Original subtitles

Police have uncovered a horrific scene

inside the farmhouse of local farmer Ed Gein.

They've never seen anything like it. He was clearly insane.

He was a psychotic.

His mind was separated from reality.

I mean, just really unbelievably bizarre activity.

To our understanding, there wasn't a lot left from the Gein case.

The reality is, 70 years ago, when this case broke,

people were making a lot of claims

and storytelling and exaggerating so much.

Some of the physical things that he did

are among the worst we've ever seen

from any serial killers.

And it's possible he was in some...

ecstatic, trance-like state

when he committed these atrocities.

There were transcripts from the interviews

that were conducted with Gein at the time of his arrest.

All of the trial documents, the preliminary hearings...

and photos and we were completely shocked.

Name's Art Schley, sheriff of Waushara County

back when the Ed Gein case broke open.

I was the lead detective.

I've been in law enforcement near my whole life.

Seen my share of stabbings, shootings, drownings.

And what Ed Gein did...

...you won't believe it.

The lie detector is on now.

Just tell the truth to each question.

Is your first name, Ed?

- Yes. - Your last name Gein?

Yes.

- Do you live in Waushara County? - Yes.

Did you have anything to do with the disappearance or death

of Dick Travis and his friend Ray Burgess?

No.

Did you have anything to do with the disappearance or death

of the eight-year-old local schoolgirl Georgia Weckler?

No.

Did you kill Mary Hogan?

I'll never forget the smell when we opened that woodshed.

The air changed once we stepped inside that house.

I've always been very fascinated by monsters

and I came to see that there were certain criminals

who seemed more like figures

out of folklore and myth

than they did flesh-and-blood human beings.

And Gein was one of them.

So, I was very, very interested in exploring his story,

particularly since it was the inspiration

for my two favourite horror movies back then.

I'd never heard of Ed Gein up until then.

And when I began looking into the case,

I realised, you know, that was a fascinating story

that had never really been fully told before.

Even before Gein's name ever hit the headlines,

we'd had our fair share of tragedies and horrors around these parts.

1947 - little Georgia Weckler

vanished just walking home.

Eight years old.

Last seen at the end of her farmhouse driveway

in nearby town Fort Atkinson.

All they ever found was a tyre track.

That was it.

Innocent little girl... gone.

Then came local boys Victor Travis and Ray Burgess in '52

out hunting deer.

Never made it home. No bodies, just vanished.

Then poor Evelyn Hartley in '53.

Babysitting in La Crosse.

House was found in chaos.

Her clothes were found abandoned on a deserted highway.

She was never seen again.

Was that the beginning of this horror story?

Serial killers can be wildly varied.

They have some commonalities,

but the underlying destructive narratives

that get them to the point that they can do

what they do

can be very different indeed.

For me, seeking to understand the worst of humanity

is compelling rather than disturbing

because I observe in myself

visceral reactions against what I am reading.

A reaction that helps to define our humanity,

to define what's good about being human.

The kind of very remote farming community

in the American Midwest where Ed Gein grew up

will have had quite an impact on his development.

I got a very vivid sense of the life in Plainfield.

You know, it's a very, very small town, one main street.

People used to joke that they didn't have to worry

about teenagers hanging around street corners

cos there are no street corners.

Um, you know, you drive by in a blink.

The land then

was notoriously... difficult to farm.

It was very, very sandy.

Because much of the state is very lush and fertile.

But that particular area,

you know, it's very, very... It's very empty and a little creepy.

The Gein family moved into town back in 1914.

Augusta Gein, the mother, got 195 acre farm on the outskirts.

Milwaukee was sin in her eyes.

Plainfield?

It was pure, clean...

...wholesome.

We know that Augusta, Ed Gein's mother,

was a religious fanatic.

She believed that that they needed

to escape the sin of the cities,

and hated man and believed that women were the source of all sin.

From what we know,

Gein's father was an abusive alcoholic,

but Gein's mother, who was far and away

the most dominant figure in his life,

kept Gein tied very, very tightly

to her apron strings.

The very brutal, primal, barbaric environment

that Ed Gein grew up in

in this isolated farm had a big impact on him.

And we know that, an even as a very young child, about four years old,

we know that he walked in on his mother

slaughtering a pig, bleeding out a pig.

So that the physicality,

the raw, shocking physicality of that experience,

to a four year old, will have had a big impact on him.

The main emotion I think it will have generated in him

was actually one of excitement

and that's what made it so dangerous.

GEIN My mother was real good to me.

Did you idolize her like a son should?

- That's right. - Would you say

that your love was equally divided for your mother and father?

Or did you have greater love for your mother?

My mother was a strong woman. She didn't like women.

"All women are whores," she'd say.

To our understanding,

there wasn't a lot left from the Gein case.

In case my husband was doing some... just research and ended up finding

the holy grail of Ed Gein stuff.

We didn't think it would be much more than maybe a few letters,

but there was photos of transcripts

from the interviews that were conducted with Gein

at the time of his arrest.

All of the trial documents, the preliminary hearings, and photos,

and we were just completely shocked.

It's better to explore these...

these kind of graphic or unsavoury topics

in the context of education

cos the reality is, 70 years ago, when this case broke,

people were making a lot of claims

and storytelling and exaggerating so much.

And it was, from day one,

people's morbid curiosity got the better of them.

You know, one of the things I've discovered in writing my books

is that until these figures become infamous,

you know, they're just these obscure people.

So they're very, very limited

accounts of and records of their past.

Ed Gein was an outcast and a loner...

...who was subjected constantly

to these hectoring, religious...

...lectures by his mother,

you know, warning him about the evil of the modern world,

warning about the evil of women.

Ed's daddy, George, was orphaned at five.

Raised on a farm outside La Crosse.

He grew up quiet. Shy.

Grew into a man without much will of his own.

He drifted into the city, took jobs where he could.

Then came Augusta, Ed's beloved mom.

Raised Ed on fire and brimstone scripture.

Strict, stern. German immigrant stock.

She married George in 1899.

God knows why...

cos she came to despise him.

So what we know Ed Gein was subjected to as a child

was extreme psychological cruelty

from his mother - being told that he wasn't lovable.

We know that, at the same time, he was...

he was exposed to his father being violent to him and his mother.

Now, both of these created a child

who was utterly in fear,

but also felt absolutely powerless.

And the only solution to that feeling that was generated in him,

the only solution that was ever modelled for Ed Gein,

was one of brutality and violence.

SCHLEY Then there was Henry,

Ed's older brother, by a few years.

Henry... he was the favourite son.

After Henry was born, Augusta prayed for a girl.

So we know that Augusta wanted Ed to be a girl after Henry.

Made no qualms about it. Did not hide this from the young Ed

and, in fact, dressed him up as a... as a girl.

All Ed ever wanted was to make his mama love him.

For him to be the favourite.

That boy loved his mama with the kind of love that never dies.

The impact, fundamentally,

on how he saw himself

would have been very significant.

Being told, essentially,

that what you were was not what was wanted.

Will have had a very destructive effect on his identity.

Augusta ruled with a Bible in one hand

and a belt in the other.

Hated men. Hated women even more.

Call them sinful. Said every woman but her was a whore of Satan.

Meanwhile, his father, George, drank himself into a stupor.

Worked as a leather tanner.

Beat the wife and kids when the bottle ran dry.

Other kids mocked little Eddie -

called him a mama's boy.

His mother, Augusta,

seemed to see the modern world

as this place of decadence and depravity.

Even the small town of Plainfield - you know,

with these hard-working, God-fearing farmers -

she believed was a kind of

miniature Sodom and Gomorrah.

Gein was completely in her thrall.

You know, his contemporaries, his peers, from what I understand,

would frequently mock him and make fun of him.

There is also some reason to believe

Gein might have been the victim

of some childhood sexual abuse.

Not at the hands of his parents, but at the hands of his peers.

It's definitely more common to see

abuse, neglect, abandonment

and sexual trauma

early in these murderer's lives than not.

You see some form of trauma.

But then you can point to, well, there are plenty of people

that go through the same amount of abuse or trauma

that don't kill people.

I think a large portion of people that we know the names of though,

if they were intervened with early on,

I don't think that they would have killed.

SCHLEY As Ed grew up, he did odd jobs -

fixing roofs, babysitting the neighbour's kids.

Folks thought he was a little strange, sure,

but... harmless.

We sure got that wrong.

We know that Ed Gein, was trusted as a babysitter.

That he came across as quite normal.

Now, this is something that we see

and I think it's because he was aware

of just how abnormal he was

and aware of his fundamental abnormality.

Ed Gein worked very, very hard

to present an utterly demure, utterly non-threatening exterior.

And it seems to have worked.

In 1940, God finally answered her prayers.

George died,

worn out by drunken disappointments.

He was 66.

That left Augusta alone with her boys

until, once again, tragedy came knocking.

In 1944, a big brush fire out in the fields.

Ed and his older brother, Henry, were out there.

Only Ed came back.

Claimed he had lost Henry in the smoke.

The father died,

George Gein died,

and then Gein's brother died in this accident,

around which there is some ambiguity.

There were some people who felt

that Gein murdered his brother.

I myself think that the brother just died in this accident.

Henry's body was found untouched by flames

and bore unexplained bruises.

Authorities have ruled the death accidental, but questions linger.

Just the fact that Ed Gein led the kind of impromptu search party

right to Henry's body

after he claimed that he lost track of him, was a little suspicious.

Not to mention there was some trauma to Henry's head

that was written off. There was no autopsy performed.

No burns, no soot...

...just bruises on poor Henry's skull.

Coroner said asphyxiation.

But I'll tell you this.

Ed and Henry did not see eye to eye.

It makes sense that he will have thought

by killing Henry he might finally win Augusta's love.

I think he erroneously misattributed

this failure to win her love to Henry.

At that point, nobody was looking to him as though he was dangerous.

They thought he was just kind of like a...

a weird oddball, but very nice.

Kind of maybe a little bit slow, but... but kind.

Then, just one year later, his mom had a stroke.

And then another.

Ed became her nurse.

Washed her, fed her, watched her waste away in that old farmhouse.

And on December 29th, 1945, she died.

His whole family now dead, Ed was alone.

The last Gein standing.

And now he began to change.

Gein was left alone with his mother.

So, his dependence on her

grew even more extreme and more intense.

And then, when she died,

he was left utterly alone, utterly bereft.

You know, that's when his madness really began to flower.

You recall telling me on Sunday

that you became moody or sad or depressed

after your mother passed away?

Well, naturally, I was upset.

But after about two years,

I believed it was God's will that way.

SCHLEY He sealed off her room,

locked it up like a shrine.

Like a tomb.

Kept every thread, every dress, every cent.

From then on, he slept in the kitchen.

Ate off the same plate, talked to the walls.

He said she still spoke to him.

Said he heard her voice at night, clear as a bell...

...telling him what she always told him.

"Only a mother could love you, Eddie. Only a mother."

Even though Augusta was phenomenally cruel to Ed,

when she died...

he will have experienced this as utterly...

utterly petrifying, utterly traumatic,

and done everything he could to...

to reverse the situation.

When the fundamental relationship of your life is not resolved,

when the offenders do not grow into

a proper, masculine maturity

and relate to their mothers from that basis -

but they are they are stuck, they are trapped under her power -

then this leads to violent reactions.

This makes him somebody who moves between different personas,

very starkly.

But he's also somebody who's...

trapped under his mother's power

and playing out a good boy role.

A childlike demeanour.

SCHLEY I got involved in the story

when Mary Hogan went missing.

She was born in Germany but she came to the States young.

Been through two husbands, ran the local tavern by herself.

Loud, brash, smoked like a chimney.

But Ed seemed to like her.

She looked a little like his mama.

He used to go in there, just sit and watch her.

Then, one night in '54, after closing time...

...she vanished.

Spent .32 casing near the bar.

Breaking news out of Plainfield.

Mary Hogan, the well-known owner of Hogan's Tavern, has vanished.

Police found blood at the scene.

Her car remains parked outside the well.

The Waushara County Sheriff's Office is investigating.

SCHLEY Then, weeks later, in the bar,

after a few too many drinks, Ed joked,

"She ain't missing. She's at my place."

The local boys thought it was a joke

but, years later, we realised it was a confession.

A lot of what we hear are people

angry that, you know, serial killers are caught faster

because, in so many cases, it's like,

"How did this happen for so long and how did it keep going?"

Now, with Ed Gein, he was making comments about,

you know, taking Mary Hogan's body to his farm.

And people laughed it off cos they were like, "That's a weird joke."

But they thought it was a joke.

Then another horrible crime happened.

Opening day of deer season, 1957.

Whole town out hunting

except for one store owner - Bernice Worden.

Ran Worden's grocery store.

Well-loved mother of my deputy Frank Worden.

Frank knew right from the go something was off.

Walked in and saw blood on the floor.

Cash register gone.

His mother nowhere.

We began investigating.

Local farmer Lars Thompson had just come back from a deer hunt.

Ed passed him on the road... with blood on him.

Now Ed hated blood.

Said the smell made him gag.

Lars assumed he'd been deer hunting like all the other townsfolk...

...but I guess deer was the kind of prey that got Ed excited.

The blood meant we all knew that this could be a murder.

Then Frank saw the receipt slip.

Ed Gein had been the last customer.

The more you understand and the more you...

know and get to learn about these different cases,

the more you can kind of see how the dominoes fell into place

with, you know, their lives

and how one horrible thing led to another horrible thing.

And then these people are doing horrible things to other people.

SCHLEY We went straight back to Ed's house.

No answer when we knocked,

We circled around the back and stepped into the woodshed.

That's when we found her there.

Bernice. Hung upside down.

Rope around her ankles.

A crossbar through the legs.

Police have uncovered a horrific scene in the farmhouse

of local farmer Ed Gein.

The remains of a woman, believed to be Bernice Worden,

were found hanging from the rafters, gutted like wild game.

Investigators described the interior as a slaughterhouse.

Her head was gone, her torso split open.

And on a hook... her heart tucked in a bag.

Her head was found in a burlap sack...

...nails through the ears

like he meant to mount it like a trophy.

Coroner said the mutilation all happened after death.

But the ritual...

...that was deliberate.

What the hell were we dealing with?

We think of the 1950s in the US,

stereotypically,

as this balmy, happy era.

You know, everybody, all these middle-class families

living in suburban houses surrounded by white picket fences -

kind of represented later on in the TV series Happy Days.

And here, in the midst of all this prosperity

and middle-class family cosiness,

you had this crazy farmer

in the middle of America's heartland,

performing these bizarre rituals

which were like those of Aztec priests,

you know, who used to skin,

flay the flesh from their sacrificial victims

and dress themselves in the skin.

You know, the... you know, the jarring incongruity

between how mainstream American culture was

and was represented then, and what was going on.

You know, these archaic rituals

that were being performed in this Midwestern farmhouse.

We have to understand just how different from us

somebody like Ed Gein is.

He was... a psychotic.

This is not somebody who is experiencing

a sudden emotional reaction.

This is somebody who is fundamentally, utterly disturbed.

His mind was separated from reality.

And this separation from reality would have been at its height

during his most violent episodes.

The motivation, the ability that allows him

to commit the kinds of crimes that he does,

are just completely inconsistent

with any guilt or shame at all.

They just... He just doesn't have that internal landscape at all.

SCHLEY This wasn't a panic kill.

This was practiced, planned.

The house was holding more than just her.

Ed was having pork chops with his farmer neighbours,

the Hills, when we got to him.

Lester and Irene lived over on Third Street,

two blocks from the grain elevator.

Nice folks. Salt of the earth.

Ed had been babysitting their boy Bobby.

Eight years old. Quiet kid.

Thought Ed was funny. Played mouth organ for him.

When I first became a police officer, I really wasn't clear

which direction I wanted to go.

But once I got into the homicide unit,

it became really clear, really fast, to me,

that homicide is where I needed to be.

Working for the victims, actually - the victims, the victims families,

they became special to me

over the 25-plus years that I did work in homicide.

I really wanted to understand and give the victims and their families

some kind of justice, some kind of closure, if that was even possible.

A lot of detectives I knew who came to homicide

they really didn't last very long because it's difficult.

On a personal level, on a professional level,

it's difficult to work homicides day in and day out.

In Ed Gein's case, he clearly didn't cover his tracks.

He went to that hardware store and he attempted to make a purchase.

And they were able to see the last purchase made was by him.

The victim was missing and they were able to track the victim.

They found the victim, amazingly, at his home hanging upside down.

I believe she was beheaded.

I mean, just really unbelievably bizarre activity.

I went to Wisconsin,

spent time in Plainfield.

Actually spoke to people who had known Ed Gein.

A young man who lived in the house

closest to the Gein farmhouse

who had spent time in Ed's house.

Gein had a particular kind of pathology

that led him to a very specific kind of crime.

I had lunch with a woman - Irene Hill.

Irene Hill was the woman at whose home

Gein had dinner at on the night he was arrested.

Even that night, Ed was smiling when we rolled up.

Sat there with his plate.

Knife and fork placed just so, like he was at Sunday dinner.

He didn't bolt, didn't flinch,

just blinked once,

real slow,

like he was seeing us from a dream.

Said, "What's the fuss, boys?"

He didn't act the way the typical serial killer might act.

For example, serial killers don't normally leave evidence behind.

They normally do all they can to keep from getting detected,

so they can kill again and continue with their depraved activity.

Ed Gein didn't really seem to do that.

I realised pretty early on that,

I think by the technical description he was a serial killer,

but I also think he was clearly insane.

We took him to the interrogation room

at the local jail over in nearby Wautoma.

Then things got strange fast.

She's dead, ain't she?

We hadn't told him anything yet.

Not a word.

Did you shoot and kill Bernice Worden?

I know something is wrong.

No person in his right mind would do what you're telling me.

That's when I knew.

Knew we were dealing with a killer.

What I didn't know was what else we were going to find real soon.

I started asking questions,

getting it all down on tape.

For a long time he was evasive, confused.

One minute he'd say he was doing one thing,

then he'd question himself and say maybe he'd got things wrong.

It's like he was having these little arguments with himself.

Like there were two of them -

the good boy, Ed...

...and the killer.

What happens when a child, a young child,

is exposed to two very different schools of thought

that cannot be reconciled

is that they develop a split personality.

We know that Ed Gein talks about Ed number one and number two -

these two very distinct personas -

and that entirely makes sense to me.

This is what this is the result of something we call double bind.

It's when a child is exposed to two ways of thinking,

two ways of approaching life,

that are completely incompatible,

cannot in any way be integrated together

to form a sensible way forward.

He was calm. Too calm.

No lawyer, no sweat on his brow.

Finally, he started talking more openly.

Started talking about digging graves

like it was the most normal thing in the world.

He talked about prying open caskets

like you'd talk about splitting firewood.

Told us how the soil changed texture six inches down.

Explained the best way to lift a body without breaking it.

Used the word harvesting.

But what chilled me most... was the tone.

No remorse, no hesitation.

Just quiet certainty.

Like a man explaining how to patch a roof before rain.

And going through the records

and going through the interviews with Ed Gein,

you can see his kind of train of thought of.

He didn't think what he was doing was that... that bad.

He thought he's preserving and keeping these things.

It's a little bit of a thrill.

And with the grave robbing, he's not really harming anybody.

So a lot of things that exist today, crime-scene wise,

clearly didn't exist then.

I would suspect that the police officers responding to the house

or to the crime scene where Ed Gein lived, would process their own scene

where today we have crime scene investigators

that specifically are designated to process a crime scene

separate from the detective.

Back in those days, the detectives would take fingerprints

and they would look for any sort of trace evidence.

They would look for any other evidence

that may connect him to other victims

beside the victim that we know he killed.

Potentially, based on what we're seeing,

we have a bunch of other potential victims.

So you would do also a lot of trace evidence,

anything that'll link him back to any other victim.

You'd catalogue everything, collect everything. You'd leave nothing out.

That's what you would do today. Back then, I feel like

they probably did all that, but they probably did it

in a whole different way than how it's done today.

And I feel fairly certain that they'd never seen anything like it.

One item in particular that's most interesting to me

are all of his interviews

and the transcripts from him.

When we first got the collection,

we went through all of the records and all of the transcripts

and interviews in full,

and it was really eye-opening to see just again

how he was behaving and how he was speaking about the crimes,

as well as just interacting with another human being.

We know that, when he was interviewed,

Ed Gein changed... chopped and changed his stories

and seemed to oscillate between different personas.

I think this is just a reflection of the utter chaos

that is his mental world.

It's also somebody who goes through very clear episodes

of being separated from reality.

It's somebody who's actually, in this interview situation,

being exposed probably to more social contact

than he's had much of before.

And he has the intelligence to pick up on the fact

that the officers have particular views

about some of the things he's saying

and he's adjusting, I think, to that.

So... so we've got a whole bunch of things going on in the interviews

that are leading to this very distorted picture.

There was no madness in his eyes, no rage in his voice...

...just a vacancy...

...like the lights were on

but nobody had lived in that house for years.

And right then I realised...

...we weren't dealing with a man any more.

We were sitting opposite a monster.

The phenomenon of serial murder

has always been with us

going back to the very beginnings of our species

because our primate ancestors,

committed atrocities

that were very much like those we now associate

with what we call serial killers.

So the term serial killer is a relatively recent term

for what used to be called lust murder.

You know, these are extreme sexual sadists

who derive their pleasure

from torturing and killing helpless victims.

And that was not Gein's MO.

There were a lot of claims being made as soon as Gein was arrested...

...not just through people of Plainfield

actually making various claims and starting rumours,

but rumours were starting from the police.

They were starting from newspapers.

They were starting from the 55 news journalists that were on Plainfield.

There were more journalists

than people that actually lived there at points.

So there were so many things happening.

And I think...

I mean, you can really see how the case evolved

and got more and more sensational

as people were kind of left

to wonder what was actually found, what happened.

I think that this is not somebody

who's experienced enough at social interactions

to be a good manipulator.

There's a lot more...

Strange as it sounds,

the responses he's giving are fairly authentic.

The novelist DH Lawrence said,

"The soul of man is a dark forest."

And all of us are brought up

to walk a very narrow path through that forest.

They began to dig up the corpses of other women.

This is somebody who is utterly disturbed.

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