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00:00This program contains graphic violence and sexual situations. Viewer discretion is advised.
00:07No!
00:13Two bloody crime scenes.
00:18Dozens of empty graves.
00:21Someone was going in and digging up corpses.
00:25A sick obsession with mother.
00:28And a suit of human skin.
00:31He starts putting on female skin, female breasts, actual breasts.
00:40A plot from a Hollywood horror film?
00:44This is a terrifying true story.
00:49Monsters are real.
00:52And the scary thing is they look just like you and I.
00:56The actual events that inspired the movie Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and many more stories of terror.
01:07Behind the Screams.
01:09Small Town America, 1954.
01:25It's a time of peace and prosperity.
01:27In rural Plainfield, Wisconsin, a town of less than 800 people.
01:34By early evening, most of the locals have settled in for the night.
01:38But a dim light still shines inside one local tavern.
01:51The owner, Mary Hogan, is busy cleaning up after a long day of work.
01:56She's a tough, outspoken woman who can hold her own against drunk and disorderly patrons.
02:08There's just one person left in her bar.
02:12As he quietly sips his coffee, she goes about her routine.
02:15You have enough coffee over there?
02:18What she doesn't realize.
02:22Inside this man, a flame of cruelty and hatred is burning.
02:28Slowly growing more intense and more deadly.
02:37Watching Mary intently, the man reaches inside his jacket for a cold metal object.
02:43An instrument of death.
02:56The next morning, the middle-aged bar owner is nowhere to be found.
03:03The peace of Plainfield is shattered.
03:06It's a crime that will one day inspire countless horror films.
03:12A violent attack that sends waves of terror throughout the entire community.
03:17Why would anyone want to hurt Mary Hogan?
03:21And is the assailant someone living here in Plainfield?
03:25I think when you look at individuals in small communities, they tend to believe that they know everybody.
03:35That they know everything that's going on.
03:38They're typically long-term families that have lived there.
03:42And they see the big city as that place where crime happens and there's a lot of violence.
03:47Very, very different from the location in which they live.
03:51So anytime you have violent crime in a small community like that, it's going, and especially really aberrant violent crime, it's going to have a huge impact on the public there.
04:04The job of finding Mary Hogan falls on Sheriff Harold S. Thompson.
04:18Nicknamed Topper, he's a tough, serious man.
04:23A father of 12 children.
04:25Although he's a veteran peacekeeper, he's only been assigned as sheriff temporarily.
04:30Used to settling misdemeanors and local disputes, violent crime is something entirely new for Topper.
04:40Most of these investigators and police officers were appointed.
04:44They have very little training, so they don't have any experience working cases like this.
04:49It becomes a daunting task when they're faced with a disappearance of an individual.
04:53Arriving at the scene, Sheriff Thompson pushes open the door to Mary's Tavern and immediately sees the bloody signs of a violent struggle.
05:07He scans for anything out of place.
05:14A cash box lays empty on the counter.
05:18But something tells him this is something far more sinister than a robbery.
05:24In every crime scene, you have something that is being targeted by the suspect.
05:28The problem with this crime scene is that you've got missing cash from the scene, but you also have a missing body from the scene.
05:34Typically in a robbery, we're looking for the thing that's being taken.
05:38It's going to be cash, it's going to be some sense of valuables, some object perhaps.
05:43But when a body is missing, it's clear that the target is not just property, it's a person.
05:48Thompson finds a single bullet casing resting ominously on the floor.
05:58Clear evidence, the pool of blood is from a gunshot wound.
06:04On the bar, a spilled coffee mug sits upright, marked with a bloody fingerprint.
06:09Thompson wonders, does this print belong to the killer?
06:15A bloody fingerprint at the scene is really important to us because it indicates it's probably been left at the time of the crime.
06:23But remember, in the 50s, we don't have the same kind of database as we have today.
06:28A fingerprint database is going to be very, very thin, if at all.
06:31Without a known suspect with fingerprints in custody, there's nothing to match.
06:35Bloody drag marks lead from the bar, through the red puddle on the floor, toward a door.
06:43Outside, the trail ends at a set of tire tracks.
06:48Every crime scene, hopefully, leaves you with some form of forensic evidence.
06:52In this particular situation, inside, you've got blood smears from the body being drug.
06:56And outside, you've got tire tracks.
06:58The problem, of course, is you're going to have to have a series of tires to match the tracks to.
07:02So it may have some investigative value for you along the way, but more importantly, it'll have value once you find the guy who has the tires.
07:17Sheriff Thompson's baffled by the senseless crime.
07:21Without a body, he has no way of knowing if this is a kidnapping or a killing.
07:26Witnesses who left the bar the previous day say that Mary locked up at around 4.30 in the afternoon.
07:35But the evidence suggests that sometime later, she let her attacker inside and made him a cup of coffee.
07:42The assailant was probably someone she knew very well.
07:57Recognizing his lack of experience and need for help, Sheriff Thompson calls the crime lab in nearby Madison to inspect the scene.
08:07Yeah, hey Ron, this is Sheriff Thompson down here at the sheriff's station.
08:10If you don't have expertise and you haven't worked a ton of these scenes, there's probably going to be something you miss.
08:16And that's why smaller agencies will sometimes call a larger agency that has experience doing a number of homicides.
08:23You have a better chance of catching that missing detail.
08:26Thompson also starts a list of potential suspects.
08:29Mary Hogan had no known enemies, but her past is shrouded in mystery.
08:36Twice divorced, she moved to Plainfield from Chicago.
08:40Some locals believe she may have managed a big city brothel.
08:45There's even talk around town that Mary had ties to the mob.
08:49Was Mary in trouble with the mafia?
08:55And if so, did they follow her all the way to Plainfield to take her out?
09:01There's a kind of a history in a period of time in America when the mob, loosely referred to organized crime, was seen as more influential by investigating agencies.
09:12So at this point, we're looking at the potential that a mob hit could be in place here at this scene.
09:18But there's a problem with this theory of a mob assassination.
09:23Unlike Chicago, Plainfield is a small, close-knit community.
09:28People tend to notice when sharply dressed city folk drive into town.
09:33Even an average-looking stranger couldn't pass through without being noticed by someone.
09:39If it's a mob-style execution, I would either expect there to be a body still at the scene executed in a particular fashion,
09:46or nobody at all.
09:49What you have here is kind of a combination of both, which really doesn't make sense from the perspective of a mob execution.
09:56If the mob isn't responsible for Mary's disappearance, maybe someone living in Plainfield is to blame.
10:04Mary's outspoken manner could have rubbed a bar patron the wrong way.
10:16One possible suspect is a tavern regular, town oddball Ed Gein.
10:26It's common knowledge in Plainfield that the 48-year-old man had a tough upbringing.
10:35His father was an abusive alcoholic, and his mother, Augusta, was an obsessively puritanical woman.
10:43She railed against the pleasures of the flesh.
10:49You can't trust any of them.
10:53And kept her sons at arm's length.
10:56A behavior that only made Ed crave her attention more.
10:59It also made him very awkward when it came to women.
11:09Ed had made comments about Mary in the past.
11:14So, when people are focusing on, like, who could have done this?
11:18Why is she gone?
11:19What happened to her?
11:21Ed's name sort of surfaces, comes up to the top.
11:24While Ed's considered harmless by everyone in town, he was involved in another bizarre incident.
11:36A decade before the Mary Hogan investigation, Ed and his brother Henry Gein are heading out to clear some dry overgrowth from an area close to their home.
11:47The men set a patch of grass ablaze, and as the winds kick up, things quickly get out of hand.
11:56They fight to get the blaze under control.
12:01And when the flames finally go out, Ed walks out of the field, alone.
12:08He goes straight to a neighbor asking for help to find his brother Henry.
12:17But then, strangely, at the scene of the fire, he guides the neighbor directly to his brother's motionless body.
12:25As an investigator, if I'm watching Ed bring this group to look for his brother, and he seems to know exactly where to go immediately, is it a coincidence?
12:37I'd want to at least eliminate the possibility that he knew where his brother was because he was the last person to see his brother alive.
12:45If you're assembling the most reasonable inference from evidence, this seems very suspicious.
12:50And there are other puzzling details.
12:55Henry's body and clothing show no sign of burns.
12:59And there are mysterious bruises on his head.
13:02Ed suggests his brother probably fell and hit his head on a rock.
13:07The whole incident is strange.
13:10But without proof, the locals accept Ed's story.
13:13A medical examiner says his brother must have died from smoke inhalation.
13:20They've talked to Ed, and although he's a bit odd, they don't really have anything else to go on.
13:29The reason town folk are so quick to dismiss Gein?
13:33Even though his behavior is strange, he's known throughout Plainfield for his willingness to help.
13:41He works odd jobs, chops wood, whatever it takes to lend a hand.
13:47People would come to Ed and say, hey, Ed, can you help me load this hay?
13:52Ed, can you help me fix this fence?
13:53And Ed would accommodate them.
13:55He would go and do these things, sometimes for money, sometimes just because, you know, he was living in this community.
14:03He did babysit for a couple of families.
14:07Because Ed is really more comfortable with children than he is with adults.
14:12He's socially undeveloped because he's lived on this farm his whole life.
14:17He's small, he has a very diminutive stature.
14:23He doesn't appear to be threatening to anybody.
14:27For these same reasons, Sheriff Thompson can't see Gein as a suspect in Mary Hogan's disappearance.
14:34He turns his attention to other missing persons cases in the area.
14:40Sheriff Thompson, this is the file you're looking for.
14:42Thanks, Daisy.
14:43When you have those types of incidents in a small geographic location, the likelihood that they are not connected is small.
14:58When investigators are looking at this particular case, there are several people at the time who are missing within a timeframe relatively similar.
15:06And what you're doing when you have a number of people who are missing of this nature is you're trying to find the common thread.
15:11Is there something about each victim that's so common that you could attribute them to the same suspect?
15:17Do they seem like they could be actually connected to one another in some way?
15:21Are they connected geographically? Are they connected because of the same age, the same sex?
15:25The sheriff uncovers three missing persons cases that have all gone unsolved.
15:30And they all happened within two hours of Plainfield.
15:38Case number one.
15:40An eight-year-old girl, Georgia Weckler, went missing.
15:44Walking less than a half-mile home from school, she disappeared in broad daylight.
15:50Case number two.
15:5142-year-old Victor Travis and his friend, Ray Burgess, went off into the woods near Plainfield to hunt deer.
16:04No trace of the men or their car was ever found.
16:07Finally, case number three.
16:13Just one year before Mary Hogan's disappearance, teen Evelyn Hartley was babysitting a small child when she vanished.
16:27Just one of her tennis shoes was left at the scene of the crime.
16:31There is blood found at the scene where she disappears.
16:37There's apparent drag marks.
16:39It looks like she was injured at that location and removed from the location.
16:44It's very similar to Mary Hogan.
16:47Injured at the location and removed.
16:50Thompson notes that in each case, huge search parties combed nearly every inch of the surrounding landscape,
16:56looking for any sign of what happened to these missing girls and men.
17:02But after days and weeks of searching.
17:06Nothing.
17:10There's only one lead in the Georgia Weckler case.
17:14A dark Ford sedan.
17:16Seen once on the road leading to Georgia's home and again later in town.
17:22But is this enough to catch a criminal?
17:24At best, a description of a Ford, especially if it's very generic in its description,
17:30is only going to give you a piece of circumstantial evidence you could later put in part of a cumulative case.
17:35But it's not going to be like that one aha moment where you say, wow, only one person in town owns a Ford.
17:41In a community like this where so many Fords are present, there's no way to connect the Ford to any one particular individual in that community.
17:48It's just going to be one piece of a larger puzzle.
18:01One witness claimed he saw a young girl in the backseat pleading to go home.
18:05And a man shoving her down out of sight.
18:09Then the car was gone.
18:12But was Georgia the young girl in the backseat?
18:14Was this a drifter kidnapping people for ransom or for some other evil purpose?
18:26And has the drifter returned?
18:27Thompson ponders the evidence and it just doesn't add up.
18:36Young Georgia Weckler, teen Evelyn Hartley, the male hunters and middle aged Mary Hogan.
18:44If one man committed all these crimes, he has no clear method or motive.
18:49In this case, you've got a middle aged woman, you've got two young girls and you've got two hunters that are part of the potential missings that people are looking at.
18:58And you're trying to say to yourself, well, what is it about these five different missing people that is similar or dissimilar?
19:05There's a lot of differences here between these five missing persons.
19:08I think if we were to look at these crimes in present day, of course, we might say that there may be some connection, especially in these small communities.
19:19We're talking hundreds of people.
19:22They might refer to this as sort of a serial crime.
19:26Again, we don't have any bodies, so we don't even know that there's homicides.
19:30All we have are disappearances of individuals.
19:33We suspect there's been foul play because there's blood at a couple of these scenes.
19:37But all we have is that they've disappeared.
19:47With no strong suspects in the latest disappearance of tavern owner Mary Hogan, Sheriff Topper Thompson sets his sights on hunting down the assailant's vehicle.
19:58He used it to transport his victim.
20:02Matching the tracks found at the scene is the best lead he has.
20:07It's not unusual to have a crime scene where you don't have a lot of physical evidence, just a few small things, and you do the best you can with what you have.
20:13And in this particular case, we've got tire tracks.
20:16Unfortunately, it's a lot of work to go from tire track to specific suspect with that tire.
20:21In some ways, all evidence can be divided into two categories.
20:26Evidence that leads you directly to a suspect, and evidence that once you have a suspect, can connect you to a crime.
20:32Tire tracks are more in the second category.
20:33I can't use a tire track and immediately tell you who the suspect is, but if you can give me the suspect who's got a car, I can match the car in reverse to the tire track.
20:43Thompson goes farm by farm looking for any suspicious cars, trucks, or people.
20:51But each location leads to a new dead end.
20:55Either the assailant's left town, or he's very good at covering his tracks.
21:01If we're going to start with a tire track, we've got to ask the question, am I looking for a local suspect?
21:08This is a huge county, and there are dozens, hundreds of cars.
21:11If it's somebody who drove through, all of that work could be for nothing.
21:15Adding to the challenge, in this small farming community, Sheriff Thompson has limited resources and manpower.
21:23The properties are spread out over acres. Covering every inch is nearly impossible.
21:32In any murder investigation, you're asking a question, is this a single event, or is this a connected series of events?
21:38Is this part of a series of murders, or just one particular murder?
21:41If it's part of a series, you're trying to ask yourself the question, what's driving the killer?
21:44What the sheriff doesn't know is that right here in once peaceful Plainfield, a place of honest labor and holy worship,
21:58a deviant mind is committing acts even more twisted than murder.
22:02Under cover of darkness, the predator stalks not only the living, but the dead in local cemeteries.
22:15Armed with a shovel and lantern, this deviant mind is searching for something inside human graves.
22:24Digging up a freshly buried coffin, he opens the lid, takes what he needs, then fills the hole again.
22:39Leaving no sign that anything ever happened, and he does it over and over.
22:47The most chilling part, this thief isn't looking for hidden treasure.
22:55He wants the corpses themselves, especially the females.
23:02Every theft scene has a target, something that the suspect is interested in, which is why the theft is occurring.
23:09In grave robbing, you have to ask the question, what is being targeted?
23:14Is it property? Is it jewelry? Is it clothing? Or is it something more sinister? Is it the actual body that's in the grave?
23:21In this particular case, it doesn't appear that property is the target. Instead, it's the bodies.
23:31He's a selective thief.
23:34He's stolen whole bodies before.
23:37But sometimes, he takes just an arm, a leg, or even a head.
23:43What macabre purpose could all these dead bodies possibly serve?
23:54Digging up corpses suggests some kind of paraphilic behavior, whether it's necrophilia, having sex with the bodies, whether it's voyeurism, wanting to look at the dead bodies.
24:05In this case, the bodies that were being dug up were basically middle-aged women.
24:12So we've got a certain type of individual that's being dug up.
24:18These nightly activities have gone unnoticed for years.
24:24The thief only visits fresh graves, leaving them just as he found them.
24:30It's an act no one could possibly believe is happening in Plainfield.
24:35But things will never be the same in this town ever again.
24:39Three years after the disappearance of Mary Hogan, Sheriff Topper Thompson has moved on.
24:58And there's a new sheriff in charge.
25:01His name is Art Schley.
25:03Schley's as baffled by Mary's case as his predecessor.
25:06But all that is about to change.
25:12Late one morning, hardware store owner Bernice Worden is checking inventory with her son, Frank.
25:19When Ed Gein shows up.
25:23Morning, Frank. Hi, Bernice.
25:25Morning, Ed. How are you today?
25:27Oh, can't complain.
25:29Say, Bernice, would you?
25:31Gein invites Bernice to go out roller skating.
25:34Oh, I don't know, Ed.
25:37Store's keeping me pretty busy these days.
25:39He's asked before and she's always said no.
25:42When she declines.
25:44Yeah, Ed, we're pretty busy stocking up here.
25:46He turns to Frank.
25:48Bet you're still going deer hunting tomorrow, right, Frank?
25:51Crack of dawn. Couldn't miss that.
25:54Bernice, I need a gallon of antifreeze.
25:58I'll come by tomorrow and get it.
26:01Okay, Ed, I'll make a note of that.
26:04See you tomorrow.
26:05Oh, God.
26:06Oh, my God.
26:10Around 4 o'clock the next day.
26:13Mr. Schley.
26:14Art, it's Frank.
26:16I need you to come down to the store right now.
26:18Frank, calm down. What's going on?
26:20Sheriff Schley gets a panic phone call from Frank.
26:23He asks the sheriff to rush over to the store.
26:26That something has happened to his mother.
26:28Now, Art.
26:29He thinks he knows who's responsible.
26:32Ed Gein.
26:34I need you to get down here right now, Art.
26:37All right, Frank, calm down.
26:38I'll be there in a sec.
26:46Entering the store, Sheriff Schley is immediately struck
26:49by how similar it looks to the Mary Hogan crime scene
26:51three years earlier.
26:53Something's wrong, Art.
26:55Look, there's blood on the floor.
26:56Frank tells Schley when he got back from deer hunting,
27:00his mother was gone.
27:02The cash register was missing,
27:04and one of the rifles for sale had a spent cartridge
27:08still inside the chamber.
27:10Okay, well, it could have been a robbery.
27:13I don't think so. I think it was Ed Gein.
27:17Sheriff Schley scans the scene.
27:21He sees bloody streaks on the shop floor.
27:23It indicates Bernice was dragged away.
27:27But this clue won't help to identify the assailant.
27:30In the 1950s, we don't have the technology that's available
27:33to us today, the technology to collect certain forms of evidence
27:36for DNA or blood typing or any other forensic comparisons.
27:41Luckily, that's not the only clue.
27:44Frank shows Sheriff Schley the most critical piece of evidence.
27:51A sales receipt for antifreeze.
27:55The same item Gein had inquired about the day before.
27:59Bernice's son, although he's not a homicide detective,
28:03not trained that way, he's got a real motivation.
28:06He's got an avid interest, number one, in this kind of a crime scene.
28:08But number two, this is his mom that's missing.
28:12He's motivated in a way that most homicide detectives aren't.
28:15Immediately, Sheriff Schley's mind starts racing.
28:19He reviews the evidence left in the store,
28:23and a vision of the horrible attack starts to take shape.
28:26With Frank out hunting all morning, Bernice would have been all alone
28:34when Ed returned to Warden's hardware store.
28:38Hi, Bernice.
28:39Hey, Ed.
28:41I've got that antifreeze you wanted.
28:44Bernice keeps rifles behind the counter for sale.
28:48All Ed needs to do is find a way to get Bernice to head and back.
28:52Here you go.
28:54Hey, hey, hey, hey.
28:55Then...
28:56Almost forgot.
28:57...he could make his move.
28:59I have to do some work on the shed today, so I need some four-penny nails.
29:04Oh, okay. I have those in back, so just hang on a minute.
29:11Slipping behind the counter, he could quickly grab an unloaded rifle off the wall
29:17and quietly step back into the front of the store.
29:23His next step is proof this attack must have been premeditated.
29:28With no ammo on display, he must have brought his own cartridge.
29:33Pulling the bullet from his jacket pocket, he could silently load the weapon
29:39and wait for his victim to return.
29:42Okay, Ed. I got the nails you wanted. How many of them you...
29:48As Bernice made her way to the front of the store, she had no way to know.
29:53Ed Gein was seething with anger.
29:58You should have gone roller-skating with me, Bernice.
30:05Ed!
30:07No!
30:08No!
30:16Schley speculates Gein could have removed the cash register to disguise the true nature of his crime.
30:23The same trick used before when Mary Hogan vanished.
30:27But are the two crimes truly related?
30:31And is Gein really a monster living in plain sight?
30:35So here we have another scene.
30:38A missing female. Gunshot wound. Blood at the scene, the body is missing.
30:42Very interesting and very distinct MO, and it's very similar to what happened to Mary earlier.
30:47These two crimes appear to be connected.
30:52Immediately, Sheriff Schley picks up his partner, Dan Chase, and the hunt is on.
30:58The officers quickly locate Gein outside a neighbor's home.
31:10They approach carefully.
31:12He could be armed and dangerous.
31:15Ed?
31:17So as a detective, when you're approaching somebody you think may be a suspect in a crime,
31:20is this guy going to be armed?
31:21You've really planned these things out in your mind so as you make the approach, you're making it safely and you're making it tactically.
31:28I want you to slow down for a sec.
31:30One of the officers asks Gein to tell him where he's been all day.
31:34What did you do today?
31:35Gein says he's just been doing chores.
31:37And I found some wood at El Grady Ranch.
31:42That's when they use a common law enforcement trick to get to the truth.
31:46I was walking here.
31:47I want you to start from the top again.
31:49They ask Gein to repeat what he said.
31:52I found some wood at the Smith Ranch.
31:59The best tactic to use if you're trying to determine if someone's telling the truth is simply to have them tell the same story over and over again.
32:05The El Grady Place.
32:07Ask the question from a slightly different angle.
32:09And as you listen to the response, you're listening for the slight variations.
32:12Smith Place.
32:13The El Grady Place.
32:14The El Grady Place.
32:15Smith Place.
32:16Would indicate that this person's not telling you the truth.
32:18Oh, Smith Place.
32:20Gein can't remember the lies he's told.
32:23His story changes.
32:25He's up to no good.
32:27Then...
32:28No, no, I've been framed!
32:31Gein's mind collapses.
32:34After years of murder and mayhem, perhaps the guilt, perhaps the sheer evil must come out.
32:43Calm down, Ed, all right?
32:44What have you been framed for?
32:46Mrs. Warden.
32:47Did you say Mrs. Warden, Ed?
32:49Yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:50She's dead, isn't she?
32:52At this point, not even the police know for sure what happened to Bernice.
32:56They arrest Gein on the spot and take him to jail.
33:04With Gein in custody, Sheriff Schley and Officer Chase race to search the Gein family farm.
33:12There's no time to lose.
33:13This secluded property nine miles from town stretches over 95 acres.
33:20And Bernice could be anywhere.
33:30They begin just a short drive off the road at Ed Gein's very dark and forbidding home.
33:36Many of the local children believe it's haunted by an evil spirit.
33:44They have no idea how right they are.
33:50The officers slowly move toward the building, looking for a way in.
33:55They can actually enter the residence if they have a sense there's a possibility that somebody's still alive, is injured, is in dire need of help.
34:06It's exigent circumstances.
34:09That's the motivation they have to actually enter the house.
34:15They notice a shed in the back of the home.
34:18Schley can see the door, only has a rickety latch.
34:22He lifts his foot up and kicks hard.
34:25Get ready.
34:34Any time you walk into a scene like this, you have a kind of a tension between discovery and danger.
34:42You know, you have a sense that I'm going to discover something that's powerful, that's going to make this case.
34:45Maybe I'll even discover Bernice alive, that would be great.
34:47But there's always a sense of danger too.
34:49You don't know that Ed Gein is acting alone.
34:51You don't know what's going to be in there, who's going to be in there.
34:53You can walk in and get ambushed.
34:55So as you're walking into a scene like this, you're always on the edge of your seat.
34:58You're always on guard.
35:08The officer's flashlight beams reveal trash everywhere.
35:11But what they're about to see they could never imagine, and will never forget.
35:23As Schley turns to search the corner, he feels something heavy brush against him.
35:33Something hanging from the ceiling.
35:40It's a human body.
35:42Oh, God.
35:50Bernice Worden, loving mother, widow, and respected business owner, hangs upside down, beheaded, and split down the middle.
36:00The way a deer is butchered after a hunt.
36:05Jesus.
36:07It's the revolting act of a sick, perverted mind.
36:17No matter how tough you think you are as a cop, and most of us, when we train, we think we're pretty tough about these kinds of things.
36:22Especially if you're working homicides.
36:24Some scenes are worse than others.
36:26And here you have the most horrific scene, one of the worst scenes in the history of homicides.
36:33He reacts like probably most of us would, runs out of the room and throws up.
36:36When you look at it, it's not a crime of passion.
36:50There clearly is a plan here.
36:52It's done in a very methodical way.
36:55Her feet are spread apart on a bar.
36:58She's been hoisted up by a block and tackle.
37:04Her hands have been tied to her sides.
37:07She's been essentially eviscerated, opened up from her sternum all the way up to her pubic bone.
37:14And all of her internal organs are gone.
37:17And, of course, we're talking about police officers who have never seen anything like this.
37:23They look at Bernice, and they're not even sure if it's Bernice or not, because the corpse doesn't have a head.
37:31It's clear that he had done this kind of activity before.
37:35Clearly he was skilled at it.
37:40And Bernice isn't Ed Gein's only trophy.
37:48Inside the main home, his demented decorations are everywhere.
37:54Parts of bodies.
37:58Women's skulls.
38:01And hidden under a burlap sack, the face of Mary Hogan.
38:08Turned into a horrifying mask.
38:14You're wondering, well, why would he do this?
38:17Why is he collecting all of these different body parts?
38:20I mean, this really goes to this psychosis that Ed has.
38:27But Ed Gein's greatest prize is the one that truly gives a glimpse into the psyche of a madman.
38:35Propped up in a dusty, cluttered room, Schley finds a full body garment Gein had sewn from human skin.
38:43He wore this suit to become female.
38:48Ed has still got this fixation on his mother.
38:54At some point, fairly shortly after her death, Ed is actually believing that he has the power to will her back to life.
39:03He'll will her back to life, bring her back from the dead.
39:07And when he can't do that, he essentially recreates her in himself.
39:12He starts putting on female skin, female breasts, actual breasts.
39:27Starts wearing a vagina and actually dancing around out at night in the moonlight.
39:33I mean, it's a very macabre, kind of very creepy scene.
39:39But from a psychotic standpoint, what you really see is Ed trying to become his mother.
39:45Seeing this house of horrors, Sheriff Schley comes up with a possible motive in the murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden.
40:01To Ed Gein, his mother, Augusta, was a saintly figure, incorruptible and free of sin.
40:08And though Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden reminded him of his mother, in his eyes, they were the opposite.
40:18They brought out something inside him that Augusta fought all her life to suppress.
40:24Gein's manly lust.
40:26I can't believe you looked at that horrible girl, Cindy. You have to learn.
40:31He wanted these women.
40:33And this urge went against everything he'd been raised to believe.
40:36It drove him to insane violence.
40:42When his mother died, it was devastating for Ed.
40:46He lost not only his very best friend, but he lost his support structure.
40:52Ed, I think, essentially was socially and emotionally lost at that point.
40:59Gein's clothing made of human flesh.
41:03His bloody crimes.
41:06And his childish, simpletons' grin horrify and mystify the public.
41:12How could a man like this exist?
41:15The psychology of Ed Gein is fascinating to me.
41:19What drove him to take these two victims when he did, years apart, and what he did in the middle of all those years.
41:24And it's really, it seems that Ed is far more fascinated with the parts he got from the murders than the actual victims themselves.
41:33Clearly, Ed is psychotic.
41:44He has serious mental health problems.
41:46And it's the mental illnesses, it's the way he perceived his thinking patterns about his mother and his activities that drives his crimes.
41:59And we can see, you have an individual who's digging up corpses.
42:02He's cutting out vaginas, he's cutting off breasts, he's cutting off the skin, he's cutting off the skull and taking off the hair on the skull, he's wearing it.
42:15He's making clothing out of a woman's skin.
42:17This is incredibly aberrant behavior.
42:21But it's, his crimes are driven by this, this severe mental illness.
42:30Sheriff Art Schley, overcome by the atrocities he witnessed inside Gein's home, can't contain his anger.
42:37He attacks Gein in his jail cell, repeatedly slamming him against a wall.
42:51Hoping he can force Gein to confess to murder.
42:56He never does.
43:00Gein maintained his innocence throughout the murder trial.
43:03In court, he claimed he killed Bernice Worden by accident.
43:08That the sight of blood made him faint.
43:11He couldn't recall how she came to be hanging in his home.
43:17So where did he get the huge array of human body parts police found in his home?
43:22He says he pulled them from local graves.
43:25He's admitting to the police that he has engaged in digging up corpses from local cemeteries.
43:36Some he took with him, some he returned, some he removed body parts from, some he was skinning.
43:42But he's engaged with this, these dead individuals, all women.
43:48And it's so unusual for people because for the time in 1957, the baseline of behavior isn't what we have today.
43:59We don't have 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news.
44:04And it was so unusual, so bizarre, that it just captured the national audience.
44:11Although he was ultimately found guilty of murder, he never saw the inside of a prison cell.
44:19Labeled insane, he spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.
44:24There are only three things that motivate any homicide.
44:29Financial greed, sexual or relational lust, and the pursuit of power.
44:33But there's a fourth category we have to assess, and that is just crazy.
44:37There's somebody so insane that they're not even motivated by anything.
44:41They're just doing it without a motivation because they're crazy.
44:45This is something we have to assess, especially when we come to trial.
44:48Were they able to make free choices, and they were driven by one of these three things they could have resisted?
44:51Or are they just so crazy they couldn't make a free choice?
44:56I think that he was very mentally disturbed.
45:00And there's no question, when he is interviewed by a number of psychiatrists and psychologists,
45:08that they all are in agreement that he is psychotic.
45:11And they describe him as schizophrenic, which is clearly, I think, the case when you look at Ed Gein's history.
45:17I think that the delusions that he had, and perhaps some of the auditory hallucinations, this severe mental illness, had him acting in ways that we might characterize them as evil.
45:31But I would say that when you're talking about psychopaths, people who understand the difference between right and wrong and simply choose to do wrong, that is probably an individual that I would describe as more evil.
45:59It was an unsatisfying end for the people of Plainfield.
46:10With no way to strike out at Gein the man, they wreaked their vengeance on Gein's family home, burning it to the ground.
46:18But even after he died in a mental hospital, 27 years after his arrest, the memory of his horrible crimes lived on.
46:32Buried in his family plot, Gein's tombstone was vandalized repeatedly.
46:38Authorities finally placed it in storage for safekeeping.
46:41Ed Gein turned life in Plainfield, Wisconsin, on its head.
46:47Media poured in for the trials, for all the attention in these very aberrant homicide cases.
46:54National attention, international attention.
46:58The world had its eye focused on Plainfield, Wisconsin and the residents there.
47:03They were never going to be the same because there's, in their minds and in their hearts, they realized, can I really know if there's not another Ed Gein out here?
47:14Someone that I know who could be doing the same thing?
47:17The attention from 1957 to present day never left Plainfield, Wisconsin.
47:24It always has that moniker as the city that grew the monster Ed Gein.
47:30The psychotic monster that was digging up graves and cutting up women and wearing women's clothing and, you know, a house full of vaginas and breasts and lamps and chairs made out of human skin.
47:44That community will always be known for that and not for the people that were in the community.
47:49And I think that was very difficult for them to deal with.
47:54They never wanted that focus.
47:57But the legacy of Ed Gein will never die.
48:01He put a face on true horror.
48:04And the most shocking thing is how plain and simple that face of terror truly is.
48:11Monsters are real.
48:14And the scary thing is they look just like you and I.
48:17In 1959, just two years after Gein's arrest, Wisconsin native Robert Block published the book Psycho.
48:25In it, the main character Norman Bates, obsessed with his late mother, kills victim after victim in the small town of Fairvale.
48:35The film adaptation of Block's novel is one of the most famous horror films of all time.
48:41And behind it all is Ed Gein, a man who could have gone unnoticed by the world if it weren't for his sick appetite for female flesh and a bizarre obsession with his mother.
49:02In many ways, Ed Gein was a very ordinary guy.
49:06He lived alongside his victims for years before they became his victims.
49:10I think that's what's so shocking about Ed Gein's case, is it's horrifying to think that there's somebody who could be just like us, looks like us, lives with us, interacts with us, and in the end becomes a predator of us.
49:21And that's why I think Ed Gein has lived on in infamy as the face of evil.
49:27Two bloody murders.
49:30A grave robber that steals human bodies.
49:34And a suit sewn from female flesh.
49:38These things shouldn't be real, but they are.
49:42It's the true story of Ed Gein.
49:47A psycho.
49:49The ghoul of Plainfield.
49:51Behind the screams.
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