them was for half a gallon of antifreeze. Worden remembered that Ed Gein had stopped by the previous evening at closing time and said he’d be back the next morning for antifreeze. Ed had also asked Worden if he intended to go hunting the next day. Worden also recalled that Gein had been in and out of the store quite frequently the previous week

Since the cash register was missing, it appeared that Gein had planned a robbery after finding a suitable time when the coast would be clear.

Worden told of his suspicions to the sheriff. The sheriff Art Schley and captain Lloyd Schoephoester set off for the farm, seven miles outside Plainfield…

The house was dark and Ed Gein was absent, so acting on a hunch, they drove to a store in West Plainfield where Gein usually purchased groceries. Gein was there as he’d just had dinner with the proprietor and his wife. He was just about to leave in his truck.

The sheriff halted him, and asked him to get into the police car for questioning. Gein told of how he thought someone had tried to frame him for Bernice Worden’s death. Sheriff Schley took Ed Gein into custody; Schley had not mentioned Bernice Worden’s death.
Sheriff Schley and Captain Schoephoester returned to the house with other officers. The doors to the farmhouse were locked, but the door to the side shed at the rear of the house opened when Schley pushed it with his foot. It was nighttime and since the farm had no electricity, the sheriff had to use a torch. It revealed a naked corpse of a woman hanging upside down from a crossbeam, the legs spread wide apart, and a long slit running from the genitals almost to the throat. But the throat, like the head, was missing. The genitals and the anus were also missing. Bernice Worden had been disemboweled like a deer.

The place looked like it had not been clean or tidied in years; there were piles of rubbish everywhere. The few rooms that weren’t nailed off were littered with books, old papers, magazines, utensils, tin cans, cartons and a lot of other junk.

What those police officers also found is in the extreme. In the house they found - two shin bones, four human noses, a quart can converted into a tom-tom by skin stretched over both top and bottom, a bowl made from the inverted half of a human skull, nine ‘death masks’ (from the well preserved skin from the faces of women), ten female heads with the tops sawn off above the eyebrows, bracelets of human skin, a purse made with a handle of human skin, sheath for a knife made in human skin, a pair of leggings made from human skin, four chairs with the seats being replaced by strips of human skin, a shoe box containing nine salted vulvas of which his mothers was painted silver, a hanging human head, a lampshade covered with human skin, a shirt made of human skin, a number of shrunken heads (Ed always joked that he had a collection of shrunken heads), two skulls for Gein’s bedposts, a pair of human lips hanging from string, Ed’s full woman body suit constructed with human skin and complete with mask and breasts, Bernice Worden’s heart in a pan on the stove, and the refrigerator which was stacked with human organs.

The bodies of 15 different women had been mutilated to provide Gein’s trophies. It is also said that sometimes Gein brought house gifts of fresh venison to his neighbors although Gein said he had never shot a deer in his life.

One early story of Ed Gein is that in 1942. Ed was invited over to his nearest neighbor's house, the Bankses. A female relative of the Bankses was in the house, and was wearing shorts; Ed couldn’t keep his eyes off her legs. Later that night a man broke into the woman’s house and grabbed her small son by the throat, asking him where his mother had gone. The intruder fled before the boy could tell him anything. The boy thought he had recognized Ed Gein as the man.

Some other stories of possible victims of Gein are an eight-year-old girl who went missing in 1947 and a fifteen-year-old who had disappeared on her way home from babysitting in 1953. The babysitter’s bloodstained clothes were found but no body had turned up. In Ed’s house there were some body parts which didn’t prove to come from that of his grave robbing or 2 known murders.

Gein was in a series of examinations at the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane. He was proven insane. The reasons for his actions were seen; he loved his mother but he hated her, so that is why he killed older women. It is said that Mary Hogan had more of a passing resemblance to his mother.

Gein denied being a cannibal or necrophiliac, but he did admit to grave robbing.

The case created a sensation because of the true nature of the crime. Thousands of people drove to Plainfield to get a look at the 'murder farm'. Eventually the place was burned down by the Plainfield citizens as they regarded it as a place of evil.

At Christmas, 1957, Gein was judged insane and he was committed to Waupan State Hospital for a life sentence. Gein died of cancer on 26 July 1984, at the age of 78. He was buried back in Plainfield next to the graves of his family.

In the house the police found:

Human skulls mounted upon the corner posts of his bed

Human skullcaps, apparently in use as soup bowls

An array of "shrunken heads"

Skin fashioned into a lampshade and used to upholster chair seats

Skin from the face of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, found in a paper bag

A vest crafted from the skin of a woman's torso

Socks made from human flesh

A sheath made from human skin

A human heart (it is disputed where the heart was found; deputy reports all claimed that the heart was in a saucepan on the stove, while some crime scene photographers claimed it was in a paper bag)

A window shade pull consisting of human lips

Four noses

Organs in the refrigerator

Pieces of salted genitalia in a box

Gein's most notorious creations were an array of "shrunken heads." Various neighborhood children — whom Gein occasionally babysat — had seen or heard of these objects, which Gein offhandedly described as relics from the South Seas, purportedly sent by a cousin who had served in World War II. Upon investigation, these turned out to be human facial skins, carefully peeled from cadavers and used by Gein as masks.

The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, the crown of a skull used as a soup-bowl, lampshades covered in flesh pilled taut, a table propped up by a human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs. The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death-masks - the skinned faces of women - and decorative bracelets made out of human skin. The stunned searchers also uncovered a soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a "mammary vest" flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother.

In 1958, Gein's car, which he'd used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at a public auction for the then-considerable sum of $760 to carnival sideshow operator Bunny Gibbons. Gibbons later charged carnival-goers 25¢ admission to see it.

On July 26, 1984, Gein died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer in Goodland Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers chipped off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is displayed at present in a museum in Waushara County, Wisconsin.

In 1995 near the location of the old Gein home place parts of up to eleven human skeletons all female but one were discovered in a old well. Local police said that while they can not say 100 percent for certain it is in all likelihood that these 11 remains were the work of Ed Gein as they dated back to the time when he was on his killing spree in the area. The only male was a mailman that vanished the year before Ed Gein was caught. At the time of his disappearance he had been Ed Geins mail delivery person.

Many people over the years since his death have claimed to have seen a younger Ed Gein walking along the road in the direction of his former home which had burned to the ground years before. He is often seen in his car driving the roads around his former home. Several young couples parked in make-out areas over the years have claimed to have been approached by a man who fits Geins description and several have claimed Gein has beat on their car windows. The local police refused to post the drawing of the lover's lane stalker because he so closely resembled Ed Gein.

Ed Gein’s activities certainly inspired the literature and film industry. Because of the true nature of the crimes it gave Hollywood a lot of ideas to work on.

One such early film was Psycho. Based on the Robert Bloch novel and made into a Hitchcock film. The connection being the overpowering mother and horror of the film, it made it one of the first of a kind. Robert Bloch got most of the ideas for Psycho from Ed Gein's life.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one movie lightly based on Ed Gein. The story is about a group of traveling teens who stumble on a horror house. The house’s residents are a family of weird homicidal cannibals who also like grave robbing and constructing furniture made of bones and skulls alike. The lead bad guy is called ‘Leatherface’.

Leatherface likes chasing teens around with his chainsaw and wearing the human face mask of his victims. There are about four Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies each with the teen’s trying to escape the deadly Leatherface. The connection is mostly with the house, grave robbery and cannibalism.

One more recent and Academy Award winning film is Silence of the Lambs. It’s about an FBI agent who’s tracking down a serial killer and to find him she must get the help of an intelligent cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lector. The serial killer she’s trying to track down is called ‘Buffalo Bill’ because he likes to kill women and make clothes of their skin, also he wants to be a woman, hence the skin costume like that of Gein. There are a lot of connections to this film and Ed Gein, being with the skin clothes, cannibalism, and Buffalo Bill being a transvestite.