As expected, a letter duly arrived summoning Ed to a medical in Milwaukee, a journey of 136 miles which would be the longest Ed Gein made in his entire life. Fortunately for him (and for Augusta) the draft board turned Ed down, due to impaired vision in his left eye. He returned to Plainfield where in addition to his farm duties he now earned money doing odd jobs. The income from these jobs was essential to the family’s survival as it had long since become evident that the farm’s tainted soil was never going to provide them with a living.
Another source of income for Ed was babysitting. Ed was good with kids and he was popular with their parents, always polite, always diffident. The kids loved him and he seemed to have a real rapport with them, more so than he’d ever had with people of his own age. He was particularly skilled as a story teller and would enthrall his young charges with creepy tales of South Sea cannibals and headhunters. Ed knew a lot about the subject, of course. He’d been entranced by such stories since he was a boy himself.
Henry Gein also spent a lot of his time doing paid work away from the farm. Of the two, Henry was the more outgoing, the more at ease with outside folk. This was probably because, unlike Ed, Henry did not take everything his mother said as gospel. It was something that occasionally came between them, when Ed challenged Henry on some or other comment he’d made about Augusta which Ed considered less than respectful. Still, those issues were usually resolved quickly once Henry assured Ed that he loved their mother deeply and had nothing but respect and admiration for her. That usually set Ed’s mind at rest. He was close to Henry and looked up to him. If it were ever to come down to a choice between him and their mother, though, there could only be one winner.
Which brings us to the subject of Henry’s tragic and unexpected death at the age of just 43. It happened on Tuesday, May 16, 1944, while the Gein brothers were fighting a runaway brush fire on their property. No one knows how the fire started exactly. In some versions of the story it began accidentally, in others, the brothers set it deliberately to burn off the dry grass. Whatever the case, a strong wind picked up and began directing the flames towards a stand of pines at one end of the field.
The brothers quickly realized that they could not allow the flames to reach the trees and set off a much larger conflagration. They therefore decided to split their firefighting efforts, with Ed circling around to attack the blaze from the south while his brother continued working the northern edge. By this time, the smoke was so thick that Ed soon lost sight of Henry. Nonetheless, he continued to beat at the bushes with damp hessian bags, continued to hastily construct firebreaks with his shovel. Eventually, exhausted, his face blackened by soot, he’d gained the upper hand.
By now it was dark and Ed had not seen Henry for several hours. He could see, however, that his brother had also been successful in putting out his side of the fire. All that lay before him was a field of embers, glowering in the dark. Ed walked directly across them, calling out to Henry but getting no response. He then jogged back to the farmhouse expecting that Henry would be there. He wasn’t.
Concerned now, Ed ran back to the field and continued searching for his brother but found nothing. Eventually, after about an hour, he decided that he needed to get help and drove in his truck to his neighbors, the Johnsons. They, in turn, summoned Deputy Sherriff Frank Engle and a search party was hastily assembled.
Back at the field, Ed urged the men to follow him and then set off at pace, leading the group within minutes to the spot where Henry lay. This particularly concerned Deputy Engle. Hadn’t Ed just told them that he’d been searching for over an hour and had been unable to find Henry? How then had he been able to lead them directly to the corpse? Engle let that anomaly slide for now. It was clear that Henry Gein was beyond help but the Deputy needed to make a quick in situ inspection of the body and its immediate vicinity.
But that inspection threw up a whole host of new questions about Henry Gein’s death. The patch of ground on which he lay was scorched black and yet Henry appeared unharmed by the flames. The only marks on him appeared to be an array of peculiar bruises on his head, bruises that may or may not have been inflicted by someone wielding a shovel.
That, in any case, was not up to the deputy to resolve. The medical examiner would have to make a call as to cause of death. What Engle needed to know was how Ed had been able to lead them directly to the body when his earlier search had failed to locate Henry. He put that question to Ed now, while they awaited the arrival of the coroner’s van. “Funny how that works,” was all the little man would say, as though that explained everything.
Henry Gein’s body was removed for autopsy where County Coroner George Bladder determined that he’d died of asphyxiation. As for the bruises on his head, Bladder thought that he might have struck his head on a rock when he collapsed after being overcome by the smoke. No one appears to have mentioned that the field in which the fire had occurred was not particularly rocky. Neither was any attempt made to locate the offending rock. How else might George have acquired his head injury? There was certainly no suggestion that his brother might have inflicted it upon him.
Chapter 4: Alone
Henry Gein was laid to rest beside his father in the Plainfield Cemetery. If Ed was particularly bereaved by his brother’s passing he showed no outward sign of it. In public he continued to wear his disconcerting and permanently affixed smile. Expressions of condolence were accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and a resigned sigh, as if to say “it’s done and can’t be undone.”
But Ed’s response to the next misfortune to befall his family was rather more pronounced. One day, just a few months after Henry’s death, Augusta complained of feeling unwell. Ed knew it was serious when his mother, who refused to leave the farm except in the most dire of circumstances, insisted that he take her to a doctor.
Augusta was taken to the hospital in the nearby town of Wild Rose. There, Ed spent an anxious few hours in the waiting room before a doctor appeared to solemnly inform him that his mother had suffered a stroke. Augusta would have to stay at the hospital and during that time, Ed became a fixture around the place, spending as much visitation time as he was allowed in the ward as well as many hours in the waiting area.
Eventually, Augusta was discharged and Ed transported her back to the farm where he put her to bed and over the weeks that followed tended to her every need. Augusta was a good patient. She seldom complained and provided Ed with all of the instructions he needed for her care. Chief among those was for him to sit with her in the evening reading from the bible by lamplight. Ed was grateful for the opportunity. He relished waiting on the woman he adored above all others. He was almost disappointed when, after months of bedrest, Augusta announced that she was ready to be on her feet again. That was in mid-1945 and Augusta Gein had less than six months to live.
On December 29, 1945, Augusta suffered another stroke and was rushed back to the Wild Rose Hospital where she died that same day of a brain hemorrhage. Ed Gein had lost the woman who had been the center of his universe for all of his 39 years.
To say that Ed was distraught at the death of his mother would be a massive understatement. He was destroyed by his loss, consumed by it. At the sparsely attended funeral he wailed so loudly that he drowned out the vicar. Later, at the cemetery, he stood with tears and snot running down his face as the casket was lowered into the ground. Then he said a tearful goodbye to the few family members who had bothered to show up and retreated back to the sanctuary of his farmhouse. He had never felt so alone. In fact, he doubted that he would be able to bear the weight of his sorrow.
But Ed did emerge from his grief. After a period of bereavement, he began slowly taking on odd jobs again. However deep his despair, he had to earn a living.
To the outside world, Ed seemed to change little after the death of his mother. He was still the same soft-spoken, awkward individual, he still wore his peculiar lopsided grin, he could still be called on to do a favor for anyone in need. It was true that his physical
appearance, never that well-groomed to begin with, had deteriorated. And it was also evident to anyone who passed the Gein farmhouse that the old place had fallen rapidly into disrepair after Augusta’s passing. Weeds now covered the once-tidy front yard, growing between rusty farm implements; the porch roof was sagging, the paint peeling from the walls; woodland was reclaiming the pastures in which rye had once been sown; the few cows the family had owned had been sold off. In truth, Ed had no need to work the farm. His needs were few and could be easily financed by leasing out some of his land and by doing odd jobs for his neighbors. Ed was a hard worker and a reliable one, so he was never out of employment.
As for his life away from work, Ed had none. He was the very picture of the lonely old bachelor, who retreated to the dubious comforts of his dilapidated farmhouse at the end of the day to do God-only-knew what. More than one of the farmers’ wives in the area took pity on him and would sometimes deliver a home-cooked meal or a batch of cookies. Their menfolk, meanwhile, thought Ed odd. There was a distinctly feminine quality to him which some of them found disconcerting. And they also found his preferred topics of conversation to be weird.
Ed seldom had much to contribute to a discussion unless the subject veered towards the macabre and bizarre. Then he was difficult to shut up. He’d talk at length about how tribesmen on the South Pacific islands decapitated their enemies and kept their shrunken heads as souvenirs; how English body snatchers during the 19th century dug up corpses and sold them to medical researchers; and how one particular group of depraved English aristocrats exhumed the bodies of recently deceased young women for what Ed described as “indecent purposes.” Another favorite subject was the atrocities committed by the Nazis. One story he particularly enjoyed telling was about how Ilse Koch, the so-called “Bitch of Buchenwald,” made lampshades and other artifacts from the skin of murdered concentration camp inmates. Ed appeared almost breathless as he relayed the details of these outrages in graphic detail.
If there was one exception to Ed’s routine during this time it was the regular visits he made to Mary Hogan’s tavern in the neighboring town of Pine Grove. This was odd for a number of reasons. First, Ed wasn’t much of a drinker, hardly surprising when you consider that he’d been raised by an alcoholic father and a mother who thought that whiskey and beer were pumped straight from the bowels of hell. Second, if Ed had been inclined to stop off for a drink, why make the 7-mile trek to Pine Grove, when there were any number of perfectly serviceable taverns closer at hand? It wasn’t that the Hogan place offered any particular attraction. It was a concrete bunker topped by a curved corrugated iron roof, Spartan inside and run by an abrasive woman of dubious reputation.
It seems that Ed’s real reason for visiting Hogan’s was the proprietress herself. Mary Hogan was a stoutly-built, middle-aged woman who spoke with a thick German accent and was seldom able to complete a sentence without the insertion of several cuss words. And yet, Ed appeared fascinated by the thickset tavern owner. To him, she was the mirror image of his sainted mother, coarse where Augusta had been refined, profane where she had been pure. Ed would spend hours in the bar, nursing a single beer while directing wistful glances in Mary’s direction. It was as though this woman, so like his mother in appearance, so unlike her in character, had cast a spell on him.
Chapter 5: The Missing
Over a ten-year period, beginning in the late 1940’s, law officers in central Wisconsin were baffled by a number of mysterious disappearances from their jurisdictions. The first of these occurred on the Thursday afternoon of May 1, 1947. Eight-year-old Georgia Weckler had attended her grade school in Jefferson that day and had been lucky enough to get a ride home with her neighbor, Mrs. Floerke, sparing her a long walk on a warm day. Mrs. Floerke had dropped Georgia off at the end of her drive on Highway 12, leaving her with a half-mile walk to the Weckler farmhouse. She never made it.
When Georgia’s parents finally realized that she was missing that evening, hundreds of volunteers assisted the police in searching an area of ten square miles around Jefferson, hoping to find the little girl. Unfortunately, those searches came up empty. The only clues to Georgia’s disappearance were tire marks found near the place where she had last been seen.
Six years later, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, another young girl went missing under mysterious circumstances. Evelyn Hartley was a pretty 15-year-old and the daughter of Richard Hartley, a biology professor at Wisconsin State College. On the evening of Saturday, October 24, 1953, Evelyn was babysitting the 20-month-old daughter of her father’s colleague, Professor Viggo Rasmussen. Evelyn had only recently started babysitting and had set up a routine where she would phone her parents several times during the evening. On this evening, however, the calls failed to come.
At around 9 a.m., Richard Hartley gave in to his growing concern and tried reaching his daughter by phone. When several attempts brought no reply, he got into his car and drove to the Rasmussen residence. There, a worrying scenario awaited him. No one answered when he knocked at the door. He then peered through a window, and could see one of Evelyn’s canvas sneakers on the floor. His alarm now growing, Hartley circled the house, trying doors and windows. Eventually, he found an open basement window and gained entry. That was when he discovered blood spatters and clear signs of a struggle. The baby was there, and unharmed, but Evelyn was nowhere to be found.
The police officers who responded to Professor Hartley’s frantic call were equally disconcerted by the scene. Not only was there blood inside the home, it tracked out over the lawn and away from the property. There was also a bloody hand print on a neighboring house, and the missing girl's other shoe, which was found in the basement. Investigators surmised that an intruder had gained access via the basement and that Evelyn had been overpowered when she had gone to investigate a noise. She had then been dragged away into the night
A massive search was conducted for Evelyn Hartley, eventually turning up bloodied clothing that had belonged to her. Other than that, no trace of her was ever found.
The disappearances of Georgia Weckler and Evelyn Hartley happened more than a hundred miles apart and there is no evidence that they were committed by the same perpetrator. Moreover, they occurred some distance from Plainfield and the victims, in each instance were children. Not so, the next three people to mysteriously drop off the face of the earth. First there was Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, a couple of deer hunters who ventured into the woods after a few too many drinks and vanished forever. Then there was Mary Hogan. The owner of Ed Gein’s favorite watering hole.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 8, 1954, a farmer named Seymour Lester stopped off at Hogan’s Tavern for a drink. To his surprise, he found the place deserted, an unusual state of affairs, particularly as the owner had failed to lock up the premises before she had departed. Lester was about to leave himself when he spotted a pool of blood behind the bar counter. That sent him sprinting for the door, scrambling into his truck and racing to the nearest farmhouse to call the police.
A short while later, Sherriff Howard S. Thompson arrived at the scene with a few of his deputies. It was immediately clear to the officers that Mary Hogan had met with foul play. The blood on the floor was streaked, as though someone had pulled her body through it, dragging it towards the door and then out into the parking lot. Moreover, the police found a spent .32-caliber shell. Mary had apparently been shot.
The question was, why? Robbery was ruled out as a motive since no attempt had been made to empty the register. It seemed that the killer had shot Mary Hogan then dragged her to the parking lot, loaded her into a pickup truck and driven away with her. But why? To what purpose? The police were left baffled as to the answer.
And they fared no better in locating the missing woman. A search of farms in the area yielded no result, while inquiries were made as far afield as Chicago, where Mary Hogan had previously lived. Nothing. Mary Hogan, like Georgia Weckler, like Evelyn Hartley, like Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, was gone. Her d
isappearance would remain a mystery for the next three years. Then it would be resolved in the most bizarre circumstances imaginable.
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The mystery of Mary Hogan’s disappearance would be a topic of discussion around Plainfield for many years and none appeared more fascinated by it than Ed Gein. Ed, in fact, would develop a bizarre sense of humor about the case. His acquaintances, of course, knew that Ed had had a thing for Mary. They’d all seen him staring doe-eyed at her while barely sipping his beer. After Mary went missing, they began teasing him on the subject. On one occasion, a neighbor of Ed’s named Elmo Ueeck teased him that if he’d plucked up the courage to ask Mary out, she’d be at his farmhouse right now, cooking dinner, rather than missing. “But she’s not missing,” Ed responded with a hint of humor in his voice. “She’s down at the house right now.” Ueeck, who like most folk around Plainfield thought that Ed was a few cards short of a full deck, could only chuckle.
Unhinged: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Butcher of Plainfield Page 2