Saturday, November 16, 1957, was the first day of deer season in Waushara County, Wisconsin, and most of the men in Plainfield were in the woods. Frank Worden, a deputy sheriff, was one of them. When he came back into town that afternoon, his mother's hardware store was closed and she was gone. Inside he found the cash register open, a pool of blood on the floor and a .22 rifle out of its place on the rack. The last receipt his mother had written was for antifreeze, and it was made out to a fifty-one-year-old bachelor who did odd jobs around town. His name was Edward Gein.
That night the sheriff and his deputies drove out to the Gein farm, a few miles from town. The house had no electricity. In a shed attached to it, by flashlight, they found Bernice Worden's body hanging upside down, decapitated and opened like a deer after a hunt. What they found inside the house over the next hours is why Gein's name is still known around the world, and why so much of what people believe about him comes from fiction rather than from the record.
Augusta Gein was born on July 21, 1878, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to German immigrant parents. Harold Schechter, whose 1989 book Deviant remains the most thorough account of the case, wrote that she grew up in a fiercely religious household and that her father beat her for small offenses. She met George Philip Gein when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four, and they married around 1900 (accounts give 1899 or 1900). They ran a grocery store in La Crosse. Their first son, Henry, was born in 1902. Edward Theodore Gein followed on August 27, 1906. According to Schechter, Augusta had hoped for a daughter.
The marriage was unhappy. George drank and, by A&E's account, beat both boys. Augusta scorned him as lazy and weak and despised the city more. She read to her sons from the Bible, warned them against alcohol and against women, whom she regarded as instruments of the devil, and told them that a flood would one day wash away women's sins. In 1913 she bought a small dairy farm to get the family out of La Crosse, and in 1914 or 1915 she moved them again, to a 195-acre farm outside Plainfield in central Wisconsin. It was about six miles from the nearest village, at the end of a dirt road. The buyer was Augusta, at a time when most landowners were men. The two-story farmhouse had no electricity or plumbing, and as money ran short over the years it slowly came apart.
Augusta kept her boys away from other children as much as she could. They went to school, but there Ed was teased for a lazy eye, and classmates remembered him as an odd boy who sometimes laughed for no reason anyone could see. He took his mother's side in everything. Henry did not. As he grew older, Henry criticized Augusta and her teaching, and he worried aloud about how close she and Ed had become.
George Gein died of heart failure in 1940, at sixty-six. Henry and Ed took odd jobs around Plainfield to keep the household going. On May 16, 1944, the brothers were burning brush on the property when the fire got into the marsh and out of control. Afterward Ed reported Henry missing, and when searchers came he led them straight to his brother's body. Schechter wrote that the body was covered in soot but not burned, and that there were bruises on Henry's head. The county coroner ruled the death asphyxiation, and no autopsy was done. Some investigators later came to suspect Ed. Nothing was ever proved.
Augusta had a stroke not long after Henry's death and was confined to bed. For the first time she depended on her younger son, and he nursed her and read the Bible aloud to her. She recovered enough to walk, then had a second stroke and died on December 29, 1945, at sixty-seven. Schechter wrote that only her siblings and Ed came to the funeral.
Ed lived alone after that. He closed off her bedroom and the rooms she had used and left them as she had kept them, while he lived in a couple of rooms and the rest of the house filled with clutter around him. He did odd jobs and farm work, and he sometimes babysat for neighbors, who found him odd but helpful. A&E reports that in these years he read about anatomy, shrunken heads and Nazi atrocities. To Plainfield he was a quiet, peculiar, harmless man.
By his own account, he began opening graves in 1947, about two years after his mother died. He blamed what he called "a force built up in me." He told investigators he had made as many as forty night visits to local cemeteries, most of them in Plainfield, and that he looked for the graves of recently buried middle-aged women, women he said reminded him of his mother. He named three cemeteries: Plainfield, Spiritland in Portage County, near Almond, and Hancock. He gave the authorities a list of nine graves he said he had robbed. He said he worked in a kind of daze, sometimes came out of it and stopped, and sometimes returned remains out of guilt. He said he had an erotic obsession with the bodies but denied having sex with them, because, he said, they smelled too bad.
Mary Hogan was born in Germany. She had lived in Cicero, Illinois, before moving to Portage County, Wisconsin, around 1949, and she had been married twice and divorced. By the early 1950s she ran a tavern in the Pine Grove area near Bancroft, about six miles from the Gein farm, and lived in the same building. She was careful. She opened only in the daytime and served only people she knew, because, by the Stevens Point Journal's account, she was afraid of strangers. People believed she kept a good deal of money on the premises. Gein later told investigators he had been in her tavern "probably three times."
She was last seen alive late on the afternoon of December 8, 1954, between about 4:30 and 5:30. When a neighbor came by, the tavern was empty and there was blood across the floor, smeared as if someone had been dragged. Investigators recovered a spent cartridge. There was no other trace of her, no lead worth following, and the case went cold.
Some time afterward a local sawmill owner, Elmo Ueeck, teased Gein about it. If he had spent more time courting Mary, Ueeck told him, she would be cooking for him instead of missing. "She's not missing," Gein answered. "She's down at the house now." Ueeck took it as one of Eddie Gein's odd jokes, and no one went to look. That exchange comes from Judge Robert Gollmar's 1981 book on the case.
Three years later, when the house was searched, Mary Hogan's face was among the masks, and her skull was found in a box. Portage County Sheriff Herbert Wanserski identified her. "We have found the face and head of Mary Hogan among the objects in Gein's farm home," he told reporters. Gein said he had shot her and hauled her body home on a sled. He said he could not remember the details.
Bernice Worden was born in Canton, Illinois, on May 9, 1899, and came to Plainfield with her parents as a child. She married Leon Worden, who founded Worden Hardware and Implement, and after his death she ran the store herself. She belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star and the American Legion Auxiliary. She had a son, Frank, who served as a deputy sheriff, and a daughter, Miriam Walker, and by 1957 she had four grandchildren.
Gein was a familiar face in the store. In town it was said that he had once asked her out. He denied it later. "No, I never asked her that way," he said. "It was just in a joke." According to Isthmus, he had recently chatted with her about roller skating and had asked her son whether he would be hunting that weekend.
Accounts differ on whether Gein was in the store on Friday, November 15, as well as on Saturday. At his trial eleven years later, he said that on Saturday morning he had bought antifreeze and asked to look at a rifle that was for sale. He said it went off while he was examining it and that Worden, about twelve feet away, had been looking out the window. "I looked up and Mrs Worden was gone," he testified. "I couldn't see her... so I stepped around this island and I saw her lying there." He said he fainted, or nearly fainted, at the sight of blood, and did not remember moving her body or driving home, though he did remember eating supper with neighbors that evening. The coroner, Russell Darby, found that she had been killed by a small-caliber bullet to the head.
Frank Worden called Sheriff Art Schley. Schley was thirty-two, a native of Richford who had married Nita Straw in 1943 and had three daughters, and he had become Waushara County's sheriff that year. Deputies from several counties joined the search. Gein's car had been seen in the village that day. Two deputies drove out to his farm, found no one home and left after a quick look around. Several hours later Schley went back with another officer. Gein was still not there.
Gein was found at supper with the Hill family, friends who sometimes gave him work. (Isthmus names the host as Lester Hill, a grocer; a relative remembered it as Irene Hill.) According to Gollmar's account, when officers questioned him there Gein said someone was framing him. Asked for what, he named Mrs. Worden. Asked about her, he said: "Well, she's dead, ain't she?" He was taken into custody.
At the farm, after dark, Schley pushed into the summer kitchen, the shed attached to the house, and swept it with a flashlight. "My God, there she is!" he said, according to the Hanneman Archive. Bernice Worden's body hung by the ankles from a rod and a block and tackle. "The body was dressed out and the head was missing," Captain Lloyd Schoephoester of the Green Lake County sheriff's department said. Schley went outside and was sick.
More officers came, and so did technicians from the state crime laboratory in Madison. With no power in the house, they brought a portable generator and floodlights and worked through the night in nine rooms choked with rubbish, newspapers, bottles and tools. Bernice Worden's head was found in a burlap sack. Accounts of where her heart was found differ.
The officers then found what has fed seventy years of horror stories: bowls made from the tops of human skulls; skulls on the bedposts; masks made from the skinned faces of women; chair seats, a wastebasket and other furnishings covered in human skin; leggings and a vest of skin; a belt decorated with nipples. The Hanneman Archive's count from the contemporary reports is five heads, four skulls and ten death masks. Other counts vary: the remains of about ten women, by HISTORY's count; fourteen cadavers, by another. Officers also found a book on embalming and embalming fluid. Two rooms, his mother's bedroom and sitting room, were neat under their dust and had been shut away.
Waushara County Sheriff Art Schley's only public description of what he saw was brief. It was, he said, "just too horrible. Horrible beyond belief." Coroner Darby called the search the "most revolting thing I have ever seen." Charles Wilson, director of the state crime laboratory, later ordered the masks buried rather than shown to the press.
The first interrogation went badly. According to Gollmar's book and Harold Schechter's Deviant, Schley, frustrated during questioning, slammed Gein's head and face into a brick wall. That interview was ruled inadmissible. Wilimovsky, an investigator from the state crime laboratory, questioned Gein again to produce a confession that could be used.
Within days Gein had been brought before County Judge Boyd Clark on a robbery complaint connected to the store. He told the judge he did not want a lawyer. The district attorney suggested bail of $5,000; the judge set it at $10,000. Gein was then taken to Madison for questioning and lie detector tests.
Over two days at the crime lab, Gein admitted killing Worden and Hogan and said he had taken the remains of at least nine other women from graves. At first he admitted only Worden; he acknowledged Hogan after her remains were identified. He spoke freely about the graves and said little about the killings. He said he had been in a daze. Wilson read his statement to reporters on Wednesday, November 20. Gein "now has admitted he is responsible for the death of Mary Hogan on Dec. 8, 1954," it said. Wilson said he had seen no remorse in the man, "just a sort of detachment." He also asked the public not to prejudge him. Gein, he said, "is a human being deserving a fair trial."
That same day Bernice Worden was buried. Nearly one hundred people had come to her wake the night before.
Wilson announced that Gein had been cleared of several other Wisconsin disappearances: Evelyn Hartley, a fifteen-year-old babysitter who vanished in La Crosse in 1953; Georgia Jean Weckler, eight, taken from the end of her family's driveway in Fort Atkinson in 1947; and Victor "Buck" Travis, who vanished during the 1952 hunting season. A polygraph about Irene Keating, thirty, of Fort Atkinson, missing since August, was inconclusive. Not everyone was satisfied. Adams County Sheriff Fred Searles still wanted to question Gein about Travis and two other missing men. On November 29 it was reported that skeletal remains found on the farm belonged to a large, middle-aged woman, not to Travis.
On November 25, 1957, investigators exhumed two of the caskets on Gein's list in the Plainfield Cemetery, belonging to Eleanor Adams and Mabel Everson. According to the Hanneman Archive's account of the contemporary press, both were empty, and a set of dentures and a wedding ring turned up in the soil above one of them. A 2007 account in the Madison weekly Isthmus says the results did not fully support his story. Many families did not want their relatives' graves disturbed, and no other graves were opened. No charge was ever brought over any of them.
On November 21, 1957, Gein was arraigned in Waushara County on one count of first-degree murder for Bernice Worden and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. District Attorney Earl Kileen had said he would charge only one killing and was willing to accept the plea. "I will move immediately for a sanity hearing when he is arraigned," he told reporters, and he did.
On November 23 Gein entered Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Waupun for thirty days of observation. Tests there put his full-scale IQ at 99. The staff diagnosed a "schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type." Gein told them of an outside force that drove him, of hearing his mother's voice years after her death and of seeing faces in piles of leaves. One doctor, Dr. Warmington, noted "a very marked sexual preoccupation throughout most of his answers to questions," and others described an "abnormally magnified attachment" to his mother. The doctors concluded that his judgment was so ruled by fantasy that he did not know right from wrong.
In January 1958 two psychiatrists testified that he was not competent, and Judge Herbert A. Bunde committed him to Central State. "It is unlikely he will ever be at liberty again," Bunde said.
Plainfield was a village of about seven hundred people. Before November 1957 Gein's oddities had been a local joke. Afterward, residents felt betrayed by him and then overrun. About four thousand cars drove through town on the Sunday after the arrest. Life ran a seven-page spread and Time three pages, and reporters came from Europe. The Associated Press named the case Wisconsin's top story of 1957, ahead of the Milwaukee Braves' World Series win. Harold Collins, the village president, said that "everybody was reasonably sure that he killed Mary Hogan," and Ed Marolla, the editor of the weekly paper, said residents resented that the case had been left unresolved. Sick jokes about Gein spread across the state. Dr. George Arndt studied them and found they were not told within ten or twenty miles of Plainfield.
The Gein farm and its contents were set for auction on March 30, 1958, Palm Sunday. The household goods, a mower, his Ford sedan and his Chevrolet pickup were to go at noon, the farm itself at 2:30. The auctioneers dropped a plan to charge fifty cents to walk through the property. There was talk that a buyer wanted to turn the house into a museum, and neighbors did not want one.
At about 2:30 on the morning of March 20, a policeman saw a glow in the sky. By the time the Plainfield volunteer fire department arrived, the house was beyond saving, and the crews worked to keep the fire from spreading. The fire chief was Frank Worden. Brush had been burned on the property to clean it up for the sale, so the fire might have been an accident, but a state fire marshal said, "We had to assume that the fire was set." There was no snow on the ground and no tracks to follow. No cause was ever determined. When Gein was told, he reportedly said, "Just as well."
At the auction his 1949 Ford went for $760 to a carnival operator, Bunny Gibbons, who toured it at county fairs as the car that had hauled the dead from their graves and charged twenty-five cents a look until the authorities shut the exhibit down.
Gein spent ten years at Waupun. On January 16, 1968, Waushara County District Attorney Howard Dutcher announced that Dr. Edward F. Schubert, Central State's superintendent, had reported "significant changes in the mental status of Ed Gein." Schubert said Gein had "kind of mellowed over the years." Doctors, among them Dr. George Arndt, found him "mentally able to confer with counsel and participate in his defense," and Circuit Judge Robert H. Gollmar ruled he could be tried. Gein needed a new lawyer: his first, a Plainfield attorney named Belter who had entered the insanity plea in 1957, had since become an assistant district attorney.
The trial, on the single count of murdering Bernice Worden, was held in November 1968 without a jury and lasted about a week. Seven witnesses were called, among them crime lab technicians who had worked on the autopsy, a former deputy sheriff and a sheriff. Art Schley was not among them. He had left the sheriff's office in 1963 to become the county's highway commissioner, and he died of a heart attack on March 22, 1968, at forty-three, according to his obituary in the Oshkosh Northwestern. Gollmar wrote that Schley's worry about being called as a witness "hastened his death."
Gein testified himself. His account was the accident with the rifle. His lawyer handed him a gun so that he could show the court how it had happened. "I couldn't pull the trigger because the gun would fire," he said. He allowed that he might have pulled the trigger, or that the rifle might have gone off on its own. "I couldn't say." Explaining the gaps in his memory, he said, "So that is why I can't answer at this time."
Gollmar found him guilty of first-degree murder. In a separate hearing, as Wisconsin law then required, he found that Gein had been insane when he did it, and sent him back to the hospital. The Hogan case was never tried. "Due to prohibitive costs," the judge later explained, "Gein was tried for only one murder." By the account of Crime Library, the families of the two women and of those whose graves were disturbed never felt that justice had been done.
By most accounts Gein was content in the hospital. He worked as a carpenter, a mason and an attendant, and, by a 1982 UPI account, as a groundskeeper until 1976. He made rugs, polished stones, read travel books and listened to the radio; with money he had earned he bought a cheap receiver for ham radio. He was one of the few patients who never needed tranquilizers. "If all our patients were like him, we'd have no trouble at all," Superintendent Schubert told reporters. Staff also noticed that he stared at the female employees.
On June 27, 1974, he asked a sanity hearing to release him after seventeen years. Witnesses said he had never been a problem, though he could react badly to other patients. The request was denied. In 1978 he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. By 1982 he was showing signs of forgetfulness. He died in Mendota's geriatric ward on July 26, 1984, aged seventy-seven, of respiratory failure; hospital officials said he also had cancer. He was buried in the Plainfield Cemetery, the cemetery he had robbed, in the family plot beside his mother and brother.
Visitors chipped pieces off his headstone for souvenirs. In June 2000 the stone, which weighed about 150 pounds, was stolen outright. Biography.com reports that it was recovered about a year later and put into storage; other accounts say it never came back. Either way, the grave has been unmarked ever since.
Allen Wilimovsky, who spent thirty-three years with the state crime laboratory, said of the case a quarter century later: "I never experienced an investigation before or since that was so unusual."
Plainfield did not want to talk about it. The writer August Derleth dropped a Gein chapter from his 1968 book on Wisconsin murders because the wounds were still too fresh. Gollmar's own book was turned down by more than a dozen publishers before it appeared in 1981. In April 2006 the remaining forty acres of the property were listed on eBay for $250,000, and the listing was pulled after five days under the site's rules on murder memorabilia. Most of the land is now a pine plantation. In 2007 a hardware store employee in Plainfield, whose aunt was among those exhumed, told Isthmus she was "tired of it being dredged up." A cattle farmer said, "some things are best not talked about."
Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, with its devoted son and dead mother in a sealed house, drew on the Gein case, and Alfred Hitchcock filmed it in 1960 with Anthony Perkins. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) borrowed from it, as did lower-budget films such as Deranged (1974) and Ed Gein: In the Light of the Moon (2000). In the fall of 2025 Netflix devoted a season of a true-crime anthology series to him. Each retelling has added to the story.
Henry Gein's death. The coroner ruled it asphyxiation, and no one was charged. The bruises, the unburned body and the brothers' quarrels over their mother led some investigators and later writers to suspect Ed. This is suspicion only.
How many graves. Gein listed nine graves and spoke of as many as forty visits. A 1984 UPI report said ten graves had been opened and the bodies taken to his home; another count gives fourteen cadavers. Only two graves were ever checked. A Portage County sheriff insisted Gein "never robbed a grave in his life," which would mean the remains came from killings, but the dentures and ring found above an empty casket in 1957 pointed the other way. Gein's dates also shifted: in one 1957 statement he put the grave robbing between 1944 and 1952, and elsewhere he said it began in 1947. Isthmus reports a local belief that his mother's grave was the first he tried to open; it was never examined.
An accomplice. Crime+Investigation says Gein had help from a gravedigger named Gus, and that he turned to killing after Gus was institutionalized in 1954. No other report confirms this, and it is not part of the court record.
Other disappearances. Gein was formally cleared in the Hartley, Weckler and Travis cases, though Gollmar later wrote that he suspected Gein in the disappearance of Travis and a companion, Ray Burgess, after Travis's jacket and dog were found near the Gein farm. None of these suspicions was ever proved.
Cannibalism. Gein handed out packages he called venison, though he did not hunt deer. Several neighbors who had received them were said to have fallen ill after his arrest, which led some to suspect cannibalism. He denied eating human flesh, and nothing was proved.
1878, July 21: Augusta Gein born in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
About 1900: Augusta marries George Philip Gein.
1902: Henry Gein born.
1906, August 27: Edward Theodore Gein born in La Crosse.
1914 or 1915: The family moves to a farm outside Plainfield.
1940: George Gein dies, aged sixty-six.
1944, May 16: Henry Gein dies after a brush fire on the farm.
1945, December 29: Augusta Gein dies.
1947: Gein begins robbing graves, by his own account.
1954, December 8: Mary Hogan vanishes from her tavern.
1957, November 16: Bernice Worden killed; Gein arrested; the farm searched.
1957, November 20: Gein's confession to both killings announced; Worden buried.
1957, November 21: Arraigned for Worden's murder; pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.
1957, November 23: Admitted to Central State Hospital for observation.
1957, November 25: Two graves exhumed in the Plainfield Cemetery.
1958, January: Found unfit for trial and committed.
1958, March 20: The farmhouse burns.
1958, March 30: The auction.
1968, January 16: Declared competent to stand trial.
1968, March 22: Former sheriff Art Schley dies.
1968, November: Bench trial; guilty of first-degree murder, found insane, recommitted.
1974, June 27: Petition for release denied.
1978: Moved to Mendota Mental Health Institute.
1984, July 26: Dies at Mendota, aged seventy-seven.
2000, June: Headstone stolen.
Two women were shot. One killing was tried, before one judge, in one week, and ended in a verdict that found Gein guilty and insane in consecutive hearings. The graves were never litigated, and only two were ever opened. The first confession was ruled out because of how it was taken. Most of what is said about Ed Gein rests on what was found in that house and on what he chose to tell investigators afterward. Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, who ran their own businesses and were known to everyone around them, are the two people the case is about.