Case File: Ed Gein

Ed Gein, born in 1906 in La Crosse, Wis., was the second son of George and Augusta Gein. His father was a violent alcoholic who routinely beat him and his older brother, Henry. Augusta, however, seems to have exerted the most influence on the criminal: A domineering religious fanatic, she blamed alcohol and women for the evils of the world, frequently lecturing to her sons from the Bible. Augusta prevented her sons from having any social interactions with other children outside of school.

Bullied at school for having a “lazy eye,” Gein was remembered as an odd child who sometimes burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Augusta succeeded in isolating her young sons from social contact when the family moved in 1914 to a secluded farmhouse outside the small town of Plainfield, about 87 miles north of Madison.

George died in 1940, leaving Augusta alone with her two adult sons. Though Gein idolized his mother, his brother had much less affection for the sharp-tongued harpy, often criticizing her and arguing against her strict Biblical teachings, which greatly disturbed Gein.

After putting out a brush fire on their property in 1944, Gein reported his brother missing. Oddly, Gein then led officials directly to Henry’s body, which had several bruises on his head. Though the county coroner ruled asphyxiation as the cause of death, no autopsy was performed and some investigators suspected Gein may have played a role in his brother’s death.

Now alone on the farm with his aging mother, Gein brought in a meager income by working odd jobs around the Plainfield area, where he was considered helpful but eccentric; some neighbors noted his shabby appearance and noxious body odor. Nonetheless, he was occasionally hired as a babysitter: Gein found children easier to relate to than adults.

After his mother died of a stroke in 1945, Gein lost his only companion—perhaps the only person he ever cared about—and his already tenuous grip on reality deteriorated rapidly. He closed off his mother’s bedroom and other areas of the house, leaving them exactly as she left them, and occupied just two squalid rooms in the lonely farmhouse.

Around the time of his mother’s death, Gein began reading books about human anatomy, taxidermy, shrunken heads, cannibalism and Nazi atrocities, including the use of human skin to make lampshades. By 1947, Gein put his newfound knowledge to use and began making nighttime visits to graveyards in the Plainfield area, including the graveyard where his mother was buried.

Other alarming events began occurring in the region around this time. In 1947, Georgia Weckler, age 8, disappeared from her home after being dropped off after school. Witnesses reported seeing a dark Ford sedan in the area—Gein owned a maroon Ford sedan. Weckler was never seen again.

Two area men, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, left a Plainfield bar in 1952 and disappeared. The following year, teenager Evelyn Hartley was abducted while babysitting for a La Crosse family. Though her panties and bra were found outside La Crosse, her body was never recovered.

And on the morning of November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden was reported missing from the Plainfield hardware store she managed. Her son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, found the cash register open, blood stains on the floor and a .22 caliber rifle out of place on its rack after returning home from a hunting trip.

The sheriff also came across a receipt for antifreeze made out to Gein, the final sale of the prior day—a critical piece of evidence that triggered a gruesome police investigation.

After Gein was arrested later that day, officials began to search his farm, where they soon found Worden’s body in a shed. She was hanging upside down with her headless body gutted and her internal organs removed. According to police, she was field-dressed like a deer.

When investigators began to search the inside of the Gein house, they found a macabre gallery of body parts: bowls crafted from human skulls, masks and body suits made of women’s facial skin, skulls mounted on bedposts and dozens of other grotesque discoveries.

Police also came across Worden’s severed head and heart. Nearby, investigators found another head, which turned out to be the remains of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner who had disappeared three years earlier.

Upon questioning, Gein confessed to shooting Hogan in 1954 while visiting her tavern. Additionally, Gein admitted he had visited local graveyards about 40 times over the years, and on several of those occasions, he exhumed the bodies of recently buried women, particularly middle-aged women he thought resembled his late mother.

Gein told investigators he had an erotic obsession with the women’s corpses, though he denied having sex with them because “they smelled too bad.”

On November 21, 1957, Gein pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to Worden’s murder. Psychological experts determined that Gein had schizophrenia and was a “sexual psychopath” with an “abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.”

Upon sentencing, Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum security facility in Waupun.

The Gein farm outside Plainfield was scheduled for auction in 1958, but a few days before the auction, the house burned down under suspicious circumstances, suspected to be due to arson. Gein’s Ford sedan was sold to a carnival operator named Bunny Gibbons, who charged 25 cents a view until authorities banned the ghoulish exhibit.

In 1968, Gein was determined to be mentally competent to stand trial. He was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of Worden, though he was also determined to have been legally insane at the time of the killing, so he was again returned to Central State Hospital. Gein was later transferred to Mendota Mental Institute in Madison, where he died of complications from cancer in 1984 at the age of 77.

The Gein case and its subsequent trials sparked a media frenzy: the small rural town of Plainfield, its residents, and the Gein farmhouse were besieged by reporters and photographers clamoring for any information about the "Butcher of Plainfield."

Gein’s ghastly deeds continue to inspire as much fascination as dread. Besides Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Buffalo Bill of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, the Gein murders have given rise to numerous fictitious psychopaths, including Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dr. Oliver Thredson from the television series American Horror Story: Asylum.

In 2024, it was announced that Charlie Hunnam will star as Ed Gein in season 3 of the Netflix production Monster. In addition to Hunnam, the Ryan Murphy-helmed series will also feature Laurie Metcalf as Augusta Gein and Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock.