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- [00:01]
James Buddy Day
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- [00:31]
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- [01:02]
Fred Reed
The men thought Eddie was different, a little bit weird and simple. But the women, they perceived him differently because the way he looked at them.
- [01:15]
James Buddy Day
I have a vivid memory of standing in the Plainfield cemetery with a shovel in my hands. Now, it's not in the way you're thinking. It's the middle of winter, and we're trying to locate artifacts recovered from the Ed Gein investigation that had vanished decades earlier. For the last six years, I've been following the trail of Ed Gein through forgotten police reports, lost recordings, and interviews with the people who knew him.
- [01:43]
Fred Reed
He was in a box by himself. When it comes to his murders, Ed
- [01:47]
James Buddy Day
Gein is one of the most infamous serial killers in American history. His crimes inspired characters like Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill. Yet much of what people think they know about Gein comes from decades of retelling, exaggeration, Myth making. Since 2019, I've been investigating the case myself, and along the way, I've uncovered evidence long thought lost. I've tracked down original documents and discovered that key parts of Gein's arrest story may not be what we've been told.
- [02:25]
Harold Schechter
Often what you see with these psychopathic figures are just kind of extreme, grotesque exaggerations of emotions and so on, you know, that normal people possess, like Charles
- [02:43]
James Buddy Day
Manson or Ted Bundy. Ed Gein has become larger than life, a real person transformed into a horror icon. But who was Ed Gein before the mythology? Today, I'm going to take you back to Wisconsin, and together we'll separate the legend from the man and examine the circumstances that shaped him. And by the end, you'll meet the real Ed Gein, not the Netflix monster, not the caricature created by popular culture, but the quiet handyman from plain whose crimes continue to cast a shadow over American culture 75 years later.
- [03:24]
Fred Reed
I don't know how to explain different, but he was just kind of different.
- [03:29]
James Buddy Day
I'm James Buddy Day. This is unmarked. When you spend years investigating a case for a documentary, something strange happens. You become so familiar with the people and places and the evidence that the public version of the story, it starts to feel almost unrecognizable. And for me, Ed Gein is one of those cases. It began in 2019 when my producing partners and I uncovered evidence of a cover up at the center of the Ed Gein investigation. Gein's original confession, taken just after his arrest on November 16, 1957, had remained hidden for more than 70 years. And in its place, historians, journalists, and true crime authors relied on a confession transcript that was released by the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory days later. It's a document that, as our investigation revealed, was far less reliable than anyone realized. We'll get to all of that in this episode. And I should mention that much of that research ultimately became the 2023 documentary series, the Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, which I directed. But a documentary can only hold so much. There are interviews, discoveries, dead ends, and strange moments from the investigation that never made it into the series. So today I want to tell you the true story of Ed Gein. Not the movie version, not the legend, the story of the man. But before we get too deep, let me catch you up. There is plenty of spectacle when it comes to Ed Gein, but we are not here for the spectacle. We are here for the truth behind it. In 1957, Ed Gein was arrested for the murder of a police Plainfield local, Bernice Worden. He would later confess to killing another local woman, Mary Hogan. Investigators also discovered that for years, Gein had been secretly entering local cemeteries and removing human remains from the graves. Those facts alone were shocking. But over the decades, the crimes have become something else entirely. The story of Ed Gein escaped the boundaries of true crime and entered popular culture, each retelling adding another layer, until the man himself was almost impossible to see beneath the mythology.
- [06:09]
Harold Schechter
You know, what's interesting about the Gein case is that it has served as the inspiration, really, for what I regard as the three most terrifying horror movies of the late 20th century. Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Science of the Lambs. And each one takes sort of different things from the Gein story. If you read the book Psycho. After Norman is arrested, he mentions Ed Gein. You know, he says, oh, people are always comparing me to Ed Gein.
- [06:43]
James Buddy Day
That's Harold Schechter. He literally wrote the book on ed Gein. His 1998 biography of Gein, Deviant, remains one of the most important works ever published on the case.
- [06:55]
Harold Schechter
Robert Bloch, who wrote the book Psycho, was living in Wisconsin at the time the Gein story broke. His wife was a native of that part of Wisconsin. They had gone back to live with her family. As I recall, she was suffering from some kind of illness. And he immediately recognized Seguin's story as being this incredible, you know, potential source for a horror novel.
- [07:22]
James Buddy Day
And let's be honest, part of the reason we keep returning to the Gein case is the horror. The details are so unsettling that they almost demand retelling. But after six years of researching Gein, interviewing people who knew him and walking the places where his story unfolded, I've come to believe that the horror is also the thing that prevents us from really understanding him. The more frightening Gein becomes, the less human he appears. And if we're going to understand what happened in plainfield in the 1950s, we have to resist that temptation. So how do we get past the monster? How do we find the humanity in a man newspapers once called the ghoul of Plainfield? The same way we always do. We go back. Because before Ed Gein became a headline, before he became a horror icon, before he became a monster, he was a child. And to meet him, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. When I first visited Plainfield, one thing surprised me. How little it's changed. The same roads that Ed Gein traveled are still there. The downtown is small enough to walk across in minutes. The hardware store where Bernice Worden was last seen has been renovated over the years, but it's still immediately recognizable. Standing there, it became easier to understand that this wasn't some forgotten gothic landscape. It's a farming community, a real place filled with ordinary people.
- [09:04]
Fred Reed
It was a little town of farmers, small farmers. Most everybody was a dairy farmer or had cows or they could have had pigs, not too much beef. And it was all dry land at that time. There was no irrigation like there is now. So it was what you call a poor community.
- [09:24]
James Buddy Day
That's Fred Reed, who we tracked down during one of our many trips to Plainfield. This interview is from a decade ago, and unfortunately, we've lost touch with him since. But Fred grew up near the Gein farm, and Knew Ed personally.
- [09:40]
Fred Reed
Eddie was always strange. He might have been a little mentally ill, but that, you know, we just had no idea. He was just an odd person. Eddie was odd, I guess.
- [09:55]
James Buddy Day
Fred is one of the many people I've met whose lives intersected with with Ed Gin. Over the years I've spoken with many people who knew him. Like the family who housed him while he was first in custody and the employees who worked at the hospital where he spent the rest of his life. And despite their different experiences, they all describe remarkably similar things. A man of few words. Painfully shy, observant, thoughtful.
- [10:24]
Fred Reed
He was quiet when he was in your presence. He was in your presence. But not loud and obnoxious. Not contributing a lot to the conversations that were going on or situations that people were talking about. He would just kind of stand there and observe.
- [10:42]
James Buddy Day
Ed Gein is born in La crosse, Wisconsin in 1906. A few years later, the family acquires a 155 acre farm outside Plainfield. His father, George Gein, is a struggling farmer whose life is marked by alcoholism. His mother, Augusta is something entirely different. Augusta is intensely religious, controlling, and by many accounts deeply disappointed that she never was able to have the daughters she wanted.
- [11:17]
Fred Reed
Well, the thing that we heard about Augusta was that she was very strict, hated men. And then that's about all we knew because she died. Sharks when I was 3, 4 years old.
- [11:32]
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- [12:32]
James Buddy Day
Contemporary accounts describe Augusta as believing that men were weak, lustful, morally, corruption. And for young Eddie, those beliefs become the lens through which he understands the world. I wanted to understand that isolation for myself. So I drove out to the Ghien farm. The original farmhouse is long gone, but the Landscape remains, and even today it feels remote, surrounded by fields and woods, and that's with modern roads and vehicles. In the early 20th century, it might as well have been on another world. This is where Eddie spends most of his childhood. School records indicate that he attends through the eighth grade, but we're talking about a one room farmhouse. And regardless, Augusta tightly controls his life. Friends are discouraged, girls forbidden. The outside world is portrayed as sinful and dangerous.
- [13:32]
Harold Schechter
Well, from what we know, his mother Augusta was this very, very dominant figure in his life who kept him very tightly tied to her apron strings, who apparently spent a lot of time warning him against the dangers of having anything to do with the opposite sex.
- [13:58]
James Buddy Day
This is where something important begins to form. Eddie develops a relationship with his mother that is both dependent and contradictory. She becomes his source of morality, identity and emotional security. But buried beneath that dependence are signs of resentment and frustration.
- [14:19]
Harold Schechter
She kept him in a state of perpetual infantilism, really. And he developed what appeared to be, you know, this classical love hate relationship with her in which he was completely dependent on her, you know, an extreme mama's boy.
- [14:41]
James Buddy Day
Years later, after his arrest, a psychiatrist asks Gein about his parents. His answers are revealing, and I'll read them to you now. Quote. His feelings toward his father are overwhelmingly negative. He describes George as a drunk who abused him and his brother. But in the medical notes, when the conversation turns to Augusta, Gein's composure breaks. These records note that he begins to cry. And to describe her, he offers only a simple, she was good in every way. That statement tells us almost every, everything we need to know. What we're seeing here is what psychologists call pathological idealization. Gein's attachment to his mother has become so central to his identity that he can no longer see her as a complex human being. The record suggests that Augusta is controlling. Yet when Gein is asked to describe her, all of that disappears. And by adolescence, Augusta is no longer Gein's mother, at least psychologically. She's become his source of identity. Gein isn't just attached to his mother. He depends on her to understand who he is.
- [15:59]
Fred Reed
Ed, he was kind of a shy fella. That hat, he always wore the hat. You see the pictures of him in that kind of a funny hat that he wore. He was extremely polite.
- [16:13]
James Buddy Day
What Fred Reed is describing is the contradiction at the heart of Ed Gein. Privately, he becomes increasingly dependent upon that idealized image of his mother. But publicly, he's something else entirely.
- [16:28]
Harold Schechter
Well, you know, Gein was a little bit regarded as the town oddball. He always lived a fairly isolated life, but he was regarded as harmless, somewhat simple minded, again, kind of town weirdo.
- [16:46]
Fred Reed
Well, everybody thought he was odd. Eddie would kind of stand off the side and listen, take in what was going on. Eddie was not a leader, you know, he wasn't boisterous or anything like that. He was just there.
- [17:02]
James Buddy Day
The graves of both George and Augusta Gein still sit in the Plainfield Cemetery, and Ed Gein is buried right beside them. When I visited, a local researcher showed me the plots. Ed Gein's grave is unmarked. The original headstone was stolen years ago and never replaced to discourage further vandalism. But we had a scale replica of Augusta's headstone created for our documentary series, one that now sits right behind me on the shelf. And Ed's father, George, gave Gein his headstone is also in place, and it records his death as April 1, 1940, when Ed Gein is 34 years old. So back in 1940, with George gone, one of the few barriers standing between Ed Gein and his mother has disappeared entirely. And the consequences of that shape everything that follows.
- [18:01]
Harold Schechter
He was actually probably brighter than people give him credit for, but I think that the general impression of him was, you know, this somewhat pathetic, dull witted, you know, nice enough guy.
- [18:25]
James Buddy Day
Two years later, it's 1942. The Second World War is raging across Europe and the Pacific. Millions of men are entering military service. And in rural communities like Plainfield, enlistment and the draft are reshaping daily life. Ed Gein's older brother Henry, attempts to enter the armed forces but is rejected. Considered too old for service, and unlike Ed, Henry appears to have developed some independence from Augusta's influence. Locals later report that Henry saw his mother more critically than Ed did and was increasingly frustrated by the hold she maintained over both their lives. What's interesting about this period is how it aligns with what psychiatrists would later observe about Ed Gein himself. When I reviewed Gein's rare hospital records, I was struck by how different they were from the popular image of him. The doctors describe a man who is aware of his surroundings and capable of carrying on coherent conversation. They note that he speaks in a quiet, modulated voice and measure his IQ as 99, which is essentially average for the time. In other words, this is not the portrait of a man disconnected from reality, but as the report continues, the doctor's note that guy never married and never had any sexual relations. They describe a man attempting to suppress normal sexual drives through what they call, quote, intellectual inhibition. They identify significant sexual conflicts involving guilt, identity, and voyeuristic fantasy. When I first read that passage, it felt like I was seeing the psychological consequences of Augusta's influence in black and white. For decades, Gein was taught that sexuality was sinful, that women were dangerous, that desire itself was something to fear. Those feelings don't disappear simply because a person reaches adulthood.
- [20:32]
Fred Reed
He just seemed to have kind of a different stare to him. He would kind of print like, stare out into space if there's something. If you weren't talking direct to him, you know.
- [20:42]
James Buddy Day
By the time Ed gein reaches his 30s, the records suggest a man who is almost completely withdrawn from normal romantic and sexual relationships, while privately struggling with impulses that he neither understands nor knows how to express. At the same time, tensions are growing inside the Gein household. His brother Henry becomes increasingly concerned with about the relationship between Ed and Augusta. And according to later accounts, he openly criticizes their mother in front of Ed and questions the influence she has over him. And that history is key because in 1944, Henry Gein dies under circumstances that remain controversial to this day. In my research, I came across a newspaper clipping from the Daily Tribune dated May 1944. The headline reads, rites today for a man who died in fire. I'll read the article to you. Funeral services were held here this afternoon For Henry Gein, 42, Town of Plainfield, farmer who died of a heart attack while trying to protect his farm from the ravages of a grass and brush fire. A searching party with lanterns and flashlights searched the burned over area, and in the evening, several hours after the search began, found the dead body of Mr. Gein lying face down. Apparently, the man had been dead for some time when he was found, and it appeared that the death was the result of a heart attack, since he'd not been burned or otherwise injured. End quote. On its face, it's a tragic but unremarkable story of the time. But decades later, people would begin looking at Henry Gein's death very differently. So here's what we know. On May 16, 1944, Ed and Henry are burning vegetation on marshland near the gain farm. At some point, the fire spreads beyond their control. And as darkness approaches, Ed returns alone and reports that he and Henry have become separated. A search party is assembled, and according to accounts that survive, Ed leads the search party directly to Henry's body.
- [23:09]
Fred Reed
The only thing I heard that his brother had died at that time, fighting a fire, they thought, and I don't know, and then they thought that Eddie had done him in. But I Don't. I don't know. That was never proven.
- [23:23]
James Buddy Day
Fred Reed's uncertainty reflects something I've encountered repeatedly in Plainfield. Even today, people have opinions about Henry's death. But opinions aren't evidence. What makes this case so intriguing is not what people believe happened. It's what never happened. After Henry's death, there's no homicide investigation. There's no meaningful effort to determine whether foul play is involved. And despite questions that emerge years later, a full autopsy is never performed. The official conclusion is that Henry has died of asphyxia and heart failure while fighting the fire. Could that be true? Absolutely. But when viewed through the lens of what we now know about Ed Gein, the circumstances raise difficult questions. If Henry was murdered, then the story of Ed Gein begins not in 1957, but 13 years earlier in a burned out marsh outside of Plainfield. What we know for certain is that shortly after Henry's death, Augusta suffers a stroke. Her health deteriorates rapidly. She becomes increasingly dependent on Ed for care. And with Henry gone, there's no longer anyone standing between mother and son. This goes on until December of 1945, when Augusta Gein dies from a massive stroke.
- [24:51]
Harold Schechter
I mean, he was, you know, from all accounts, I mean, reduced to this state of helpless weeping and sobbing at her funeral. She was, you know, his only love, really.
- [25:08]
James Buddy Day
Additional records I uncovered years later help explain the depth of that loss. When a psychiatrist interviews Gein after his arrest, they note that he became emotional when discussing his mother. They report that after her death, he reports hearing her voice on several occasions and even describe a period where Ed Gein believes he can raise people from the dead through willpower. This obviously is not ordinary grief. It's grief becoming entangled with developing friends, fantasy. It's the beginning of a man losing his anchor to reality.
- [25:45]
Harold Schechter
He had lost, you know, his dearest and only true companion. He turned her bedroom into a kind of shrine. Sealed it off, never entered it again.
- [25:55]
Fred Reed
We heard that once his mother died, he was felt so bad about it that he boarded him up and left it exactly the same as was when she was living there.
- [26:05]
Harold Schechter
So.
- [26:06]
Fred Reed
And I'd only heard that it was the bedroom. Her bedroom. I don't know if any more rooms. I don't know how many rooms were in the house. Never in there. So I don't know. But he did board that up. That was boarded up when the policemen come.
- [26:21]
James Buddy Day
For years, Ed Gein has been taught that women are dangerous, that sexuality is corrupting, that the outside world is sinful. The one exception was always Augusta. Now she's gone. And according to records, Gein becomes increasingly withdrawn, isolated, and preoccupied with thoughts of death.
- [26:49]
Fred Reed
People trusted him just like you would if you. The next door neighbor, say, well, we gotta be gone or got a funeral to go to or something. You want to come over and watch the kids for a while, and Eddie would be there to do it.
- [27:01]
James Buddy Day
Despite what's happening underneath the surface, this is how people saw Ed Gein at the time. Solitary but trusted. And that's one of the most unsettling things about this case. Because while Plainfield saw a quiet handyman, something very different is taking shape inside the Gein farmhouse. After Augusta's death, Gein's fantasy life becomes increasingly detached from reality.
- [27:28]
Fred Reed
His farmhouse was just kind of a square house, as I remember it, and had kind of a lean to or garage or something kind of on the side of it like most houses did. The outside was kind of an old, unpainted house. I don't know if there was anybody that he confided in or how that worked. You know, that was. You know, the communication isn't like it is now.
- [27:55]
James Buddy Day
Gein is not living in a city surrounded by people who might notice his deterioration. He's alone on a remote farm in a house slowly falling apart around him. And inside that house, his fantasy life becomes more elaborate. Later records will describe Ed's behavior from this period as morbid and ghoulish, involving the exhumation of several bodies and. And fashioning things like masks from human remains. Gein will later tell investigators that he visits cemeteries repeatedly over a period of years, targeting fresh burials.
- [28:34]
Fred Reed
The house, I guess, was a total disarray. There are a lot of books that we heard that he had, how to preserve, and if you cut people up, which he was doing, how to preserve some of that, those parts and everything, it made some strange thoughts go through your mind. How in the heck a person could do this to another human and have it kept quiet for so long?
- [29:01]
James Buddy Day
You know, there's no question that fantasy is driving this behavior. But where does that fantasy come from? When investigators search gein's farmhouse in 1957 after his arrest, they discover a substantial collection of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings. Ed Gein is often portrayed as an isolated farmhand with little interest in the outside world. But the evidence suggests something different. He was a reader. He consumed information, and he appears to have been particularly interested in stories involving anatomy and the human body. While researching the case, I've spent a lot of time reviewing contemporary newspapers and magazines that would have been available during the years that Gein was living alone on the farm. And again and again, I keep encountering reports from Europe. Following the second World war, as allied forces liberated concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials under unfolded, Newspapers began publishing shocking accounts of Nazi atrocities. Readers were confronted with stories of preserved body parts, Human remains used for scientific experiments, and allegations that objects had been fashioned from human skin. And when I compared those reports to the objects later recovered from Gein's farmhouse, the similarities were impossible to ignore. It's remarkable how much the images and stories Gein encountered in those years provided him with sort of a blueprint. Real world examples that became incorporated into the private world he was constructing on the farm.
- [30:47]
Harold Schechter
Gein was primarily really a necrophiliac, you know. What Gein was doing over the course of about a dozen years Was exhuming the corpses of middle aged or elderly women who presumably reminded him of his dead mother.
- [31:09]
James Buddy Day
One of the more interesting moments in my investigation happened in the Plainfield cemetery. Standing among the graves, I was able to examine the first burial site that Ed Gein is believed to have disturbed. And something immediately stood out. The grave sits directly in front of Augusta Gein's. For decades, researchers have speculated that Gein's real objective Was not the women buried there at all. It was his mother. The theory goes that Gein intended to exhume Augusta, but discovered that her casket had been protected beneath a concrete slab, Making the task far more difficult than he anticipated. Unable to reach her, he took turned his attention to local obituaries. Now, most of the evidence for this comes from Gein's statements that were made years later after his arrest. There's no physical evidence proving that he ever attempted to open Augusta's grave. In fact, while we were in Plainfield, we submitted a formal request to exhume Augusta's grave and examine the burial conditions for ourselves. That request was was denied. So these questions remain unanswered. But whether Gein intended to dig up Augusta or not the locations of those graves Forces us to confront a more important question. Why was he robbing graves in the first place? We understand where his fantasy comes from, but the moment we start listing the objects recovered from the Gein's farmhouse, We risk doing exactly what the talent tabloids did in 1957. We become fascinated by the objects and lose sight of the person. The more useful question is not what Gein was making, it's what those objects meant to him. Records suggest that Gein was not simply collecting trophies. He was trying to solve an impossible emotional Problem. His mother was dead, and he could not form normal addition adult intimacy. He had been raised to fear sexuality, to distrust women, and to view the desire itself as shameful. At the same time, he'd elevated Augusta into something close to a saint, the only woman he considered pure, the only person he ever truly depended upon. And in a state of despondency and identity fracture, he derives a new fantasy, one in which he becomes his mother.
- [33:38]
Harold Schechter
He was making a kind of skin suit in which he would, you know, in which he would dress and apparently pretend to be his own mother.
- [33:50]
James Buddy Day
Some researchers argue that Gein was not simply trying to possess his mother, but to become her. This aspect of the case is incorporated into the character of Buffalo Bill in the movie, such as Silence of the Lambs. Film scholar KE Sullivan has written about the way Gein's story has been repeatedly misread and sensationalized through the lens of horror films and popular culture. But the records do suggest that identity fracture is at the center of this.
- [34:20]
Harold Schechter
You know, it's very hard to totally get into the psychology of somebody as profoundly aberrant as Ed Gein. But, you know, one of the things that was going on, that appeared to be going on was he was both at the same time, enacting, you know, this rage against the mother who had dominated and in many ways ruined his life, you know, by. By violating and desecrating these female corpses in such a horrendous way. But at the same time, you know, he seemed to be trying to reconstitute her. He seemed to be trying to bring her back.
- [35:08]
James Buddy Day
By 1954, Gein's fantasy has become more elaborate. The graveyards are no longer enough, and he turns his attention towards women in town.
- [35:19]
Fred Reed
He always stared at the women as they walked around. The women would say, well, he always give me a creepy feeling. He always give me a funny feeling. You know, they didn't really think they'd want to be alone, you know, with him at any time. They'd soon have somebody around because he did have a strange aura about him.
- [35:44]
James Buddy Day
One of these women is Mary Hogan. Mary had immigrated to the United States from Germany and eventually settled in Wisconsin. She ran a small tavern near the reed family farm.
- [35:58]
Fred Reed
Mrs. Hogan, that was a little tavern up there north of where our farm was. It was probably four miles up there. My folks, neither one or dad and uncle, Mother, none of them drank, so never was in the tavern. But it was just a small place.
- [36:16]
Harold Schechter
I understand because of her stature and age, she bore some resemblance to Gein's love and hated mother. So again, I think in his madness, he saw Mary Hogan and his other victim, Bernice Worden, as kind of surrogates for his own mother.
- [36:42]
James Buddy Day
We don't know exactly what happens between Ed Gein and mary hogan on December 8, 1954, but according to the original investigative notes, at approximately 4:40pm a local man enters the tavern and finds blood on the floor. Searching the tavern, authorities discover a cartridge casing from a.32 caliber revolver. Mary Hogan is gone.
- [37:07]
Fred Reed
Mary Hogan was missing, and I suppose they had found some blood, but they never found out. Nobody knew who did it. And the funny thing was that after that it happened. I know that the threshing crew, they were talking about it with Eddie. And Eddie says, hi, I got her down to my place. And I said, eddie, you fool, you haven't got her down to your place. And they said, yes, I do. And, you know, everybody laughed and joked about it, and that was the extent of it. And he was telling the truth. He did have her down to his place.
- [37:40]
James Buddy Day
That anecdote captures the impossible contradiction of Ed Gein. He tells the truth, and nobody believes him. In fact, Mary Hogan's murder would have remained a mystery forever if police had not searched Ed Gein's farmhouse three years later and found artifacts made from her remains.
- [37:59]
Fred Reed
It was very hard to visualize that of somebody doing that to human. You know, we butchered pigs, we butchered cows and stuff and deer. But to have thinking that somebody would take a person and do that to him. But we didn't know the peculiar thoughts that went through Eddie's mind at that time.
- [38:26]
James Buddy Day
After killing Mary Hogan, Gein appears to have turned his attention towards another woman in town, Bernice Worden, an elderly widow and grandmother who works at the local hardware store where Gein regularly purchases supplies. What's striking is how closely Bernice fits a pattern that has already begun to emerge. For years, Gein has been searching cemeteries for women who resemble his mother. But no matter what Gein brings home, he can never accomplish the one thing he actually wants, which is to bring his mother back in some form. And that's what makes Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden so significant. Because instead of searching for pieces of his mother among the graves, he begins focusing on living women who resemble her. Women who, in Gein's increasingly distorted worldview, represent something closer to the original.
- [39:21]
Fred Reed
I knew Bernice well. I remember her as a nice woman, old, friendly. If we went in there, I'd be up there with my uncle, who was usually the one that would take and we'd go get the feed ground for the cows.
- [39:41]
James Buddy Day
The morning of November 16, 1957, begins under circumstances almost impossible to recreate today. It's the opening of deer season, and much of the male population of Plainfield is in the woods before sunrise. Many businesses are closed. The town is unusually quiet. For Gein, it creates opportunity. He enters warden's hardware store and purchases a gallon of antifreeze. At some point afterwards, Bernice Worden is shot with a.22 caliber weapon. Weapon. Her body is removed from the store. Money is taken from the register. Hours later, investigators discover spent shell casings and a sales slip documenting the antifreeze purchase.
- [40:27]
Fred Reed
We heard that Bernice. They thought she'd been murdered. She wasn't there. The store. They just thought that she was missing and thought she must have been murdered because they'd found blood.
- [40:40]
James Buddy Day
Geen transports Bernice back to his farm. And then, after carrying out acts that would ultimately make international headlines, he leaves to visit neighbors for coffee. That's where police find him. In my research, I came across the official autopsy report of Bernice Worden's body. It reads in part, the body of a murdered and mutilated woman. Mrs. Bernice Worden has been found in the woodshed of the old Gein farmhouse near Plainfield, Wisconsin. The body had been found hanging by the heels from the roof bars. Decapitated and eviscerated head and viscera have been found in the same location. The vulva in a box and the heart in a plastic bag.
- [41:27]
Fred Reed
The phone rang, and we were just finishing up supper before we went out to milk the cows and then do the night chores. We found out that night that Eddie had been picked up for killing Mrs. Wardner. And my dad and uncle. My uncle always lived with us. He never was married, so he lived with us. And he and dad were talking. God dang it. They said, somebody's picking on Eddie again. He wouldn't do anything like that. He's harmless.
- [41:56]
James Buddy Day
At this point, Gein is in custody, where he reportedly gives a lengthy confession. And much of what has been written about Ed Gein over the last 75 years comes from this confession that he supposedly gave to investigators after his arrest at the state crime lab. If you've read a book about Gein or watched a documentary or listened to podcasts, chances are you've encountered some version of this confession already. I certainly had. But in 2019, a family connected to the original investigation contacted me and my producing partner. They told us that the story everyone knew wasn't the whole story. According to our original reporting, before Ed Gein was transported to the Wisconsin State Crime Lab, he had already confessed in Plainfield on the night of his arrest. Not to state investigators, not to psychiatrists, but to a local judge named Boyd Clark. And that confession had been recorded. Now, for the for decades, those recordings remained hidden inside a safety deposit box. But they were provided to me, and we restored the tapes and ultimately presented portions of them in our documentary series, the Lost Tapes of Ed Gein. And to this day, I possess the only complete copies known to exist. And when I first listened to them, I realized something immediately. This is not the Ed Gein I thought I knew. Now, before we go any further, you're not going to hear those recordings in this episode. First, they're extraordinarily difficult to hear. The tapes are decades old. They're stored in less than ideal conditions. And despite extensive restoration work, much of that audio remains faint, distorted and obscured. Not ideal for a podcast. Second, I don't own the the rights to the recordings themselves. Those rights belong to the documentary production. So I can't simply play the tapes throughout this podcast, even though you'll find others who have ripped them off. But I have spent years listening to them. And Ed Gein isn't delivering long, thoughtful explanations. He doesn't offer detailed psychological insights. He doesn't speak like the Ed Gein that appears in books and documentaries and TV shows. He's painfully quiet, hesitant, uncertain. He struggles to remember names. Oftentimes, he appears confused about timelines and events. Frequently, his answers are only a few words long. The gain on those recordings sounds remarkably similar to the man described by the people who knew him in Plainfield. And the confession that historians have relied upon for decades seems. Seems very different. That version presents a Gein who is articulate, insightful, reflective, and remarkably detailed. The contrast is impossible to ignore. Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting the later confession is entirely false. What I am suggesting is that it is not a verbatim account of anything Ed Gein actually said. And the hidden confession not only reveals that Gein was interviewed extensively in the local jail. They also reveal that after those interviews, Gein accompanied officials to the local cemeteries, where he attempted to identify the graves he had opened.
- [45:25]
Fred Reed
To prove that he had dug up the graves, they went and dug some of those back up, and they found a crowbar in one, they found a hammer in another that he had left behind in his haste.
- [45:36]
James Buddy Day
Eventually, Gein is transported to court, formally arraigned, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Wisconsin Central State hospital. And there, for the first time, doctors begin trying to answer the questions that still haunt this case today. When news of Gein's crimes broke, the story spread across America. With astonishing speech, newspapers competed to outdo one another. They called him the Plainfield Ghoul, or the Mad Butcher of Plainfield. The headlines transformed a disturbed and painfully shy handyman from rural Wisconsin into a national monster. And in many ways, that transformation, it never ended. Just 30 miles away, an aspiring writer named Robert Bloch foundation followed the case closely. Bloch later wrote that he was fascinated by the idea that a killer with such grotesque compulsions could live unnoticed in a small farming community where everyone supposedly knew everyone. The result was Robert Bloch's novel called Psycho. At the same time, Gein's house becomes a tourist attraction. His belongings become collectibles. His. His car is purchased by a carnival promoter and exhibited for paying audiences. Even the farm itself becomes part of the spectacle. But before the property can be sold at auction, the farmhouse is burned to the ground.
- [47:07]
Fred Reed
All we knew is that that one morning we got up and Eddie Gein's house had burnt down. And we had heard that took a long time for the fire department to get there. So that's, you know, that was in the community. And I think that's what happened because I'm sure it was arson and I think there was proof of that.
- [47:27]
James Buddy Day
It isn't until 1968 when Gein is finally brought to trial. Because of the cost of prosecution, he's only tried for the murder of Bernice Worden. The proceedings last just a week. The verdict is unusual even by the standards of the day. Gein is found guilty of murder and not guilty by reason of insanity. At the same time, he is returned to the hospital and there he remains for the rest of his life. And that's what makes this case endure. Because if Ed Gein were only a monster, there would be nothing to learn. Instead, he reminds us of something much more uncomfortable. The people who commit the worst crimes are rarely the creatures we imagine them to be. They're human beings. And until we understand that, we'll never understand why these crimes happen at all. Before we wrap a few show notes, we often get comments on where people can see extended interviews or research that we based our show on. And all that is available inside our Patreon called Unmarked Case Files, where you can examine the evidence for yourself. There's also all our audio episodes which are available ad free. And early next, you can pick up my book, Charles Manson the Last Words on Amazon, Kindle and exclusively Kindle Unlimited. We are going back to Spahn Ranch this summer with new content across multiple platforms related to the Manson murders. So now is it good a time as ever to pick it up? If you want to see what I'm working on in real time, you can follow me on Instagram amesbuddyday. I'm not hard to find. Unmarked is produced by John Nadeau. Our additional producer is Jesse Demarais. This episode was edited by Dave Alderson. Until next week, this is Unmarked
- [49:28]
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