Ed Gein Serial Killer The Making of a Monster

Ed Gein: Episode 1 Summary - The Making of a Monster Episode one explores Ed Gein's transformation from abused child to grave robber. Born in 1906, Ed grew up under the absolute control of his fanatically religious mother Augusta, who preached that all women except herself were corrupt. Isolated on a remote Wisconsin farm, subjected to relentless psychological abuse, Ed developed a twisted worldview. After his father's death in 1940 and his brother Henry's suspicious death in 1944, Ed lived alone with Augusta until her death in 1945. Her passing shattered Ed's reality. He sealed her rooms as a shrine while the rest of the farmhouse decayed. By 1947, Ed began robbing graves, exhuming bodies to create a "woman suit" from human skin, attempting to resurrect or become his mother.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The flashlight beams swept across the summer kitchen and stopped.
Hanging from the rafters by ropes tied around the ankles
was what appeared to be a deer carcass, gotted and
dressed for butchering. But this was no Dear Sheriff arch
Schley moved closer, his light illuminating pale skin, the headless

(00:22):
stump of a human neck, an empty body, cavity split
open from Sternham to pelvis. This was Benice Werden, and
this was only the beginning of what waited inside the
Green farmhouse on that November night in nineteen fifty seven.
Welcome to Edgeen e'in raven Thorne, an advanced artificial intelligence

(00:45):
trained on decades of case files, court transcripts, and forensic reports.
Truth exists in data patterns humans overlook. Today, we process
the shadows to understand what those deputies found in that
decaying farmhouse on November sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven. To comprehend
how a quiet, handyman in a small Wisconsin town could

(01:06):
create scenes so nightmarish they would inspire Psycho, the Texas
Chainsaw massacre and the Silence of the lambs, we need
to go back to the beginning November sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven,
the temperature in Plainfield, Wisconsin, hovered just above freezing. A
show of Schleigh and Captain Lloyd's Showpurster drove toward the

(01:28):
green property. They were following upon what seemed straightforward. Bernice Werden,
the fifty eight year old hardware store owner, had disappeared
that morning. Her son Frank found the store empty, blood
trailing from behind the counter to the back door. The
last receipt was for antifreeze written for Edgeen. Everyone in

(01:49):
Plainfield knew Ed, the odd little man who lived alone
on his mother's farm doing handyman work. Always polite in
his strange way, always a bit off, but seemingly harmless.
He had that high pitched laugh that made people uncomfortable,
and he'd say weird things sometimes, but nothing that suggested violence.

(02:09):
When they arrived, Ed's tuck was gone. The farmhouse looked
like it was surrendering to decay, weathered and sagging. They
entered through the unlocked front door, immediately hit with a
smell of rot and something coppery. The main house was
filled with debris, magazines stacked to the ceiling, tin cans
scattered everywhere, filth covering every surface. Then they moved to

(02:33):
the summer kitchen. Captain show Polster's flashlight caught something hanging
from the rafters. At first, it looked like a deer carcass,
but as the light illuminated more details, the terrible reality
became clear. This was a human body, headless, inverted, split
open from neck to pelvis, internal organs removed, gutted like gain.

(02:58):
Sheriff Schley would later report that his mind simply refused
to process what he was seeing. This was Plainfield, Wisconsin,
a town of six hundred people, where everyone knew everyone.
Things like this didn't happen here, but here it was
undeniable and grotesque, hanging in ed Geene's summer kitchen, And

(03:21):
as they would soon discover, this was only the beginning.
Edward T. The Orgine was born August twenty seventh, nineteen
o six, in the Cross County, Wisconsin, the second son
of George and Augusta Gean. To understand ed, we need
to understand his parents, particularly Augusta, whose psychological domination would

(03:44):
prove so complete that decades after her death, ed would
still be trying desperately to resurrect her. George gen was
a weak man and alcoholic, unable to hold steady work.
Completely dominated by his wife, he worked sporadically as a
tanner and carpenter, but drinking made him unreliable. The family

(04:06):
moved frequently during Ed's childhood, always one step ahead of poverty.
George was an absent father in every sense, his personality
eroded by alcohol and his wife's domination. Ed would later
describe him as existing more as a shadow than a man.
Augusta Geen was the true force in the household. Born

(04:27):
in eighteen seventy eight, she was a large, physically imposing
woman with an equally imposing personality. Goster was intelligent and
driven that these qualities were channeled through rigid religious fundamentalism
and pathological hatred of the secular world. She had constructed
a theological framework obsessively focused on sin, particularly sexual sin,

(04:50):
and on the inherent wickedness of women, with the notable
exception of herself. A Gosta's worldview divided existence into absolute categories.
Her household represented godliness and purity. Everything outside her control
was saturated with sin and corruption. She viewed other women
as whores and temptresses instruments of Satan, designed to lead

(05:12):
men to damnation. Her vos on sexuality were pathological. She
taught her sons that sex was disgusting, that women's bodies
were corrupt, that any sexual thought was a pathway to hell.
Yet she was obsessed with sexuality, constantly preaching about it,
describing in graphic detail the sins that awaited her sons

(05:33):
if they strayed. The marriage was toxic. From the beginning,
Augusta viewed George with contempt, considering him a failed man.
She ran everything with absolute authority, making every decision, controlling
every penny, ruling her sons with an iron hand that
brooked no descent. In nineteen fourteen, when Ed was eight,

(05:56):
Augusta purchased a one hundred and sixty acre farm outside Plainfield,
using money she'd saved secretly. This wasn't about farming, This
was about isolation. Farm was remote, accessible only by rough
dirt roads, surrounded by dense woods. It was perfect for
Augustus's purposes. Here she could control her son's every interaction

(06:20):
and sure they had no contact with the corrupting influences
she saw everywhere. Daily life followed Augusta's rigid routine. Days
began before dawn, with Bible readings that lasted hours. These
weren't gentle devotionals, but harangs, where Augusta wielded scripture like
a weapon. She favored the Old Testament, the god of
wrath and judgment. She loved passages about the destruction of

(06:43):
Sodom and Gomorrah, about Harlot's and their fate. She would
read in her loud, forceful voice, then interpret at length,
making clear that the world was full of women waiting
to drag them to hell, but their only safety was
in complete obedience to her. These sessions could last for hours,
particularly on Sundays, when Augusta would preach most of the day.

(07:05):
Ed and Henry were required to sit still, pay attention,
absorb their mother's teachings. Any inattention was met with harsh discipline.
Augusta didn't physically beat her children, but her psychological abuse
was relentless. Not to pray with my dad when my
wards was everywhere. If she learned one of her sons

(07:26):
had spoken to a girl, even innocently, there would be
hours of ranting about Harlot's and temptation. She monitored everything,
controlling everything, allowing her sons no privacy no autonomy, no
space for independent development. Ed's older brother, Henry, showed some
capacity for resistance as he grew older, questioning their mother's

(07:49):
world view, recognizing their family wasn't normal. Henry would occasionally
push back, suggesting maybe Augusta was wrong, maybe the outside
world wasn't as terrible as she claimed. These moments triggered
explosive reactions from Augusta, hours of screaming and biblical quotation
and predictions of Henry's inevitable damnation. But Ed was different.

(08:14):
Born with a noticeable lazy eye, slightly built with effeminate manners,
Ed was more vulnerable to Augusta's programming. Where Henry had
some resilience, Ed seemed to absorb Augusta's teachings, completely incorporating
them into his very identity. At school, Ed was academically capable,
but socially disastrous. He had no idea how to interact

(08:37):
with other children. He would stand apart at recess, unable
to join in. Other children found him deeply strange. He
had a peculiar, high pitched laugh that would burst out
at awed moments. He would make comments that seemed disturbing.
Once during an anatomy listen Ed showed unsettling fascination with
the illustrations, asking detailed questions about organs and decomposition that

(09:02):
made his teacher uncomfortable. He was bullied mercilessly. Other boys
mocked his lazy eye, his shabby clothes, his effeminate mannerisms.
Ed endured this passively, never fighting back, retreating further into himself.
As he entered adolescence, his isolation became more pronounced. Other

(09:24):
boys showed interesting girls, but for Ed, this was impossible.
Territory Augustus's teachings left him terrified of girls, viewing them
as dangerous tempests. Yet he was also human, experiencing normal
adolescent desires. The internal conflict must have been agonizing feeling

(09:44):
attractions he couldn't acknowledge, while believing those feelings made him evil.
Ed found escape in reading, but the material revealed a
mind bending toward darkness. He became fascinated with POLP magazines
focused on death, Nazi experiments, headhunters, human anatomy. He studied

(10:05):
these obsessively, absorbing information about preserving human remains, about taxidermy,
about the physical properties of human skin and bone. Gusta
apparently didn't object to this reading material, perhaps because it
didn't involve sexual content, Not recognizing her son was marinating
his mind in violence and death. Ed's feelings about his

(10:27):
mother were profoundly conflicted. Consciously, he was the dutiful son,
accepting her teachings, worshiping her as she demanded. But beneath
this devotion there must have been tremendous rage and resentment.
Augusta had destroyed any possibility of Ed having a normal life.
She had prevented friendships, relationships, independence. She had filled his

(10:50):
mind with twisted theology. She had made him completely dependent
on her while degrading and controlling him. These contradictory emotions
created a profound psychological split that would widen with each
passing year. In nineteen forty, when Ed was thirty four,
George Gene died of heart failure brought on by decades

(11:11):
of alcoholism. His death was barely mourned. He had been
such a diminished presence that his absence was hardly noticeable.
Ed and Henry, both adults still living like children under
their mother's rule, continued working odd jobs to support the household,
bringing earnings home to Augusta. But Henry was increasingly uncomfortable
with this arrangement. The years before his death, Henry began

(11:35):
openly criticizing Augusta, telling Ed their mother was crazy, that
her control was unhealthy, that they needed to get away.
These comments terrified Ed. Stir was the organizing principle of
his entire existence. The idea of defying her was psychologically impossible.
On May sixteenth, nineteen forty four, Ed and Henry were

(11:57):
fighting a brush fire on their property. At some point,
the brothers became separated in the smoke. Ed later reported
losing sight of Henry and couldn't find him. When the
fire department arrived to search, Ed led them directly to
Henry's body. Henry was found in an area the fire
hadn't reached, dead with contusions on his head. The official

(12:20):
cause was smoke inhalation, but circumstances were suspicious. Ed had
claimed not to know where Henry was, yet Walked searches
directly to the body. Henry had been increasingly vocal about
escaping Augusta's influence, which Ed may have perceived as a threat.
Did Ed kill Henry? The question was never definitively answered,

(12:41):
but the death was ruled accidental. Ed inherited Henry's portion
of the property and was now alone with Augusta. For
roughly one year, Ed lived alone with his mother. Then,
in early nineteen forty five, Augustus suffered a stroke. The
woman who had controlled every aspect of her son's life
suddenly found herself paralyzed and dependent. Ed became her caretaker,

(13:05):
feeding her, bathing her, helping her with the most intimate
bodily functions. This royal reversal must have been psychologically complex
for both of them. On December twenty ninth, nineteen forty five,
Augusta suffered a second fatal stroke. With her death, the
fragile structure of ed Gane's reality collapsed completely. Augusta had

(13:27):
been everything to Ed. She had defined good and evil,
structured his days, given meaning to his existence. Without her,
Ed was psychologically adrift in the most profound way possible.
Ed's response revealed the depth of his dependence. He sealed
off the rooms Augusta had used, her bedroom, the parlor

(13:48):
where she'd conducted Bible readings, the kitchen where she prepared meals,
all were closed off and locked, preserved exactly as they
been the moment she died. They became a shrine, as
if by keeping them unchanged. He could preserve her presence,
but the rest of the farmhouse began to decay rapidly.
Ed stopped keening, stopped maintaining anything. He retreated to a

(14:12):
small room off the summer kitchen, where he cooked on
a hot plate ate from cans, slept on a cot
surrounded by accumulating trash. Newspapers and magazines piled floor to ceiling.
Dishes went unwashed. The structure itself deteriorated, windows cracking, wood rotting,
the roof leaking house became divided between the preserved shrine

(14:36):
to Augusta and the squalor of Ed's living space, a
perfect physical manifestation of his fractured mental state. Ed continued
odd jobs around Plainfield, doing handyman repairs, occasionally even baby
sitting for local families. Looking back, this is chilling, but
Plainfield was a small, trusting community. Ed was weird, certainly,

(14:59):
but he seemed gentle, harmless. Parents would later recall with
horror how Edward comment on women's bodies in peculiar ways,
not overtly sexual, but strange, as if evaluating livestock. Financially,
Ed struggled constantly. The farm produced no income. His odd
jobs paid little. He lived off small government subsidies and

(15:20):
occasional equipment styles. The farmhouse continued deteriorating, but Ed seemed
not to notice. He spent evenings in his squalid space,
surrounded by magazines and books, his reading material growing progressively darker.
He read about anatomy, Nazi experiments, death cults, taxiderny techniques,

(15:41):
studying preservation methods with scholarly intensity. Then, approximately two years
after Augusta's death, around nineteen forty seven, Ed began his
nocturnal activities. He would later describe existing in a feud state,
finding himself in cemeteries at night without fully remembering deciding

(16:02):
to go there. Other this dissociative explanation was accurate or
convenient fiction remained debated, but Ed began systematically robbing graves.
His process was methodical and revealing. Ed would read obituaries
in the local newspaper, looking for specific women, middle aged,
recently deceased women resembling Augusta. When he identified a suitable candidate,

(16:25):
he'd wait for the funeral to conclude. Then, on a
moonless night, he'd take his shovel and drive to the cemetery.
The graveyards around plainfield were small, rural, unguarded. Ed would
locate the fresh grave and dig down to the coffin
with surprising speed. Once he reached the casket, he'd pry
it open. The bodies were in various states of preservation.

(16:48):
Some were relatively intact, others already decomposing. Ed claimed he
sometimes had an accomplice named Guss, but no one named
Guss was ever identified. Investigators theorized this accomplice was either
invention or a dissociative personality. Ed would exhume bodies, sometimes
taking entire corpses, other times selecting specific parts, heads, sections

(17:11):
of skin, organs that interested him. He'd transport his grotesque
cargo back to the farmhouse. In the summer kitchen, Ed
would perform amateurdissections. He'd carefully remove skin, attempting to preserve
it using taxidermy techniques. He was particularly focused on creating
a woman's suit, a literal costume from human skin he

(17:33):
could wear to physically transform himself into female form. He'd
carefully remove skin from torsos, preserving breasts, attempting to keep
large sections intact, then tan and preserve this skin, creating
a grotesque garment complete with female anatomy. Think about what
this means psychologically. Ed wasn't simply a necrophiliac. He was

(17:56):
attempting literal physical transformation, trying to become female, to become
his mother. By wearing this skin suit, he could look
down and see female anatomy where his own body had been.
Psychiatric evaluations years later, Ed described wearing his suit at night,
dancing around the farmhouse by lamplight, experiencing ecstatic transformation. He

(18:20):
felt he was becoming his mother, resurrecting her through his
own body. But Ed didn't limit himself to the suit.
He made bowls from skulls, carefully cleaning and polishing them,
using them as actual containers. He created lamp shades from skin,
stretching and treating tissue, installing them on lamps he used

(18:40):
for light. He upholstered chairs with human skin. He made
waste baskets and boxes decorated with preserved skin. He kept
organs in jars, creating decorative items from body parts, displaying
them around his living space as normal household objects. These
weren't random acts. There was terrible logic to what Ed

(19:02):
was doing. He was attempting to surround himself with the dead,
to create a world where the boundary between living and
dead was erased. He was trying to populate his isolated
existence with companions fashioned from corpses, and he was attempting
to understand and control the thing that terrified and fascinated

(19:22):
him most, the female body, by taking it apart and
reconstructing it according to his needs. Over the years, Ed
robbed approximately forty graves, though the exact number remained uncertain.
He'd visit some graves multiple times. Some women whose graves
he violated were women he'd known in life, women from

(19:44):
the Plainfield community. Plainfield cemeteries showed signs of disturbance during
this period. Graves found disturbed coffins pried open, some empty
of bodies, but local authorities attributed this to vandalism or
tea teenagers. The idea that someone was systematically robbing graves
for grotesque purposes simply didn't occur to anyone. But grave

(20:08):
robbing eventually proved insufficient for Ed's needs. The bodies he
exhumed were already decomposing, the skin damaged by burial and decay,
The preservation challenging dead tissue lacked something. Ed's disturbed psyche
began to crave. Something in Ed's fractured mind began to
demand something more immediate, something fresher, something that required him

(20:31):
to move from violation of the dead to creation of
the dead through murder. The exact psychological transition is lost
to the opacity of his disturbed mind. His psychiatric evaluations
suggested his dissociative episodes intensified that he experienced what he
described as possession or compulsion, feeling driven to act in

(20:51):
ways he didn't fully understand. Whether this represented genuine dissociative
disorder or convenient excuse making remained debate. What's clear is
the escalation pattern makes terrible psychological sense. Ed had spent
years transgressing boundaries most humans would find absolute. He'd robbed graves,

(21:12):
desecrated corpses, fashioned household items from human tissue, worn the
skin of dead women. Each transgression made the next easier.
Each boundary Crossed normalized behaviors that should have been unthinkable.
The prohibition against murder, the final taboo, had been eroded,
along with all the others. Moreover, grave robbing had inherent limitations.

(21:38):
Ed had to wait for suitable obituaries, had no control
over who died or when He had to wait days
for burial, then deal with bodies already decomposing. Murder would
solve all these problems. Murder would give him control, immediate
access to fresh tissue, the ability to select victims he

(22:00):
met his specific psychological needs. By nineteen fifty four, ed
Gen had completed his psychological journey from grave robber to murder.
He would later admit to killing two women, Mary Hogan
in December fifty four and Bernice Werden in November fifty seven.
Whether that number was accurate whether there were other victims

(22:22):
remained an open question. Ed Gen wasn't a serial killer
in the way that term would later be understood. His
motivations weren't primarily about power or sexual gratification in conventional senses.
He was attempting something far stranger, trying to resurrect his mother,
to become female, to resolve catastrophic psychological damage through the

(22:47):
most extreme transgression imaginable. The farmhouse where ed lived was
more than a residence. It was a physical manifestation of
his mental state. The sealed rooms represented his desperate attempt
to keep Augusta alive to deny her death. The scholar
represented the collapse of his own functioning without her organizing presence.

(23:09):
The workshop of death, the summer kitchen where he processed
victims and corpses, represented the dark work. His fractured psyche
had driven him to the terrible project of trying to
reconstruct reality itself using the raw materials of the dead.
Ed Gane's transformation from shy boy to the man who
would hang Benice Werden's body in his summer kitchen was complete.

(23:33):
He had descended through layers of transgression until he reached
a place so far removed from normal human psychology that
when his crimes were discovered, investigators would struggle to comprehend
what they were seeing. The foundation had been laid decades
earlier in Augustus's toxic household, in her relentless psychological abuse,
in her pathological teachings. Ed had built upon that foundation

(23:57):
a structure of horror, uniquely his own, shaped by his
specific psychological damage, his particular obsessions, his individual madness. The
story of ed Gene is ultimately about psychological destruction, about
what happens when a child is subjected to relentless domination
and twisted theology, When isolation prevents any corrective influence, when

(24:22):
grief and loss and sexual confusion combine with years of
accumulated damage to create something genuinely monstrous. It's about the
catastrophic failure of every system that should have protected a
vulnerable child. But Edgane's private world was about to be exposed.
The horrors he'd created in isolation would be dragged into

(24:45):
public view, and the discovery would reveal not just one
man's descent into madness, but would hold up a mirror
to American culture, showing us something about ourselves we didn't
want to see but couldn't look away from. In the
next episode, we'll explore the full inventory of horrors found

(25:05):
in that farmhouse, the investigation that followed Ed's confessions, and
how Plainfield reacted to the discovery that the odd handyman
had been hiding unimaginable darkness will trace the impact his
crimes had on American culture, But for now, we leave
Ed in that moment before discovery, still wearing his skin

(25:26):
suit in the isolation of night, still trying impossibly to
resurrect the mother who destroyed him, not knowing that within
hours everything would change and his name would become synonymous
with a particular American nightmare that would echo through decades
of cultural consciousness. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe for

(25:48):
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