Unhinged: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Butcher of Plainfield

by Robert Keller

  On another occasion, Ed went even further. “I loaded her onto my pickup and drove her home,” he said only half-jokingly.” Again this elicited no more than wry chuckles and head shakes from the men who heard it. It was exactly what they’d come to expect from the local oddball.

  Around this time, there was another story that began circulating about Ed Gein. The word was that he had a collection of shrunken heads in his house. Bob Hill, a local teenager who was on friendly terms with Gein, swore that he’d seen them. So too did some other kids who claimed to have snuck into the Gein farmhouse for a peek. Still, no one was particularly concerned about these rumors. Everyone knew that Ed was always telling tales about cannibals and headhunters. They assumed that the heads were Halloween decorations, bought by the little farmer to feed his obsession.

  One can only imagine what the good citizens of Plainfield would have made of Ed’s other “Halloween decoration,” a suit he sometimes wore that made him look like the rotting corpse of an elderly woman. Sometimes, when the moon was full, he’d don this ghoulish get-up and cavort naked in his overgrown front yard.

  Chapter 6: Hunting Season

  The middle weeks of November are hunting season in Wisconsin, a nine-day window during which heavily-armed men descend on the woods and inflict wholesale slaughter on the local wildlife (and occasionally on one another). Ed Gein, however, was no hunter. In fact, he’d often professed that he was sickened by the sight of blood.

  And so, as he headed into Plainfield on the drizzly afternoon of November 16, 1957, Ed was one of the few men around. That suited him just fine. The destination that he had in mind was Worden’s Hardware Store. He planned on buying a quantity of anti-freeze there and had brought along a jug for that purpose.

  Worden’s was something of an institution in Plainfield. Founded in the 1890’s as a harness shop, it had been acquired by Leon Worden in the 20’s and had with the passage of time morphed into a general store that sold everything from farming equipment to household appliances to firearms. These days, it was run by Leon Worden’s widow Bernice, who was usually assisted by her son, Frank. On the day in question, Frank (who also doubled as the town’s deputy sheriff and fire warden) was out in the woods hunting, with the rest of the men. When Ed Gein entered the store carrying his glass jug, Bernice Worden was alone.

  Bernice was less than pleased to see Ed. Generally, she did not have a problem with the scruffy little man but lately he’d been making a nuisance of himself, hanging around the store and pestering her to go to a movie with him, or to the roller rink in a neighboring town. Bernice wasn’t certain if Ed meant the invitations seriously since he was wearing his perpetual grin when he made them. Still, she had no interest in stepping out with Ed Gein. Like most of the townsfolk, she regarded him as an idiot.

  Today, however, all Ed wanted was a half-gallon of anti-freeze which Bernice pumped for him from the steel barrel that she kept in her office. She then took the dollar note he proffered, wrote out a sales receipt for 99c and handed him the receipt and his one cent in change. Ed then thanked her, picked up his jug and left.

  But a moment later, Ed was back, having apparently deposited the jug of anti-freeze in his car. He’d been thinking, he told Bernice, of trading in his old Marlin rifle for a new one. Would it be okay if he checked out one of the Marlins hanging in the gun rack? Bernice said that that would be fine and removed the firearm Ed pointed out and handed it to him. While the little man began inspecting the weapon, she turned her back on him and looked out through the glass frontage into the street. While she was doing so, Ed was rooting around in his pockets, coming up with a .22 round and slotting it into the chamber. Bernice would not have seen him lift the rifle and draw a bead on the back of her head. She would not have heard the crack of the weapon or felt the impact of the bullet that ended her life.

  At around five that evening, Frank Worden returned from his hunting excursion. It had been a cold and unproductive day in the woods and Frank was hardly in the best of spirits. And his mood was hardly improved when he arrived at the hardware store and found it shut. Hadn’t his mother told him that she was keeping the store open until six? More to the point, why had she left all of the lights on? Feeling just a little annoyed Frank decided to stop by his house to pick up his set of store keys. He was back within a matter of minutes.

  But the moment Frank stepped inside, he knew that something was wrong. The cash register was missing from the counter and there were brownish splatters on the floor which he recognized instantly as blood. Then he spotted the drag marks, also in blood, leading to the back door. Following them, he opened the door into the yard and saw that the store truck was missing.

  Frank Worden was by now deeply concerned about his mother’s wellbeing. But he was a trained deputy and so he managed to remain calm as he placed a call to Sheriff Art Schley at his office in Wautoma about fifteen miles away. Schley listened attentively as Worden described what he’d found. Then he told Worden to stay put until he arrived. After hanging up the phone, Schley called his chief deputy, Arnie Fritz. Some twenty minutes later, the two officers pulled up outside Worden’s Hardware Store. Inside, they found a clearly distressed Frank Worden. “I know who did this,” Worden said as they entered. He held up a rectangle of paper which the officers took to be a sales receipt. “Ed Gein,” he said bitterly.

  The sales receipt, Worden explained, was not the only reason that he suspected Gein. “He’s been hanging around the store a lot lately,” he said. “Pestering my mother to go out with him. Just yesterday he was in here asking if I’d be going hunting today. I didn’t think much of it at the time but I’m wondering now if he planned on getting my mother alone.”

  Both Schley and Fritz agreed that Gein was a viable suspect and should be located as soon as possible. Before they went after him, however, they wanted to call in some backup. Fritz therefore got on the phone and started calling local jurisdictions. Before long, lawmen from as far afield as Madison were converging on the sleepy little burg of Plainfield. By early evening, the street outside Worden’s Hardware Store was crammed with police cruisers of various descriptions, all of them with revolving blue and red roof lights. And the locals had also been drawn from their homes by the commotion. Plainfield had never seen anything like this in its entire history.

  Ed Gein, meanwhile, was totally unaware of the furor. He was having dinner at the home of the Hill family, having been invited to stay after helping them get their car started. The first he heard of the hubbub going on downtown was when Irene Hill’s son-in-law, Jim Vroman, rushed in and told them about it. Ed showed little reaction to the story, except to comment that it would have taken someone “pretty cold-hearted” to drag Bernice Worden away. He then agreed to drive Bob Hill downtown to see what was going on. He was sitting in his car, just about to leave the Hill residence, when Deputies Dan Chase and Poke Spees found him.

  Gein made no objection when the officers asked him to accompany them to their squad car. He then willingly answered questions regarding his whereabouts that day but soon tripped himself up by insisting that he had nothing to do with Bernice Worden’s death.

  “How do you know that Mrs. Worden is dead?” Chase asked him.

  “I heard it,” Gein replied without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Heard it from who?” Chase persisted.

  “I must have heard them talking about it,” Gein said, without elaborating on who he was referring to.

  Chase then informed him that he was a suspect in the robbery of Worden’s Hardware Store and then radioed his chief to tell him that he had Ed in custody. Neither of them could have suspected at that time that they had just embarked upon one of the most sensational murder inquiries in American history.

  Chapter 7: House of Horrors

  Sherriff Arthur Schley had been in his position less than a month and this was the first major case he’d had to take charge of. He was less than certain of how to proceed but was pleased nonetheless at how things were going
. After just a few hours, his men already had a suspect in custody. A suspect to what, though? Robbery certainly, since a cash register had been taken, along with the store truck and a brand new Marlin rifle. But Schley must have known that there was more to the case than that. The blood left at the scene suggested a far more serious offense. The next course of action was therefore clear. They had to find Bernice Worden.

  The obvious place to start was Ed Gein’s farmhouse and so Schley asked Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster of the Green Lake County Sheriff Department to accompany him and headed out of town, arriving a short while later at the ramshackle structure.

  By moonlight, the Gein house had a sinister look to it, as though it kept secrets that might drive a man crazy were he to discover them. Even the police officers felt a chill as they tramped across the yard, a chill that had nothing to do with the frigid weather. With flashlight beams illuminating their path, the men rounded the property, trying doors and windows and finding all of them tightly shut. Then they reached the summer kitchen and at last found an entry.

  Schoephoerster led the way, his beam picking a path across a floor littered with cartons, tins, moldering feed bags and other garbage. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and on the counters roaches scurried to escape the light. From underfoot came the scuttling of rodents. The place gave off a quite sickening stench of damp and filth and offal gone bad. What kind of a person could live in these conditions, Schoephoerster wondered?

  They were at the inter-leading door now, the one that gave entry into the house itself. Again the handle yielded when turned and this time Schley entered first, his flashlight picking out the details of a filthy and chaotic kitchen. All sorts of junk littered the floor, making in almost impossible to pick a path. And the smell in here was far worse, now it included the unmistakable stench of human waste and something else, the dull coppery aroma of freshly butchered meat.

  Schley rounded a carton of mildewed newspapers and turned side-on to pick a path past a couple of rank and stained mattresses. The weatherworn floorboards creaked under his feet. Now he backed up against something that sent an involuntary spasm of revulsion through his body. Turning slowly and playing his beam across the object he was greeted by the sight of a decapitated and gutted carcass, suspended by its legs from the ceiling. For the briefest of moments Schley’s brain registered an automatic response…deer. But then the reality of what he’d seen hit him and he turned and ran, blundering into the dark. He barely made it outside before he dropped to his knees and ejected the contents of his stomach into the snow. Bernice Worden had been found.

  =======

  It took more than a few minutes for Schoephoerster and Schley to steady their frayed nerves. Then Schoephoerster went to his squad car and reported what they’d found and he and Schley steeled themselves and re-entered the house. This time they were at least prepared for the horror that awaited them but that did not make the experience any less harrowing. The gutted, headless corpse had been suspended from a crude wooden crossbar fixed to the ceiling. A sharpened stake had been inserted through the ankle tendon of one leg to facilitate this, while the other leg was tied to the crossbar with a rope. The victim’s arms were held against her body by another length of rope that ran from her wrists to the crossbar. A block-and-tackle had been used to hoist the body of the 58-year-old grandmother into this undignified position.

  By now, the first of the backup officers had arrived and they too were left stunned by the sheer barbarity of the scene. But the butchered carcass of Bernice Worden was just the first of many horrors that they would uncover. Eddie Gein, the soft-spoken bachelor with the lopsided grin, the harmless old man who had acted as babysitter to many of their offspring, had been keeping secrets.

  The first impression that the officers formed of the Gein homestead was that it was extremely filthy. Ed Gein seemed to regard his living quarters as a conveniently placed landfill. The floor was strewn with bottles, cans, scraps of partially eaten food, old newspapers, filthy rags, boxes of moldering magazines, rodent droppings, all of it giving off a noxious odor that had many of the officers gagging and protecting their sensitive nostrils by pinching them between thumb and forefinger. Then there were Gein’s peculiar keepsakes – a Maxwell House coffee can containing lumps of masticated chewing gum, a collection of cracked and yellowed dentures, a washbasin which Gein had for some reason filled with sand and placed in the middle of the floor. All of these were strange but nothing compared to the rest of Ed’s bizarre collection.

  One of the officers picked up a crudely shaped soup bowl, still bearing the congealed remnants of Ed’s last meal, then rapidly put it down when he realized what it was – the top half of a human skull. There were other skulls too, including some that were hung from the posts of Gein’s bed as decoration. In the kitchen, Schoephoerster found a chair with oddly colored strips of leather forming the seat. Closer inspection proved that the “leather” was in fact made from strips of human skin, the underside still lumpy with chunks of fat.

  Four such chairs were found in the house. So too, were other artifacts made from skin – a waste basket, lampshades, a drum, the sheath of a hunting knife, a belt made from female nipples, a shade pull made out of a pair of lips. Even these paled in comparison with Gein’s most horrific creation – a “skin suit” consisting of a pair of leggings and a top piece that included a woman’s sagging breasts. It appeared that Gein had skinned one of his victims, tanned the hide and then constructed this hideous ensemble. To what purpose? The officers shuddered to think but it seemed obvious that the little bachelor enjoyed wearing it.

  Neither was this the last of the discoveries at the Gein house. In a box, officers found a collection of female genitalia, nine vulvas in all, most dried and shriveled but the latest addition sprinkled with salt to preserve it. There was also a box full of human noses and the pride of Eddie’s collection – his death masks. These, the officers surmised, were what the teenagers had previously reported as “shrunken heads.” It appeared that Gein had carefully peeled the skin from his victims’ skulls and used a stuffing of paper and sawdust to give them shape. Four of these macabre objects were mounted on the wall. Others were stored inside plastic and paper bags and at least one of them was recognizable. “My god, it’s Mary Hogan,” one of the officers said.

  The case of the missing innkeeper, gone for over three years, had finally been resolved. And if Gein had killed Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the police wondered, how many other women had he murdered? Judging by the number of body parts found in his home, quite a few.

  There was one other area of the house that the police officers had yet to investigate and seeing as this area was sealed off, with planks of wood nailed across the doorway, the officers were apprehensive of what it might contain. Given the horrors that Gein had left in plain sight what might be so terrible that he felt it needed to be hidden from the world?

  As it turned out, the sealed off area was a shrine. Augusta Gein’s bedroom, covered in a generous layer of dust but otherwise neat as a pin. Ed had left it exactly as it had been on the day his beloved mother had died.

  Chapter 8: The Body Snatcher

  Following his arrest, Ed Gein was transported to the county jailhouse in Wautoma. There, he was questioned by Joe Wilimovsky, a polygraph specialist from the State Crime Lab. But despite being subjected to intense interrogation, Gein maintained a stoic silence for over twelve hours. When he eventually did start talking, he caught the investigators entirely by surprise. They believed that they had captured the worst mass murderer in the state’s history but Gein had an altogether different, although no less horrific, tale to tell.

  He admitted killing Bernice Worden, although he claimed that it had been an accident. According to Gein, he’d been trying the Marlin rifle to see if it would accommodate the .22 ammo he had when the weapon had accidentally discharged, hitting Mrs. Worden in the head. He couldn’t remember all the details, he said, because it happened in a daze. However, he vaguely remembered dra
gging the body outside and loading it into the store truck. He’d then driven the truck a short distance out of town, hidden it in some trees and returned to pick up his car. Mrs. Worden’s body was later transferred from the truck to the car and driven out to the Gein farmhouse. There he had begun butchering the corpse but had been interrupted when Bob Hill had knocked on his door and asked for his help in getting the Hill family car started. Gein had then gone to the Hill residence and had later enjoyed a meal with the family, while Bernice Worden’s desecrated corpse was hanging upside down in his kitchen. He was still at the Hills when the police arrived to arrest him.

  Gein had delivered this confession in a deadpan way that was at odds with the silly little grin that remained fixed to his face throughout. However, the investigators were far from satisfied with his explanation. If it really had been an accident, they wanted to know, why hadn’t he just called the police? Why had he chosen to haul the body away? Why had he butchered it? On those issues Gein again claimed amnesia. “It’s all very hazy,” he said.

  The interrogators could see that they were not going to get anything else from Gein regarding the Worden murder so they tried another tack. What about the other bodies that had been found at the farmhouse, estimated by now to be the remains of at least ten women? What of Mary Hogan, the one victim who had thus far been identified? Here, Gein’s answer caught them by surprise. He admitted to killing Hogan although his version of events was almost identical to his telling of the Worden murder. He said that he’d been sitting at the bar in Hogan’s Tavern when his rifle had accidentally discharged and the bullet had hit the innkeeper in the head. Since Ed was the lone customer in the tavern at the time, he’d decided to haul the body away to cover up what had happened. As for the other bodies the police had found, he said that they were not murder victims but corpses he’d stolen from local cemeteries.