Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Attention, Orlando and New Orleans. Stuff you Should Know is
coming to your town October nine and ten, which is soon,
which means the time to buy tickets is running out
and f y I our shows tend to sell out,
so go to s Y s K live dot com
and you'll find links to tickets and info and you
(00:21):
should probably go now. We'll see you in October, and
if you want to come see me, do my End
of the World live show. I'll be in Chicago on
September twelve and in Austin, Texas on October two. Ticket
links are weirdly hard to find, so just search End
of the World Josh Clark, Austin, or Chicago, and your
friendly search engine will help you out. See you in Orlando,
(00:44):
New Orleans, Chicago, and Austin. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the horror show. I'm Josh, there's Charles,
have you Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and um,
(01:05):
we are about to pass out from nausea. Yeah, I
think we need to issue a strong c o A.
Oh yeah, um, I don't know. Maybe some parents might
depends on what you title this thing. They might think
ed Gan was like a children's show host or something. Yeah,
I guess that's possible. So, yeah, it's a good idea.
We preface this with this one is really just not
(01:28):
for kids. I don't even know what agent would really start.
Maybe I don't know. It's really grizzly and gross. Yeah,
maybe no one should listen to this. How about that? Um,
before we give him further started, just let me throw
one more thing in. Okay, okay, I am doing an
End of the World live show in Chicago on September twelve,
(01:52):
Just saying, so if anybody wants to go see you
can get tickets to come see me do my End
of the World live show in Chicago on September twelve
at l H hyphen St dot com. Enough set, that's great,
Thanks Chuck. So we're talking about ed Geene, who is
most decidedly not a children's show host. Um, although ironically
(02:16):
he was a babysitter from time to time. It's baby
the most shocking thing I've ever read in my life. Yeah,
although I mean it doesn't seem like he posed much.
I mean, obviously he was a threat to anything, but
that was not his m O. No kids weren't, which
will see later. Some people are like, it doesn't matter,
He's probably still a child killer. It just doesn't fit there.
(02:39):
He had a very specific m O for sure as
far as killers go, and he doesn't qualify as far
as I know, as a serial killer, although I think
that's just silly, but um, he failed to hit the
big three mark, I guess is what it takes to
be a serial killer? Well proven at least. Yeah, that's true,
that's true. So he's possibly a serial killer, I guess.
(03:00):
And if you um have never heard of edg geen
fret not, we're going to tell you all about him.
But I would wager that you have at least encountered
some character based on him, because there's probably no real
life killer or criminal that was just stick with killer.
Who's inspired more utterly deranged characters than Ed Gene has. Yeah,
(03:23):
for sure, I mean we we know the Big Three
or of course Psycho with Norman Bates Texas, Chainsaw Masacre
with leather Face, and of course Silence of the Lamps
with Hannibal Lector there was James James Gum who is well,
that's true. James Gum was the Buffalo Bill character right
exactly who was right? None of which are Hannibal Elector. No, no, no,
(03:48):
Hannibal Elector was even like man, that guy's off his rocker,
Do you think, Yeah, I think a little bit. I
think he was kind of like this. Maybe at least
he felt he was sloppy or something. He definitely knew
he was smarter than that guy, so I think he
looked down on him in one way or another. So
um edg. Geen story starts, as so many of our
(04:11):
stories start, at birth. Back in nineteen o six in Wisconsin.
He was born little Edward Theodore Geen, And I'd like
to say like things started out normally, but I don't
get the impression that there was a single normal day
in ed Gaen's entire life. He he just really pulled
up the short straw, as it were, as far as
(04:31):
the birth lottery goes. Yeah, he uh. You know. His
father was an abusive alcoholic. His mother she under grocery
store for a little while and Lacrosse, Wisconsin, but she
was Augusta was by all accounts, a um mentally ill,
religious zealot, overbearing, overbearing. There needs to be a stronger
(04:54):
word in this case, super overbearing, super overbearing mother yeah
times infinity Yeah. And the and the religious the religious
stuff is just off the charts as far as um,
anything to do with sex and intercourse was the worst dirty,
possible thing imaginable. And that she hammered this into her
(05:16):
two boys. She really didn't hammer by, I guess, grabbing
their genitalia sometimes and railing at them about how this
is the devil's unit or whatever she'd call it. I
don't know. She probably could have called the devil's unit.
I don't think it's entirely impossible. But she realized she
looked around their town of Lacrosse, Wisconsin and said, this
(05:39):
place is a sinkhole of filth. There's a quote from her.
I guess it's an ed geen doing an impression of
his mom, which will find out later. He really liked
to do a lot um And she moved her whole family,
sold the family grocery store, and moved from Lacrosse, Wisconsin
to a little town called Plainfield, which had a population
of about five hundred. In Plainfield was it had been
(06:02):
established decades before, but it was still so small that
they'd only built the fire station and the local school
within the last like seven eight years. It was a
very tiny little town, and so you'd think like, Okay,
maybe Augusta Gean could could relax a little bit here.
Not so, Yeah, did you look up a picture of her?
(06:22):
I didn't. Actually, I don't think I have ever seen her. Yeah,
she looks like you would think. Yeah, I think I
just had such a mental image of her. I assumed
I knew what she looked like, and she does not
look friendly, let's put it that way. I could see
that hair in in a kind of a tight bun maybe,
and then with the calico lace um neck dresses. Yeah.
(06:44):
I mean, no one smiled in pictures back then, but
she and the only photo that I found was especially
good at the photo scowl right. So you know, they
moved to Plainfield, where she thought things would be better,
I guess, and uh not a sinkhole of health, and
it was not any better. There was there was no
place that Augusta Geene could have gone that would have
(07:06):
been suitable for her. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah,
because there were other human beings there, and I think
she considered just about everyone filth uh, unless they were
you know, maybe the preacher and who knows. She may
have considered her preacher filth. I could see that, and
she definitely considered her husband filth, considered her husband filth
and women, um, you know, in any woman that had
(07:26):
been on a date with another man, she uh had
bad things to say about it. Seems like yeah, so, um,
that was actually not a good move for the family.
You know, they've been doing okay from from what I
could tell, is as far as they could do okay
with an abusive, alcoholic, shiftless father, um and an angry
mom and lacrosse. I think they've been doing better financially.
(07:49):
They moved to Plainfield and they started farming, and their
dad was fairly useless to begin with. But secondly, the
soil that the land, they were not used to farming,
this kind of sandy soil where they didn't have any
idea what they were doing with farming anyway, so they
had a really hard time growing crops. And then apparently
the neighbors weren't the friendliest neighbors around, so nobody stepped
(08:10):
in to help them and show them what to do,
so they endured some real hardship on the farm. That
was problem. One problem too was ed Geen was not
one to leave the house very much. And when he did,
he went to school. And it's not like school was
a respite for him or a place to escape from.
It was just as hellish as it was at home. Basically, Yeah,
(08:33):
it was. It was pretty bad for Ed. He had
a week eye on one side, He had a growth
on his tongue that made him talk different than the
rest of the kids. Uh, he had sort of a
feminine appearance and all of this, you know, and you know,
and this is bad at any time in history probably
and when you're a little kid in school, but back
(08:55):
then it was really bad. And of course he was
bullied and teased, and he would come home crying and
his father would beat him for crying and call him
a sissy. And things are really getting out of hand,
Like his his mom won't let he or Henry really
leave much at all. Um, so they're just stuck in
isolation where his psychosis and you know, later found out
(09:18):
to be seriously mentally ill, obviously, but it certainly didn't
help to be in this kind of environment, not at all.
But I mean, this is this was life for him.
This is how he lived. He and his his older
brother Henry, who had him by I think four years
or something like that. Um, this was their life, and
Henry had like this. He was not as wrapped up
(09:39):
in their mother as Ed was. Not by a long shot.
Henry felt totally comfortable criticizing his mother. He saw her
as mentally imbalanced. He was just not under her spell
like Ed was. Um. But that's how they grew up,
that's how they lived. And she made them both promise
that they would die virgins because sex was just so
awful and dirty. Um. And then in nineteen forty the
(10:02):
family um took a turn for the different when George,
their dad, died of a heart attack, and that actually
kind of opened up Ed's life a little bit more.
Number one, he had his mom all too himself, right,
But number two, just by virtue of having to go
out and make more money, he had to go out
of the house and do things like odd jobs and
(10:24):
babysit and that kind of stuff. So it changed his
life a little bit. But it's not like it had
any big lasting effects for the better. Yeah, for sure. Um,
he didn't quite have her to her to himself yet
because Henry was still around. But Eddie, you know, like
you said he didn't travel much. I think the furthest
he ever traveled away from his house was one time, Um,
when he was thirty six, he went to Milwaukee, a
(10:46):
hundred and fifty miles away for military inspection, where he
did not get in to the military because of his
lazy eye, which, uh could have changed the course of
his history. You know, had he gotten accepted into military
service and gotten under the out from under the thumb
of his mother, could change to the course of a
lot of people's history, you know what I mean, Yeah,
(11:08):
for sure. So uh, four years later, after dad dies, UM,
he and his brother they're working at the house. They're
burning some brush. The fire gets out of control, and
then Henry is found dead and everyone's like, you know,
he died in this fire. He died in this fire.
Upon a little bit of investigation, and it seems like
that's about all they did. Uh, that was bruising on
(11:30):
Henry's head and neck, and uh they listed his cause
of death as being asphyxiation. Anyway, and like we said earlier,
it was never proven. But it seems like since uh
edit led them to the body, even though he said
he couldn't find Henry during the fire. Yet here's where
he is. It's a little fishy. It was all fishy.
(11:51):
So you know, to this day, people say that Ed
killed his brother and that was probably his first murder, Yeah,
which is a it's a pretty significant first first murder,
murdering your own brother, you know. So now Ed really
does have his mom to himself. But apparently from what
I read, she really her health took a really um
(12:12):
bad term for the worse after Henry died. Um, she
really took it hard. And so in less than a
year she suffered a stroke and um it was basically
a housebound, if not um bed bound, and Ed took
care of her, which I get the impression that Ed
was more than happy to take care of his mom
day and night. Oh yeah, for sure. I Mean it
(12:34):
was a um, just such a twisted manipulation that was
going on because on one hand she's just screaming at
him and calling uh, putting him down, calling him a
failure and a weakling. And then other times he would
she would call him into bed to like sleep with
her and hold her, and she would whisper to him
and say that he could spend the night in her
(12:56):
bed and stuff. So like he didn't know which way
was up. It was just standard elderly mom and middle
aged son stuff, you know. But we all go through it.
It's true. We've all crawled into our mom's bed and
slept the night at age forty five. But this didn't
go very well for ed Um. He still was laughing
(13:17):
it up though. Here's the thing. He was the um.
He was so devoted to his mom that any attention
from her, negative, positive, whatever, would have been like that,
that's he needed that, that was normal to him. However,
he got it um. So he uh, he took care
of her. He cared for one way or another. And
(13:38):
she died um in which is what was that a
year after her his brother died. Yeah, so she didn't
even last a year after Henry died. She dies of
from what I saw was pneumonia and probably another stroke.
And now here's the thing. Ed Geane, who was almost
never allowed to leave the farm, and when he did
(13:59):
he encountered but who were extraordinarily unfriendly to him. He
had turned into um, a bit of a weirdo, you
could say, even just from the outside, just from you know,
what normal people knew about him. In town, he was
considered an oddball in a weirdo but generally harmless. But
now he was totally and utterly alone on this family farm,
(14:22):
and the first thing he did was board up his
mom's rooms so that he could establish a shrine tour.
The rest of the house, though, kind of fell into
what you would call disrepair. Yeah, I mean there was
serious neglect at that point. He didn't seem to care
about keeping the house up except for that pristine room
where mommy lived. Uh. He started getting into some unusual
(14:46):
things like anatomy books and um pornography and horror novels,
pulp horror, um, Nazi Nazi books about Nazi atrocities, and
he would he would start to go out a little
that he generally still stayed around the farm, and like
we said earlier, unbelievably worked as a babysitter and as
a handyman around town. So he started to kind of
(15:09):
appear a little bit in town. And no one thought
a lot about the guy, um, except like the occasional
time when he would stop in at this pub Mary
Hogan's and Pine Grove and he would say weird things
about some horror novel or some Nazi book that he
was reading to the point where people were like, that's
a very to talk about head hunting and sex change operations.
(15:32):
This is what they called it back then. Uh, it's
an odd thing to talk about at a bar in
rural Wisconsin, especially for sure. And he would also he
had a weird habit of like laughing suddenly apropos of
nothing that anyone else could could put their finger on.
So it seemed a lot like he was laughing at
his own jokes, that kind of stuff. He was an
(15:52):
odd dude. But again, the town was They considered him
so harmless and so trustworthy that they would let him
baby sit their children. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He
had a reputation from um the way that people put
it of not going deer hunting with the rest of
the guys, which I mean, like, if you don't go
deer hunting in Wisconsin in the forties and fifties, what
(16:13):
is wrong with you? You know what I mean. But
he was known to be too squeamish to to do
something like deer hunting, so he didn't deer hunt. That's
how the town viewed him. Um. And if you look back, though,
there were a lot of red flags that he was
putting up that. In retrospect, with all of the information
that the town's folk later had, UM really seemed very
(16:36):
fishy that they were just kind of waving awful lot
of stuff like, for example, that bar owner the bar
he went to Mary Hogan's tavern, she disappeared and no
one knew where she went. For three years, she just vanished.
There was a little bit of blood left behind at
the bar, but one night, as she was closing the
bar down, she just vanished. And Ed used to joke
(16:57):
about how Mary was staying at his house for the
not eight um, and the townspeople thought that was weird
but not necessarily remarkable, maybe a little tasteless, um, But
in reality he had murdered Mary Hogan Um back in
nineteen Should we take a break right there? Oh? Yeah,
that was an abrupt cliffhanger. We're on the wrong side
(17:18):
of the cliff. We'll come back right after this. You stop,
(17:44):
all right, So we're back on the wrong side of
a cliffhanger. Well, wait a minute, Wait a minute, So
Mary Hogan disappeared. What happened, Chuck, What possibly happened to
Mary Hogan? She was murdered by who by Ed Gaan
on December eight, and I didn't see that coming. He
shot her. He shot her with the THIRTI caliber pistol,
(18:06):
put him into his pickup truck, and took her back
to the farm. And this is not something that was
known until seven when everything really unraveled. It was the
full three years though that he was still in town. Uh.
And I guess occasionally making a joke about what happened
to Mary, right, So, Um, when you say things unraveled
(18:27):
for him one night, like they found out everything. They
went from thinking he was just an odd little dude
who wouldn't even kill a deer two coming across the
the most depraved, deranged human being in the history of
American crime up to that point. There may have been
people to come later on, but A Gene was the
(18:48):
first truly depraved killer in America that America had ever known.
Proved me wrong, somebody who loves true crime proved me wrong. Yeah,
And here's the thing. He was Um. He had survived
things like the local kids coming by peeking in his
house and saying they saw human shrunken human heads hanging
(19:09):
in the living room. And he survived all that and
laughed it off and said that, you know, my cousins
served in the South season World War two and sitting
these little heads back as souvenirs. Whereas it not not
not that the kids are like wrong or mistaken. It's no,
I got shrunken heads are just souvenirs. Yeah, But as
it turns out, they were real human heads, right, So
(19:31):
they were real human heads. They weren't from the South Seas,
and um Edd had shrunk them himselves. Actually, he had
read some books on that kind of thing and probably
talked about it at the bar, which he probably regretted
when those teenagers started running their mouths around town. But
um he didn't have to worry about that for very
long because in nineteen fifty seven, in November of nineteen
(19:52):
fifty seven, he went to the local hardware store, Warden's
Hardware Store. And Warden's Hardware Store was owned and operated
by a woman named Bernice Warden Um and she was
working that day. It was towards the end of the
day and ed Geane came in. He needed a jar
of Annie freeze, and she sold it to him, filled
out of receipt, gave him the receipt. Um, and I
(20:15):
guess I presumed that that was done. Their business was done.
But Ed walked over to the wall and got down
a twenty two caliber rifle and pulled the twenty two
calibershell out of his pocket, put it in the rifle,
and then shot Bernice Warden in her head. And um,
he apparently then and this is this is where the
(20:36):
podcast really starts to get grizzly. Everybody, so just buckle
in or maybe press stop here. But the the amount
of blood that they would later find in this hardware
store was so much that they presumed that Ed cut
Bernice Warden's throat after he shot her in the head
and then dragged her to the loading dock where he
(20:57):
took her body away. That's right. So uh, he put
their rifle back on the rack. Um didn't even bother
to take out the shell that he had brought, took
the cash register and um, and I don't get the
idea that that was to make it appear as if
it were a robbery. Even I think he just needed
the money. Probably that's possible, um, although who knows. But uh.
(21:18):
Bernice Warden had a son named Frank, and he was
a deputy, and he came back into town after deer
hunting like everyone did in Wisconsin in the nineteen forties, excepted.
He stopped by the old hardware store, and it was
very odd to him because she was not there. The
door was unlocked, the back door was open, and then
he notices a little trail of blood from the front
(21:40):
to the back door, and very quickly and easily just
looked at the little receipt pad saw that half gallon
of andy freeze was the last receipt made out to
ed Geen called the sheriff and they went to Gaen's
farmhouse to question him, and very quickly found Bernice Warden
behind the house hanging in what's called the summer kitchen.
(22:02):
I guess that's where you go when it's really hot
to cook. That's not outside the house. Uh. And again
this is where it gets super grisly. You've got one
more chance to stop. Turned back now. But he basically
treated her as if he had been deer hunting. She
was disemboweled and dressed like a deer, hanging naked upside
down from a pulley, beheaded and fully fully dressed and
(22:26):
butchered like a deer would be. So I want to
I want to just restate something. One of the two
people who found her was her son, Like he walked
into the summer kitchen and there's his beheaded, disemboweled mother
hanging by her ankles in ed Gein's summer kitchen, just
like imagine that. Like if you read all of the
(22:47):
accounts of this stuff, no one ever stops and points
out that, like, poor Frank Warden found his mother like this,
But they he did, and the sheriff was there too,
and very quickly they called for backup. And back in
the day in rural Wisconsin, backup meant like all the
neighbor folk, all the men in the in the surrounding county,
(23:09):
we were deputies basically, So they all showed up, and
pretty soon they launched this investigation of edg Geen's house,
and in very short order edg Geen's house would be
known as the House of Horrors. And that's a pretty
good name for it, actually, considering what they found there,
because they caught um a game basically right in the
(23:30):
act of of field dressing um Bernice Warden. But this
is definitely not his first rodeo as far as that
was concerned. No, but it appears as if it was
only the second time that he had ever actually killed someone.
What they found was really disturbing. You know, human body
(23:52):
parts used, uh in exactly the ways that they were
in silence of the lambs, as far as like using
human skin and human bones and skulls to make into
other things. UM yeah, I mean the most horrifying stuff
that you could imagine. Uh. And they realized that it
was probably about fifteen women, um in total, you know,
(24:14):
from all the various parts that they were able to
get together, and uh, he had only killed two of them.
So that presented a bit of a conundrum until ed
Gean said basically, uh, you know what I do. I
I'm digging up people from their graves. Yeah he said that. Um,
later on he was caught just so utterly red handed.
(24:36):
It was ridiculous. But they spent hours and hours, like
maybe ten twelve hours during that first um, that first investigation,
and it wasn't a big house, but they were just
turning up so much horrible, twisted, bizarre stuff made out
of body parts that it just took that long to
catalog and and combed through everything. Um. But he said, no,
(24:58):
I've been robbing graves because I am capable of raising
the dead, So I go and rob graves. And the
first grave I ever robbed was my mother's grave about
a year and a half after she died back in Um.
I went to the grave site, dug her up, I
opened her casket, and I pulled her head clean off
(25:18):
of her body with my bare hands, which is the
grizzliest thing any human being has ever done in their
entire life, in the history of the world. Yeah, but
it's interesting in the uh they never went and exhumed
the grave site as part of the investigation, which is
really strange. So they're taking Edgain's word for it. I guess,
um they had dug up other ones chucks, So I
(25:41):
don't know if maybe they were just satisfied that, like
promise they found one or two, They're like, fine, we'll
believe you on the rest of them. And I guess
maybe in the nineteen forties that was like they got
their man, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not
sure what that would have done in the case of
his mother's grave. You know, sure it's like, hey, what
whatever you do to your mother's eighteen month old corps
(26:02):
is your business. I guess I don't think that. I
don't think that was a case. Uh. But this is
where Errol Morris weirdly comes into the story. Uh. And
I feel like we talked about this on another episode
at some point. Oh really this was news to me.
But Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, he was going to
do a story about ed Geen spent about a year
in playing Field in the seventies doing his research that
(26:25):
he uh, he never made the film, but his pal
Verner Hertzog, they had sort of a interesting relationship over
the years. But Berner Herzog said, you know what, you're
going to go back and dig up the grave and
the dead of night. Rold and Errol uh did not
show up. Apparently herd Zog did though they had the Yeah,
(26:46):
they had like an appointed night and day and time
and everything, and Herzog was there right probably with the
shovel or two and maybe some coffee and donuts. I
would imagine snacks were not in order. But you never know,
think Caeryl Morris made the right decision in that in
that case, because you know, grave robbing, even for verification
(27:07):
for a research project or research for a project that's
you don't want to do that kind of thing. So,
as far as we know then, no one has ever
verified Ed's story about his his him taking his mother's head,
But there's a lot of other good evidence that that
that was the case, that he did do that, because
one of the things they found in his house were
(27:28):
faces human faces of women. And this is a really
important point here, women all roughly of the same age build, um,
look kind of and all of those women happened to
look kind of like his mother. And so over the
years a lot of people have said, like, why did
he do this? What was the problem? But one of
(27:49):
the first psychiatrists after he was caught, and we'll talk
a little more about and being caught, but um, one
of the first psychiatrists who examined him, said, UM, I'm
pretty sure I have figured out why this guy did this.
He was robbing graves and trying to resurrect the dead,
when really he was trying to resurrect his mother, and
(28:09):
he was robbing the graves of women who looked like her.
Both of the women, Mary Hogan and Bernice Warden who
he murdered, they bore a rough resemblance to his mom.
And so what he was ultimately doing in his head
was was creating a substitute mother, or recreating his mom,
reanimating his mom so that she could never leave him again,
because he brought her back from death. In reality, if
(28:32):
you were a teenager looking through egg Gean's window at night,
he was dressing up in a suit of skin made
from women who he had murdered or whose graves he
dug up so that he could pretend more accurately to
be his mother. That's right. Uh, he admits, Like you said,
he was called super red handed, so he admitted fully
to those murders. Although uh Hogan's the confession about Hogan
(28:56):
was ruled it admissible because they basically, you know, beat
him to a pulp while he was in the waiting room. Well.
Plus also with with Bernice Warden, he he always said
that it was an accident, which was bs, but that
he never confessed to purposefully murdering her. That's right. Um,
it was you know, and inappropriately, uh, I guess inaccurately
(29:19):
relayed that there was a human heart, uh and a
frying pan on the stove. Um. It turns out that
was not true, but that was enough to get rumors
started that he was a necrophile. That he was a
cannibal and was eating human organs because human organs were
found all over the place. Uh, it seems like that's
probably not true. Um, but maybe we should take a
(29:41):
break and talk a little bit about the trial of
ed Gen and what happened right after this. Well, wait
a minute, wait a minute, before we take a break, Chuck,
let's just say he was convicted. We'll be right back
right after this. So we're on the other side of
(30:16):
a cliffhanger again, that's right. Uh. Edgean has a lawyer
named William Belter who throws in not guilty by reason
of insanity plea. And at the time he was found
unfit to stand trial in because they diagnosed him as
having schizophrenia, and uh, he went to Central State Hospital,
(30:37):
where he stayed for ten years until they finally did
say you are fit to stand trial ten years later. Uh.
And then sort of anticlimactically, he was found guilty of
the murder of Bernice Warden, um, but found insane at
the time. So basically, just go back to Central State Hospital, right,
(30:58):
And he petitioned years after that, in nineteen seventy four
to be released. He was like, Okay, maybe I was
crazy at the time. I'm not anymore, let me out,
and they said no. He said okay, and he never
He never tried again. He would have had much of
a shot. No, apparently the guy, the doctor, the director
of the hospital, the Central State Hospital, used to receive
(31:19):
pretty frequently death threats if if he ever let ed
Geen out. Yeah, I'm sure that he didn't even need those. So. UM.
A lot of people, including the judge who presided over
a Gain's case in nineteen sixty eight, who went on
to write a book, strongly suspected Gaine was responsible for
(31:40):
other disappearances and murders, not just his brother Henry's, but
also some local ones. There were two hunters who went
missing in nineteen fifty one. Um. The only thing that
was ever found of them was one of their jackets
and their dog, one of their dogs, but they in
their cars just vanished mysteriously. Um. And again was later
questioned about and he's it. I didn't kill him, but
(32:01):
my neighbor did. And I can show you where the
bodies are, and I guess the authorities went. Now that's okay. Um.
There was an eight year old girl who went missing.
A fifteen year old girl who went missing. Um. And
so some people think that Edging really did kill multiple people.
And it's possible because he still never admitted to murdering
(32:22):
Bernice Warden, right, So maybe he did and he just
would have never fessed up. I don't know, but it does,
like you were saying way earlier, it goes against his
m o murdering kids and then murdering men. What he
was after were women that looked like his mother. That's
that was my impression. Yeah, And as you would expect, uh,
(32:42):
a house like this, after something like this goes on,
becomes It was already sort of the stuff of legends
because of kids poking their face in and seeing you know,
heads hanging on the wall. But after this happened, like
you you can imagine exactly like what happens, people are
coming by to see the how else driving by the
House of Horrors, vandalizing the House of Horrors. Um. They
(33:06):
posted notice eventually that the contents of the house and
the farm we're going to be auctioned. And you know, understandably,
the townspeople went nuts. Uh, They're like, you can't auction
this stuff out. We've already got enough problems with the
notoriety in our little, quiet, small town that we all
love population And in March twentieth they took matter into
their own hands, seemingly allegedly because the house burned to
(33:30):
the ground one night and they never uh, they never
caught who did it, But it's pretty clear that it
was an entire town of people with pitchforks and torches. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure they're handing out like kool aid and
saltines at that thing as refreshments. I think the whole
town did it, you know. Yeah, But it did not
stop the curiosity of this house. Of course it didn't.
(33:51):
I mean like people still came and still do go
to to see the lot where this was. Um, but
it did. It was probably pretty effective to to cut
down a lot of looky lose. There was no real
pilgrimage or shrine for people to go to with with
just an empty field. I think maybe like the driveways
still there, I don't know, Um, it's not much to
(34:13):
look at. So yeah, there's gonna be a lot less
people that come to playing field. But a couple of
things were auctioned off, one of which was supposedly as
cauldron where he kept um disemboweled embowels. I guess um
that is not necessarily ever been proven as correct. That
actually is his cauldron is just allegedly as cauldron. But
(34:34):
his car was definitely auctioned off um. And there's a
bidding war that that that started between like fourteen bidders,
and the winning bid was from Bunny Gibbon, who was
a carnival sideshow operator who bought the car to promote
at sideshows. And Bunny Gibbon started promoting it as ed
(34:55):
geins Ghoul car which he used to transport bodies to
and from the rave and transported Bernice Warden back to
his house and Bunny Gibbons put a a mannequin in
the cars again as the driver and a mannequin as
Bernice Warden's body and charged twenty five cents to come
take a peek at it. Yeah, and he sold a
(35:16):
lot of those admission tickets. UH sold like two thousand
of him over a two day period. It's a lot
for a carnival, it is. And you know, people are
attracted to the macab and I kind of always have been.
So he made a little money. Um, although it was
very controversial and he got some good good bad publicity
because of it, which was fine with him. Um, But
(35:39):
at some point some of these fair started to say, no,
we're not gonna let you come in here and bring
this car in here. We're basically going to shut you down. Uh.
The sheriff arrived at one and shut him down, and
then he basically said, you know what I'm taking. I'm
taking my car onto greener pastures in Illinois. We're hopefully
(35:59):
I'll be able to show my car there. Yeah. I
guess Illinois was fine with it, or it just petered
out or something, because after that, the trail kind of
goes cold, and no one has any idea what became
of ed Gein's car. So it may be out there somewhere.
It may be in parts in different cars. It may
just be a cube, who knows it. Maybe part of
(36:20):
your refrigerator could be. But no one knows what happened
to ed Gaen's car. Yeah, we do know what happened
to ed Gain's cauldron. Uh. If that was in fact
his cauldron, woman named Evelyn Mayer bought it in n
and planted flowers in it representing the victims. Fifty years later,
her grandson Dan McIntyre found it in his parents garage,
(36:43):
had it verified by people from the auction that they
were you know, they at least say that was that
was the one. Uh. And then four years ago it
was auctioned off and now is on display at Basin's
Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. Wow. I would go see that, wouldn't.
You don't know. I don't know if I would fly
out in Vegas to see it or anything like that,
(37:03):
but if I were walking down the street and they're like,
come on in, I'd probably go in. I don't think
I'm not interested in that stuff. Um. I want to
also let me give a shout out because I hadn't
heard anything about the cauldron before, but um, I found
out about that from the site Cult of Weird. Cult
of Weird. I'm not sure. It's a good little site,
and I think they might actually be based in Wisconsin.
(37:25):
So I just want to tip my hat to them
for teaching me about Gaine's Cauldron. Interesting, So, Chuck, When
um Ed Gaine was still alive, he was very much
a legend. He didn't die until and long before that
he was basically made into this legendary boogeyman. When the
(37:48):
first character that was based on him hit the big screen.
It was a Norman Bates and Hitchcock's Psycho, and Hitchcock
had made this movie based on a book that had
come out I think the year before by an author
named Robert Block, also called Psycho, and Block was from Wisconsin,
so he kind of fashioned the meat of the story,
or the bones of the story around the edgeen crimes.
(38:12):
Was that intentional? The bones are the meat? Yeah? You
know what's really sad is it absolutely wasn't interesting. I
was like, what, why are you making that face? I
don't understand. Uh. The next movie was a little more
on the nose. Uh. In nine four there was a
low budge movie called Deranged and it was about a
(38:35):
killer name Ezra Cobb, but it was very clearly modeled
on ed geen Um. And when you look at even
the production stills of this thing, he's like eating brains
out of a skull and making suits of skin. It's
it looks really pretty horrific. It was a Canadian movie,
but it starred as Azra Cobb a k A. Ed
(38:56):
geene One, Robert's Blossom, one of my favorite character directors
who was no longer with us. What else was I in?
He played Old Man Marley and Home Alone? Okay, wow, wow,
I'll bet he did a good ed Geen. He did,
and when he was younger he looked. I mean, if
you think he was scary and in Home Alone, you
should have seen him when he was in his twenties.
(39:17):
I can imagine those Canadians. Man, they'll they'll make a
ghastly film. Have you ever seen um uh um strange Brew.
I actually love that movie. Yeah, I bet you that.
I'm not sure if that one ages, I'll be curious.
I was like, come on, what's a what's a movie
associated with Canada? And come on, Josh, come on. Um.
(39:39):
So the next step was actually the same year The
Texas Chainsaw Masker came out, the same year that Deranged did.
And Toby Hooper knew about the egg Geen story because
he had relatives in Wisconsin who are like, listen to this,
and they told him. He said, I'm gonna grow up
to make a crazy movie about this based on this
some day, and he did. He made the Texas Chainsaw
(39:59):
Man o Secre, which was one of the all time
great that's just horror movies, but indie movies of all
time for sure. Have you ever read there's a Texas
Monthly like long form article about the making of the
Texas Chainsaw mascre. Have you ever read it? No, but
Texas Monthly is a pretty good rag. It is a
good rag. I think maybe Skip Pollen's worth throat. They've
got a few really great writers there. But um they
(40:23):
they used to There was another like much much bigger
like studio film shooting in the area at the same time,
and the crew from the Texas Chainsaw Masacre would go
to that set and act like they worked there for catering,
like during lunch and stuff like that. It would go
steel catering food and just pose like they were supposed
to be there, and then they go back in films more,
(40:44):
although they also frequently get kicked off a set and
get caught. I went to a catering trucker too in
my neighborhood in l A when I wasn't working on them. Well,
you're letting them, you're not ruining their shots, so they
owe you, you know. I was just getting to breakfast
Breedo occasionally. Uh So As far as Gene well, of course,
we mentioned Silence of the Lambs. Uh In n But
(41:06):
as far as Gene goes, he was a model prisoner
um or well, you know, I guess in the in
the home where he was it wasn't a prison. Well
he was in Carson. He wasn't honored to leave. So
do you call him a prisoner though? I guess patient? Patient? Inmate? Maybe?
How about inmate? All right? He was a model inmate. Uh.
There was one quote from a cook that said Eddie
(41:28):
was normally a very unassuming, quiet, helpful kind of guy.
You didn't know who what he had done, you would
think nothing of him. Uh. And like you said, he
died there in four Um of cancer and respiratory illness
on July and was buried in playing Field with his
family at three am, obviously too in the dead of night.
(41:51):
Um ironically across from a grave that he had robbed. Um.
But they smartly eventually removed his headstone and put it
in storage because it was stolen in two thousand. Then
they founded in Seattle a few months later, they were like,
let's just leave this unmarked between Henry and Augustus Graves. Really,
what good is it doing? Like what are they saving
(42:12):
it for? You know? Oh? I mean there may be
laws against destroying a headstone. Oh I'll bet you're right.
I'll bet you're right. So yeah, you can go visit
their graves now. And the gap in between their headstones
is that's where a gain is buried. And there's one
more thing, like we were a lot of people talk
about cannibalism, a lot of people talk about necrophilia, but
(42:32):
it's not at all clear that he ever ate any
person and that he ever engaged in any actual like
sex act with anybody that he murdered or dug up.
And in fact, remember he promised his mother that he
would remain a virgin his whole life. He said that
he had never had a sexual encounter with anybody else
(42:53):
living or dead, just himself, you know what I mean?
That was it. So he's probably not in necro file either.
Let's say for Ed Gaine, Wow, this was a ghastly episode,
wasn't it. Um. If you want to know more about
Ed Gaine, mob, there's a lot that you could go read,
like we didn't even we purposefully didn't really go into
(43:15):
the stuff that they found at his house. It was
really bad. So if this floated your boat and you
want to get all sick, oh go check it out.
In the meantime, it's time for a listener mail. This
is called eyewitness identification. Real life story Here, Hey guys.
A few years ago, I saw a man crouching by
(43:37):
my neighbor's bike she kept locked to a chain fence
between our properties. Watch for a few moments to confirm
he was working towards stealing the bike. When I asked
him when he was doing, he muttered nothing, and I said, well,
it kind of looks like you're trying to steal my
neighbor's bike, so I'm gonna call the cops now. First
of all, Karen, I don't know if that was you
shouldn't probably engage that that man. That's true, but it
(44:00):
was pretty hilarious line. Yes, uh, he ignored me and continued.
So I stood there about five feet away, separated by
that chain link fence. He continued and uh, describing his
clothing and features to the police over the phone. When
the dispatcher asked how old he looked, it took everything
in me not to pause and ask him his age.
(44:20):
So unfortunately, the man got away with the bike before
the cops arrived, so they drove around looking for him,
came back a while later with a man on a
bike who did bear a very close resemblance to the thief.
Even the clothes were super similar. The guy matched the
description I had given so closely the cops would not
could not believe it when I repeated, uh, no, he's
(44:41):
not the guy. Uh. The only reason I was so
certain is because it took I really took the time
to look at him for a moment. I'm a terribly
unobservant person, and it really made me realize what a
poor witness I would make after the fact, how hard
it could be to note those necessary details when your
brain is on autopilot. They were never able to catch
the petty by thief, but very glad they didn't arrest
(45:02):
the innocent man. And how dumb am I for standing
next to a criminal? Well, I call the cops on him. Well,
at least she knows now, she's she's got some perspective. Now, Yeah,
she says, is before our camera phones and such, So
next time I'll just snap a picture. Yeah, sir, can
you look at me? Great? Thank you? And that is
from Karen and Memphis. And Karen said, come to a
show in Memphis. She said, you guys could sell out
(45:24):
the orpheum, No problem. Oh yeah, I looked it up
the orpheum sea so. Oh, I don't know, Karen, we
cannot sell out the orpheum, no problem. No, I don't
think so. If you have something about half that size, yeah,
we could try that. We might be in business. Maybe
we can do it to Memphis or a special show
at grace Land. That'd be pretty cool. Cheez, that'd be wonderful.
(45:45):
We could do it in that the television room, yeah,
or orton Sun Records, or on the Lisa Marie. Oh yeah,
was that the plane it's been on there? It's great. Okay, Well,
if you want to get in touch with this, like Karen,
did Karen be a little safer next time? It's a bike? Okay? Um.
You can go onto our website Stuff you Should Know
(46:07):
dot com check out our social links there, or you
can send us an email to stuff podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H