Artistic commentary on an abusive relationship. The man feels incomplete without her and stalks her, but the woman is complete by herself. Harvey tries to force her to be a part of him, she eventually gets away from him, but is left visibly scarred, and he goes back to being only half a person.
Some things just can’t be unseen. Be Warned….
The Butcher of Plainfield, Ed Gein has launched an industry of American horror movies. You may or may not be familiar with the name Ed Gein, but you probably have heard of Alfred Hitchcock’s black and white thriller Psycho or maybe as a teenager, watching the drive thru movie slaughter fest, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both of these movies were loosely based on the true story of Ed Gein and so was Silence of the Lambs and dozens of others. Many books have been written about Ed including the book that inspired Alfred Hitchcock to script the movie Psycho with the same title written by Robert Bloch in 1959 just 2 years after Ed’s murder victim Bernice Worden was discovered hanging like a gutted deer in his shed.
What makes the story of Ed Gein so unusual is that his story was more horrific than any of the films that were inspired by his ghoulish past. The people of Plainfield, Wisconsin would like the world to forget but realistically that is just not going to happen. Even this week a new A&E TV prequel series launches entitled the Bates Motel.
There are many sources of information on Ed Gein on the internet, some are pretty accurate and some just regurgitate the same misinformation stolen from other sources. This article should clear up the facts, as I have done my research and have gone beyond with my obsession with Ed Gein amassing quite a collection of items along the way.
One of the most asked questions I get is: “What movie is the most accurate on Ed Gein?” The answer: Ed Gein made in 2000 with the original title of In The Light of the Moon with actor Steve Railsback.
There are a few scenes that are inaccurate such as Mary Hogan dying in his bed tied up. In reality, she was shot and killed in her tavern and her head was cut off. I guess film makers wanted to tone down some of the violence. Steve was most remembered by his portrayal of Charles Manson in the TV movie Helter Skelter. Personally, I like the movie that Steve Railsback was in called Lifeforce but not necessarily because of his acting more because of Mathilda May walking around stark naked for most of the movie.
I can include that movie in this article because of the “Kevin Bacon rule“. Lifeforce was directed by Tobe Hooper who also directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that was based on Ed Gein.
Ed Gein’s victims were not quite the eye candy as Mathilda May is, they were women who reminded Ed of his mother. Mary Hogan was no supermodel and Bernice Worden was in her late 50’s at the time of her death. There has been speculation that Ed was responsible for the death of a few young girls but I will cover that topic later.
There are many good books on Ed Gein, most people look to “Deviant – The Shocking True Story of ED GEIN, the original Psycho” by Harold Schechter but don’t overlook one of my favorites: “Ed Gein Psycho” by Paul Anthony Woods as it has the most pictures and is a quick read.
One of the best documentaries out there on Ed Gein has interview segments with Harold Schechter created by Biography Channel part of the Serial Killer series entitled: Ed Gein – American Psycho.
Ed was born in 1906 in La Crosse County near his future horror house that was located in Plainfield, Wisconsin. As a child little Eddie had a trouble getting along with other children in school because of the fact that he was a shy, distant and odd little boy. Ed was sharper than most when it came to reading because that is where Eddie escaped from the torments of the world. His classmates used to tease him calling him a “milk-sop” and poking fun at his droopy eye and odd grimace. They blew spitballs from a peashooter at his face. Tears would well up in his eyes as his face crumpled up. Always too soft for the world, always to gentle – a true mamma’s boy. He would often abruptly start chuckling during a quiet period in class at a funny thought he had in his head and kept those thoughts to himself not sharing the humor. Most likely various scenarios of how he would punish those that teased him.
He had only marginal luck dating, his first real girlfriend didn’t share the same views as Eddie did on the love of his mother, so that “sinner” had to go. Mother was a saint and always number one in his priorities. So, when he failed at asking a woman out on a date, as he often did at any attempt, he would have to sneak a Detective magazine past mother’s eye to the bedroom and ogle the sexy cover and pictures inside.
In the movie American Psycho starring Christian Bale this describes his Eddie’s thought process…
Here is the first instance, of many you will find in my articles on Ed Gein, where I need to set the facts straight. Eddie never said that, it was actually a quote from Ed Kemper aka “The Co-Ed Killer” from the 70’s. You will often see people associate that quote to Ed Gein thanks to a movie misquote in American Psycho.
Eddie would fumble though an attempt of dating an older woman by asking her to a skating rink. That seemed to be his pickup line: “I don’t know how to skate neither, maybe we could hold each other up?” Somehow it never happened the way he envisioned it in his head…
He would fantasize about being the bad guy and outsmarting the police as he had his way with the “no good scarlet”. Ed died a virgin, although he did take care of the snap in his pocket on occasion. He was caught in the act by his mother one day. She said: “Edward… are you didlin’ with yourself again? “No… No Ma… I’m just reading a fascinatin’ article, an’ ..an’..” BUSTED. Mother proceeded to preach to him; “If you have to touch that overripe shrimp, Edward, that is between you and the Lord.” and “The sin of Onan is nothing against the sin of the fornicator and the adulterer.”
Ed was crazy alright but “Wacko”, well maybe a little less around the likes of Ma.
There is speculation that Augusta Gein was pregnant for Henry while out of wedlock and that she had lied as to the date of Henry’s birth on certain documents to cover up what would have been scandalous in her town creating gossip that would taint her reputation as a religious woman. Census records support such a theory. Is it possible that the skeleton in Mother’s closet triggered her hatred of sex and women. If Ed’s drunkard father George came home from the pub wanted some sex from Ma, she would say; “If God wanted us to enjoy this filthy act, He would have made it pleasurable.” with that she would lift her dusty old skirt and say; “You have your way, but make it quick, you hear!”
After Ed Gein’s father George died, Ed’s brother Henry started to observe a strange relationship between Ed and his Mother Augusta get even stranger. Each night Augusta Gein would gather up the boys to preach to them from the Bible about the wickedness of women and while Ed was fully attentive, Henry was becoming more aware that she was being obsessive and he often became bored and detached from her radical views. Henry was starting to become skeptical and wanted to have his own life with a woman and move away from the captivity and isolation from the world that Augusta had created to control her boys thinking. One day Henry had observed Ed coming out of his mothers bedroom after she had changed clothes. Could there have been incestual relations between the two? Henry asked Ed, what he was doing in there? Ed muttered “Nuthin”
Ed’s first murder victim is rumored to be his only brother Henry. After Henry fell away from Mother’s control of preaching and ranting about the evils of women, he became more and more verbal to Ed about how he was a momma’s boy and worse yet how momma was wrong about words of the Lord.
Ed ran to his house to fetch his brother and tell him about a wild fire that needed to be put under control so it doesn’t burn down the farm
Henry and Ed went into the brush fire area and Ed reports he couldn’t take the smoke anymore and left his brother to fend for himself. He then went into town to get the sheriff and round up some men to search for Henry. While they went through the woods, the sheriff asked Ed if he had stopped by the house yet to see if Henry returned, but Ed did not answer. Although Ed claimed he didn’t know where Henry was, he amazingly led them right to where his body was. There was his brother Henry, curled on his side, dead. They noticed the scorched ground all around him but no burns on this clothes or body, he did have what could have been a burn or laceration from being hit on the head. That couldn’t be it, must have been his heart gave way.
They never questioned it, why would Ed be a suspect? After all, the Gein family have already lost their father, now thy have lost their eldest son. At the funeral Ed was acting odd around mother proclaiming how Henry would have been a disappointment if he had lived, being a sinner in thoughts and all, and how it was just him and momma now. I think at this point Augusta may have been a little more self-aware of how Ed was getting a little stranger than normal.
Lucky her, as she fell ill and was bed ridden, Eddie was going to take good care of momma. No one in the world would be able to take care of her like he could. At first, she was semi mobile and he would drive her to town for provisions as she never trusted people, figuring they would take advantage of her Ed.
Then the day came, momma died. Ed lost control like a little child and everyone around him noticed. He became withdrawn even more. His behavior become more and more strange. What was this man doing at this farmhouse all alone with no fancy electric lights? What does isolation do to a man who has never had a true friend except his mother?
His answer was resurrection!
Ed Gein is now all alone at the farmhouse, without mother around, he can now dive into his curiosities of women. He would go to the local book store and purchase more of his Detective Magazines (he used to have to have to hide from Augusta) and books on the anatomy of women, head hunting and resurrection. He was already semiskilled at taxidermy, so why not branch out and make his own love doll?
Like this guy did in Russia
While Ed boned up on how to shrink heads, learn all the parts of a vagina and how to outsmart the police, He would baby sit for the locals. Some boys he babysat for discovered some of his shrunken heads that were not very “shrunken” and Ed played it off as a gift from overseas. The parents dismissed what their kids seen and Ed was off the hook from suspicion of any wrong doing. After all, it is just “Weird Ed”, the man that loves to tell ghost stories and get the kids all geared up.
Some of his neighbors were not as trusting and some had feared Eddie. One time Eddie had dinner with a local family when they had a female guest relative over. Eddie would stare at the young girl as though he were undressing her. A stranger had broken in their house one night when the folks were sleeping and a young boy in the house was choked out from the attacker who was asking him questions of the whereabouts of the young girl visitor. The boy later said the attacker looked like Eddie Gein when questioned by his parents. Ed was never invited back to their house for dinner or any other event and the incident went unreported to authorities. Other women told stories of hearing noises outside of their window and thought they had seen Eddie as a peeping tom.
Eddie was now living in complete filth, like a hoarder. Eddie Gein would sink his fingers in a can of pork and beans to check to see if it were warm enough to eat. He would light his oil lamps and read up on the female anatomy and started doing experiments. He had a mentally ill friend who helped him dig up some graves in the grave yard, Ed explained that he needed them for experiments and would put them back when he was done. It was time to resurrect Momma and (like Jesus Christ) she would return to the world to save it as momma was nothing less than a Saint.
Augusta would recite from memory, Proverbs:
The lips of a strange woman drop honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her latter end is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword.
Now therefore, my sons, hearken unto me, and depart not from the words of my mouth. Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house.
For why shouldest thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman. And embrace the bosom of a stranger?
What, my son? and what, O son of my womb? And what, O son of my vows? give not thy strength unto women, Nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.
He could hear her words as she spoke from the Bible:
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet coulour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written: “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH”
It was believed that the first woman Ed Gein took from the grave was his mother. Eddie would carve out the vagina and anus and skin the breasts from the torso and the rest he would cut up for meat, except the face. Eddie painted momma’s vagina silver because her’s was special. He would peel off the face or save the entire head to keep him company and he would put lipstick on them, that way they would be dressed up for dinner.
Eddie would use the skin to make lampshades, upholster chairs, decorative masks for the wall and even had full body suits to wear while he beat a drum to the light of a full moon during his rituals of resurrections. He danced the night away, dressed in the flesh of a woman. He had his own version of cross dressing.
He even had a nipple belt, maybe it looked like this?
Ed Gein’s inventory of fleshy treasures around the farmhouse included:
Eddie was about to add to that growing collection with a real live woman, not the dead kind no more, they smelled too bad…
His friend that helped him finally was committed to a hospital for the mentally ill, so Eddie was on his own but by then he had a system down. Eddie would read the obituaries in the local paper and get them late at night just after they were buried that way the dirt was softer and easier to shovel.
Georgia Jean Wreckler was last seen near her farm home in rural Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin at approximately 3:30 p.m. on May 1, 1947. A neighbor gave her a ride part of the way home from the Oakland Center school, where she was a third-grader, and dropped her off at the entrance to the half-mile-long driveway leading up to her home.
Georgia told the neighbor that she might go into the woods and pick some flowers for a May Day basket before going home. She and her siblings normally rode their bicycles to school, but it had rained recently and the ground had been muddy, so Georgia’s father drove his children to school the morning of her disappearance. Georgia was released half an hour before her older brother and sister, and found a ride with the neighbor, who had gone to the school to pick up her own child.
The neighbor saw Georgia collect a large bundle of letters from her family’s mailbox and start walking up the driveway, but she never arrived at her house. She has never been heard from again and the mail she was carrying at the time of her disappearance has never been found. Georgia’s mother was initially not concerned when the child did not arrive home; she assumed Georgia was with her father. The parents began searching at 6:00 p.m. when Georgia’s father arrived at home without his daughter.
Witnesses reported seeing a dark-colored, possibly black, four-door 1936 Ford sedan with a gray plastic spotlight in the vicinity that afternoon. The car vanished at the same time Georgia did, and deep tire tracks were later found on the road, as if a vehicle had pulled out fast.
At first investigators believed Georgia had been kidnapped for ransom, as her father was a public official and a man of means. Days passed and no ransom demands were made, however. Authorities now believe Georgia was taken by a sexual predator. Curiously, prior to her disappearance, Georgia had made several remarks indicating that she especially feared being kidnapped.
Ed Gein is considered a possible suspect in Georgia’s disappearance as Gein did own a black 1937 Ford and was in the area at the time of her disappearance reportedly visiting relatives.
Georgia’s disappearance remains unsolved.
Ed Gein was now going to the tavern more often drinking and thinking about having a sex change and had even asked the other guys at the bar if they had ever thought of having a sex change. Everyone had a good laugh and dismissed it as just another random stupid thing from crazy Ed. At this time, he was beginning to become more uncomfortable about how tavern owner Mary Hogan was talking to the other guys. She was everything his mom despised in a woman.
Ed’s dead mother kept crowding his mind, so he kept drinking trying to drown out her voice in his head, but it never worked she kept getting louder and more demanding… Kill that Harlot! Kill her Ed!
Ed began making nocturnal visits to as many as 40 cemeteries, frequently leaving without any offense, but on at least 9 occasions Ed dug up the coffins of newly-buried middle-age women. He had scouted these women out in the obituaries. He would take what he wanted then recover the violated graves.
Besides masturbation, Ed denies ever having has a sexual experience in his life and stated that he never had sex with the cadavers because “they smelled too bad.” His cravings and compulsions still fall under the category of necrophilia. An increase in missing persons in the area began at this time as well, stumping police.
Evelyn Hartley was baby-sitting a twenty-month-old girl at the home of La Crosse State College professor Viggo Rasmusen on the evening of October 24, 1953. Rasmusen and his wife, along with many other La Crosse residents, were attending the town homecoming game. The Rasmusen house was located in the 2400 block of Hoeschler Drive. The family had a regular baby-sitter, but she also planned to attend the homecoming game that night.
Evelyn was hired as a replacement. She brought four or five school books with her and planned to study while the baby slept. She was supposed to call her parents at 8:30 p.m. to check in, but she never did. Her father tried to call several times that day and never got an answer. He became worried and went to Rasmusens’ house to check on his daughter.
Evelyn’s father found the house’s doors locked and the lights and radio on. The baby was unharmed, asleep in her crib, but there was no sign of Evelyn. The furniture inside the living room was disarranged and Evelyn’s textbooks were scattered. One of her shoes and her eyeglasses, which were broken, were on the living room floor. Her other shoe was found in the basement. All the windows in the house locked except a basement window in the back of the house. The screen for that window had been taken out and was leaning against the outside wall. A short stepladder was positioned at the window in the basement; it belonged to the Rasmusens and they’d been using it to help paint the basement.
In addition to the indications of forced entry, was a significant amount of blood of Evelyn’s type both inside the home near the basement window, and outside in the yard. There were two pools of blood in the yard; one stain was 18 inches in diameter. There was a bloody handprint about four feet off the ground on the wall of a garage 100 feet from the Rasmusens’ home, and stains on the home of a neighbor’s house. Tracker dogs traced Evelyn’s scent for two blocks, then lost the trail at Coulee Drive northeast of the Rasmusen home. Authorities believe whoever took her put her in a car.
Several days after her disappearance, a pair of underpants and a brassiere that could have been Evelyn’s were found near the underpass on Highway 14, two miles south of La Crosse. They too were stained with blood. A bloodstained pair of men’s pants was found along the same road four miles away; it is unknown if the pants are connected to Evelyn’s case.
Some people suspect Edward Theodore Gein may have been involved in Evelyn’s case. He was visiting relatives in La Crosse, just blocks from the home where she was babysitting, on the night of her disappearance. No trace of Evelyn was found on his property and he denied any involvement in her case. He has still not been completely cleared.
Her case remains unsolved.
In the winter of 1954, a Plainfield tavern keeper by the name of Mary Hogan mysteriously disappeared from her place of business. Police suspected foul play when they discovered blood on the tavern floor that trailed into the parking lot. Gein’s needs escalated into believing to perfect his desired sex change he would need fresher bodies.
On December 8, 1954, Gein, now age 48, was attending Mary Hogan’s tavern and shared the bar space with hunters and farmers who enjoyed putting back a few and listening to the sailor talk of bartender/owner Mary. She had a mouth and demeanor that “Mother” wouldn’t approve. That night Mary Hogan vanished with only a trail of blood on the floor that led outside.
The police were unable to solve the strange disappearance of Mary Hogan, but with the blood found at the tavern, they knew she was most likely a victim of foul play.
Police also discovered an empty bullet cartridge on the floor. Police could only speculate about what might have happened to Mary because like the other missing people, they had no bodies and little useful evidence. The only other common tie among these cases was that all of the disappearances happened around or in Plainfield, Wisconsin.
Ed Gein Kills His Final Victim
On November 16, Gein robbed Worden at the local hardware store she owned and killed her. Her son, a deputy, had suspected Eddie from the start. Earlier he was in the shop to purchase some antifreeze. He was always looking at her as though he was peeling her clothes off. (or in Ed’s mind her skin) Found at the crime scene was receipt from the last customer… Ed Gein. Blood was on the floor and the cash register was missing. The deputy rounded up some men and went to Ed’s farmhouse only to discover his mother’s body naked and gutted like a deer in his summer shed and the missing cash register.
When authorities searched Gein’s farmhouse, they found an unimaginably grisly scene: organs were in the refrigerator, a heart sat on the stove, and heads had been made into soup bowls. Apparently, Gein had kept various organs from his grave digging and murders as keepsakes and for decoration. He had also used human skin to upholster chairs.
Though it is believed that he killed others during this time, Gein only admitted to the murders of Worden and Hogan and that was only after getting a piece of apple pie with some cheese on it as a reward for speaking. He was describing the killings when he had a funny look on his face of disgust. The physiologist had though that Eddie was showing signs of remorse until Ed said: “This cheese taste dried out, it’s giving me a stomach ache.” He then smiled and continued to describe his gristly work as though he was telling how to change the oil filter on his ford truck.
In 1958, Gein was declared insane and sent to the Wisconsin State Hospital in Mendota, where he remained until his death in 1984.
He was such a good patient that he was allowed to have huge hedge clippers when trimming the landscape outside the hospital.
Mother! Blood!
The police questioned everyone that was at the tavern the night of her disappearance and it also included Eddie Gein, but after they spoke to Ed, they had thought that this simpleton couldn’t possibly be a suspect and moved on to other leads.
Ed joked with the locals with “Mary isn’t missing… She is back at my farmhouse right now.” Everyone laughed. Little did they know that Mary was at his farmhouse butchered up and her head was in a paper sack.
