Ed Gein

Warning: This article contains graphic and possibly disturbing details about Ed Gein's murders.

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Ed Gein

Edward Theodore Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), was one of the most notorious murderers in United States history. The particularly bizarre and morbid nature of his crimes shocked the world even though it may never be known if he committed more than two murders.

Childhood

Ed Gein was born to George P. Gein (1873-1940) and Augusta T. Gein (1878-1945) on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Edward had a brother, Henry G. Gein (1902-1944) who was born on January 7, 1902. The Geins were a notably dysfunctional family. George was a violent man who could not keep a job, usually spending his days brooding on the front porch and consuming liquor. Ed rejected his violent, aimless father, as did his older brother Henry and especially Augusta, who treated him like a nonentity. Despite her deep contempt for George, the atrophic marriage persisted. Divorce was not an option, due to the family's fanatical religious beliefs. Augusta operated the small family grocery store and eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, Plainfield, which thereafter became Ed's permanent home.

Augusta decided to move 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. Aside from school, Ed spent most of his free time doing chores on the farm. Augusta, who was fanatically religious, drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drink, and, above all, that all women (herself, of course, excluded) were whores. According to Augusta, the only acceptable form of sex was solely for procreation. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them scriptures from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder, and divine retribution. When Gein reached puberty, Augusta became even more fanatical towards her son, once dousing him in scalding water after she caught him masturbating in the bathtub.

With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanor, Ed became a target for bullies. Ed was also notorious for a permanent lopsided grin that was even displayed during serious conversations. Classmates and teachers recall other off-putting mannerisms, such as seemingly random laughter, as if he was laughing at his own personal joke. Despite Ed's poor social development, he managed to do fairly well in school, particularly in reading. Some researchers argued that Ed's detrimental childhood experiences were a contributing factor in his later behavior.

Deaths of family members

By the time George died in 1940, Henry had begun to reject Augusta's warped view of the world. He had even taken to bad-mouthing her within earshot of his mortified brother. In March 1944, the brothers found themselves in the middle of a brush fire on the farm. When Ed ran to get the police, he told them he had lost sight of Henry, but then led them directly to his brother's corpse. Although there was evidence Henry had suffered blunt trauma to the head, police decided he died of asphyxiation while fighting the fire.

On December 29, 1945, Augusta died of cancer. At the funeral, the 39-year-old sobbed uncontrollably, utterly devastated. Gein had grown up terrified of human contact, especially with women; he never dated and was almost certainly a virgin. While Augusta sometimes berated him for being a failure like his father, more often than not she apparently nurtured the bizarre, Oedipal devotion she had planted into his psyche. She would talk softly to her son, tell him that he was a "good boy," and let him sleep with her. Police would later find every room in the Gein house a filthy mess, save for the sitting room and Augusta's bedroom, which Gein had kept spotless in homage to her.

Arrest

Police investigating the disappearance of store clerk Bernice Worden in Plainfield, Wisconsin, on November 16, 1957, suspected Gein to be involved. Upon entry to the shed on his property, they made their first horrific discovery of the night, Worden's corpse. She had been decapitated, and was hanging upside down by the ankles and split open down the torso like a deer. The mutilations had been performed post mortem; she had been killed with a close-range rifle blast from a .22.

Searching the house, authorities found:

• severed heads acting as bedposts in the bedroom;
• skin used to make lampshades and chair seats;
• skullcaps made into 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);
• a necklace of human lips;
• a waistcoat made up of a vagina and breasts; and
• other items fashioned from the parts of human bodies including a belt fashioned from nipples.

Above all, Gein's most infamous creation was an entire wardrobe fabricated of human skin consisting of leggings, a gutted torso (including breasts) and an array of tanned, dead-skin masks that looked leathery and almost mummified.

Under questioning, Gein eventually admitted 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. He did dig up his mother, and would masturbate over her body. After his mother died, Gein had begun to think often of castration, and even considered a sex-change operation, but couldn't afford it. One writer describes Gein's practice of putting on the tanned skins of women as an "insane transvestite ritual."[1] Gein also participated in a stunted form of necrophilia, achieving sexual pleasure by playing with the mutilated sexual organs of corpses. 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, a local tavern employee who had been missing since 1954.

Harold Schechter, a leading expert on serial killers, wrote a best selling book about the Gein case called Deviant. In this book, Schechter mentions a tragic footnote: Plainfield sheriff Art Schaley 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. Schaley died of a heart attack at the age of 43 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 he had butchered him."

Gein was found mentally incompetent and thus unfit to stand trial at the time of his arrest, and sent to the Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin which is now Dodge Correctional Institution. Later Central State Hospital turned into a prison and Gein was transfered to Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1968, his doctors determined he was sane enough to stand trial, he did and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and spent the rest of his life in the hospital.

Whilst 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 very large 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

Gein died of cancer in 1984 at the age of 78 in the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.

His body was interred at Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Vandalism to the grave site, near his parents', included many years of stone pieces chipped off for souvenirs until his gravestone was finally stolen in 2000. It was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and now is displayed in a museum.

Popular culture

Films

• Ed Gein's crimes became widely known because they were believed to have inspired the novel Psycho by Robert Bloch (Bloch later denied this in an interview), which became an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Also, the crimes largely inspired the films Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Alan Ormsby's Deranged as well as parts of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs (in the form of the character Buffalo Bill) and Red Dragon (in the form of the character Francis Dolarhyde). Gein's story was adapted into its own movie, In the Light of the Moon, starring Steve Railsback as Gein and Carrie Snodgress as Augusta. A movie released in April 11, 2003, House of 1000 Corpses, directed by Rob Zombie, has a scene involving Ed Gein, and Dr. Satan recreates some of what Ed Gein had done.

Music

• Bands Killdozer, Slayer, Mudvayne, Macabre, The Fibonaccis and Dahmer have composed songs about Ed Gein called "Ed Gein," "Dead Skin Mask" [2], "Nothing to Gein", "Old Mean Ed Gein," and "Edward Gein," respectively. There is a grindcore band by the name of Ed Gein. "Gidget Gein" was the stage name of a bassist in the band Marilyn Manson (real name Brad Stewart).
• The Swedish death metal band Deranged released an album called "Plainfield Cemetery".
• In the 1980s, an American punk rock band called itself "Ed Gein's Car."
• In 1995, the alternative rock band Blind Melon released the song 'Skinned', which is sung from the point of view of Gein.
• Featured in the song 'Mama Say' by the Bloodhound Gang is the line "I'll be in your face like Ed Gein."

Comics

The manga named Rurouni Kenshin (during the Revenge arc), features a character named "Gein", a dollmaker who digs up corpses and turns them into human-like dolls, and also constructs armours with them, that he wears to spy and fight.

The independent comic "Poison Elves" involved a minor story-arc (Ressurection Man) at the beginning of the series, wherein the main character runs into a man named Ed, who lived with his mother and supplied corpses to local doctors for dissection, and who was later found to be killing people and tanning their skins for clothes and drums.

See also

• 1930 US Census with Gein's in Plainfield, Wisconsin

External links

• Crime Library Article about Ed Gein
• Rotten.com Library Article (site not work-safe, graphic images)
• http://www.radford.edu/~maamodt/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Gein,%20Ed.htm
• Ed Gein the movie and films about other serial killers
• Findagrave: Gein family