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It was in the capacity of handyman that the small,
slightly built bachelor, in his early fifties with thinning fair hair and watery
blue eyes, became well known to local residents. Though he was obliging, hard
working and trustworthy, most people regarded him as a little eccentric.
Ueeck did not bother with Gein much, even though he had known him for years.
Along with the other residents of Plainfield, he found Gein extremely difficult
to talk to, more often than not Gein would look away nervously and lapse into an
empty-headed lopsided grin, or else come out with some comment so strange and
inappropriate that it would leave the other person lost for words.
On this occasion, however, Ueeck could not resist the temptation to tease Gein
on the subject of Mary Hogan, Eddie was always particularly ill at ease when the
talk turned to women, but Ueeck had seen Gein at Hogan's tavern on several
occasions sitting alone at the back of the bar, clutching a glass of beer. He
and his friends noticed the way Gein just sat and stared at the bar owner, lost
in a world of his own. They supposed, with barely concealed amusement, that
Eddie was in love.
Ueeck began by suggesting to Gein that if had made his intentions to Mary Hogan
a little plainer, she might at this moment be cooking supper for him back at his
farmhouse, instead of being missing, presumed murdered.
Some time later, Ueeck would recall their conversation and that Eddie had
'rolled his eyes and wiggled his nose like a dog sniffing a skunk', before
shifting from one leg to the other and lapsing into one of his familiar grins.
'She isn't missing,' Gein replied after a few seconds' deliberation. 'She's at
the farm right now.'
Ueeck shrugged off what seemed like another of Gein's infrequent and rather
pathetic attempts at humour, which no one could really understand. And although
Gein was to repeat the claim to several other Plainfield residents in the weeks
that followed, not one of them took it the least bit seriously. It was, after
all, just the kind of crazy thing that Edward Gein would say. |
 |
[
Bernice Worden ]
Bernice's father, Frank Conover, had been part owner of the hardware store
she later ran. She married his business partner, Leon Worden. Worden's was one
of the oldest and most successful businesses in Plainfield. A comfortable
retirement beckoned for Bernice - Until Ed Gein walked through the door. |
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|
Like Mary Hogan, Bernice Worden of Plainfield was
a plump, solidly built woman in her late fifties, and a more than capable
business person. Unlike Hogan, she was a devout Methodist who enjoyed almost
spotless reputation among her fellow Plainfielders.
Bernice had taken over as sole proprietor of Worden's Hardware and Implement
Store in 1931 following the death of her husband. In the intervening years,
assisted by her son Frank, she had built it into a thriving business to which
every farmer in the area would turn at some time or another, for everything from
agricultural machinery to rifle cartridges.
In 1956, she was nominated Plainfield's first 'Citizen of the Week' by the local
Newspaper, and on the rare occasions when she was not working she could
generally be found with her grandchildren, whom she adored.
On the morning of Saturday 16th November 1957, she opened the store as usual,
expecting a slow start to the day's trade. It was the first day of Wisconsin's
nine day deer hunting season, and most of Plainfield's male inhabitants -
including her son Frank - were already out in the surrounding woodlands. The
rest of the town was deserted and most of the shops closed, but Bernice Worden
decided to keep her shop open, thinking that there would be a steady stream of
visitors eager to replenish their supplies.
She soon had a customer. A little after 8.30am, the small figure of Ed Gein
shuffled up to the hardware store clutching an empty glass jug. Like everyone in
Plainfield, Bernice found it hard to regard Gein as anything more than a
simpleton, but lately he had taken to troubling her over the most trifling of
details without actually buying anything. Only the night before, Gein had
stopped off at the store to check on the price of anti-freeze. On being given
the answer, he had stood there for several seconds with an idiot grin on his
face before shuffling off into the dark.
Bernice had also been taken aback a few weeks earlier when Gein, out of the blue
turned up at the store and invited her to go ice-skating with him. The offer had
been blurted out in a nervous, half joking way, and she had simply shrugged it
off. Yet she was sufficiently unnerved to relate the incident to her son, and to
point out that since then, she had seen Gein staring at her from inside his pick
up or from the other side of the street. |
|
|
[
Worden's Hardware Delivery
Truck ]
Worden's hardware store stood on Plainfield's main street, which
was very quiet on the morning of her murder - most male citizens had
gone deer hunting. After shooting Mrs Worden, Gein loaded her body
into the truck, then drove it to his car. |
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|
The whole scene at Worden's on 16th November can
only be pieced together from Gein's later confused recollections. Besides
Bernice and Gein, there had not been a soul in sight. Mrs Worden apparently
filled the jug, returning to the front of the store and wrote out a sales slip.
Gein then paid and left. A few moments later he returned.
Picking a hunting rifle off the rack in the corner, he explained to Mrs Worden
that he was thinking of changing his old .22 rifle for a more up to date gun
which would fire different sized bullets. She agreed that the weapon he held in
his hands was a good buy, and carried on with her work. Suddenly while her back
was turned, Gein reached into his pocket and slipped a cartridge into the rifle
while pretending to inspect the action. A moment later, he took aim - and fired.
Between 8.45am and 9.30am the same morning, Bernard Muschinski, the pump
attendant at the filling station across the street from the store, noticed Mrs
Worden's delivery van pull out of the garage behind the building and head off
down the road. He thought little of it.
But a few hours later, he walked past the store and was surprised to see the
lights on inside. The front door was locked, and Muschinski assumed that Mrs
Worden had forgotten to switch them off.
The next person to see Gein was the sawmill owner, Elmo Ueeck. He had just shot
a deer on Gein farmland and was making a hasty exit from the property, with the
kill tied to the front of his car. Ueeck was therefore dismayed to see Gein's
Ford sedan pounding down the road towards him - since he was sure that even
Eddie would object to unauthorised hunting on his land. But as the two cars
passed, Gein simply gave a friendly wave. Ueeck also remarked that Gein was
driving well above his usual speed. |
|
|
[
Ed Gein ]
Ed Gein was fifty one when his ghoulish world was opened to public view. He
was suffering from serious mental illness and had committed two murders. |
|
|
Later around 3pm, Ueeck's conscience began to
trouble him and he drove back to the Gein farm to explain and apologise about
the deer. He found Gein with his car jacked up, changing the snow tyres back to
summer treads - a sight that struck him as odd, since there were already a
couple of inches of snow on the ground. Gein was friendly and did not seem
unduly bothered about the deer.
Later that afternoon, Gein had a visit from another of his neighbours, his
teenage friend Bob Hill and Hill's sister Darlene, who asked whether he would
mind driving them into town to buy a new car battery.
Gein stepped briskly out of the house to meet them, his hands covered in blood.
He explained that he had been dressing a deer. This puzzled Bob Hill, since Gein
had always professed a distaste for butchery and claimed the sight of blood made
him feel faint. But Gein said he would be glad to help, and after returning to
the house to wash, he ushered them to his car and set off for town.
When Gein and the Hills finally returned to the Hills' home on the edge of town,
it was getting dark, and Bob's mother, Irene, invited Gein to stay for supper.
He accepted readily, little knowing it would be the last meal he would eat as a
free man.
Sometime earlier, shortly before dusk, Bernice Worden's son Frank had pulled
into the Plainfield petrol station opposite the family store after an
unsuccessful day's hunting. He was mystified to hear from the attendant that the
delivery van had been seen leaving the store early that morning. Frank had
expected to find his mother still behind the counter, about to shut up shop.
The two men had then confirmed Muschinski's earlier discovery - that the door
was locked but the lights were still on - and Frank, who did not have a spare
key with him, returned home to fetch one.
Among his other duties, Frank Worden was a Plainfield deputy sheriff, and like
his mother, he was a steady, reliable person. But as he unlocked the door of
Worden's Store and stepped inside, he could barely keep control of himself. The
cash register was gone, torn from its place on the counter, and towards the back
of the shop there was a large patch of blood. |
|
|
[
Sheriff Art Schley ]
Sheriff Art Schley was formerly employed by the Waushara County Highway
Department. He was just thirty two when he was made sheriff in 1957. The Gein
investigation, his first murder case, proved a grueling initiation into the job. |
|
|
Frank telephoned County Sheriff Art Schley in
Wautoma, 23km (15 miles) away, then carried on searching the store for his
mother. When the sheriff and his chief deputy arrived a quarter of an hour
later, Frank had already made up his mind what had happened.
'He's done something to her,' Worden told them confidently.
'Who has?' they asked.
'Ed Gein,' said Worden.
Frank Worden had not been idle during the time Schley and his deputy took to
drive from Wautoma to Plainfield. In his mind he replayed the conversations with
his mother about Gein - how Eddie had been staring at her of late, how he had
pestered her to go out with him, and how only the previous night he had stopped
off at the store to ask about the price of anti-freeze. Worden also recalled
that Gein had asked him if he intended to go hunting the next day. Could it be
that Gein had been checking to see if the coast would be clear?
What had clinched it for Worden was the discovery near the blood patch of a
handwritten sales slip for two quarts of anti-freeze. It was dated 17th November
and made out to Ed Gein. Sheriff Schley put out a general alert on the radio to
bring Gein in for questioning.
Gein himself, meanwhile, had just finished eating with the Hills when a
neighbour burst in to report news of Bernice Worden's disappearance. Eddie's
only comment was: 'It must have been someone pretty cold-blooded.'
Irene Hill would later recall that she joked with Gein saying, 'How come every
time someone gets banged on the head and hauled away, you're always around?'
Gein, she remembered, had simply shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
Bob Hill suggested that Gein should drive the two of them into town to see what
was going on. Gein happily complied, and the two men stepped out into the
freezing, snow covered yard to start Gein's car. At that point, Traffic Officer
Dan Chase and Deputy Arden Spees arrived looking for Gein.
Chase and Spees had found the handyman's farm locked and empty when they had
driven there a few minutes previously. Since it was well know that Bob Hill was
one of Ed Gein's friends, the Hill's store was the next logical port of call.
Officer Chase stepped smartly across the yard and rapped on the window of Gein's
car just as it was about to pull away.
Gein was ordered to get out and was escorted back to the squad car for
questioning. Chase asked him to recount what he had been doing all day, and
where. Gein told him, and then Chase asked him to run through his story a second
time. Immediately, it became apparent that there were glaring inconsistencies
between the two versions, and Chase told him so.
'Somebody framed me,' Gein retorted.
'Framed you for what?' Chase asked.
'Well, about Mrs Worden,' said Gein.
'What about Mrs Worden?'
'Well. she's dead, ain't she,' Gein replied.
'Dead!' exclaimed Chase. 'How d'you know she's dead?'
"I heard it,' said Gein. 'They told me in there.' |
|
|
[
Ed Gein's Farmhouse ]
Ed Gein's weatherboard farmhouse held barbaric surprises that shocked a
nation. In 1914, the Gein family - Ed (then aged eight), his older brother
Henry, and mother and father - had bought the place, along with the 78-ha
(195acre) farm. By 1956, the place
had fallen into serious decay. |
|
|
As soon as Sheriff Schley heard over the radio
that his chief suspect had been apprehended, he went Gein's farmhouse with
Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster of the neighbouring Green Lake County Sheriff's
Office.
At 8pm, the two officers drove up to the Gein farmhouse and walked to the
icicle-hung porch. They found the front door securely locked, but the door to a
shed-like ground floor extension at the back of the house gave easily. |
|
|
[
Ed Gein's Farmhouse ]
The lack of electricity in the Gein house - there never had been any - forced
the police to resort to using torches until a generator was brought in to supply
lighting (the scene in the photograph was lit
up from the photographer's flash). Gein's demented activities took place in
forbidding gloom. |
|
|
Switching on their flashlights - Gein had no
electricity - the two men stepped inside the wooden shed. A moment later, Art
Schley felt something brush his shoulder and he wheeled about to see what it
was. As his flashlight beam played across the object, he gasped in horror and
cried out to Schoephoerster.
There before him, hanging upside down from the rafters, was the naked, headless
corpse of a woman whose body had been split from crotch to breast, and
disembowelled. Schley's immediate thought was that it looked as if it had been
trimmed and gutted, just like a deer.
It took some time for the two policemen to get a grip of themselves, and for the
full horror of what they had witnessed to sink in. Eventually, Schoephoerster
was the first to make it to the car. He radioed for help and then both men
braced themselves and prepared to set foot back in the house.
A second look at the body revealed it was hanging from a wooden cross bar which
had been sharpened and driven through the tendons of one ankle, the other foot
having been slit below the hell and secured to the pole with wire.
The cross bar had been attached to a block and tackle, and then pulled up
towards the rafters. Only once had Schley seen anything like it before, and that
was in an abattoir. Whoever it was - and Schley had little doubt it was Bernice
Worden - had been slaughtered and expertly dressed for butchery as if she were a
side of beef. |
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|
[
Searching the Gein's Farmhouse ]
A police officer continues the long sift through the rubbish of Gein's
kitchen. Here the police found a soup bowl made from the sawn
off top of a human skull and a chair whose seat was made from strips of human
skin (under which fat was still stuck). |
|
|
The body aside, it was hard to believe that a
human being could live in such conditions. Everywhere were piles of stinking,
rotting rubbish, with furniture, kitchen utensils and dirty, ragged clothes
strewn anyhow. Cardboard boxes, empty cans and rusting farm implements littered
the floor, giving the impression that the room had been overrun by some beast
which had left a trial of filth and excrement in its wake.
Shining their flashlights around, hardly daring to let their eyes follow the
beams, Schley and Schoephoerster then became aware of stranger sights -
detective magazines and horror comics piled into boxes or dropped on the floor,
a sink filled with sand, spat-out chewing gum in an old coffee tin, rows of
dentures displayed on the mantelpiece. Whoever had assembled this collection was
evidently driven by some sickening force far beyond either man's comprehension.
It was not long before Gein's farm was choked with squad cars, as the help which
Schoephoerster had requested began to arrive. To start with, the search through
the house continued by flashlight and paraffin lamps. But then a generator was
brought in, and as the house was bathed in the glare of police arc lights, the
full horror of what was inside became apparent. |
|
|
[
Searching the Gein Farmhouse ]
A view of the filthy chaos of Gein's kitchen. Behind the kitchen door, in a
brown paper bag, the police found Mary Hogan's 'mask' - that is, the skin and
hair that Gein had peeled from her skull. The discovery ended a three year long
mystery as to her whereabouts. |
|
|
Scattered about the kitchen were a number of
skulls, some intact, others sawn in half and used as crude bowls. Two of them
had even been used to adorn the posts at the foot of Gein's festering, rag
strewn bed in the adjoining sleeping area. One of the chairs by the kitchen
table turned out on close inspection to have a seat consisting of strips of
human skin. There were other appalling artefacts - lampshades, wastepaper
baskets, a drum, a bracelet, the sheath of a hunting knife - all fashioned from
human remains.
Even worse was to come. As the investigators poked around, they uncovered boxes
containing various body parts, each of which had been cut away from an
unidentified corpse with the skill and precision of a surgeon. There was a kind
of vest fashioned from skin taken from the top portion of a woman's body, with a
cord running through the back so that it could be worn, and several pairs of
'leggings' made from the skin of real human legs.
Most horrifying for all the police searching the house was the discovery of a
collection of death masks - of the kind more usually associated with only the
most lurid tales of tribal cannibalism.
Each of the nine masks consisted of the face and scalp of the victim, hair
intact, which had been peeled from the skull and stuff with rags or newspaper.
Four of these masks were found hanging on the walls around Gein's bed, silent
witnesses to whatever bizarre nocturnal fantasies he had indulged in. The others
were found in bags, old cartons and sacks scattered there and in the kitchen.
Some had been treated with oil to keep the skin smooth, and one still had traces
of lipstick. Another head - recognizable to one of the officers present -
belonged to Mary Hogan, the bar owner who had vanished three years earlier.
By this time, the assembled company of policemen, forensic experts and
detectives on the scene were stunned into silence, their faces white with
horror. Many of them were long-serving officers who had seen all kinds of
gruesome crimes in their time, yet nothing could have prepared them for the
house of corpses, bones and other human remains now before them. |
|
|
[
Ed Gein ]
Ed Gein is brought back to his farm to help police with their search for
human remains on 18 November 1957. Since his mother's death, he had lived in a
macabre world of his own, ruled by psychological forces beyond his control. |
|
|
Even in the harsh forest of a Wisconsin November
night, the stench was unspeakable. Searchers found the heart of Bernice Worden
left in a plastic bag in front of the kitchen stove, and her still warm entrails
wrapped in an old suit nearby. But still the police searched on, grimly
determined to find the one piece of evidence that had so far eluded them - the
head of the corpse hanging from the rafters.
Beyond the kitchen and the sleeping area which led off it was the ground floor
of the house proper. The door was securely boarded up, but within minutes the
investigators had prised away enough of the planks to gain entry into the main
living room.
Their torch beams shone down on an orderly and perfectly normal family room, in
which the only thing out of place was the thick layer of dust that encased
everything from the furniture to the ornaments above the fireplace. It was a
mausoleum - a shrine that had been closed up and left by Gein exactly the way it
was the day his mother died twelve years earlier.
In the early hours of the morning, two of the investigators from the crime lab
returned to search the 'summer kitchen' extension. In a corner of the room, amid
the rubbish, they spotted a couple of old mattresses. One of the pathologists
lifted the top mattress and saw an old hessian feed sack, which was giving off
steam. Pulling the sack out into the middle of the floor, he opened it up and
found what everyone had been looking for. The head of Bernice Worden was covered
in dirt, and blood was congealed around the nostrils, but otherwise it was
perfectly intact.
The expression on the face seemed reassuringly peaceful, but the two
investigators were taken aback by the sight of nails which had been driven into
the ear sockets with a cord stretched between them. Gein had obviously intended
to hang Mrs Worden's head on his wall, along with the other ghoulish bedroom
trophies displayed there. |
|
|
[
Sacks & Boxes from the Gein Farmhouse ]
In the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory, sacks and boxes full of human
remains taken from Gein's farmhouse await examination by forensic scientists. |
|
|
As the night wore on, the search of the Gein's
farmhouse finally drew to a close. Mrs Worden's corpse was taken down from the
rafters and labelled along with the other remains, which were then packed into
plastic sacks and dispatched to Goult's Funeral Home in Plainfield so that a
proper post mortem examination could be carried out.
No one present had been able to guess how many bodies had contributed to the
heads, skins, or other parts to the grisly cache, but it was clear that far more
than just those of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were involved.
One question then remained in the minds of the stunned, sickened police officers
as they left Gein's farm that night - who did the other corpses belong to?
While the gruesome discoveries were being made at his Farmhouse, Edward Gein sat
quietly in the Wautoma County jail, guarded by the arresting officers, Dan Chase
and Arden Spees. At 2.30am on Sunday 17th November, Sheriff Schley returned from
the nightmare scene in Plainfield.
Over the next twelve hours, Gein was questioned almost continuously, without an
attorney present, but he continued to stay silent. In the meantime, the initial
autopsy report on Bernice Worden confirmed that she had died from a .22 calibre
gunshot wound to the head.
The following morning, Monday 18th November, Gein broke his silence. He said he
had shot Mrs Worden, loaded her corpse into her truck and driven it out to a
nearby pine forest. Leaving the truck there, he had walked back to town to fetch
his car, then driven back to the forest. He transferred the corpse from the
truck into the car, and then drove to the farmhouse, where he trussed and
butchered the body.
All these details were included in a statement that District Attorney Earl
Kileen issued to the press that morning. He then added on or two more
speculative details of his own, specifically that some of the victims' body
parts found at the farmhouse appeared to belong to 'young people', and the way
Mrs Worden's corpse had been mutilated, it had 'looked like cannibalism'.
According to the lab technician Allan Wilimovsky, 'Mrs Worden's heart was found
in a saucepan on the stove', although, in fact, it had been found in a plastic
bag near the stove. |
|
|
[
Ed Gein ]
Ed Gein was taken back to the farm twice to point out burial spots. He was
also driven to Madison, the state capital, for lie detector tests and hours of
interrogation. |
|
|
Soon the reporters were filing the most lurid
details of the case back to newspapers as far away as Chicago. In the meantime,
Kileen himself went to interview Gein, who said he could remember none of the
details of Bernice Worden's killing because he had been 'in a regular daze' at
the time.
Under further questioning, Gein said he thought it had all been an accident.
Why then, asked Kileen, had he stolen the cash register? Gein said that he
'hoped to strip it down and examine the mechanism' to see how the machine
worked.
Kileen pressed him on what he had done with the body. Gein began describing how
he had trussed it up and bled it into a bucket, then buried the fresh blood in a
hole in the ground.
Asked if he thought he had been dressing out a deer, Gein replied 'That is the
only explanation I can think was in my mind.'
Gein was asked to account for the numerous skulls, pieces of skin and other
human remains found at the farm. Adamant that, to his knowledge, he had murdered
no one else besides Bernice Worden, Gein told astonished detectives that he had
obtained the bodies from various graveyards.
He explained that over the last few years he had on occasion been gripped by a
sudden compulsion to rob graves. In many cases, he had known the victims while
they were still alive and had read about their deaths in the local paper. He
would drive to the cemetery on the night of the burial, remove the body from the
freshly dug grave, and fill the grave in again to leave it in what he cheerfully
described as 'apple-pie-order'.
Gein admitted that on many of these nocturnal expeditions - up to forty of them
- he panicked on reaching the grave, and drove straight home again. He could not
remember how many bodies he had actually obtained, and once more offered the
excuse that he was in a 'daze'. When asked if he had ever enjoyed any kind of
sexual relations with the stolen corpses - a question already foremost in the
minds of his interrogators - he shook his head and cried, 'No! No!', before
adding that they 'smelt too bad'. Gein also strenuously denied charges of
cannibalism.
On Monday afternoon, 18th November, Ed Gein appeared in court charged only with
armed robbery of the cash register from Worden's store. The DNA's office wished
to postpone any murder charges until the forensic evidence was completed and the
prisoner had been subjected to a lie detector test. Afterwards, he was driven
out the farm, where he showed the police and a posse of accompanying reporters
the spot where he had buried Bernice Worden's blood.
That afternoon Gein was also interviewed by detectives from La Crosse - his
hometown in western Wisconsin - about the disappearance four years earlier of a
fifteen year old girl named Evelyn Hartley. The results proved inconclusive.
Gein was also questioned by sheriffs from neighbouring Portage County on the
subject of Mary Hogan, whose head they already knew had been discovered at the
farm. Lapsing into confusion and frequent bouts of silence, the prisoner denied
knowing her at all, though he did concede he had visited her bar for a drink
once or twice.
The following day, the press contingent, which had by now taken up more or less
permanent residence in town, were finally allowed inside Gein's farm to see for
themselves the squalor in which the 'Butcher of Plainfield' had been living. |
|
|
[
Gein's Sweetheart ]
After Gein's arrest, a fifty year old Plainfield citizen named Adeline
Watkins became an overnight celebrity by claiming to have been the killer's
girlfriend.
'I LOVED KIND, SWEET MAN, STILL DO,
SAYS CONFESSED KILLER'S FIANCÉE"
ran a Minneapolis Tribune headline. Miss Watkins, said the report, had received
a marriage proposal from Gein on their last date together in February 1955, but
had turned him down. No sooner had the story appeared, than the woman retracted
her claim. She also denied that she had ever called Gein 'sweet'. |
|
|
Though now confronted by hard fact, imaginations
ran riot and a fresh flood of horror stories appeared on front pages all over
the country. Some reports suggested there were as many as fifty bodies buried
around the farm. Others claimed that Gein had handed out packages of human flesh
to unsuspecting neighbours, and most linked his name with every disappearance in
Wisconsin over the last ten years.
Meanwhile, Gein himself was taken to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory in the
state capital, Madison, to be interviewed while connected to a lie detector. The
polygraph test only took about thirty minutes, but in the more than eight hours
of questioning that followed, he confessed to having worn the 'clothes' he had
made out of human skin. He also caved in on the subject of Mary Hogan, admitting
that he thought he had murdered her, while remaining 'very hazy' about the
precise details. As far as the death of Bernice Worden was concerned, he
continued to maintain that it had been an accident, and would do so for the rest
of his life.
Later in the interview, the questions turned to Gein's grave robbing exploits.
If the soil was soft enough, he would remove it by hand and prise open the lid
of the burial casket with a crowbar to expose the body. Sometimes, Gein only
removed the head - first by working the head back and forth, then snapping the
spinal cord and cutting the head off with a knife. Occasionally, he would remove
other parts as well. A few times he had removed the entire body, then replaced
the casket lid and refilled the grave.
Throughout the interrogation, Gein remained his usual quiet, co-operative self.
He described his deeds without any apparent remorse, and only became flustered
and reticent when the questioning returned to Mary Hogan's or Bernice Worden's
murder. Joe Wilimovsky (brother of Crime lab specialist Allan Wilimovsky), who
operated the lie detector, was sure that he was hearing the truth. He was also
struck by the calm way Gein described how he had sawed through skills or
disembowelled bodies.
Afterward, DA Kileen made a statement in which he said that Gein would be
charged with the first-degree murders of Hogan and Worden 'in a day or two', but
that his office was satisfied Gein had nothing to do with other disappearances.
He then informed reporters, much to their fury, that the State Attorney General
had ordered a news blackout of the entire case. |
|
|
[
Ed Gein ]
|
|
|
Thereafter, events began to move more swiftly. On
Thursday 21st November, Gein was formally charged. On the following day, at the
preliminary trial hearing. Gein's attorney entered a plea of insanity, and the
judge committed Gein to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in
Waupun, some 75kms (50 miles) to the south east of Wautoma, pending
psychological tests. The focus of the case now shifted to his grave robbing
exploits.
Kileen announced at the hearing that Gein had given police a list of the victims
whose resting places had been violated. Subject to permission of relatives, the
authorities hoped to exhume a number of graves the following week. One of the
people on the list was a Mrs Eleanor Adams, who had died six years before, in
1951.
Pat Danna, the sexton of Plainfield Cemetery, insisted, however, that it was
simple not possible for a single man to do what Gein had alleged. And, in any
case, he was sure none of the graves in his charge had been disturbed. As the
mystery deepened, a story spread that someone had assisted Gein in his grave
robbing activities.
On Saturday, Gein was taken back to his Plainfield farm a second time, where he
showed the police a trench which said contained the cremated remains of Mary
Hogan's body. The trench was duly excavated, and the remains of considerably
more than one corpse removed for examination. By the following Monday, under
mounting pressure from all sides to find out where the bodies had come from,
Kileen ordered Eleanor Adam's grave to be opened. |
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[
Plainfield Cemetery ]
Pat Danna, seton of Plainfield Cemetery, stands at the grave of Eleanor
Adams, shortly before it was opened to check on Gein's body snatching claims.
The graces behind belong to Gein's parents. |
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The ground in the cemetery was frozen that day,
and it took Danna and his assistant more than an hour to dig down as far as the
burial casket. As the earth was scraped away from the casket, the cover was seen
to be split in two. Having removed the pieces, Dana and his assistant reached in
and lifted off the lid of Mrs Adam's coffin. It was empty, save for the rotting
burial shroud, and something else - a steel crowbar.
The assembled group moved to another grave on Gein's list, some 27m (30 yards)
away from the first, and began a second excavation. Before they had even dug a
few feet, the workmen began to uncover what were unmistakable human remains.
When the coffin was finally reached and opened, it came as no surprise to find
it empty. Gein's story was confirmed. In the case of Mrs Adams, he had removed
the whole body. At the second grave, he had removed the parts that he wanted,
and then hurriedly covered up the evidence.
What no one could even begin to guess at this stage was how many more graves had
been violated.
On Wednesday 27th November, the police were directed by Gein's neighbours to a
rubbish pit on his property, some way from the farmhouse. Gein, they said, was
often to be seen digging there, though they had always assumed that he was
simply burying rubbish.
Excavation of the site uncovered another near-complete skeleton, the skull of
which seemed rather large for a woman and contained a gold tooth. This in turn
gave rise to speculation that the body was that of local farmer Ray Burgess, who
had disappeared with a friend while on a hunting expedition back in 1952.
After the discoveries of the past two weeks, the people of Plainfield were
convinced that the monster who had been living undetected in their midst for so
long was capable of anything. However forensic tests proved that the body was
that of a woman.
Gein, meanwhile, was subjected to exhaustive psychological tests by doctors at
the Central State Hospital. A second lie detector test appeared to confirm that
apart from Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, Gein had confined his butchery to the
bodies of women who were already dead. He finally admitting to stealing nine
corpses all of middle aged women.
Once again, he calmly described what he had done with the dismembered heads,
limbs and other body parts. It appeared that, on occasion, he had donned the
human skin 'vest; and 'leggings', and danced around his yard.
The idea of this butcher-transvestite, trampling by nightfall through the
stinking debris and rotting remains that littered his living quarters, disgusted
the interrogators. Yet Gein himself appeared to see little wrong with mutilating
bodies that were already dead, and seemed proud of his anatomical knowledge his
handiwork displayed. |
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Wisconsin Central State Hospital ]
In 1978, Ed Gein was transferred to Wisconsin's Central State Hospital to the
Mendota Mental Health Institute (pictured above), a Gothic pile near the state
capital of Madison. He remained there until his death in 1984. His case has
fascinated mental health specialists across the land. |
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The psychological tests, which included the
standard Wechsler adult intelligence test, showed that Eddie Gein was in many
ways 'quite bright' - even above average - but that he had great difficulty
expressing himself or communicating with people in anything other than the
simplest terms. Psychologists at the hospital put this down to some previous
'severe emotional disturbance', stating that it prompted Gein into fits of
irrational behaviour followed by extended periods of calm and remorse.
They also discovered that his sexual-emotional development was severely
retarded, causing him to retreat into a bizarre fantasy world in which his
feelings towards women became confused with grief over the death of his mother,
and fear of transgressing his own peculiarly straight laced moral code.
Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, Gein claimed, were 'not good women''. He did not
go as far to suggest that they deserved to die, but rather that they were fated
to meet violent ends, and that he was merely acting as the instrument of their
deaths.
On the subject of the mutilated corpses, Gein conceded that he had once
entertained the idea of brining his mother back to life through the body of
another woman. He had been disappointed when his plan failed.
He said that in the years since his mother's death he had seen 'faces in the
leaves' and smelled 'bad odours'. In fact, the odours continued to trouble him
even as he sat in the Central State Hospital facing interrogation. When asked
what the odours smelled like, he replied, 'It smells like flesh'.
On 18th December 1957, Gein faced his last interrogation by a panel of six
specialists, under the chairmanship of Dr Edward E Schubert, director of the
hospital. Their conclusion was that he was insane, and therefore not mentally
competent to stand trial. It was decided to keep Gein in hospital until after
Christmas, and the psychologists' recommendations were forwarded to the state
Attorney General. |
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Judge Herbert Bunde ]
Circuit Judge Herbert Bunde was a stern and forthright jurist who, after
listening to no more than five minutes of recommendations by both the defence
and prosecuting attorneys, signed the order committing Edward Gein to a mental
hospital. |
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Gein was brought before presiding Judge Bunde on
the morning of 6th January 1958, and sat impassively in the dock chewing gum
while three psychologists - including Schubert - gave expert evidence. After
listening to their opinions, Bunde had no hesitation in endorsing the hospital
recommendations, and Gein was committed indefinitely to the state mental
hospital.
The decision raised a storm of protest among the residents of Plainfield, many
of whom were infuriated that the man who had made their town a byword for murder
and grave robbing would not be standing trial. In an effort to placate them,
Attorney General Walter Honeck wrote a letter stating that Gein's incarceration
did not automatically rule out a trial at some time in the future, and that he
would be examined at regular interviews to see if his mental condition showed
any signs of improvement.
In March, just as the dust was beginning to settle, a fresh row erupted over the
announcement that Gein's farm and its contents were to be sold by auction, and
that potential purchasers could inspect the property for a fee of fifty cents -
a charge necessary, it was claimed, to discourage 'casual sightseers'. Quite
apart from the thought that others stood to gain where Plainfield had so
evidently lost, the date of the auction - 30th March, Palm Sunday - was seen by
the more religious people of the town as a direct affront. |
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[
The Auction of Ed Gein's Farmhouse ]
Waushara County residents inspect Gein's property in March 1958 before its
proposed auction. Plainfield citizens were outraged that the date set for the
auction was a religious holiday - an open invitation for divine retribution. But
the house met a fiery fate probably caused by human hands. |
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As it turned out, the auction never took place. On
the evening of 20th March, the sky was illuminated by the sight of the Gein farm
in flames, while the residents of Plainfield stood by and witness what many
believed was divine retribution. Among their number was the town's fire officer,
Bernice Worden's son, Frank. The cause of the fire was never discovered, and
Gein's own comment on hearing the news was, 'Just as well'.
But the Gein story was not over. In May 1960, dogs scrabbling in a trench on
what had once been Gein farmland discovered a fresh pile of human bones,
including arms, leg bones and a pelvis. The mad little handyman's eventual
tally, once all the remains had been analysed, catalogued and accounted for,
came to fifteen bodies, including the two murder victims Bernice Worden and Mary
Hogan.
Gein flourished in his new home, and was a model prisoner. He got along well
with the warders, and, in marked contrast to the other inmates, never showed
signs of requiring sedation. He also demonstrated considerable skill at
handicrafts in the prison workshops, and the small salary he was paid he bought
a short wave radio, becoming something of a radio ham.
In January 1968, however, District Judge Robert Gollmar received a letter from
the hospital authorities stating that in their opinion Gein was now mentally fit
to stand trial. Though Gollmar, on reviewing the case, thought that such a trial
would be a waste of time and money, he felt that the assurances given by
Attorney General Honeck to the people of Plainfield had to be honoured. Gollmar,
therefore authorised the proceedings to go ahead.
The trial, which took place in Wautoma, opened on 7th November 1968, and lasted
a week. It was, on a point of American law, 'bifurcated' - that is, a split
trial. In the first part, Gein would be tried for the murder of Bernice Worden.
If found guilty, the second part would determine whether he was sane at the time
of the killing.
For the first time, a jury and public gallery were to bear witness to the
gruesome findings at the Gein farmhouse. The jury heard numerous psychologists
recall for the second time their interview with Gein, and how - on the subject
of grave robbing at least - the little man seemed hardly aware that he had done
anything wrong. He was regarded as psychotic and a chronic schizophrenic.
When the verdict came, it was a surprise to no one, though Gein had the strange
distinction of being found guilty and not guilty on the same day: guilty of the
murder, not guilty because of his obvious insanity.
Gein himself remained, as always, quiet and docile throughout. At the end, Judge
Gollmar proclaimed: 'The court does find that on November 16th 1957, the
defendant, Edward Gein, was suffering from a mental disease,' and ordered him to
be returned to hospital. He then declared the case finally closed, rose from the
dock and shuffled through the assembled ranks of reporters and photographers.
The Plainfield Butcher was soon on his way home to the Central State Hospital in
Waupun. |
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[
Ed Gein ]
Looking stouter than he was when first committed to the state mental hospital
back in 1958, Ed Gein - by now something of a national celebrity - makes his way
into the Wautoma County Courthouse on 22nd January 1968. He was attending the
proceedings that were to leaf to his trial in November for Bernice Worden's
murder. |
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In February 1974, a petition was filed on behalf
of Ed Gein with the Waushara County Court claiming that after some sixteen years
of incarceration, he had now 'fully recovered his mental health' and should be
kept in hospital no longer.
After reviewing the petition, District Judge Robert H Gollmar duly instructed
the state mental hospital to carry out a fresh series of psychiatric tests, the
findings of which would be heard in court on 27th June.
Prior to the hearing, Gein chatted amiably with reporters outside the
courthouse, telling them that he was now keen to see something of life, and was
planning a round the world trip. But the four doctors who gave evidence in front
of Judge Gollmar were overwhelmingly of the opinion that the ageing psychopath
should not be released.
Significantly, one state that although Gein's 'thought processes were generally
intact and reasonably well organised' when discussing 'non-threatening
material', the psychosis that had afflicted his mind for so long remained
simmering just below the surface, 'ready to be reactivated under the right
conditions'. Judge Gollmar had no choice but to reject Gein's petition.
Gein was taken back to the high security hospital, but in 1978 he was moved to
another institution - the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison - when the
Central State Hospital was turned into a 'correctional reception centre' under a
new name, the Dodge Correctional Institute. |
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[
Ed Gein ]
Ed Gein surrounded by journalists in the Waushara County Courthouse, awaits
the start of the hearing of his unsuccessful 1974 petition for release from the
Central State Hospital. |
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On July 1984, Edward Gein, aged seventy eight,
died of respiratory failure in Mendota's geriatric ward. He was lain to rest in
an unmarked grave in Plainfield Cemetery - beside his mother. |
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