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Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill & Leatherface: The Man Who Made Them Real
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ed Gein robbed graves, wore masks of human skin, and built furniture from bones — and no one in Plainfield suspected a thing. This is the chapter that explains how a quiet Wisconsin farmer became the founding father of American horror.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
How does a man become the template for three of the most terrifying fictional killers in American history, and no one around him knows anything is wrong? That's the question that sits at the center of Ed Gein's story.
To understand what investigators found on that November day, you have to understand where Ed Gein came from. He was born in nineteen oh six in La Crosse County, Wisconsin.
He was left alone on the farm. He sealed off Augusta's bedroom and kept it exactly as it had been in her lifetime.
Gein didn't collect body parts the way investigators sometimes imagine in these cases, stored and hidden away in boxes. He incorporated them into his living space.
By the early nineteen fifties, grave robbery was no longer satisfying. The bodies were decomposed.
Bernice Worden ran the hardware store in Plainfield. On the morning of November sixteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, Ed Gein came into the store.
Gein spoke with investigators over the following days with a cooperation that was, in its own way, unsettling. He confirmed the grave robberies.
The newspaper coverage of Gein's arrest and the discovery at the farm was immediate and national. A Wisconsin thriller writer named Robert Bloch lived roughly fifty miles from Plainfield.
There's a tendency when discussing cases like this to focus on the inventory. The objects.
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