Soon cops will raid Edward Gein’s house,
and what they find there won’t just disturb them, it’ll break them. Many will never be the same after that, but
today, Edward scoops one last spoonful of soup from a bowl he’s fashioned from a human
skull. He then empties the remnants of the soup into
a wastebasket made from skin. Today is a big day for Ed; he’s finally
finished stitching together a very special suit he’s made. Illuminated by the light of a lamp that’s
covered with what looks like faces, Ed first slips on a pair of leggings that look like,
er, legs. Next, he slips into his corset, a garment
that once served as part of the torso of a woman. He pulls everything tight with a belt decorated
with, you guessed it, bits of what used to be a person. He’s almost ready now, there’s just one
last piece to his new outfit to put on: a human face mask. He looks in the mirror and thinks, “Perfect.” He’s finally become his mother; his masterpiece
is complete. Reeling with joy, he runs into the garden
and dances under a full moon. We are talking now about possibly the strangest
serial killer to have ever walked the planet. His story is like no other. Ed was truly unique in his depravity, and
that’s why he’s inspired movies such as “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Silence
of the Lambs”. But if there’s one movie that fits Ed’s
life like a glove, it’s “Psycho.” We are sure you’ll agree after you’ve
watched this story that Mr. Edward Gein was a true American psycho. The question is, how did he get away with
his crimes for so long. Did no one in that small town of his not wonder
if there was anything a little bit strange about the man? His entire house was full of things made from
human body parts. To do that he needed quite the stock of bodies. How did he get them? How did he manage to do it without the local
cops noticing? But first, let’s go back in time and talk
about the young Ed. How did a young man become such a monster,
a guy that would become known as the “Butcher of Plainfield?” Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27,
1906, in a place called La Crosse County in the state of Wisconsin. His parents, George and Augusta, had one other
son named Henry. Life wasn’t easy for the family. George couldn’t hold down a job for long
and support his wife and sons for the simple fact he devoted much of his time to something
other than his family. That thing was whiskey. Augusta, someone who you might call a controlling
matriarch, wasn’t happy with the life she had. To try and improve matters, she made the decision
to move the family across counties to the small rural village of Plainfield. There they would work on an isolated farm,
barely ever seeing the 700 or so other residents of the village. The two boys went to the local school, but
it seemed to the teachers that there was something wrong with the boys. Ed had this habit of just laughing out loud
for no good reason. He didn’t have many friends, and even if
he did make friends his mother would soon put a stop to the relationship. You see, to understand Ed’s later behavior
you really need to know a thing or two about his mother. She might have had an alcoholic husband who
often returned home stinking of the demon liquor, a man who could barely put food on
the table, but she was no angel herself. She not only despised her own husband, but
she despised everyone besides her kids. The only reason she didn’t ask for a divorce
was that it went against her religious beliefs. When not in school both Ed and Henry weren’t
allowed off the farm. Augusta’s reasoning was that most people
were evil. She preached to the boys daily about the depravity
of mankind, reading chapters from the bible about the fires of hell awaiting most folks. She told her kids that those who take to the
bottle will meet with eternal damnation. She told them that women were loose, they
couldn’t be trusted, and they too would one day have a date with the devil. Of course, Augusta said she was not one of
those women. She was moral. She had committed herself to God. Her bible was her blueprint for life. We don’t need to tell you that this kind
of overbearing mothering isn’t great for kids, especially when you throw demons and
hellfire into the mix. We’ll get to the crimes soon, but you need
to know a little bit more about Ed’s pre-skin-suit life. The whisky eventually killed George when Ed
and Henry were in their thirties. After that, both men worked on the farm and
did odd jobs around the village to make ends meet. They did handiwork for locals, but something
Ed really enjoyed doing was babysitting. Yep, the Butcher of Plainfield was great with
kids, likely because his own development had been arrested due to his mother’s strictness. This is what one of the townsfolks actually
said about Ed’s way with kids, “Good old Ed. Kind of a loner and maybe a little bit odd
with that sense of humor of his, but just the guy to call to sit in with the kiddies.” And get this, people still sent their kids
to stay with Ed long after his mother died. Some of those kids told their parents that
they’d seen shrunken heads and strange masks around his house, but the parents dismissed
this as the kids being over-imaginative. So, Augusta still had a firm grip on Ed’s
mind even though the child had grown into a man. Henry had at least managed to get into a relationship
with a local woman, but Ed was still too attached to his mom to think about another woman. Henry would actually talk to others about
how Ed was way too obsessed with their religious zealot of a mom, and when Ed heard this, he
wasn’t too happy. He didn’t want to hear anyone talking badly
about Augusta. With that in mind, what happened when Ed was
38-years-old might not surprise you. There was a huge fire at the farm. Firefighters were called and managed to quell
the flames, and then they left. Ed later called the police department and
told the cops he couldn’t find his brother. A search party went out at night with their
lanterns glowing all over the farm and they eventually found Henry. He was dead. He wasn’t burned at all, he was just lying
on the ground with his face in the mud. Surprisingly, the cops said no foul play. The coroner said Henry had died of asphyxiation. He said that even though it appeared Henry
had been hit over the head with something. Was is it Ed who killed Henry? Did Ed want to be the sole benefactor of his
mother’s adoration? Most people now think yes. Had the cops worked a little bit harder they
likely could have prevented the rise of the monster. Not long after Henry’s downfall, Augusta
suffered a terrible stroke that left her paralyzed. Now Ed had to play nurse for his mother, with
her shouting orders as her devoted son ran around doing all the jobs in the house. Nothing Ed could do could save her. She had another stroke soon after and died. To say the least, the adoring son of that
bible-waving beast was devastated. The house just got messier and messier, but
not in one room. Ed kept his mother’s room as clean as possible,
making it into a shrine for her. He also boarded up many of the other rooms
in the house, with his main room being the kitchen. He still babysat from time to time, but his
biggest joy was reading books about Japanese and German atrocities during the second world
war. He also had a thing for detective pulp fiction,
books back then that often included gory stories of cannibalism in the Pacific. Ed managed to get by doing odd jobs and he
also enjoyed a windfall from some land he sold that had once been his brother’s. What the locals in the village didn’t know
at this time was that Ed had lost his head. The death of his mother had traumatized him
to the extent he was dangerously psychotic. He had become deranged and there was no going
back. We don’t know the exact time when Ed started
playing around with corpses, but it’s thought that during the late forties and early fifties
he was gravedigging and killing. He’d sometimes wait until someone had been
buried and then he’d sneak off to the graveyard in the middle of the night and exhume the
corpse. He’s now called a necrophiliac serial killer,
which means he gratified himself sexually with the bodies before he got to work on making
things from them. Let’s now fast-forward in time and tell
you about what the cops saw when they entered the property and had the shock of their lives,
a shock some people say killed the local sheriff. What he saw that day was so terrible, so unthinkable,
he was overwhelmed with feelings of disgust, horror, and sadness. He died soon after from heart failure. It was the deputy sheriff that first arrived
on the property. He opened a barn door and before his eyes,
he saw a dead woman hanging upside down from a beam. To him, she looked like an animal that had
been killed and was in the process of being butchered. She had already been split down the middle
and her internal organs had been removed. It was enough to make the cop vomit on the
spot. Her head had been removed and the tendons
in her ankles had been cut and a rod thread through them. It sure was a sight to behold. Worst still, the police found her head in
a burlap bag. Ed had driven a nail in each of her ears and
fastened string to them as if to make a kind of hanging trophy. There was much worse to come. The rest of the police department arrived
on the scene. Now it was time to check the rooms of the
main house. In the kitchen, they discovered Ed had likely
been thinking about doing some cooking. On the stove was the heart of a woman, kept
next to a bunch of cooking pots. Cops would later say Ed was no doubt a cannibal
as well as a necrophile, and what really turned the stomachs of the townsfolks was that they’d
often eaten packages of meat Ed had given them. Did that make them cannibals, too? Inside the houses, they found stacks of human
bones. They found at least ten severed heads. Some of those heads had had the faces peeled
off them. They ended up becoming Ed’s face mask collection. To make them more realistic he’d adorned
some of their lips with lipstick. One of the cops who saw those masks remarked
that the people were very recognizable. One of the faces of a recent victim had only
just been removed and Ed had placed that one in a paper bag. The cops weren’t anywhere near finished
with their search. They found the skin wastebasket we told you
about. They found chairs with human skin coverings. There were skulls with the tops sawn off;
female genitals stored in a shoebox; they found noses, lips attached to a drawstring,
female fingernails, a human skin lampshade, skulls on bedposts, and of course Ed’s piece
de resistance, his human body suit, replete with the breasts of a woman. So after his arrest, how did Ed explain himself? He admitted that he’d robbed the graves
of women. He wanted his mother back and making things
from the body parts of women was kind of like having his mother around all of the time. By making a woman suit he could actually become
his mother. It turned out that those kids had been right
and indeed Ed had kept shrunken heads in his house. One kid, a 16-year-old who sometimes went
to see ball games with Ed, said Ed had always told him the heads and faces were all stuff
he’d collected that had come from the Philippines. That wasn’t true; they were all local women. Cops did wonder how a man could dig up a grave
all by himself in just one night, but when they went to the graves of the victims sure
enough the women or most of the women were missing from their coffins. Occasionally Ed would take what he needed
from the body and later return the body parts he wasn’t interested in. So, what led the police to Ed’s house in
the first place? That was because the police went to a local
store and found a trail of blood, the blood of a woman named Bernice Worden. Ed had shot her and slit her throat and then
he’d proceeded to drag her body out of the store and take it to his house. Hers was the body hanging from that beam and
Ed had literally left a trail of blood for police to follow. The cops also found out from Bernice’s son
that Ed had been in the store the day before and said he’d come back in a day to buy
a gallon of antifreeze. On the floor of the store, the cops found
a bloodied receipt for a gallon of antifreeze. Ed didn’t immediately admit to this crime,
but the cops used a tried and tested technique to get him to confess. It was simple enough. They just made him look at the corpse of the
woman he had killed and mutilated and in the end, he cracked. He also admitted to killing a tavern-keeper
he knew well, a woman named Mary Hogan. A mask made from her face was found in his
house. At first, the cops didn’t believe that all
those body parts in Ed’s house had been robbed from graves. What they thought they had on their hands
was one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history, but as we said, Ed told them
about the graves he’d robbed, and he wasn’t lying. He also said he only killed people when the
ground was so hard from the cold it made exhuming bodies impossible. He guessed his grave-robbing lasted from 1947
to 1952, and he added that at times he’d been helped by a man named Gus who’d stopped
helping Ed when he was forced to live in a home for the elderly. We probably don’t need to tell you that
the Wisconsin State Crime Lab had never heard a story like this before. At first, Ed was reluctant to open up to investigators,
but the longer he was with them the more he talked. They listened as he explained the thing he
liked to do the most was put on his tanned skin suit, don one of his face masks, put
female sex organs over his male sex organs, and then run around in the garden, especially
when it was a full moon. That may sound about as crazy as crazy can
get, but with only two murders under his belt, how come Ed Gein is called a serial killer. Isn’t it three or more kills that gets a
person into the serial killer hall of infamy? Well, it’s generally thought Ed killed quite
a few more people. Remember he lived in a pretty remote area,
and so when we tell you that other people went missing around places where Ed frequented,
well, the cops thought he was likely behind those disappearances. Police found the genitals of girls in Ed’s
house and it’s now believed that they belonged to some missing local girls. It’s also believed that Ed was behind the
disappearances of two deer hunters who left the Plainfield tavern one night and were never
seen again. One of the missing men’s jacket and his
dead dog were found on the Gein farm. The judge who presided over Ed’s trial later
wrote that there was little doubt Ed had killed more than two people. That judge found Ed not guilty by reason of
insanity and sent him to serve out his sentence at Central State Hospital for the Criminally
Insane. It’s actually quite unusual for serial killers
to receive this verdict, but we don’t think many people would disagree with the judge
in this case. Ed Gein almost certainly had a case of what’s
called the Oedipal Complex, a psycho-sexual condition in which a child desires his parent
of the opposite sex. Ed’s mother’s fanatic talk of God and
the devil and telling her sons that all women were bad except for her no doubt was the foundation
of Ed’s obsession with her and his exclusion from other women. He actually told the police in what they said
was a chatty way that he was also obsessed with the power of women, but unable to actually
be close to a living woman, he decided he’d surround himself with dead ones. He told police his victims were usually quite
plump, just like his beloved mom. He always denied he had intercourse with the
bodies, saying, “They smelled too bad.” The cops didn’t believe him but were taken
aback when Ed told them he took great pleasure in skinning women. The police said what was surprising was the
cheerful and matter-of-fact way he spoke. It seemed to them as if Ed felt he hadn’t
really done anything wrong. Ed Gein died from lung cancer and respiratory
illness in 1984 at the age of 77. If there’s such a thing as an afterlife,
he’s probably quite made up since he is buried with his mother. There is just one problem, though…Henry
also takes up space in that plot. As for that old farmhouse, the building that
was the inspiration for the house in the movie, “Psycho”, it was burned down in 1958 while
Ed was serving time. It was no accident of course, but no one was
ever arrested. When Ed was told his dear mother’s house
was gone, that his childhood home had been destroyed, he replied, “Just as well”. Believe it or not, the nurses who were charged
with taking care of Ed said he was a lovely man, although some of them said he liked to
stare a lot. He was docile most of the time and proved
to be quite excellent at sewing and other handicrafts. Now you need to watch this, “America's Most
Evil Serial Killer - John Wayne Gacy.” Or if you want to know more about investigating
killers, watch this, “How Serial Killer Profilers ACTUALLY Catch Serial Killers.”
