Ed Gein： The Killer That Inspired Many Horror Films

Ed Gein： The Killer That Inspired Many Horror Films

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:24):
or wherever you find your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
In November nineteen fifty seven, police in the small town
of Plainfield, Wisconsin, were searching for a missing woman named
Benice Warden. They were about to make one of the
most gruesome discoveries in US criminal history.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
One of them turned on his flashlight, beamed it around,
and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters.
What your first say thought was some kind of gutted deer.
They realized, to their incredible horror, that it was a
woman's corpse that was hanging by its heels.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
The twisted killer was a quiet loner named ed Gean.
Hidden inside the fifty one year old's rural farmhouse was
a ghoulish treasure trove of human remains.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
So it was a lamp shade made of human skin.
They found that the remains of twelve human heads, gloves
made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers.

Speaker 5 (01:30):
You think of this happening, you know, now it's still
be shocking, But back then, in a small, tiny rural community,
it was breath checking.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
America had woken up inside the nightmare of ed Gean,
one of the world's most evil killers. The gruesome crimes

(02:12):
of ed Gean horrified fifties America. When his rural home
was searched on the sixteenth of November nineteen fifty seven,
the police uncovered a gothic house of horrors. As well
as the remains of two missing local women. They found
an array of human bones, skulls, and skin that had

(02:34):
been fashioned into furniture and clothing. The town of Plainfield
was in complete shock. One of the residents who remembers
the effect Gan had on Plainfield is Max Harrington.

Speaker 6 (02:47):
I think shark would be the biggest thing that we
could use to describe the atmosphere in the community. We
were still pretty much a clannish community at that time.
When a lot of the families that were here had
always been here, took your breath away, you know, you just, yeah,
it was shocking. I still is. People don't do things

(03:08):
like that in a small on a normal day. That's
just not part of what we grew up with.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
The story of this twisted killer begins over a century ago.
Ed Gean was born in Lacrosse County, Wisconsin, on the
twenty seventh of August nineteen hundred and six. By the
time he was eight years old, his parents moved ed
and his older brother Henry to Plainfield.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well. The Green family moved to Plainfield from Lacrosse, Wisconsin,
partly because the mother of the family, the matriarch, Augusta,
had decided that Lacrosse was a kind of sodom and
gomorrah like hellhole, and she didn't want her children to

(03:57):
be corrupted by all the imar influences of the big city.
Needless to say, Lacrosse was not a particularly big city,
but they moved to a remote farmhouse about six miles
west of You wouldn't necessarily say downtown Plainfield, because there
was no uptown Plainfield.

Speaker 6 (04:18):
It's not the largest city in the state of Wisconsin,
but it's plenty big enough for those of us that
live here.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
Plainfield was a very remote, isolated, featureless little village. A
state guide book at the time described it as totally nondescript.
The population was very small, never more in its history,
I think than seven or eight hundred people. You know,

(04:47):
probably the entire population of the village could have fit
into a New York City apartment building.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
The Genes one hundred and fifty acre farm was located
on the corner of Archer and second Ed rarely got
to leave the property and socialize with other children.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
His mother, Augusta, is a very domineering character. Indeed, she
is a devout Christian, and she has some very extreme
ideas about sin and about morality, and she drums into
her sons that they're not to socialize with anybody outside
of the family because all of the people around them
in the local town are sinners, they're evil, or the

(05:27):
women are halls. And so she creates this very insular
family environment where they're quite isolated from the rest of
the community, and that has a really significant impact on them.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Gans seemed to have been very friendless whenever he would
make some kind of friend. On those rare occasions when
he would try to make a school friend and bring
home a school friend, the mother would immediately find some
reason to disapprove of the other child and forbid ed
from ever bringing him home. So he grew up again

(06:00):
in a state of complete social isolation.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
And Gean's relationship with his father was also far from perfect.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Well. The father, George was an alcoholic. He appeared to
have been somewhat free in his use of physical punishment,
but mostly the picture that emerges of George is of
kind of a hapless individual who was as all three
male members of the family were, under the thumb of

(06:29):
his wife, and again who was regarded as much as
anything else, as a sort of obstacle or impediment to
the household.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
As Ed entered adolescens, his life became even more insular.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
He dropped at school when he was around about twelve
or thirteen to work on the family's farm, and he
was considered to be a bit of an odd ball.
He was quite a loner, and he enjoyed quite solitary pursuit.
So he really quite liked reading and was quite a
prolific reader. So he was somebody who didn't really fit in,
but worked incredibly hard to keep the family farm going.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
On April first, nineteen forty, Ed's father, George, died of
heart failure, leaving thirty three year old Ed, his brother Henry,
and Augusta alone on the family farm.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Ed's older brother, Henry, seemed to have freed himself a
little more emotionally and psychologically from Augusta's dominance, and even
apparently on a couple of occasions, expressed some criticism of
their mother and the hole she was exerting over both

(07:41):
of them. So, Ed, who at least on a conscious level,
worshiped his mother and saw her as a kind of
goddess who could do no wrong, appears to have been
both a little shocked, you know that Henry would find
any cause to criticize Augusta and possibly built up some

(08:02):
kind of animosity toward Henry for that attitude.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Ed became a handyman doing odd jobs around Plainfield to
help with living expenses on the farm.

Speaker 6 (08:14):
We used to see it occasionally. I'd see him around
town and then he was always a friendly person, quiet, friendly,
usually had a joke to tell. He always had down
to say hello and ask after how you were a
person who you would never suspect of anything other than
being a decent sort of person.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
In May nineteen forty four, death would hit the Green
family once again, but this time in more suspicious circumstances.
After a brush fire on their farmland got out of control, Ed.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
And Henry were out there trying to put out the fire,
and they got separated, and Ed could not locate Henry,
and he went and got help. But then after getting
this help, he led the other people directly to where
Henry's body lay, and there were some mysterious bruises on
Henry's head. Maybe The official verdict of the medical examiner

(09:14):
was that Henry had died of a heart attack while
fighting this fire, and had injured his head when he
fell and hit a rock. But afterwards, when Gene's crimes
were uncovered, there was a lot of talk that perhaps
Henry had been a victim of Eds, that Ed in
fact had killed Henry, partly because of Henry's criticism of Augusta.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
The impact upon their mother. Augusta was phenomenal. She really
broke down about Henry's death and she had a strike.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
But of course, by then, you know, the psychic bond
between Augusta and Ed was so incredibly intense. Already evidence
seems to suggest that with the other two men out
of the way, Ed revel in having his mommy alone
to himself.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
But Dean's mother never really recovered from her stroke, and
their time alone only lasted for nineteen months.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Ed nursed her very very diligently, even apparently would get
into bed with her on occasion and stroke her and
comfort her, and then she seemed to recover, but then
she suffered another, this time fatal stroke.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Augusta Gean died on December the twenty ninth, nineteen forty five.
Thirty nine year old Ed was completely devastated because his.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
Mother was so domineering. I think she really did stunt
his development and he almost got stuck at a kind
of teenage adolescent phase in his life. So looking at
how he behaved at the funeral, he was in his
thirties at this time, and he was reported to be
wailing like a small child, So he hasn't got that
kind of emotional control that's associated with thirty something.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Meant, the death of his mother he left him completely
completely isolated, you know, living in this increasingly ramshackle, dilapidated
farmhouse that he ceased to take care of whatsoever or
Augusta was his only real human contact. So it was
at that point, you know that gen embarked on these

(11:23):
various outrageous that would ultimately make him this notorious figure
in American crime.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Alone and isolated from the rest of society, Gean spiraled
out of control over the next twelve years. He became
obsessed with recreating the world he'd shared with his mother.
It would lead him to a series of dark and
disturbing crimes that would eventually culminate in murder.

Speaker 6 (11:53):
One of my summer jobs when I was a student
in high school was more in the cemetery and two
of my buddies and I that was about a four
day job for us to all that, and we would
see it out there. On occasional he come out, and
if he saw us work, he need always come over
and say hello and again sometimes have this little story

(12:16):
to tell. And he was very good about stopping and
see his mother's grave.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
I think neighbors saw him as an odd, very meek,
somewhat simple minded person, but one who is always willing
to pitch in when some farm work needed to be
done or some chore needed to be run for them.
But they of course had no sense of the life

(12:42):
that he was pursuing inside that incredibly creepy dismal world
of his own farm.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
It was a world that fifty one year old Geen
had managed to keep hidden the way until the winter
of nineteen fifty seven.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
November sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven, was the first day of
deer hunting season that year, and it was a day
when basically the entire male population of the town would
have been out in the woods hunting deer. As Ed knew,
Ed drove into town to the Warden Hardware Store. The

(13:17):
Warden Hardware Store was owned by a woman named Bernice Swarden.

Speaker 6 (13:22):
I knew missus Warden quite well. She and her family
ran the hardware store here for many years. Almost everybody
in the community knew Missus Warden.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Ed had kind of been hanging around the store for
a couple of weeks previously. He had developed something of
an obsession with Bernie Swarden.

Speaker 4 (13:39):
He would talk to her, he would ask her out,
and it was quite clear that she really wasn't that
interested in him.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Ed came in asked to buy half a gallon of
anti freeze, which Bernie Swarten poured out for him and
wrote out a receipt. He went back out to his
truck and came back inside and asked her to see
a rifle that was in the window. When Bernie Swarden
turned her back to him, he shot her in the
back of the head and then loaded her corpse in

(14:08):
his truck control back to his farm.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Dean had murdered the fifty eight year old woman in
broad daylight.

Speaker 6 (14:16):
It was dear season, so dear season is like a
ghost dollar around here. Everybody in those days, especially, everybody
was out hume. And she wasn't even missed for quite
for some hours. And then then the sellen reported that
she wasn't at the store. Well, that was her son,
of course.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Later that day, Frank Warden returned from the woods and
found the store empty. His mother wasn't there. He was
very perplexed by that. And then he saw a trail
of blood across the floor of the hardware store and
not only realized, you know, that some foul play had occurred,
but immediately suspected ed Gean because Gane had been kind

(14:56):
of bothering his mother for the past few weeks.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
And there was one piece of evidence that confirm Frank
Warten's suspicions. To the police.

Speaker 5 (15:04):
When they went to search the place, they found the
receipt for the antifries that was in Ed's name, and
they just worked backwards, saying that he was probably the
last person to see her alive, but they didn't suspect
it he was as deranged as he was.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
One set of lawman went out in search of Geen.
They found him having dinner at a neighbor's house and
they arrested him, and then another set of lawman went
out to Gen's farmhouse, and that's where they made these
discoveries that really sent shock waves around the world.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
On a dark winter's night, officers from the Plainfield Police
Department began to search the Green farm for Benice Wharten.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
They couldn't get into the house, so they went around
back and entered into what was called the summer kitchen,
which was a little shed outside.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
This property didn't have any electricity, so they were pretty
much fumbling around in the dark with flashlights, but I
don't think they expected to find what they did find there.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
One of them turned on his flashlight and beamed it
around and saw this object that was hanging from the rafters,
which at first they thought was some kind of gutted deer,
although it didn't look like a deer. They realized, to
their incredible horror that it was a woman's corpse that
was hanging by its heels and been completely gutted.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
She'd been strung up essentially, and she was slit from
her sternham to her pelvis, so she'd essentially been butchered
by ed. It really was that the most grotesque thing
that these officers had.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Ever come across, and they realized they had found the
body of the Bernouse Warden, and of course both of
them just stumbled out in horror and vomited at the
side of this thing.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
When the news spread across the town, the residents of
Plainfield were in complete shock.

Speaker 6 (17:06):
When I heard of his arrest, I couldn't believe it.
I was sure they had the wrong person, because it
just didn't seem like anything that they were they were
telling us was the head that we all know. Yeah
it was. It was a Saturday night. We were at
the dance and the story went through there and everybody

(17:27):
that I don't believe it, but it was true.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
After finding the butcher body of Benice Warden in a
shed at ed Dean's farm, the police officers moved their
search into the main house.

Speaker 4 (17:41):
He boarded up some areas of the family's home to
maintain the rooms as his mother had left them, and
in other parts of the property he just started hoarding things.

Speaker 6 (17:51):
You know.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
You would have trash and rubbish build up, and it
really became a complete hovel.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
You'd reverse the normal process of trash disposal, you know,
and instead of taking all his garbage to the dump,
would go to the dump and bring it into his house.
It was just this incredible chaos of trash and garbage.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
But there was more than just household waste.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Amid all that wreckage, they discovered these incomprehensible, unspeakably awful
objects that have been fashioned out of human body parts.
There were chairs that were upholstered in human flesh.

Speaker 4 (18:30):
So it was a lamp shade made of human skin.
They found that the remains of twelve human heads, gloves
made out of the skin from a corpse's fingers.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
There was a jar containing human noses. There was a
box full of female genitalia, some of which had been
painted and tied with ribbons. There was a belt fashioned
out of female nipples. There was a shade pull made
of human lips.

Speaker 5 (18:58):
They found all types of things that belonged to people
that were no longer people, and it was shagging. I mean,
you think of this happening. You know now it's still
be sharking, But back then, in a small, tiny rural community,
it was absolutely it was breath checking.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
Edskin's farmhouse was the habitation of a literal ghoul, you know,
somebody who had been living amidst these horrific relics of
human dismemberment. It was a madhouse.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Dean's fascination with death and corpses had been growing ever
since his mother had died twelve years previously.

Speaker 4 (19:41):
Ed had always enjoyed reading. It was quite a solitary pursuit,
so that's not particularly surprising. But after the death of
his mother and his brother, he started to read an
awful lot more, and his tastes in literature really did
spank quite a wide spectrum. He read pornographic magazines, he
read medical textbooks, and he developed a particular interest in

(20:03):
ILSA Coke, who worked at one of the Nazi concentration
camps and collected patches of skin of the prisoners who
were detained there. And I think all of this was
fueling a very active imagination. So he's developing these obsessions
and these interests, and he's quite skilled as a farm
hand at this point in time. He knows how to

(20:25):
slaughter animals, he knows how to prepare carcasses. He's from
a community that's very much into its hunting and it's fishing.
So at some point reality and fantasy are going to collide.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
As the search of the farmhouse progressed, officers found that
the grotesque collection of body parts became even more disturbing.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Among the most sidious of all the items were human
skin masks that were hanging from the wall of his bedroom,
the faces of women that had been flayed from the
skulls and that had been preserved, some of them had
lipstick applied to them, and that had been hung on
the walls as decorations. And then, most notoriously, there was

(21:08):
a skin suit that Ed had crafted out of the
upper torso of a woman and the leggings of a woman.
And apparently, as he later confessed, he would put on
this skin suit and put on one of the female's
skin masks and caper around in his yard pretending to
be his mother.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Dean's macarb collection had been acquired from the very same
cemetery where his mother's body lay.

Speaker 4 (21:38):
Two years after the death of his mother in nineteen
forty seven, he starts grave robbing. So he's going in
to a local burial ground. He's digging up bodies, and
he's taking things from the bodies. Now he's not taking
jewelry or items of any value, he's actually taking body parts.
It really is an absolute house of horrors. So what

(22:00):
started off as an interest, which was confined to the
pages of a book, has now become a reality behind
the doors of this rather bizarre house. So what he's doing,
in a really grotesque way is trying to bring his
mother back to life in some way, shape or form,
because he was just so dependent upon her for a
sense of his own identity.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
And the search wasn't over yet. Officers would soon discover
inside a paper bag in Dean's home the severed head
of a woman who'd been missing from Plainfield for over
two years.

Speaker 4 (22:35):
I think that the real tipping point for ed Dean
was when his mother and his brother died, because even
though this family was very intense and rather extreme in
its beliefs, it was still a check on his behavior.
There was still that informal surveillance over him, and I
think that kept him contained. But once he was on
his own, he was free to ruminate and fantasize, and

(22:58):
his behavior was only going to escalate.

Speaker 7 (23:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
It's like some crack opened up, you know, in the
civilized part of his head, and all this weird, archaic
stuff going back to the days, you know, when our
species did engage and these bizarre, unspeakable rituals, you know,
flooded out and took possession of him.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
With Gean in custody, officers continued to scour his home
and they were about to make another startling discovery a
local woman who'd been missing for almost three years.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
There had been a female tavern keeper named Mary Hogan
who ran this roadside tavern outside of Plainfield, who had
disappeared very very mysteriously.

Speaker 6 (23:44):
In those days, we had eighteen year old bars where
teenagers could go in and have beer, and she ran
one of those. That was a kind of a modest place,
to be very kind, but she disappeared before I was
old enough to frequent those establishments.

Speaker 4 (24:03):
When she went missing, he'd said some rather bizarre things.
He said to one of the townspeople, Oh, she's not missing.
She's up at the house. But because he was a
bit of a misfit and because he was a bit weird,
people didn't really take what he said very seriously at all,
so that one was allowed to slip under the radar
until this grizzly discovery a few years later.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
In searching through Dean's House of horrors, the investigators opened
up some receptacle and saw this face and pulled it
out and realized it was Mary Hogan's that she had
been another one of these victims.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Dean had murdered Mary Hogan on December the eighth, nineteen
fifty four, three years previous to killing Benice Warden.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
I think there was some sense in which he associated
her with his mother. You know, she almost seemed to
be like the shadow side of his mother, and I
think in killing her again, he was both enacting some
kind of homicidal reade toward his mother. But I think
also there were times when he just ran out of

(25:13):
suitable female corpses and how to make his own.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Back at the local police station, it was time for
Ed Dean to start talking.

Speaker 7 (25:24):
Well.

Speaker 4 (25:24):
For the first day after his arrest, I think Ed
felt like a bit of a fish out of water.
He didn't quite know how to react, but he did
start talking after about twenty four hours, and the first
thing he said was that he wanted an apple pie
with a slice.

Speaker 7 (25:38):
Of cheese on it.

Speaker 4 (25:40):
And that really does show the emotional immaturity of this guy.
And when you've got somebody whose development stops at a
particular points, they don't develop those complex emotions that enable
them to empathize with other people or to think through
the consequences of their actions. So what you've got here
is a teenage boy and a man body, and he

(26:00):
was capable of some really terrible things.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
He was subjected to a very lengthy interrogation. He freely
confessed to the murders of Bernice Swarden and Mary Hogan.
When the police first broke into Green's house and discovered
this crazy mass of body parts, their first assumption was
Gen was a serial killer. It was only during his
interrogation that he revealed that they were taken from the

(26:27):
corpses he had dug up from the local cemetery, and
people in a way had a hard time believing that
than that he was a serial killer. That seemed like
totally beyond the bounds of belief for a whole variety
of reasons.

Speaker 7 (26:40):
Human bodies are traditionally buried six feet underground. That's a
lot of digging. That's a lot of work to get
to them through packed earth. He'd need spades, picks, he'd
need to be strong, and he'd need one. Assumes to
do it at night because he'd need to be undisturbed.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
I'm not sure he did reckons that what he was
doing was wrong. You know, there's some necrophiles who think, well,
I wasn't really hurting anybody. You know, they're dead anyway.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Dean confessed to investigators that between nineteen forty seven and
nineteen fifty two he regularly visited the local cemetery after doug.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
He would often follow the local newspapers and read the obituaries,
and when some middle aged or elderly woman who bore
some vague resemblance to his departed mother died and was buried,
he would apparently go out to the cemetery at night,
while the soil was still fresh and easily dug up

(27:40):
and exhume these coffins and remove the bodies and sometimes
take the entire corpse back to his farmhouse, sometimes just
take parts of the corpse back to the farmhouse and
leave the rest there.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Investigators decided to dig up some of the graves to
see if Gean was telling the truth.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
When they unco them, they discovered that the coffins had
been broken into and the bodies were missing, or you know,
there were just parts of the skeleton remaining there.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
He admitted to grave robbing nine corpses, but the maths
didn't quite add up because the police had found twelve
human heads in Gen's property and he'd only admitted it
to eleven offenses against separate people, so the numbers never
really added up properly. So there's always been questions over that.

Speaker 7 (28:30):
And Gen's crimes were in the late fifties nineteen fifty seven.
The state of forensic science in those days was far
less than we have now. Things like DNA simply didn't
exist as a tool, so identification could potentially be very difficult,

(28:51):
and I would suspect in certainly some of the body
parts simply impossible.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
There was no doubt that Genes specifically targeted females. All
the graves he desecrated belonged to women.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
I think he was both trying to rebuild his mother
but I also think that he was taking revenge on
his mother. That kind of love and hate of mommy
were manifested both by his attempting to bring her back
from the dead, but also perpetrating, you know, these atrocities

(29:26):
on the corpses of female bodies.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
It's been reported that Geen did, in fact try to
return Augusta to the family home after her funeral.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
There's some indication that he initially tried to exhume his
mother's corpse, you know, apparently had missed the presence of
his mother so much, you know, he wanted to bring
her back and somehow in his madness, you know, reconstitute
her in his household. He couldn't get to his mother's

(29:56):
grave because the soil in that part of Wisconsin very sandy,
and many coffins are buried within concrete vaults to prevent
the sound from collapsing on them, and that was apparently
true of Augusta Geen.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
In November nineteen fifty seven, Ed Gean was charged with
the murder of Benice Warden. The media descended on the
tiny town of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
What kind of a land did you know? Well man
and nice man, just like anybody else.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
The only difference I'd said, man, he seems.

Speaker 7 (30:34):
To be.

Speaker 5 (30:39):
Well.

Speaker 4 (30:40):
The cultural context of the Green case is quite an
interesting one because I think this was one of the
first cases that gathered an awful lot of attention. There
was a media circus that developed around this, because nothing
like this ever really happened before. It was something completely new, but.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Spread there very quickly through the local newspaper papers and
you know, and then through the associated press and so
on to the national media. You know, a Plainfield, which
you know, had always existed from the time of its
founding and happy obscurity, you know, suddenly found itself to
be the center of national and even international attention.

Speaker 6 (31:21):
It was just an exasperating time. And then we were
inundated by nosey nellies that all thought that boy, I'd
got to go drive by that old farmhouse. And then
we became a I don't like to use the word chaotic,
but a very unsettled community. For a while.

Speaker 3 (31:41):
Plainfield was suddenly famous and famous for the most horrifying
of reasons. You know, that it was the home of
America's most notorious psychopath.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
The entire community was stunned for the previous decade they'd
been living in the same town as a life bogeyman.
It would now be down to the court to decide
whether or not ed Geen was insane. On November twenty first,
nineteen fifty seven, the fifty one year old pleaded not

(32:15):
guilty by reason of insanity at his arraignment at Washara
County Court, and it was declared that he was unfit
to stand trial.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Their indication that Ed was clinically psychotic, that he had hallucinations,
that he heard choices where the trees would start talking
to him. Most serial murderers are not psychotic, but Ed
seemed to have the symptoms of some form of psychosis.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Deen was sent to the Central State Hospital for the
Criminally Insane in Warpaon, Wisconsin, which is now a maximum
security prison seventy miles away in Plainfield. The community was
trying to get back on its feet, but the shadow
of Ed Geen lingered over the town.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
In nineteen fifty eight, the property that Gene had lived
in was was due to be auctioned off, and I
think the last thing that local people wanted was for
this to become some kind of shrine, some kind of
attraction for people who were morbidly fascinated. So a few
days before the auction that the property was burned to
the ground.

Speaker 6 (33:21):
Essentially a lot of talk of arson. The they had
been cleaning up around there and had been burning crash
up around the that that particular day too. So then
that was or anyway, that was an excuse of a
possible cause, that maybe the wind got something in the

(33:42):
evening and got some live embers in there. A lot
of the neighbors weren't too happy with having talk of
it being turned into a museum of sorts, but that
was that there was. There were a lot of stories. Anyway,
it's gone. People still kept coming on even after the
horse was gone for a year. Still I had people

(34:04):
coming to drive by the empty lot where the horse
us listay in.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
In March nineteen fifty eight, the car which Gan used
to transport the bodies of his victims was bought at
an auction for over seven hundred dollars by a carnival
operator who charged fascinating Americans twenty five cents for a
photograph at a maccarbres side show.

Speaker 4 (34:25):
I think what we're seeing here is the rise of
the serial killer consumer culture. People are fascinated in these
kind of cases, and some criminologists refer to this as
wound culture, that we're essentially drawn to the trauma and
the suffering of other people, and we're drawn to the
artifacts that exist around these cases.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Gan remained in the Central State Hospital for eleven years
until doctors determined that he was finally fit to stand
trial for the first degree murder of Benice Warden. The
hearing lasted for a week, and on November fourteenth, nineteen
sixty eight, Judge Robert Golmar had reached a verdict.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
He was tried and found guilty of the murder of
Bernce Warden, but then he was judged insane and stuck
back on the mental institution.

Speaker 4 (35:12):
I think that was possibly somewhere where he may have
thrived because he had structure, he had a routine, He
had people watching over him and looking after his needs.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Forensic psychologist doctor Helen Mollison interviewed Gan during his time
in hospital.

Speaker 5 (35:30):
I was working at that time as a staff psychiatrist
and I was covering all the units, and when I
was asked to go over to see this person, I
went over to see it and I saw ed Gan.
He was not at all coherent. He was such a

(35:50):
little person that I found it hard to picture him
as the person who committed all this commericides. He lived
there very peacefully. He never caused any problems, never had
any type of behavioral thing, no type of I guess

(36:11):
you could say consequence for bad behavior.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Dean's quiet nature in hospital was in stark contrast to
the monster Helen had heard so much about.

Speaker 5 (36:22):
I received a letter from one of his neighbors who
used to be a friend of his. She was a
little girl, and she remembers going over to his house
and he would serve soup and everything. What turned out,
the soup bowls were the skulls of many of his victims,
and people never knew it.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
On July the twenty sixth, nineteen eighty four, Ed Dean
died of lung cancer, aged seventy seven. He was buried
next to his mother on the Gean family plot, at
the same cemetery which he so often desecrated during his
career of horror. Dean has left a lasting impact on
the small community where he committed his ghoulish crimes.

Speaker 6 (37:07):
We really wouldn't care to have that be our, claimed
to Famiel We've turned out lots of doctors and architects,
and some really good people out of our schools here
were very proud of. We'd rather be known for a
tremendously good population than to be credited for only one

(37:30):
violent issue.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
But just like the carnival operators of the nineteen fifties,
people continue to try and get their hands on grizzly
souvenirs related to Gan.

Speaker 4 (37:42):
In the year two thousand, somebody was found to be
selling parts of the gravestone that had been erected at
Ed Dean's grave for people who are fans of the
serial killer cult. This was just the gift that kept
on giving.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Well, they keep putting up headstones, and the headstones skip disappear.
There's a whole category of collectible that has come to
be known as murder abelia, and Geen relics are particularly
prized among people who collect that kind of morbid relic.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Over sixty years since the horrific crimes, Geen has grown
into a notorious figure in American folklore, a killer of
almost mythic proportions.

Speaker 7 (38:25):
The two things that are fascinating about Ed Geen is
the fact that he only as far as we know,
murdered two people, which is a lot less than many
infamous killers, but he's had such a huge legacy in films, books, music,
he seems to have become a sort of pop culture murderer.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
At the time the Green crimes were being revealed in
the press, there was a writer of Paul horror named
Robert Block who had moved to Wisconsin to be with
his wife's family, and at some point when Geen was
being interviewed by various psychiatrists, all these headlines in the
papers were trumpeting the fact that Geen had been motivated

(39:13):
by these deranged edipal conflicts. You know, that he was
this desperately sick mama's boy, you know who was perpetrating
these atrocities on middle aged women, you know who reminded
him of his mother. And this caught the attention of
Robert Block, who decided this could potentially make the basis

(39:33):
of a good horror novel, and that became the book Psycho.
In the book Psycho, Norman Bates, actually after he's arrested,
compares himself at the end of the book to Ed Geen.
So the connection is made very, very explicit there in
the book. Anyway, Psycho, as we know, became turned into
one of the great classic horror movies of American cinema.

(39:56):
You know, if you look at horror movies before then
there are all these Eastern European monsters Frankenstein and Dracula
and the Wolfman, you know, or else they were aliens
from outer space, you know. With Psycho, Psycho establishes and
you know at Geen establishes. You know, this quintessentially American

(40:16):
figure of horror, the ordinary middle American guy who turns
out to be this monster in disguise. And then of
course Geen becomes the basis for Toby Hooper's Texas and
Samascre and later on for Thomas Harris's character Buffalo Bill
in Silence of the Lambs. You know, so Geen has
this very very direct influence on American horror cinema.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
But Dean's crimes were not fictional. They were very real,
and he remains one of the most infamous murderers in
US history.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
We think of Geen as this notorious American serial murderer,
but in many ways he doesn't really fit that profile.
For example, he wasn't a sexual sadist in the way
John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy were or Jeffrey Dahmer.
You know, he wasn't driven by that particular form of deviance.

Speaker 4 (41:12):
I think he was brought up in a vacuum that
created the conditions for someone who would go on to
to do evil things. So whilst most people are a
shot and repulsed and absolutely horrified at some of the
things he's done, because he didn't have that filter and
that check on his behavior, he was able to escalate

(41:35):
to a level of evil.

Speaker 5 (41:36):
I think evil is something that you know, professionally, people
don't believe in evil, But I truly believe that he
was evil. I think there are people who would like
to say that the devil get into him and made
him do these awful things, But I think he was

(41:57):
born evil.

Speaker 6 (41:59):
Yeaed I knew was not an evil person. He did
things that normal people do not do, and there's no
just no doubt about that. And to kill two people
is certainly not a person who you would really like
to invite to your neighborhood party. But yeah, he was.

(42:20):
There was something in his head that didn't click right ed.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Dean's crimes are the stuff of genuine nightmares. The man
with an unhealthy obsession with his mother, brazenly murdered two women,
and kept a bizarre collection of gruesome keepsakes inside his
house of horrors. He truly deserves to be remembered as
one of the world's most evil killers.