Unmasking the Butcher - Inside Ed Gein's Skin House

**Episode Transcription

Welcome everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Love and Murder the 100th episode of Love and Murder- the weekly true crime podcast discussing relationships gone terribly wrong. Where our motto is you’re either someone’s last love or first murder.

I am your host Ky and this show discusses true crime cases told in the form of a story with mystery and suspense.

Be sure to subscribe to Love and Murder on Spotify, Apple or whatever platform you’re on so you don’t miss any of the cases.

In today’s episode, I’m bringing you a doozy of a case. A case of a sick man who thought human skin was the leather he needed for his furniture and accessories. This episode was chosen by our lovely LaM, the one and only Stacey-Marie! Thanks Stacey!

But first, I wanted to remind you to head on over to our exclusive group at patreon.com/loveandmurder. I normally tell you about our last bonus episode, but this week there’s been so much activity in that group that you’re really missing out. If you don’t want commercials or this intro and SO MUCH MORE join us over in our exclusive LaM group www.patreon.com/loveandmurder

Now, on to the show…

Let’s dive into the twisted family dynamic of Augusta Gein and her two sons, Henry and Edward.

I want to start of by saying that all of this is from extensive research that I did and none of it is from me; just retelling through research so it was said. I know this is for all of the cases, but I want to make it abundantly clear for this case.

So NOW grab your apple juice, grab your butts and lets get into it.

It all started in 1900 when Augusta Crafter married a man named George Phillip Gein. Augusta was a religious fanatic. Basically, today, it is believed that she was schizophrenic, so this was real to her but not to anyone else. For those of you who don’t know, according to psychiatry.org, “Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder that affects less than one percent of the U.S. population. When schizophrenia is active, symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, trouble with thinking and lack of motivation. However, with treatment, most symptoms of schizophrenia will greatly improve and the likelihood of a recurrence can be diminished.” Part of Augusta’s delusions was an aversion to sex and female sexuality; however, she did want to be a mother, though. The problem is, she wanted to be a mother while she had schizophrenia and was not seeking or getting any treatment at all. Why wasn’t her husband helping her or trying to talk some sense into her? Well he was too busy being an alcoholic. Not only that, his personality is described as non-confrontational. In 1902, two years after she got married, she gave birth to her first son, Henry. However, it was said that Augusta didn’t feel an attachment to him and instead fantacized about having a girl. Some women feel like this after birth. This is a form of postpartum depression. Did you know this? I believe that, along with her schizophrenia, she stayed in the delusion that she needed a daughter rather than Henry. On August 27, 1906, in La Crosse Wisconsin she gave birth to Edward Theodore Gein, who everyone called Ed. By the way, there’s speculation that Augusta got pregnant with Henry before her and George were married, but they falsified dates on certain documents to cover up the potential scandal. Because back then, you ruined your family’s name and your reputation if you had sex out of wedlock, not to mention had a baby. That would have been a scandal. If anyone ever watched Bridgerton, you would know. Anyway, census records seem to support this theory.

Just a side note: Ed was born a small growth over one of his eyes with also made him have a lazy eye.

At this time, 1911, George had a small grocery store which he wasn’t running properly so Augusta took it over. This made her feel powerful and she wielded her authority over her family, particularly Ed, to ensure he would be “different” than the men in her life. According to her, she didn’t want her son to become a lustful man.

Augusta raised the children, while George sat back and drank and left her to her dealings. She taught them, she said, that the world was an evil place and to stay away from women. This sounds like the mother from Carrie. I wonder if that’s who she was based off of.

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Augusta wanted to move from the “sinkhole of filth” which was what she thought of Plainfield and away from anyone and any town since she believed this would infect her sons. As she said, “her boys’ morality would be sullied by contact with the outside world.” So, in 1915, when Ed was 9, George sold the store and the family moved to Plainfield – from the city to a small town where they lived in isolation on a 155-acre farm. Augusta held the deed to the new farm, just as she had with the Geins’ grocery store. Despite her husband’s intermittent employment, Augusta’s no-nonsense businesswoman attitude enabled her to save the necessary money to purchase this new property. They tried to grow crops there, but in the sandy soil nothing would grow and the townspeople wouldn’t help. Augusta hated men and didn’t want her sons to grow up like their father – unsuccessful and an alcoholic. She also hated the women of the town, who she viewed as a bunch of whores. Damn, does she like anyone?! She involved her sons in screaming prayers and incantations. Augusta’s open contempt for her husband may have also stemmed from her being the family breadwinner still.

Augusta believed that everyone was trying to corrupt her children, especially girls, so she didn’t allow them to have friends. Ed wanted friends so he made imaginary friends for himself. The only time Ed left the isolation of home to go to school – which was actually only a one-room schoolhouse that the town called Roche-a-Cri grade school. He actually did very well in school and loved reading, which he excelled at. However, he just couldn’t connect with his classmates because of his social awkwardness, which I could only image as his mother wouldn’t have him around other children. He also had this propensity to burst in to weird fits of laughter just whenever. All of this coupled with the issue with his eye and he was a bullseye for bullies.They would call him “milksop” as part of their jeering. Which, in today’s world you’d be like – excuse me what?! TF is a milksop. Let’s look it up shall we? Ok according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a milksop is “a weak or cowardly man.” When Ed would come back home crying, his mother would make fun of him, while his father would hit him upside the head for crying. Sooo he was ridiculed and bullied at school and ridiculed and bullied at home. I don’t see this turning out good for ol’ Ed.

As he grew older, and as you can imagine, his social life wasn’t really successful. His first real girlfriend – I’m actually shocked a girl talked to him or that he ALLOWED a girl to talk to him – anyway, she didn’t get along with his mother – shocker – so she had to go. After that Ed never dated again. Aside from his brother, he had very little interaction with other children. In 1920, after finishing eighth grade, Ed stopped going to school and worked around the farm instead.

As for Ed’s relationship with his mother- oh he deeply loved his mother. He soaked in her teachings about how she thought the world was and he even seemed to agree her harsh view of the world. One memory that really stood out for Ed was of when he was only 7 years old. He wasn’t allowed to go into the area where his parents slaughtered their livestock. However, being a child, one day he want into that area and saw them slaughtering a pig. He stood there and watched his mother cut the pig open from it’s stomach with her bare hands and take out its entrails. He notes that her bare hands were covered in blood. Ed described another memory of falling down the stairs as a child and being saved by his mother, who as he said, could do no wrong. However, he also remembered feeling like he had been pushed down the stairs in the first place. Psychiatrists later evaluating him theorized that his mother likely did push him before catching him.

When their father died on April 1, 1940 due to heart failure from alcoholism – and probably from holding his emotions in when dealing with Augusta – Ed and his brother worked odd jobs around town to help their mother keep up with bills. The residents considered them to be trustworthy and good handymen. Ed even did some babysitting for his neighbors’ children, who he seemed to get along better with than the parents themselves. However, Henry was more rebellious and didn’t always agree with their mother’s tyrannical control over their lives; he often stood up to her and voiced his views against hers’. He was trying to live a normal life, dating a divorced single mother of two and thinking of moving in with her. Ed saw this as a rebellion against their mother especially when Henry talked against Augusta to him. This ended up being a fatal mistake.

On May 16, 1944, Ed and Henry were working in the fields, clearing vegetation by burning it, when a controlled burn went wrong. The fire suddenly got out of control, and when firefighters arrived they worked to put out the blaze. Once it was out, which was at the end of the day, Ed told them that Henry was missing. Now, you may think that with the chaos going on, he probably didn’t know that his brother was missing, but no. He knew that Henry had been missing from the get go and didn’t tell the firefighters about it until the end of the day. As police started looking for him, Ed said he would help and actually, immediately led them directly to Henry with no deviation in his path. Henry was found face down in the marsh, seemingly having died from asphyxiation. Police had throught they would have found him as a burned body, but no. Not a scratch. There wasn’t even burned ground anywhere near where the body was. When the body went to the coroner for autopsy, the coroner found a wound from blunt force trauma to his head. Instead of doing anything about it, he just figured his lunch time was coming up and wrote asphyxiation in the report as the cause of death.

The police ruled his death as an accident. Open and shut case Johnson! Now time for pizza!

With Henry gone, Ed became the sole target of his mother’s fanatical religious rantings and her fury. Augusta’s behaviour changed and became more erratic, sometimes being viciously angry towards Ed, and other times showing such tenderness to him and even allowing him to share her bed. (but like in a mother/son way – even though that’s still weird as he’s a grown ass man)

One day in 1945, when Ed was 39, Ed and Augusta went to a man named Smith’s house to buy straw and witnessed him beat a dog to death. But the event that utterly outraged Augusta was she saw a woman, who wasn’t Smith’s wife, in his house while his wife wasn’t home. This brought on such anger in her that she suffered a stroke.

Ed took care of her after that, staying in isolation with his mother. This is sounding more and more like the Bates Motel don’t you think? Unfortunately, at the end of that year, Augusta died. This left Ed alone. And he stayed alone as a hermit. After his mother’s death, Ed worked to preserve their house and basically turned it into a shrine to Augusta’s memory. He even went as far as closing up all of the rooms she used to ensure they stayed in pristine condition. Once he did that, he then moved himself and his stuff into one small bedroom that was attached to the kitchen.

As he continued to live alone, he spent his days consumed by his obsessions. He taught himself about Nazi medical experiments, looking into the human anatomy, obsessing over porn, and reading countless horror novels. With all of this, he had an intense interest in the female anatomy. Although he showed no interest in dating women in real life, he began indulging in his sick fantasies.

Some of his neighbors were wary of him, and some didn’t trust him at all. In fact, during a dinner party with one family, Ed stared at a young girl visitor in a way that made everyone uncomfortable. Later that night, someone broke into that family’s house while they were sleeping, came across a young boy, asked him where the little girl was, and then was choked out. When the boy’s parents asked him what the attacker looked like, he described Ed. They left it alone and never told the police. Other women claimed to have heard strange noises outside their windows, with some even believing they had seen Ed looking in.

Ed’s interest in studying human anatomy and Nazi concentration camp experiments led him to begin grave robbing in 1947. He saw a newspaper article about a woman who had been buried that day, and his morbid curiosity led him to the grave site. He made nocturnal visits to as many as 40 cemeteries, frequently leaving without causing harm. However, on at least nine occasions, Ed dug up the coffins of newly-buried middle-aged women who he had previously scouted out in the obituaries. He continued to rob graves for the next ten years, always going during a full moon and only taking the body parts he wanted, sometimes taking the whole corpse. Actually, in one report, it’s said that the first grave he robbed was his own mother’s. He would dissect the bodies and keep certain body parts (like intestines, hearts, sex organs – so I guess vaginas and breasts – and heads), then skin the body and drape the whole skin over a mannequin. He even wore the skin suit and danced around under the night sky.

On May 1, 1947, a third-grade girl named Georgia Jean Wreckler mysteriously disappeared near her farm home. At first, Georgia’s mother was not concerned when the child did not arrive home; she assumed Georgia was with her father. It wasn’t until Georgia’s father arrived home without her that they began searching for her. She had been last seen by a neighbor at 3:30pm, who had given her a ride part of the way home from school. Georgia had mentioned wanting to pick flowers in the woods before heading home. Another neighbor saw Georgia walk up her driveway after geting the mail. Witnesses reported seeing a dark-colored, possibly black, four-door 1936 Ford sedan with a gray plastic spotlight in the vicinity that afternoon. Interestingly, 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 quickly. It was initially thought that Georgia had been kidnapped for ransom as her father was a public official and wealthy. However, the days soon passed without any ransom demands being made. Georgia’s disappearance was most likely due to a sexual predator and not a kidnapping. Before her disappearance, Georgia had said many times that she feared being kidnapped. Despite a search, her body was never found. In addition, the mail she was carrying at the moment of her disappearance has never been found.

Even though Ed never left home, he did have some means of income. He was an excellent handyman and in 1951, he received a farm subsidy from the federal government. Additionally, he sometimes worked for the local municipal road crew and the crop threshing crews in the area. And for those who don’t know, like me, according to the Rice Knowledge Bank, “crop threshing is the process of separating the grain from the straw. It can either be done by hand or by using a treadle thrasher or mechanized.” Now that brought on even more questions for me, but this isn’t a podcast of farming – so i’ll look more into that after the episode. Anyway, in addition to all of that Ed was even kind enough to offer his babysitting services to the locals.

For a full decade, no one paid much attention to the Gein farm outside of town. But on the evening of October 24, 1953, something terrible happened in La Crosse. Evelyn Hartley, a babysitter who was looking after an almost 2 year old girl at the home of college professor Viggo Rasmusen, disappeared without a trace. The Rasmusens and many other residents of La Crosse were attending a town homecoming game that night, so Evelyn was hired to babysit. She brought some school books with her and planned to study while the baby slept, but when it was time for her to check in with her parents at 8:30 p.m., she never did.

Her father became worried and went to Rasmusens’ house to check on his daughter. When he arrived, he found that the doors were locked and no one was answering, even though the lights and radio were on. When he was finally able to get in, he found the baby sound asleep in her crib, but Evelyn was nowhere to be found. He noticed that furniture in the living room was in disarray, and her textbooks were scattered around. One of her shoes and her glasses, which were broken, were on the living room floor, while the other shoe was found in the basement. All of the windows in the house were locked except for a basement window in the back which had its screen removed. A stepladder was found next to the window; it belonged to the Rasmusens and they’d been using it to help paint the basement.

In addition to signs of forced entry, there was a significant amount of blood found inside and outside of the house. The blood was Evelyn’s. One pool of blood was near the basement window and there were two pools of blood outside – one that was 18” in diameter. Investigators found a bloody handprint on the garage wall. Police tracking dogs traced her scent for two blocks before losing it, leading authorities to believe that whoever took her must have put her in a car. They did find some of her blood on a neighbor’s house.

Days later, underwear and a bra that may have belonged to Evelyn were found stained with blood near the underpass on Highway 14, two miles south of La Crosse. But that’s not all. A pair of men’s pants, also stained with blood, was found along that same road four miles away, although it’s unclear if they are connected to the case.

So who could be responsible for Evelyn’s disappearance?

In the winter of 1954, a 51 year old bar owner, Mary Hogan disappeared. It was known that Ed had started frequenting this bar and drinking alot. While in the bar, he’d been asking other guys if they ever thought of changing their sex – as they referred to it back then. As people did in school, the guys laughed and him and dismissed him.

The day Mary went missing, a customer had come to the bar, only to find no one there, but there was a pool of blood on the floor and a .32 calibar spent cartridge was near it. Following bloodstains that went out the back door, brought him to the parking lot where they stopped near some tire tracks. The tracks looked like those from a truck. Investigators deduced that Mary had been shot, picked up, and taken away. However, police had no leads.

Some time later, Ed hinted to sawmill owner Elmo Ueeck that she was “at the farm right now.” Elmo didn’t ask for any further explanation. I mean – wtf?!

Years later, on November 16, 1957, Ed shot and killed Bernice Worden in her store in Plainfield. He took a rifle off of the rack in the store and used his own .22 bullet which he carried with him. Who carries their own bullets – just the bullets. Wow

He took her body and the cash register home with him.

Her son Frank came back from deer hunting to find the store closed, the lights still on, and no signs of his mother except for blood on the floor and an empty place where the cash register had been. Frank reported the strange situation to Sheriff Art Schley, who immediately took action by checking that morning’s sales records. Among the sales, he found a purchase made by none other than Ed Gein who had stopped by the store the night before. Ed, who had asked Bernice about going hunting the next day, had purchased a half-gallon of antifreeze, a detail that raised suspicions among the authorities.

Frank believed that Ed had planned his mother’s robbery and murder knowing that Frank would be away deer hunting. The sheriff and Captain Lloyd Schoephoester immediately headed to Ed’s farmhouse. However, when they arrived, they found no signs of the suspect. Undeterred, they went to a local store where Ed was spotted getting into his truck. They stopped him and asked him to come in for questioning.

Ed, who had not been informed of Bernice’s death, just blurted out a suggestion – “hey hey I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe someone else murdered Bernice and they’re trying to frame me!” Of course those are my words. Sheriff Schley was like – all I asked you is if you wanted some water, but thanks for telling us everything we needed to know. So after the initial…uuuuhhhh… he admitted to shooting Bernice with a .22 caliber rifle, leading to his charge of first degree murder and he was promptly arrested on November 16th, 1957. Officers then headed to Ed’s farm and it was then that the true horror of the situation was revealed; They uncovered a grisly scene that would later inspire Hollywood movies. The doors of the house was locked at the time, but the shed was open.

Inside they found the corpse of a woman that was naked and it was hanging upside down from a crossbeam with the legs spread wide apart. The corpse had been cut from the genitals to right before the throat. Well I say almost to the throat because the throat and head were missing and so were the vagina and anus. After an autopsy, it was revealed that this had been Bernice Wooden!! WOW!

Of course after that they basically kicked down the door of the house.

As soon as they entered the dark, gloomy house, the authorities were hit with a foul odor. They had to rely on oil lamps, lanterns, and flashlights to search the dingy rooms because there was no electricity. The disorderly state of the place indicated that it hadn’t been cleaned in years and the rooms that had not been nailed shut had piles of magazines, old papers, cans, utensils, cartons, and other junk were scattered around. As the group moved from room to room, they found:

“Whole human bones and fragments
Wastebasket made of human skin
Human skin covering several chair seats
Skulls on his bedposts
Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off
Bowls made from human skulls
A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
Leggings made from human leg skin
Masks made from the skin of female heads
Mary Hogan’s face mask in a paper bag
Mary Hogan’s skull in a box
Bernice Worden’s entire head in a burlap sack
Bernice Worden’s heart “in a plastic bag in front of Gein’s potbellied stove”
Nine vulvae in a shoe box
A young girl’s dress and “the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old”
A belt made from female human nipples
Four noses
A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring
A lampshade made from the skin of a human face
Fingernails from female fingers”

After throwing up, going to therapy, and questioning why they signed up to be cops in the first place, investigators took these to the state crime laboratory where they photographed them and then destroyed them.

With Bernice, Ed said that he didn’t take the cash register to commit a robbery – he just wanted to see how the cash register worked and planned to return it later, but just never got to it.

They also found the remains of Mary Hogan. Ed said he had become increasingly uncomfortable with how Mary talked to the other men at the bar, and one day he shot her in the head with a .32 revolver. He put her body in his pickup truck and took her back to his shed. Ed also readily admitted that he’d collected most of the remains of women from three local graveyards, which he’d started to visit two years after his mother’s death. He told police he’d gone to the graveyards in a daze, looking for bodies that he thought resembled his mother. He admitted to enjoying cutting up bodies and sorting out their insides. Sometimes, he would even wrap the parts in butcher paper like you would with meat. This took him back to when he was 7 and saw his mom doing this with the pig.

When this information came out, the town referred to him as the “Butcher of Plainfield.”

There is a theory that Ed had a mentally ill friend, identified only as Gus, who helped him dig up graves in the graveyard. This was because of Ed’s build – slim and not muscular. When asked why did he even dig up graves, Ed explained that he dug up the graves because he needed the corpses for experiments and would put them back when he was done. Because authorities were uncertain as to whether Ed was capable of single-handedly digging up a grave during a single evening, they decided to exhume test graves. Allan Wilimovsky of the state crime laboratory participated in opening three test graves identified by Ed. They decided to dig up and open graves that he’d said he’d already dug up. This was in part to see if he dug these up by himself or not AND to corroborate his confession that he did dig them up and put some of them back. The three different caskets were inside wooden boxes, were about 2’ (60 cm) below sandy soil, and most of the bodies were stolen soon after the funerals while the graves were not completed – so basically the graves hadn’t been completed yet. Authorities found one empty casket, a casket Ed had failed to open because he lost his crowbar, and for the third casket, most of the body was gone, but Ed had returned some body parts and rings. So everything was as he’d confessed.

It’s not known for certain if there were other murders committed by Ed beyond the known deaths of Bernice and Mary. However, after his arrest, a search of the house revealed newspaper clippings of murders of Wisconsin women whose killers had not been caught.

Despite his many crimes, Ed insisted that he was not a cannibal or necrophiliac, but he did admit to grave-robbing. Ed’s ultimate goal, as he told investigators, was to create a “woman suit” – basically, he wanted to crawl into his mother’s skin. So he wasn’t looking to do a transition, he was looking to be comforted by his mom by being INSIDE his mom or even thinking he was becoming his mom. Wow! Norman Bates for real. Like I said before, the first woman Ed took from the grave was his own mom’s corpse. He would carve out certain body parts and even painted her lady parts silver because – as he put it – “her’s was special”. Ed even kept his mother’s head and face with him as a companion. As for the other corpses, he would cut off their vagina and anus, he would skin the breasts, and then he would cut up the rest of the body as meat to eat. For the face, he would peel that off or save the heads to keep him company. During dinner time, he would put lipstick on them so they would have been dressed up for dinner. He said that although he started out robbing graves, he thought that fresher bodies would be better for his collection because they wouldn’t be decayed or have a smell to them, and so he turned to murder. The investigation of the house turned up a shirt that Ed had made from the tanned torso of a middle-aged woman, complete with a full set of breasts. Ed eventually confessed to wearing this shirt at night and pretending to be his mother. I can’t even imagine the extent of the mental illness.

The bodies of 15 different women had been used to create Ed’s furniture, clothing, utensils etc… In November 1957, burned remains of at least one woman were found in an ash pit behind Ed’s house, and the remains of another woman were found in a garbage pit. In 1995, remains of 10 females and one male were found in an old well. Ed claimed that these were stolen from graves and not murdered by him.

During the investigation and questioning, Ed was reportedly assaulted by Waushara County sheriff Art Schley. The Sheriff banged Ed’s head and face into a brick wall, resulting in the initial confession being ruled inadmissible. Sheriff Schley passed away in 1968 from heart failure and before Ed’s trial, with some attributing his death to the trauma of knowing about Ed’s crimes and the fear of having to testify, especially about the assault he committed. Dude, I can understand how traumatic this could have been for everyone involved. Even his friends blame Ed for killing him due to how weak his heart got from the trauma, saying that it was basically like Ed had killed him himself.

In 1957, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In January 1958, Ed was initially found unfit for trail due to insanity, so he pled guilty due to insanity, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane currently called Dodge Correctional Institution. The doctors there believed that he loved his mother but also hated her, which is why he targeted older women who resembled her, such as Mary Hogan.

He was sent to various hospitals, including Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.

The true nature of Ed’s crimes caught the attention of many, with thousands of people driving to Plainfield to look at and take pictures of the “murder farm.” The house was supposed to be auctioned off on March 30, 1958 with rumors that it was going to be turned into a tourist attraction. On March 20, some one or some people burned down the farmhouse, which Plainfield citizens believed was a place of evil. When Ed was told that the house was burned down he just shrugged and said, “just as well.” Well the fire didn’t stop people from making money and an auction of the farm objects was held afterward, with the highest-selling item being Ed’s Ford “death car.” Carnival side-show operator Bunny Gibbons purchased the car for $760 (which is about $7,937.56 today) and put it on display as “Ed Gein’s Ghoul Car” for 25 cents admission (which is about $2.62 today) at the outgamie County Fair in Seymour, WI started in July 1958. Thankfully, the exhibit was eventually closed down for its bad taste at the Washington County Fair in Slinger, Wisconsin.

Psychiatrists have theorized that Ed struggled with his gender identity, and that his desire to wear a “female suit of skin” was a form of self-hatred. He may have been trying to transform himself into a woman. This kind of behavior – adopting a killer’s “ritual” – is believed to help the killer live out some kind of fantasy.

Criminal justice professors Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T. Holmes theorize that Ed “transferred an early humiliation into a later quest for power.” They think that Ed’s motives went far beyond just acquiring “raw material” for his skin suit, and that he had a misplaced aggression toward women, especially his mother.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think it’s as simple as his mother was his only friend and he wanted his friend back.

Although he denied any sexual relationship with his mother, other psychologists speculate that Ed may have created and worn clothing made of female skin as a way of coping with the grief of losing her and becoming her, in a sense.

Ed was deeply attached to his mother, making it difficult to distinguish himself from her. Once his mother passed away, he struggled to cope and tried to bring her back by collecting body parts that reminded him of her. His actions were an attempt to stay close to his mother, and without her, he lost his sense of identity. Yes, I more agree with this theory.

Although his upbringing laid the foundations for his troubling tendencies toward women, his crimes may not have happened if his mother was still alive. His overwhelming grief, coupled with his isolation, and mental state, caused him to turn to extreme measures.

FBI Special Agent John Douglas quoted Ed’s psych evaluation, which noted that his motivation for wearing the suit of skin was due to “hostility, sex, and a desire for a substitute for his mother in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely.”

In the early part of 1968 – so 10 years after he was found not guilty due to insanity, Ed was determined fit to stand trial. The trial was held on November 7 without a jury at the request of the defense. Can you imagine what kind of media frenzy that would have been? Judge Robert H. Gollmar presided and Ed was found guilty on November 14, 1968. “Due to prohibitive costs, Gein was tried for only one murder—that of Mrs. Worden. He also admitted to killing Mary Hogan”. So this means that the state never tried him for her murder because they thought that it a waste of money since he was already going to spend the rest of his life in hospitals due to his insanity.

He was 62 years old at this time. He was sent to the Central State Hospital in Waupon and in 1978 he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute, where he eventually died of respitory and heart failure on July 26, 1984 at the age of 77. Despite his gruesome crimes, he was known as a kind and polite prisoner.

Remember Evelyn Hartley, the babysitter? Some people think Ed, who was visiting relatives in the area at the time, might have been involved. There was never a trace of Evelyn to be found anywhere and although he said he hadn’t touched her, he was never completely cleared of this crime. To this day, her case is still unsolved.

Remember the third-grade girl named Georgia Jean Wreckler? It’s theorized that she was one of Ed’s victims as well as he owned a black 1937 Ford and was also visiting relatives in the area during the same time that Georgia went missing. However, everything about her disappearance is still a mystery. Wow – Georgia and Evelyn is too similar to be a coincidence.

After his death, people went to his gravesite to steal pieces from his gravestone as souvenirs. In fact, the gravesite itself was eventually stolen in 2000. Really people? How is this something to own? Why? Of a mentally unstable guy who committed horrible acts. In June 2001 the gravestone was recovered near Seattle and is now in a museum near Waushara County, WI.

No one is quite sure how many people Ed actually killed.

The entire story inspired the character of Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Augusta inspired many psycho mothers from horror movies.

Ed ended up being known as “The Plainfield Ghoul” and “The Butcher of Plainfield.”

And that is our 100th episode and the insanely outrageous, disturbingly nasty case of Edward Gein. Everyone thank Stacey-Marie for requesting this case. I know alot of you LaMs already know about it, but thank you for listening to my retelling of the case.

I want to personally thank each and everyone of you for your support of this little podcast that started because a woman named Ky was fascinated by true crime and why people do the things they do. I want to thank the relatives of the victims who reached out to me and told me that my retelling of their case helped them out or gave them closure. Your messages also helped me to continue what I was doing. I want to thank all my exclusive LaMs who believed in me enough to even donate their money monthly towards Love and Murder and also thank the LaMs who join me in my free group. As usual, if you want to join either – all the links are in the show notes below.

Also as usual, if you’re an exclusive LaM at www.patreon.com/loveandmurder, all of this show’s extras are included with the episode. If you join today, you get all of the past shows extras as well. Now’s the time to join as I’ve been advised to change my prices and that will be happening soon. But if you get in now, you’re grandfathered in. www.patreon.com/loveandmurder.

And love your loved ones and don’t murder them – finally the answer to what does all love and no murder mean

As always, I want to remind you that it’s All Love and No Murder

Thank you to each and every one of you for helping me get to 100 full length episodes. I’ll see YOU in the next episode. Bye!