He was never tried for Mary Hogan’s murder because the state allegedly saw it as a waste of money. Ten years later, Ed was deemed fit to stand trial and was convicted of the murder of Bernice Worden - but just of Bernice Worden. JOHN CROFT/Star Tribune via Getty Images Ed Gein being led away from his house in handcuffs after admitting that he’d killed two women. What Investigators Found Inside Ed Gein’s House There, authorities found what would later inspire horror movies such as Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Police went to Ed’s farmhouse to investigate - and found themselves in the middle of a waking nightmare. Her last customer? None other than Ed Gein, who’d gone into the store to buy a gallon of antifreeze. Worden, a 58-year-old widow, had last been seen at her store. Everything changed in November 1957 when a local hardware store owner named Bernice Worden vanished, leaving nothing behind but bloodstains. Indeed, for a full decade, no one thought much about the Gein farm outside of town. He also began to indulge his sick fantasies, but it took a long time for anyone to realize it. Ed filled his days by learning about Nazi medical experiments, studying human anatomy, consuming porn - though he never attempted to date any real-life women - and reading horror novels. Living alone, far from town, he began to sink into his obsessions. He boarded up rooms that she’d used, keeping them in pristine condition, and moved into a small bedroom off the kitchen. Though he kept some rooms pristine in memory of his mother, the rest of the house was a mess.įollowing Augusta’s death, Ed Gein transformed the house into something of a shrine to her memory. So, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Ed Gein’s first victim was likely his older brother, Henry.īettmann/Getty Images The interior of Ed Gein’s home. Though Henry sometimes stood up to Augusta, Ed never did. (His father, a timid alcoholic who died in 1940, cast a much smaller shadow over his life.) He absorbed her lessons about the world and seemed to embrace her harsh worldview. What’s more, Ed’s lazy eye and speech impediment made him an easy victim of bullies.ĭespite all this, Ed adored his mother. But he failed to establish any meaningful connections with his classmates, who remembered him as socially awkward and prone to odd, unexplained fits of laughter. ![]() Even there, Augusta had the family settle outside of town since she believed that living in town would corrupt her two young sons.Īs a result, Ed Gein only ever left his family’s isolated farmhouse to go to school. ![]() She raised Ed and his brother Henry to believe that the world was full of evil, that women were “vessels of sin,” and that drinking and immortality were the instruments of the devil.įrantic to protect her family from the evil which she believed lurked around every corner, Augusta insisted that they move from La Crosse - a “sinkhole of filth,” she thought - to Plainfield. 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Ed came of age under the influence of his religious and domineering mother, Augusta. Ed Gein’s Early Life And His First Murderīorn Edward Theodore Gein on Aug. Listen above to the History Uncovered podcast, episode 40: Ed Gein, The Butcher Of Plainfield, also available on Apple and Spotify.
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