World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 15 - Ed Gein - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In November 1957, police in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, were searching for a missing woman named Bernice Worden.
They were about to make one of the most gruesome discoveries in U.S. criminal history.
-One of them turned down his flashlight and beamed it around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer. They realized, to their incredible horror,
that it was a woman's corpse that was hanging by its heels. -The twisted killer was a quiet loner named Ed Gein.
Hidden inside the 51-year-old's rural farmhouse was a ghoulish treasure trove of human remains.
-There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found the remains of 12 human heads,
gloves made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers. -You think of this happening, you know, now,
it would still be shocking. But back then, in a small, tiny rural community, it was breathtaking.
-America had woken up inside the nightmare of Ed Gein, one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The gruesome crimes of Ed Gein horrified '50s America. When his rural home was searched on the 16 November 1957,
the police uncovered a gothic house of horrors. As well as the remains of two missing local women,
they found an array of human bones, skulls, and skin that had been fashioned into furniture and clothing.
The town of Plainfield was in complete shock. One of the residents who remembers the effect
Gein had on Plainfield is Max Harrington. -I think shock would be the biggest thing that we could use
to describe the atmosphere in the community. And we were still pretty much clannish community at that time
when a lot of the families that were here had always been here. It took your breath away, you know, you just --
you know, it was shocking. It still is. People don't do things like that in a small town on a normal day.
That's just not part of what we grew up with. -The story of this twisted killer begins over a century ago.
Ed Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on 27 August 1906. By the time he was 8 years old, his parents moved Ed
and his older brother, Henry, to Plainfield. -Well, the Gein family moved to Plainfield
from La Crosse, Wisconsin, partly because of the mother of the family, the matriarch, Augusta,
had decided that La Crosse was a kind of Sodom- and-Gomorrah-like hellhole. And she didn't want her children to be corrupted
by all the immoral influences of the big city. Needless to say, La Crosse was not a particularly big city,
but they moved to a remote farmhouse about six miles west of, you wouldn't necessarily say, "downtown Plainfield,"
because there was no uptown Plainfield. -It's not the largest city in the state of Wisconsin,
but it's plenty big enough for those of us that live here. -Plainfield was a very remote, isolated,
featureless little village. A state guidebook at the time described it as totally nondescript.
The population was very small, never more, in it's history, I think, than 700 or 800 people.
You know, probably the entire population of the village could have fit into a New York City apartment building.
-The Gein's 150-acre farm was located on the corner of Archer and 2nd Avenue. Ed rarely got to leave the property
and socialize with other children. -His mother, Augusta, is a very domineering character, indeed.
She is a devout Christian and she has some very extreme ideas about sin and about morality.
And she drums into her sons that they're not to socialize with anybody outside of the family
because all of the people around them in the local town are sinners, they're evil, all the women are whores.
And so she creates this very insular family environment where they're quite isolated from the rest of the community.
And that has a really significant impact on them. -Gein seemed to have been very friendless.
Whenever he would make some kind of friend on those rare occasions, when he would try to make a school friend
and bring home a school friend, the mother would immediately find some reason to disapprove of the other child
and forbid Ed from ever bringing him home. So he grew up again in a state of complete social isolation.
-And Gein's relationship with his father was also far from perfect. -Well, the father, George, was an alcoholic.
He appeared to have been somewhat free in his use of physical punishment. But mostly the picture that emerges of George is of,
you know, kind of a hapless individual, who was, as all three male members of the family were,
under the thumb of his wife, and again, who was regarded, as much as anything else,
as sort of obstacle or impediment to the household. -As Ed entered adolescence, his life became even more insular.
-He dropped out of school when he was around about 12 or 13 to work on the family's farm.
And he was considered to be a bit of an oddball. He was quite a loner. And he enjoyed quite solitary pursuits.
So, he really quite liked reading and was quite a prolific reader. So, he was somebody who didn't really fit in,
but worked incredibly hard to keep the family farm going. -On April 1, 1940, Ed's father, George, died of heart failure,
leaving 33-year-old Ed, his brother, Henry, and Augusta alone on the family farm.
-Ed's older brother, Henry, seemed to have freed himself a little more emotionally
and psychologically from Augusta's dominance. And even, apparently, on a couple of occasions,
expressed some criticism of their mother and the hold she was exerting over both of them.
So, Ed, who, at least on a conscious level, worshipped his mother, and saw her as a kind of goddess who could do no wrong,
appears to have been both a little shocked, you know, that Henry would find any cause to criticize Augusta,
and possibly built up some kind of animosity toward Henry for that attitude. -Ed became a handyman doing odd jobs around Plainfield
to help with living expenses on the farm. -We used to see Ed occasionally. I'd see him around town, and he was always a friendly person,
quiet, friendly, usually had a joke to tell. He always had time to say hello and asked after how you were,
a person you would never expect of anything other than being a decent sort of person.
-In May 1944, death would hit the Gein family once again, but this time, in more suspicious circumstances,
after a brush fire on their farmland got out of control. -Ed and Henry were out there trying to put out the fire
and they got separated and Ed could not locate Henry. And he went and got help, but then after getting this help,
he led the other people directly to where Henry's body lay. And there was some mysterious bruises on Henry's head.
The official verdict of the medical examiner was that Henry had died of a heart attack
while fighting this fire and had injured his head when he fell and hit a rock. But afterwards when Gein's crimes were uncovered,
there was a lot of talk that perhaps Henry had been a victim of Ed's. That Ed, in fact, had killed Henry partly
because of Henry's criticism of Augusta. -The impact upon their mother, Augusta, was phenomenal.
She really broke down about Henry's death, and she had a stroke. But of course, by then, you know,
the psychic bond between Augusta and Ed was so incredibly intense already, evidence seems to suggest
that with the other two men out of the way, Ed reveled in having his mommy alone to himself.
-But Gein's mother never really recovered from her stroke and their time alone only lasted for 19 months.
-Ed nursed her very, very diligently, even apparently, would get into bed with her on occasion
and stroke her and comfort her. And then she seemed to recover, but then she suffered another,
this time fatal, stroke. -August Gein died on December 29, 1945. 39-year-old Ed was completely devastated.
-'Cause his mother was so domineering, I think she really did stunt his development,
and he almost got stuck at a kind of teenage adolescent phase in his life. So, looking at how he behaved at the funeral,
he was in his 30s at this time, and he was reported to be wailing like a small child.
So he hasn't got that kind of emotional control that's associated with 30-something men.
-The death of his mother left him completely, completely isolated. You know, living in this increasingly ramshackle,
dilapidated farmhouse that he ceased to take care of whatsoever. Augusta was his only real human contact.
So it was at that point, you know, that Gein embarked on these various, outrageous,
that would ultimately make him this notorious figure in American crime. -Alone and isolated from the rest of society,
Gein spiraled out of control. Over the next 12 years, he became obsessed with re-creating
the world he shared with his mother. It would lead him to a series of dark and disturbing crimes
that would eventually culminate in murder. -One of my summer jobs when I was a student in high school
was mowing the cemetery. And two of my buddies and I, that was about a four-day job
for us to mow that. And we would see Ed out there on occasion. He'd come out, and if he saw us working,
he'd always come over and say hello, and, again, sometimes have this little story to tell.
And he was very good about stopping and see his mother's grave. -I think neighbors saw him as an odd, very meek,
somewhat simple-minded person, but one who is always willing to pitch in when some farmwork needed to be done
or some chore needed to be run for them. But they, of course, had no sense of the life
that he was pursuing inside that incredibly creepy, dismal world of his own farm.
-It was a world that 51-year-old Gein had managed to keep hidden away until the winter of 1957.
-November 16, 1957, was the first day of deer-hunting season that year, and it was a day when, basically,
the entire male population of the town would have been out in the woods hunting deer, as Ed knew.
Ed drove into town to the Worden Hardware Store. The Worden Hardware Store was owned by a woman
named Bernice Worden. -I knew Mrs. Worden quite well. She and her family ran the hardware store here
for many years, almost everybody in the community knew Mrs. Worden. -Ed had kind of been hanging around the store
for a couple weeks previously. He had developed something of an obsession with Bernice Worden.
-He would talk to her, he would ask her out, and it was quite clear that she really wasn't that interested in him.
-Ed came in, asked to buy half a gallon of antifreeze, which Bernice Worden poured out for him
and wrote out a receipt. He went back out to his truck then came back inside and asked her to see a rifle that was in the window.
When Bernice Worden turned her back to him, he shot her in the back of the head and then loaded her corpse in his truck,
and drove back to his farm. -Gein had murdered the 58-year-old woman in broad daylight.
-It was deer season, so deer season, it's, like, a ghost town around here. Everybody -- in those days, especially,
everybody was out hunting. And she wasn't even missed for quite some hours. And then someone reported that she wasn't at the store,
well, that was her son, of course. -Later that day, Frank Worden returned from the woods
and found the store empty. His mother wasn't there. He was very perplexed by that.
And then he saw a trail of blood across the floor of the hardware store. And not only realized, you know,
that some foul play had occurred, but immediately suspected Ed Gein, because Gein had been kind of bothering his mother
for the past few weeks. -And there was one piece of evidence that confirmed Frank Worden's suspicions to the police.
-When they went to search the place, they found the receipt for the antifreeze that was in Ed's name.
And they just worked backwards, saying that he was probably the last person to see her alive.
But they didn't suspect that he was as deranged as he was. -One set of lawmen went out in search of Gein.
They found him having dinner at a neighbor's house, and they arrested him. And then another set of lawmen went out to Gein's farmhouse.
And that's where they made these discoveries that really sent shockwaves around the world.
-On a dark winter's night, officers from the Plainfield Police Department began to search the Gein farm for Bernice Worden.
-They couldn't get into the house, so they went around back, and entered into what was called the "summer kitchen,"
which was a little shed outside. -This property didn't have any electricity, so they were pretty much fumbling around
in the dark with flashlights. But I don't think they expected to find what they did find there.
-One of them turned down his flashlight and beamed it around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer -- although it didn't look like a deer.
They realized, to their incredible horror, that it was a woman's corpse that was hanging by its heels,
and been completely gutted. -She'd been strung up, essentially, and she was slit from her sternum to her pelvis.
So, she'd essentially been butchered by Ed. It really was the most grotesque thing
that these officers had ever come across. -And they realized they had found the body
of Bernice Worden. And, of course, both of them just stumbled out in horror and vomited, you know, at the sight of this thing.
-When the news spread across the town, the residents of Plainfield were in complete shock.
-When I heard of his arrest, I couldn't believe it, I was sure they had the wrong person
because it just didn't seem like anything that they were telling us was the Ed that we all knew.
And that was a Saturday night, we were at a dance, and the story went through there,
and everybody said, "I don't believe it." But it was true. -After finding the butchered body of Bernice Worden
in a shed at Ed Gein's farm, the police officers move their search into the main house.
-He boarded up some areas of the family's home to maintain the rooms as his mother had left them.
And in other parts of the property, he just started hoarding things. You know, you would have trash and rubbish build up,
and it really became a complete hovel. -He had reversed the normal process of trash disposal.
You know, and instead of taking all his garbage to the dump, would go to the dump and bring it into his house.
It was just this incredible chaos of trash and garbage. -But there was more than just household waste.
-The middle of that wreckage, they discovered these incomprehensible, unspeakably awful objects
that had been fashioned out of human body parts. There were chairs that we upholstered in human flesh.
-There was a lampshade made of human skin. They found the remains of 12 human heads,
gloves made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers. -There was a jar containing human noses.
There was a box full of female genitalia, some of which had been painted, and tied with ribbons.
There was a belt fashioned out of female nipples. There was a shade pull made of human lips.
-They found all types of things that belonged to people that were no longer people, and it was shocking.
I mean, you think of this happening, you know, now, it would still be shocking. But back then, in a small, tiny rural community,
it was absolutely -- it was breathtaking. -Ed Gein's farmhouse was the habitation of a literal ghoul.
You know, somebody who had been living amidst these horrific relics of human dismemberment.
It was a madhouse. -Gein's fascination with death and corpses had been growing ever since his mother had died 12 years previously.
-Ed had always enjoyed reading. It was quite a solitary pursuit, so that's not particularly surprising.
But after the death of his mother and his brother, he started to read an awful lot more,
and his taste in literature really did span quite a wide spectrum. He read pornographic magazines.
He read medical textbooks. And he developed a particular interest in Ilsa Koch, who worked at one of the Nazi concentration camps
and collected patches of skin of the prisoners who were detained there. And I think all of this
was fueling a very active imagination. So, he's developing these obsessions and these interests,
and he's quite skilled as a farmhand at this point and time. He knows how to slaughter animals.
He knows how to prepare carcasses. He's from a community that's very much into its hunting and its fishing.
So, at some point, reality and fantasy are going to collide. -As the search of the farmhouse progressed, officers found
that the grotesque collection of body parts became even more disturbing. -Among the most hideous of all the items were human skin masks
that were hanging from the wall of his bedroom, the faces of women that had been filleted from the skulls
and that had been preserved. Some of them had lipstick applied to them and that had been hung on the walls as decorations.
And then, most notoriously, there was a skin suit that Ed had crafted out of the upper torso of a woman
and the leggings of a woman. And apparently, as he later confessed, he would put on this skin suit,
and put on one of the female skin mask, and caper around in his yard, pretending to be his mother.
-Gein's macabre collection had been acquired from the very same cemetery where his mother's body lay.
-Two years after the death of his mother, in 1947, he starts grave-robbing. So he's going into a local burial ground,
he's digging up bodies, and he's taking things from the bodies. Now, he's not taking jewelry or items of any value.
He's actually taking body parts. It really is an absolute house of horrors. So, what started off as an interest,
which was confined to the pages of a book, has now become a reality behind the doors of this rather bizarre house.
So what he's doing, in a really grotesque way, is trying to bring his mother back to life in some way, shape, or form
because he was just so dependent upon her for a sense of his own identity. -And the search wasn't over yet.
Officers would soon discover, inside a paper bag in Gein's home, the severed head of a woman
who'd been missing from Plainfield for over two years. -I think that the real tipping point for Ed Gein
was when his mother and his brother died. Because even though this family was very intense
and rather extreme in its beliefs, it was still a check on his behavior. There was still that informal surveillance over him.
And I think that kept him contained. But once he was on his own, he was free to ruminate and fantasize,
and his behavior was only going to escalate. -You know, it's, like, some crack opened up, you know,
in the civilized part of his head, and all this weird, archaic stuff going back to the days,
you know, when our species did engage in these bizarre, unspeakable rituals, you know, flooded out and took possession of him.
-With Gein in custody, officers continued to scour his home and they were about to make another startling discovery --
a local woman, who'd been missing for almost three years. -There had been a female tavern keeper named Mary Hogan,
who ran this roadside tavern outside of Plainfield, who had disappeared very, very mysteriously.
-In those days, we had 18-year-old bars where teenagers could go and have beer. And she ran one of those.
It was kind of a modest place, to be very kind, but she disappeared before I was old enough to frequent those establishments.
-When she went missing, he'd said some rather bizarre things. He said to one of the townspeople,
"Oh, she's not missing. She's up at the house." But because he was a bit of a misfit
and because he was a bit weird, people didn't really take what he said very seriously at all.
So that one was allowed to slip under the radar, until this grizzly discovery a few years later.
-In searching through Gein's house of horrors, the investigators opened up some receptacle
and saw this face and pulled it out and realized it was Mary Hogan's, that she had been another one of these victims.
-Gein had murdered Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, three years previous to killing Bernice Worden.
-I think there was some sense in which he associated her with his mother. You know, she almost seemed to be, like,
the shadow side of his mother. And I think, in killing her, again, he was both enacting
some kind of homicidal rage toward his mother, but I think, also, there were times
when he just ran out of suitable female corpses and had to make his own. -Back at the local police station,
it was time for Ed Gein to start talking. -Well, for the first day after his arrest,
I think Ed felt like a bit of a fish out of water. He didn't quite know how to react.
But he did start talking after about 24 hours. And the first thing he said was that he wanted an apple pie
with a slice of cheese on it. And that really does show the emotional immaturity of this guy.
And when you got somebody whose development stops at a particular point, they don't develop those complex emotions
that enable them to empathize with other people or to think through the consequences of their actions.
So what you've got here is a teenage boy in a man's body, and he was capable of some really terrible things.
-And he was subjected to a very lengthy interrogation. He freely confessed to the murders of Bernice Worden
and Mary Hogan. When the police first broke into Gein's house and discovered this crazy mass of body parts,
their first assumption was Gein was a serial killer. It was only during his interrogation that he revealed
that they were taken from the corpses he had dug up from the local cemetery. And people, in a way, had a hard time believing that
than that he was a serial killer. That seemed, like, totally beyond the bounds of belief
for a whole variety of reasons. -Human bodies are traditionally buried six-feet underground.
That's a lot of digging. That's a lot of work to get to them through packed earth.
He'd need spades, picks. He'd need to be strong and he'd need, one assumes, to do it at night
because he'd need to be undisturbed. -I'm not sure he did recognize that what he was doing was wrong.
You know, there are some necrophiles who think, "Well, I wasn't really hurting anybody.
You know, they're dead anyway." -Gein confessed to investigators that between 1947 and 1952,
he'd regularly visited the local cemetery after dark. -He would often follow the local newspapers
and read the obituaries. And when some middle-aged or elderly woman, who bore some vague resemblance to his departed mother,
died and was buried, he would apparently go out to the cemetery at night, while the soil was still fresh,
and easily dug up and exhumed these coffins and remove the bodies and sometimes take the entire corpse back to his farmhouse,
sometimes just take parts of the corpse back to the farmhouse and leave the rest there.
-Investigators decided to dig up some of the graves to see if Gein was telling the truth.
-When they uncovered them, they discovered that the coffins had been broken into
and the bodies were missing or, you know, there were just parts of the skeleton remaining there.
-He admitted to grave-robbing nine corpses, but the maths didn't quite add up because the police had found 12 human heads in Gein's property,
and he'd only admitted to 11 offenses against separate people. So the numbers never really added up properly.
So there's always been questions over that. -Ed Gein's crimes were in the late '50s -- 1957.
The state of forensic science, in those days, was far less than we have now. Things like DNA simply didn't exist as a tool.
So identification could potentially be very difficult and I would suspect in, certainly, some of the body parts, simply impossible.
-There was no doubt that Gein specifically targeted females. All the graves he desecrated belonged to women.
-I think he was both trying to rebuild his mother, but I also think that he was taking revenge on his mother.
That kind of love and hate of Mommy were manifested, both by his attempting to bring her back from the dead,
but also perpetrating, you know, these atrocities on the corpses of female bodies.
-It's been reported that Gein did, in fact, try to return Augusta to the family home after her funeral.
-There's some indication that he initially tried to exhume his mother's corpse. You know, apparently, Ed missed the presence
of his mother so much, you know, he wanted to bring her back, and somehow in his madness,
you know reconstitute her in his household. He couldn't get to his mother's grave because the soil
in that part of Wisconsin is very sandy and many coffins are buried within concrete vaults
to prevent the sand from collapsing on them. And that was apparently true of Augusta Gein.
-In November 1957, Ed Gein was charged with the murder of Bernice Worden. The media descended on the tiny town of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
-Well, the cultural context of the Gein case is quite an interesting one, because I think this was one of the first cases
that gathered an awful lot of attention. There was a media circus that developed around this
because nothing like this had ever really happened before. It was something completely new.
-It spread very quickly through the local newspapers. And you know, and then through the Associated Press
and so on to the national media. You know, Plainfield, which, you know, had always existed
from the time of its founding in happy obscurity, you know, suddenly found itself to be the center of national
and even international attention. -It was just an exasperating time. And then we were inundated by nosy Nelly's
that all thought that, "Boy, I got to go drive by that old farmhouse." And then we became, I don't like to use the word chaotic,
but a very unsettled community for a while. -Plainfield was suddenly famous and famous for the most horrifying of reasons.
You know, that it was the home of America's most notorious psychopath. -The entire community was stunned.
For the previous decade, they'd been living in the same town as a real-life bogeyman.
It would now be down to the courts to decide whether or not Ed Gein was insane. On November 21, 1957, the 51-year-old pleaded
not guilty by reason of insanity at his arraignment at Waushara County Court. And it was declared that he was unfit to stand trial.
-Their indication that Ed was clinically psychotic, that he had hallucinations, that he heard voices,
or the trees would start talking to him. Most serial murderers are not psychotic, but Ed seemed
to have the symptoms of some form of psychosis. -Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconsin, which is now a maximum-security prison.
70 miles away in Plainfield, the community was trying to get back on its feet, but the shadow of Ed Gein lingered over the town.
-In 1958, the property that Gein had lived in was due to be auctioned off. And I think the last thing that local people wanted was for this
to become some kind of shrine, some kind of attraction for people who were morbidly fascinated.
So a few days before the auction, the property was burned to the ground, essentially.
-A lot of talk of arson. They had been cleaning up around there and had been burning
trash up around that particular day, too. So then, that was -- or anyway, that was an excuse of a possible cause,
that maybe the wind got something in the evening and got some live embers in there.
A lot of the neighbors weren't too happy with having talk of it being turned into a museum of sorts.
But there was a lot of stories. Anyway, it's gone. People still kept coming, though,
even after the house was gone. For years, still had people coming to drive by the empty lot
where the house used to stand. -In March 1958, the car which Gein used to transport
the bodies of his victims was bought at an auction for over $700 by a carnival operator,
who charged fascinated Americans 25 cents for a photograph at a macabre sideshow.
-I think what we're seeing here is the rise of the serial killer consumer culture.
People are fascinated in these kind of cases. And some criminologists refer to this as "wound culture,"
that we're essentially drawn to the trauma and the suffering of other people and we're drawn to the artifacts that exist around these cases.
-Gein remained in the Central State Hospital for 11 years, until doctors determined that he was finally fit to stand trial
for the first-degree murder of Bernice Worden. The hearing lasted for a week, and on November 14, 1968,
Judge Robert Gollmar had reached a verdict. -He was tried and found guilty of the murder of Bernice Worden.
But then he was judged insane and stuck back in the mental institution. -I think that was possibly somewhere he may have thrived
'cause he had structure, he had a routine, he had people watching over him and looking after his needs.
-Forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Morrison interviewed Gein during his time in hospital.
-I was working at that time as a staff psychiatrist, and I was covering all the units.
And when I was asked to go over to see this person, I went over to see it, and I saw Ed Gein.
He was not at all coherent. He was such a little person that I found it hard to picture him
as the person who'd committed all these homicides. He lived there very peacefully.
He never caused any problems, never had any type of behavioral thing, no type of,
I guess you could say, consequence for bad behavior. -Gein's quiet nature in hospital was in stark contrast
to the monster Helen had heard so much about. -I received a letter from one of his neighbors,
who used to be a friend of his. She was a little girl. And she remembers going over to his house
and he would serve soup and everything. Well, it turned out the soup bowls were the skulls of many of his victims,
and people never knew it. -On July 26, 1984, Ed Gein died of lung cancer, age 77.
He was buried next to his mother on the Gein family plot, at the same cemetery which he so often desecrated
during his career of horror. Gein has left a lasting impact on the small community
where he committed his ghoulish crimes. -We really wouldn't care to have that be our claim to fame.
You know, we've turned out lots of doctors and architects and some really good people out of our schools here.
We're very proud of them. We'd rather be known for a tremendously good population
than to be credited for only one issue. -But just like the carnival operators of the 1950s,
people continue to try and get their hands on grizzly souvenirs related to Gein.
-In the year 2000, somebody was found to be selling parts of the gravestone that had been erected at Gein's grave.
For people who are fans of the serial-killer cult, this was just the gift that kept on giving.
-Well, they keep putting up headstones and the headstones keep disappearing. There's a whole category of collectible
that has come to be known as "murderabilia," and Gein relics are particularly prized among people
who collect that kind of morbid relic. -Over 60 years since the horrific crimes,
Gein has grown into a notorious figure in American folklore, a killer of almost mythic proportions.
-The two things that are fascinating about Ed Gein is the fact that he only, as far as we know,
murdered two people, which is a lot less than many infamous killers, but he's had such a huge legacy in films, books, music.
He seems to have become a sort of pop-culture murderer. -At the time the Gein crimes were being revealed
in the press, there was a writer of pulp horror named Robert Bloch, who had moved to Wisconsin to be with his wife's family.
And at some point, when Gein was being interviewed by various psychiatrists, all these headlines in the papers
were trumpeting the fact that Gein had been motivated by these deranged, oedipal conflicts.
You know, that he was this desperately sick mama's boy, you know, who was perpetrating these atrocities
on middle-aged women, you know, who reminded him of his mother. And this caught the attention of Robert Bloch,
who decided this could potentially make the basis of a good horror novel, and that became the book "Psycho."
In the book "Psycho," Norman Bates, actually, after he's arrested, compares himself at the end of the book to Ed Gein.
So, the connection is made very, very explicit there in the book. Anyway, "Psycho," as we know, turned into one of the great,
classic horror movies of American cinema. You know, if you look at horror movies before then,
there were all these Eastern European monsters, Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man,
you know, or else they were aliens from outer space. You know, with "Psycho," "Psycho" establishes
and, you know, Ed Gein establishes, you know, this quintessentially American figure of horror,
the ordinary, middle-American guy who turns out to be this monster in disguise. And then, of course, Gein becomes the basis
for Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and later on for Thomas Harris' character,
Buffalo Bill, in "Silence of the Lambs." You know, so Gein has this very, very direct influence
on American horror cinema. -But Gein's crimes were not fictional. They were very real.
And he remains one of the most infamous murderers in U.S. history. -We think of Gein
as this notorious American serial murderer. But in many ways, he doesn't really fit that profile.
You know, for example, he wasn't a sexual sadist in the way John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy were, or Jeffrey Dahmer.
You know, he wasn't driven by that particular form of deviance. -Well, I think he was brought up in a vacuum
that created the conditions for someone who would go on to do evil things. So whilst most people are shocked and repulsed
and absolutely horrified at some of the things he's done, because he didn't have that filter
and that check on his behavior, he was able to escalate to a level of evil, I think.
-Evil is something that, you know, professionally, people don't believe in evil.
But I truly believe that he was evil. I think there are people who would like to say
that the devil got into him and made him do these awful things, but I think he was born evil.
-The Ed I knew was not an evil person. He did things that normal people do not do
and there's no doubt about that. And to kill two people is certainly not the person
who you would really like to invite to your neighborhood party. But, yeah, he was --
there was something in his head that didn't click right. -Ed Gein's crimes are the stuff of genuine nightmares.
The man with an unhealthy obsession with his mother brazenly murdered two women and kept a bizarre collection
of gruesome keepsakes inside his house of horrors. He truly deserves to be remembered as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Ed Gein murdered two women in the 1950s and was also a body snatcher. He would fashion items out of bones and skin.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Ed Gein's horrific crimes include murdering two women and creating a collection of body parts, shocking the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Key points

The Gruesome Discovery. Police uncover a woman's corpse hanging in Ed Gein's farmhouse, shocking the community.
The House of Horrors. Gein's farmhouse revealed a collection of human remains and grotesque items.
Community Shock. Residents of Plainfield struggle to comprehend the horror of Ed Gein's actions.
A Twisted Obsession. Ed Gein's fixation on his mother and death led to his horrific crimes.
The Final Tipping Point. The deaths of Ed's mother and brother unleashed his darkest impulses.
The Grizzly Discovery. Investigators uncover the horrifying truth about Ed Gein's victims, including Mary Hogan.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It took your breath away, you know, you just -- you know, it was shocking.

Max Harrington describes the shock in Plainfield after the discovery of Gein's crimes.

2:27WatchJul 28, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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