(soft music) - We do tend to see this case get blown up into almost fictionalized proportions because it is such an unbelievable case to begin with.

- The Gein case, it very rapidly entered into cultural mythology.

You know, Gein became this folkloric boogeyman.

- A lot of his crimes that he later commits, you do see a lot of overtones of him almost trying to make sense of the loss of his mother and also bring her back in kind of a way, or embody and try to emulate aspects of his mother because he was completely lost without his only rudder and like the only guiding force in his life.

- You know, he is one of our country's great mythic monsters.

- [Narrator] We grew up watching paranormal investigators like Zak Bagans on "Ghost Adventures," Ryan and Shane on "Buzzfeed Unsolved" and "Ghost Files," and Sam and Colby on YouTube.

The semi-casual investigations, people just trying to connect with those who are no longer around or something we just can't understand, and diving deep into true crime cases.

All throughout history, different cultures have believed in the paranormal, divine gods, spirits, aliens, shaman, and witchcraft, just to name a few.

Supernatural occurrences are reported all over the world and have become ingrained into pop culture.

Since the beginning of humanity, people have been questioning the bigger picture of existence.

What's really out there?

Aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot?

Well, we want to try it ourselves in our own backyard.

So come with us and explore the paranormal and macabre side of the great Midwest.

- In the Gein family, there were were four family members.

It was Ed Gein, his mother, Augusta, George, who was the father, and Henry, who was Gein's older brother.

- George Gein, the father, had led, had a very tragic childhood.

When he was a boy, like maybe four or five, his parents and siblings were caught in a flash flood on their way back from town and killed.

So he was orphaned at a very, very young age.

He had a tough life.

At some point, he met and married Augusta Lehrke, who came from a very, very industrious religious Lutheran background.

From what we know, and in fact infer from different evidence about Augusta, was that she was a very domineering person.

She was also extremely religious, apparently bordering on fanatical.

We don't know exactly how they met or what brought them together.

In my book "Deviant," I speculate a little about, you know, what might have attracted them to each other.

George was a bit of a ne'er do well and he might have been attracted to Augusta's, again, very efficient, industrious discipline side.

It's possible, again, speculation that something about George's submissiveness was exactly what, or partly what attracted him to Augusta, you know, as well as the fact that she was, at the time, what would've been considered an old maid.

And he was, you know, good-looking, eligible bachelor.

But as I say, much of what we think we know about them is pure speculation.

- When Ed Gein was born in 1906, he was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

They had actually a grocery store briefly that was mainly run by Augusta Gein, the matriarch of the family, and she was certainly the one that was very controlling.

The father, George Gein, was an alcoholic man who was also in the war and had some possible PTSD and coped with alcohol.

So she had to fill in the role of being kind of the mother and the father and the provider and the head of the household.

- The marriage, from everything we could tell, was extremely troubled.

George became increasingly alcoholic and increasingly ineffectual.

They owned a grocery store for a while, and initially when they first opened it, the ownership was under George's name.

And then in a short while, the city directories listed Augusta as a proprietor and George as the clerk, which I think speaks volumes both about the kind of personalities they were and the nature of their relationship.

- About six or seven years later, the family moved to Plainfield, Wisconsin.

- So Augusta seems to have regarded the modern world as having gone to hell in a hand basket, and that the city of La Crosse was a kind of modern day Sodom, and, you know, filled with fast-living, loose moraled women and so on and so forth.

And she apparently transmitted that view of womanhood to her sons, you know, constantly warning them against, you know, the seductions of the modern woman and keeping them both really tied to the strangulation point, to her apron strings.

- The family went from already a small town in Wisconsin to an even smaller community.

- Well, it was a very, very small village, a farming community in a particularly infertile part of Wisconsin that was sometimes called the Great Dead Heart of Wisconsin.

Soil was very sandy.

You know, the farmers led very hard scrabble lives.

I think the total population of Plainfield at that time was around 700 people.

I mean, there were fewer people in the village than there were in the Bronx apartment building I grew up in.

- So it was very isolated and it was very small, but a tight-knit community, and it was really not on the map before the crimes.

- There was a basically one street commercial center, which supplied all the necessities of the townspeople, including a hardware store, grocery, gas station, things like that.

But it was a very, again, rural, remote district, which at the time Gein was growing up, you know, hadn't really evolved so much from the way it had been in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

- The families seemed to interact, from what we can gather at least, they seemed to interact at an arm's length to a degree, mainly because Augusta was so strict and she was so distrusting of everybody around her.

She didn't want her sons to be corrupted by people who weren't as religious as her, or didn't have as many strong convictions and morals as she did.

So she was trying to ensure she was raising her boys right and getting rid of any outside influence that really wasn't her.

- Again, Augusta seemed to have come to believe that even in a town as rooted in a way in the previous century as Plainfield, this corrupt, immoral, modern world and the values associated with it had infiltrated, so she was always doing her best to keep her sons free of those nefarious influences.

- She used her faith to guide over the two sons that she had.

She had a lot of disdain for more modern culture in a lot of ways, especially women.

And so the Gein boys, so Henry and Ed Gein, were dissuaded from being in relationships with women, but they even were not really allowed to have friends.

So they were very isolated in this really rural town, so they were very alone.

- We know that Augusta drilled into them both religious lessons.

She was a very pious Lutheran, and she came from this Germanic Lutheran background.

And from what I have gathered about people of that background in that time and place is that they were not given to demonstrations of warm, loving, affectionate upbringing.

She was a very, very strict disciplinarian.

She inculcated this very, very rigid moral code in them.

She was unaccepting of any frailties and so on and so forth.

- So Ed and his brother Henry went to school right around Plainfield and they went to grade school.

It was just a one room schoolhouse actually.

And there were, I think, about 12 classmates about.

Gein did drop out of school by the time he reached eighth grade, and that was largely to help with the family and the farm.

And Henry being older by several years had already been helping with the farm by that point.

And it was a farming town, which was pretty standard at that point, so that wasn't too strange, but certainly the continued isolation, I think we do see a lot of the aftermath kind of in Gein's later life.

Now, it was kind of tricky because when Ed Gein grew up and was living into adulthood, people in town seemed to like him enough, and he was kind of known as being a loner and a little strange, but nobody thought that he was dangerous or thought he was unsafe.

They just thought he was a little strange and unusual.

- I'm sure it's as true today as it was when Ed was growing up.

In any group of public school age kids or high school aged kids, there's always going to be one kind of weirdo who ends up being the butt of practical jokes and so on and so forth.

There were things evidently about Ed's behavior.

He always seemed to wear a goofy smile and laugh inappropriately, and he didn't have any real social skills.

I mean, that was true of him throughout his life.

Even as an adult, he couldn't really relate comfortably to other grownups.

- Since Ed Gein was a child and when he was going to school, he was kind of the wrong end of the joke more often than not.

He was made fun of often when he was in school.

He did have a lazy eye, so he was physically a little bit different, but he was smaller and he was very quiet and he would sometimes be found laughing to himself.

That didn't change that drastically.

Even interacting with other people his own age, he was a little awkward and he was strange and he really was not, he wasn't good with women either.

So speaking to women was a difficulty of his, and knowing this, people did make fun of him for that.

- From people I spoke to who knew him, you know, there was a slightly feminine quality to him that, you know, also made him, laughingstock might be too strong a word, but you know, kind of an outcast.

- That was a dynamic that maintained throughout his life from what we can tell.

George Gein, Ed Gein's father, died relatively young.

He died in 1940, and after his death, there was a dynamic shift in the family because now Augusta Gein was the sole arbiter of how the household ran and how everybody was to kind of live and function amongst each other.

She already did kind of run the household, but there was always a male presence, even if he was less seen and heard than typical men of his time were.

- Deducing from his obituary, you know, he seems to have been a respectable member of the community.

Within his family, you know, from everything I knew about him and from everything I knew about what happened to their lives subsequent to his death, you know, his death didn't seem to be an occasion for a lot of mourning.

In fact, in certain ways, I think it was kind of a relief given how alcoholic he had become, abusive he had become, and just in a way how much of a burden he had been since he had been unable basically to keep up with the farm work in any way.

- Henry eventually actually bought his own plot of land right next to the Gein family farm.

So he showed that he wanted to stay very close to home and he wanted to take care of his mother and provide for his family and continue on that path.

And Henry Gein, unfortunately, met a very sudden end in 1944.

- Henry and Ed had gone out apparently to start a fire to burn off some marsh grass, and the fire got out of control.

- And it was, you know, being put out by a whole team of people, but.

- They became separated when the fire was finally extinguished.

- Nobody knew exactly where Henry was, so then.

- Ed went to get help to find his brother, and they found him lying dead.

- Gein ends up leading them right to Henry's body, and one man actually who was on that search party even mentioned, "Wait, I thought you didn't know where he went," and Gein just said, "Funny how that works."

So that was always something that stood out to me as interesting, certainly, because there are some people who might speculate that Gein is responsible for his brother's death.

- The initial ruling was that he had died of a heart attack or smoke inhalation, that it was an accident.

After, you know, the Gein atrocities became public, there were all these stories that Ed had murdered Henry because Henry had been badmouthing their mother, so, you know, that it was a Cain and Abel situation.

- Ed always seemed to really look up to him, so that was.

He really respected his work ethic and thought that he was a really good, well-intentioned, hardworking individual and really respected him.

So it would've had to been very dramatic if Ed would've turned on his brother, who he really loved and respected.

- Now, it is true that he might not have been entirely unhappy to get Henry out of the way, in the sense that he could now have his mother all to himself.

- Henry also started a relationship with a woman who was widowed, and the mother really frowned upon that, and that's where the rift with Henry and Augusta started happening.

Leading up to the death, there was some tension with Ed and his brother, Henry, mainly concerning the mother.

So Augusta was notoriously abusive and very controlling.

Henry became aware of the mother's abuse and was vocal about it to Gein.

It puts kind of a rift in the family dynamic that could have ended badly, but again, there's no way of knowing exactly what happened to Henry.

He was, it was believed that he died of natural causes associated with the fire.

I know one report was a heart attack, but then one report was that he died of smoke inhalation.

Either way, there were strange bruises to his head, which were never explained.

So it's one of those mysteries that I think we just don't know enough about, and I don't know that we ever will.

- You know, often when appalling crimes have been discovered, all kinds of other previous ambiguous crimes are attributed to the perpetrator, and it turns out he had nothing to do with them.

My own personal opinion is Eddie did not kill his brother.

- So I go back and forth.

I do think that he died of kind of mysterious circumstances and the tension.

Again, we're kind of pulling from a lot of information that isn't like super sound.

The fact that Henry died when had some bruises on his head and it wasn't really looked into, I think Gein could have been responsible.

I don't, I go back and forth on how much I believe that versus something natural happened during that fire, but I go back and forth, honestly.

Toward the end of Augusta's life, Ed was her sole caretaker because she suffered a stroke after Henry passed and was happy to rehabilitate her, and was actually really proud of the fact that she was on the mend and actually getting better, because he felt like he did the right thing by taking such good care of her.

But then in 1945, she suffered a second stroke.

She ended up passing away of that stroke shortly after it happened, and then Ed was totally alone after that point.

- She had always infantilized him, so he was always incredibly dependent on her.

Now, she was suddenly dependent on him.

So the dynamic of their relationship changed very, very radically.

You know, I think her being incapacitated, you know, is both terrifying to him, but also on some level gave him a certain amount of gratification because again, in addition to this professed idol worship, you know, I think there was a lot of, well, there would've had to have been a great deal of anger and fury and hostility to this woman who had so dominated, and in many respects, ruined his life.

- So after Augusta passed away in 1945, Ed Gein was very much, he was completely alone and Ed was very lost.

In the immediate aftermath when she passed away, he was completely destroyed and the community actually did seem to come and kind of rally around him.

Even at the funeral, there were people who remembered seeing how upset he was and would come up to him and, you know, express their sympathies and also say that, you know, "If you need anything, we're here," and so on.

And he took that to heart and he did acknowledge that, that he was grateful for the community to be there for him.

However, in practice, that didn't really go down that way, unfortunately, after the funeral ended and everyone kind of moved on, he didn't.

And so he kind of stayed stuck where he was, grieving his mother, and she was such a controlling force in his life that he didn't really know what to do or how to express these feelings that he was having, or how to go about mourning in a more traditional way.

So a lot of his crimes that he later commits, you do see a lot of overtones of him almost trying to make sense of the loss of his mother and also bring her back in kind of a way, or embody and try to emulate aspects of his mother, because he was completely lost without his only rudder and like the only guiding force in his life.

After Augusta Gein passed, Ed Gein's crimes started, from what we can tell, pretty soon after.

It was about, it was about actually 18 months since she had passed away.

He did at first attempt to dig up her remains, but quickly found out that there was a cement vault covering her casket, and so he was not able to gain access.

After that, in about 1947, we can see that he started visiting graves of women who had just recently passed, and that's when the grave robbery started just thereafter.

And he mostly frequented the Plainfield Cemetery.

From what we can tell, seemed to rob almost a grave every year.

But then in 1954, things made a shift.

Mary Hogan was a tavern owner, and she lived in the vicinity of Plainfield, but she had this tavern, and she went missing on December 8th of 1954, and it was a complete cold case.

Nobody knew exactly what happened to her.

She was gone, and there was blood on the floor.

There was a bloody fingerprint on a glass that was basically the only evidence anybody had, but it wasn't enough to go on.

So it ended up running cold.

And when Ed Gein's crimes came to light in 1957, that's when they discovered that he actually was responsible for this murder that happened years prior.

What we can tell, and based on his interviews and what we know, you know, especially in hindsight with the investigators looking into Ed Gein now in 1957 and trying to connect the dots with the murder of Mary Hogan, we can tell that Ed Gein did go into the tavern, he shot and killed Mary Hogan, and then put her body into a vehicle and transported her back to his property.

And that is where he proceeded to dissect and keep some parts of her remains.

And one thing that also came up in town, because everyone, it was a very small community, people had heard that Mary Hogan went missing.

Ed Gein would sometimes be around people talking about the disappearance of Mary.

I wonder what happened to her.

And he would make remarks like, "Oh, she's back at the farm," and things like this, that people knew him to say weird things, so they're just like, "What are you talking about?"

And like, moved on.

But he had a very strange way of engaging with other people on a social level, so him making a weird joke was not very uncommon or not outside of his character.

So they didn't think much of it.

Then in hindsight, it becomes very chilling to know that he was basically admitting that he murdered this woman and had her remains at his house.

In November of 1957, Bernice Worden became the last victim of Ed Gein.

- It was the first day of deer hunting, and basically all the men in the community had gone out to the woods.

- Ed Gein was not, and historically speaking, would say that he wasn't a huge fan of hunting.

He would hunt squirrels, but he wasn't a huge fan of blood, is what he would tell other hunters when invited to go on these hunting expeditions and whatnot.

And Bernice Worden ran a hardware store.

It was the only hardware store in the, in Plainfield.

It was right in the heart of it all, and everybody knew her and everybody shopped at this hardware store.

- Now, for some days previous to that, Ed had been visiting the local hardware store, and Ed had, in his own completely inept way, you know, apparently been, well, showing some kind of interest in her, or at least Bernice Worden felt he was showing some kind of interest in her.

Ed went into the store under the pretext of buying antifreeze, I believe.

- Ed Gein, that morning, walked in and from what we, from what we know, he engaged in conversation with Bernice Worden and bought about half a gallon of antifreeze and was talking to her about a gun in the shop and asking to test it out.

At some point in that exchange, he ends up shooting Bernice Worden in the head when her back was turned, and she died immediately.

After that, Gein ends up putting her body in her own truck and driving away to some kind of near a bunch of woods, and then leaving the body there.

He gets his own vehicle, drives to pick her body up and puts her body in his trunk, and then goes back to his house.

So that is all taking place on the first day of hunting season when most people are just like out and about and not there, so there weren't many people to bear witness to any of the things that were happening.

And I think that is also telling that there could be some premeditation to the crimes, or at least seeing the opportunity to commit the crime that shows that there was some thought process.

After he brings Bernice Worden's body back to his property, he proceeds to, the way it's described by investigators, she looked like she was dressed out like a deer, though she was gutted and her body was cleaned and washed and drained of blood.

When people came back to Plainfield, her Bernice Worden's son, Frank, was one of those people.

- He noticed while his mother was missing and that there was this trail of blood leading from behind the cash register out through the back door.

- He immediately thought that there could have been a robbery gone wrong and proceeded to look for any clues.

And one of those things he looked at was the sales from that day.

The last sale was for half a gallon of antifreeze.

And just earlier in the week, he remembered having a conversation with Ed Gein, asking and inquiring about the price of antifreeze.

So putting two and two together, that one little clue, led him to think maybe he knows something, maybe he saw something.

We'll start there because we don't know where else to start.

Frank Worden and some other officials actually went out to look for Gein to try to question him, and they did not have any luck getting access to his house at first.

He wasn't home.

But then in looking for him, they opened the summer kitchen.

- And made this horrific discovery of her corpse, which was hanging by its heels and had been dressed out like a deer.

- Gein, it turned out was at a neighbor's house having dinner, the Hill family, and he historically used to actually babysit for that family too.

So they end up tracking him down and they immediately brought him in and questioned him, and the crimes really started unraveling from that point.

- And at that point, the search of the farmhouse proper began, and as "Life Magazine" would put it, you know, "This house of horrors."

It was as though he had reversed the normal process of garbage disposal, and instead of taking all this junk to the dump, bringing it home, I guess he was, in his own way, kind of a hoarder.

So he was living in this squalid chaos without electricity, without running water, all by himself, very isolated, you know, and gradually descending into this madness that finally overtook him.

- So when they discovered Bernice Worden's body, immediately they acted as though this is a crime scene.

They have to investigate.

They have to see what else is going on.

Ed Gein's house didn't have any electricity though.

It was dark and it was cold.

It was November, so it was a scene that needed, they needed light.

So they brought in a generator, they hooked it up and illuminated the scene, and it was a mess for starters.

It looked like he was living in complete squalor.

There were boxes everywhere of paper, magazines, books just strewn about the property.

It looked like somebody had been living there, but maybe were not like fully there.

- Well, again, what they found is so far beyond comprehension, you know, and given all the horrors that have occurred since, you know, still has not lost its capacity to shock and appall.

They just found this charnel house, you know, filled with human female body parts that Gein had assembled and turned into various household objects.

- Once they start actually looking at the contents of the house, they start discovering that there are human remains in the house, beyond just the corpse of Bernice Worden.

So quickly they end up discovering skulls and the fragments of skulls in the house and what later became known as the skullcap bowls.

They also were opening boxes and finding bits and pieces of skin and tatters of different human flesh that was dried up and preserved and kept in boxes.

They found the genitalia of nine different women in a different box.

- There were all these face masks.

He had flayed the faces off his female victims and tanned them, hung them up as decorations.

- They also discovered a lot of other grizzly artifacts.

So immediately when they're putting eyes on all these things, they start collecting all this evidence and putting it in bags and boxes to then analyze at the Wisconsin State Crime Lab.

It was a tremendous amount of evidence that was brought out of the house.

One other notable thing that was discovered were two chairs.

They were like normal rattan, like dining room chairs, but instead of having the wicker or rattan seat, it was human skin determined to be either from the back or the chest of a woman likely grave robbed.

So those things were pulled out of the house and discovered and everyone was horrified to say the least.

- And of course, the initial assumption was that they were all from murder victims.

What emerged, which in a way was even more shocking to the community, was that they were actually parts of dead bodies, women that Ed had exhumed from local cemeteries and brought home.

- When the case broke, they immediately knew the gravity of the situation, especially because the nature of how Bernice Worden's body was found.

Immediately, officials from at least three different counties were brought in right off the bat.

It was all hands on deck, and the Wisconsin State Crime Lab was also on the scene down from Madison, Wisconsin.

So it was so many officials that were on the scene, that were collecting evidence, gathering evidence, taking photos, and it was absolutely chaotic from all reports.

On top of that, there was distrust in the locals to see all these crimes unfolding.

They didn't want the crimes to be blown out of proportion.

They wanted to understand what was going on, but also they didn't want all these different officials and reporters coming in.

So it was a kind of contentious relationship between the people in Plainfield and everybody else coming in from all the surrounding areas.

There were more journalists than residents of Plainfield when the case broke.

- You know, don't forget also the time in which it occurred.

This was the balmy, upbeat Eisenhower era and Midwest America, you know, these happy suburban households with white picket fences and so on.

Here's somebody in the heartland of the country, you know, this farmer who is committing these incredibly unspeakable atrocities.

- Because there was a shift in journalism and crime reporting around basically the 1930s through the '50s, you saw the big shift of use of newsreels and kind of more tabloid style and pulp reporting and radio of course too.

So you see a lot more access to information.

"Life Magazine" did a whole piece, a whole massive piece on the Ed Gein case.

And so this is one of the earlier cases that went very international.

And I think part of that is because of the bizarre, brutal nature of the case and the crimes, but also you see, you know, the unprecedented aspects of it and it took place in this small town.

And it seems almost like a movie and just prime for sensationalist news reporting.

It became very kind of almost otherworldly in how it was talked about and how news media and so on would expand and embellish on aspects for, you know, sensationalism and selling papers rather than accurate reporting.

Arthur Schley was the sheriff of that county.

And so he basically put a gag order on talking about this case, which is wild, because he didn't want to harm the investigation and he didn't want to harm, you know, the eventual trial.

And he's trying to be sensitive.

He is from this county, so, and he knew Bernice Worden personally, who was the final victim.

And like he was seeing it from the townspeople's point of view of stop talking about this.

It's not fiction.

It's real.

We're real people.

And these were real people who are victims and who were affected.

But then in turn, you see the journalists who are in Plainfield who are clamoring for any story.

And there are so many of them competing for the inside scoop, this angle, this story.

And you eventually see journalists asking other journalists for details about the case, because there wasn't enough information coming from officials.

So Earl Kileen was the district attorney, so he was the one actually giving out a lot of information on the findings, but he was also making a lot of claims that were not verified before the investigators could verify them.

And so a lot of the authorities who were investigating were like, "Hey, stop doing that."

But he was the only one talking to the press.

And so a lot of his assumptions, for example, he's the one that said, "There's no way that Gein was grave robbing.

These all must have been murdered living people at one point who he killed.

And that's how there's this much stuff."

Because he didn't personally believe that Gein could rob graves and go undetected.

But that claim was, it was later found out that Gein definitely, he did that and it was verified.

And what Gein confessed to, the nine grave robberies, some of them were even checked to verify the state he claimed to leave them in.

And it was right.

It was all of this mess of you have a sheriff that doesn't want to talk about this case from his county.

Then you have the district attorney who is like giving interviews left and right to anybody without verifying any of his claims.

And then you see all of these journalists who are desperate to report on this unfolding case that is so bizarre and unprecedented that they, there's a need to keep up with it.

And now people are invested in like nationally in the story.

There was one headline that called his house, "The human slaughter factory," or like just wild stuff that isn't really like fitting or accurate, but it sounds good and it sounds crazy and bizarre and so you want to hear more.

But it was a very contentious relationship with the press and the people that lived in Plainfield.

And I think that that tension is even still felt to this day.

So some of the initial rumors that started when the case was still breaking and unfolding were rumors about more victims, like more murdered victims, how there had to be more people that were, you know, killed by Ed Gein, and he didn't, there's no way he robbed this amount of graves alone by himself.

Then you also hear townspeople in Plainfield and other reporters who are kind of in on the whole unfolding and unraveling of this case, but also getting wrapped up in the bizarre nature of it.

And you hear reports of cannibalism, you hear, or accusations that there must have been cannibalism for this and that reason.

You also hear rumors that Gein may have had victims out of Plainfield as well.

So you hear a lot of investigators, even from other counties who were investigating this case, did start to wonder if a missing person from their county could be attributed to Gein.

Those also were investigated but found to be, they didn't go anywhere.

There were no leads.

Gein didn't travel ever south of Milwaukee, so he definitely didn't kill somebody in Chicago.

He was never simply in Chicago.

But then you do still hear a lot of people making, you know, claiming rumors about being given meat by Ed Gein and it turns out maybe it was human remains.

It was a mess essentially.

And so you do see a lot of exaggeration on the amount of victims, the amount of things taken out of the house, the nature of the crime and how brutal and reports of cannibalism.

So you start to see that evolve pretty quickly.

The demeanor of Ed Gein after the crimes came to light and after he was in custody and people in town were interviewed about him, most of the townspeople had more or less the same thing to say is that he was a little strange, but overall seemed harmless and this was really shocking to them.

- When I did my book "Deviant," I, you know, I went out to Plainfield, was talking to people.

You know, I spoke at length to somebody who had been a kid who knew Ed and had been in his house and so on.

Yeah, no, Ed was a, you know, he was a good neighbor.

You know, people, you know, were kind of fond of him.

- And the investigators who were actually the first ones talking to him and interviewing him mentioned his demeanor was almost, almost shy and kind of childlike in a way.

There was one experience where he was told to, in a patrol car, duck because there was press and they were trying to get photos of him.

And he was kind of giggling and like, it was almost like it was a game.

So instances like that kind of tell more about his mind and how his inner world operated, which was, it was pretty isolated socially and just didn't have all of the tools for adulthood maybe.

And largely we can attribute that to his mom's over controlling and social isolation that she imposed on the whole family.

But yeah, the investigators who were interviewing him mentioned how kind of soft-spoken he was and how he was kind and he was very willing to talk and willing to cooperate.

And he did seem to express remorse and guilt.

So when Gein was first arrested in 1957, shortly thereafter, he was interviewed by a psychologist to determine whether or not he's competent to go to trial.

They found that he was not competent to stand trial.

So they put him in an institution.

He was at the Central State Hospital mostly for about 10 years before 1968 comes around and they finally go to trial for the murder of Bernice Worden.

- Yeah.

The thing about Ed's medical condition, I mean, he was ultimately diagnosed as suffering from some form of schizophrenia.

You know, and there is some evidence that Ed would suffer from different kinds of visual and auditory hallucinations on occasion.

Apparently he would suddenly see vultures and trees.

You know, he would have apparently olfactory hallucinations.

He would smell corpses.

- It turns out all of the evidence that was taken out of Gein's property was actually obtained without a search warrant.

And that comes in later to when Gein actually goes to trial.

He is only charged with the murder of Bernice Worden.

Even though he robbed nine graves, he desecrated all these corpses and made things out of human remains.

And one of the reasons for that was because when they got that evidence, they didn't have a search warrant to actually legally obtain that evidence of other crimes.

So they charged Gein with that one murder, which was enough to put him away for the rest of his life, because he was then found not guilty by reason of insanity.

And the aftermath of that was behind the doors of an institution for the rest of his life.

If somebody is found criminally insane versus the charge of murder, technically it's easier to get out of prison after you've murdered somebody than out of an institution.

If you're ever found like legally insane, then you're that way forever.

Maybe the officials who were handling the case saw it that way too where, you know, it's possible that you could parole for this murder, but would Gein ever?

No, but maybe just erring on the side of caution, they wanted to ensure that the crimes he committed were reflected in him never seeing the light of day again.

But what happens to the evidence after it was found to be inadmissible, the state destroyed it.

So they put it in a mass grave, largely at the Plainfield Cemetery, and a lot of it was also incinerated.

Anything that looked like stuff that he made, like any ghoulish creations, those were intentionally destroyed.

And that's why we don't know so much about the Gein case, because all of the evidence that you could possibly cite is gone unless it pertains to Bernice Worden, which is why you see books since 1981 published with the photos of Bernice Worden, how she was found.

But you won't see any photos of any other evidence because it was destroyed along with the photos of the evidence, which, because they didn't need to keep it, they didn't want to, they didn't want to archive this stuff.

It was, you know, the '50s and the '60s when they had all the tangible stuff.

And it was like obviously before digitizing any of this stuff, so there isn't like a digital footprint that is kept.

Once it's gone, it's gone.

And that's also one of the reasons that there's so much misinformation with what was found in Gein's house.

Because the initial reports will say there were officials on the scene and they found the human skin chairs.

They found a waste basket made out of flesh.

They found human skullcap bowls and they found bits and pieces of flesh like in boxes and around the property.

But then that evolves into there were lampshades made from human skin, even though his house didn't have electricity.

There was a nipple belt, even though that didn't, there was no mention of that until Gollmar's book in 1981, he published that, but he also doesn't cite who says they saw it, where that was reported on initially.

So it does become definitely like the fish that gets bigger and bigger and the story keeps on getting embellished more and more.

- And one point, you know, that I've been making repeatedly to people is that technically Ed was not a serial killer, because the term serial killer was specifically coined to describe a certain kind of sexual sadist who derives his extremely perverted pleasure from abducting, torturing, and murdering helpless victims.

You know, it was a phrase the FBI coined to describe people like Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper and John Wayne Gacy.

Ed was not in that sense a sexual sadist.

We do know that he murdered two women, Bernice Worden and a tavern keeper named Mary Hogan, whose head was also found among his bizarre collection, but he executed them very swiftly.

He basically, most of his victims came again from local graveyards.

And apparently when he ran out of suitable middle-aged stout women who reminded him of his mother to bring home, you know, he just went out and created a couple of corpses himself.

So it's not accurate to call him a serial killer.

Again, he was basically a necrophile.

You know, the Gein case became, well, it very rapidly entered into cultural mythology.

Gein became this folkloric boogeyman first locally and then ultimately nationally.

You know, he is one of our country's great mythic monsters who is a subject of endless storytelling in one way or another.

What I tell people is in every community, you see this in "To Kill a Mockingbird" with Boo Radley, children tell stories about some weird character living off the beaten path who's supposedly a witch or an ogre or whatever.

I said before that I grew up in a Bronx apartment building and on the sixth floor there was a creepy old lady and we used to tell all these scary stories about her.

She was a cannibal witch and so on and so forth.

You know, she turned out to be, you know, a harmless old cat lady.

And the same thing was true in Plainfield.

Only in Plainfield turned out to be true, you know?

There really was this weird character living off in some creepy remote house, you know, that children would tell stories about.

You know, this is also the time when Freudian psychoanalysis held sway in the country.

So there were all these newspaper articles about Gein and his relationship to his mother.

And you know, the word Oedipus complex was thrown around quite a bit.

And one consequence of that was the (indistinct) writer, Robert Bloch, who was living at the time not far from Plainfield, you know, is reading all those newspapers and immediately inspired him to create the character of Norman Bates in "Psycho."

- The evolution of Ed Gein in pop culture is more staggering with this case than I think any other case, in the true crime realm at least.

So we first see the influence of this case on Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of "Psycho" from the Robert Bloch novel.

"Psycho" and the character Norman Bates specifically drew a lot of heavy influence from this very real case, most notably the relationship between Ed Gein and his overbearing, very controlling mother who he is almost embodying and trying to manifest in some way.

Meanwhile, in "Psycho," his mother is dead and living in the house and he's mimicking her voice and it's creepy.

So you do see that, and that's 1960.

- "Psycho," of course, is this seminal work.

You know, the first, what came to be called splatter movie, you know, gave birth to a whole genre of horror that's still very much with us.

- But then you do also see in 1974, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and you see the first thing that flashes on the screen "Based on true events."

So with that in mind, what was this pulling from?

So then you can go back in time and see very clearly the influence of Ed Gein on the character Leatherface, and that, you know, the masks made out of face skin.

Those were actually found in Ed Gein's property amongst other things, but that was maybe one of the most shocking things that was found in his house, and became a really central part of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

- Evidently, Tobe Hooper, like many young people, was so, you know, traumatized by reading about the Gein case in "Life Magazine," you know, that he ultimately transformed it into "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

- Then after that, you see even like Buffalo Bill from "Silence of the Lambs."

- This character Buffalo Bill and his quest to make a skin suit was explicitly based on Gein.

And you know, and by now, Gein has just become one of these mythic American monsters that, you know, continues to be portrayed sometimes highly inaccurately in popular culture.

- We do tend to see this case get blown up into almost fictionalized proportions because it is such an unbelievable case to begin with, especially with how it was reported on back then with the yellow journalism and the crime reporting being very overly sensational when the case was breaking, and people adapting or tweaking or embellishing.

It doesn't take much.

- You know, what's interesting to me is each of those artists, Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, Thomas Harris, took something different from the Gein story that reflected, you know, the obsessions and anxieties of the moment.

You know, "Psycho" is very much a product of the 1950s.

You know, it has a lot to do with kind of sexual duplicity.

You know, the '50s being very prudish, you know, women were supposed to remain virginal and, you know, TV shows when I was growing up, you know, "I Love Lucy," married couples couldn't be shown sharing the same bed.

But then underneath, there was all this lurid, you know, this lured underground world of, you know, porn magazines and so on and so forth.

My theory of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is it has a lot to do with the Vietnam War.

Tobe Hooper's first movie was an anti-war picture, and it sort of shows the Cartwrights turn into cannibal killers, you know?

You know, it's like America was suddenly turning into this death machine preying on its college-aged children.

And then with "Silence of the Lambs," you know, Buffalo Bill wants to be a beautiful woman.

In the novel, his last words as he's dying to Clarice Starling are, "How does it feel to be beautiful?"

It has something to do with like mutilating the female body to achieve some ideal, which has led to our own extreme culture, I think, of cosmetic surgery and so on and so forth.

And, you know, my feeling is, you know, again Gein has entered the criminal mythology of our country, and those kinds of figures, you know, the stories have always been told in all kinds of different ways.

You know, it's like the outlaws of the West.

I mean, Billy the Kid, you know, talk about psychopathic killers, you know, it's this creepy little psychopath, you know, but he's been turned into this heroic figure.

My feeling is anybody in a way is entitled, you know, to make whatever they want of the Gein story, as long as they don't present it as the true story, which has happened recently in a series that I won't mention the name of, you know, which leads people to believe they're seeing the true story of Ed Gein, which they're not.

- And you can still say, "Oh, this is based on true events," but the pop culture influence I think is also, it did kind of water down, I think, the reality of the case too, because we can cite the Ed Gein case and say like, "Oh yeah, this is real," but it's been so intertwined with pop culture for so long, it almost seems unbelievable.

And I do think that takes away from the reality and the gravity of the real situation and the real victims that are impacted by the case and so on.

And another thing that is interesting with the pop culture influence, with the movie "Psycho" coming out in 1960, that is when you see the distinct shift in horror from, you know, the '50s and the '40s and the '30s, you see the Universal monsters, and they're monsters, like they're fictional beings, and there's that, and that's what horror is.

But then in 1960 with "Psycho," you see the humans being the monsters, and you even see the vilification of mental illness and the idea and concept of a lunatic escape from the asylum and that trope became really heavily ingrained in pop culture too.

And I do think that the Ed Gein case is a very specific and distinct marker for that.

(soft music) (birds chirping) (Thank you Graveface Museum: gravefacemuseum.com/, instagram.com/graveface_museum/ and Queens College in NYC: qc.cuny.edu/) (eerie music continues)