Edward Theodore Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on August 27, 1906, and grew up on an isolated farm outside Plainfield. His father was an alcoholic who died in 1940. His mother Augusta was a fierce religious presence who told her sons that all women outside the family were harlots. His brother Henry died in 1944 while fighting a brush fire on the property, in circumstances that have been questioned since without ever being resolved. Augusta died in December 1945 and Gein was left alone in the farmhouse. He sealed off the rooms she had used and kept them as they were.
To the town he was shy Eddie, the handyman who would fix a fence or sit with your children. He read anatomy texts, pulp accounts of the Nazi camps, and the death notices in the local paper. From about 1947 he began going out to graveyards at night, sometimes with a friend, and taking bodies or parts of them home. He said later that he was trying to understand the female body, and that he wanted to become a woman himself.
On December 8, 1954, he shot Mary Hogan, who ran a tavern at Pine Grove, and took her body home in his truck. Police found blood and a spent .32 casing and no trail. Weeks later a sawmill owner mentioned the disappearance to Gein, who said she was not missing, she was at the farm right now. Nobody followed it up.
On the morning of November 16, 1957, he shot Bernice Worden in her hardware store on Plainfield's main street with a .22 rifle from her own display rack, using a cartridge he had brought with him. He locked the store, took her body away in the store truck, and took the cash register because he wanted to see how it worked. Her son Frank, a deputy sheriff who had been out deer hunting, came back to a locked store with the lights on and blood on the floor. The last sales slip was for half a gallon of antifreeze, and Gein had asked for antifreeze the evening before.
Sheriff Art Schley found Gein at a neighbour's house and drove out to the farm that night. The place had no electricity. By torchlight, in the shed, they found Bernice Worden hanging by the heels, headless and dressed out like a deer. Inside was the rest of it: masks made from women's faces, bowls made from skullcaps, a lampshade, chair seats, a belt of nipples, a shoebox of preserved genitals, skulls on the bedposts, organs in the refrigerator, and a wearable suit of skin. Objects were traced to at least ten women, most of them taken from graves. Gein confessed to two murders and to robbing nine graves, and denied cannibalism and necrophilia.
He was found unfit to stand trial in 1957 and sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Waupun. Ten years later he was judged competent. In November 1968 he was tried for the murder of Bernice Worden and found guilty, and in the second phase of the trial found legally insane, and returned to hospital for the rest of his life. He died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison on July 26, 1984, aged seventy-seven, and was buried in Plainfield beside his family. The farmhouse burned down in an unsolved fire in March 1958, weeks before it was due to be auctioned. His car was sold for $760 to a carnival operator who charged a quarter to look at it.
The case matters out of all proportion to its body count because of what was made of it. Robert Bloch, living sixty miles away, took the mother and the isolated house for Psycho. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre took the furniture and the mask, and The Silence of the Lambs the skin suit. Almost everything the public thinks it knows about Gein has come back to it through those films.