Original subtitles

Gein was left alone with his mother.

And then when she died, that's when his madness

really began to flower.

They found the victim,

amazingly, at his home, hanging upside down.

I believe she was beheaded.

He executed very, very swiftly.

What he was interested in was

bringing their bodies back to his farmhouse

and performing... you know, these horrific operations.

There's one item that we have, and it is...

the only known piece of human remain evidence from the case.

He created some kind of a skin

that he would be able to get into and become his mother.

This is not somebody who...

who is experiencing a sudden emotional reaction.

This is somebody who is fundamentally, utterly disturbed.

Me and my detectives needed evidence.

So we went up to Ed's house to take a look around.

I barely took two steps before I brushed something with my shoulder.

There it was, hanging from the rafters.

A headless body.

A woman slit open from the breastbone to the belly.

Gutted. Clean. Hung upside down by the ankles.

Bernice Worden's heart was in a bag.

It was about 18 inches from his bed,

along with kindling and cloth that

looked like it was firestarter for Gein's wood stove.

And basically, come to find out that Gein had the intention of

burning Bernice Worden's heart to get rid of it.

Bernice Worden's body was washed...

but looking at Gein as a whole,

a whole total, like, case... it made...

it would almost make more sense that he saw blood and it was...

and the body was dirty cos he had her on the ground.

And so he washed her off.

So, from a hunting and farming town,

you would see that and you would think,

"Oh, it looks like, you know, how you would prepare a deer basically."

The rest of the house, if you could call it that,

wasn't better.

Trash ankle-deep.

Old clothes, rusted cans, broken tools,

dentures lined up on the mantel like trophies.

A sink full of sand. Horror comics stacked in corners like scripture.

Ed's handiwork.

When you get to the house and you know he's killed the one victim,

and you find all these body parts from numerous other bodies,

it's-it's a new game for them.

They have no idea what they're dealing with.

So I'm sure they had a tough time.

He was pretty clearly insane

just by the stuff that he did.

All the... the souvenirs and trinkets

he brought back to his house.

Made belts. He made... made items out of human skin.

I mean, that's really beyond the norm.

Obviously, that's so bizarre. Most serial killers avoid detection.

Ed Gein did not avoid detection. Clearly.

True... unbelievable... horror.

Furniture made from human skin.

Skulls made into soup bowls.

A belt stitched from human nipples.

One woman's face peeled like an orange and pinned to the wall.

Why in God's name had he done this?

The two women he killed, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden...

he executed very, very swiftly.

What he was interested in

was bringing their bodies

back to his farmhouse

and performing, you know,

these horrific operations on their bodies.

Gein was not interested in subjecting his victims...

...to prolonged, agonising deaths for his own sexual pleasure.

There were lips hanging by a string near the window.

A lampshade made from a face stitched with precision.

Then it dawned on me... he wasn't just killing.

He was crafting.

He was making trophies.

One item in particular that's most interesting to me

are all of his interviews.

And the transcripts from him.

It was really eye-opening to see, just again how...

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

as well as just interacting with another human being.

Remember the heart also that was in the bag.

What did you tell me?

That's the idea. The idea of burning.

You see, that was in that waste.

I was wondering, Ed, you selected the heart to burn,

and remainder of the intestines remained in the box with their head.

Well, they would be quite hard to burn when they're fresh.

And you thought that maybe because the heart was a solid mass.

- That's right. - And how about the lungs?

Well, them was separated.

Could have been afterwards. This was too fresh.

And with Bernice, did you have any thoughts in your mind

when you removed her face, that it was because

of the resemblance to your mother?

I couldn't say.

I personally got the feeling that...

he was just very... very, very... mentally ill.

Quite frankly.

And again, it's not that looking at mental illness

will excuse horrible crimes.

It really just seems like somebody that's lost

and doesn't really get the gravity of what he's doing

and doesn't... is kind of just detached from reality.

I think the fact that what he's doing is creating things

which seem to be practical, useful,

just speaks to exactly

how disturbed his mind is.

He's not presenting these as... as trophies of...

of what he's done.

He's beyond that awareness even.

He's so far in his own disturbed reality

that he's creating these... practical devices.

They're not... It's not trophies in the way that I...

you... you often see with a serial killer.

What astonished me was how detailed he got,

the pride he had in his work.

Told me what tools are used,

how he made sure not to damage the skin when he cut her open.

He also told me a story.

Once when he was little, he walked into the barn

and saw his mother butchering a pig,

letting the blood run into a bucket.

He said that left a real impression on him.

Of course, the press soon got wind of it all.

Reporters started throwing around words.

Cannibal, necrophile... psycho.

Next day he started talking more.

I asked him about Bernice.

Ed told us he'd walked into Worden's hardware asking for antifreeze.

Then he asked to see the .22 rifle in the window.

When she turned her back, he slipped a bullet from his coat pocket,

loaded the gun, and shot her point blank in the back of the head.

Ed told us how he dragged her lifeless body

to the back room, out the loading dock

into her own delivery truck.

And parked it out on East Road in the pines, out of sight.

Later, he moved her body into his own car.

Took her home, hung up her like venison.

There were a lot of claims being made

as soon as Gein was arrested.

But rumours were starting from the police.

They were starting from newspapers.

They were starting from the 55

news journalists that were on Plainfield.

There were more... more journalists than people

that actually lived there, at points.

I mean, you can really see how the case evolved

and got more and more sensational

as... as people were kind of left to wonder

what was actually found, what happened?

Shy, polite, sitting there opposite me,

slowly confessing, eating a ham sandwich.

Even asked for a slice of apple pie like the world was still normal.

We asked him about what we'd seen up there at his farm.

The body parts. How many other women had he killed?

He thought about this for a long time.

Then told us where he got the rest of the bodies from.

Ed, what is your explanation for the bucket or pail?

Let's see, I'm trying to get that straightened out.

I think that was some kind of container.

Wastebasket?

That's probably what it was, or something.

- What is it made of? - That is...

That's human skin. - That's human skin.

Do you know who it came from?

Let's see. I'm...

I'm afraid I couldn't exactly say, but that is from a leg, I believe.

- From a leg? - Or probably from two.

I don't know. You know, it's so...

Let's see. Is that soiled in two places?

It's soiled. It's dirty. It's in two pieces.

Well, that could be probably from thighs.

- The thighs? - Yes, or something like that.

Are they from a living person or a person in a grave?

That's from a person from the grave.

Ed began calmly and coldly explaining

about his grave-robbing.

Said it started in '47, 18 months after his mom died.

Told me he couldn't take the silence in that house.

Said the loneliness gnawed at him.

Every room echoed with her voice.

Said he had visions, dreams.

And then the idea formed in his twisted mind.

He thought maybe, just maybe...

...he could bring her back... from the grave.

He tried to resurrect her.

He tried to bring her back to life.

There's some evidence that hers was the first corpse

he tried to exhume.

But he was unable to get to it

because... like other... graves in that area

...where the soil is very, very sandy...

her coffin was encased in a cement... vault.

So he couldn't get to it.

But he began to dig up the corpses

of other women of Augusta's

approximate age and stature.

You know, these were women he knew from the community.

He would read the obituaries in the local paper,

and whenever one of these women would die,

he would go to the graveyard at night and dig up her corpse.

And, as I said, bring it back to the house.

The first time he tried was to dig up his own mama.

He said he made about 40 trips to local cemeteries,

but most nights he'd panic and go home empty-handed.

But nine times, he got exactly what he wanted.

He brought their recently-buried bodies back home,

being careful to leave the graves looking untouched.

Said he only took women who reminded him of his mama.

That they were still warm.

What did he want them for?

Ed Gein, he was doing grave-robbing.

He was bringing victims home.

Not people that he killed necessarily, but people

that he would go and dig their grave up and bring body parts to his house

and have them all over his house like souvenirs,

and very strange, I believe, sexually-related kind of things.

His need for some, some kind of human bonding is so powerful

that it's driving him to go and dig up bodies

that may resemble his mother's to some extent

in a... in a desperate attempt to restore

that sense of existence, of balance.

Displaying signs of... of...

...incredible trauma at the loss of somebody

who had, nonetheless, been extremely cruel to him.

The first was Grace Beggs,

69 years old, buried in 1947.

Then came Elsie Sparks, 55, followed by Marie Bergstrom,

who was 85 when she passed.

Mabel Everson, another widow, was next.

Then there was Eleanor Adams.

Her grave was the first we confirmed.

We went there and it was empty, just like he said.

He'd taken her back to his home to begin his work.

The term necrophilia was originally invented

to describe a 19th-century French military man

named Sergeant Bertrand.

He'd raid cemeteries, dig up corpses,

until he found one of a recently buried lovely young woman.

And then have sex with it.

Whereas Gein was, like, bringing these corpses back

to use their body parts for home improvement projects.

You know, he wasn't really driven,

you know, by this incredibly perverse sexual desire.

After her, Ursula Callanan,

Lola Foster, Harriet Sherman,

and finally, Alzadia Abbott.

Nine women in total desecrated, defiled...

...taken from the earth by a monster

who thought he could bring back the dead.

When he had them in his home...

...he got to work.

He skinned them, peeled their faces,

tanned their hides, used bones for tools,

lips for decoration.

Said he never did things to the bodies.

Claimed they smelled too bad like that.

Were there other bodies that were never found?

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of information

available about the other victims that were grave-robbed.

To kind of show how if, you know,

if Gein was telling the truth about his grave-robbing

and to kind of set the victims' families at ease.

Because Gein was naming who he recalls robbing graves of

and they were able to spot-check

essentially three of the nine graves Gein claimed to rob,

and recovered the caskets in the same state

Gein remembered leaving them,

which was more or less empty, save for a few bones.

But are there more? We don't know.

Again, it's the span of time it makes sense with the amount

of victims that he's confessed to.

But again, could there be more? It's possible.

He did seem very forthcoming with the nine.

And it's... it's kind of hard to believe

that there would be a tenth that he was just omitting.

He said he didn't know how many bodies he'd taken.

Said he was in a daze.

Said sometimes even buried pieces back into the grave.

Some of the skin and flesh wasn't quite right.

The shrinks call it psychosis, schizophrenia.

But, to me, it was simple.

Ed never stopped needing his mama.

He needed in some way to bring her back from the dead.

He needed his trophies to remind him of Mom.

There's one item that we have in the collection,

and it is the only known piece

of human remain evidence from the case.

So, it is...

It was really shocking to see at first.

It is... It's something that looks mundane.

So my husband opens this tiny little jewellery box,

and he pulls out this keychain.

It's a lock of a woman's hair attached to a keychain

for the Shell service station

that happened to be right across the street

from Bernice Worden's hardware store.

And when we received it, we were told by this man

that we gained the collection from

that he thought it was a victim's hair.

On the back it's handwritten name, address:

Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin.

And he put it in my hand so I could look at it closer.

And immediately when I put it in my hand, I was...

I just had the immediate thought that I verbalised,

I was like, "I think it's his mom's hair."

That has become one of the most important pieces of the archive.

Even after she died, he kept her room pristine.

Slept in a shed room by the kitchen

like he wasn't worthy of the rest of the house.

For Ed Gein all human bonding,

all human connection has been...

encapsulated within the person, the body of his mother.

So I think he's driven by this...

...desperate pain to recreate

some physical... representation of her.

On the one hand, he was trying to again restore his mother.

He was trying to bring his mother back to him.

But at the same time, because of these...

...mutilations and operations he performed on the bodies,

you know, there was some aspect

of hostility and hatred and aggression.

He was both trying to bring her back,

and he was also wreaking some kind of vengeance on her.

Psych evaluations suggested

he was a schizophrenic with split identities.

Edward No.1 and Edward No.2.

Nice home boy...

...and psycho killer.

There was this profound ambivalence,

this overwhelming love,

and this commensurate, if unconscious hatred of this woman,

you know, who had dominated and destroyed his life.

We can't say what produces creatures like Ed Gein.

You know, there are some... human beings...

whose behaviour is ultimately inexplicable.

Ed didn't kill for pleasure.

He killed to build her again.

Piece by piece.

Stitch by stitch.

You told me before about the strict teachings

from your mother regarding women in general,

that, on many occasions during the time of her illness

and after her death, you would have preferred to...

be a woman rather than a man.

Well, I... I know I thought of that a lot.

Do you have any recollection of telling me

about considering the removal of your penis and testicles?

Yes. That did come into my mind

quite a few times when I was younger.

The one thing he was most proud of creating,

we found it hanging in the closet.

A full suit made of human skin.

Stitched from the torsos of women. Tanned and cured like leather.

Breasts, bellies, thighs all sewn together, crudely and carelessly.

Ed called it the woman's suit.

Said he wore it when the moon was full.

Said it helped him feel close to his mama.

The woman's suit that we know Ed Gein made out of skin

and wore around the house is... another level.

What's not clear to me if there is... if this is, again,

a desperate attempt, at her vivification,

bringing her back to life, embodying her,

and somehow making her alive again.

The pain he's experiencing is because he's been naughty.

He knows that his mother wanted him to be female.

If he becomes female, that he can reverse this situation,

this pain that he's experiencing at her absence.

And it's as if he thinks that he can somehow...

...in this woman's suit win her love, get her back.

You know, he had this upper torso skin suit.

And he also had cut out the vulvas

of a number of some of his victims,

which during one of his confessions,

he... kind of admitted to somehow strapping on himself.

And he would, apparently go outside at night and caper around...

you know, pretending he was his own mother.

Was that it? Did he want to become her?

I can't stop seeing the horrors we found.

Faces. Whole faces stitched in the crude masks...

...or sliced off noses.

Nine vulvas, one painted with silver spray paint.

One stuffed with sawdust.

The horrors kept coming.

And then the proof we needed.

He wasn't just a ghoul and a grave robber.

He was a murderer.

Because right there, folded neatly in wax paper...

Mary Hogan's face.

A face I knew.

It was... beyond belief, beyond understanding.

Beyond evil.

Both Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan were killed in November, December,

which is right around the time his mother passed away.

So is it possible that he was almost going back into...

into some sort of

like, almost a trauma response to,

you know, being simultaneously obsessed with his mother

as a way of coping with her abuse?

Ed didn't deny a thing. Told us he'd wear the suit.

Said he'd walk outside under the stars,

stretch out his arms and imagine he was her.

So there is some evidence that Gein

wanted to turn himself into a... into a female.

In the 1950s,

there was... a very, very...

famous person named Christine Jorgensen.

She actually grew up

not far from where I grew up

in the Bronx, New York.

Christine Jorgensen, who was a transsexual, very early.

But, in any case, Gein was very, very fascinated

by the Christine Jorgensen case.

Ed's room was filled with anatomy texts,

lurid pulp fiction, crime comics...

...Nazi atrocity books, horror magazines.

His own sick library of blood and bondage,

bodies cut up on every cover.

And the kind of material that we know Ed Gein was looking at...

horror magazines, anatomy material Nazi paraphernalia.

To somebody with the kind of disturbance of mind that he had,

this will have been absolutely lethal.

It shaped and gave form to the possibilities.

It gave him storylines to pursue.

Whether horror magazines or Nazi paraphernalia...

...trained his vulnerable mind.

Augusta had this extreme aversion to,

if not loathing of the opposite sex.

Had been hoping that her second child, Ed...

would be a girl.

There's a good deal of evidence, you know, that she treated him

often as a helpless little girl.

You know, this was the aspect that ultimately the writer Robert Bloch,

who wrote the novel Psycho,

picked up on when he created the character of Norman Bates.

You know, you see those characteristics

very clearly in Norman Bates and his relationship to his mother.

After the news broke,

the whole country lost its goddamn mind.

Life magazine ran a photo spread.

Headlines called him The Butcher of Plainfield.

Later, Hollywood came calling.

Within years, we saw Norman Bates in Psycho,

Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw.

Even Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs.

One aspect of Gein's... crimes

that has always so shocked people

and that became the inspiration, for Thomas Harris's character,

Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs,

was that he flayed

the upper torso of one of his female victims

and made what at the time, the newspapers called a mammary vest.

I would say most people know Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

They know Psycho. They know Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs.

And even the people that know Ed Gein by name

don't really have the accurate information out there because again,

there's so much misinformation floating around.

They know he was the guy that made stuff out of skin,

but the items that they're citing,

like the nipple belt, the lampshades,

are things that actually weren't found in the house.

They were things that have been added to the narrative

after... after the initial case broke.

It started with, you know, Bernice Worden's heart in a paper bag.

He also has pieces of skin in a box, and he has

a chair that he made out of human skin.

And that quickly evolved into...

he had skulls adorning his bedposts

and the whole masks set up on his, like,

at eye level as you walk through his house and there's...

a heart in a potbelly stove and just all of these things

that, again, people are just embellishing

for the sake of... obviously selling a story.

But they also could because it was such a weird case to begin with

that, who's to say if he created a wastebasket out of human flesh,

why wouldn't he create a, you know, a lampshade?

Reporters showed up from all over the world.

Everyone wanted a piece of the story.

But what they missed, what they'll never experience...

...is the silence of that farm.

The smell of death...

...we had felt walking through his front door.

And this mask that you wore over your face,

could... could that be Mary Hogan?

You know, I can't say for sure on anything.

Well, do you remember bringing Mary home with you?

The whole thing seems impossible, but... can be. Must be.

Do you remember removing her intestines?

See, I don't...

That that is all a blank. - How about her vagina?

Do you remember removing her vagina?

Like I say, it's a daze. I guess.

Remember my asking you earlier, Eddie,

about these two pieces of tissue?

And you said they were breasts turned inside out.

And you thought maybe they could be Mary Hogan's.

They could be. I...I can't remember.

And for what reason did you possess them?

Well, kind of a remembrance, I believe, to remind me of her.

Your mother?

On the 21st of November, 1957,

after being formally charged,

Gein's attorney entered a plea of insanity.

The judge committed Ed to the Central State Hospital

for the Criminally Insane in Waupun,

pending psychiatric evaluation.

Psychiatrists said Gein was legally insane

and he was not mentally competent to stand trial.

On the 6th of January, 1958,

Judge Bond heard expert testimony from three psychologists

and agreed with the hospital's recommendation.

Ed Gein was then committed indefinitely

to the State Mental Hospital.

We all have predispositions,

and Ed Gein had a predisposition to mental illness.

But the background, the environment in which he grew up...

Over... Year after year after year,

being exposed to the psychological

and the physical context that he was,

are what created... the serial killer that we know is Ed Gein.

After many years in the Mendota State Mental Institute,

they finally did put Ed on trial in 1968.

Doctors said he was still legally insane.

Couldn't tell right from wrong. Still, the people needed closure.

They brought him back to Waushara County.

In the trial, when Ed Gein's psychiatrist was testifying,

he specifically mentioned

when Ed Gein's mother passed,

all of the people in Plainfield paid their respects,

and they came to Gein's house to extend their sympathies

and say, you know, "We're here for you.

And if you need anything, we're here."

And they essentially, they promised to Gein

that they would still pay attention to him

and still have an interest in him even after his mother's passing.

And as soon as the funeral and the newness of her death subsided,

he felt abandoned because nobody kept an interest in him

and nobody came to visit him.

And he was really just left to his own devices.

And necrophiliac acts are typically people that fear rejection,

and they have abandonment issues.

And those two things definitely check.

And you don't have to actually have sex with a dead body

to be a necrophiliac. It's just any interest in the dead.

Took the jury all of a day to decide.

Guilty, but not responsible.

Judge ordered him back to the insane asylum

to be locked away for good.

In the asylum said he was treated well.

That the food was good.

Told one visitor he was studying religion.

Later on in 1974, he petitioned for release,

said he wanted to see the world, go travelling.

Four doctors stood up and said not a chance.

He would rot there in that hospital. Folks felt cheated.

Somebody like Ed Gein,

the disturbance, the degree of the disturbance

was a long time in the making.

Was the product of a very drawn out, iterative process

where he became slowly more and more disturbed.

And indeed, he was very disturbed for a long time before anything

came to the surface.

Reversing that much disturbance

would be considered a monumental challenge.

After Ed was locked up,

they planned to auction off his farm.

Even charged folks 50 cents just to walk through it.

But holding it on Palm Sunday?

That didn't sit right with Plainfield folks.

Felt like mocking the dead.

And so on March 20th,

that house went up in flames.

Whole town watched.

And standing there, quiet as ever,

was my deputy, Frank Worden, Bernice's boy.

Just watching it burn.

They never did find out who did it.

But when Ed heard the news, he just said...

"Just as well."

Damn right.

Whenever we look at a figure like Ed Gein

or Jeffrey Dahmer...

you know, or any of those figures

who, again, seem... seem almost supernaturally horrible.

We're always looking for some answer as to what made them that way,

because that's comforting.

You know, if we could reduce these terrifying phenomena

to simple, manageable explanations,

again, it makes you feel... more in control of things.

I don't believe that any human beings are fundamentally born evil.

But it's hard to describe...

...the behaviour that Ed Gein did as anything else.

Nurses said he never caused trouble.

Spent his last years reading, drawing.

Said "please" and "thank you". Model patient.

And get this - still sewing too.

Pillows this time. Skilful as ever.

It's very interesting that we find Ed Gein finally thriving,

seeming calm and happy in the mental hospital

when he's... he's finally incarcerated.

This doesn't surprise me because here we have him

finding a place of safety.

He's no longer isolated.

And what's more, it's the absolute authoritarian care

that he will have remembered...

receiving as a young boy.

He will have... He'll feel that sense of safety...

that he felt under the...

under the power of his mother.

He still heard voices, still talked about his mama.

Like she'd be home any day now.

Ed died in July of '84.

Cancer of the liver.

They buried him in Plainfield Cemetery

next to his brother and mother.

Word got out. His headstone was stolen in 2001.

Still missing.

Tourists still visit, though.

I...sort of believe, you know, the universe...

is the cosmos divided into...

two opposing forces. Love and evil.

You know that there are certain acts are so appalling

that the only way you can really adequately describe them

is by calling them evil.

I don't think that anybody is born destined to do terrible things.

I think it's a combination of not just, like,

your environment and your upbringing, but also biology.

So, to a degree, the way you're born,

there are some differences within the brains of people that do kill.

And everybody has their own opinions, of course,

but when somebody makes a comment like,

"Oh, yeah, they're just a monster."

I think that takes away from...

from the kind of social and cultural responsibility

of why people end up this way.

Even though some of the physical things that he did

are among the worst we've ever seen from...

from any serial killers,

his motivations are not the worst,

psychologically speaking, that I've ever seen.

The grotesqueness and the extremeness

of what Ed Gein did,

I think, actually, are slightly at odds

with the... underlying psychological processes.

I've seen... I've seen worse

underlying psychological narratives

driving criminals' behaviour.

Ed Gein was driven by...

a narrative of pain.

Rather than a narrative of...

a desire to... to... to cause pain.

We all find it fascinating, I guess...

...what humans can be capable of.

I guess some folks might feel sorry for Ed.

The ultimate mommy's boy looking for the love he'd never find.

The Original Psycho.

Don't have nightmares.

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