October 9, 2025 • 42 mins
He is called "The Butcher of Plainfield" "Grandfather of Gore "The Ghoul of Plainfield" and has been a source of inspiration of countless movies that take a small truth about the life of Ed Gein and spin an entire book or movie series designed to scare those who dare read or watch. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack go behind the stories and tell the true story of a man who admitted to killing two women in the 50s but is suspected of so much more.
Transcribe Highlight
00:02.83 Introduction
02:11.40 Conversation about Ed Gein
05:02.30 Scary movies using parts of Ed Gein story
10:09.05 Grave Robbing
15:08.53 Body exam done in a mortuary
20:13.24 Deputy sent to Ed Gein's house, finds decapitated victim
25:24.90 Gein admitted killing two women - did he practice on the dead?
30:09.33 Waste basket made of human skin, skulls mounted on bedposts
35:10.80 Gein made belt out of nipples
40:23.39 Movies using parts of Ed Gein story
42:03.25 Conclusion
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Bus with Joseph Scott More, I'd say after out
of all of the Looney Tune characters. For me personally,
having been a child of the sixties and seventies and
grown up watching the Bugs Bunny road Runner Hour for
those many years, my favorite adversary for Bugs Bunny was
(00:26):
probably Yosemite Sam. And the reason I liked Yosemite Sam
was because he had a temper that was unlike any
other character. He could just go off at the drop
of the hat and not so over the top but
still willing to shoot Bugs Bunny was Elmer Fudd. Elmer
(00:46):
Fudd didn't exactly have the same charisma as Yosemite Sam,
and certainly Bugs Bunny could fully constantly somewhat of adult.
But you know, in true crime, and specifically as it
applies to serial perpetrators, there's one person that has always
(01:08):
reminded me of Elmer Fudd, and that's because it would
seem that everywhere this one perpetrator went, he always wore
a hat just like Elmer's. He always seemed kind of dim,
and he always seemed lost. Today, given all of the
(01:35):
current news about a recent television program, I wanted to
step back just for a moment and have a conversation,
a conversation about the forensics of ed Gean, otherwise known
as the Butcher of Plainfield. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this
(01:57):
is Bodybacks.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Dave.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Who was your I know, I know for fact you
watched Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner hour at some point in time.
I got to tell you, drifting back all those years,
did you did you have a favorite adversary of Bugs Bunny?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, I liked all of them.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I mean I liked Bugs because he got out smart
at everybody. They made the bad guys into idiots.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I like Yosebity Sam, you know, he cracked me up.
Elmer Fudd, you know I liked him. Okay, but yeah, yeah,
I just like Bugget.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I like bugs. I smarten them all the time. That
was kind of my thing.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
The one character in that whole universe that just always
irritated me, that was the Roadrunner. I was always cheering
for the Cody.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I really was.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I just got I got, yeah, I really was. I
just you know, I was.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Just for the bad guys.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Like you're watching Goodfellas, You're hoping Henry Hill, you know,
ends up standing. I'm and killing everybody.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, No, no.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
But you know it's it's uh, you know, it was
it was always the Cody against the road Runner.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
And yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I'm trying to figure out, how does a tune so
pure and innocent that we we grew up on this,
you know what our generation learned classical music?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Symphony music from absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, the first time I went to a symphony, that's
what they took us, like in seventh or eighth grade,
and that's the first thing they did. They start off
with the lone Ranger and then they go into the interlude,
they go into all the other ones.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Well, that's bugs, that's Tasmanian devil, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Well it was the Valkyries. I think the Valkyries the
opera with Elmer Fudd wearing the Viking helmet and killed
the Web, killed the Web. But you know the thing
about it, those things that seemingly I think Dave, are
so very seemingly docile. Many times it can be those
(04:04):
things that go bump in the night. I think for
a lot of us. You know, it's kind of like
the you know, we're coming into the Halloween season a
horror movies. The thing that always scares me in Halloween
movies is not our horror movies. It's never like some
ghostly specter. It's always the child's toy that begins to
move across the floor, like the tricycle, you know. Or
(04:27):
the doll that's like inanimate, sitting in a chair and
suddenly the head starts to turn in one direction, you
know that, Or the doll appears on the bed next
to the kid that's terrified of the doll in the
first place. And I think that ed Gean probably he
was this kind of I don't know, that'll.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Be kind of us. A lot of people don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
And I mean this because you know, you hit me
with that Geen a while back, and he said, you know,
we really need to do this story.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
We really do.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And you started naming up all of these scary movies
that actually we're taken from the ed Gean story that
came out of the fifties. And that's scary enough. I mean,
when you realize that all of these scary seventies, eighties,
and nineties movies began with a real life story in
Wisconsin with ed Geen, and yet he's not technically a
(05:20):
serial killer, isn't even though.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
He's not not in my estimate. And look, I'm not
a serial killer specialist. Just because I've worked worked, you know,
killings that were serialized by several individuals does not make
me an expert on the topic of, you know, digging
into their psyche. As a matter of fact, I just
in state, you know, the stuff that I deal with
(05:43):
and you deal with by extension on the show is
heavy enough without you know, digging into the brains of
one of these people. But from what my colleagues have
told me that specialize in this area, most of the
time they're looking at a minimum of three. And I
hate to reduce it or use this term, but there's
(06:03):
no really confirmed kills, I guess, and to the best
of our knowledge, to the best of our knowledge, he's
only admitted to two. And here's the thing about it.
There are always people out there that want to give
credit to individuals for more killings. And some of that
(06:31):
stems I think, well, in the past, it stemmed from
cops that wanted to close books on cases. And famously,
I'll give you an example. Famously, my first job, which
was in New Orleans. While I was there, my friend
who was the commander of the homicide division. They actually
hosted oddest tool came to town. Yeah, he came to town.
(06:55):
And I could tell you really the over top, over
the top story about the but it's so disturbing on
one level. I'm not going to say it, you know,
on air, but to and what he was looking for
in many of these instances, because it was him and
Henry that were the serial killer pair allegedly that traveled about.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Henry what was that guy's last name?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Okay, but he was in Texas, right, and he claimed
to have like killed one hundred people, and then it
was like they got him in a chair and he
found out, I can get another pack of cigarettes if I
tell him I killed three people in Arizona.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So he tells, yeah, Dave, I've heard estimates up to
four hundred of them working in tandem. And you know, look,
that's you're starting to get into. I don't know ginghis
Khan numbers there. I don't know if that's and I'm
being facetious by saying that, I just don't.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Know that that's Henry Lee Lucas.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, Henry Lee Lucas. And and you know again another
person that allegedly had you know, to wax Freudian here
for second. To wax Freudian here for a second. Is actually,
you know, kN to Gean in the sense that had
mommy issues, which is kind of kind of fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Sickly I had to do a thing on Henry Lee
Lucas a couple of years ago, one of those deep
dive things that I get it tied up in sometimes,
and I'm not kidding. It was one of those things
show where I kept thinking, I'm hoping the funding falls
away on this because I'm tired of this guy. It
was just, yeah, the worst of the worst, but those
mommy issues.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It was bad.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
But with ed Gean, the two people that he killed
that he has admitted to killing, the one thing I
noticed is that both women were professional women. They had businesses.
We're talking about in the nineteen fifties, right.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yep, yeah, they were. And I think that's that's significant here.
You know that the relationship that he had with his mother,
there's some ination, uh you know that that she, you know,
casts versions on every other woman in the world other
than herself, and that all women were evil, and all
(09:10):
all evil sprouts from from females, and you need to
stay away from them. You know, you're going to hell. No,
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I can watched The water Boy the other day and
she kept saying everybody was the devil.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So yeah, I wonder, I wonder if that character is
based on on ed Gean's mama. Yeah, Kathy, one of
the greatest living actors in American history.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I love her.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
But yeah, so I got to tell you, Dave, you know,
relative to to being capable of what ed Geen was
eventually capable of, it wasn't. It wasn't like one of
these suddenly he had a light bulb go off over
his head to wreak the kind of horror and terror
(09:53):
that ranged all the way from I don't know. We
could talk about grave robbing. I think actually there are
elements of necrophilia obviously that are involved in here, and
you don't necessarily you don't necessarily have to have a
sexual encounter.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
With the dead.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Or raping a corpse is what it comes down to.
It can be the sexualization of the remains afterwards, you know,
and we see this in some of the quote unquote
tanned skins that what he formed out of them, which
is almost like he's trying to transform himself, as some
(10:36):
people say, into his mother. I've heard other people say,
trying to transport himself into the life of a woman.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Okay, now this again is something that came up in
Silence of the Lambs in Buffalo Bill.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So a lot of these books and movies that we
have seen in the last years, there's like a shred
of ed geen. They take this part of it and
put it over here, this part and put it on
leather face and you know, the Texas Kansaw massacre and
here's you know, that's that's pretty scary when you think
about what we do as a society, that we would
(11:10):
take a shred of truth and spread it around and
make all these other fictionalized stories that actually you can go, yeah,
I did that. A guy really did try to make
a mom suit.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, And you know that in and of itself is
far more terrifying, I think than you know, some wackerdoodle
out in Texas, you know, run around with chainsaw and
chopping people up and that sort of thing. And yeah,
the mask that you see, you know, quote unquote leather
face wearing is I think probably an homage obviously to
(11:41):
Gean he's out in a rural area, isolated in a house,
you know, and there's all kinds of other elements to this,
I think, probably even even elements of cannibalism that some
people claim that Gean was potentially involved in as well,
you know, the taking of these human remains. And you know,
(12:06):
I think I've looked at this case over a number
of years. You know, it's been brought to my attention
by students over the years, and one of the things
that's so striking to me, Dave, is that and just
kind of set the tone here. This is a meanness
in the terms of this is not a technical world
(12:29):
that has happened in. This was a black and white world,
and it was I think saying America was innocent back then,
we just come out of World War Two. We were
not innocent by any you know, stretch of the imagination.
You had people the decade before that was starving, living
hand to mouth, you know, and the depression. So you know,
(12:49):
I take exception anybody says that America was in the
innocent time back then. You know, it wasn't. We've come
through one of the couple of the most brutal decades
in certainly our country system, maybe even in world history,
but the world that those investigators back then inhabited, Dave,
Particularly on that night in November where they finally approached
(13:16):
that farmhouse, not a light was on, as a matter
of fact, no electricity. The environment was illuminated when it
was illuminated only by lamps. When they walked in and
they pulled out their flashlights and they began to shine
them about looking through this garbage heap that this man
(13:40):
lived in. Suddenly their eyes focused on things that probably
no human being is meant to see. But it was
their job to process that scene and tell this horrific story. David.
(14:08):
One of the things that I was really interested in
with ed Geen was to kind of dig in and
see if there were, if there was, how much data
there was out there relative to forensics. And I came
across something kind of interesting in this search. Did you
know I discovered the name at least of a forensic
(14:32):
or a pathologist who actually did the examination on one
of the remains covered recovered at the scene. Actually it
was miss Warden's body, and this physician's name he was
actually from Sheboygan and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he did the
(14:59):
examination of this woman's body actually in a mortuary day.
He was working for the state police or the state
Crime Lab on their behalf. And you know, back then
there were forensic pathologists, but there weren't that many certified
forensic pathologists. So he's a pathologist. He was studying other things,
(15:21):
but he also he also did the examination post mortem examination,
at least on Warden's body. He may have done other ones,
but I don't have a lot of record relative to that.
But here's another interesting bit to this. This same pathologist
actually went to the hospital date and personally examined at
(15:43):
Gean while he was in custody. Oh wow, which I
was kind of fascinated by. And I'm wondering was he
for thinking enough, because you know, this is something we've
been involved in in forensic pathology for a number of years,
and it's called living forensic pathology, and sometimes forensic pathologists
(16:06):
are called in to examine the living, examine the records
of the living, and many times is to look and
see if that individual has any injuries on their body
that might communicate with any other injuries that you know,
they may have found an autopsy or that may have
been alleged to have occurred. And I think about this
(16:28):
guy that was in the midst of this. His name,
his name is actually doctor Friedrich Eigenberger, and he was
born in Germany, and you know, he had been serving
in this area for a long time, had been working
(16:49):
in this area, and you know, can you imagine just
like him. I can guarantee you the day that these
cops got up and you know, they put on their
Humphrey Bogart like suits with their snap brown hats and
their overcoats, and they're going out there just like them.
This doctor, this was the last thing he expected to
(17:09):
be doing, you know, the next day, can you imagine?
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And remember how it started, Joe.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
It started with an investigation because Bernice Worden went missing.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
They were looking for her.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And as they began the investigation, they find out the
morning of November sixteen, nineteen fifty seven, she's fifty eight
years old, she owns a hardware store. She disappears that
morning and as they're tracking, just like we would do now,
you know, now we would have a CCTV camera, we'd
have you know, ring garbell cameras, any number of things.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Well, back to the.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Question is would The question is would they work and
would they be would they be clear?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
O luck And so the store. This is how it
came about. The hardware store's truck was seen driving out
near the rear of the building at around nine thirty
in the morning. The store didn't have a lot of customers, okay,
so they had receipts for the entire day. But they
actually found a receipt signed by ed Gean that he
(18:11):
was going to come back the next morning, okay, the
morning of November sixteen and get a gallon of Annie freeze.
So he comes in the day before she goes missing,
agrees I'll buy this, and the receipt is still there.
She's gone. So that was what led them to go, well, okay,
(18:33):
ed Geen said he was coming here, she's not here.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Let's go check. Let's talk to Ed. Let's go see
Ed now.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Based on what they found inside that house, I dare
say people had a few ideas about ed Geen. I
can't imagine. They thought he's old farmer brown just hanging
out there in the dell. You know, people had to
think this guy, there's something up with this cat.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Wow. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And hey, I'm glad
you brought up the term far in the Dell because
you know, there's actually a tiny little range of hills
and southern Wisconsin called the Dell's and my God rest
his soul, my father in law he actually went out
there and would hunt deer out there with friends. But yeah,
(19:16):
and so there's actually the Dell or the Dell's out
in Wisconsin. By the way, if I've never been to Wisconsin,
beautiful state. However, it did produce by Jeffrey Dahmer, who
was actually born in Ohio, I think, but he you know,
he practiced in Ohio. I mean, And of course ed Gan.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Frank Wordon tells the police that you know about ed
coming in the night before his mother goes missing. They
find the sales slit, and so that last sales receipt
receipt signed by ed Gan, written by Bernice Warden on
the morning she disappeared, So that evening ed Gean was
actually arrested, they went out and said, well, I mean,
we got to and two here we're going to put
(19:55):
it together.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Now.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
This is why I say they had to have other
things going on. This is like the bullet part, you know,
they had to have something else going on them to
just go out and say, well, Ed, we got a
receipt saying you were coming by to get Bernie get
a Annie Freeze, and she's gone, so we're going to
arrest you.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
But they went to Ed's property.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And that's why this is what I'm thinking, Joe, have
you ever walked into a site where the sheriff's deputy
the sheriff's deputy. Now, when I think of a deputy,
oftentimes I think of a younger guy. I know that's
not always the case, but that's what I in my
head when I'm picturing. I don't know who he was,
(20:35):
but a sheriff's deputy discovered the decapitated body of Missus Worden, Yes, and.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
She was hanging.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Upside down by her legs with a crossbar at her
ankles and ropes at her wrists. And the description in
this shed out of the property, the torso had been
dressed out like a deer. Yep, she had been shot
with the twenty two caliber rifle. And they believe the
(21:09):
mutilations were done after her death. Now, Joe, you're going
to have to explain the mutilations because I have no
way of knowing what we're really talking about. Other than
that crazy description.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Well, if I could just interject a little something here,
this is actually called trusting. So he and I don't
know if you recall this, we actually had another case
that involved trusting Paton Lord. I guess it's probably two
years ago now.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The name of it. I had to look up what
it meant.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
And yeah, exactly. And I think that that individual had
used a prefabed I don't know if they created their
own trust. It seems as though they had purchased one,
because you can buy them. And the people that use
these day are people that hunt, hunt game, you know,
big game, and so it's used for field dressing most times.
(21:59):
You well, you field dressing. It's not necessarily field dressing.
If you're doing it, you're domicile. I guess field dressing
implies that you're dressing out the animal in the wooded
area where you took the animal. However, in this particular case,
she was trust and that would give you just automatically,
if you were to come onto this cold and you
(22:20):
saw this body, other than the absolute shock and horror
of what you're witnessing before you, you would know that
this person had worked either maybe as a butcher at
some point in time, or they'd worked in a slaughterhouse,
or they were hunter and you know, you know, Dave,
(22:44):
you know ed Gean was known he was a deer hunter.
I think that his brother had been to while they
were in life. And as I had mentioned, there's a
lot of beautiful deer up in Wisconsin. But if you're
you know, if you're raising hogs as well, this is
kind of a way that this would be accomplished as well.
So the reason a body would be trust. And when
(23:07):
we say trust, it's suspended by ankles and instead the
wrist are stabilized. They are concurrently tied as well, just
like with an animal, it'd be the animal's four legs
and then the hind legs are on the primary bar,
so supporting the weight. Well why would.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
You do this?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, the idea is when you split the animal and
you're going from the pubis all the way to the
neck what we would call the sternoclavicular notch, which is
where the sternum and the clavical actually join. The reason
you do this is that when you make the initial
(23:46):
incision and then you go behind and go down to
the bowel and as you begin to kind of trim
down the spine, which is what you do. You're pulling
the viscera out with one hand and you're shaving with
the other hand, and gravity begins to help you. So
you don't have the need of an assistant, Okay, you don't.
(24:08):
You don't have to have somebody there. Then after you've
done this, and most of the time, you know, with hunters,
hunters they'll have a way, uh and certainly in professional butchery,
they'll have a way to collect all of the organs.
Generally it'll be in a centralized sack or something like
this that they can kind of set aside. Because there
(24:30):
are organ meats you know, that people people live off of.
They you know, things that have value, uh, liver, kidney,
and certainly if you're making sausage, uh, you would use
with hogs in particular, you'd save the bowel because those
are natural skins that you can actually place, you know,
you can place organ meat into and grind it up.
(24:53):
So and there's nothing, uh, you know, there's nothing here
that would give you indication that this is some kind
of amateur person that hasn't been around the dead. And
what we come to find out about ed Gean is
that it would seem, brother Dave, that these two women
(25:16):
that he rolled over on and admitted to killing were
in fact kind of culmination. I think I think he
had been practicing. And how do you practice? How do
you practice if you're a surgeon. Well, when you're in
medical school, you go to the gross anatomy lab, where
(25:38):
no matter how you treat the body, no matter how
many cuts you make on the body, the body is
not going to react. But then you move from gross
anatomy to a point where you're working on a living
and in my opinion, that's what ed Gene did. Look, David,
(26:13):
I've never been to Plainville, Wisconsin, all right, I'm not
saying I wouldn't want to go.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
What there is to do there, what there is to see.
I'm at a point in my life now where I
don't have to have a lot to do. I can
just kind of sit and look at things. It all
depends on my vantage point. I mean, i'd much I'd
much prefer sitting down in Gulf of Mexico and watch
wave roll in. Brother. You know, uh, but you know
there there, you know there are certain locations. I've never
(26:41):
been there, but I've heard everybody describe this town as
a location where not much changes or has changed for
a long long time. That's what's so horrific about this.
And I'm not casting aspersions on big cities, but if
(27:04):
ed gean, he would make the news in a big city.
But if this happened in some large metropolis anywhere in
the world, it would make it through several news cycles,
and then it would pass away and something new would
replace it. The fact that this is where it works
(27:26):
just the opposite. I think the way that this happened
and the level of horror that was inflicted on this
community has made this thing cycle back over and over again.
And you know as well as I know, because we've
heard that those of us that live in more rural
areas in America we referred to as living in fly
(27:48):
over country. Right then we don't really matter that sort
of thing, and so but this is that one. This
is one of the earliest examples I think of a
story that resonated with everybody because it kind of got
into our collective conscience. I think, I'm not going to
say DNA, but you know, it really stuck. Willis think
(28:09):
about this.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
She had the blank Dahlia in the forties out in
La Yeah, and you know where her body was cut apart,
drained of fluid, and it was positioned staged for people
who were shocking, shocking pictures taken and shown on you
know it Still to this day there are books still
being written about it and claiming, you know, that was
a murder mystery. But I'm not disagreeing with you one
(28:30):
hunt at all because the story of ed Geen, Like,
let me just give you a little idea what they
found inside there, because it wasn't just one victim. And
I think that's the part that I cannot imagine why
this did not become bigger than it is. The fact
that we're still having movies and documentaries done about it
(28:50):
shows it is big. But I'm with you one hundred percent,
it just lives a different news cycle when you're in
the rural areas of our country.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Here's what they found.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
They Granted, I would be mortified looking for a woman
that I now believe is probably dead, you know, but
what they found, the way they found her decapitated, that's
more than enough to call it my career over, you know.
But not only did they find Bernice Worden's body, so
(29:20):
just disabused.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
I mean, it was just horrible. But then they found.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Whole human bones and fragments, a waste basket made of
human skin, human skulls mounted on bedposts, female skulls, some
with the tops of the head, sawn off bowls made
from human skulls. This is plural, okay. And again they
(29:50):
went there for Bernice Ward and thinking we're going to
find one fifty eight year old business owner, and they
opened the gates of hell.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, that really did it gets worse, Joe.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
And I'm not even going to go any further because
I didn't know this, all right. I have not done
a huge deep dive on ed Geen until I did this,
I didn't know the level of what he had done
or how he went about doing it. When you said
you think that he finally moved to living and killing,
how did he get all the others before then, Joe,
(30:21):
where was he going to?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Well? Yeah, he's a grave robber, you know. And there's
been any number of categories of grave robbers over the years,
and we've covered them, you know, we've talked about them specifically.
Most of them were to remember the story that we
covered out of that goes back you know in the
ante Bellum South in Georgia where they were renovating, you know,
the medical school at Georgia Medical College many years ago,
(30:45):
and they were covered all of those remains, and those
had been remains probably a slave population that had been
dug up so that medical students could actually do gross
anatomical studies, and for a long time that was that
was where most grave robbers. I think kind of fixated
and with it. I think that even in our own brains,
(31:08):
if we try to process this, we can say, Okay,
I don't necessarily agree with how they went about that. However,
I do in fact understand the utility of it for
the purposes of educating future medical practitioners. I mean, I
think you and I would both agree that we both
would like to have medical professionals, professionals taking care of
(31:29):
us that understand basic human anatomy.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I would have absolutely no problem donating my body to
a medical school that felt they could learn or teach
anything based on this. I would have no problem with that.
Not everybody's like that, and I get that, but there
are people like that have no problem with it. I'd
sign the paper right now. Matter of fact, I'm willing
to auction it off. If you want to reach out
with the body.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Bags, I'll look into it for you.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
On the movie No Escape, you know I love those shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah, I love shoes, which is actually a Hannibal lector
quoted too. But anyway, the you know, in this particular case, though, Dave,
you know you said that you didn't want to go
any further. I will. I'll go ahead and talk about this,
(32:15):
and just so people understand, this is really horrible stuff
that this guy had contained in here. And again I
can't urge folks enough to think back. This is a
nineteen fifties world where we pretty much believed everything that
we saw in the news. We trusted people. You didn't
have monsters were something that weren't like in our face,
(32:38):
and we weren't even using We were nowhere even near
using the term serial killer, which of course ed Geen
is technically not so our senses, our sensitivities have changed
much since then, but even by today's standard day, there
are things in this house that are so shocking. You know,
(33:00):
they believe that he had robbed essentially forty graves, which
I find fascinating in the sense that most people in
rural areas. Not all, but many people would go out
and tend to their family's plots, right you go out there.
(33:22):
This may have been going on for I don't know.
Some people say maybe in the immediate wake of his
mother's death, that it kind of something switched, some trigger,
you know, switched in him and he felt the need to,
you know, kind of embrace this. It's actually kind of
reminiscent Dave of in one sense of Dahmer, because you know,
(33:43):
Dahmer famously said he was trying to create zombies, you know,
people that he could just keep with him and fill
them adjacent to him and hold on to them to
have some kind of relationship. I don't know if that's
what is at work, but I do know from a
forensic stand point, there were so many samples and specimens there.
(34:05):
Just let me run this by you day real quick.
And this is one of the more shocking things he found.
There were nine volvas found in a shoe box. And
here's what's kind of troubling. Uh Two two of the
vulvas that they found were from teenage girls. Now, teenage
(34:32):
girls don't suddenly die, all right, unless there's some kind
of you know, an accident or some kind of disease
that they're suffering from. That leads me to think, were
there any missing teenage girls back then that were never
reported missing, or were these from burials? But he, you know,
(34:53):
he had held on and for those of you anatomically
that are not familiar with the term volva, it's literally
the external genitalia female. So he had gone in and
dissected this out and had retained them. He had made
a belt out of out of skin. There's one story
(35:16):
that goes that the belt was actually made of nipples
kind of all laced together that you know, he would
put put around him and wear. Also, he had a
female suit that he had skinned out, complete with breast.
He had a skinned mask that he had placed on him.
(35:40):
And kind of one element to this is that in
the wake of his mother's death, Dave ed Gean had
begun training in taxidermy, and so he would be not
only was he familiar, as we saw with the one
body that's inverted and suspended that he could feel dressed
(36:03):
and animal, but he was he was into actually fixing
bodies so that they could be preserved, or he was
learning that process. I think along the way he's also
picking up on tanning methodologies, how to tan hide, you know,
because we've always we've always you know, we've always worn
(36:29):
you know, animal products, we've always worn leather belts, leather shoes,
all those things. Well, you have to go through a
tanning process. Native Americans did it just naturally, you know,
they could. They could stretch out a skin and tan
it and scrape it and all that sort of thing.
But if you know what you're doing, and you apply
the right mixture that's going to be primarily sodium based
(36:49):
mixture to dry out, to dry out the skins, you
can still do that and keep it soft and malleable
and be able to take it and turn it into
functional leather so you can create things. And that's that
goes to his fixation. I think one of the big
issues here. I'm really curious as to and I know
that the remains were eventually buried in an unmarked grave
(37:13):
there in plainfield, But wouldn't it be fascinating if if
you could go back in time and dig those remains
up and maybe take a look at them genetically to
find out who exactly they were, and you know, open
open that door, uh, you know, because there might be
(37:33):
families out there that just assume that, you know, their
loved one had been buried, they were in the ground,
and this is going to be generations later. But you
find that that connectivity, you know, between living relatives and say, yeah,
this was one of Gene's victims. Maybe people wouldn't want
to know that information, but I am fascinated by that aspect.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, man, Mary Hogan, Yeah, she was the ed Gean
confessed to killing Mary Hogan and Bernie's Ward. Now, Mary
Hogan was killed in nineteen fifty three or fifty four, yeah,
fifty four. Bernie's worden in fifty seven, Okay, And when
they actually found Bernice, they actually found Mary Hogan's face
(38:19):
mask in a paper bag. They found Mary Hogan's skull
in a box. Now, what are these masks that are
made from the skin of female heads?
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah? Is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, yeah it is. It's actually, according to what has
been said, is that he would drape this over his head,
and you know, and he had actually created female leggings
day which again he had skinned out the legs of
(38:54):
some corpse and created leggings that he could wrap around
his own his own leg and walk around with this
I'm assuming that, you know, because look, his farm was
kind of isolated, you know. It was not like on
the main street, you know, in this little burg up there.
It's out, it's outside of town, and so he could
(39:19):
walk and frolic and do everything he wanted to do
in the moonlight, you know, dressed, and he'd been engaged
in this behavior, you know, for years and years. He
had actually perfected it to a great degree. I think
it would have been I think by standards from back then,
it would have been a heck of a thing to
be able to go in there and be able to see,
(39:42):
to be able to see what had occurred from a
forensic standpoint, and be able to map that scene out
and try to breathe life in it from that perspective.
I'm hoping that someday maybe they'll be able to. But
I know that the story resonates with everyone, or we
wouldn't continue to have these various iterations of it, you know.
(40:04):
And look, these stories that you see in Hollywood are not,
as you well pointed out, Dave, They're not all ed Geane. Okay,
a lot of these stories they're selectively choosing. I was
under the understanding when Thomas Harris wrote wrote Silence and
Lambs that that character, which in the book is called
(40:25):
and in the movie is called Buffalo Bill. He's kind
of an amalgam of several serial killers. It's not just
or let me rephrase that, because I'll get snapped back on,
because Dean was not necessarily a serial killer, but he
was a monster.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Joe, he's a monster, you know, he's the worst of
the worst.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Look, we've done stereo killers, and that they're horrible in
and of himself. He's a different breed, And I wonder
how many of these are out there.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, And it is troubling that you, I think that
your soul could become this dark. I think that you
would engage in this kind of behavior for a protracted
period of time and it would be normalized in your world.
That you know, maybe he's lingering around the local cemetery
(41:16):
or funeral home. Maybe he's checking the o bits he's
looking in there Are there any fresh dead women that
I could go and visit after dark with my shovel
in my hand? Is there anybody that I could go
and construct this fictionalized life or perception of myself? Is
(41:36):
there anybody that I could take and hold on to
forever and ever, never having to bury them like I
had to bury his mom. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Bodybacks.
Body Bus with Joseph Scott More, I'd say after out
of all of the Looney Tune characters. For me personally,
having been a child of the sixties and seventies and
grown up watching the Bugs Bunny road Runner Hour for
those many years, my favorite adversary for Bugs Bunny was
(00:26):
probably Yosemite Sam. And the reason I liked Yosemite Sam
was because he had a temper that was unlike any
other character. He could just go off at the drop
of the hat and not so over the top but
still willing to shoot Bugs Bunny was Elmer Fudd. Elmer
(00:46):
Fudd didn't exactly have the same charisma as Yosemite Sam,
and certainly Bugs Bunny could fully constantly somewhat of adult.
But you know, in true crime, and specifically as it
applies to serial perpetrators, there's one person that has always
(01:08):
reminded me of Elmer Fudd, and that's because it would
seem that everywhere this one perpetrator went, he always wore
a hat just like Elmer's. He always seemed kind of dim,
and he always seemed lost. Today, given all of the
(01:35):
current news about a recent television program, I wanted to
step back just for a moment and have a conversation,
a conversation about the forensics of ed Gean, otherwise known
as the Butcher of Plainfield. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this
(01:57):
is Bodybacks.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Dave.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Who was your I know, I know for fact you
watched Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner hour at some point in time.
I got to tell you, drifting back all those years,
did you did you have a favorite adversary of Bugs Bunny?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, I liked all of them.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I mean I liked Bugs because he got out smart
at everybody. They made the bad guys into idiots.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I like Yosebity Sam, you know, he cracked me up.
Elmer Fudd, you know I liked him. Okay, but yeah, yeah,
I just like Bugget.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I like bugs. I smarten them all the time. That
was kind of my thing.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
The one character in that whole universe that just always
irritated me, that was the Roadrunner. I was always cheering
for the Cody.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I really was.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I just got I got, yeah, I really was. I
just you know, I was.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Just for the bad guys.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Like you're watching Goodfellas, You're hoping Henry Hill, you know,
ends up standing. I'm and killing everybody.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, No, no.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
But you know it's it's uh, you know, it was
it was always the Cody against the road Runner.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
And yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I'm trying to figure out, how does a tune so
pure and innocent that we we grew up on this,
you know what our generation learned classical music?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Symphony music from absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, the first time I went to a symphony, that's
what they took us, like in seventh or eighth grade,
and that's the first thing they did. They start off
with the lone Ranger and then they go into the interlude,
they go into all the other ones.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Well, that's bugs, that's Tasmanian devil, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Well it was the Valkyries. I think the Valkyries the
opera with Elmer Fudd wearing the Viking helmet and killed
the Web, killed the Web. But you know the thing
about it, those things that seemingly I think Dave, are
so very seemingly docile. Many times it can be those
(04:04):
things that go bump in the night. I think for
a lot of us. You know, it's kind of like
the you know, we're coming into the Halloween season a
horror movies. The thing that always scares me in Halloween
movies is not our horror movies. It's never like some
ghostly specter. It's always the child's toy that begins to
move across the floor, like the tricycle, you know. Or
(04:27):
the doll that's like inanimate, sitting in a chair and
suddenly the head starts to turn in one direction, you
know that, Or the doll appears on the bed next
to the kid that's terrified of the doll in the
first place. And I think that ed Gean probably he
was this kind of I don't know, that'll.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Be kind of us. A lot of people don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
And I mean this because you know, you hit me
with that Geen a while back, and he said, you know,
we really need to do this story.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
We really do.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And you started naming up all of these scary movies
that actually we're taken from the ed Gean story that
came out of the fifties. And that's scary enough. I mean,
when you realize that all of these scary seventies, eighties,
and nineties movies began with a real life story in
Wisconsin with ed Geen, and yet he's not technically a
(05:20):
serial killer, isn't even though.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
He's not not in my estimate. And look, I'm not
a serial killer specialist. Just because I've worked worked, you know,
killings that were serialized by several individuals does not make
me an expert on the topic of, you know, digging
into their psyche. As a matter of fact, I just
in state, you know, the stuff that I deal with
(05:43):
and you deal with by extension on the show is
heavy enough without you know, digging into the brains of
one of these people. But from what my colleagues have
told me that specialize in this area, most of the
time they're looking at a minimum of three. And I
hate to reduce it or use this term, but there's
(06:03):
no really confirmed kills, I guess, and to the best
of our knowledge, to the best of our knowledge, he's
only admitted to two. And here's the thing about it.
There are always people out there that want to give
credit to individuals for more killings. And some of that
(06:31):
stems I think, well, in the past, it stemmed from
cops that wanted to close books on cases. And famously,
I'll give you an example. Famously, my first job, which
was in New Orleans. While I was there, my friend
who was the commander of the homicide division. They actually
hosted oddest tool came to town. Yeah, he came to town.
(06:55):
And I could tell you really the over top, over
the top story about the but it's so disturbing on
one level. I'm not going to say it, you know,
on air, but to and what he was looking for
in many of these instances, because it was him and
Henry that were the serial killer pair allegedly that traveled about.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Henry what was that guy's last name?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Okay, but he was in Texas, right, and he claimed
to have like killed one hundred people, and then it
was like they got him in a chair and he
found out, I can get another pack of cigarettes if I
tell him I killed three people in Arizona.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So he tells, yeah, Dave, I've heard estimates up to
four hundred of them working in tandem. And you know, look,
that's you're starting to get into. I don't know ginghis
Khan numbers there. I don't know if that's and I'm
being facetious by saying that, I just don't.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Know that that's Henry Lee Lucas.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, Henry Lee Lucas. And and you know again another
person that allegedly had you know, to wax Freudian here
for second. To wax Freudian here for a second. Is actually,
you know, kN to Gean in the sense that had
mommy issues, which is kind of kind of fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Sickly I had to do a thing on Henry Lee
Lucas a couple of years ago, one of those deep
dive things that I get it tied up in sometimes,
and I'm not kidding. It was one of those things
show where I kept thinking, I'm hoping the funding falls
away on this because I'm tired of this guy. It
was just, yeah, the worst of the worst, but those
mommy issues.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It was bad.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
But with ed Gean, the two people that he killed
that he has admitted to killing, the one thing I
noticed is that both women were professional women. They had businesses.
We're talking about in the nineteen fifties, right.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yep, yeah, they were. And I think that's that's significant here.
You know that the relationship that he had with his mother,
there's some ination, uh you know that that she, you know,
casts versions on every other woman in the world other
than herself, and that all women were evil, and all
(09:10):
all evil sprouts from from females, and you need to
stay away from them. You know, you're going to hell. No,
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I can watched The water Boy the other day and
she kept saying everybody was the devil.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So yeah, I wonder, I wonder if that character is
based on on ed Gean's mama. Yeah, Kathy, one of
the greatest living actors in American history.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I love her.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
But yeah, so I got to tell you, Dave, you know,
relative to to being capable of what ed Geen was
eventually capable of, it wasn't. It wasn't like one of
these suddenly he had a light bulb go off over
his head to wreak the kind of horror and terror
(09:53):
that ranged all the way from I don't know. We
could talk about grave robbing. I think actually there are
elements of necrophilia obviously that are involved in here, and
you don't necessarily you don't necessarily have to have a
sexual encounter.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
With the dead.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Or raping a corpse is what it comes down to.
It can be the sexualization of the remains afterwards, you know,
and we see this in some of the quote unquote
tanned skins that what he formed out of them, which
is almost like he's trying to transform himself, as some
(10:36):
people say, into his mother. I've heard other people say,
trying to transport himself into the life of a woman.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Okay, now this again is something that came up in
Silence of the Lambs in Buffalo Bill.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So a lot of these books and movies that we
have seen in the last years, there's like a shred
of ed geen. They take this part of it and
put it over here, this part and put it on
leather face and you know, the Texas Kansaw massacre and
here's you know, that's that's pretty scary when you think
about what we do as a society, that we would
(11:10):
take a shred of truth and spread it around and
make all these other fictionalized stories that actually you can go, yeah,
I did that. A guy really did try to make
a mom suit.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, And you know that in and of itself is
far more terrifying, I think than you know, some wackerdoodle
out in Texas, you know, run around with chainsaw and
chopping people up and that sort of thing. And yeah,
the mask that you see, you know, quote unquote leather
face wearing is I think probably an homage obviously to
(11:41):
Gean he's out in a rural area, isolated in a house,
you know, and there's all kinds of other elements to this,
I think, probably even even elements of cannibalism that some
people claim that Gean was potentially involved in as well,
you know, the taking of these human remains. And you know,
(12:06):
I think I've looked at this case over a number
of years. You know, it's been brought to my attention
by students over the years, and one of the things
that's so striking to me, Dave, is that and just
kind of set the tone here. This is a meanness
in the terms of this is not a technical world
(12:29):
that has happened in. This was a black and white world,
and it was I think saying America was innocent back then,
we just come out of World War Two. We were
not innocent by any you know, stretch of the imagination.
You had people the decade before that was starving, living
hand to mouth, you know, and the depression. So you know,
(12:49):
I take exception anybody says that America was in the
innocent time back then. You know, it wasn't. We've come
through one of the couple of the most brutal decades
in certainly our country system, maybe even in world history,
but the world that those investigators back then inhabited, Dave,
Particularly on that night in November where they finally approached
(13:16):
that farmhouse, not a light was on, as a matter
of fact, no electricity. The environment was illuminated when it
was illuminated only by lamps. When they walked in and
they pulled out their flashlights and they began to shine
them about looking through this garbage heap that this man
(13:40):
lived in. Suddenly their eyes focused on things that probably
no human being is meant to see. But it was
their job to process that scene and tell this horrific story. David.
(14:08):
One of the things that I was really interested in
with ed Geen was to kind of dig in and
see if there were, if there was, how much data
there was out there relative to forensics. And I came
across something kind of interesting in this search. Did you
know I discovered the name at least of a forensic
(14:32):
or a pathologist who actually did the examination on one
of the remains covered recovered at the scene. Actually it
was miss Warden's body, and this physician's name he was
actually from Sheboygan and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he did the
(14:59):
examination of this woman's body actually in a mortuary day.
He was working for the state police or the state
Crime Lab on their behalf. And you know, back then
there were forensic pathologists, but there weren't that many certified
forensic pathologists. So he's a pathologist. He was studying other things,
(15:21):
but he also he also did the examination post mortem examination,
at least on Warden's body. He may have done other ones,
but I don't have a lot of record relative to that.
But here's another interesting bit to this. This same pathologist
actually went to the hospital date and personally examined at
(15:43):
Gean while he was in custody. Oh wow, which I
was kind of fascinated by. And I'm wondering was he
for thinking enough, because you know, this is something we've
been involved in in forensic pathology for a number of years,
and it's called living forensic pathology, and sometimes forensic pathologists
(16:06):
are called in to examine the living, examine the records
of the living, and many times is to look and
see if that individual has any injuries on their body
that might communicate with any other injuries that you know,
they may have found an autopsy or that may have
been alleged to have occurred. And I think about this
(16:28):
guy that was in the midst of this. His name,
his name is actually doctor Friedrich Eigenberger, and he was
born in Germany, and you know, he had been serving
in this area for a long time, had been working
(16:49):
in this area, and you know, can you imagine just
like him. I can guarantee you the day that these
cops got up and you know, they put on their
Humphrey Bogart like suits with their snap brown hats and
their overcoats, and they're going out there just like them.
This doctor, this was the last thing he expected to
(17:09):
be doing, you know, the next day, can you imagine?
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And remember how it started, Joe.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
It started with an investigation because Bernice Worden went missing.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
They were looking for her.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And as they began the investigation, they find out the
morning of November sixteen, nineteen fifty seven, she's fifty eight
years old, she owns a hardware store. She disappears that
morning and as they're tracking, just like we would do now,
you know, now we would have a CCTV camera, we'd
have you know, ring garbell cameras, any number of things.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Well, back to the.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Question is would The question is would they work and
would they be would they be clear?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
O luck And so the store. This is how it
came about. The hardware store's truck was seen driving out
near the rear of the building at around nine thirty
in the morning. The store didn't have a lot of customers, okay,
so they had receipts for the entire day. But they
actually found a receipt signed by ed Gean that he
(18:11):
was going to come back the next morning, okay, the
morning of November sixteen and get a gallon of Annie freeze.
So he comes in the day before she goes missing,
agrees I'll buy this, and the receipt is still there.
She's gone. So that was what led them to go, well, okay,
(18:33):
ed Geen said he was coming here, she's not here.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Let's go check. Let's talk to Ed. Let's go see
Ed now.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Based on what they found inside that house, I dare
say people had a few ideas about ed Geen. I
can't imagine. They thought he's old farmer brown just hanging
out there in the dell. You know, people had to
think this guy, there's something up with this cat.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Wow. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And hey, I'm glad
you brought up the term far in the Dell because
you know, there's actually a tiny little range of hills
and southern Wisconsin called the Dell's and my God rest
his soul, my father in law he actually went out
there and would hunt deer out there with friends. But yeah,
(19:16):
and so there's actually the Dell or the Dell's out
in Wisconsin. By the way, if I've never been to Wisconsin,
beautiful state. However, it did produce by Jeffrey Dahmer, who
was actually born in Ohio, I think, but he you know,
he practiced in Ohio. I mean, And of course ed Gan.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Frank Wordon tells the police that you know about ed
coming in the night before his mother goes missing. They
find the sales slit, and so that last sales receipt
receipt signed by ed Gan, written by Bernice Warden on
the morning she disappeared, So that evening ed Gean was
actually arrested, they went out and said, well, I mean,
we got to and two here we're going to put
(19:55):
it together.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Now.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
This is why I say they had to have other
things going on. This is like the bullet part, you know,
they had to have something else going on them to
just go out and say, well, Ed, we got a
receipt saying you were coming by to get Bernie get
a Annie Freeze, and she's gone, so we're going to
arrest you.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
But they went to Ed's property.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And that's why this is what I'm thinking, Joe, have
you ever walked into a site where the sheriff's deputy
the sheriff's deputy. Now, when I think of a deputy,
oftentimes I think of a younger guy. I know that's
not always the case, but that's what I in my
head when I'm picturing. I don't know who he was,
(20:35):
but a sheriff's deputy discovered the decapitated body of Missus Worden, Yes, and.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
She was hanging.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Upside down by her legs with a crossbar at her
ankles and ropes at her wrists. And the description in
this shed out of the property, the torso had been
dressed out like a deer. Yep, she had been shot
with the twenty two caliber rifle. And they believe the
(21:09):
mutilations were done after her death. Now, Joe, you're going
to have to explain the mutilations because I have no
way of knowing what we're really talking about. Other than
that crazy description.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Well, if I could just interject a little something here,
this is actually called trusting. So he and I don't
know if you recall this, we actually had another case
that involved trusting Paton Lord. I guess it's probably two
years ago now.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The name of it. I had to look up what
it meant.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
And yeah, exactly. And I think that that individual had
used a prefabed I don't know if they created their
own trust. It seems as though they had purchased one,
because you can buy them. And the people that use
these day are people that hunt, hunt game, you know,
big game, and so it's used for field dressing most times.
(21:59):
You well, you field dressing. It's not necessarily field dressing.
If you're doing it, you're domicile. I guess field dressing
implies that you're dressing out the animal in the wooded
area where you took the animal. However, in this particular case,
she was trust and that would give you just automatically,
if you were to come onto this cold and you
(22:20):
saw this body, other than the absolute shock and horror
of what you're witnessing before you, you would know that
this person had worked either maybe as a butcher at
some point in time, or they'd worked in a slaughterhouse,
or they were hunter and you know, you know, Dave,
(22:44):
you know ed Gean was known he was a deer hunter.
I think that his brother had been to while they
were in life. And as I had mentioned, there's a
lot of beautiful deer up in Wisconsin. But if you're
you know, if you're raising hogs as well, this is
kind of a way that this would be accomplished as well.
So the reason a body would be trust. And when
(23:07):
we say trust, it's suspended by ankles and instead the
wrist are stabilized. They are concurrently tied as well, just
like with an animal, it'd be the animal's four legs
and then the hind legs are on the primary bar,
so supporting the weight. Well why would.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
You do this?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, the idea is when you split the animal and
you're going from the pubis all the way to the
neck what we would call the sternoclavicular notch, which is
where the sternum and the clavical actually join. The reason
you do this is that when you make the initial
(23:46):
incision and then you go behind and go down to
the bowel and as you begin to kind of trim
down the spine, which is what you do. You're pulling
the viscera out with one hand and you're shaving with
the other hand, and gravity begins to help you. So
you don't have the need of an assistant, Okay, you don't.
(24:08):
You don't have to have somebody there. Then after you've
done this, and most of the time, you know, with hunters,
hunters they'll have a way, uh and certainly in professional butchery,
they'll have a way to collect all of the organs.
Generally it'll be in a centralized sack or something like
this that they can kind of set aside. Because there
(24:30):
are organ meats you know, that people people live off of.
They you know, things that have value, uh, liver, kidney,
and certainly if you're making sausage, uh, you would use
with hogs in particular, you'd save the bowel because those
are natural skins that you can actually place, you know,
you can place organ meat into and grind it up.
(24:53):
So and there's nothing, uh, you know, there's nothing here
that would give you indication that this is some kind
of amateur person that hasn't been around the dead. And
what we come to find out about ed Gean is
that it would seem, brother Dave, that these two women
(25:16):
that he rolled over on and admitted to killing were
in fact kind of culmination. I think I think he
had been practicing. And how do you practice? How do
you practice if you're a surgeon. Well, when you're in
medical school, you go to the gross anatomy lab, where
(25:38):
no matter how you treat the body, no matter how
many cuts you make on the body, the body is
not going to react. But then you move from gross
anatomy to a point where you're working on a living
and in my opinion, that's what ed Gene did. Look, David,
(26:13):
I've never been to Plainville, Wisconsin, all right, I'm not
saying I wouldn't want to go.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
What there is to do there, what there is to see.
I'm at a point in my life now where I
don't have to have a lot to do. I can
just kind of sit and look at things. It all
depends on my vantage point. I mean, i'd much I'd
much prefer sitting down in Gulf of Mexico and watch
wave roll in. Brother. You know, uh, but you know
there there, you know there are certain locations. I've never
(26:41):
been there, but I've heard everybody describe this town as
a location where not much changes or has changed for
a long long time. That's what's so horrific about this.
And I'm not casting aspersions on big cities, but if
(27:04):
ed gean, he would make the news in a big city.
But if this happened in some large metropolis anywhere in
the world, it would make it through several news cycles,
and then it would pass away and something new would
replace it. The fact that this is where it works
(27:26):
just the opposite. I think the way that this happened
and the level of horror that was inflicted on this
community has made this thing cycle back over and over again.
And you know as well as I know, because we've
heard that those of us that live in more rural
areas in America we referred to as living in fly
(27:48):
over country. Right then we don't really matter that sort
of thing, and so but this is that one. This
is one of the earliest examples I think of a
story that resonated with everybody because it kind of got
into our collective conscience. I think, I'm not going to
say DNA, but you know, it really stuck. Willis think
(28:09):
about this.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
She had the blank Dahlia in the forties out in
La Yeah, and you know where her body was cut apart,
drained of fluid, and it was positioned staged for people
who were shocking, shocking pictures taken and shown on you
know it Still to this day there are books still
being written about it and claiming, you know, that was
a murder mystery. But I'm not disagreeing with you one
(28:30):
hunt at all because the story of ed Geen, Like,
let me just give you a little idea what they
found inside there, because it wasn't just one victim. And
I think that's the part that I cannot imagine why
this did not become bigger than it is. The fact
that we're still having movies and documentaries done about it
(28:50):
shows it is big. But I'm with you one hundred percent,
it just lives a different news cycle when you're in
the rural areas of our country.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Here's what they found.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
They Granted, I would be mortified looking for a woman
that I now believe is probably dead, you know, but
what they found, the way they found her decapitated, that's
more than enough to call it my career over, you know.
But not only did they find Bernice Worden's body, so
(29:20):
just disabused.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
I mean, it was just horrible. But then they found.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Whole human bones and fragments, a waste basket made of
human skin, human skulls mounted on bedposts, female skulls, some
with the tops of the head, sawn off bowls made
from human skulls. This is plural, okay. And again they
(29:50):
went there for Bernice Ward and thinking we're going to
find one fifty eight year old business owner, and they
opened the gates of hell.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, that really did it gets worse, Joe.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
And I'm not even going to go any further because
I didn't know this, all right. I have not done
a huge deep dive on ed Geen until I did this,
I didn't know the level of what he had done
or how he went about doing it. When you said
you think that he finally moved to living and killing,
how did he get all the others before then, Joe,
(30:21):
where was he going to?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Well? Yeah, he's a grave robber, you know. And there's
been any number of categories of grave robbers over the years,
and we've covered them, you know, we've talked about them specifically.
Most of them were to remember the story that we
covered out of that goes back you know in the
ante Bellum South in Georgia where they were renovating, you know,
the medical school at Georgia Medical College many years ago,
(30:45):
and they were covered all of those remains, and those
had been remains probably a slave population that had been
dug up so that medical students could actually do gross
anatomical studies, and for a long time that was that
was where most grave robbers. I think kind of fixated
and with it. I think that even in our own brains,
(31:08):
if we try to process this, we can say, Okay,
I don't necessarily agree with how they went about that. However,
I do in fact understand the utility of it for
the purposes of educating future medical practitioners. I mean, I
think you and I would both agree that we both
would like to have medical professionals, professionals taking care of
(31:29):
us that understand basic human anatomy.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I would have absolutely no problem donating my body to
a medical school that felt they could learn or teach
anything based on this. I would have no problem with that.
Not everybody's like that, and I get that, but there
are people like that have no problem with it. I'd
sign the paper right now. Matter of fact, I'm willing
to auction it off. If you want to reach out
with the body.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Bags, I'll look into it for you.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
On the movie No Escape, you know I love those shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah, I love shoes, which is actually a Hannibal lector
quoted too. But anyway, the you know, in this particular case, though, Dave,
you know you said that you didn't want to go
any further. I will. I'll go ahead and talk about this,
(32:15):
and just so people understand, this is really horrible stuff
that this guy had contained in here. And again I
can't urge folks enough to think back. This is a
nineteen fifties world where we pretty much believed everything that
we saw in the news. We trusted people. You didn't
have monsters were something that weren't like in our face,
(32:38):
and we weren't even using We were nowhere even near
using the term serial killer, which of course ed Geen
is technically not so our senses, our sensitivities have changed
much since then, but even by today's standard day, there
are things in this house that are so shocking. You know,
(33:00):
they believe that he had robbed essentially forty graves, which
I find fascinating in the sense that most people in
rural areas. Not all, but many people would go out
and tend to their family's plots, right you go out there.
(33:22):
This may have been going on for I don't know.
Some people say maybe in the immediate wake of his
mother's death, that it kind of something switched, some trigger,
you know, switched in him and he felt the need to,
you know, kind of embrace this. It's actually kind of
reminiscent Dave of in one sense of Dahmer, because you know,
(33:43):
Dahmer famously said he was trying to create zombies, you know,
people that he could just keep with him and fill
them adjacent to him and hold on to them to
have some kind of relationship. I don't know if that's
what is at work, but I do know from a
forensic stand point, there were so many samples and specimens there.
(34:05):
Just let me run this by you day real quick.
And this is one of the more shocking things he found.
There were nine volvas found in a shoe box. And
here's what's kind of troubling. Uh Two two of the
vulvas that they found were from teenage girls. Now, teenage
(34:32):
girls don't suddenly die, all right, unless there's some kind
of you know, an accident or some kind of disease
that they're suffering from. That leads me to think, were
there any missing teenage girls back then that were never
reported missing, or were these from burials? But he, you know,
(34:53):
he had held on and for those of you anatomically
that are not familiar with the term volva, it's literally
the external genitalia female. So he had gone in and
dissected this out and had retained them. He had made
a belt out of out of skin. There's one story
(35:16):
that goes that the belt was actually made of nipples
kind of all laced together that you know, he would
put put around him and wear. Also, he had a
female suit that he had skinned out, complete with breast.
He had a skinned mask that he had placed on him.
(35:40):
And kind of one element to this is that in
the wake of his mother's death, Dave ed Gean had
begun training in taxidermy, and so he would be not
only was he familiar, as we saw with the one
body that's inverted and suspended that he could feel dressed
(36:03):
and animal, but he was he was into actually fixing
bodies so that they could be preserved, or he was
learning that process. I think along the way he's also
picking up on tanning methodologies, how to tan hide, you know,
because we've always we've always you know, we've always worn
(36:29):
you know, animal products, we've always worn leather belts, leather shoes,
all those things. Well, you have to go through a
tanning process. Native Americans did it just naturally, you know,
they could. They could stretch out a skin and tan
it and scrape it and all that sort of thing.
But if you know what you're doing, and you apply
the right mixture that's going to be primarily sodium based
(36:49):
mixture to dry out, to dry out the skins, you
can still do that and keep it soft and malleable
and be able to take it and turn it into
functional leather so you can create things. And that's that
goes to his fixation. I think one of the big
issues here. I'm really curious as to and I know
that the remains were eventually buried in an unmarked grave
(37:13):
there in plainfield, But wouldn't it be fascinating if if
you could go back in time and dig those remains
up and maybe take a look at them genetically to
find out who exactly they were, and you know, open
open that door, uh, you know, because there might be
(37:33):
families out there that just assume that, you know, their
loved one had been buried, they were in the ground,
and this is going to be generations later. But you
find that that connectivity, you know, between living relatives and say, yeah,
this was one of Gene's victims. Maybe people wouldn't want
to know that information, but I am fascinated by that aspect.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, man, Mary Hogan, Yeah, she was the ed Gean
confessed to killing Mary Hogan and Bernie's Ward. Now, Mary
Hogan was killed in nineteen fifty three or fifty four, yeah,
fifty four. Bernie's worden in fifty seven, Okay, And when
they actually found Bernice, they actually found Mary Hogan's face
(38:19):
mask in a paper bag. They found Mary Hogan's skull
in a box. Now, what are these masks that are
made from the skin of female heads?
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah? Is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, yeah it is. It's actually, according to what has
been said, is that he would drape this over his head,
and you know, and he had actually created female leggings
day which again he had skinned out the legs of
(38:54):
some corpse and created leggings that he could wrap around
his own his own leg and walk around with this
I'm assuming that, you know, because look, his farm was
kind of isolated, you know. It was not like on
the main street, you know, in this little burg up there.
It's out, it's outside of town, and so he could
(39:19):
walk and frolic and do everything he wanted to do
in the moonlight, you know, dressed, and he'd been engaged
in this behavior, you know, for years and years. He
had actually perfected it to a great degree. I think
it would have been I think by standards from back then,
it would have been a heck of a thing to
be able to go in there and be able to see,
(39:42):
to be able to see what had occurred from a
forensic standpoint, and be able to map that scene out
and try to breathe life in it from that perspective.
I'm hoping that someday maybe they'll be able to. But
I know that the story resonates with everyone, or we
wouldn't continue to have these various iterations of it, you know.
(40:04):
And look, these stories that you see in Hollywood are not,
as you well pointed out, Dave, They're not all ed Geane. Okay,
a lot of these stories they're selectively choosing. I was
under the understanding when Thomas Harris wrote wrote Silence and
Lambs that that character, which in the book is called
(40:25):
and in the movie is called Buffalo Bill. He's kind
of an amalgam of several serial killers. It's not just
or let me rephrase that, because I'll get snapped back on,
because Dean was not necessarily a serial killer, but he
was a monster.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Joe, he's a monster, you know, he's the worst of
the worst.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Look, we've done stereo killers, and that they're horrible in
and of himself. He's a different breed, And I wonder
how many of these are out there.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, And it is troubling that you, I think that
your soul could become this dark. I think that you
would engage in this kind of behavior for a protracted
period of time and it would be normalized in your world.
That you know, maybe he's lingering around the local cemetery
(41:16):
or funeral home. Maybe he's checking the o bits he's
looking in there Are there any fresh dead women that
I could go and visit after dark with my shovel
in my hand? Is there anybody that I could go
and construct this fictionalized life or perception of myself? Is
(41:36):
there anybody that I could take and hold on to
forever and ever, never having to bury them like I
had to bury his mom. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.