True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)

by Jack Rosewood

  Instead, the depravity of it all would leave a nation reeling, and Plainfield wondering what could have happened to make Ed Gein go off the rails and descend so far into the depths of hell.

  Chapter 1: Did his mother make him do it?

  Edward Theodore Gein, born in August of 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, had a mother from which nightmares are made.

  Devoutly religious, Augusta Gein’s sharp tongue – no doubt Stephen King had in mind Augusta Gein when he created the fanatically religious and cruel mother in Stephen King’s “Carrie,” who drove her daughter to kill - sent Ed’s alcoholic father George deeper into the bottle while giving Ed and his older brother Henry some seriously distorted ideas about women.

  As far as Augusta was concerned, women aside from herself were the spawn of Satan, little more than trollops with a mission to ruin men’s lives, and she did everything in her power to protect her boys from their painted and perfumed clutches.

  Augusta ruled their home with a puritanical, domineering hand, but still, Ed worshipped the woman who ran the family grocery store almost single-handedly while George grew drunker and more abusive, until the city of La Crosse, nestled along the banks of the Mississippi River, became steeped in what she saw as too much sin, forcing her to sell the store in 1914 and move to the sanctuary that would be Plainfield.

  A twisted love

  But Plainfield would prove to be a sanctuary for none of them. Augusta watched her husband descend into the depths of his bottle, becoming angrier, more abusive and less able to provide anything for his family, and she grew to hate the man intensely.

  Eddie, meanwhile, so adored his mother that psychiatric experts later said he had a bit of an Oedipus complex when it came to his feelings about Augusta, who was, to hear her tell it, the only good woman left in Wisconsin.

  “My mother was a saint,” Ed later told anyone who would listen.

  But his own views were likely twisted by her very rigid ideals.

  “Young children are like sponges and it is likely that Ed absorbed everything his mother conveyed to him through her strict religious code,” one psychologist said. “By isolating her children from the outside world, Ed was given the message that the world was a dangerous place and she was protecting him from it. This would have acted to exacerbate Ed’s image of her as a ‘saint.’ Young children do not tend to question what their caregivers do or say, but accept that what they are doing is within their best interest.”

  Still, the dichotomy of Augusta’s stringent belief system alongside Ed’s growing sexual desires created a conflict inside him that would simmer for years.

  According to one report, when he was 12, his mother caught Ed masturbating in the bath. The woman instantly reacted by squeezing his genitals, calling them “the curse of men.”

  Of course he was tormented.

  “It is possible that Ed developed an angelic perception of his mother in order to cope with the abuse,” one psychologist said. “There is also some evidence that Augusta brainwashed Ed through frequently claiming that all women, with the exception of herself, were evil. The bond Ed developed with his mother as a child literally controlled the rest of his life, with his home becoming a shrine to her.”

  Augusta kept her boys close to home, and once in Plainfield, they went to school, then came home and worked the 195-acre farm. Augusta discouraged friendships, so her boys rarely left for anything other than a few side jobs for neighbors.

  School years paint bleak picture

  The boys attended Roche-a-Cri grade school, a one-room schoolhouse with 12 students. Ed was average at school, but an excellent reader. Still, he was shy, sensitive and effeminate, which made him a target for bullies. Ed was shunned and teased by the other kids, in part because of a lazy eye, but also because he had a lesion on his tongue that impacted his speech.

  Given his handicaps, he didn’t make friends easily, which was just as well, since any attempts at friendship were met by severe abuse at the hand of his mother, who took every opportunity to berate her boys into submission for fear they would end up just like their father.

  As for George, when Ed came home crying from the torment he suffered at school, he received no sympathy from him. Instead of comfort, Gein was met with a drunken beating.

  No matter where he was, there was clearly no escape for young Eddie.

  First death changes family dynamics

  When father George died of a heart attack in 1940, life grew even more constricted for Ed and Henry, both of whom still lived on the farm. They did odd jobs around town to help support their mother, but she kept close tabs on her sons.

  For his part, in addition to handyman-type labor, Ed sometimes took babysitting jobs, which suited him well since he got along better with children than he did with adults.

  Augusta, meanwhile, continued her barrage of warnings, so much so that younger brother Henry started to reject her fanatical ideals, and grew somewhat critical of Ed’s abnormal attachment to their mother.

  Ed couldn’t have been pleased.

  Fire at the farm

  A few years later, on May 16, 1944, a brush fire threatened the family farm, and both brothers headed out to fight the blaze.

  They each approached from different directions, and by nightfall, the fire was out. Henry, however, was missing.

  Police were called, and in a move that would cast suspicion on him until he died, Ed led them directly to his brother, who was lying dead in the brush, a bruise on his forehead. He was untouched by fire.

  “Funny how that works,” said Ed.

  Sure, police – and neighbors – had their suspicions, but there was nothing linking Henry’s bruises to Ed, and nothing was pursued.

  Henry’s death was ruled asphyxiation. But from his grave, it’s possible he was thinking that perhaps he shouldn’t have been so critical of Ed’s diehard devotion to their mother.

  Mother’s death changes everything

  A little more than a year after Henry’s death, Augusta Gein suffered a series of debilitating strokes, and died just a few days after Christmas, on December 29, 1945.

  Eddie, who had done everything his mother ever asked of him, was devastated, and he immediately turned much of the farmhouse into a shrine to Augusta, cordoning off her bedroom and other rooms, leaving only the kitchen and a small room off the kitchen that he used as a bedroom, for himself. It would be these rooms that he would soon be decorating to his liking.

  Within a year, neighbors began complaining about Ed’s smell. Without his mother to nag him into bathing, he tended to skip hygiene and laundry altogether.

  While he continued to do odd jobs around town – including babysitting for neighbors’ children - he spent his spare time reading, and developed a particular fondness for stories about tribal head shrinking, cannibalism and other exotic oddities.

  And it was now, perhaps triggered by his mother’s death combined with abject loneliness, or maybe finally free to express his true self, that Ed slowly transformed from odd man to monster.

  Chapter 2: Taking cemetery visits just a little too far

  He spent a lot of time at the cemetery, visiting his mother, until eventually he enlisted the help of a mentally disabled friend named Gus to help him dig up her body. Gein immediately twisted off her head, and used techniques he had learned in his beloved books to preserve it.

  That first treasure eventually proved to be not enough for Gein, who soon developed a particular fondness for the Obituary section of the newspaper.

  When women who resembled his mother in any way passed away – he favored middle aged women with larger, more generously padded builds - he would call on his friend Gus to help him dig up the bodies. He then harvested an array of body parts, especially so the outer layer of skin, which he would peel off and wear to give himself the illusion of having breasts and a vagina, to add to his gruesome collection.

  Gein would later tell police he wore the skin because he wanted to know what it felt like to be a woman, a co
nfession that suggested he might have been transgender.

  Unfortunately for Gein, while his grave robberies occurred about the same time Christine Jorgensen was making headlines for coming home from Denmark as one of the first known male-to-female sex reassignment surgeries, the man just didn’t have the New York-born Jorgensen’s elegance or class. He was a grizzled Midwestern hunter and farmer who favored flannel caps and overalls, and would never have been in a position to make his dream of being a woman – if at all true – a reality.

  It is more likely that Gein – like the character of Norman Bates in “Psycho” who was inspired by him – wore the grisly pieces as a way to keep his mother alive, especially because he tended to choose women who fit his mother’s description when perusing the obituaries for victims.

  Or perhaps it was a bit of both.

  “Ed was less interested in the female body and more interested in reclaiming his mother,” one psychologist said. “The female body reminded him of his mother and the ultimate reminder of her would be to have a sex change.”

  Dr. R. Warmington, one of the first psychiatrists to interview Gein after his arrest, said that Ed’s “motivation is elusive and uncertain but several factors come to mind – hostility, sex, and a desire for a substitute mother in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely.”

  He might have been satisfied with corpses, if Gus hadn’t gone to live in an old folks’ home, leaving Ed on his own, an impossible position for successful grave robbing, which was no one-man job.

  Since his proclivity for collecting female body parts hadn’t waned, Gein had a problem, and murder was the only answer.

  When corpses lose their charm

  A native of Chicago, bar owner Mary Hogan was a large woman, about 5’8” and 200 pounds, the right size to grapple with unruly drunks and win.

  Twice divorced, she ran her Bancroft establishment – located about six miles from the farmhouse of Ed Gein - for five years, before she went missing on Dec. 8, 1954, at about 4:30 p.m. The bar was empty – her afternoon customers had already staggered home – and she likely would have locked up before making herself some supper in her adjoining living quarters.

  When the tavern didn’t open the next day, patrons alerted Portage County sheriff Harold Thompson, who broke into the place, only to find a puddle of blood on the floor and a spent shell casing from a .32 rifle.

  There were no clues, no witnesses and no theories about what might have happened to Hogan, and the idea of murder didn’t even cross the sheriff’s mind. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind, really, despite the blood.

  Even Elmo Ueeck, who was working with Ed the day after Mary Hogan’s murder. Ed told Elmo that he had killed Mary Hogan and had hung her at his house. Elmo didn’t believe him.

  “If you’d spent more time courting Mary Hogan, she’d be cooking for you instead of being missing,” said one of Ed’s neighbors, to which Eddie responded with a smile, “She’s not missing. She’s down at the house now.”

  It turned out, however, that Sheriff Thompson was a bit derelict in his duties. About a year after Hogan went missing, the tavern was reopened by Mr. and Mrs. Hank Sherman, who reportedly found a few clues, including a man’s cap that appeared to be stained with something that appeared to be blood, in the living quarters formerly occupied by Mary Hogan.

  How were they to know that Gein had shot Hogan and then dragged her body home on a sled, turning her face into a macabre work of art that he’d hung on his wall?

  From time to time, people did notice Gein’s odd artwork, but he was able to convince them that the trophies he’d harvested from corpses were really nothing more than wartime souvenirs his cousin had brought back after fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II.

  Bernice Worden: An infamous death

  It would be three years before Ed Gein again felt the urge to gather more body parts, and unlucky for her, it was Bernice Worden, who ran Plainfield’s corner hardware store, who would catch his fancy.

  The day before he killed her, Ed had stopped at the hardware store, asked about the price of antifreeze, then chatted a while with the 58-year-old woman’s son Frank, about hunting season, which started the next day.

  He told both that he would be back by the next day.

  But when Frank returned from hunting on November 17, 1957, he was concerned when he saw that not only was his mother not at her usual spot behind the counter, but the back door of the store was wide open.

  When he went inside, he found a trail of blood leading from the front of the store to the open back door, along with the last receipt his mother had written.

  It was for a half-gallon of antifreeze.

  Chapter 3: Stepping into a house of horror

  Gein was found eating supper at his neighbor Lester Hill’s house, and was promptly arrested.

  From the back of the police car, as Deputy Dan Chase questioned him, Gein said, “Somebody framed me.”

  “Framed you for what?” asked Chase.

  “Well, Mrs. Worden,” responded Eddie.

  "What about Mrs. Worden?" asked Chase, who hadn't yet mentioned why Gein was sitting in the back of the cop car.

  “Well, she's dead, ain’t she?” Gein replied.

  “How do you know she's dead?” the officer asked from the driver’s seat.

  Gein attempted to tell Chase that the Hills had been talking about it during supper – “Well, they were talking about it in there,” he said – but unless they had seen Bernice Worden’s body earlier and failed to call police, that was impossible.

  With Gein in custody, the sheriff and other authorities headed to Gein’s farmhouse to look for evidence. Nothing could have prepared them for what they would find.

  Walking into hell

  When Arthur Schley felt something brush against his shoulder after he entered Ed Gein’s summer kitchen, which doubled as a woodshed, he didn’t think much of it, until he shined his flashlight on what would turn out to be Bernice Worden’s headless body, gutted like a deer.

  He promptly ran outside to throw up, which has to be excused, given that at the time, most of the area’s officers were regular people with regular day jobs who had volunteered to serve as deputies on a part-time basis. They were hardly prepared for something like this.

  “The body had been cleaned and handled in a way similar to that used in a slaughterhouse,” officer Earl Kileen said, adding later – after Worden’s heart was found in Ed’s kitchen, stuffed into a sack in front of Gein’s potbellied stove - that “it appears to be cannibalism.”

  The cannibalism statement “sent dozens of people to their doctors suffering from stomach problems after remembering eating packages of ‘venison’ given to them by Gein,” according to reports.

  But despite the horrific finds in the house, including Worden’s head in a burlap sack, her ears pierced with nails and tied with twine, as though it had already been prepared to become art for Eddie’s walls, a belt made of nipples, a table with human bones for legs, cannibalism wasn’t part of Ed’s repertoire.

  Of course, that didn’t make the house – which appeared to be a hoarder’s house in the rooms where Ed lived, but was otherwise pristine in the rooms he had sealed off, aside from some dust – any less macabre.

  “My first impression was some degree of shock,” remembered Allen Wilimovsky of the state crime lab, which was called as soon as the first dismembered body part was discovered. “I momentarily stepped back and without saying anything other than thinking to myself, ‘What type of individual would do something like this?’”

  While flashlights were at first the only light officers had to search by, they soon employed spotlights, given the gruesome finds tucked in dark corners, including the box of vulvas, one fresh and doused in salt, excised in rectangular sections removed with fine attention to detail, the dried face and hair of Mary Hogan, carefully peeled from her skull, hanging in a bag on the back of a door, four noses in a jar.

  “I’ve be
en killing for seven years,” said Gein on the night of his arrest, even as he said that Bernice Worden’s shooting was a complete accident, occurring when the loaded Marlin rifle he was looking at accidentally discharged, striking Mrs. Worden.

  Worden’s death reveals a macabre house of horrors

  It’s no wonder that Plainfield sheriff Arthur Schley almost mucked up the works when he got a little physical while interrogating Gein, and slammed the farmer against the jail wall in an attempt to get him to confess to killing Bernice Worden, whose cash register was found amid Gein’s macabre collection.

  Schley had just spent the night touring Gein’s house of horrors, and had not only seen Bernice Worden’s headless body hanging from the rafters of Gein’s shed, but also her head, tucked into a burlap sack with nails through her ears tied together with twine, apparently in preparation for hanging on the wall.

  It was, Schley said, “just too horrible. Horrible beyond belief.”

  It was not enough to get a confession, however.

  “In spite of the third degree treatment, Gein did not confess that night,” wrote Judge Robert Gollmar in his 1984 book, “Ed Gein.”

  What he did say, however, was that he was a bit confused and his memory was fuzzy.

  He told Kileen that he indeed went to Bernice Worden’s store with a glass jug to order some antifreeze.

  “Mrs. Worden said, ‘Do you want a gallon of antifreeze?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘Only a half-gallon.’ I held the glass jug for her while she poured the anti-freeze into it. It was 99 cents. I gave her a dollar, and got one cent change.