Even if you don’t recognize Ed Gein’s name, you’re probably familiar with aspects of his story. After all, his crimes were the inspiration for some of the most iconic horror movie characters of all time, like Norman Bates from Psycho, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. But the focus will be on the so-called “Mad Butcher” in Monster: The Ed Gein Story — the latest season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series, which premieres Oct. 3 on Netflix.
Gruesome even by true crime standards, Gein’s criminal acts — including grave robbing, murder, and mutilating corpses — sent shockwaves through his small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin when he confessed to them in 1957. But it wasn’t until 1989, five years after his own death, that Gein achieved national notoriety, thanks to the publication of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho” by Harold Schechter — the seminal book on Gein, rereleased in April with a new foreword. He has lingered in the public consciousness ever since.
Part of the enduring fascination with Gein stems from people’s curiosity about how a quiet, unassuming Midwestern farmer could be capable of such grisly acts, and why he would commit them in the first place. “In the middle of this benign, Eisenhower-era America that’s been romanticized and mythicized, you had this guy in this creepy farmhouse performing these grotesque rituals,” Schechter tells Rolling Stone. “Something almost archaic broke through in Gein’s psyche, and he was plunged back into this world of human sacrifice and keeping body parts as trophies.”
Beyond that, whether or not people realize it, Gein has had a lasting impact on popular culture, serving as the basis for characters who prompted a shift in the horror genre in the second-half of the 20th century. For those unfamiliar with Gein, here’s a primer on his life, crimes, and influence on American culture.
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What crimes did Ed Gein commit?
Between 1947 and 1952, Gein exhumed the bodies of nine women. He also confessed to murdering two women in 1954 and 1957. He brought the bodies of all 11 women back to his farmhouse as he acquired them, and mutilated their corpses, cutting them into pieces and storing them in his home.
Some of his collection was organized by body part: nine vulvas in one shoebox, four noses in another; a Quaker Oats container filled with scraps. Police also uncovered bones, breasts, vaginas, lips, and heads. In addition to peeling the faces, scalps, and hair off of nine of the women to make masks, he also fashioned a wearable “woman suit” out of skin from a woman’s legs and torso. There was also a wastebasket, tom-tom, and the seats of four chairs all made out of human skin.
“He was living among the dead,” Schechter says. “He was eating his canned pork and beans out of bowls he fashioned from skull caps. He’d flayed the faces of a number of victims and hung them in his bedroom as wall hangings.”
To some extent, Gein was inspired by the Nazis’ human experimentation during World War II. During the 1950s, when Gein was committing his crimes, details about the Nazi atrocities and the death camps were coming to light. “Gein was also a voracious reader of these cheap, sensational men’s magazines that were popular at the time, many of which featured stories about leather-clad Nazi babes torturing prisoners,” Schechter says. “There was some evidence that he’d been reading stories about South Seas cannibals who would flay their victims and use the skins to make pom poms and things like that. So it seemed to be a combination of those things.”
Given the nature of his crimes, some people suspected that Gein was also engaging in cannibalism. But according to Chloë Manon, co-owner and curator at the Graveface Museum — a true crime and oddities museum in Savannah, Georgia that’s home to an exhibit on Gein — there’s no evidence that he ate any of his victims. Of the nine women that Gein exhumed from their graves, most were embalmed, she points out — meaning that it’s highly unlikely that he would have consumed them. But that still leaves the two women he murdered.
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“The only person he could have potentially cannibalized in any capacity would have been his first victim, Mary Hogan, because the second victim, Bernice Wordon, was found relatively quickly after her disappearance and murder, and there was no sign of cannibalism,” Manon explains.
How many people did Ed Gein kill?
Though Gein had only confessed to two murders — Mary Hogan on Dec. 8, 1954, and Bernice Worden on Nov. 16, 1957 — he soon found himself a suspect in a number of other investigations. Shortly after his arrest, police from other jurisdictions descended upon Plainfield to question him about his potential role in at least 10 other missing persons and suspected murder cases. But polygraph test results indicated that he hadn’t been involved. Schechter doesn’t believe Gein was behind these other disappearances.
“When [police] found all these human body parts at Gein’s house, they assumed they were all murder victims, because nobody imagined that he was a grave robber,” he says. “In fact, when he revealed that he was a grave robber, it was harder for people to believe than that he’d gone around murdering all these people.”
Manon agrees, noting that there’s not much compelling evidence suggesting Gein took part in these crimes, other than that they took place around the same time as his two murders. “It doesn’t seem like his M.O., exactly,” she says. “He was primarily targeting women who were a little bit older and were already deceased. At the end of the day, he was more of a necrophiliac than a murderer. He more wanted to have the remains, as opposed to someone who gets a rise out of the action of killing and stalking.”
How was Ed Gein caught?
At around 5 p.m. on Nov. 16, 1957, Frank Worden walked into the hardware store his parents owned to find the cash register — and his mother — missing, along with blood stains on the floor. After examining the day’s receipts, he noticed that Gein was the last person to make a purchase. Worden alerted the police, and they immediately searched Gein’s farmhouse.
That night, Plainfield police found the body of Bernice Worden, 58, along with the mutilated corpses of 10 other women, including Hogan, who was 51 when she went missing in 1954.
Following his arrest, Gein was charged with first-degree murder, but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was deemed unfit to stand trial, and spent the next 11 years in psychiatric hospitals. The trial took place in 1968, where a judge first ruled that Gein was guilty of murdering Worden, then ruled that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. “Nothing else went to trial, like the grave robberies or the desecration of corpses,” Manon says. Gein was then placed in Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, where he remained until his death in 1984 at the age of 77.
Did Gein have a motive?
Little is known about Gein’s childhood — and what we do know comes from his conversations with police and psychiatrists after his arrest, Schechter says. “The main feature of his childhood was being completely under the thumb of his domineering, fanatically religious mother, Augusta, who was constantly hectoring him about the evils of the modern world, and kept him very tightly bound [to her], to the point of strangulation, by her apron strings,” he explains.
After’s brother Henry died in 1944 at the age of 43, Gein was left alone with his mother. “I don’t think there was anything like physical incest going on, but there was definitely a natural relationship between the two of them where Gein, consciously, at least, worshiped her,” Schechter says. “In all his remarks about her in his confessions, he talks about her as a saint and the best woman who ever lived and his only friend. But clearly there was some kind of deep ambivalence towards her, because I think that his atrocities were motivated both by his desire to bring her back into his life and a suppressed hatred of her.”
Many people, including Schechter, believe that Gein’s complicated relationship with his mother — who died in 1945 — was the driving force behind his crimes. “He wanted to resurrect his mother, in effect, and he apparently tried to dig up her corpse,” he explains. But she was buried within a concrete enclosure, so he was unable to reach her coffin. That’s when he began looking for other women to take her place.
“The earliest bodies [Gein] exhumed formed a semi-circle around his mother’s grave,” Schechter says. “He would read the local obituaries, and whenever a middle-aged or elderly woman would die, he would go to the cemetery that night, exhume the corpse, bring it back to his farmhouse, and perform these different horrific acts upon the dead body.” When he ran out of bodies to dig up in local graveyards, he murdered Worden and Hogan to replenish his supply.
Was Gein a serial killer?
Though Gein is often referred to as a serial killer, Schechter doesn’t agree with that label.
The term “serial killer,” he says, was coined in Germany in the 1930s, but didn’t enter the American lexicon until the 1970s and 1980s. At that point, it was used to describe psychopathic sex killers — or, as Schechter put it, “men who derive their perverted pleasure from kidnapping and torturing and murdering victims, and their highest sexual ecstasy from inflicting these horrible atrocities on their victims.”
Gein, he argues, doesn’t fit that psychological profile, and is more of a necrophile. “He wasn’t like John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy or Edmund Kemper,” he says. “These people committed what they called ‘sexual homicide’ or ‘lust murder’ back then, and that wasn’t Gein’s M.O.” Rather than torturing his victims while they were alive, he executed them quickly so he could dismember and dissect their corpses.
Consequently, Gein is what’s known as a “product killer” — someone who commits murder because they want a dead body — as opposed to a “process killer,” who is more interested in the various steps involved in a murder than the resulting corpse.
How did Gein impact popular culture?
In 1957, author Robert Bloch was living less than 30 miles away from Plainfield when news of Gein’s crimes broke, and inspired the pulp novelist to write the most famous book of his career: Psycho. “For weeks and weeks, all the front pages of newspapers were about this case, and talking about [Gein’s] mother complex,” Schechter says. “That’s where Bloch got the whole idea of Norman Bates from — you know, ‘a boy’s best friend is his mother.’”
On top of that, the location of Gein’s crimes influenced the setting of the book. “As [Bloch] explained it to me, most killers with multiple victims have to travel around to find their victims,” Schechter says. “But he knew that Gein never left Plainfield, so he had to figure out a way to get the victims to him. And that’s when he came up with the Bates Motel.”
The book, which was published in 1959, also contains a direct reference to Gein. “If you read the original novel, when Norman is arrested, he compares himself to Ed Gein,” Schechter says.
But Gein’s impact on pop culture went beyond serving as the inspiration for the 1959 novel and 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie. “Up until Psycho, all the monsters that haunted cinema came from other places: vampires from Transylvania, werewolves from London, mummies from Egypt, and Martian invaders,” Schechter says. “Norman Bates was really the first all-American monster. So insofar as Gein stands behind Norman Bates, you could say that Gein really Americanized horror fiction and horror cinema.”
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Along the same lines, Manon says that the Gein case perfectly coincided with and maybe even propelled a shift in horror as a genre — when the creature features of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s gave way to the “psycho killer” trope in 1960. “At that point, people realized that real people can be scarier than fictional monsters,” she says.
That was true of Gein. “Every now and then, a real-life flesh-and-blood figure comes along who so closely resembles a supernatural or fairy tale monster that they achieve this mythic folkloric status,” Schechter says. Many communities have an ominous house off the beaten path where local children believe a witch or other evil creature resides, but is actually home to someone harmless. “In Gein’s case, it turned out to be true,” Schechter says. “There really was a monster living in this remote farmhouse.”
