Original subtitles

Bernice Worden had been murdered.

They'd caught Eddie because he was the one that had done it.

I knew Bernice well.

She'd been gutted out like a deer.

It was very hard to visualize somebody doing that to a human.

But we didn't know the peculiar thoughts

that went through Eddie's mind at that time.

What time was that? Do you remember?

Eddie is such a mythic figure.

Hearing this actual human voice...

I can't even remember that.

It just makes these crimes that much more real.

Well, we've been debating for years

what did Ed Gein sound like?

I have been playing Ed Gein in my brain for so long.

He sounds just as bewildered as I always expected him to.

- Sure. Always wondering,

"Why did I do this?

What possibly could have driven me to dig up these women,

to make these, you know, costumes, to do all of this?"

Like, he's still -- He's marveled.

My first reaction to him talking

is he's actually a lot more canny than I thought he was.

As I'm listening to him react,

he knows there are things he can't tell the police.

It's almost like he's already known

that this has been going on for so long

and he's surprised that they're shocked.

Yeah.

He's almost ignorant of his own macabre ways. It's crazy.

That's what people said

again and again during his confessions,

people who spoke to him,

is that people would start off a little bit hard towards him

and then they would become sympathetic

because the way they described him was as a little boy,

a demented little boy, but a little boy nonetheless.

Oh, you're bright, you know, aren't you?

Well, now, will you let me do this after?

Ed Gein had the emotional social maturity of a small child

who was, on all accounts, very dependent on his mom.

When I listened to the tapes, he seems very suggestible.

He's somebody who seems very passive.

He didn't go through the kinds of stages

and the maturation that a person would go through

if they, you know, were allowed to socialize

and have friendships outside of the home

and lived in a place where he had that kind of support.

He had never really developed into a full-fledged self.

This is the front of the Waushara County jail

as it looked in 1957.

This is where the Ed Gein tapes were actually made.

And in the back of the building

was actually where Ed Gein was held.

Everything inside the building is still original to 1957.

He actually came out of this door to go to the courthouse.

First night he got here, they put him in a drunk tank

to protect him from all the people of Plainfield.

Thought they'd be coming to get him.

Then after that, they moved him into his regular cell.

Ed Gein's cell is directly behind that second window.

He was here for three days and two nights.

This is a small town in Wisconsin.

Where they just know that train's coming.

They know it's coming. And if you're law enforcement,

this is not what you want.

You do not want this stain on your community.

People are humble,

but they have a lot of pride in -- in being good people.

Also, it happened under your nose.

- Under your nose. - You know, like,

you did not know that this ghoul was operating

right next to you.

The relics of Hollywood representations

of serial killers is that they're kind of like geniuses

who are plotting and scheming the perfect murder

and building a whole kind of, like, structure

around getting away with it.

He's an example of somebody who was not doing that.

He was acting in plain sight.

But I told them I can't understand it.

No one knew of the existence of this tape.

Till now, everyone, and myself included,

believed that his first confession came much later

than this when he was taken to the crime lab.

The fact that he was interviewed in the jail cell

immediately after he was taken into custody

changes our view of the whole timeline

and sheds very different light on the case.

When Sheriff Schley discovered Bernice Worden's naked corpse

strung up by her heels,

Gein is actually not at home,

but he is at a neighbor's house having dinner.

One of the -- the sons suddenly comes in

and -- and says he's heard that Bernice Worden has gone missing

and there's a big commotion in town.

And, you know, he wants to go into town

and see what's going on.

And -- And Ed volunteers to go with him.

Ed makes some kind of weird remark at the time,

almost indicating that he knows something dreadful has happened.

But before the two of them could leave,

the two deputies who had been dispatched to the Hills' house

show up, and they take Gein into custody.

The search of his house was actually going on

at the time this interview was taking place.

So the full extent of Gein's horrors

had not even come to light yet.

Here's this socially isolated,

clearly disturbed individual.

He finds himself being questioned by the authorities.

But the people who are interrogating him,

and I guess they were trying hard

not to be overly judgmental,

they weren't being harsh with him

or they weren't threatening him.

But, I mean, he was really in a kind of odd spot.

All of a sudden, you know, the truth is revealed.

Much more would be discovered

in the coming hours and days

as investigators excavated

this archeological dig in hell,

coming upon all of these horrors.

Gein had spent years fashioning these incredibly grotesque

household objects out of human body parts.

Investigators see objects and artifacts

that they couldn't even comprehend.

Would be in that time period a series of entirely unexpected,

very peculiar, very bizarre, shocking behavior.

Actually, the dialogue was relatively placid

and civilized,

given what you imagine could have happened

back at the police station.

One of the sheriffs that spent just six hours

in that house went back

and physically attacked Ed Gein in his jail cell

because he was so disturbed by what he'd seen

and so disturbed by what Ed Gein's actions

did to him personally.

Schley shows up and bursts into the cell,

grabs Eddie,

immediately begins to manhandle him.

Schley was in this uncontrollable blind rage.

Schley immediately wants to know who else Gein has killed

and really has to be pulled off of Gein.

Ed Gein seems like a quiet,

sort of unremarkable person.

And yet when you compare the image of him

to the stuff that police found at his house,

it's almost so jarring.

And there -- there seems to be a real disconnect

between his appearance

and the gruesome things that they discovered at his house.

I can't imagine what it must have been like.

You did not know that this ghoul was operating right next to you

and he was insinuated in all of your lives.

And he did all of these things.

They almost probably,

almost equal to Ed don't want people to know about this.

"Let's not get into too many details, Ed."

If it's true that there's a ghoul

in Plainfield, Wisconsin,

then it's also an indictment on the police.

It's an indictment on everybody.

No, my, uh -- The way I remember,

I think it was two -- either a day or two after that.

My dad was Art Schley,

County Sheriff of Waushara County.

We lived in the jail at the time.

It was no different than living in a home somewhere.

That was our home, let's put it that way.

This is a picture of us in the jail.

It is my mom and myself and my dad.

And it's in the office.

My bedroom,

if you were to cut a hole in the wall,

I would have been upstairs by the bullpen.

When my dad was voted in as sheriff,

it would have been probably the summer of '57.

And this case broke

the last part of November of '57.

He had never had any law enforcement training

before this.

And so when this big case came about,

he really didn't have a lot of experience

or a lot of knowledge on how to handle something this big.

On the night Ed Gein was arrested,

I would have been probably 11 years old.

I was in the sixth grade.

All these men were sitting in the stairway

and I couldn't get up to bed.

And I said, "Why?"

And that's when I was told what had happened.

I can't imagine someone being as normal as he seemed

and yet could do such horrible things.

Ed was just in the lower level of the jail.

I can remember Judge Boyd Clark.

He was a very nice-looking, very nice-appearing man,

had a young family,

and I probably was at his house at one point.

I actually had a crush on his son, Nelson Clark.

I remember Ed Kileen.

He lived right across the road from us.

People had said my dad roughed up Ed Gein a little bit.

I heard he grabbed him by the front of the shirt

and pushed him up against the -- the wall.

My dad was a friend of Frank Worden

because Frank Worden was a deputy of his.

And this was his mother.

I guess my dad probably was just upset to think

one human being could do something so horrific

to another human being.

I just think maybe it was a normal reaction as why

or how could you do something like that?

You would imagine there would be an outcry.

"We want to know if Mom is in her grave or not.

Did this ghoul take her from her grave?"

Families would raise a fuss.

It is odd that he could just tell them,

"Well, it's this -- this number,"

and they go, "Okay, we'll -- we'll check two.

We'll accept that -- that everything is accurate

and valid."

So that seems kind of sloppy and a little weird.

The phone rang.

We were just finishing up supper

before we went out to milk the cows.

We found out that Eddie had been picked up

for killing Mrs. Worden.

It was shocking.

There hadn't been a whole lot of murders around, you know?

You just wait for the news to develop, and --

and it did. It didn't take long.

I went in to supper.

My sister-in-law, she said,

"Did you know Eddie Gein's killed Mrs. Worden?"

And I said, "Do you know

that's the biggest damn lie I ever heard?"

That's just the very words I said.

How long had you known Mr. Gein?

- Seven years. - Seven years.

What kind of a man did you know him as?

Well, a man -- a nice man,

just like anybody else.

The only difference I'd say in the man,

he seems to be little odd.

Think about this also -- 1957,

having an actual news reporter

have to say the words "human skin suit

made from local man's mother's body."

Like, this -- They didn't want to cover, like,

that there were Black people in the Olympics.

Like, what are they going to --

Now you have this thing. They're going to literally,

like, blow your mind with this piece of information.

The term "serial killer" doesn't come out for another

20, 30 years after Ed Gein was caught.

So Ed Gein's arrest must have been a massive shock

to the American psyche and to the world.

I don't remember when I realized

what was really going on.

Probably it had to do with all the newspaper men,

all the media that was there.

They were this small farming community,

perfectly happy with being isolated

and not being known by the rest of the world.

All of a sudden, they're going to have to deal with

people like us driving into their town,

looking around, going to the graveyard

for the rest of the town's existence.

Plainfield, Wisconsin, for as long as America exists,

will be the hometown of Ed Gein, no matter what.

It was just crazy.

After a while, there was so much media there.

They'd be sitting on the steps and we'd have to say,

"Excuse me, can I get upstairs?"

And they'd have to get up and get out of the way

so we could go upstairs.

And, I mean, they weren't just sitting one or two of them.

The stairs were full of media.

What kind of a man did you know of Ed Gein as?

Well, rather simple-minded,

but he always --

I always figured he was just perfectly harmless.

You could be a serial killer or just kind of gay

and they would be in Wisconsin, be like,

"He's just a little different. He's just a little different."

I'd say he was more or less a pleasant man

who would be nice man to talk to

or somebody would like to have around.

Seems to be a harmless fella, you know.

Plainfield -- It's the home of Ed Gein.

It's not on the sign. But -- But it's -- it's known.

There are -- There are hints throughout the town.

On one hand,

we're horrified by what happened.

Like footage of, like, a car accident

or, like, an earthquake is,

on one hand, just horrifying and scary.

But there's something also morbidly exciting about that.

And we don't want to look,

but we can't look away at the same time

because of the nature of the crimes.

It's been years since I've been to Plainfield,

but even when I was researching my book,

it was a sore subject with a lot of people.

There were people who had family members

whose bodies had been exhumed by Gein.

You kind of begin to think about it.

People are talking about it.

That sucker, he's really kind of a sick devil.

You've heard of people killing people,

but you don't hear them taking them in and gutting them out

and all that kind of stuff that Eddie did.

He was in a box by himself when it come to his murders.

If you drive around the country,

there are all these small towns that take civic pride

in being home to whatever.

Plainfield was suddenly like,

"This is the town where Ed Gein committed his crimes."

Here's a picture of my grandpa and grandma's car

that my dad would use at times to take Ed Gein

to different appointments or something

when he thought maybe he'd be followed or something like that.

Okay. My dad is opening the door for Ed Gein.

Yes.

Yeah.

Ed's covering his face.

Ed was always a very polite man.

My mother made the meals and done the laundry,

and we would help take the meals down.

And when we take the food tray in to him,

he'd always thank us for bringing it.

I don't know what to say about him.

Saying the man is a nice man when he done what he done --

It's a terrible thing for him.

It's a terrible thing for the people involved.

And it was a terrible thing

for the -- for the whole community of Plainfield.

After Ed's arrest,

he was declared mentally incompetent

and consigned to a mental institution.

Competency is not the same thing as insanity.

Competency is really can you understand

the meaning of your charges.

Can you participate in a knowing manner with your attorney

and your own defense?

Are you fit to proceed to trial?

It's no shock that he'd wind up in a hospital.

The crimes are too weird. They're too violent.

They're peculiar.

Had it been something like a sexual assault or a murder,

the commission of a -- a robbery,

they would have just thrown him in prison.

But this stuff that he did was just too unthinkable

and too weird.

And, you know, my rule of thumb is if it scares a jury,

you're going to the hospital.

I'm looking at Edward Gein's records

from Central State Hospital,

and this reflects his intake.

What is interesting and consistent with his interview

at the police station is that he was found to be coherent.

The records are very descriptive,

but also in some respects contradictory.

I mean, on one hand, they talk about his train of thought

as coherent and relevant, but sometimes illogical.

Now, I don't know what that means.

That seems to be an implicit contradiction.

They also say that he experiences visual

and auditory hallucinations,

and yet they then go on to say it's uncertain

if these should be designated as overt hallucinations.

Well, I don't know what you would call them.

There's only two questions you can ask.

Is it real or is it not real?

They even are curious about whether or not

he found the bodies sexually stimulating.

And there's some speculation about that.

But I don't see anything where he says

that he found the bodies sexually stimulating.

Though he's not providing much of an explanation

for his own conduct as to what motivates him.

It's my sense that they don't have, like,

a really great idea about who this guy is

and what would have motivated him to do what he does.

They're hedging their bets.

They're not really sure themselves

and they probably never saw anything like this.

I was a consulting psychologist

at Central State Hospital

where, in the early 1970s, I had an encounter with Ed Gein.

And I must say it was memorable.

I was there working hard in this office.

I was writing away at the desk.

I heard this noise behind me.

I just kept on working because I was used to distractions.

But then I got thirsty, and so I went out in the hall.

I saw Dr. Schubert.

And he said to me, "Did you meet Mr. Gein?"

And I turned around.

There was Mr. Gein.

He wasn't very tall, white hair,

and he had these tools, a hammer and saw.

He'd been trying to put up a partition behind me.

I just about fainted.

Dr. Schubert goes,

"I guess he was taking your measure."

He was referring to the idea

that Gein had skinned various women and made,

you know, like, lampshades out of them.

I was really upset that Dr. Schubert would do this.

I complained to the other people that worked there

and they said, "Oh, Gein's harmless."

And there wasn't anything malicious in his eyes.

It was only some confusion and concern.

People in general felt kind of sorry for him.

It was an odd contrast in terms of this little old man

that evoked pity and such sensational crimes.

I later asked Dr. Schubert why Gein had done these things.

He said that as far as he could figure,

that Gein was trying to reconstitute his dead mother.

Now, how he would do that, I don't know.

But of course, the man was crazy.

This is my copy of the novel Psycho.

It's a first edition.

Very happy to have a chance

to read the first edition as it came out.

This is before the film came out.

This is as it appeared

before all the fame and -- and the hoopla.

Robert Bloch is perhaps the best known writer of horror fiction

through the middle part of the 20th century.

There's a quote by Stephen King saying,

"There was nobody better than Bloch,

nobody more prolific,

nobody more profoundly influential."

And when I graduated from high school in 1934,

I sat down and started to write professionally.

Sold my first story six weeks later.

I was 17 then and I didn't have enough sense to quit.

One of the great contributions that Bloch made

to the horror genre

was that he realized that what is between the ears

can be much more horrible

than what's out there rustling in the night.

Bloch idolized H. P. Lovecraft, who was 27 years his senior

and who would die at a young age.

Bloch started off writing that kind of supernatural horror

that H. P. Lovecraft is so well-known for.

But there was a change for Bloch.

He started reading psychology textbooks,

books by psychologists about the craft of psychology.

And so he made a shift, late '40s, early '50s,

into writing psychological horror,

as we see exemplified in Psycho.

We have this morass of things happening

at the end of the 1950s

alongside interest in psychology,

interest in psychoanalysis,

interest in theories around trauma,

interest in what does the family structure mean?

And that, I think, makes it a perfect,

perfect moment for Psycho

to really take the country by storm.

Bloch himself was in small-town Wisconsin

when this small-town Wisconsin horror story

was being exposed to the world.

That was the reason for the book.

When I heard of the Gein case,

I didn't hear anything about the details,

but I did hear about an apparently ordinary man

living an ordinary life in a very small town

where he had been observed by his neighbors for many years

and never suspected of his crimes.

And I said, "That's the story."

He was a nice man, just like anybody else.

Perfectly harmless.

I'm going to write a story about

a man in a similar situation. Point out to people

that they don't necessarily know their neighbors

or the people that they come in contact with.

And that, to me, is truly horrifying.

For Bloch, the idea that this could be happening

in a small town in the middle of Wisconsin

where everybody knows everybody's business

just absolutely fascinated him.

It fit in really well with his ideas of psychological horror

that the person you should be afraid of

is not the werewolf howling at the moon

or some sort of supernatural monster

that will come at you in the night.

It's the guy sitting a couple seats behind you on the bus.

And why is he coming after you?

Maybe there's no reason.

Maybe he's just coming after you.

The life of a pulp fiction writer during this era,

the idea wasn't necessarily to create great art all the time.

It was to sell your story, get the small payday,

sell another story, get the small payday.

Bloch reported that it took him seven weeks

from start to finish with Psycho,

which is an amazingly kind of brief period of time

if you've ever tried to write a novel.

But he was also of the generation

for whom being prolific was the way to sleep indoors

and eat every once in a while.

It is primarily a story of a girl with a secret.

She's just stolen $40,000 from her employer.

And it's about a young man

who leads a tortured secret life

so secret that he himself is not aware of it.

And it is about the buried and exhumed secrets of his mother.

Norman Bates, on the surface,

he seems sweet, he seems vulnerable.

But underneath the surface,

there's all kinds of things roiling.

There's all kinds of dark psychology

that's all wrapped up in,

of course, his obsessive relationship to his dead mother.

Bloch considered many titles for the novel.

He was inspired by words like psychology

and psychoanalysis.

It's about being a psychotic, right?

It's about somebody being a psychopath.

And that is really different from just saying

"This monster is outlandish.

This monster can never happen."

Here we have a monster who is defined

by the inner workings of his brain.

Today, organizations of specialists

in mental medicine

like the New York Psychoanalytic Institute,

have helped to gain general medical acceptance

for such doctrines, considered a radical departure

when first advanced by Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna

some 50 years ago.

It gets us toward a variety of mental illnesses,

including some pretty violent and gruesome ones

that perhaps the Ed Gein story brought up in Bloch's mind.

Psycho didn't sell particularly in any way

that was different from his previous work,

but it did attract the -- the attention of

a film production company.

They didn't accept the first offer from this film company

that they had never heard of.

They accepted the second offer, which was for $9,500,

and Bloch's cut was about $6,000 for that,

which is a nice payday for a writer of pulp fiction.

Bloch was fairly convinced that it was unfilmable,

partly the way that the narrative is kind of structured.

We have this main character in the novel.

She dies, and you're less than halfway through the novel.

And so the idea that -- that this could be filmable

successfully, given a Hollywood formula,

Bloch was just really kind of doubtful about that.

And then he found out that the film company

was actually Alfred Hitchcock,

who was looking for his next film.

Hitchcock started in England.

He was a British director.

Eventually he comes over to the States to make movies here,

and that's really where he experiences

the vast majority of his success.

And when he makes Psycho in 1960,

he really hadn't made a straight-up horror movie.

That was really the first time that he had done something

in that extreme horror genre.

Hitchcock was on a tremendous roll at that point.

This is just after North by Northwest.

Maybe the -- the rights conversation

would have been a little different

had Bloch's agent done a bit more homework

before signing away the rights.

The power of cinema in its purest form is so vast

because it can go over the whole world on a given night.

A film could play in Tokyo, West Berlin, London, New York.

And the same audience is responding emotionally

to the same things.

And no other medium can do this.

- Dirty night. - Do you have a vacancy?

Oh, we have 12 vacancies.

Psycho the novel bears a tremendous resemblance

to Psycho the film.

But one of the interesting changes that happened

between the novel

and Hitchcock's interpretation of the novel

was that Norman Bates changed subtly.

In the novel, he's probably 20 years older.

He doesn't look like the young Hollywood

leading man of Anthony Perkins, that's for sure.

He's described as balding and overweight

with an alcohol problem.

Do you go out with friends?

Well, a -- a boy's best friend is his mother.

Norman Bates

can never be separated from Tony Perkins,

who, of course, plays him and plays him so beautifully

as this kind of vulnerable character

who also houses significant darkness.

But then that also was in some parts influenced by Ed Gein.

Ed Gein had a little round face.

He always would wear, like, a baseball hat.

He'd always thank us or, you know, always say something,

greet us in some way, usually.

Just a nice little old man, really.

He really was, just like all the people said.

You couldn't believe that he would do anything that gruesome.

I don't know if he snapped or why he would do what he did,

but I don't know.

The very, very famous shower scene,

which occurs on page 39 out of 180 pages

in this edition of the novel,

it comes and goes very quickly.

The economy of language is stunning in this.

You read the novel and you look at that shower scene,

the shower scene is very, very, very brief.

And it ends a section

and it's just a series of very short sentences,

declarative sentences,

and it comes and goes so quickly.

But it's shocking.

It's the economy of language

that creates the horror for Bloch in that scene.

The last four lines of this chapter,

"Mary started to scream,

the curtains parted further,

and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife.

It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head."

And that's the end of the chapter.