Now Playing
From Grave Robber to Killer: The Mind Behind the Masks
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On November 16, 1957, investigators entered Ed Gein's barn and found something that had no category yet — a crime scene that would redefine American horror. This episode reconstructs the discovery, the grave-robbing years, and the mother who made him.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The morning of November 16th, nineteen fifty-seven, starts like any other in Plainfield, Wisconsin. A Saturday.
Gein's property sat about ten miles outside Plainfield, out past the fields and the tree lines, on a stretch of rural Wisconsin that didn't draw visitors. He was known well enough in town.
Deputy Frank Worden and the officers with him entered the barn first. The farmhouse would come later.
The smell hit them before they could take anything in properly. The farmhouse hadn't been maintained in years.
Two confirmed murders. That's the official count.
Augusta Gein died on December 29th, nineteen forty-five. For Ed Gein, that date was a rupture from which he never recovered.
What the evidence suggests is a man who had been absorbing his mother's identity for years before her death and continued that process after it, just through different means. The religious framework Augusta installed in him treated women simultaneously as sacred and dangerous.
When Gein was taken into custody on November 16th, nineteen fifty-seven, he didn't run. He was found at a neighbor's house nearby, calm, cooperative.
Here's what the Gein case did that went far beyond Wisconsin. The newspaper coverage of the arrest and the farmhouse discovery ran nationally in late nineteen fifty-seven.
The barn is where Bernice Worden was found. It's where the investigation began in earnest.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.