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The Barn, the Graves, and the Question Nobody Could Answer
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ed Gein robbed graves for years, built furniture from human remains, and killed his neighbors — and Plainfield, Wisconsin never noticed. This chapter follows the crimes, the psychology, and the night investigators opened his barn.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
How does a man spend years digging up graves, furnishing his home with human remains, and killing his neighbors, and nobody notices? That's the question that still hangs over Plainfield, Wisconsin.
Plainfield is a small farming community in central Wisconsin. In the nineteen fifties, it was the kind of place where people knew each other's routines, their vehicles, their dogs.
He didn't begin with murder. He began with graves.
In December of nineteen fifty-four, a tavern owner named Mary Hogan disappeared from her bar in Pine Grove, roughly eight miles from Plainfield. There was blood on the floor.
On November sixteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, Bernice Worden didn't come home. She owned the hardware store in Plainfield, and that morning she'd opened as usual.
Gein was found unfit to stand trial initially and committed to a state psychiatric facility. In nineteen sixty-eight, after a decade of institutionalization, he was deemed fit.
While Gein was being evaluated, the case was generating national press coverage. The details were extraordinary.
The next major adaptation came in nineteen seventy-four. Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre introduced Leatherface, a large, violent figure in a rural setting who wears a mask made from human skin.
In nineteen eighty-eight, Thomas Harris published The Silence of the Lambs. The novel introduced Jame Gumb, known as Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who murders women and harvests their skin to construct a suit.
Three films. Three different villains.
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