For this small Wisconsin community of under 700 persons,
10 years of trying to forget
have been wiped away in a single day.
The return of the name of Ed Gein
means return of memories,
memories that many have been trying to forget.
[man] In 1957, this small-town Wisconsin horror story
was being exposed to the world.
[woman] Ed Gein, he's the first
well-known American serial killer.
But it's the fact that he repurposed people's bodies,
and that's what -- that's what's so upsetting about him.
[laughs]
[dramatic music plays]
Ed Gein has been going to graves
and digging up, excavating bodies.
[Schlesinger] He took skin and fashioned lampshades with it
and upholstery on his chair and couch.
I've never had a case where a person wanted
to wear somebody else's skin.
I don't think I ever heard of a case like that
in the annals of crime.
[Berrill] It might be satisfying to defile dead bodies,
but there's nothing more powerful than killing someone.
It's like he ran out of bodies, so he decided to create his own.
I'd never heard Gein's voice.
So to now actually encounter this incredible piece
of firsthand evidence is astonishing to me.
-That's incredible. Yes! -Oh, that's awesome.
-Yes! -Yes!
I mean, no one knew of the existence of this tape.
[Marcus] We've been debating for years, like,
what did Ed Gein sound like?
I have been playing Ed Gein in my brain for so long.
I don't know what to expect.
[Schechter] I mean, this casts a whole new light
on the Gein case.
[Lee] For a researcher, we're always looking for data
that gets us closer to the phenomenon.
[man] He knows there are things he can't tell the police.
The term "serial killer" doesn't come out
for another 20, 30 years after Ed Gein was caught.
I think it's why people adopt some of the details for movies.
Gein was so enmeshed with his mother
that he wanted to become his mother.
[woman #2] Ed Gein was Norman Bates
and Norman Bates was Ed Gein.
The comparison between the two of them was so right on.
Well, a-a boy's best friend is his mother.
[dramatic music plays]
[mid-tempo music plays]
[clicks]
[Schechter] I've always been interested in monsters.
I had actually been working on a book about horror movies,
and it was then that I discovered
that both "Psycho" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
had been inspired by Ed Gein.
I wrote the book "Deviant,"
which I consider the definitive biography of Ed Gein.
I'd never heard Gein's voice.
[man] Restless feeling.
There are some kind of newsreel images of Gein --
one when he was arrested and one at his trial --
but you don't hear Gein's voice.
So to now actually encounter
this incredible piece of firsthand evidence
is astonishing to me.
Eddie is such a mythic figure,
hearing, you know, this actual human voice,
it just makes these crimes that much more real.
[tense music playing]
On this particular day,
pretty much the entire male population,
as well as some of the female population of Plainfield,
was out in the woods.
It was the first day of deer hunting season.
[mid-tempo music plays]
Frank Worden, who runs the hardware store with his mother,
Bernice Worden, returns from a day of deer hunting.
As soon as Frank enters her store,
he's stunned to see a trail of blood
leading from the sales counter out through the back.
And he also spots some .22-caliber shell casings
on the floor.
He runs to the cash register,
and he notices that there's a receipt made out
for some antifreeze.
Frank Worden had been in the store the previous day.
Ed Gein came in asking about the price of antifreeze
and also what Frank regarded as pestering Bernice,
sort of floating the idea
of their going out on a date roller skating.
So, immediately,
Frank Worden suspects that Gein is somehow involved.
Eddie Gein was generally seen as kind of an oddball.
People saw him as somewhat simpleminded,
completely harmless.
[man] How long did you say you'd known Mr. Gein?
Well, I've known him ever since he was a little boy.
He's lived here all his life in this farm?
Well, I don't know whether he was born here or not,
but the family moved up here around 50 years ago, probably.
And, uh, I knew his dad more than 40 years ago
when he used to haul potatoes in town.
Frank immediately notifies Sheriff Schley,
and Schley and a deputy proceed directly to the farmhouse.
[dramatic music plays]
They approached the house, Eddie's not home,
and they go around to the woodshed.
[tense music plays]
There are no lights.
They enter the shed. Completely dark.
Suddenly they're confronted with this absolutely appalling sight.
Bernice Worden's naked corpse strung up by her heels.
Bernice Worden, this grandmother,
her naked body
is strung up from the rafters.
She's been split open entirely, completely eviscerated.
Her head has been cut off and is nowhere to be seen.
You know, she's up there like some game animal
that's been dressed out after the kill.
I'm looking at the official autopsy report
on Bernice Worden's body.
It reads, in part,
"The body of a murdered and mutilated woman,
Mrs. Bernice Worden,
has been found in the woodshed of the old Gein farmhouse."
"The body had been found hanging by the heels
from the roof bars -- decapitated and eviscerated.
Head and viscera had been found in the same location,
the vulva in a box, and the heart in a plastic bag."
So after Schley and his deputy
kind of collect themselves a little bit, they go back,
and they're able to enter the house through the shed,
which adjoins the house.
And immediately they start stumbling on these other
utterly horrific, utterly nightmarish sights.
[dramatic music plays]
On "The Last Podcast on the Left," we like to
what we call is "defang the monster."
But somebody like Ed Gein, whose sheer --
for lack of a better word -- playfulness of his crimes
and what he was like as a person,
mixed with what he actually did, is extremely unique.
You see in his house too, like,
truly it's -- it's an exteriorization of his own mind.
Meanwhile, Ed has been located
at the home of this neighbor of his,
and they take Gein into custody.
[tense music playing]
[choir vocalizing]
[Lee] Ed Gein,
there's been so much out there about him in popular media.
For a researcher, it's, you know,
we're always looking for data
that gets us closer to the phenomenon.
I wanted to hear the man himself.
Most serial killers that we know of,
at least through the history of serial killing,
are quite aware of what they're doing
and are very intentional in their actions
and just show no remorse.
For us, as social and behavioral scientists,
we can guess at their motivations
and the things that are driving them to commit violent crimes,
but usually the words coming from the mouths
of the people themselves are the best source.
[Berrill] My immediate reaction to listening to Gein
is that he displays little or no emotion.
He's being interviewed for the very first time
about years of behavior that's quite bizarre and ghoulish.
And you have to imagine that this guy's been living
inside his head for a lot of years.
He wasn't being overly defensive,
and he wasn't being really angry or he wasn't acting annoyed.
I mean, it's almost like this was a nonevent,
which is kind of interesting given the time period
that this whole thing took place.
[up-tempo music plays]
I think we have to remember this is, like, in the 1950s.
This was a time when there was a kind of idyllic notion
of the American family.
You work hard, you have, like, a house
with a picket fence and two kids
and that kind of thing.
Ed Gein's arrest must have been a massive shock
to the American psyche and to the world
because it disrupts this picture.
He's a kind of meek, unremarkable man
who could have been your neighbor.
And there's something eerie about that
that is disruptive to our collective ideas
of what is a monster.
[Schechter] Ed was born when his parents
were living in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
They were owners of a small kind of general store.
He was the second child born to the family.
We know very little about Ed Gein's older brother, Henry.
From what we know and what we gather,
George Gein was a somewhat feckless, unreliable individual.
He was also evidently an alcoholic.
George Gein, his life began in tragedy.
It's -- Ed Gein's entire upbringing from, you know,
40 years before he was born, it's like it was ordained.
George Gein, coming to Wisconsin,
his entire family dies crossing a river,
and he was adopted by a different family.
He is in no way whatsoever wanted.
And then, of course, becomes a drunk.
[Berrill] Having a father that's an alcoholic,
when he's drunk is prone to violence,
is a rough spot to be in --
well, for anyone, but particularly in a place where
there's little or no likelihood of being rescued.
That abuse can later on manifest in so many different ways.
One can only guess at what some of the escapist fantasies
might have been for this guy.
His mother was the -- the better of two choices, obviously,
even if she were somewhat aloof or cold
or might have been overly controlling.
[Schechter] From all available evidence,
Augusta had been raised
in a very, very stern, strict Lutheran household.
In many ways, she fits the model
of a classic kind of religious fanatic
who is obsessed with the evils of the sins of the flesh.
The lips of a strange woman drip honey,
and her mouth is smoother than oil.
[Schechter] Ed was subjected throughout his childhood
to Augusta's harangues about the evils of womanhood
and the decadence and corruption of the modern world
and all the evil temptations that Ed might be exposed to.
You cannot hide behind your beauty.
Your beauty has made you evil.
Augusta, she was a harrowing influence on Ed Gein.
[Lee] Ed Gein, he grew up under the shadow
of his mother's fanaticism.
So I think he probably had this
very paradoxical relationship to his mom
where, on one hand, she was the source of everything --
his life, his sense of right and wrong --
but on the other hand felt resentful.
[Schechter] Ed was a very extreme pathological form
of what used to be called a mama's boy.
Augusta was a saint who could do no wrong.
Whenever he spoke about her after his arrest,
he would -- he would burst into tears.
When you have someone who's chronologically an adult male
but yet they're -- they're psychologically fused
with their mother,
the worst-case scenario is a kind of a psychological incest.
You know, how did they -- they come to be so close,
and why was he unable to extricate himself
from this relationship?
This was the only person that he had any enduring contact with.
So if there's any intimacy in his life,
it was with his mother.
And by that I mean, of course,
emotional or psychological intimacy.
Now, we don't know if there was any physical or sexual intimacy,
but it can't be ruled out.
When you want to understand this type of psychopathology
that is so strong and so deviant,
it's not just a result of poor parenting,
he hated his mother, his mother did this to him,
his mother did that to him.
This is much, much deeper than that.
There's so many people that are brought up
in all of these bizarre sorts of ways.
Almost none of them go out and do what Gein did.
Some people have described Augusta
as being a rigid Christian woman
who sees sex as sinful and women as sinful,
and Gein was to promise his mother
never to have sex with women,
stay by yourself, everyone's a bad, bad person.
That's not Christianity. That's mental illness.
And I think the biggest component
that Ed Gein got from his mother is some sort of mental disorder,
not necessarily her poor parenting, which never helps.
But there's some level of mental illness with the both of them.
Augusta seemed to see wickedness and sinfulness
all around her.
She came to see La Crosse
as kind of a Midwestern Sodom and Gomorrah.
And so she finally persuaded her husband to move to Plainfield,
this small farming community.
It was a little town of farmers.
There was no irrigation like there is now.
It was what you call a poor community.
Well, nobody was better or worse than the other guy
who was all equal -- poor.
[laughs]
When I first knew about Ed, see,
I was only eight, nine years old, is all it was.
And he was just part of the -- part of the group.
But he was always pleasant
and not troublesome or anything like that.
I mean, he was just different.
I don't know how to explain "different,"
but he was just kind of different.
[grunts]
[exhales sharply]
You got Bernice Worden here.
Yeah, Augusta and Henry
are about 100 feet to my left down there.
I think one of his victims is right behind us in the trees.
My family came down from Quebec, Canada,
and we lived in Wisconsin.
We loved the weather, loved the people.
Good place to live and raise your family.
It's right here.
I was driving through Plainfield a couple times a week
and I noticed that hardware store
and I started reading the books on Ed Gein
and really got obsessed with it.
So I started researching it right after that
and wrote two books on it.
Everybody say "hi" to Ed. This is it.
Well, it kept getting stolen.
Got George on the end, and you got Augusta here.
Ed's here, and Henry's on the end.
A lot of people come out here and visit Ed
and take some of his mother's tombstone apparently.
There's a lot missing compared to the last time I was here.
A lot of history within Plainfield is right there.
[projector clicks]
April 1, 1940,
George died from basically drinking.
He didn't do nothing. He just basically drank.
So once he died, the boys
started working more around town,
earning money to support the family.
So he wasn't really missed.
[Marching band plays]
[Projector clicks]
[Speaking German]
-[man] Heil! -[crowd] Sieg heil!
Henry had to go down for the draft in '42.
The first number drawn by the secretary of war
is serial number 158.
Henry got rejected because he was too old.
[Schechter] Henry seems to have been the more,
let's say, well-adjusted of the two,
though it wouldn't be hard to be more well-adjusted than Ed Gein.
Henry kind of saw Augusta for what she was,
and he wasn't going to let himself be
totally dominated by her in the way Ed did.
There's some evidence that he, you know,
was trying a little bit to wean his younger brother
away from Augusta's influence.
It's not like Henry Gein was the normal brother...
-No. -...who would have been
just fine had he moved to Milwaukee.
Henry Gein actually kind of creeps me out
almost more than Ed, because it's like, Henry,
you could have gotten the fuck out of there
if you wanted to, whereas, like,
Ed is obviously mixed a little different.
[Marcus] These guys are spending many nights on the front porch,
you know, sitting in front of their mother,
her reading them sections from the Bible.
And Henry, at this point, he wants to get away.
Ed's brother might have been urging Ed to leave,
talking about how terrible Mother was.
Maybe he couldn't tolerate it.
Maybe he found that so offensive.
And maybe -- maybe he was jealous
of his brother's ability to break away.
They're in their early 40s at this time,
and Henry, for the first time, brings up to his brother,
"Do you think maybe you're a little too close to Mom?"
-Ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo! -Ooh! Don't do that.
-Not good. -Don't say that to Eddie.
[Berrill] I can understand the older brother saying,
"Well, this really isn't a place I want to wind up staying."
Whereas Ed just couldn't. So he was stuck.
It's kind of like being psychologically enslaved.
You know, like, no one physically tied him to a chair,
but he was kind of psychologically
tied to the chair.
Later on in his life, Henry actually found a girl
that he wanted to move in with, and she actually had a --
had a child of her own.
And that was against everything Augusta taught him.
And I think that's what happened when he died.
The reason why he died -- because Ed got upset.
[Projector clicks]
This is a newspaper article from May 19, 1944.
"Funeral services were held here this afternoon for Henry Gein,
42, town of Plainfield farmer, who died of a heart attack
while trying to protect his farm
from the ravages of a grass and brush fire."
And the evening, several hours after the search began,
found the dead body of Mr. Gein lying facedown.
Apparently, the man had been dead for some time
when he was found
and it appeared that death was the result of a heart attack.
It was a normal farming afternoon when Ed Gein
and his brother Henry were out in a field burning brush.
Supposedly, Ed was separated from his brother,
and Ed ran back to town.
Ed ran back to town, said he couldn't find his brother,
and the police came out, and Ed led them right
to where Henry was laying facedown in the grass,
and there was a bump on the back of his head.
And so they basically ruled that he died of asphyxiation,
and the police stopped investigating.
[Schechter] Such accidents were not uncommon
because when you start a brush fire,
you know, there's a great deal of smoke involved.
And there had been other people
who had died of smoke inhalation.
[Reid] All I heard is that they thought that Ed had
maybe murdered his brother, but we don't know that.
I don't know.
Heard that he was jealous of his brother.
Don't know that either.
[Lee] Ultimately, we'll never know.
And only Ed Gein would know.
But the circumstances of the case
and when we look at his life history
and the intense attachment that he had to his mother,
you could come up with a very plausible explanation
that he wanted to have his mother to himself.
We all know he did it. [Laughs]
Shortly after Henry died, Augusta suffered a stroke.
And suddenly Ed found himself
taking care of his mother.
Ed suddenly has a one-on-one relationship with his mother,
this person who is his everything.
[Schechter] Augusta had always been the one
who had taken care of Eddie.
Now he found himself dressing her and feeding her,
helping her.
[Bowser] Augusta, she was bedridden.
And Ed actually used to climb in bed with her and stroke her
and stuff and caress her and that and make her happy.
Took care of her. Kind of the way he wanted it.
Of course, Eddie was very, very devastated
to see this woman who he'd always regarded as godlike
suddenly reduced to this kind of state.
[Projector clicks]
Augusta died on December 29, 1945, a year after Henry.
The descriptions they have of Ed Gein at her funeral --
his face covered in snot,
saying that she was too good for this world.
Ed Gein was so obsessed with her and so ensconced
in the world that she created for him that a fuse blew.
[Schechter] Ed really only had one close relationship
in his whole life.
He wasn't close to his brother.
He hated his father.
You know, Augusta was his entire emotional world.
And now she was gone.
He was living in squalor.
Once his mom is no longer around,
he's left to his own devices.
He feels this tremendous sense of loss and trauma,
and he descends into this darkness.
So from that point on, Ed really becomes obsessed
with resurrecting his mother somehow.
[Marcus] He went to her grave and prayed every night
for her to rise from the grave.
I mean, he would go night after night -- "Please rise.
Please, Mother. Please come back."
These are Ed Gein's medical records
dated December 19, 1957.
It reads, "After the death of his mother,
he felt that he had a special power
whereby he could raise the dead to life
by an act of his willpower."
[Berrill] I guess he couldn't tolerate the idea
of being separated from his mother
despite the fact she was dead.
I guess the idea that he might be able to possess her corpse
or her body would be a source of comfort for him.
[Indistinct whispering]
[Lee] There could have been a part of him that was fearful of,
you know, digging up his mother's corpse
and realizing that that was, you know, a shell of his mother
and it wasn't actually his mother anymore.
It raises more questions.
What were you planning to do with your mother?
Like, were you going to stuff her and turn her into a doll?
Was there some kind of a desire
to physically be with his mother?
And in that sense, I do mean sexually.
[Indistinct whispering]
[Projector clicks]
Watch out for the ice.
This is the gravesite of Eleanor Adams.
This is one of the graves that was actually exhumed
a couple days after they caught Ed.
And they got down to the casket.
They opened it up, and it was empty.
Augusta's buried probably, say, about 12 feet off from here.
It's so close. I mean, very close.
So Mom would have been watching him.
[Laughs]
The other bodies served as proxies --
you know, close to his mother, but not quite his mother.
[Schlesinger] In Gein's case, he was following this.
He knew when there was a funeral --
he read about it in the paper --
and would dig the corpse up almost the next day
or that evening. Why?
Because the dirt at that point
would be very soft and it would be easy to get out.
When the judge is sort of telling him
and reviewing details with him in the case,
he kind of goes along with the details
and says, "Yeah, that's probably what happened."
He's not denying it, but he's also not confessing to it.
So I think he's sort of taking this kind of, like,
passive approach to his role in this.
He has been going to graves and digging up,
excavating bodies and using their body parts.
That process, you know, is very difficult in its own ways.
There's practical challenges that come with digging a body up
that is typically buried six feet underground.
Clearly, he had a number of fantasies or ideas
about what needed to be done with these bodies.
I mean, there was a reason for digging up these graves
and taking these women out.
Someone doesn't wake up one day and say,
"I think I'll go out and start digging up
bodies in a cemetery." No.
This begins 10, 15, 20 years earlier
in the offender's mind, in his fantasies.
Now, sometimes fantasy serves as a substitute for action,
but other times, fantasy paves the way for later action.
In Gein's case, it's pretty obvious that his fantasy
was so strong, he actually acted it out and did it.
There's a kind of fantasy life,
and then there's actually the reality of, like, dealing with
bodies that have decomposed very badly in the ground
for sometimes years.
[Ed] That's right.
It's quite bizarre.
I mean, after all, how many bodies do you need?
He wanted the bodies and he mutilated the bodies
and desecrated the bodies.
But what he did with the body parts is itself extraordinary.
[Projector whirs, clicks]
[Women vocalizing]
[Projector clicks]
[Schechter] He would dig up these corpses
and -- and bring them back to his farmhouse
and dissect them and -- and fashion different artifacts
out of the body parts.
[Marcus] The word that people used over and over again
after they discovered the house was "revolting."
And that to me was the perfect adjective
for what was going on in there.
These little bowls made from human skulls
that he'd eat beans out of.
You know, you'd walk into his room
and he's got skulls on each of the four --
on each of the four bedposts.
He's got a box full of vulvas with little ribbons
-wrapped around them. -Somebody's jealous.
He was a voracious reader of the kind of pulp men's magazines
that were very, very popular at the time,
which would have articles about things like headhunting.
He would sit there and read these books,
you know, these true crime books, true crime magazines.
-He loved -- -Just eating beans.
Eating beans, reading about Nazis making lampshades
out of human skin.
These acts seem to have been modeled to some extent
on the Nazi atrocities that were coming to light
and being published in these pulp magazines.
For a guy like Ed, discovering photographs
or newsreels from World War II,
maybe he couldn't have imagined that before he saw it.
In the Gein case, he took skin and fashioned lampshades
with it and upholstery on his chair and couch.
[Berrill] The fact is, when you see all the bodies piled up
and you see people as disposable,
you understand that people were experimented with...
...if you're inclined emotionally or psychologically
to that type of thinking,
even if you don't want to admit it,
it grabs your attention in sort of the wrong way.
[Schechter] There was apparently a belt he made out of nipples.
It was this totally nightmarish environment.
[Berrill] I think the notion of using the human flesh or skin
to make objects or to upholster a chair
or something like that is kind of peculiar.
Almost suggests to me that you are finding comfort
in that these skulls are keeping you company
and that you're so disturbed
that you feel that you're surrounded by people.
Gein isn't disinterring bodies because he's lonely
and has nobody to talk to.
This is very perverse behavior.
And the -- the level of his disturbance
goes really to the core of his personality
and to the core of his sexual dynamics.
The sexual instinct itself is very, very strong.
But the sexual instinct itself is complicated,
and there can be perverse sexual arousal patterns.
Look what he's creating items from.
Most of it's genitals and vaginas and nipples
and these sorts of things.
When Gein looks at what he did
and he sees the heads all over the place,
this is very arousing to him.
This is very stimulating to him
because look at the domination he has over these people.
He can cut them up. He can desecrate them
in all these various ways. He has total domination.
That is very, very arousing for somebody like Gein.
[Lee] He is on record saying that he didn't have
sexual relations with corpses.
[Schlesinger] This may come as a shock to people --
Criminal defendants don't always tell the truth.
They lie all the time.
So you really can't go by what Gein said.
When you look at his behavior, notwithstanding his denial
that he had sex with the bodies, is he capable of it?
Obviously he's capable of it. Look exactly what he did.
There were these rumors that he was a cannibal.
In the Gein case, when the police entered the home,
they saw a human heart in a frying pan on a stove.
Now, it doesn't take a lot of imagination
to raise the question -- What's he doing
with a human heart in a frying pan on a stove?
I mean, did he eat some of the body parts?
That's not unheard of.
Could he have eaten some of the victims?
The answer is, obviously he's capable of it.
There's very little that Gein is not capable of.
[Projector clicks]
[Gunshot]
[Up-tempo jazz music plays]