Ed Gein: The Ghoul of Plainfield

An attractive young woman takes off her white bathrobe and steps into the shower. She pulls the shower curtain closed and turns on the water. As she is soaping herself, a silhouette appears through the curtain. It appears to be an elderly woman holding a butcher's knife in her left hand. Suddenly, the curtain is yanked back and the blade comes crashing down in rapid successions. The high-pitched music drowns out the cries of the young woman. Her blood is washed down the drain by the cascading water.

This is obviously a description of the infamous shower scene from the movie "Psycho." What is possibly even more frightening and bizarre than a middle-aged innkeeper dressing as his dead mother and murdering innocent people, is the fact that the movie was based on true events. Alfred Hitchcock's film was a silver screen adaptation of a novel written by Robert Bloch. Bloch based Norman Bates' character on the real-life "Ghoul of Plainfield," Ed Gein. Gein was also the inspiration for characters such as Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs). Gein's body count is extremely low compared to that of other killers in his league, but what he lacked in victims, he made up for in depravity. His crimes were so unspeakable, they made on-screen killers like Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill look like Santa Claus. This is his story.

Edward Gein is a typical example of what is known as a "Disorganized Killer." According to the FBI profiling manual, this type of killer is usually of average intelligence or below. He has difficulty maintaining a job, usually because he is mimicking his father's poor work ethic. People in this category are socially inept and are loners. Many of them are sexually incompetent. The crimes of a disorganized killer are just that, disorganized. The murders are very impulsive and not pre-meditated. The killer usually lives or works near the scene of the crime and targets a neighbor or local acquaintance. Since the attacker usually knows the victim, he attempts to depersonalize the victim. The killer does this by covering and/or defacing the victim. Little or no effort is made to hide the crime or clean the site of the crime; everything is left as is. Because of this, clues are often left at the crime scene. The killer executes his victims quickly, usually via a gun. The killer is not familiar with having a sexual relationship with a living woman, so any mutilation or sexual abuse is committed after the victim is dead.

In addition to being a disorganized killer, Ed Gein is also an anger-retaliatory killer. These killers are men who had a domineering female influence (usually a mother) who was abusive and left them with feelings of humiliation and inadequacy. Although there are exceptions, a majority of these killers substitute a female that is reminiscent of the mother (or domineering female) for the actual source of their anger. It is rare, but possible for the person to kill his own mother (Henry Lee Lucas and Edmund Kemper were anger-retaliatory killers who murdered their abusive mothers).

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 8, 1906. He and his family moved to a farm near Plainfield, Wisconsin. His father was an alcoholic who was always either drinking or working. Since the father was not an active part of his children's lives, the mother was the dominant parent. Augusta Gein was devoutly religious and raised her two sons with an iron fist. To her, everything was a sin, but sex was the worst sin of them all. She did not allow her children to have any social relationships, especially not with the opposite sex. Gein's father passed away in 1940. Four years later, his brother, Henry was killed while trying to fight a marsh fire (There is speculation that Ed killed his brother due to the strange circumstances and the inexplicable bruising on the back of his brother's head). Ed had developed an ambivalent attitude towards his mother; on one hand, he loved and adored her, on the other, he resented her for disabling him from having a normal relationship with a woman. The year of Henry's death, Augusta had a stroke. Ed cared for her until a second stroke killed her in 1945. The death of his mother symbolized the loss of all that was familiar to him and was the onset of his deviant behavior.

Gein sealed off his mother's room, leaving everything just the way it was. He mainly lived out of a bedroom and the kitchen. His house was in a constant state of disarray. It can be said that the condition of his house was an outward representation of what was going on inside his mind. He had a great deal of literature on morose topics, such as headhunting and Nazi war crimes. He was also a big fan of horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. He was uncertain about his masculinity and considered castrating himself on several occasions. He possessed a strong desire to be a woman and researched various sex-change operations.

Between the years of 1947 and 1954, Ed Gein frequented the local cemeteries and dug up freshly buried corpses. He would read the obituaries in the newspaper and visit the site late that night to dig up the body. He took the corpses to his home and committed necrophilic acts upon them. He then dissected the bodies and fashioned various artifacts out of them, which he displayed around the house.

Eventually the corpses were not enough for Ed and he began procuring his own dead bodies. The first victim was the robust owner of the local tavern, Mary Hogan. She disappeared on December 8, 1954. A puddle of blood was found at the scene, as well as an overturned chair and the shell casing from a .32 caliber gun. It would take three years before the spent cartridge was matched up to gun found in Gein's home.

On November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden, the owner and operator of a local hardware store, was reported missing by her son. The circumstances were very similar to that of the Hogan disappearance. Frank Worden went to the hardware store looking for his mother when he noticed a pool of blood on the floor; Bernice was nowhere to be found. Frank recalled the "town crazy," Ed Gein visiting the store the day before and mentioning that he would return for antifreeze. There was a receipt for antifreeze made out to Ed Gein on the counter and a witness reported seeing Gein's truck parked in the store lot earlier that day. There was a trail of blood leading out the back door of the store. Frank summoned the police and they headed over to the Gein residence. What they saw there would haunt their dreams for the rest of their lives.

In the summer kitchen, behind the Gein house, strung up by her heels and gutted like a deer, was the headless body of Bernice Worden. The inside of the Gein residence was no better. There, authorities found an endless array of sickening artifacts and ornaments, fashioned out of human body parts. There were chairs upholstered in human flesh, belts made out of female nipples, a box full of preserved and decorated female genitalia, inverted skulls which were being used as soup bowls, lampshades made of human skin, shrunken heads and most bizarre of all, a human skin suit, equipped with breasts. Ed Gein often wore this suit and paraded around the house in it pretending to be his mother (hence the inspiration for Norman Bates). It was his warped version of a sex-change operation. A human head was found at Gein's house that had two nails hammered into it and twine attached to each nail. The head belonged to Bernice Worden and Gein was planning to hang it as an ornament. Various organs were found stewing in a pot on the stove.

While in police custody, Gein confessed to all of his grave robberies and the murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. The grave robberies were confirmed when some of the graves were dug up and the bodies were missing. The shell casing found at the Hogan scene was determined to have been fired from a gun that was found at the Gein residence.

On January 16, 1958, Edward Gein was declared unfit to stand trial by reason of mental incompetence. He was sent to Central State Hospital. A decade later, Gein was found fit to stand trial. He was found innocent by reason of insanity by Judge Robert Gollmar and sent to a mental hospital. Gein was a model prisoner up until his death on July 26, 1984. He was buried next to his mother Augusta. This posed a bit of a problem. Vandals constantly broke into the cemetery and defaced the final resting place of Ed Gein. In June of 2000, an unknown person removed what was left of Gein's tombstone. It surfaced in Seattle on June 21, 2001.

It is obvious how the life of Ed Gein was used as inspiration for the character of Norman Bates. Gein's female skin suit and habitual exhumation inspired "Leatherface" from Tobe Hopper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Leatherface also robbed graves and fashioned artifacts from the body parts of his victims. Like Gein, he wore the skin of his victims. Gein also inspired "Buffalo Bill" from Thomas Harris' The Silence of theLambs. Like Gein, Bill creates a skin suit from the flesh of his victims and questions his masculinity. Buffalo Bill was a transvestite, like Ed, and often dressed as a woman.

Ed Gein was one of the most influential serial killers in the history of crime. His actions shocked and horrified the nation. He became immortalized through characters such as "Norman Bates" and "Leatherface." His name has been permanently etched into American history as a "Boogie man" type figure. Endless songs, jokes and riddles were written about Ed Gein. The heavy metal group "Slayer" wrote a song called "Dead Skin Mask," as a tribute to Gein. Another heavy metal band named themselves after Gein, choosing the title, "Ed Gein's Car." In 2002, Velocity Home Entertainment released a movie called "Ed Gein". On March 6, 2007, another film was released, documenting the events of Gein's life, "Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield."