'Edward Gein had two faces. One he showed to the neighbors. The other he showed only to the dead.'

Steven Points – ‘Daily Journal’.

The shadow of the monstrous mother had divided his mind forever. There was no escaping it, the die cast for each and every crime he ever committed.

*

The late Edward ‘Ed’ Theodore Gein achieved, through the sheer awfulness of his crimes, the embodiment of a real-life ghoul. A scrawny, diminutive fellow, with a face the jaundiced colour of old wax, sunken cheeks perpetually grizzled with several days of beard growth, he had committed some quite horrific crimes. The majority of these took place in the 1940s and 50s at his remote, clapboard farmhouse in the small, rural community of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Edward 'Ed' Gein.

The central region of Wisconsin is the epitome of the US Midwest. It is so flat and featureless that even the state guidebook calls it "nondescript." It has been more evocatively described as America’s “great dead heart,” with “bleak grassy plains scattered with lonely farmsteads and small towns devoid of life.” During the summer months, places such as Wittenberg, Rural and Harrisville are hot and dusty and have their share of wandering, emaciated dogs, closed-down movie theatres, grubby diners and gas stations with Coke machines standing sentry out the front.

The town of aptly named Plainfield in Waushara County has a population never exceeding eight hundred, and lies between Wisconsin Rapids and Wautoma along Highway 73. Plainfield is the state’s agricultural epicentre. Raising a few livestock or growing patches of rye in the stony soil, some farmers scratch for a living, eking out their existence in shacks with sagging roofs and weather-blasted walls.

Other, more stalwart farm buildings are large, scattered and prosperous. Every mile or so one will pass a snug-looking farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby will be the ubiquitous red barn with a rounded roof and a tall silo packed full of golden grain.

Wisconsin is the quintessential Midwest and boasts 54,000 square miles of rustling corn.

As reported in The Waushara News, the state has a darker side: “It is a wild country that could hide violence for years and perhaps never give up its secrets.” One could drive by such an old place, set deep within the 'Badger State’ and with the accumulated knowledge of horror movies seen and novels read, easily conjure the image of the lurking madman and his meat-cleaver, merrily committing atrocity after atrocity, secure in his isolated domain.

So where do the ideas for all these books and movies come from and are some based on fact? Shades of Norman Bates, the gaunt, retiring, archetypal mama’s-boy-turned serial killer of young females in Robert Bloch’s genre-defining book, Psycho, and subsequently immortalized on celluloid by Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, it is no coincidence that Bloch was resident at the time of the Gein case, in the town of Weyauwega, less than 30 miles east of Plainfield.

What of the hulking ‘Leather-face’ - the demented, simpleton/killing-machine of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who along with his equally insane family slashed a wide-reaching swathe through the annals of horror film-making?

One can go down the line here: The Silence Of The Lambs, William Lustig’s Maniac, gritty old gems with classically colourful titles like Three On a Meat Hook, Motel Hell and Deranged. Most of us could surely think of more.

The character of Francis Dolarhyde in Thomas Harris’ exceptional novel Red Dragon, and the emotionally crippling interaction between this killer and his tyrannical grandmother owes much to the story of Ed Gein.

All these works, masterful and exploitative alike, can be attributed to the misdeeds of one man and the gory legend that has been woven around him will undoubtedly endure for many years to come. His was a world of zombies, cadavers, deaths heads. Yet, how did such a man evolve, metamorphosising from an innocent toddler into a cannibal and necrophile, forever to reside among the pantheon of the world’s worst homicidal bogeymen?

*

On Sunday, 26 August 1906, Augusta Gein - praying to The Almighty for a daughter - instead gave birth to a son in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She named the newborn Edward. Her stern Lutheran upbringing and marriage to weak-willed drunkard George Gein had helped develop in her a loathing of males. 

Augusta managed the family store almost single-handedly because her husband spent most of his time and money in the local bars. She vowed that Edward would never be like the lustful, godless men she saw around her and as the child grew he would come to learn that crossing his mother had its costs. Even his father had learned to give her a wide berth at times. The fanatically religious Augusta had her booze-addled husband exactly where she wanted him, cowed and obedient. Ed and his elder brother, Henry, would also behave subordinately or face her wrath.

In 1913, the Gein’s started a new life as dairy farmers. Both boys were taught early on that women - excluding Augusta of course - should generally be dismissed as “painted harlots,” even “whores.”  It is small wonder then where Ed’s negative and confused impression of women stemmed from.

From a raising aspect, a child who is brought up in a home where his parents yell and scream, hit each other, and hit their children, will experience these outbursts as 'normal'. It is ‘normal’ to the child because he or she has little or nothing to compare it with. As far as Ed was concerned, this was the world and the only world he knew.

Up until the age of sixteen, school was Ed’s only contact with others his own age. As fast as he found a new friend, his mother would object. In her eyes everyone was a threat to the moral purity of her son, so Ed withdrew from contact with other children. Those who remember him report that he was a “feeble and shy” boy, self-conscious of his small build, exceptionally so of a fleshy growth that lent his right eye a permanently “droop."

Many serial killers, including those who indulged in cannibalism, Gein's was an isolated childhood, ripe breeding ground for fantasy.

Farming alongside his mother and father in the fields around their home and occasionally playing with his elder brother were his only means of socialising. He also professed an aversion to blood or killing – common sights in Plainfield, where hunting and livestock farming were a way of life. Yet at night, under his bedcovers by lamplight, he devoured horror comics and books depicting murder and violence. It was the one subject guaranteed get him talking. When he wasn’t kneeling before his crazed zealot of a mother, having scripture not just quoted but screamed at him, Ed would silently rejoice when allowed to repair to the secret world that awaited him in his bedroom.

In effect, his personality was splitting. Ed Gein had two worlds; the harshness of his reality under the rule of Augusta, and the clandestine haven he sought for relief. In his bedroom things were different. He wished he could stay there forever, engaging his fertile mind in tales of vampire bats thirsting for warm arteries and mindless horrors shambling after their human prey, instead of having mother to contend with.

George Gein was also retreating further into himself. When Augusta finally succeeded in goading him beyond endurance he would drink even harder, sometimes lashing out at her as Ed and his brother Henry looked on. With perhaps a touch of theatre, Augusta would drop to her knees hysterically praying for her husband’s death.

Her prayers were answered in 1940 when George Gein died, a broken invalid, aged sixty-six.

In the spring of 1944, Ed and brother Henry had been fighting a fire near their farm when they became separated. A search party was mounted and strangely, the younger Ed was able to lead them straight to the spot where Henry lay dead. Though there was bruising on Henry’s forehead, which Ed was unable or unwilling to account for, his death was later attributed to asphyxiation by smoke.

Shortly after her elder son’s fatal “accident,” Augusta Gein collapsed with a stroke. Over the next year Ed nursed her back to health as best he could, but God intervened and she died in December 1945.

Ed didn’t know what to do. Suddenly, at the age of thirty-nine, he was in an environment he barely understood. No mother around to mentally castrate or guide him was something he had never known. It had always been Augusta in the hot seat, taking control of his every decision. He could not and did not cope. The coldness, violence and repression of his childhood had insidiously twisted in his brain. Now all he had were his fantasies and with the omnipotent matriarch of the house out of the way, these would engulf and sink him.

The townsfolk were as supportive as they could be of “poor Eddie.” The man had lost a father, a brother and a mother in a comparatively short space of time and was all alone up at that old farmhouse. What they didn’t know was that "Eddie" had his mind on things other than mourning the deaths in his immediate family.

Following the disapproving Augusta Gein’s demise, Ed's crime magazine and horror comic collection swelled. Titles like The Vault of Horror, and Tales from the Crypt paramount among them. Anything featuring horned demons, blood-crazed ogres and rotting zombies heaving themselves out of the damp earth to visit untold horrors upon unsuspecting, scantily clad girls, he hoarded.

Some of his favourites were illustrated and sensationalised publications about Nazi war criminals, bloodthirsty pirates terrorising the high seas, cannibal tribes and voodoo head shrinkers. Gein would lap this stuff up, spending hours laying on his mattress fantasising about all these wonderfully gruesome stories.

Ilsa Koche, the notorious SS death camp supervisor, portrayed in Ed’s magazines as a curvaceous blonde, suitably-attired in tight-fitting uniform, knee high black leather boots and armed with a large whip, particularly thrilled him. Significant were stories where the buxom Nazi “she-bitch,” would upholster her colleagues’ furniture with human skins. 

The Dirty Dame of Dachau – “She got her kicks from the corpses of the men she had once loved. Now I was the chosen victim for her passion,” was a typically trite sentiment.

Another of Ed’s heroines was Irma Grese, a teenage SS officer who revelled in her task of despatching concentration camp victims - women and children - to the gas chambers. And, if this kind of material was not enough to pollute his fertile imagination, he also closely studied the exploits of 19th century Edinburgh grave robbers Burke and Hare, avidly cross-referencing everything contained therein with the thick tomes on human anatomy he had also amassed.

Without the restrictions placed on him by his mother, he could now at last embrace his treasured stories of sex-spiced sadism and pulp horror as often as he wished - and toy with the idea of actually doing some of the things he read about, right here in his farmhouse. Nobody would know.
 
By the 50s, Plainfield was a cluster of wood framed houses, decrepit convenience stores, assorted town-establishments and insalubrious watering-holes; for like much of Wisconsin at that time, Plainfield did little to pump the necessary through America’s “great dead heart.” 

Ed Gein had spent his life here. Now in his forties and still a virgin, his existence was markedly different from that of the more outgoing local men. Most of them had girlfriends or wives. Gein could only stand on the sidelines and watch. With his tousled crop of greasy hair, finely shaved away at the back and sides, rarely freshly bathed, his check shirt buttoned right to the top and bundled up in his dirty hunting-jacket, visually he cut quite an undesirable figure.

To the casual observer he seemed quite content with his unassuming life, and he was, having kept his fantasy-world in check until now. But he had cracked. Nobody knew madness dwelt within the sloppily presented little man who showed up in town from time to time behind the wheel of his battered pick-up truck. Returning the odd greeting from somebody who recognised him as he ambled up the street to buy his groceries, he would head for a solitary beer at Hogan’s Tavern, or stop by Worden’s Hardware Store. This was the routine, established and seldon changed.

Though Ed Gein habitually frequented both of these establishments, he didn’t show up around Hogan’s so often these days, not since the proprietress, a fiery middle-aged woman named Mary Hogan had disappeared one bitterly cold afternoon in December 1954.

A local farmer named Seymour Lester had come through the door of Hogan’s Tavern that day with every intention of whetting his whistle. He found the place deserted. After calling for service, then for Mary, he noticed a large splotch of coagulating blood by the door leading to her private quarters. The message quickly filtered through that something was wrong and Seymour Lester made for the nearest telephone to call for help. 

When County Sheriff Harold S. Thompson arrived with his deputies, an immediate search of the building was made. Of Mary Hogan there was no sign, although her car was still parked out the back in its usual spot.

Closer inspection of the pool of blood soaking into the scratchy pine flooring revealed some odd “streaking” patterns. Settling on his haunches, Thompson closely inspected. It looked as if something weighty had been dragged through it. Nearby was an expended .32-calibre cartridge.

A sticky red trail snaked across the dusty floor and out the back door, where it ceased abruptly beside a set of tyre tracks. It did not require Hercule Poirot to ascertain what had happened here. Someone had bagged the tavern-owner as one might a hunted animal and spirited her away. At first glance it could have been a robbery gone wrong but this failed to explain why nothing, aside from Mary herself, seemed to be missing. Even the cash register was untouched.

There was speculation that Mary Hogan had a questionable past. Some of the locals rumoured that she was once a notorious Chicago madam, with organised crime connections; that she had purchased her bar with the proceeds of her illicit escapades back in ‘The Windy City’. Chinese whispers.

Had the mob come for her? Not quite.

The tough-talking, boisterous Mary Hogan, who sprinkled her every sentence with only the choicest of expletives, had made quite an impact on the conservative - and for the most part deeply religious - farming families of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Some men, unbeknownst to their disapproving wives, rather enjoyed the seedy aura of Hogan’s Tavern. The reputation of the woman running things added to its murky appeal.

Plainfield, Wisconsin. A quiet farming community, until the discoveries at Gein's farmhouse.

Whenever Ed Gein, who played the role of town-handyman to a tee, stopped by for a beer after a day ploughing the fields, repairing doors and painting fences, he sat alone and stared at raven-haired Mary Hogan.

She fascinated him. Mother had warned him about women like this. They were bad. That’s why he was so taken by her. Augusta Gein would most certainly not approve of her son’s infatuation - but she wasn’t around any more.

Despite the Hogan situation remaining unsolved, life went on in Plainfield and Ed Gein continued to materialise at Worden’s Hardware. A devout Methodist in her late fifties, Bernice Worden, the store’s owner was a big bosomed, matronly woman who felt sorry for Gein. He looked such a lonely man, a little simple even, with his slow speech and the facial tic he had developed somewhere along the way. But he was always unfailingly pleasant. Bernice thought he was all right.

Ed clearly felt similarly as he once asked Bernice out on a date, suggesting they go ice-skating. She didn’t go but thought enough of the offer to mention the incident to her son, Frank, who chuckled.

Saturday, 16 November 1957 was the start of Wisconsin’s nine-day deer hunting season and most of the town’s male inhabitants were out in the woods with their rifles. Snow-blown Plainfield had a deserted, ghost town feel to it that day. All the stores were closed, except Worden’s Hardware. Bernice Worden made the fateful decision to keep her place open.

It was 8.30 am when Ed Gein shuffled into her store, clutching an empty glass jug. Bernice smiled at him and he smiled back. Ed said his jug needed filling with anti-freeze. Bernice obliged. He didn’t seem to want to stop smiling. He wasn’t saying anything, seemingly he had nothing to say, but he wasn’t leaving either. He stared for a while longer, as if looking right through her, then said goodbye and left. When he came back inside moments later, he was cradling a .22 calibre-hunting rifle.

Frank Worden, son of Bernice, was a deputy sheriff. He helped his mother build the Worden family business following the death of his father. It was shortly before dusk as he pulled his car into Plainfield’s gas station. The attendant there had something to tell him.

The man had observed the Wordens' delivery truck driving away from the hardware store earlier that morning. Mrs Worden’s presence behind the wheel was not confirmed. Rather, it seemed as though the vehicle’s driver was male. Concerned because there was no reason why his mother should leave the hardware store in the middle of a business day, unless she was seriously unwell, Frank headed over there.

The door to Worden’s was locked, however the lights were on. Frank knew in his bones that the store would prove to be empty.

Worden drove home to fetch his key to the building. Upon returning he let himself inside, calling his mother’s name as he did so. He was starting to get a sinking feeling inside, his natural cop’s antenna was up. Moving slowly through the store, service revolver drawn, he noticed the cash register was absent, yanked from its moorings on the counter. There was more. As with the Hogan scene three years earlier, in the shadows just beyond the glare of an overhead light, was a puddle of blood.

As burly county sheriff, Arthur 'Art' Schley, travelled through fifteen miles of gathering darkness from police headquarters in Wautoma, to Plainfield, he thought of how anxious and upset young deputy Worden had sounded on the telephone. He had never known Frank so distraught. By the time Schley arrived at the store, Frank Worden, who had been pacing back and forth like a caged animal, was about ready to explode. “He’s done something to her!” he exclaimed.

When asked by the sheriff to elaborate Worden said; “Ed Gein.”

He had always thought Gein was an oddball and believed he had been stalking his mother. Gein would sit parked in his truck across the street, staring intently at Bernice through the storefront window. He just knew Gein was in some way involved because he had discovered a handwritten sales slip for two quarts of antifreeze dated that very day and made out in Gein’s name. Gein had also been in the store a lot recently, enquiring at to how much various items cost, but not actually buying anything. Today he had.
Sheriff Schley, Frank Worden and another deputy headed for Ed Gein’s house.

Gein’s movements that day are well documented.

At around 10 o’clock in the morning, sawmill owner, Elmo Ueeck, shoots a deer on farmland belonging to Gein. As this is illegal, Ueeck deems it prudent to turn tail with his kill and put some distance between himself and the spot where the animal was slain.

It is on the road, with his quickly cooling prize lashed to the hood of his car, that Ueeck notices Ed Gein’s pickup hurtling towards him. Sure that Eddie will be angry if he suspects him of having killed on his property, Elmo Ueeck squirms in his seat as the two vehicles pass one another. He is a little surprised when Gein, seemingly oblivious to the dead animal attached to the front of Ueeck’s car, gives him a wave as he goes by.

Ueeck later remarks on the determination he noted on Ed Gein’s face. Ueeck thinks he looks very dedicated to getting home - fast.

As lunchtime arrives and Ueeck experiences pangs of guilt for taking advantage of Ed’s good nature, he drives out to the Gein farm to admit what he has done and apologise.

Ed is out in the front yard with his car up on jacks. He grunts a distracted greeting to Elmo as he busies himself with the task of changing his snow tyres back to summer treads. Elmo frowns at the spectacle. What in the hell is Eddie Gein up to? There are a couple of inches of snow on the ground, and a lot more on the way.

Still, it isn’t really any of his business and he ploughs ahead with his rehearsed apology for what happened earlier. He discovers Ed to be not in the least concerned. It's fine, no problem, says Gein. A deer is a deer and Ed lets him know it's not an issue.

Ueeck next attempts to add levity to the exchange but Ed isn't biting. It is clear he has things to be getting along with. Elmo Ueeck leaves.

Later, his neighbours, teenagers Bob Hill and his sister Darlene, visit Ed.

Young Bob has become something of a friend to the older man and is the only person ever invited into Eddie’s private lair to view all his books and magazines with him.

An inquisitive youngster, Hill has always been very interested in Ed’s things; especially reading the stuff about shrunken heads. Delighted with Bob’s positive response Gein once showed him something “very special.” It turned out that Ed Gein had his own shrunken heads. He even produced one from a paper bag, for his friend Bob to see. The object was shrivelled and purple, barely identifiable as human, its features swollen and distorted. Sparse wisps of what looked like hair sprouted from the tiny cranium. Bob, a little shaken, was very impressed by just how “real” it looked.

This particular afternoon the Hills are round at Eddie’s place asking for a lift into town so they can buy a new car battery. After rapping at the door several times, Gein finally emerges. His manner is brisk and his movements somewhat erratic as he sweeps the door shut behind him. He comes down the steps to greet them. Both notice that Eddie’s hands and the arms of his shirt are covered in blood, as is a leather apron he wears. There is even a fine spray of it across his cheeks. It reminds Bob a little of a Red Indian’s war paint.

Ed Gein's house.

Gein lets them both know that he is just done with dressing a deer. Now he is finished, he is happy to help out. After stepping back inside the dark confines of his farmhouse to sluice himself clean of all that blood, he re-emerges and gestures for them to get in his car.

As he drives, the pair ruminate on the strangeness of Eddie dressing out a slaughtered animal, when he had always professed to feel most queasy at the thought of butchery. The very sight of blood had him feeling faint. Or so they had believed.

When Gein returns from town sometime later with the young brother and sister in tow, it is near dark, extremely cold, and all are feeling quite ravenous. It is Eddie’s good fortune then that Irene Hill, Bob and Darlene’s mother, invites him to join them for supper. Gein appears most grateful. It has been a busy day for him.

As he sits at the Hills’ table, finishing off a steaming plate of meat and vegetables, there is a knock at the door. It is a neighbour of the Hills' and she is here to let them know that Mrs Worden has disappeared, under suspicious circumstances no less.

Calmly placing his dirty dishes in the sink, Gein opines: “It must have been someone pretty cold-blooded.”

Adventurous Bob Hill excitedly suggests that Eddie drive them into town again, to get the low-down on the Worden affair. Gein offers his customary insipid grin and says why not. As the pair cross the freezing yard to Ed’s car, Officer Dan Chase and Deputy Poke Spees, both of whom are interested in speaking with Edward Gein, intercept them.

Having earlier been up to Gein’s farm, they had found it locked and empty. They knew Gein often visited with the Hills, so that’s where they came next. Standing beside Spees’ squad car, the officer asks Ed Gein what he has been doing that day. Gein tells him a lie. Spees asks him again and notices the story conflicts with the original. Clearly Gein is not an accomplished liar, barely able to remember what he had been saying from one moment to the next.

When the inconsistencies in the two versions of how Ed Gein spent his day are tossed back at him, the little man seems almost to sag where he stands. It is as though some dark, guardian spirit, nauseated with its host’s incompetent attempts to deceive has given up and departed.

“Somebody framed me,” Gein mumbles.
“Framed you for what?” is the incredulous response.
“Well, about Mrs Worden.”
“What about Mrs Worden,” Officer Chase asks, levelly.
“Well she’s dead ain’t she?”
“Dead. How’d you know she’s dead?”
“I heard it,” Gein retorts, hooking a thumb in the direction of the Hill‘s house. “They told me in there.”

Ed Gein is placed under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Bernice Worden. Tucked into the backseat of the squad car, his gaze is a downward one. The game is up. The cops are about to make the most appalling discovery of their careers.

*

Sheriff Schley rendezvoused with Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster up at the Gein farm just as soon as he got wind of the arrest. Forcing the door to the kitchen extension at the rear of the property the two men let themselves into Gein’s domain. It was the smell that hit them first, an overpowering stench of spoiled food and decaying matter. There was something else, another odour Schley recognized from his occasional visits to the county morgue, the smell of death.

The police suspected they might find a body here. There had been an awful lot of blood at Worden’s Hardware. Unbelievable clutter surrounded them in Ed Gein's home. Casting the beams from their flashlights across the dark room, the two investigators moved carefully to avoid tripping over something. Negotiating their way through a sea of fermenting, half-eaten cans of food, filthy utensils, bundles of old clothing and mildewy sacks of grain, they were ever mindful of hazards. Not only was there a jumble of farming implements but also a lot of other sharp edges in the form of disused and disarticulated farming machinery. A tumble onto one of these could split open a head.

Then Art Schley felt something bump against his shoulder. The sudden contact startled him and he whirled round. There in the jittery glare of his flashlight was something a lot worse than expected. Suspended from the rafters of Ed Gein’s kitchen extension like a twisted marionette, was what at first glance appeared to be a huge slab of meat with arms and legs; the decapitated body of a woman in her mid-to-late fifties. Bernice Worden.

In addition to her head having been hacked off directly above the shoulder blades, there was a gaping fissure extending from the vagina and culminating between her breasts. Bernice Worden had been gutted. Just as a hunter peels open the belly of his kill and removes the glistening innards, Ed Gein had done the same with the former hardware store owner.

Closer inspection of the corpse revealed further abominations. In the faltering light the corpse’s skin had a pale, waxy hue, like cottage cheese. It contrasted starkly with the deep red lips of the horrendous abdominal cleft across Mrs Worden’s torso. Glistening viscera pushed itself out through the opening.

Bernice Worden had been hung from what looked like a tree limb. Sharpened to a wicked point at each end it was rammed through the sinew of one ankle; the other end secured with chicken wire to a penetrative slash below the opposite heel, effectively splaying her legs. Rope entwined each wrist, keeping the arms rigid and at her sides. The killer had wanted plenty of room to manoeuvre as he sliced his way through Mrs Worden’s body. What would Frank Worden make of this?

Stumbling outside to escape the fetid conditions of the Gein homestead the two men stood in the snow and struggled to control their revulsion. It was Schoephoerster who made radio contact with reinforcements.

There was no real sense of danger here, all the murdering had been done and the man of the hour was in police custody. The two men just did not wish to cope with this alone. Both commented on the pervasive air of evil surrounding the farmhouse, and both feared there was more to come. They did not yet know the half of it.

With detectives and more police officers on the way Schley and Schoephoerster resolved to enter Ed Gein’s house once more, to look for Mrs Worden’s head.

Unable to locate this anywhere in the immediate vicinity, they began sifting through the revolting detritus of Ed’s kitchen and beyond.

They noted that for some reason the kitchen-sink had been filled with sand. There was a row of ancient dentures aligned on a sideboard as one might display a fine collection of porcelain. Stacks upon stacks of true crime magazines and comics, many warped by damp and time, spilled from boxes and cascaded from shelves.

Once Gein’s house had been well lit and there were several other deputies and investigators on the case, the search continued. There was a lot more in this kitchen than at first met the eye, such as several human skulls, some with clots of scalp and dirty hair still attached. Most of these were fully intact, stashed amidst the squalor. A few had been sawed in two, rendered into gothic food receptacles - soup bowls and plates.

Strewn about like strange treasures, were swatches of mouldering flesh and bone fragments. The stinking chaos of the kitchen would be replicated throughout the house, with further indicators of Gein’s dementia being uncovered each step of the way.

Officers were shaken to find that many of Gein’s home furnishings were fashioned from a soft, leathery material that looked like human skin. It had been used to line the seats of chairs and make lampshades. Bracelets and belts - one with female nipples grafted onto it – consisted of similar stretchy tendrils.

There was a wastepaper basket constructed from flesh and bone and a tanned skin hunting-knife sheath, a box of Quaker Oats which, rather than containing the product advertised on the packet, was found to contain hardened globs of brain matter. “This is just too horrible. Too horrible for words” Sheriff Schley recalled muttering.

When it seemed as though things could not get much worse, officers searching Gein’s bedroom were shocked to find a wall devoted to various hanging pockets of skin. Up close they turned out to be people’s faces. These "death-masks" were mounted like trophies. One looked very familiar to investigators.

It seemed the riddle of the missing tavern owner was finally solved, Mary Hogan winding up here in Ed Gein’s farmhouse, reduced to a severed face.

Boxes were piled throughout the house, some containing relatively innocuous items; bloated sheaves of ancient newspaper and anatomy books for the most part. Yet there were other items, such as body parts and flesh-cuttings. Paper bags were filled with sliced-off lips and noses and a dusty cache of vaginas. Unfolding an aged suit, officers were assailed by the meaty aroma of freshly excised internal organs, including a ropey mass of entrails congealing in their juices, belonging, the rightly presumed, to Bernice Worden. Her heart was stashed inside a blood-caked sack by the stove.

Then they found the dead woman’s head. It had been stuffed into an old feed sack and was spattered with dirt and dried blood. An unpleasant adornment consisted of two steel hooks, driven into each eardrum, with a piece of twine attached.  It looked like Gein had planned to hang this up somewhere around the house, maybe in the master bedroom, alongside his faces.

In the ground floor hallway, investigators came to a sealed-off room. Thick planks of wood had been nailed across the door. Something dreadful must surely lay within so they prized the boards away to gain access.

Rather than beholding a family of grinning corpses in various stages of decomposition, seated around a dining table, as one might expect to find in one of the many "splatter" movies later inspired by Ed Gein's crimes, the living-room beyond was exceptionally neat, tidy and apparently free of the macabre.

Every item of furniture had been caringly arrayed, a cluster of ornaments graced the mantelpiece, and a large, centrally placed rug dominated the immaculate living room, marred only by a thick, universal layer of dust. This was a room placed off-limits many years ago. It had been Augusta Gein’s pride and joy, her special place, while she was alive, and turned it into a shrine by her youngest son when she was not.

Elsewhere in the house, new horrors waited. Captain Schoephoerster held aloft a crudely rendered garment, made entirely from skin. It had been cured and looked like it was supposed to be some kind of vest. It came from the upper body of a woman and boasted a pair of large, sagging breasts. There were also several lengths of similarly treated “leggings.”

As unpalatable as it was to imagine, a naked Ed Gein had dressed up in his makeshift woman-suit, parading around his filthy den and out in the backyard beneath the glow of a non-judging moon.

Just how many dead females all these body parts accounted for was a question that went unanswered until all remnants had been catalogued and packaged in plastic sacks and dispatched to Goult’s Funeral Home in Plainfield. It looked like around nine or ten women. The question now was how did Ed Gein come to have all these dead bodies in his house?

*

While law enforcement was taking his farmhouse apart, Ed Gein was detained at the Wautoma County jail. A couple of officers kept watch over the prisoner. Assuming he must be completely insane, they had to ensure he didn't do anything silly like commit suicide.

They were waiting for Sheriff Schley to return from the scene to interview the prisoner. Everyone was keen on hearing some - any - explanation as to why this man had done what he had.

Ed Gein would be questioned solidly for twelve hours, without his attorney present. He did his best to avoid communication, remaining quiet and humble throughout. He did explain that it was not his wish to inconvenience anybody; he just didn’t want to talk about it right now.

On Monday, 18 November, the day after his arrest, Ed Gein broke his silence. In the interim it had been conclusively ascertained that the butchered carcass of what had once been a living, breathing Bernice Worden, was shot with a .22 calibre rifle. The bullet had ploughed into the side of her head, exiting through the rear. Unlike the Hogan crime scene, this time Gein had taken the spent cartridge along with him.

Slumping in his chair, not wanting to look his questioners in the eye, he admitted that he had shot and killed Bernice Worden, right there in her store. He revealed how he had deliberately waited for an opportunity to murder her, which came when he learned that most of the male population of Plainfield would be away for the day on a mass hunting expedition.

He found Bernice alone in the store and after a moment’s deliberation outside in the street, went back inside and shot her dead. He dragged her corpse out the back entrance to where her truck was parked and pushed her inside, then covered her with a tarpaulin. He drove the truck to a secluded pine forest, within walking distance as he planned to travel back to the store to retrieve his own vehicle on foot. 

Gein returned to the forest in his sedan and loaded the still bleeding body into the car. Leaving Mrs Worden’s truck abandoned in a nearby grove of trees, he made the journey back to his house, where he would have privacy with his newly acquired plaything. 

District Attorney Earl Killeen, who joined in the questioning of Ed Gein, was busy relating details of the confession to a ravenous news media. Purely speculatively – and erroneously - the District Attorney informed that some of the remains taken from Gein’s house might have been “young people.”

Later, in the interview-room, this time with Kileen himself posing the questions, Ed Gein stated that his memory of the killing of Bernice Worden, as with its gory aftermath, was spotty because he had been in “a daze at the time.”

He related how he had trussed and suspended Mrs Worden’s corpse upside down, opened her up with a sharp knife and placed a steel bucket underneath her for the blood to drain into. He then poured this into a freshly dug hole and filled it in with soil.

When later pressed to reveal the origin of the voluminous collection of human artifacts recovered from his house, Gein was emphatic that the only person he had ever murdered was Bernice Worden.

Despite the fact that her face had been hanging on Ed’s bedroom wall, he never admitted culpability for the killing of Mary Hogan.

Gein’s explanation for the rest of his horrible totems was attributable to several years’ worth of plundering Plainfield Cemetery of its graves. These night-time trysts had become an overwhelming addiction and he found himself drawn there more and more often. Avidly scanning local newspapers for the obituary columns, Gein would seek out any recent female burial, then loaded his digging implements, usually a pick and shovel, into his car and went over to the cemetery.

With a trace  of pride, Ed told how he was able to unearth the recently interred corpse and place it in his car with a minimum of fuss, explaining that he “back-filled” the hole to create the illusion of the grave having been undisturbed - “apple-pie order.” Though most would construe this as common sense to avoid detection, Gein described it as something special he did.

Regaling his captors with his corpse-stealing exploits, he said that sometimes he was “too nervous” and could not go through with it. Most times though he did, and had lost count of how many bodies he made off with.

If a question was too difficult for him to answer, he sought refuge in what was quickly becoming the familiar excuse of being in a “daze.”

When asked if he ever sexually molested any of the female cadavers back at his farmhouse, Ed was emphatic. No, never! He found this notion abhorrent not because they were dead and decomposing but because they “smelled to bad.”

Gein was quizzed about the way Bernice Worden had been dressed “just like a deer and everything.”  Why do this? Had he ever dabbled in cannibalism? Was there any possibility that he consumed the flesh of the dead?

He denied all this, saying he just "messed around" with the bodies. Nothing sexual, just, experimental. No, he had not consumed human flesh for any reason at all, be it for “sex purposes” or any other. If he was hungry, he preferred apple-pie topped with ice cream. Eating people just was not his thing. The authenticity of his claims however, are suspect as by his own admission, he was operating through some weird mental fog during these times when reliable recall was virtually nonexistent.

The fact that there was a substantial amount of human offal, seemingly in preparation for something, and the treatment afforded to Mrs Worden’s mutilated corpse, gutted like a prize kill, suggests that Gein may well have been planning to cannibalise her. What of all the other bits and pieces of the dead scattered about his home? Was everything accounted for or had some gone into the demented killer’s belly?

Touching on Gein’s childhood in an attempt at finding out what had gone wrong, detectives had him recount one of his earliest memories; a scene of violence that took place behind his parent’s store, back in La Crosse.

The small boy had watched as his mother and father entered an old tin shed. Curious, he sneaked across to the dilapidated building and peered inside. What he saw there rooted him to the spot. An intoxicating cocktail of fear, revulsion and grim fascination hooked him.

Inside the slaughtering shed, George Gein was in the process of hauling a rope over a hanging beam. Attached to it, bucking and writhing, was a trussed pig. Ed watched, mesmerised, as his father steadied the squealing creature with both hands. Augusta, the business end of all Gein family dealings, stepped forward. Clutching the biggest butcher knife young Eddie had ever laid eyes on, she neatly slit open the thrashing pig’s belly, using the blade to expertly extract the entrails; yet another display of his mother’s pervasive power, and there was a lot of blood.

As Ed Gein relived this most potent memory for his quizzers, he was able to conjure every last detail. He recalled the “long leather apron spattered with blood and slime” worn by Augusta Gein, the great white matriarch. In that moment she had seemed impossibly huge to him, a wild, unstoppable force, the ultimate representation of his mother, puissant and awesome. The pig incident left him feeling giddy with fear and elation. And mother was at the heart of it all.

On Monday, 18 November 1957, another cold and gloomy day, Edward Gein was first charged with a crime; the theft of the Worden cash register. The next day, under polygraph examination, he was questioned by sheriffs from Portage County regarding the disappearance of Mary Hogan. Gein still would not accept responsibility for her death. He was also interviewed by a couple of La Crosse-based detectives who wanted to talk about a missing fifteen-year-old girl named Evelyn Hartley.

Again, Gein denied having anything to do with the disappearance. The next day police charged him with Hogan’s murder anyway, along with that of Bernice Worden.

By this time the press was running amok. The wide-scale horror the case engendered left not just North America but the whole world in little doubt about the dark doings up at the Gein place. And of course with a horror story of this magnitude, there was plenty of room for hyperbole.

Some said that between 50 and 100 bodies had been pulled out of Gein’s “murder house” and that the “Plainfield Butcher,” as he had been dubbed, had even distributed parcels of flesh to the good folk in town. What exactly these people had thought of the dubious-looking offerings from Ed Gein went unreported.

Reporters made amateur attempts to look at all the missing persons cases around Wisconsin over the last ten or twenty years. Then they started naming Ed Gein as the prime suspect. In the vast majority of these cases, such assertions were without foundation.

This would become a favourite tool of the press and be echoed throughout the years whenever a sensational murder series was uncovered. From the Ted Bundy cross-country rampage, the terrible crypt in the crawlspace of John Wayne Gacy’s ranch-style home in Chicago, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where the bland edifice of number 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester had hidden what Fred West had been up to for the last 30 years, the popular media seemed to thrive on the idea of even more bodies: The murderer had not killed enough, he must have murdered more!

Often, certainly in the above cases, they probably had, but there was no direct evidence linking Gein to the killings of anybody but Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden.

Returning to Gein’s grave robbing now that the murder charges had been dealt with, the police focused on a list Gein provided, a vague guide to which tombs he had tampered with. When detectives later spoke to the sexton of Plainfield Town Cemetery, they were told quite firmly that it just would not have been possible to accomplish all of Gein’s alleged achievements if he were just one man acting alone.

Confronted with this, Gein finally conceded that there had been another man involved. Someone he tentatively named as “Gus.” This mysterious character was never located. He may have been invented by Gein, despite the sexton’s resolute stance that Gein had to have been aided on such trips.

Gein’s stories were finally substantiated after excavations of several graves were carried out. All that remained in the coffin of one vanished cadaver was a mouldy burial shroud. Leads pertaining to further human remains, as yet unaccounted for, had to be followed up and police escorted their suspect back to his house to point out a trench he admitted using to dispose of cremated corpses. This also proved to be true, but Gein did not know their names or how many there were. “Quite a few” he estimated.

Short of disinterring many other graves of dead females to ascertain which ones were missing, investigators would never know the full toll.

On Wednesday, 27 November, yet another set of remains was unearthed from a ditch neighbours recalled observing Gein digging. When police visited the shallow excavation they found a skeleton, the large, elongated skull of which at first appeared to be male. There was a brief flurry of excitement when the police speculated that it might belong to a farmer who, with another man had failed to return from a hunting trip back in 1952.

In fact, there was a lot of surmising going on - mainly in press circles - about whether Ed Gein had been taking out hunters who traipsing through nearby woodland may have strayed onto his property and vanished.

But it wasn’t the skeleton of a man. A state pathologist revealed how forensic examination proved conclusively that the skeleton was female, another of Gein’s decaying toys, nabbed from Plainfield Cemetery.

After undergoing a barrage of psychological testing, as ordered by the state, Gein was found to be “mentally unfit” to stand trial. No one thought this especially unusual, given what he had done, and Gein made a brief court appearance on Monday, 6 January.

Appearing unperturbed by the his predicament "The Plainfield Butcher" languished in a chair, chewing gum and looking slightly stoned, as Judge Bunde considered evidence from three of the examining psychologists. He then ordered Ed Gein be committed, for an indefinite stay, at the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane in Waupun.

His ruling caused a stir among residents of Plainfield. Ed Gein had quite simply destroyed their town’s reputation. Through his terrible deeds he had ensured that Plainfield would forever be synonymous with murder and mayhem. The townsfolk wanted to have him tried in a court of law and be held accountable for his wrongdoings. It would take another ten years before their collective wish was granted.

In the interim, hospital orderlies and medical professionals alike described Ed Gein as quiet, undemonstrative and courteous, just as he had been on the outside. He was a model patient, capable of behaving himself. Gein took genuine pride in how good he was being for all the people at Central State.

One wonders what thoughts went through the mind of Ed Gein as he lay in his hospital bed. Did he have nightmares, feel remorse, cry himself to sleep after lights out? It seems whatever dark force had inhabited Ed Gein during the mental disintegration he suffered after the death of his mother was absent in this controlled environment.

The order and enforced discipline of hospital life helped settle Ed. The private pressures he endured while at liberty, where he had been responsible for controlling his own destiny, were now completely removed, and the little inmate appeared quite content.

One windy night in March 1958, as Gein slept at Central State, his house was burned to the ground. There were rumblings in town that some entrepreneur-types were negotiating to buy the property and turn it into a black museum. Needless to say, the locals were not impressed. They wanted to try and forget the monster that had lived in their midst, and a constant stream of tourists traveling through town to visit the resident “House Of Horrors” was the last thing they needed, despite the probability of such a venture creating a commercial boon for the businesses of Plainfield.

A plot to destroy Ed Gein’s house was put into dramatic effect and the already notorious building was torched.

Curiously, when Gein himself heard the news he did not seem remotely concerned. It was as though he buried all of his ghosts when they took him away and his old home no longer exercised any power over him. Yes, all that was behind him now, he said.

In May 1960, dogs pawed their way through a trench not far from the blackened mound of rubble that had once been the Gein farm. When the dogs’ owner went to see what his hounds were so excited about, he recoiled at the sight of a skeletal hand protruding from the earth. When the cops arrived they found a familiar assortment of bones. This time it was two arms, two legs and a pelvis. These would be the last of the human remains discovered on Gein farmland. This is not to say there aren’t more. The Geins after all had a lot of land in their day.

Eight years later, twelve since Ed Gein's introduction to Central State, District Court Judge Robert Gollmar was informed in writing by hospital authorities of their opinion that Ed Gein was now mentally competent to answer for his crimes in court. After much ensuing legal wrangling, Gein would finally stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden.

The trial of Edward Theodore Gein commenced on Wednesday, 14 November 1968. It lasted just one week. During this time, the proceedings were more of a publicly accessible vehicle to determining whether Gein had been sane at the time he was killing and desecrating the body of Bernice Worden, or if he had actually been insane and as a result unable to control his deviant impulses.

A predictable slew of psychiatrists and psychologists were paraded before the bewildered jury, most of whom were unable to fully comprehend all the mystical medical jargon anyway. The experts seemed, to be saying, in typical roundabout fashion, that all was not well in the head of Ed Gein. This much was obvious but in the interests of legality, the question was, had he been able to appreciate the wrongfulness and the severity of his acts? That remained to be seen.

Nearly all facets of Gein’s crimes and psychosis were addressed during the trial, the horrible discoveries at his house, the grave robbing, and the murders. As the trial progressed it became more and more obvious that this man had been demented at the time the crimes were perpetrated. More importantly for the defendant, the jury agreed.

Although Gein was found to have murdered Bernice Worden, he was not held responsible on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Gein did nothing to confirm his madness for anyone in court that day, like leaping from his seat, screaming incoherently or frothing at the mouth. His was a quiet insanity and when Judge Gollmar ordered that he be returned to his home at the state hospital, he duly rose and trotted off alongside his guard like a child led by a parent.

In the decade since the discoveries at the Gein farm, Sheriff Art Schley had become haunted by the case, under incredible pressure over the years, due as much to the incessant attentions of the national media as the nightmarish events he had had to deal with. In the end it became too much for him. He died from a massive heart attack in December 1968, only a month after testifying at Gein’s trial. He was forty-three.

Ed Gein was transferred from the hospital in Waupun when it closed in 1978 and spent the rest of his days at the Mendota Health institute just outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

He died six years later on Wednesday, 26 July 1984, cause of death determined as respiratory failure.

Apart from a few brief exchanges with reporters in a 1974 courtroom hearing, no one had heard or seen anything much of Ed Gein. He remained to the end a subdued yet affable and well-behaved patient. It looked as though all he wanted after his trial was some peace. In some measure this seems to be exactly what he attained.

When, in the summer of 1984, he finally found eternal peace, the seventy-eight year-old "Plainfield Butcher" was laid to rest in the same cemetery he had pillaged some thirty years earlier.

His was an unmarked grave. Mother rests in the next one over.