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September 18 - September 19, 2018
“There once was a man named Ed Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed. When he wanted to diddle, He cut out the middle, And hung the rest in the shed.” Popular limerick, Wisconsin, ca. 1958
There, in the beam of his flashlight, dangled a large, dead-white carcass. It was hanging upside down by its feet. Its front had been split completely open, so that its trunk was little more than a dark, gaping hole. The carcass had been decapitated as though someone had sliced the head off for a trophy. The body had been butchered like a heifer or a dressed-out deer. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was the body of a human being, an adult woman. Bernice Worden’s body. The sight was so stupefying that it took a moment for Schley to understand what he was looking at. Then he managed to choke out a
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“On horror’s head horrors accumulate.” SHAKESPEARE, Othello
These were all individuals—county lawmen, state troopers, crime lab investigators—who were used to seeing harrowing sights, to witnessing the gruesome aftermaths of murders, hunting mishaps, and highway accidents. But, to a man, the sight of Mrs. Worden’s decapitated and disemboweled body stunned them into silence. None of them had ever set eyes on anything so appalling.
The sheer disorder of the place—the sprawling heaps of rubbish, old cartons, tin cans, bottles, tools, newspapers, magazines, food scraps, rags, and much more—was profoundly disconcerting. It was as if Gein had reversed the usual process of garbage disposal and made weekly runs to the town dump to pick up a load of trash for his living quarters. Such chaos was clearly the product of an equally chaotic mind—mental derangement expressed as decor.
And indeed, even the investigators working their way through the shambles inside and seeing the newly illuminated horrors with their own eyes were having difficulty crediting their senses.
Insane as it seemed, some of Gein’s loathsome creations were obviously meant to be worn. There were, for example, several pairs of skin puttees—leggings made from actual human legs.
The masks were actually human facial skins that had been painstakingly peeled from the skulls of nine women.
Throughout the night, so many body parts were uncovered—shin bones, scalps, scraps of skin, withered breasts, vaginas, lips, noses, heads, and more—that it was impossible to tell how many victims had supplied them.
“I’ve never worked on a case quite like this one.” CHARLES WILSON, director of the Wisconsin Crime Laboratory
Within twenty-four hours of Mrs. Worden’s autopsy, newspapers throughout the Midwest would be full of equally sensational headlines, as journalists tried to find language lurid enough to do justice to Eddie Gein’s demented handiwork.
There were reporters from all the big regional dailies—the Milwaukee Journal, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Madison Capital Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Minneapolis Star, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and others. Some of these papers assigned as many as five reporters to cover various angles of the rapidly unfolding story. Writers and photographers arrived from Life, Time, and Look magazines. Television and radio stations sent news teams, and the Associated Press set up a portable wire service in the Local Union Telephone Company office to transmit photographs from
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By early Monday, it was already evident that the village of Plainfield—a quiet little town in the heart of America’s dairyland—was the scene of one of the most sensational crimes in Wisconsin, if not American, history.
And it was true that a virtual army of investigators from throughout the Midwest—more than one hundred fifty officers, according to one estimate—visited Gein’s premises during a forty-eight-hour period to check it for clues to various missing-persons cases.
But on at least nine of those occasions, he had dug up and opened caskets, removed what he wanted, then covered over the coffins again, leaving the violated graves, he assured Kileen, “in apple pie order.”
Already, Eddie seemed much more at ease with the news photographers, making no efforts to hide his face from their lenses. On the contrary, he gazed directly at the cameras, smiling for them with his shy little grin.
“Mostly, Gein liked older, more well-developed women—dead that is.” JUDGE ROBERT H. GOLLMAR
All during his youth, Gein told the detective, “he had wanted to be a doctor.”
Weber concluded by offering his personal assessment of Gein. “He is a very sincere, very meek fellow. You’d never believe he’d be the kind of guy to do such a thing. You feel like he needs help awful bad.”
“It’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.” CORONER RUSSELL DARBY, after viewing Edward Gein’s home
For all his adult life, Eddie was perceived as one of these poor, pathetic, slightly ludicrous souls—until the night, that is, when Bernice Worden’s headless body was found hanging by its heels in his summer kitchen.
Q. “It seems this item is from a leg, or probably from two. Is that sewed in two places?” A. “That’s from a person from the grave.” Q. “What about the face masks?” A. “When I made those masks, you see, I stuffed them all out with paper so that they would dry. On the vagina I did, you know, sprinkle a little salt….” Q. “Was there a resemblance in some of these faces to that of your mother?” A. “I believe there was some.” From Edward Gein’s confession
For the rest of Gein’s life, people who met him would come away with the same paradoxical impression, struck by both his childlike simplicity and his monstrous criminality.
Throughout his testimony, Eddie’s tone remained perfectly matter-of-fact, as though he were explaining the mechanics of the most ordinary of hobbies—furniture refinishing, say, or leathercraft.
Following a hunch, Wilimovsky asked Eddie if he had ever used the skins as masks, placing them over his own face. “That I did,” Eddie replied without hesitation. When Wilimovsky asked how he secured the faces to his own head, Eddie’s answer was simple. With a cord, he explained. And would Eddie “wear the faces over a prolonged time?” Wilimovsky inquired. Eddie shook his head. “Not too long,” he said. “I had other things to do.”
“He’s got a good appetite and never talks back to anyone.” SHERIFF ART SCHLEY
it was obvious to everyone who came into contact with Eddie, his defense attorney included, that one of the things Gein was most glaringly “hazy” about was the sheer magnitude of his crimes. Gein exhibited no awareness at all of their enormity.
The Gein story was everywhere. It dominated not just the news media but daily discourse as well. For several weeks, wherever Wisconsinites congregated—in stores and schoolyards, in cafés or at the dinner table—it was all people could talk about. Such was the magnitude of the story that if you lived in Wisconsin in the fall of 1957, you simply couldn’t help knowing every detail of the case, even if you never picked up a paper or turned on the TV.
“In the damp and cold November night on the day of the dead, our love awakes. The love of the dead.” From the diary of a necrophiliac
Still, there was a good deal of bitterness at the thought that Gein might end up in a mental hospital, which, as far as certain people were concerned, would be tantamount to his getting away with murder.
By way of buttressing his request, Kileen described for Judge Bunde the condition Bernice Worden’s body had been found in, “hanging by its heels” and “dressed out” like a deer. “I don’t know whether a person in his right mind would do that sort of thing or not,” Kileen opined.
He told the judge that Gein had admitted removing entire corpses and various body parts from graves. “Some mental aberration is involved,” was Belter’s assessment.
In fact, the statewide response to the Plainfield horrors was so striking that it immediately attracted the interest of various psychologists, who had never witnessed a mass phenomenon quite like it. Besides the extreme fascination with every detail of the case, from the precise number of masks found inside Eddie’s house to the menus of his jailhouse dinners, the crimes had generated an unprecedented outbreak of black humor, a craze for Gein-related sick jokes (dubbed “Geiners”) that quickly swept the state.
Why did they have to keep the heat on in Ed Gein’s house? So the furniture wouldn’t get goose bumps.
Why won’t anyone play cards with Ed Gein? He might come up with a good hand.
The most remarkable sample collected by Arndt, however, was not a joke but a poem, a macabre reworking of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas”: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the shed, All creatures were stirring, even old Ed. The bodies were hung from the rafters above, While Eddie was searching for another new love. He went to Wautoma for a Plainfield deal, Looking for love and also a meal.
When what to his hungry eyes should appear, But old Mary Hogan in her new red brassiere. Her eyes how they twinkled, ever so gay, And her dimples, oh how merry were they. Her cheeks were like roses when kissed by the sun. And she let out a scream at the sight of Ed’s gun.
Old Ed pulled the trigger and Mary fell dead, He took his old axe and cut off her head. He then took his hacksaw and cut her in two, One half for hamburger, the other for stew. And laying a hand aside of her heel, Up to the rafters went his next meal.
He sprang to his truck, to the graveyard he flew, The hours were short and much work must he do. He looked for the grave where the fattest one laid, And started in digging with shovel and spade. He shoveled and shoveled and shoveled some more, Till finally he reached the old coffin door. He took out a crowbar and pried open the box, He was not only clever, but sly as a fox.
As he picked up the body and cut off her head, He could tell by the smell that the old girl was dead. He filled in the grave by the moonlight above, And once more old Ed had found a new love. He let out a yell as he drove out of sight, “If I don’t get caught, I’ll be back tomorrow night!”
the quip about the contents of Ed Gein’s cookie jar (“lady fingers”) or the one about his favorite beer (“1.ots of body but no head)
“We all go a little mad sometimes.” NORMANB ATES
Noting that any highly publicized murder is likely to set off a cycle of copycat killings, Higgens predicted that the Gein case would lead to “a rampage of bizarre crimes” throughout the country.
To Higgens, the Gein atrocities could be traced directly to the harmful influence of such material on a dangerously impressionable mind, and her plan was to travel to Plainfield in order to collect firsthand information for a series of lectures on the dangers of crime magazines and horror comics—publications which, she maintained, offered their readers nothing less than “short courses in murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, and sadism.”
Ridiculous conclusion. The juvenile printed material for sale in 1957 America involving sadistic crimes are predated by an avid worldwide public interest in such crimes going back for millennia - any student of Ancient Greek plays and even more ancient Norse/Mesopotamian/Japanese/religious books of myths - for example, The Torah, Bible, Qur'an - can speak to the validity of my statement. It was the stories in the Bible and Ed's mother's religious fundamentalism which created Ed Gein's fantasies. Cultural entertainment simply validated Ed's feelings.
The first of December was a Sunday very much like the previous one in Plainfield, with thousands of sightseers passing through town on their way out to the Gein farmstead. Throughout the afternoon, traffic was bumper to bumper on Main Street.
It was known that various entrepreneurs had already inquired about purchasing the place, and the citizens of Plainfield were of the belief that the eventual owner, whoever that turned out to be, was likely to convert Eddie Gein’s “house of horrors” into a tourist attraction.
“The overall picture is not that of a well person.” From the psychological profile of Edward Gein
“The child who suffers on account of his contacts with the rejecting parent, generally the mother, tries desperately to preserve a good image of the parent. He wants to feel that the parent is good. If the parent is punitive and anxiety-arousing, it is not because she is malevolent but because he, the child, is bad: Mother is right in being harsh and strict with him and showing how bad he is…. The preservation of the good image of the parent is made possible by the removal from consciousness of the most unpleasant traits of the parent. Thus, the child will have two images of the parent: the
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the Associated Press conducted its annual poll of Wisconsin newspaper editors to determine the state’s top ten news stories of 1957. The results of the poll were published on Saturday, December 28. By unanimous vote, the Edward Gein case was selected as “Story of the Year,” beating out (in descending order of significance) the Milwaukee Braves pennant win and World Series championship, the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the election of William Proxmire (the first Democrat in twenty-five years to represent Wisconsin in the senate)
“People want to see this kind of thing.” BUNNY GIBBONS, exhibitor of the Ed Gein “ghoul car”
