Ed Gein

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edward Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), was an American serial killer. Though only two murders on his part were confirmed, he gained great infamy due to necrophiliac behavior, which involved the skinning of his murder victims and exhumed corpses, the decoration of his home with parts of corpses, and the creation of articles of clothing from the skin of corpses. Besides the death of his brother in 1944 under mysterious circumstances, six people disappeared from the Wisconsin towns of La Crosse and Plainfield between 1947 and 1957.

Childhood

Ed Gein was born to Augusta Lehrke (1878–1945) and George P. Gein (1873–1940) on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His parents, both natives of Wisconsin, had married on July 7, 1900, and their marriage produced Ed and his older brother, Henry G. Gein (1901–1944). Gein's father was a violent alcoholic who was frequently unemployed. Gein and his brother rejected their violent, aimless father, as did Augusta, who treated her husband like a nonentity. Despite her deep contempt for her husband, the atrophic marriage persisted. Divorce was not an option due to the family's religious beliefs. Augusta operated the small family grocery store and eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, Plainfield, which became the Gein family's permanent home.

Augusta moved 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. Besides school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Augusta, who was a Lutheran and fanatically religious, drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drink, and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were whores. According to Augusta, the only acceptable form of sex was for procreation. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder and divine retribution.

At the age of ten, Gein had his first orgasm upon viewing his mother and father slaughtering a hog in a nearby shed. When Gein reached puberty, Augusta became increasingly strict, once dousing him in scalding water after she caught him masturbating in the bathtub, grabbing his genitals and calling them the "curse of man".

With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanor, the young Gein became a target for bullies. Classmates and teachers recall other off-putting mannerisms such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal joke. Despite his poor social development, he did fairly well in school, particularly in reading.

Deaths of family members

By the time his father, George, died in 1940, Henry had begun to reject Augusta's 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 groin and had two marks on the back of his head, the local county coroner decided he died of asphyxiation while fighting the fire. Gein then lived alone with his mother. Less than two years later, on December 29, 1945, Augusta died from a series of strokes, leaving her grief-stricken son alone on the isolated farmstead.

Arrest

Police investigating the disappearance of a store clerk, Bernice Worden, in Plainfield on November 16, 1957, suspected Gein to be involved. Upon entering a 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 had been split open down the torso like a deer. The mutilations had been performed postmortem; she had been shot at close-range with a .22-caliber rifle.

Searching the house, authorities found:

severed heads acting as bedposts in the bedroom;
skin used to make lampshades and upholster chair seats;
skulls 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 face mask made out of real facial skin found in a paper bag;
a necklace of human lips;
a waistcoat, called a "mammary vest", made up of a vagina and breasts stitched together;
other items fashioned from the parts of human bodies, including a belt made 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.

Gein eventually admitted under questioning 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.

One writer describes Gein's practice of putting on the tanned skins of women as an "insane transvestite ritual". 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.

Shortly after his mother's death, Gein decided he wanted a sex change, although it is a matter of some debate whether or not he was transsexual; by most accounts, he created his "woman suit" so he could pretend to be his mother, rather than change his sex.

Harold Schechter, a leading expert on serial killers, wrote a best-selling book about the Gein case called Deviant. In this book, Schechter mentions that Plainfield sheriff Art Schley 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.

Schley 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 if he had butchered him."

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

While 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-considerable 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

On July 26, 1984, he died of respiratory and heart failure in Goodland Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. At his death, he cursed the name of his mother and an unknown person named Ane. His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalised over the years; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is presently displayed in a Wautoma, Wisconsin museum.

About Ed Gein