Ed Gein

Family, Childhood and Adolescence

Origin

Even before the birth of the children, George Philip Gein (1873-1940) was an alcoholic and had problems holding a position for a long time. He had worked as a carpenter, insurance agent and tanner, as well as in a power station and for a railway company. Since he was quite capable of making a good impression, he managed to win over 19-year-old Augusta Wilhelmine Lehrke (1878-1945) at the age of 24. Like him, she came from Wisconsin, where she had been brought up in a strictly religious Lutheran family and was very close to her father. Their marriage was unhappy from the start; George Gein drank away the money, his wife mocked him for it, and he kept silent or beat her up. Augusta Gein herself came from a very strict home where chastising children was a common parenting practice. Although she abhorred sexuality and considered it impure and a sign of male lust, she fulfilled her "marital duties" because she wanted children.

Early childhood

Their first son Henry George Gein was born in 1901. Augusta Gein was of the opinion that it would be easier to raise a girl according to her ideas and therefore hoped very much for the birth of a daughter. On August 27, 1906, she gave birth to their second child, Edward Theodore Gein, called Ed. George Gein continued to drink and continued to have trouble keeping a job, so Augusta, who set the tone in the family, determined owning her own business would be the solution. In 1909, they became owners of a small grocery store. However, Augusta Gein had to do most of the work herself, as her husband lacked ambition and continued to drink. The father beat his sons, who despised him for his lifestyle. The two exhibited aggressive behavior themselves at a young age.

The family farm

When Ed was seven years old, Augusta Gein decided to leave town to protect her children from the harmful influences of those. Beginning in 1914, the family's new primary residence was a farm, with dairy farming, near Plainfield. There was a two-story farmhouse, barn, chicken coop and tool shed, and about 80 acres of land.

She chose this deserted area to protect her growing sons from reports of fornication and adultery. The sons were only allowed to leave the property to attend school. She preached to her sons the sinfulness of human sexuality. She constantly repeated that all women were whores and sex was for procreation only, not pleasure, but never enlightened them. She read to them every day from the Bible, preferring those parts that dealt with death and destruction.

Gein was a shy boy who loved to read and had no friends. He never openly questioned his mother's parenting methods, but she often caught him secretly masturbating in the bathtub, which angered her greatly. As a teenager, watching his parents butcher a pig on the farm excited him. He was also interested in anatomy books and accounts of cannibalism. His brother Henry mocked the younger boy as a mama's boy after he failed to get the brother to socialize with him.

Death of the family

Gein's father died in 1940 at the age of 66. Four years later, there was a major fire on the family farm that killed Gein's brother. Edward told police he lost sight of his brother in the thick smoke. Nevertheless, he was able to lead the police officers directly to the body. Although Henry Gein was diagnosed with head trauma, "death by asphyxiation" was entered on the death certificate. Henry Gein is therefore considered a possible first victim of his brother. After his mother died the following year, Gein lived alone on his parents' farm.

Mental problems and crime

Relationship with the mother

Augusta Gein thought it was certainly easier to raise a girl and make her a proper, chaste and religious woman according to her ideas. So she endured the sexuality she hated after Henry's birth and prayed for a girl. At Edward's birth, his mother was disappointed, but vowed to raise this boy so well that he would become different from all other men.

Augusta Gein was dominant and set the tone and pace in the family. She was not only overly religious, but also extremely concerned with cleanliness (true to the motto "cleanliness is next to godliness"). Although she despised her husband more and more as time went on, divorce on religious grounds was unthinkable.As her sons grew into young men, their mother urged them to pay no attention to girls and women, saying they were all tramps. In addition, their mother regularly made her sons swear to remain sexually chaste.

Shortly after the untimely death of her older son, Augusta suffered a stroke and was dependent on Ed's help, which made her bond with him even closer. Now it was he who read to her from the Bible. She passed away shortly after a second stroke brought on by great excitement over an event in the neighborhood. The neighbor was beating his dog violently with a stick when a woman came out of the neighbor's house and yelled at him to leave the poor mutt alone. He did not listen to her, but beat the dog to death. Augusta got very upset about the matter, though it was not the death of the dog that enraged her, but the fact that the woman, to whom the neighbor was not married, should not have interfered. She was his whore and shouldn't even be there, Augusta insisted. Ed, however, felt his mother had been perfect. When asked about her, his eyes would moisten and he would praise how good, how pure and pious she had been. In her son's eyes, she had been what a woman should be.

First murder

Gein was 39 by now, still a bachelor, and very affected by his mother's death, so he spent a lot of time at her grave. However, he also began to socialize and frequented the local pub, Pine Grove Tavern, run by Mary Hogan. He became friends with the tavern's elderly proprietress, who resembled his mother in pure appearance. In terms of lifestyle, however, the twice-divorced woman was the opposite of Augusta. The insecure and inexperienced man could not accept that she was not only flirting with him but also with others. He resolved his emotional irritation by shooting the 51-year-old innkeeper in her bar in Pine Grove, Wisconsin on December 8, 1954. He transported the body to his home in his car.

Second murder

The next murder was committed three years later, on November 16, 1957, when Ed believed he knew that Bernice Worden had stolen her husband from another woman, who then committed suicide. She was also said to have been responsible for the breakdown of a marriage.

Gein shot the 58-year-old in her Plainfield hardware store and took her body. Police came to the farm the next day for a search after the deceased's son testified he thought he was a suspect. Worden's decapitated body was found without entrails, the body having been hung up in Gein's shed like a piece of game.

Body snatching

Aside from the remains of Worden and Hogan, police found numerous parts of various other bodies (at least 15) that had made their way from the cemetery to the farm through body snatching.

Gein had taken only female corpses, many of them middle-aged or slightly older. His two murder victims were reminiscent of his mother in both age and physique.

Among the finds were a suit made of human skin, masks made of human faces, a box with female genitals, a collection of noses. A human heart was found in the kitchen, as well as human flesh in the refrigerator. Gein pleaded guilty to about 40 counts of body snatching, testifying it had become more and more compulsive. He strongly denied necrophilia, saying the corpses smelled too bad.

Gein had cut off the heads of his victims and made their skulls into bowls from which his dogs and cats ate.