Disclaimer – the following content features graphic descriptions of murder and post mortem mutilation, it is not suitable for sensitive or immature audiences. Discretion is advised.
Background
Edward Theodore Gein was born August 27 1906, in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, United States, to George Philip and Augusta Wilhelmine Gein. He had an older brother Henry, who was five years older, born in 1901.
Augusta is said to have hated her husband, an alcoholic who couldn’t stick to a regular job, finding it hard to keep a job in general. George worked in many places, but not for long. He had previously owned a grocery shop for many years before selling it and moving onto a property with a lot of land – a farm of 155 acres.
Ed’s mother was pretty devout with her religion of the Lutheran persuasion, lecturing her sons about the immorality of the world and how women were insturmwnts for the devil to tempt them, and that she was the only woman who was safe in the arms of the divine.
She would frequently speak from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation, concerning negative topics such as death, murder and retribution. Another thing Augusta would do is keep her sons busy doing chores on the farm, they didn’t have time for socializing like many children as they grow up.
It went as far as punishing her own children if they tried to make friends, either at school, or when they went out anywhere. They were expected to conduct themselves in the proper way, her way. Ed became really shy but would be remembered for being strange in his mannerisms and he would sit laughing to himself.
“She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.”
Ed Gein ~ 1954 – 1957
Deaths in his Immediate Family
His father, George, died in 1940 of heart failure, caused by his alcoholism, aged 66. It was around this time that Henry and Ed would look for odd jobs and work around the local town and the brothers were seen as friendly and reliable. They both worked as handymen often but would take on other roles, even babysitting a few times.
Henry would speak ill of their mother, not only to Ed, but to his girlfriend, a divorced woman and mother of two children. He had told Ed he wanted to move in with her and at one point they ventured into the woods together.
A fire is said to have broken out on the property and by the time Ed raised the alarm and got help, his brother was long dead.
There were marks and bruises over his head that were inconsitent with an accidental death but he was found to have died of heart failure, not from the fire itself. The bruises later helped change the cause of death to death by asphyxiation and no autopsy was performed.
Ed was now alone on the farm with his mother, who had a paralyzing stroke shortly after Henry’s death and Ed took the role of being her sole care provider. In 1945 Ed took his mother out to see someone, named Smith, who reportedly beat a puppy to death in front of them both.
It was not thought to have upset her as much as seeing a female from inside the home shout at Smith to stop beating the puppy before it died. Augusta raged about “Smith’s Harlot” and soon after she suffered another stroke leading her health to decline further, she died in December 1945.
Ed had now lost his one and only friend and companion, the only thing he loved, his mother.
Ed stayed on the farm and worked to try to keep things going as best he could, he was clearly in a deep state of mourning and boarded up all of the areas he shared with his mother and it was around this time he started to become fascinated with cannibals and nazi atrocities, which he would read about veraciously.
He only sold off 80 acres of land that Henry owned and kept the rest for his uses, and at this stage, Ed was withdrawn and nobody had much to say about him. He had distanced himself from the locals it seems.
On the morning of November 16, 1957, hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared. Witnesses had seen the stores truck leaving from behind the store and some locals thought being hunting season, it was perhpas her son, who was an avid hunter.
Her son, the deputy sheriff Frank Worden, entered the store at around 5pm to find the store’s cash register open and blood stains on the floor. It was then that it was revealed that Ed Gein had gone to buy antifreeze, it was his receipt the last thing to have transpired at the store.
A search warrant was given for the farm and it was her own son, deputy sheriff Worden, that found her body decapitated, upside down by her legs, with a crossbar at her ankles and ropes at her wrists. She was said to have been emptied like a deer.
It turns out she was shot first, the mutilated after her death (indicated by lack of healing of the injury).
Searching the house, police would find the following things while Ed, now sat in custody for murder:
- Whole human bones and bone fragments,
- A wastebasket made out of human skin,
- Chair seats made out of human skin,
- Skulls on Ed’s bed posts,
- Female skulls, some with their skull caps having been removed,
- Bowls made from human skull caps,
- A corset made out of a womans torso skin,
- Leggings made of human leg skins,
- Masks made from female face skins,
- Mary Hogan’s face in a paper bag,
- Mary Hogan’s skull in a box,
- Bernice Worden’s head found in a bag,
- Bernice Worden’s heart in a bag in front of the stove,
- 9 vulvae in a shoe box,
- Girls clothes and two teen aged girls vulvas,
- A belt made of human female nipples,
- Four noses,
- A pair of lips on the curtain strings,
- A lampshade made from a human face.
Ed had nothing to hide at this stage and confessed to everything he was charged with, graverobbing, murder, mutilation and abuse of corpses and human remains. He admitted to using the recently dead and buried women, who resembled his mother in some way to make the grim furnitures.
He plead not guilty, by reason of insanity and during testing, Ed was found to be schizophrenic, thus unfit for trial. He was sent to Central State Hospital, a maximum-security facility in Waupun, Wisconsin, and later transferred to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
A trial went ahead for the murders of Bernice and Mary Hogan, though he said that Bernice’s death had been an accident and that he did murder Mary.
Much of his land and possessions were destroyed and sold off and when he died of respiratory failure, complications of lung cancer, aged 77, his grave was robbed of its headstone, later found and kept in storage. His grave is unmarked, but it can be located as where it has always been, in the cemetery.
His shocking story has been the inspiration for many characters in TV and movies, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the character Leatherface, Bloody Face, from American Horror Story, Buffalo Bill, from the Hannibal series to name but a few.
“I had a compulsion to do it.”
Ed Gein ~ 1957
If you want to learn more about this case, I watched this documentary, on Youtube, but proceed with caution, it is more shocking to see images, which are of course, not for sensitive and immature viewers.
I do not own the youtube videos I share, so rights are to the makers of those.
Maves Place Mysteries 