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World's Most Evil Killers S01E03
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00:00In November 1957, police in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin,
00:15were searching for a missing woman named Bernice Warden.
00:19They were about to make one of the most gruesome discoveries in U.S. criminal history.
00:25One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it around and saw this.
00:30An object that was hanging from the rafters, which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
00:35They realized to their incredible horror that it was a woman's corpse that was hanging by its heels.
00:41The twisted killer was a quiet loner named Ed Gein.
00:46Hidden inside the 51-year-old's rural farmhouse was a ghoulish treasure trove of human remains.
00:52There was a lampshade made of human skin.
00:55They found that the remains of 12 human heads, gloves made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers.
01:03You think of this happening, you know, now, it's still going to be shocking.
01:08But back then, in a small, tiny rural community, it was breath-shaking.
01:14America had woken up inside the nightmare of Ed Gein, one of the world's most evil killers.
01:21The gruesome crimes of Ed Gein horrified 50s America.
01:48When his rural home was searched on the 16th of November, 1957, the police uncovered a gothic house of horrors.
01:58As well as the remains of two missing local women, they found an array of human bones, skulls and skin that had been fashioned into furniture and clothing.
02:10The town of Plainfield was in complete shock.
02:14One of the residents who remembers the effect Gein had on Plainfield is Max Harrington.
02:20I think shock would be the biggest thing that we could use to describe the atmosphere in the community.
02:26We were still pretty much a clannish community at that time, when a lot of the families that were here had always been here.
02:33It took your breath away, you know, you just, you know, it was shocking.
02:39It still is.
02:40People don't do things like that in a small town on a normal day.
02:44That's just not part of what we grew up with.
02:46Ed Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, on the 27th of August, 1906.
03:00By the time he was eight years old, his parents moved Ed and his older brother Henry to Plainfield.
03:06Well, the Gein family moved to Plainfield from La Crosse, Wisconsin, partly because the mother of the family, the matriarch, Augusta,
03:20had decided that La Crosse was a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah-like hellhole,
03:28and she didn't want her children to be corrupted by all the immoral influences of the big city.
03:35Um, needless to say, La Crosse was not a particularly big city,
03:40but they moved to a remote farmhouse about six miles west of, you wouldn't necessarily say downtown Plainfield,
03:49because there was no uptown Plainfield.
03:52It's, uh, not the largest city in the state of Wisconsin, but it's plenty big enough for those of us that live here.
03:58Plainfield was a very remote, isolated, featureless little village.
04:05A state guidebook at the time described it as totally nondescript.
04:11Um, the population was very small, uh, never more in its history, I think, than seven or eight hundred people.
04:20You know, probably the entire population of the village could have fit into a New York City apartment building.
04:26The Geins 150-acre farm was located on the corner of Archer and Second Avenue.
04:34Ed rarely got to leave the property and socialize with other children.
04:39His mother, Augusta, is a very domineering character indeed.
04:44She is a devout Christian, and she has some very extreme ideas about sin and about morality.
04:50And she drums into her sons that they're not to socialize with anybody outside of the family,
04:56because all of the people around them in the local town are sinners, they're evil, all the women are whores.
05:02And so she creates this very insular family environment where they're quite isolated from the rest of the community,
05:09and that has a really significant impact on them.
05:12Geins seemed to have been very friendless whenever he would make some kind of friend.
05:19On those rare occasions, when he would try to make a school friend and bring home a school friend,
05:24the mother would immediately find some reason to disapprove of the other child
05:29and forbid Ed from ever bringing him home.
05:31So he grew up again in a state of complete social isolation.
05:35And Geins' relationship with his father was also far from perfect.
05:42Well, the father, George, was an alcoholic.
05:44He appeared to have been somewhat free in his use of physical punishment.
05:51But mostly the picture that emerges of George is of, you know, kind of a hapless individual
05:57who was, as all three male members of the family were, under the thumb of his wife,
06:03and, again, who was regarded as much as anything else as a sort of obstacle or impediment to the household.
06:13As Ed entered adolescence, his life became even more insular.
06:18He dropped out of school when he was around about 12 or 13 to work on the family's farm.
06:22And he was considered to be a bit of an oddball.
06:25He was quite a loner, and he enjoyed quite solitary pursuits,
06:29so he really quite liked reading and was quite a prolific reader.
06:33So he was somebody who didn't really fit in,
06:36but worked incredibly hard to keep the family farm going.
06:40On April 1st, 1940, Ed's father, George, died of heart failure,
06:46leaving 33-year-old Ed, his brother Henry, and Augusta alone on the family farm.
06:52Ed's older brother, Henry, seemed to have freed himself a little more emotionally
07:00and psychologically from Augusta's dominance and even apparently on a couple of occasions
07:07expressed some criticism of their mother and the hold she was exerting over both of them.
07:15So Ed, who, at least on a conscious level, worshipped his mother and saw her as a kind of goddess
07:23who could do no wrong, appears to have been both a little shocked, you know,
07:28that Henry would find any cause to criticise Augusta and possibly built up some kind of animosity
07:37toward Henry for that attitude.
07:41Ed became a handyman doing odd jobs around Plainfield to help with living expenses on the farm.
07:47We used to see Ed occasionally. I'd see him around town.
07:52And then he was always a friendly person, quiet, friendly, usually had a joke to tell.
07:59He always had time to say hello and ask after how you were.
08:03A person who you would never suspect of anything other than being a decent sort of person.
08:09In May 1944, death would hit the Gein family once again,
08:14but this time in more suspicious circumstances
08:18after a brush fire on their farmland got out of control.
08:22Ed and Henry were out there trying to put out the fire and they got separated
08:28and Ed could not locate Henry and he went and got help.
08:33But then after getting this help, he led the other people directly to where Henry's body lay
08:39and there were some mysterious bruises on Henry's head.
08:43Anyway, the official verdict of the medical examiner was that Henry had died of a heart attack
08:49while fighting this fire and had injured his head when he fell and hit a rock.
08:55But afterwards, when Gein's crimes were uncovered, there was a lot of talk
09:00that perhaps Henry had been a victim of Ed's,
09:04that Ed in fact had killed Henry partly because of Henry's criticism of Augusta.
09:10The impact upon their mother Augusta was phenomenal.
09:14She really broke down about Henry's death and she had a stroke.
09:18But of course, by then, you know, the psychic bond between Augusta and Ed
09:23was so incredibly intense already.
09:27Evidence seems to suggest that with the other two men out of the way,
09:32Ed reveled in having his mommy alone to himself.
09:36But Gein's mother never really recovered from her stroke
09:40and their time alone only lasted for 19 months.
09:45Ed nursed her very, very diligently,
09:48even apparently would get into bed with her on occasion
09:51and stroke her and comfort her.
09:54And then she seemed to recover,
09:57but then she suffered another, this time fatal stroke.
10:01Augusta Gein died on December the 29th, 1945.
10:0739-year-old Ed was completely devastated.
10:12Because his mother was so domineering,
10:14I think she really did stunt his development
10:16and he almost got stuck at a kind of teenage, adolescent phase in his life.
10:21So looking at how he behaved at the funeral,
10:24he was in his 30s at this time
10:26and he was reported to be wailing like a small child.
10:29So he hasn't got that kind of emotional control
10:32that's associated with 30-something men.
10:34The death of his mother left him completely, completely isolated,
10:40you know, living in this increasingly ramshackle,
10:43dilapidated farmhouse that he ceased to take care of whatsoever.
10:47Augusta was his only real human contact.
10:52So it was at that point, you know,
10:54that Gein embarked on these various outrages
10:58that would ultimately make him this notorious figure in American crime.
11:03Alone and isolated from the rest of society,
11:07Gein spiralled out of control.
11:09Over the next 12 years,
11:11he became obsessed with recreating the world he'd shared with his mother.
11:15It would lead him to a series of dark and disturbing crimes
11:19that would eventually culminate in murder.
11:26One of my summer jobs when I was a student in high school
11:30was mowing the cemetery.
11:33And two of my buddies and I,
11:36that was about a four-day job for us to mow that.
11:40And we would see Ed out there on occasion.
11:43He'd come out and if he saw us working,
11:45he'd always come over and say hello.
11:47And again, sometimes have this little story to tell.
11:51And he was very good about stopping and see his mother's grave.
11:54I think neighbors saw him as an odd,
11:58very meek, somewhat simple-minded person,
12:02person, but one who was always willing to pitch in
12:06when some farm work needed to be done
12:08or some chore needed to be run for them.
12:11But they, of course, had no sense
12:14of the life that he was pursuing
12:16inside that incredibly creepy, dismal world of his own farm.
12:21It was a world that 51-year-old Gein had managed to keep hidden away
12:27until the winter of 1957.
12:30November 16th, 1957 was the first day of deer hunting season that year.
12:35And it was a day when basically the entire male population of the town
12:41would have been out in the woods hunting deer, as Ed knew.
12:45Ed drove into town to the Warden Hardware Store.
12:50The Warden Hardware Store was owned by a woman named Bernice Warden.
12:56I knew Mrs. Warden quite well.
12:58She and her family ran the hardware store here for many years.
13:01Almost everybody in the community knew Mrs. Warden.
13:04Ed had kind of been hanging around the store
13:06for a couple of weeks previously.
13:09He had developed something of an obsession with Bernice Warden.
13:12He would talk to her, he would ask her out,
13:15and it was quite clear that she really wasn't that interested in him.
13:19Ed came in, asked to buy a half a gallon of antifreeze,
13:24which Bernice Warden poured out for him and wrote out a receipt.
13:27He went back out to his truck, then came back inside
13:31and asked her to see a rifle that was in the window.
13:35When Bernice Warden turned her back to him,
13:37he shot her in the back of the head
13:39and then loaded her corpse in his truck and drove back to his farm.
13:45Gein had murdered the 58-year-old woman in broad daylight.
13:49It was deer season, so deer season is like a ghost town around here.
13:53Everybody, in those days especially, everybody was out hunting.
13:56And she wasn't even missed for some hours.
14:01And then someone reported that she wasn't at the store.
14:04Well, that was her son, of course.
14:07Later that day, Frank Warden returned from the woods
14:11and found the store empty.
14:13His mother wasn't there.
14:15He was very perplexed by that.
14:16And then he saw a trail of blood across the floor of the hardware store
14:21and not only realized that some foul play had occurred,
14:25but immediately suspected Ed Gein
14:27because Gein had been kind of bothering his mother for the past few weeks.
14:31And there was one piece of evidence
14:33that confirmed Frank Warden's suspicions to the police.
14:37When they went to search the place,
14:40they found the receipt for the antifreeze that was in Ed's name.
14:45And they just worked backwards saying
14:48that he was probably the last person to see her alive,
14:51but they didn't suspect that he was as deranged as he was.
14:56One set of lawmen went out in search of Gein.
14:59They found him having dinner at a neighbor's house
15:02and they arrested him.
15:04And then another set of lawmen went out to Gein's farmhouse
15:07and that's where they made these discoveries
15:11that really sent shockwaves around the world.
15:15On a dark winter's night,
15:17officers from the Plainfield Police Department
15:20began to search the Gein farm for Bernice Wharton.
15:24They couldn't get into the house,
15:26so they went around back
15:27and entered into what was called the summer kitchen,
15:31which was a little shed outside.
15:33This property didn't have any electricity,
15:36so they were pretty much fumbling around in the dark with flashlights,
15:40but I don't think they expected to find what they did find there.
15:44One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it around
15:47and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
15:52which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer.
15:55Although it didn't look like a deer,
15:57they realized to their incredible horror
16:00that it was a woman's corpse
16:02that was hanging by its heels
16:04and been completely gutted.
16:07She'd been strung up, essentially,
16:09and she was slit from her sternum to her pelvis.
16:14So she'd essentially been butchered by Ed.
16:17It really was the most grotesque thing
16:20that these officers had ever come across.
16:22And they realized they had found the body of Bernice Warden.
16:26And, of course, both of them just stumbled out in horror
16:29and vomited, you know, at the sight of this thing.
16:33When the news spread across the town,
16:36the residents of Plainfield were in complete shock.
16:39When I heard of this arrest,
16:41I couldn't believe it.
16:43I was sure they had the wrong person
16:45because it just didn't seem like anything
16:47that they were telling us was the Ed that we all knew.
16:54Yeah, it was a Saturday night.
16:56We were at a dance,
16:57and the story went through there,
16:59and everybody said, I don't believe it.
17:02But it was true.
17:04After finding the butchered body of Bernice Warden
17:08in a shed at Ed Gein's farm,
17:10the police officers moved their search into the main house.
17:15He boarded up some areas of the family,
17:17to maintain the rooms as his mother had left them.
17:21And in other parts of the property,
17:23he just started hoarding things.
17:25You know, you would have trash and rubbish build up,
17:28and it really became a complete hovel.
17:31He'd reverse the normal process of trash disposal,
17:36you know, and instead of taking all his garbage to the dump,
17:38would go to the dump and bring it into his house.
17:41It was just this incredible chaos of trash and garbage.
17:45But there was more than just household waste.
17:48Amid all that wreckage,
17:50they discovered these incomprehensible,
17:54unspeakably awful objects
17:57that had been fashioned out of human body parts.
18:00There were chairs that were upholstered in human flesh.
18:03There was a lampshade made of human skin.
18:06They found that the remains of 12 human heads,
18:10gloves made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers.
18:13There was a jar containing human noses.
18:17There was a box full of female genitalia,
18:20some of which had been painted and tied with ribbons.
18:24There was a belt fashioned out of female nipples.
18:28There was a shade pole made of human lips.
18:32They found all types of things that belonged to people
18:35that were no longer people.
18:38And it was shocking.
18:39I mean, you think of this happening, you know, now,
18:43it'd still be shocking.
18:44But back then, in a small, tiny, rural community,
18:48it was absolutely, it was breathtaking.
18:53Ed's Gein's farmhouse was the habitation of a literal ghoul.
18:58You know, somebody who had been living
19:00amidst these horrific relics of human dismemberment.
19:04It was a madhouse.
19:07Gein's fascination with death and corpses
19:10had been growing ever since his mother had died 12 years previously.
19:15Ed had always enjoyed reading.
19:16It was quite a solitary pursuit,
19:18so that's not particularly surprising.
19:20But after the death of his mother and his brother,
19:22he started to read an awful lot more.
19:25And his tastes in literature really did span quite a wide spectrum.
19:30He read pornographic magazines.
19:32He read medical textbooks.
19:35And he developed a particular interest in Ilse Koch,
19:38who worked at one of the Nazi concentration camps
19:41and collected patches of skin of the prisoners
19:44who were detained there.
19:46And I think all of this was fueling a very active imagination.
19:52So he's developing these obsessions and these interests.
19:55And he's quite skilled as a farmhand at this point in time.
19:58He knows how to slaughter animals.
20:00He knows how to prepare carcasses.
20:02He's from a community that's very much into its hunting and its fishing.
20:05So at some point, reality and fantasy are going to collide.
20:09As the search of the farmhouse progressed,
20:12officers found that the grotesque collection of body parts became even more disturbing.
20:18Among the most hideous of all the items were human skin masks
20:23that were hanging from the wall of his bedroom,
20:27the faces of women that had been flayed from the skulls and that had been preserved.
20:32Some of them had lipstick applied to them and that had been hung on the walls as decorations.
20:38And then, most notoriously, there was a skin suit that Ed had crafted out of the upper torso of a woman
20:48and the leggings of a woman.
20:49And apparently, as he later confessed, he would put on this skin suit
20:55and put on one of the female skin masks and caper around in his yard, pretending to be his mother.
21:04Gein's macabre collection had been acquired from the very same cemetery where his mother's body lay.
21:11Two years after the death of his mother in 1947, he starts grave robbing.
21:16So, he's going into a local burial ground, he's digging up bodies and he's taking things from the bodies.
21:25Now, he's not taking jewellery or items of any value, he's actually taking body parts.
21:30It really is an absolute house of horrors.
21:33So, what started off as an interest, which was confined to the pages of a book,
21:38has now become a reality behind the doors of this rather bizarre house.
21:42So, what he's doing in a really grotesque way is trying to bring his mother back to life in some way, shape or form
21:50because he was just so dependent upon her for a sense of his own identity.
21:54And the search wasn't over yet.
21:57Officers would soon discover, inside a paper bag in Gein's home,
22:02the severed head of a woman who'd been missing from Plainfield for over two years.
22:07I think that the real tipping point for Ed Gein was when his mother and his brother died
22:14because even though this family was very intense and rather extreme in its beliefs,
22:18it was still a check on his behaviour.
22:21There was still that informal surveillance over him and I think that kept him contained.
22:27But once he was on his own, he was free to ruminate and fantasise
22:31and his behaviour was only going to escalate.
22:34You know, it's like some crack opened up, you know, in the civilised part of his head
22:39and all this weird archaic stuff going back to the days, you know,
22:45when our species did engage in these bizarre unspeakable rituals, you know,
22:52flooded out and took possession of him.
22:54With Gein in custody, officers continued to scour his home
22:59and they were about to make another startling discovery.
23:02A local woman who'd been missing for almost three years.
23:06There had been a female tavern keeper named Mary Hogan
23:10who ran this roadside tavern outside of Plainfield
23:13who had disappeared very, very mysteriously.
23:17In those days, we had 18-year-old bars where teenagers could go and have beer.
23:22And she ran one of those that was a kind of a modest place to be very kind.
23:31But she disappeared before I was old enough to frequent those establishments.
23:37When she went missing, he'd said some rather bizarre things.
23:40He said to one of the townspeople,
23:42Oh, she's not missing, she's up at the house.
23:45But because he was a bit of a misfit and because he was a bit weird,
23:48people didn't really take what he said very seriously at all.
23:51So that one was allowed to slip under the radar
23:54until this grisly discovery a few years later.
23:58In searching through Gein's house of horrors,
24:01the investigators opened up some receptacle and saw this face
24:08and pulled it out and realized it was Mary Hogan's,
24:11that she had been another one of these victims.
24:14Gein had murdered Mary Hogan on December the 8th, 1954,
24:21three years previous to killing Bernice Wharton.
24:24I think there was some sense in which he associated her with his mother.
24:31You know, she almost seemed to be like the shadow side of his mother.
24:35And I think in killing her, again, he was both enacting
24:39some kind of homicidal rage toward his mother.
24:42But I think also there were times when he just ran out of suitable female corpses
24:48and had to make his own.
24:51Back at the local police station, it was time for Ed Gein to start talking.
24:57Well, for the first day after his arrest,
25:00I think Ed felt like a bit of a fish out of water.
25:02He didn't quite know how to react.
25:05But he did start talking after about 24 hours.
25:08And the first thing he said was that he wanted an apple pie
25:11with a slice of cheese on it.
25:13And that really does show the emotional immaturity of this guy.
25:18And when you've got somebody whose development stops at a particular point,
25:21they don't develop those complex emotions that enable them to empathize with other people
25:27or just think through the consequences of their actions.
25:30So what you've got here is a teenage boy in a man's body.
25:33And he was capable of some really terrible things.
25:36He was subjected to a very lengthy interrogation.
25:39He freely confessed to the murders of Bernie Swarden and Mary Hogan.
25:44When the police first broke into Gein's house
25:47and discovered this crazy mass of body parts,
25:50their first assumption was Gein was a serial killer.
25:54It was only during his interrogation
25:56that he revealed that they were taken from the corpses
26:00he had dug up from the local cemetery.
26:03And people, in a way, had a harder time believing that
26:06than that he was a serial killer.
26:08That seemed like totally beyond the bounds of belief
26:11for a whole variety of reasons.
26:13Human bodies are traditionally buried six feet underground.
26:17That's a lot of digging.
26:18That's a lot of work to get to them through packed earth.
26:22He'd need spades, picks.
26:25He'd need to be strong.
26:26And he'd need, one assumes, to do it at night
26:29because he'd need to be undisturbed.
26:31I'm not sure he did recognize that what he was doing was wrong.
26:35You know, there are some necrophiles who think,
26:38well, I wasn't really hurting anybody.
26:40You know, they were dead anyway.
26:42Gein confessed to investigators that between 1947 and 1952,
26:49he'd regularly visited the local cemetery after dark.
26:53He would often follow the local newspapers and read the obituaries.
26:57And when some middle-aged or elderly woman
27:00who bore some vague resemblance to his departed mother
27:05died and was buried,
27:07he would apparently go out to the cemetery at night
27:10while the soil was still fresh and easily dug up
27:13and exhume these coffins and remove the bodies
27:18and sometimes take the entire corpse back to his farmhouse,
27:21sometimes just take parts of the corpse back to the farmhouse
27:24and leave the rest there.
27:27Investigators decided to dig up some of the graves
27:30to see if Gein was telling the truth.
27:32When they uncovered them,
27:34they discovered that the coffins had been broken into
27:36and the bodies were missing
27:39or, you know, there were just parts of the skeleton remaining there.
27:43He admitted to grave robbing nine corpses,
27:46but the maths didn't quite add up
27:49because the police had found 12 human heads in Gein's property
27:53and he'd only admitted to 11 offences against separate people.
27:58So the numbers never really added up properly.
28:02So there's always been questions over that.
28:04Ed Gein's crimes were in the late 50s, 1957.
28:09The state of forensic science in those days
28:13was far less than we have now.
28:16Things like DNA simply didn't exist as a tool,
28:21so identification could potentially be very difficult
28:24and I would suspect in certainly some of the body parts
28:27simply impossible.
28:28There was no doubt that Gein specifically targeted females,
28:32all the graves he desecrated belonged to women.
28:36I think he was both trying to rebuild his mother,
28:40but I also think that he was taking revenge on his mother.
28:46That kind of love and hate of mommy were manifested,
28:52both by his attempting to bring her back from the dead,
28:56but also perpetrating, you know,
28:58these atrocities on the corpses of female bodies.
29:02It's been reported that Gein did in fact try to return Augusta
29:06to the family home after her funeral.
29:09There's some indication that he initially tried to exhume his mother's corpse,
29:14you know, apparently Ed missed the presence of his mother so much.
29:19You know, he wanted to bring her back
29:21and somehow in his madness, you know, reconstitute her in his household.
29:28He couldn't get to his mother's grave
29:30because the soil in that part of Wisconsin is very sandy
29:34and many coffins are buried within concrete vaults
29:39to prevent the sand from collapsing on them,
29:41and that was apparently true of Augusta Gein.
29:46In November 1957,
29:49Ed Gein was charged with the murder of Bernice Warden.
29:53The media descended on the tiny town of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
29:57What kind of a man did you know he was?
30:00Well, a man was a nice man, just like anybody else.
30:05The only difference I'd say in a man, he seems to be a new act.
30:12Well, the cultural context of the Gein case is quite an interesting one
30:17because I think this was one of the first cases
30:20that gathered an awful lot of attention.
30:23There was a media circus that developed around this
30:25because nothing like this had ever really happened before.
30:29It was something completely new.
30:30It spread very quickly through the local newspapers
30:33and, you know, and then through the Associated Press
30:37and so on to the national media.
30:40You know, Plainfield, which, you know,
30:43had always existed from the time of its founding
30:45and happy obscurity, you know,
30:48suddenly found itself to be the centre of national
30:52and even international attention.
30:54It was just an exasperating time
30:58and then we were inundated by nosy Nellies
31:01that all thought that,
31:03boy, I've got to go drive by that old farmhouse.
31:07And then we became a,
31:09I don't like to use the word chaotic,
31:10but a very unsettled community for a while.
31:15Plainfield was suddenly famous
31:17and famous for the most horrifying of reasons,
31:21you know, that it was the home of America's
31:23most notorious psychopath.
31:26The entire community was stunned.
31:29For the previous decade,
31:30they'd been living in the same town
31:32as a real-life bogeyman.
31:35It would now be down to the courts
31:37to decide whether or not Ed Gein was insane.
31:40On November the 21st, 1957,
31:46the 51-year-old pleaded not guilty
31:49by reason of insanity
31:50at his arraignment at Washara County Court,
31:54and it was declared that he was unfit to stand trial.
31:58Their indication that Ed was clinically psychotic,
32:01that he had hallucinations,
32:04that he heard voices
32:06where the trees would start talking to him.
32:09Most serial murderers are not psychotic,
32:13but Ed seemed to have the symptoms
32:14of some form of psychosis.
32:17Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital
32:20for the Criminally Insane in Warpon, Wisconsin,
32:23which is now a maximum security prison.
32:2670 miles away in Plainfield,
32:29the community was trying to get back on its feet,
32:31but the shadow of Ed Gein lingered over the town.
32:35In 1958, the property that Gein had lived in
32:38was due to be auctioned off,
32:40and I think the last thing that local people wanted
32:42was for this to become some kind of shrine,
32:45some kind of attraction
32:47for people who were morbidly fascinated.
32:50So a few days before the auction,
32:52the property was burned to the ground, essentially.
32:55A lot of talk of arson.
32:57They had been cleaning up around there
33:02and had been burning trash up around that particular day, too,
33:08so then that was, or anyway,
33:11that was an excuse of a possible cause
33:13that maybe the wind got something in the evening
33:16and got some live embers in there.
33:19A lot of the neighbors weren't too happy
33:21with having talk of it being turned into a museum of sorts,
33:25but that was, that, there were a lot of stories.
33:30Anyway, it's gone.
33:32People still kept coming, though,
33:34even after the house was gone.
33:35For a year, it still had people coming
33:37to drive by the empty lot where the house used to stand.
33:41In March 1958,
33:44the car which Gein used to transport the bodies of his victims
33:47was bought at an auction for over $700
33:50by a carnival operator
33:52who charged fascinated Americans 25 cents
33:56for a photograph at a macabre sideshow.
33:59I think what we're seeing here
34:00is the rise of the serial killer consumer culture.
34:03People are fascinated in these kind of cases,
34:07and some criminologists refer to this as wound culture,
34:11that we're essentially drawn to the trauma
34:12and the suffering of other people,
34:14and we're drawn to the artifacts
34:16that exist around these cases.
34:19Gein remained in the Central State Hospital
34:22for 11 years until doctors determined
34:25that he was finally fit to stand trial
34:27for the first-degree murder of Bernice Worden.
34:31The hearing lasted for a week,
34:33and on November the 14th, 1968,
34:36Judge Robert Golmar had reached a verdict.
34:39He was tried and found guilty
34:41of the murder of Bernice Worden,
34:42but then he was judged insane
34:43and stuck back on the mental institution.
34:45I think that was possibly somewhere
34:48where he may have thrived,
34:49because he had structure, he had a routine,
34:52he had people watching over him
34:53and looking after his needs.
34:57Forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Morrison
34:59interviewed Gein during his time in hospital.
35:02I was working at that time as a staff psychiatrist,
35:06and I was covering all the units.
35:11And when I was asked to go over to see this person,
35:16I went over to see it, and I saw Ed Gein.
35:19He was not at all coherent.
35:22He was such a little person
35:24that I found it hard to picture him
35:29as the person who'd committed all these homicides.
35:32He lived there very peacefully.
35:36He never caused any problems,
35:38never had any type of behavioural thing,
35:41no type of, I guess you could say, consequence
35:45for bad behaviour.
35:49Gein's quiet nature in hospital
35:51was in stark contrast
35:52to the monster Helen had heard so much about.
35:55I received a letter from one of his neighbours
35:58who used to be a friend of his.
35:59She was a little girl,
36:03and she remembers going over to his house,
36:06and he would serve soup and everything.
36:09What turned out, the soup bowls
36:10were the skulls of many of his victims,
36:14and people never knew it.
36:16On July the 26th, 1984,
36:20Ed Gein died of lung cancer, age 77.
36:24He was buried next to his mother
36:26on the Gein family plot
36:27at the same cemetery
36:29which he so often desecrated
36:31during his career of horror.
36:34Gein has left a lasting impact
36:36on the small community
36:37where he committed his ghoulish crimes.
36:40We really wouldn't care
36:41to have that be our claim to fame.
36:45We've turned out lots of doctors
36:47and architects
36:49and some really good people
36:51out of our schools here.
36:52We're very proud of them.
36:53We'd rather be known
36:54for a tremendously good population
36:58than to be credited for only one issue.
37:05But just like the carnival operators
37:08of the 1950s,
37:09people continue to try
37:11and get their hands
37:12on grisly souvenirs
37:13related to Gein.
37:15In the year 2000,
37:17somebody was found
37:18to be selling parts
37:19of the gravestone
37:21that had been erected
37:23at Ed Gein's grave.
37:24For people who are fans
37:26of the serial killer cult,
37:28this was just the gift
37:29that kept on giving.
37:30They keep putting up headstones
37:32and the headstones
37:32keep disappearing.
37:34There's a whole category
37:35of collectible
37:36that has come to be known
37:38as murderabilia
37:39and Gein relics
37:43are particularly prized
37:44among people
37:45who collect
37:46that kind of morbid relic.
37:48Over 60 years
37:50since the horrific crimes,
37:51Gein has grown
37:52into a notorious figure
37:54in American folklore,
37:55a killer of almost
37:57mythic proportions.
37:59The two things
38:00that are fascinating
38:01about Ed Gein
38:02is the fact that
38:03he only,
38:06as far as we know,
38:06murdered two people,
38:08which is a lot less
38:08than many infamous killers.
38:11But he's had
38:12such a huge legacy
38:13in films,
38:16books, music.
38:18He seems to have become
38:19a sort of
38:19pop culture murderer.
38:22At the time,
38:23the Gein crimes
38:24were being revealed
38:26in the press.
38:27There was a writer
38:29of Pulp Horror
38:30named Robert Bloch
38:31who had moved
38:33to Wisconsin
38:34to be with his wife's family.
38:36And at some point
38:36when Gein was being interviewed
38:38by various psychiatrists,
38:40all these headlines
38:41in the papers
38:42were trumpeting the fact
38:44that Gein had been motivated
38:46by these deranged,
38:48Oedipal conflicts,
38:50you know,
38:51that he was this
38:52desperately sick mama's boy.
38:54You know,
38:55who was perpetrating
38:56these atrocities
38:57on middle-aged women,
38:59you know,
38:59who reminded him
39:00of his mother.
39:01And this caught
39:02the attention
39:03of Robert Bloch
39:04who decided
39:05this could potentially
39:06make the basis
39:07of a good horror novel
39:08and that became
39:09the book Psycho.
39:10In the book Psycho,
39:12Norman Bates,
39:13actually,
39:14after he's arrested,
39:15compares himself
39:16at the end of the book
39:16to Ed Gein.
39:18So the connection
39:19is made very,
39:19very explicit
39:20there in the book.
39:21Anyway,
39:22Psycho,
39:23as we know,
39:23became,
39:24turned into
39:25one of the great
39:26classic horror movies
39:27of American cinema.
39:29You know,
39:29if you look at
39:30horror movies
39:31before then,
39:32there were all
39:33these Eastern European
39:34monsters,
39:35Frankenstein
39:36and Dracula
39:37and the Wolfman,
39:38you know,
39:39or else they were
39:40aliens from outer space.
39:42You know,
39:43with Psycho,
39:44Psycho establishes
39:45and, you know,
39:46Ed Gein establishes,
39:47you know,
39:47this quintessentially
39:48American figure
39:50of horror,
39:51the ordinary
39:52middle American guy
39:54who turns out
39:55to be this monster
39:56in disguise.
39:57And then,
39:57of course,
39:58Gein becomes
39:58the basis
39:59for Toby Hooper's
40:01Texas Chancellor
40:02Massacre
40:02and later on
40:03for Thomas Harris'
40:05character Buffalo Bill
40:06in Silence of the Lambs.
40:09You know,
40:09so Gein has this
40:10very, very direct influence
40:11on American horror cinema.
40:14But Gein's crimes
40:15were not fictional.
40:16they were very real
40:18and he remains
40:19one of the most
40:19infamous murderers
40:21in U.S. history.
40:22We think of Gein
40:23as this notorious
40:26American serial murderer
40:28but in many ways
40:30he doesn't really
40:31fit that profile.
40:33You know,
40:33for example,
40:34he wasn't a sexual sadist
40:36in the way
40:36John Wayne Gacy
40:37or Ted Bundy were
40:39or Jeffrey Dahmer.
40:41You know,
40:41he wasn't driven
40:42by that particular
40:43form of deviance.
40:45I think he was
40:47brought up
40:47in a vacuum
40:48that created
40:49the conditions
40:50for someone
40:51who would go on
40:52to do evil things.
40:54So,
40:55whilst most people
40:56are shocked
40:56and repulsed
40:57and absolutely
40:58horrified
41:00at some of the
41:01things he's done,
41:03because he didn't
41:04have that filter
41:05and that check
41:05on his behaviour,
41:07he was able
41:07to escalate
41:08to a level
41:09of evil,
41:10I think.
41:11Evil is something
41:12that, you know,
41:13professionally
41:14people don't
41:15believe in evil,
41:16but I truly believe
41:18that he was evil.
41:20I think there are
41:22people who would
41:23like to say
41:24that the devil
41:25got into him
41:26and made him
41:27do these awful things,
41:29but I think
41:30he was born evil.
41:32The Ed I knew
41:33was not an evil person.
41:34He did things
41:35that normal people
41:37do not do,
41:38and there's no,
41:39just no doubt
41:40about that,
41:41and to kill
41:42two people
41:43is certainly
41:44not a person
41:45who you would
41:46really like to
41:47invite to your
41:48neighbourhood party,
41:50but,
41:51yeah,
41:52he was,
41:53he was,
41:53there was something
41:54in his head
41:56that didn't
41:57click right.
41:59Ed Gein's crimes
42:00are the stuff
42:01of genuine nightmares.
42:02The man
42:03with an unhealthy
42:04obsession
42:05with his mother
42:05brazenly murdered
42:07two women
42:08and kept a bizarre
42:09collection of
42:10gruesome keepsakes
42:11inside his
42:12house of horrors.
42:13He truly deserves
42:14to be remembered
42:15as one of the
42:16world's most
42:17evil killers.
42:18others.
42:20.
42:26.
42:31.
42:32.
42:32.
42:33.
42:37.
42:37.
42:38.
42:39.
42:41.
42:43.
42:46.
42:46.
42:46.
42:46.
42:46.
42:47.
42:47You
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