THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD

Unspeakable crimes of the real-life Psycho: Mother-obsessed monster who turned his victims' skin into lamp shades, seat covers and even face masks

 

By Tom Leonard 

 

Daily Mail

Oct 4, 2025

 

Serial killer Ed Gein is escorted from the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory to the county jail after confessing to two murders 

 

The most vivid memory Ed Gein recalled from his childhood was the day when, burning with curiosity, he defied his parents’ strict prohibition and crept into the windowless outbuilding behind their butcher’s and grocery shop. He was able to watch unobserved as, his father holding the carcass steady, his mother – clad in a long leather apron spattered in blood – cut open a pig hanging from the ceiling so that its entrails slid out into a bucket.

Four decades later, sheriffs in Plainfield, Wisconsin, found just such a scene when, one November night in 1957, they came to search the remote and squalid farmhouse where 51-year-old Gein had lived alone since his beloved mother had died. Only this time the body hanging decapitated and disembowelled like a deer from the shed ceiling was of a missing local woman.

Bernice Worden, 58, who owned a hardware shop, wasn’t that much younger than his mother when she’d died, thereby sealing her fate at the hands of a man who provides one of the darkest entries in the annals of violent crime.

Gein, who was considered simple-minded but harmless by neighbours, was only ever confirmed to have killed two people – not even technically qualifying him as a serial killer although he was suspected of seven other murders.

And yet his crimes in 1940s and 1950s rural Wisconsin were infinitely more chilling and gruesome than those of murderers who took a far bigger death toll – a fact that Hollywood could hardly be accused of ignoring.

Driven by a terrifying fixation with his abusive and domineering mother, he resorted not only to murder but grave-robbing and dismembering corpses so he could bring his dear Ma back to life.

Gein’s horrific deeds and twisted psyche provided the inspiration for – among others – Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs.

Far from the smooth, charming serial killer stereotype of men like the notorious Ted Bundy, the slightly-built and soft-spoken Gein was entirely nondescript. Men tended to tease him while women – if they could get over his unnerving habit of staring at them – usually felt only sympathy for him.

 

 

Ed Gein signing paperwork on November 19, 1957 at the city jail where he was held overnight.

 

Whether it excuses his crimes is deeply debatable but the unassuming Midwestern farmer was mentally and physically abused by his parents. Gein’s fire-and-brimstone mother, a deranged religious zealot, taught him that all women were temptresses for Satan.

Between 1947 and 1952, he exhumed the bodies of nine freshly-buried women, bringing the corpses – along with the women he murdered – back to his farmhouse, where he would flay them and cut up their bodies. Gein was a transvestite who dressed himself not in the clothes of his victims but their skin.

After his arrest, he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and, after being found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1968, committed to psychiatric hospitals until he died of respiratory failure in 1984, aged 77.

Now Hollywood is once again ‘celebrating’ his grisly legacy, dramatising the story of Gein himself.

Charlie Hunnam plays the killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, newly released on Netflix. The 45-year-old British Sons Of Anarchy star found the role emotionally draining and visited Gein’s grave after filming ended so he could ‘let go’ of the role. ‘I was ready to say goodbye to him and that be the end,’ he said.

He says the series asks whether Gein, who suffered ‘untreated mental health issues’, was the real monster – or whether previous film-makers have ‘sensationalised his life for entertainment’.

Such moralising is somewhat surprising given the drama was created by sensationalist producer Ryan Murphy, who has made films on US serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers who killed their parents in Los Angeles. But, in fact, Gein’s story is so dark it needs no embroidering.

When an appalled US media dubbed him the Plainfield Ghoul, the nightmarish description was, for once, true. Alfred Hitchcock may have created one of Hollywood’s most haunting horror protagonists in Psycho’s Norman Bates, but his mother fixation – leaving ‘Mother’ to rot in the cellar while he went out dressed to kill in her clothes – is hopelessly tame compared to Gein’s.

 

Gein had a terrifying fixation with his abusive and domineering mother, Augusta, which saw him resort to murder, grave-robbing and dismembering corpses so he could bring his dear Ma back to life

 

He was finally caught after he murdered Bernice Worden in 1957 – three years after he killed another local woman, bar owner Mary Hogan, who physically resembled his mother. Gein, who never travelled far beyond the small rural community of Plainfield, had resorted to murder because the supply of suitable bodies in local graveyards had dried up.

Police went to his home after finding blood stains on the floor of Worden’s hardware shop and the cash register missing. Receipts showed that the last customer she’d served had been Gein.

He’d shot her in the head before driving her body home, stripping her and hanging her up in the ‘summer kitchen’ of his farmhouse.

Venturing further into the squalid and stinking house, which Gein had left that night to dine with a neighbour, police found horror after horror – sending supposedly hardened officers staggering outside. The ghastly discoveries included food bowls made from skulls, masks made from skin peeled off human faces and scalps, and items including a waste basket, lampshade and chair covers made from human skin.

Human skulls had been mounted on bedposts while, infamously, investigators uncovered a ‘woman suit’ – a collection of skins peeled off various corpses that Gein had started stitching together shortly after his beloved mother died so he could literally – as he saw it – crawl into her skin and become her.

The component parts included leggings and a corset composed of a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist. In all, the remains of the mutilated corpses of 11 women had been stored in the house, the body parts intact as the victims had been embalmed after death.

There was no evidence that Gein had sexually abused any of the bodies but the question of cannibalism – suggested, for example, by the presence of Bernice’s heart in a plastic bag in front of Gein’s stove – was never resolved. Gein tended to say his memory was ‘hazy’ on such matters, including how he actually murdered his two confirmed victims.

Harold Schechter, who wrote the definitive book on Gein’s crimes, says he was ‘living among the dead… eating his canned pork and beans out of bowls he fashioned from skull caps’. In his bedroom, he used the faces of some of his victims as wall-hangings.

 

Charlie Hunnam plays the killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, newly released on Netflix.

Schechter believes Gein – who developed a passion for reading about history’s most lurid tales – also performed ‘grotesque’ rituals like those practiced by ancient Aztec priests, who flayed their sacrificial victims and then presented themselves in their skins.

But, like Norman Bates – the creation of writer Robert Bloch who lived near Plainfield and whose 1959 novel Psycho was turned into Hitchcock’s film the following year – if Gein was making sacrifices to anyone, it was to his mother.

Born in 1906 in the Wisconsin city of La Crosse, Gein was the second of two sons of an alcoholic, depressive father, George, whose occupations included tanning hides to make leather and who regularly beat both his children in drunken rages. He would hit Gein so hard on the head his ears would ring.

The mental assault he received from his mother was probably far more traumatic. Augusta Gein, was a fire-breathing Lutheran who read to her children from the Bible every night. She taught them that the modern world was evil and immoral, and that – above all else – they should have nothing to do with women, who (apart from her, obviously) were just harlots.

Anxious to further isolate her sons from the outside world, Augusta moved the family to tiny Plainfield in 1914 where they bought their isolated farm.

Gein was only allowed to leave to attend school. When Gein’s father died from heart failure in 1940, he and brother Henry were allowed out to the town to earn money doing odd jobs. Ed occasionally did babysitting.

Locals described Gein as shy but honest and down-to-earth – the last person, they would later assure the army of reporters who descended on the town, anyone dreamed would ever kill anyone.

As they grew up, even his brother Henry grew concerned about Gein’s intensely close relationship with their mother, who he regarded as faultless and almost saintly. (There was never any suggestion of incest). When Henry made his misgivings clear, Gein was deeply upset.

In 1944 Henry – then 43 – died after a fire broke out on their land although, when his body was discovered, it was found he’d died of heart failure. However, witnesses reported seeing bruises on his head and some have speculated that Gein killed him over his disloyalty to their mother.

Mother and son now had each other entirely to themselves, but it lasted only a few months before she was paralysed by a stroke in 1945. He devoted himself to her unstintingly but she died at 67 of a second stroke by the end of the year, leaving him devastated. Not to mention entirely alone. ‘He had lost his only friend and one true love,’ observed Schechter.

He believes Gein adored his mother but also harboured a suppressed hatred towards her which may explain why he was ready to kill and mutilate other women.

Gein boarded up her bedroom and sitting room after her death, preserving them as a pristine shrine, even as he allowed the rest of the farm to sink into filthy decay. His mental state similarly deteriorated. The public-spirited, if odd, man who always turned out to help his neighbours spent his private hours burying himself in lurid magazines and books about violent crime. He was particularly absorbed – some believe, inspired – by the Nazis’ human experiments and other atrocities in the death camps, including guards who turned the flayed skin of inmates into coverings.

He also read about South Seas cannibals who would not only flay but eat their victims.

Augusta had taught Gein to believe in immortality and his first response to her death was reportedly to try to dig up her body. However, her coffin was surrounded by concrete and he couldn’t get at it. Instead, he exhumed the bodies of other women, studying the local obituaries for any middle-aged or elderly woman for suitable candidates. He told police he made some 40 nocturnal visits to local cemeteries.

Gein became a suspect in a string of previous unexplained disappearances of women but he passed lie detector tests in denying he’d been responsible.

He told investigators he would be ‘in a haze’ each time he did his grisly work, sometimes snapping out of it midway through and stopping himself. Asked why he did it, he replied: ‘That’s the part of it. I didn’t really think. I knew better, but, you know, I was restless.’

Gein changed horror films forever. Before his crimes, audiences had only supernatural fiends like vampires to terrify them. Ed Gein proved that the monster lurking in the spooky house could be entirely human and, on the face of it, deeply ordinary.