The Backstory: The real American psycho

The Wisconsin countryside in autumn during the 1950s sounds idyllic. But it was the scene of a horrifying series of murders and body-snatching cases. Ed Gein, in “The Butcher of Plainfield,” was the loner who inspired movies like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. So…what’s his story?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, Hey, before we start, I gotta tell you
this episode gets a little gory, but it's actually the
only way to tell the story. So I'm just saying, Okay.
A lot of us love a good horror flick, especially
some of the classics like Psycho, Texas, Chainsaw Massacre in
Silence of the Lambs. Well, these and a number of

(00:20):
other terrifying flicks were all inspired by one guy, the
so called Butcher of Plainfield. I'm Patty Steele. The horrifying
story of body snatcher and murderer. Ed guy, that's next
on the backstory. The backstory is back. There are certain

(00:41):
characters in really and I mean really great horror film
that just imprint on your brain, am I right? Guys
like Norman Bates and Psycho, Hannibal Lecter and the almost
unseen Buffalo Bill both in Silence of the Lambs, And
of course leather Face in Texas, Chainsaw Massacre. Oh, who
can forget Frank Townsend in the Tour de Force three

(01:03):
on a meat Hook. Wow, Thankfully I missed that one
for sure. But all these flicks and a lot of
others were inspired by one terrifying individual. Ed Geine amazingly
saw himself less as a killer and more as an artist,
and he focused on creating his works of art by
using parts of the human body. So how did he

(01:26):
start out as a quiet, reclusive little Wisconsin farmboy and
become one of America's most infamous murderers, Plus how did
they eventually nab him? Edward Theodore Gine was born in
nineteen oh six in Lacrosse County, Wisconsin. His parents, Augusta
and George Gin, were the master chefs in this recipe

(01:47):
for psychological disaster. Ed's mom was a fanatically religious woman
who totally believed that the world was full of sin,
and especially thought that women were corrupting influences instruments of
the devil. I wonder if she thought that about herself.
Augusta also thought that drinking was a huge sin, which

(02:07):
was ironic seeing as how her husband and Ed's dad, George,
was a severe alcoholic who could barely hold a job.
Augusta ran the house with an iron fist, and she
made sure to isolate Ed and his older brother Henry
from the outside world. Augusta drilled into Ed in probably
Henry's head, that women were evil, sex was sinful, and

(02:30):
that they could only rely on their mama, and Ed
worshiped her. In fact, he was totally obsessed with his mother.
Other than that, he wasn't much of an attention grabber.
As a little kid, he was quiet, awkward, and pretty
much kept to himself. He never much left the family
farm except to go to school, where he didn't socialize

(02:50):
very much. But as he got older, his fascination with
death began to unfold. Ed was a big reader, but
it was his choice of books that became a problem.
In his spare time, He'd read books about anatomy and
Nazi experiments. He'd obsess over stories about grave robbers, and
even started to hang out at the local butcher shop

(03:12):
just to watch the animals get slaughtered. But then disaster
struck for Ed. His mother died in nineteen forty five,
when he was thirty nine years old and still living
at home, and that was kind of the final crack
in his fragile psyche. With Augusta gone, Ed was alone
for the first time in his life, and instead of

(03:32):
reaching out trying to make friends, he started visiting local
cemeteries to dig up bodies. He'd steal the corpses bring
them to his isolated farmhouse, and then repurpose their remains.
I'm giving myself chills here. By repurpose, I mean in
the most grotesque way. For years it was Ed's secret,

(03:53):
but then his obsession escalated. On November sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven,
his hometown of plain Field, Wisconsin, was terrified by the
disappearance of Bernice Warden, the owner of the local hardware store.
The store had been turned upside down, but a sales
receipt showed that the last person she'd served was Ed Guine.

(04:15):
Sheriff's deputies took a ride out to Ed's farm to
have a little front porch chat right, but what they
found was beyond anything they could have imagined. Inside the
Gune farmhouse, they found human skulls, masks, and lampshades made
from human skin, and then they found the mutilated body
of Bernice Warden hung up in the shed like a

(04:37):
hunting trophy on a meat hook. Inside the house, they
found that Ed had made masks out of human skin,
furniture with human flesh, and so many other household items
out of repurposed body parts. There was a belt he'd
made for himself by sewing together dozens of women's nipples,
and he had made pulls for his window shades from

(04:58):
women's lips. He even tried to build what was described
as a woman suit for himself in order to dress
himself up and recreate his mother so as he said
he could crawl into her skin. Gin was immediately arrested
and the more police searched the farmhouse. The worst thing
Scott more of Ed's artwork using human beings as his medium.

(05:22):
It was so disturbing to investigators that one of them,
the local sheriff, physically attacked Ed. Not long after that,
forty two year old sheriff died of a heart attack,
which friends blamed on the trauma of the investigation. They
were only ever able to pin two murders on Ed,
hardware store owner Bernice Warden and Mary Hogan, a tavern

(05:42):
owner who had gone missing three years earlier. He was
suspected in other killings, but it was clear he was
totally insane, So why spend the money, said the local prosecutor.
During his interrogation, Ed was disturbingly calm. He confessed to
his crimes in a flat, emotionless tone. It was clear
that in his world the dead could be reanimated and

(06:05):
possibly his mother could be still with him. Psychiatrist said
he mainly was a grave robber and as for murder,
only targeted women who looked like his mom, and he
actually managed to pass a lie detector test because he
believed his own lies. Eventually, ed Guin was declared legally
insane and sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, where,

(06:28):
despite some other trials, he remained for the rest of
his life and was actually a model patient. He died
in nineteen eighty four at the age of seventy seven
from respiratory failure. His grave became a target for vandals
who would chip away pieces of his tombstone for souvenirs.
And what about the Guine farmhouse, Well, it caught fire

(06:50):
not long after his arrest. Arson was suspected, but the
investigation just wasn't a priority to the fire chief since
he was the son of victim number one hardware store
owner Bernice Warden. In the Happy Go Go nineteen fifties,
ed Gein's story chilled folks to the bone. His crimes

(07:10):
were unimaginable, and they inspired some of the most terrifying
villains in movie history. Just three years after his last murder,
America was terrified by Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Psycho, in which
Norman Bates was a killer obsessed with his dead mother,
and the genre grew over the decades, with so many
based at least in some part on what happened in

(07:31):
the Guine Farmhouse. In fact, the Netflix anthology series Monster
is going to take a deep dive into Guine's story
when it's released late this year or early next. Edgin's
story isn't just about murder. It's about the perfect storm
that's created when a mentally ill child is raised by
abusive parents and no one's there to stop his psychological decay.

(07:58):
I hope you're enjoying the Backstory with Patty Steele and
not too frightened by this one. Follow or subscribe for
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me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on
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(08:19):
production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and
Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer
Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
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on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(08:41):
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.