Ed Gein

"Gein" redirects here. For other uses, see Gein (disambiguation).

Ed Gein
Edward Theodore Gein circa 1957
Born	Edward Theodore Gein
Cause of death	respiratory and heart failure
Other names	Plainfield Ghoul, Eric Frey, Ed "Psycho" Gein
Criminal penalty	Not guilty by reason of insanity
Details
Victims	2 - 7
Span of crimes	1947–1957
Country	U.S.
State(s)	Wisconsin
Date apprehended	November 16, 1957

Edward Theodore Gein (pronounced /giːn/) (August 27 1906 – July 26 1984) was a notorious American killer.

Gein is known to have killed two people, but is suspected of killing others. His crimes earned widespread noteriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and manufactured gruesome trophies and keepsakes from the corpses.

Biography

Childhood

Gein was born to George P. Gein (1873 – 1 April 1940) and wife (married Vernon County, Wisconsin, 11 December 1900) Augusta Lehrke (21 July 1877 – 29 December 1945, daughter of Prussian immigrants Friedrich Wilhelm Lehrke and Amelie Fregin) on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His parents, both natives of Wisconsin, had two sons, Ed and his older brother, Henry G. Gein (1901 – 1944). George Gein was a violent alcoholic who was frequently unemployed. Ed and his brother rejected their violent, aimless father, as did Augusta, who treated her husband like a nonentity. Despite her deep contempt for her husband, the atrophic marriage persisted. Divorce was not an option due to the family's religious beliefs. Augusta operated the small family grocery store and eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, Plainfield, which became the Gein family's permanent home.

Augusta moved to this desolate location to prevent outsiders from influencing her sons. Gein only left the premises to go to school and Augusta blocked any attempt he made to pursue friendships. Besides school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Augusta, who was a fanatical Lutheran, drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drink and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were prostitutes, whores and instruments of the devil. According to Augusta, sex was only for procreation. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder and divine retribution.

With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanor, the young Gein became a target for bullies. Classmates and teachers recall other off-putting mannerisms such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal joke. To make matters worse, Augusta would scold him whenever he tried to make friends. Despite his poor social development, he did fairly well in school, particularly in reading and the study of world economics.

Ed tried the best he could to please his mother's dictative orders, however Augusta was rarely pleased with her boys. She often verbally abused them, believing that they were destined to become failures like their father. During their teens and throughout their early adulthood the boys remained detached from people outside of their farmstead and had only the company of each other.

Deaths of family members

Ed Gein's father, George, died of a heart attack in 1940. After his passing, the Gein brothers took on a series of odd jobs to help financially support the farm and their mother. Eddie tried to emulate his brother's work habits, and they both were considered by townspeople to be reliable and trustworthy. They worked as handymen mostly, yet Eddie frequently babysat for neighbors. It was babysitting that Eddie really enjoyed, because children were easier for him to relate to than his peers.

By the time his father George died, Henry had begun to reject Augusta's view of the world and was worried about Ed's unhealthy attachment to her. He had even taken to bad-mouthing her within earshot of his shocked brother. Eddie saw his mother as pure goodness and was mortified that his brother did not see her in the same way. It was possibly these incidents that led to the untimely and mysterious death of Henry in 1944.

On May 16th, Eddie and Henry were fighting a brush fire that was burning dangerously close to their farm. According to police, the two separated in different directions attempting to put out the blaze. During their struggle, night quickly approached and soon Eddie lost sight of Henry. After the blaze was extinguished, Eddie supposedly became worried about his missing brother and ran to the police. The police organized a search party, and were surprised upon reaching the farm to have Eddie lead them directly to the "missing" Henry, who was lying dead on the ground. The police were concerned about some of the things surrounding Henry's death. For example, Henry was lying on a piece of earth that was untouched by fire and had bruises on his head. Although Henry was found under strange circumstances, police were quick to dismiss foul play. No one could believe that the odd but harmless Ed Gein was capable of killing anyone, especially his brother. Later the county coroner would list asphyxiation as the cause of death.

Gein then lived with just his mother. Less than two years later, on December 29, 1945, Augusta died from a series of strokes, leaving her grief-stricken son alone on the isolated farmstead. In his book Deviant, Harold Schechter explained that Eddie had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world."

He remained at the farm after his mother's death and lived off the meager earnings from odd jobs that he performed. Eddie boarded off the rooms his mother used the most, mainly the upstairs floor, the downstairs parlor and living room. He preserved them as a shrine to her and left them untouched for the years to follow. He resided in the lower level of the house, making use of the kitchen area and a small room located just off the kitchen, which he used as a bedroom. It was in these areas that Eddie would spend his spare time reading death-cult magazines and adventure stories. At other times, Eddie would immerse himself in his bizarre hobbies that included nightly visits to the graveyard.

Arrest

Police suspected Gein to be involved in the disappearance of a store clerk, Bernice Worden, in Plainfield on November 16, 1957. Upon entering a shed on his property, they made their first horrific discovery of the night: Worden's corpse. She had been decapitated, her headless body hung upside down by means of ropes at her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. Most horribly, the body's torso was empty, the ribcage split and the body "dressed out" like that of a deer. These mutilations had been performed postmortem; she had been shot at close-range with a .22-caliber rifle.

Searching the house, authorities found:

• Human skulls mounted upon the corner posts of his bed;
• Skin fashioned into a lampshade and used to upholster chair seats;
• Breasts used as cup holders
• Human skullcaps, apparently in use as soup bowls;
• A human heart (it is disputed where the heart was found; the deputies' reports all claim that the heart was in a saucepan on the stove, with some crime scene photographers claiming it was in a paper bag);
• Skin from the face of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, found in a paper bag;
• A window shade pull consisting of human lips;
• A "mammary vest" crafted from the skin of a woman's torso;
• A belt made from several human nipples, among many other such grisly objects;
• Socks made from human flesh.
• A sheath made from human skin.
• A box of preserved vulvas that Ed admitted to wearing.

Gein's most notorious creations were an array of "shrunken heads." Various neighborhood children — whom Gein occasionally babysat — had seen or heard of these objects, which Gein offhandedly described as relics from the South Seas, purportedly sent by a cousin who had served in World War II. Upon investigation, these turned out to be human facial skins, carefully peeled from cadavers and used by Gein as masks.

Gein eventually admitted under questioning that he would dig up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and take the bodies home, where he tanned their skin to make his macabre possessions. One writer describes Gein's practice of putting on the tanned skins of women as an "insane transvestite ritual". Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining, "They smelled too bad." During interrogation, Gein also admitted to the shooting death of Mary Hogan, who had been missing since 1954.

Shortly after his mother's death, Gein decided he wanted a sex change, although it is a matter of some debate whether he was transsexual; by most accounts, he created his "woman suit" so he could pretend to be his mother, rather than change his sex.

Harold Schechter, an author of several true crime books, wrote a best-selling book about the Gein case called Deviant. In this book, Schechter mentions that Plainfield police officer Art Schley physically assaulted Gein during questioning by banging Gein's head and face into a brick wall; because of this, Gein's initial confession was ruled inadmissible. Schley died of a heart attack at the age of forty-three, shortly before Gein's trial. Many who knew him said he was so traumatized by the horror of Gein's crimes and the fear of having to testify (notably about assaulting Gein) that it led to his early death. One of his friends said, "He was a victim of Ed Gein as surely as if he had butchered him."

Trial hearing

Gein was found mentally incompetent and thus unfit to stand trial at the time of his arrest, and was sent to the Central State Hospital (now the Dodge Correctional Institution) in Waupun, Wisconsin. Later, Central State Hospital was converted into a prison and Gein was transferred to Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1968, Gein's doctors determined he was sane enough to stand trial; he was found not guilty by reason of insanity by judge Robert H. Gollmar and spent the rest of his life in the hospital.

Legacy

While Gein was in detention, his house burned to the ground. Arson was suspected. In 1958, Gein's car, which he used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at public auction for a then-considerable sum of $760 to an enterprising carnival sideshow operator named Bunny Gibbons. Gibbons called his attraction the "Ed Gein Ghoul Car" and charged carnival-goers 25 cents admission to see it.

Death

Ed Gein's gravemarker as it appeared in 1999.

On July 26, 1984, Ed Gein died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer in Goodland Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is presently displayed in a Wautoma, Wisconsin museum.

Popular culture

The story of Ed Gein has had a lasting impact on popular culture as evidenced by its many appearances in movies, music and literature. Gein's story was adapted into a number of movies including Stephen Johnston's In the Light of the Moon, later to be retitled Ed Gein for the U.S. market as well as Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield and Deranged. Gein also influenced the nature of characters such as celluloid serial killers Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs), Norman Bates (Psycho), and Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Gein's influence can also be seen by the number of musical groups drawing inspiration from his crimes. There are a number of songs written about Gein including Slayer's "Dead Skin Mask", Mudvayne's "Nothing To Gein", Blind Melon's "Skinned" and Macabre's "Ed Gein", to name a few. In addition, a number of band names were derived from Gein including a band by the name of Ed Gein, and a New York punk band by the name of Ed Gein's Car. Gidget Gein, a former bassist for the band Marilyn Manson even derived his stage name from Ed Gein. The band Plainfield, which includes the drummer and bassist of Mr. Bungle, took their name from the town that Gein lived and murdered in. Also, a track in guitarist John 5's album The Devil Knows My Name, "Dead Art in Plainfield," is a reference to Gein.

External links

• Crime Library Article about Ed Gein
• Nov. 18, 1957: Minneapolis Tribune coverage of Ed Gein’s arrest
• 11/30/2007 Isthmus (A Madison WI paper) article of Ed Gein's legacy
• Ed Gein: An American Maniac