Is a serial killer born or made? This is a question humanity has grappled with since recorded history. A combination of a number of factors — childhood trauma, isolation, abuse, loss, and neurological and sexual impulses — all play into making someone a killer. One of the most twisted was Ed Gein, a killer who inspired a generation of horror films, and whose sick and twisted proclivities haunt us to this day.
Serial killers have existed since recorded history began, and we can assume long before that as well. No matter how far we evolve as a society, these sick individuals just pop up from time to time. One of the first was Breton nobleman Gilles de Rais, who lived in the 1400s. He was a career soldier and a comrade of Joan of Arc, but his main contribution to history is the murder of hundreds of children.
But Ed Gein, who operated in the first half of the 1900s, easily earned his place alongside de Rais in the killer hall of fame. He’s the inspiration for movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
Police caught up to him after the disappearance of a local hardware store clerk named Bernice Worden. When they entered his rural Wisconsin home, they found one of the most gruesome and shocking scenes in history. Body parts strewn about; lamps and clothing made of human skin; masks made of removed human faces – terrifying stuff. How did this happen? Let’s start from the beginning.
What is the Story of Serial Killer Ed Gein?
Sure, it’s cliche, but it’s kind of an understatement that Ed Gein had a troubled childhood. He was born to an alcoholic father and a mother with fanatical religious beliefs. She told Ed and his brother Henry that the world was an evil place, with loose women who were vessels of sin, and that drinking was the devil’s juice.
Ed was born in 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, but his mother Augusta moved them to Plainfield, because La Crosse was a “sinkhole of filth.” They lived as far from the town as they could, lest it corrupt her young sons’ minds.
This meant Ed grew up without much social interaction from his peers. The isolated farmhouse was far from any other kids, and in school he was socially awkward, and considered odd. Sometimes he would break out into laughter for no reason. To make things worse, he had a speech impediment and a lazy eye, which made him a target of bullies.
Regardless, he was a mama’s boy. He doted on his mother, and she was his biggest influence in his life. He parroted her worldviews, and never stood up to her. His father passed away in 1940, and didn’t have much influence on him.
As history tells it, and in a biblical parallel of the first murder ever committed, his first victim may have been his own brother, Henry. When Ed was a year shy of 4 when in 1944, he and his brother were clearing vegetation in the fields by burning through it. Suddenly, the fire roared out of control.
Firefighters rushed to the scene, and Ed said he didn’t know the whereabouts of his brother, but was still able to lead investigators directly to the body. Firefighters found Henry, face down, in a nearby marsh. The official cause of death was asphyxiation, but there were bruises on his brother’s head.
Ed and his mother lived on the farmhouse alone for a year, but then she died in 1945. This was the beginning of the horrific crime spree of the man they called the “Butcher of Plainfield.” Augusta’s death changed Ed forever. He sectioned off the rooms she lived in as a shrine to her memory, and he started living in a little room near the kitchen.
He spent his days reading books about human anatomy, Nazi experiments, and pornography. He read horror novels and sharpened his deviant fantasies, but he never dated any women. He was pretty much alone in that house, unbothered, for more than a decade.
That changed in November of 1957, when hardware store clerk Bernice Worden disappeared. Worden’s son later recounted that Ed was in the store the day before his mother disappeared, saying that he would come back to buy some antifreeze the next day. A sales slip for the chemical was the last thing Worden wrote before she vanished.
When police went to Ed’s house, they found a shocking scene. Worden was in the kitchen, hung upside down with ropes on her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. She was also decapitated. Her torso was open, like one would with a deer after it was slaughtered. The cause of death was a .22-caliber rifle, and the body mutilations were done after she died.
Upon further investigation, police found a number of troubling items: skulls on bedposts; human organs cooling in the refrigerator; chairs upholstered with human skin; a belt made from female nipples; nine vulvas stashed in a shoebox; ten heads of women with the tops carved off; a lampshade made from a human face and nine different masks of human skin.
That’s not all, either. Worden’s head was found in a burlap sack and the head of another victim, Mary Hogan, was just laying around in a paper bag. Ed told police that he would go to the graveyard at night and dig up recently buried bodies “in a daze.”
Sometimes he would come out of the daze and leave the graves alone. He also dug up middle aged women that looked like his mother and tanned their skins. It gets more strange: Ed wanted to make a woman suit out of human skin so he could complete a sort of ceremonial sex change. He would put on parts of their skin as a ritual for this means.
While being interrogated, he said he didn’t want to have sex with the bodies because they “smelled too bad,” but he did admit to killing Hogan.
How many people did Ed Gein kill?
This is where things get a little tricky. Ed Gein admitted to two murders: hardware store clerk Bernice Worden, and tavern operator Mary Hogan. The lore is that he maybe killed his brother, but he never admitted to that.
All of the other women, Ed Said, were from the cemetery, where he would dig up then return the bodies heavily mutilated. Turns out he had a friend to help named Gus. When Gus was moved to a retirement home, Ed began killing.
Detectives suspected he was responsible for four other murders: eight-year-old Georgia Weckler, 15-year-old Evelyn Hartley, and two deer hunters, named Victor Travis and Ray Burgess. All disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Most of the body parts came from eight deceased women from the cemetery.
What happened to serial killer Ed Gein?
Ed Gein was arraigned on a murder charge in the death of Bernice Warden in 1957 and entered a plea of not guilty due to insanity. He was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and later the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
In 1968, he was deemed fit to stand trial and he was found guilty of the murder, but he spent the rest of his days in a mental hospital. He died of cancer on July, 26 1984.