The Disappearance of Bernice Worden
On the quiet morning of November 16, 1957, in the small, unassuming town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, 58-year-old Bernice Worden vanished from the hardware store she owned. The day was the opener of deer season, and with much of the town’s male population in the woods, the streets were unusually still. The tranquility was shattered around 5:00 p.m. when Worden’s son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, entered the store to find a scene that immediately suggested violence. The cash register was open, and dark bloodstains marred the wooden floor.
As investigators began to piece together the events of the morning, a crucial clue emerged from the otherwise mundane records of the day’s business. The last receipt Bernice Worden had written was for a gallon of antifreeze. Frank Worden recalled a conversation that cast immediate suspicion on a local resident. He told his fellow officers that a reclusive and eccentric local handyman, 51-year-old Edward “Ed” Gein, had been in the store the previous evening and had mentioned he would return the next morning to purchase that very item. Gein, known to his neighbors as a harmless, if peculiar, man who did odd jobs and occasionally babysat, was now the primary suspect in a violent abduction.
Later that evening, authorities located Gein at a grocery store in West Plainfield and took him into custody. He had just finished having supper with some neighbors, a detail that highlighted the stark contrast between his placid public persona and the dark reality that was about to be uncovered. With Gein detained, officers from the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department drove out to his isolated, dilapidated farm to conduct a search that would expose a history of horror beyond their darkest imaginings.
A House of Unspeakable Horrors
The search of the Gein farm began under the shroud of a rural Wisconsin night. The property had no electricity, forcing the grim procession of law enforcement officers to rely on the stark beams of generators, searchlights, and handheld lanterns to cut through the darkness. Their investigation began in a shed on the property, and it was there that a deputy made the first of many ghastly discoveries. Hanging upside down from a crossbar by ropes at her wrists and a bar at her ankles was the decapitated body of Bernice Worden. Her torso had been eviscerated and “dressed out like a deer”. An autopsy would later confirm she had been killed with a.22-caliber rifle, and all the horrific mutilations had been performed after her death.
As the search moved from the shed to the main farmhouse, the full, unimaginable scope of Gein’s activities came into focus. The interior of the home was not merely a crime scene but a museum of the macabre, a testament to a decade of murder and grave robbing. The sheer volume and nature of the artifacts found within left seasoned investigators physically ill; some were forced to retreat outside for fresh air before they could continue their work.
The state of the farmhouse offered a chilling map of Gein’s fractured mind. While he preserved his mother’s rooms—the upstairs, the downstairs parlor, and her bedroom—as a pristine shrine, untouched since her death and sealed off from the rest of the house, his own living spaces had descended into a squalid workshop of horrors. This physical separation mirrored a profound psychological split. The shrine represented the idealized, consciously worshipped mother figure whose puritanical preachings had dominated his life. In stark contrast, the workshop was the domain of his repressed, unconscious rage and perverse desires, where he acted out his violent, fetishistic fantasies on surrogates—women who resembled his mother. He could not defile the idea of his mother, so he desecrated the bodies of others in his own profane space. The house itself stood as a physical manifestation of his psychosis: a sacred core surrounded by a landscape of desecration.
An official inventory of the items discovered cataloged a collection of atrocities that stunned the nation:
- Human Remains as Decor and Utensils: Investigators found whole human bones and bone fragments scattered throughout the home. Four human skulls were affixed to Gein’s bedposts, while others, with the tops sawn off, were used as soup bowls. A wastebasket was made of human skin, several chairs were upholstered with it, and a lampshade had been fashioned from the skin of a human face.
- Trophies and Grotesque Apparel: The search uncovered nine face masks made from the skin of female heads, carefully peeled from skulls and preserved. Other items included a corset made from a female torso skinned from the shoulders to the waist, leggings crafted from human leg skin, and a belt made from human nipples. In a shoebox, officers found nine preserved vulvas. Other discoveries included four noses, a pair of lips used as a drawstring for a window shade, and preserved female fingernails. Perhaps the most disturbing creation was a “woman suit,” a vest made of the preserved skin and flesh of a woman’s torso, complete with breasts.
- Evidence of Confirmed Victims: The remains of Gein’s two known murder victims were also identified. Bernice Worden’s head was discovered in a burlap sack, and her heart was found in a plastic bag on the stove. The head of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner who had vanished in 1954, was found in a box, and a mask made from her face was in a paper bag.
The artifacts were photographed at the state crime laboratory before being, as official reports stated, “decently disposed of”. The quiet handyman from Plainfield was now unmasked as the “Butcher of Plainfield,” a ghoul who had lived undetected among his neighbors for years.
The Making of a Monster: A Childhood in Isolation
To understand the horrors found on the Gein farm, one must look to the suffocating isolation and psychological torment of Edward Gein’s formative years. Born on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he was the younger of two sons of George and Augusta Gein. The family dynamic was profoundly toxic. George Gein was a timid, alcoholic tanner who was often unemployed and was both verbally and physically abusive toward his sons.
The true authority in the household was Augusta. A domineering and fanatically religious woman, she held a fervent contempt for the world outside her home. She relentlessly preached to Ed and his older brother, Henry, that all women (besides herself) were instruments of the devil, and that lust and carnal desire were mortal sins. She would read them graphic passages from the Old Testament detailing divine retribution and prophesied that a great flood would come to wash away the sins of modern women. Augusta actively discouraged her sons from making friends, viewing any outside contact as a corrupting influence. Despite her verbal abuse and tyrannical control, Ed developed an intense, consuming devotion to her, a fixation that would later prove to be the nucleus of his pathology.
In 1914, seeking to further insulate her family from the perceived evils of society, Augusta sold the family’s grocery store in La Crosse and moved them to a secluded 275-acre farm on the outskirts of Plainfield. This physical isolation served to amplify the psychological prison she had already constructed for her sons. For years, Ed’s life was confined to the farm and the schoolhouse, with his mother as the sole arbiter of his reality.
A Family Destroyed, A Psyche Unleashed
The fragile and perverse world Augusta Gein had built began to crumble with a series of deaths that left Ed utterly alone, paving the way for his complete psychological collapse. The first to die was his father, George, who succumbed to heart failure brought on by his alcoholism in 1940 at the age of 66. His death left Ed and Henry to run the farm and take on odd jobs to support their mother.
Four years later, on May 16, 1944, Ed’s brother, Henry, died under circumstances that remain deeply suspicious. At 43, Henry had begun to voice concern over Ed’s unhealthy attachment to their mother and would occasionally challenge Augusta’s tyrannical views in Ed’s presence. On the day of his death, the brothers were burning marsh vegetation on the property when the fire reportedly got out of control. Ed later went to the police to report his brother missing, claiming they had become separated in the smoke and darkness.
However, when a search party arrived, Ed was able to lead them directly to Henry’s body, which was found lying face down in an area of the field that had not been touched by the fire. An examination of the body revealed that Henry had suffered severe bruises to his head, injuries inconsistent with death by fire or smoke inhalation. Despite this contradictory evidence, the local authorities, who reportedly did not believe the meek Ed was capable of violence, dismissed any notion of foul play. The county coroner officially listed the cause of death as asphyxiation, and no formal investigation was conducted nor was an autopsy performed. While many investigators would later come to suspect that Henry was Ed’s first victim, this assertion has never been proven.
The final and most devastating blow came on December 29, 1945, when Augusta died after a series of paralyzing strokes. Her death severed Gein’s last tie to his family and is widely considered the catalyst that sent him spiraling from a state of severe psychological repression into one of active, gruesome psychopathy. For the first time in his 39 years, Ed Gein was completely alone on the isolated farm with his dark and burgeoning obsessions.
The Ghoul’s Work: From Graves to Murder
In the solitary years following his mother’s death, Gein transformed the family farm into a laboratory for his depraved fantasies. He supported himself with a government farm subsidy and by taking on odd jobs as a local handyman, a role that kept him on the periphery of the community’s life. Alone in the decaying house, he sealed off his mother’s rooms and began to immerse himself in his obsessions, reading anatomy textbooks and pulp magazines filled with stories of Nazi medical experiments, head-shrinking, and cannibalism.
His descent began with grave robbing. Starting around 1947, Gein made dozens of nocturnal visits to three local cemeteries. He targeted the fresh graves of middle-aged women, particularly those he believed resembled his late mother. He later told investigators he often entered a “daze-like” state during these excursions. He would exhume the bodies, take them back to his farmhouse, and use his self-taught taxidermy skills to tan their skins and craft his macabre collection of household items and apparel. He admitted to successfully robbing nine graves and led authorities to their locations, where exhumations of several plots confirmed his story.
The murders Gein committed were not driven by passion or rage in the conventional sense, but were chillingly utilitarian acts. He did not seem to kill for the thrill of the act itself, but rather to acquire raw materials for his fetishistic rituals when his primary source—the cemeteries—proved insufficient. The murders were a functional means to an end, a prerequisite for the “real” work of dismemberment and crafting that fulfilled his ultimate fantasy: to create a “woman suit” from human skin so that he could, in his words, “become his mother”. This detached, practical approach to homicide underscores the primacy of his necrophilia and fetishism, distinguishing his pathology from that of serial killers who are primarily motivated by the act of killing itself.
His escalation from grave robber to murderer began in 1954.
- Mary Hogan: On the night of December 8, 1954, Mary Hogan, the 51-year-old owner of a local tavern that Gein frequented, vanished. Investigators found a large pool of blood on the floor and a spent.32-caliber cartridge case, but Hogan’s body was gone. Years later, Gein would confess to shooting her, placing her body on a sled, and dragging it back to his farm. Her skull and a mask made from her face were among the horrors discovered in his house in 1957.
- Bernice Worden: Three years later, on November 16, 1957, Gein committed his final confirmed murder. He entered the Plainfield hardware store, and when Bernice Worden was distracted, he loaded a.22-caliber rifle from the store’s display with a shell he had brought in his pocket and shot her. This act, born of the same grim necessity as the Hogan murder, would ultimately lead to his capture and expose the full depth of his depravity to the world.
Justice for a Madman: The Trial and Institutionalization
The case of Ed Gein presented an unprecedented challenge to the legal and psychiatric systems of the 1950s. On November 21, 1957, Gein was arraigned in Waushara County Court on one count of first-degree murder for the death of Bernice Worden. His lawyer entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. After a psychiatric evaluation, Gein was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, on January 6, 1958, was declared mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial.
Gein was subsequently committed to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconsin, a maximum-security facility. For the next decade, he lived in confinement, later being transferred to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison. During this period, he was, by all accounts, a quiet and cooperative patient. He worked various jobs within the institutions, including as a mason’s assistant, carpenter’s assistant, and medical center aide, and never caused any trouble. This mild-mannered demeanor stood in such stark contrast to the gruesome nature of his crimes that it continued to perplex medical staff. The only behavior that reportedly troubled the staff was his habit of staring intently and disconcertingly at the female nurses and aides.
By 1968, doctors determined that Gein’s mental state had improved to the point where he was now competent to stand trial and could assist in his own defense. The trial began on November 7, 1968, nearly eleven years after his arrest. The prosecution, citing financial constraints, chose to try him only for the murder of Bernice Worden. The trial was bifurcated. In the first phase, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. The second phase was a bench trial before Judge Robert H. Gollmar to determine his sanity at the time of the crime. Judge Gollmar ultimately ruled that Gein was not guilty by reason of insanity, finding that he was psychotic when he killed Worden.
With this verdict, Gein was not sent to prison but was instead recommitted to the Central State Hospital to spend the remainder of his life in psychiatric care. Save for a failed petition for release in 1974, he lived out his days quietly within the walls of the institution, a “model patient” whose placid existence belied the horrors he had unleashed.
The Grandfather of Gore: Gein’s Enduring Cultural Shadow
The discovery of Ed Gein’s crimes in 1957 unleashed a media firestorm. Reporters from across the globe descended on the small Wisconsin town, and the story of the “Plainfield Ghoul” shocked and fascinated the public and the psychological community alike. More than just a lurid news story, Gein’s case tapped into a nascent post-war anxiety, shattering the idyllic image of small-town America and introducing a terrifying new archetype into the cultural lexicon: the quiet, unassuming neighbor who harbors monstrous secrets.
Gein’s most profound and lasting legacy, however, is his role as the unwilling muse for the modern horror genre. The specific, documented details of his psychosis—his relationship with his mother, his grave robbing, and his crafting of human remains—were so uniquely disturbing that they provided the raw material for some of fiction’s most iconic villains. While the films he inspired are not direct retellings of his life, they selectively borrowed key elements of his pathology to create enduring monsters.
| Fictional Character | Film/Novel | Key Inspirations from Gein’s Case |
| Norman Bates | Psycho (1960) | Obsessive, pathological relationship with a deceased, domineering mother; isolation and psychological breakdown following her death; preserving his mother’s room as a shrine. |
| Leatherface | The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) | Wearing masks crafted from human skin; decorating his home with furniture and trophies made from human bones and skin; the isolated, decrepit farmhouse setting. |
| Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | The desire to become a woman by creating a “woman suit” from the skin of female victims. This is the most direct and specific borrowing of Gein’s stated fantasy. |
The immense popularity of these films has led to the conflation of their fictional narratives with the facts of Gein’s actual crimes. It is crucial to separate fact from fiction. Gein was not a chainsaw-wielding maniac, nor was he part of a cannibalistic family; though he made bowls from skulls, he denied engaging in cannibalism. He was a solitary figure whose confirmed victim count stands at two, not the dozens often implied by his cinematic counterparts. His true horror lay not in high body counts or dramatic chase scenes, but in the quiet, methodical desecration of the dead, born from a mind warped by isolation and obsession.
An Unmarked Grave in Plainfield
The physical remnants of Ed Gein’s life were systematically erased. His “house of horrors,” which had briefly become a morbid tourist attraction for curiosity seekers, was destroyed by a fire of suspicious origin on March 20, 1958, just before the property and its contents were scheduled to be auctioned. When Gein was informed of the fire while in custody, he reportedly shrugged his shoulders and said, “Just as well”. His car, which he had used to transport bodies, was sold at auction to a carnival sideshow operator who charged the public 25 cents for a viewing.
As his health failed in the late 1970s, Gein was transferred to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He died there on July 26, 1984, at the age of 77, from respiratory failure secondary to lung cancer. He was buried in the Plainfield Cemetery, in the family plot between his parents and his brother Henry.
Even in death, his notoriety persisted. His gravestone became a target for souvenir hunters, who chipped away pieces of the stone over the years until, in June 2000, the entire tombstone was stolen. It was recovered a year later near Seattle and placed in storage at the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department to prevent further desecration. Today, the grave of Edward Gein lies unmarked, a silent plot of land in a quiet Wisconsin cemetery, offering no physical trace of the man whose gruesome deeds left an indelible and bloody mark on the American psyche.
