Furniture Made Out of Human Skin - Who Actually Was Ed Gein

"Mr. Gein certainly was a strange one, possibly the strangest man to leave his footprints on American history."

- The Infographics Show

Furniture Made Out of Humans - Who Was Ed Gein (The Real-life Leatherface) is a video on the Infographics Show telling the story behind one of the most infamous serial killers, Ed Gein, that inspired Leatherface, and many other characters from famous films.

Synopsis
Ed Gein very well might be one of the evilest and twisted humans to have ever lived. No other serial killer has more horror films based off of his gruesome story, but do you really know anything about Gein? Check out today's serial killer profile of the real American psycho, Ed Gein!

Transcript
It is just another day in the household of Ed Gein. The morning starts well, with Ed waking up early as usual to the familiar chorus of birdsong that he hears outside in the garden. Yawning and stretching, he peers out of the open window to be greeted by a warm breeze. Life is good.

As per usual, he grabs a nut from a bowl he’s fashioned out of a human skull. When his morning hunger is satiated, he heads over to the closet and picks out a pair of human-skin leggings and a bodysuit made from a human torso. He then looks at a shelf bedecked with faces he once skinned from heads. Wagging his finger at the selection as if to say, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, he chooses the face that belonged to a woman named Dora. He smiles, thinking about how much she looks like his dearly departed mother. If the weather holds up, in the afternoon he’ll put on the entire outfit and have a little dance in the garden.

This may sound like the intro to a dark horror movie, but it was in fact the truth of Ed Gein’s life. He told the cops matter-of-factly that he derived great enjoyment from skinning women. He also admitted that he would wear his human suit and, in his thoughts, become his deceased mother. It was literally like getting under someone’s skin. What you want to know, though, is why would he do this? That’s not often discussed. There are also a few things about his life that have been questioned in the past, so we’ll try and clear some things up today.

Okay, so most of you will have heard about the so-called “Butcher of Plainfield” and we imagine many of you know that quite a few horror movies have been based on what he did. “Silence of Lambs”, “Psycho”, and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” being the well-known ones, but Gein inspired many, many more. We’ve talked about his wicked deeds before, but for you Ed Gein newbies, we’ll give you a fast-track introduction to his life.

In short, his mother, Augusta, was an overbearing, controlling, puritanical matriarch. She hardly ever allowed Ed and his brother out of their isolated farmhouse in the small rural village of Plainfield, Wisconsin. She would fill their heads with words from the bible, telling the boys that sin was all around, that evil lurked, that both men and women were corrupted, unkind, and constantly as carnal as canines in heat. That’s one reason she kept them home so often. She didn’t want them getting too close to the sinners in the town of 700 or so where they lived. It didn’t help that the father was a drunkard. Men, to Augusta, had been a huge disappointment in her life. She despised the women in the town, though, as much as the men, which made her a misogynist as well as a misandrist. We guess you could call her a misanthrope, although one delusionally believing she was guided by God. She told the boys all those townsfolk had loose morals. For this reason, Ed never really formed any relationships with girls while he was growing up. He had no idea how to interact with girls, and later women, due to the fact his mind had been warped by his mom. We’ll come back to the psychological impact of this soon.

Okay, so fast-forward a few years and the bottle had made short work of Ed’s father. His brother actually did manage to get into a relationship when he’d grown into a man, although Ed was never able to escape from his mother’s very firm grasp. So, as you can imagine, Ed was pretty upset when his mother died. In his late 30s, he was the sole inhabitant of the farm, and by God, what a mess it was. It looked like a junkyard inside. What he’d done is boarded up most of the house and made two of the rooms where his mother stayed the most often into shrines for her. The kitchen and another room he kept for himself, although the area looked more like a dump.

The state of the house when cops arrived was described like this, “After the unholy squalor of the rest of the house, the very neatness of these rooms was intensely unsettling.” The house actually had no electricity or running water. When they found Ed he’d been subsisting mostly on rabbits he’d hunted and potatoes. Occasionally he’d go out and fill up on pork chops at the house of a couple named Irene & Lester Hill. If he could get it, he also enjoyed Macaroni Cheese.

In 1957, when he was 41-years old, police arrived on his property following up on an investigation of a missing woman. They knew Ed, as did many of the townsfolk, as being a quiet man who kept to himself. He had never been a threat to them, quite the opposite in fact, he even babysat for kids now and again, with one parent once saying, “Good old Ed. Kind of a loner and maybe a little bit odd with that sense of humor of his, but just the guy to call to sit in with the kiddies.” Yep, can you imagine how that person felt when the cops made their grizzly discovery?

Here are some of the things they found, besides the body of the missing woman who Ed had tied to the beams of his barn ready to butcher her. He’d already sliced her down the middle and removed her organs and head, but much work still had to be done. Police also found: Human skulls. A corset made from the skin of a woman’s torso. That was his bodysuit. They found nine masks made from faces he’d peeled off. They found a head, a collection of vulvae in a shoebox, a belt made from nipples, human skin leggings, human skin chair covers, and a skin wastebasket, as well as a collection of noses and some lips attached to a window shade drawstring. There were skulls on bedposts and a lampshade made from a woman’s skin.

You already know that he was obsessed with his mom. Often, serial killers that have killed women have grown up with very controlling mothers who have been extremely overprotective. According to psychologists these kids don’t properly develop. Some feminists have taken umbrage with this point, saying it’s just another case of men blaming women for their own misdeeds, but according to one study we found, 66% of serial killers were raised in a household with a dominant mother. There’s also the fact she screamed about hell and sin to young Ed all the time. Sure, you can’t put the whole blame on her, but you do have to ask if her very peculiar and often abusive way of childrearing led to Ed’s macabre behavior.

Ed’s father was also to blame since he often just went quiet or disappeared during the mother’s tirades. A dominant mother and a weak father can sometimes be a bad mix. On some occasions, the father would strike the mother. Domestic violence is also a common feature in the childhoods of serial killers. Three-quarters of serial killers have suffered psychological abuse as kids. So, perhaps Ed’s obsession with his mother was because of her dominance and the fact he never got a chance to see how abusive she was. Her hatred of other women may also have encouraged Ed to believe they were all bad, and that she was the only good one. This twisted love is likely why after she died, Ed tried to recreate his dear, dead mother. But what about the brother?

Ed always looked up to his brother. Together they did odd jobs around the town, although since Ed was somewhat emotionally retarded, he much preferred to babysit. Kids were on his level. The thing was, the brother took note of how obsessed Ed was with their mom. He even berated the mom about it, telling her to let Ed do his own thing. Instead of appreciating his older sibling standing up for him, Ed couldn’t believe his brother was saying such things about the purest, most wonderful woman in the world, a woman he later told cops was a “saint”.

Now there was some resentment between the brothers. One day there was a brush fire that was getting a little too close to the farmhouse. The brothers went to put it out, but only one came back. Ed got in touch with the cops and told them he’d lost his brother while putting out a fire. A search party later found him, except his lifeless body was not near where the fire had been. On top of that, his head was bruised. No one believed that quiet Ed the local babysitter could have killed his brother. The coroner ruled the death asphyxiation, but it’s almost certain that this was Ed’s first murder. Investigators should have asked for an autopsy, and if they had, it’s very likely “The Silence of the Lambs” would have been a very different movie. Those who have studied the case have said that Ed was not only upset at his brother’s attitude regarding his mother’s behavior but he likely wanted her all to himself. Now there were just the two of them, but things weren’t exactly peachy creamy.

Augusta had a stroke and according to what Ed later told the cops, she was still very much anti-women. You should know here that while Augusta said fornication was a sin, she still had children. Historians say that after having her first son she prayed for a girl. She believed a girl could be controllable, would be chaste, would not sin like men. But she got Ed, who could be said to have been the girl she wanted. When he was born, she told herself that this child would be perfect. She would not allow him to be foul-mouthed, lustful, immoral, and impious. She would control his every action. So, when it was just her and Ed things actually became worse. Much of their time was spent reading about sinners.

This was one passage from the bible she liked to read to him even when he was a fully grown adult. It’s from Revelation 17: 3-5, about John seeing a vision of a “great prostitute”. “So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written.” Maybe now you might be close to understanding how such a demented man became the way he was. But there’s more, much more.

Augusta had a stroke, so after that Ed had to do most of the chores. He was also tasked with reading the bible to her each night since she was not able to read to him. He’d sit there under lamplight at the side of her bed while she told him to read passages like the one you’ve just heard. It’s easy to understand why Ed wasn’t exactly comfortable with women. One day they ran out of straw, so both she and Ed went to a guy named Smith to buy some. Only when they got there, Smith was beating a dog in a very brutal fashion. He beat it so much it died in front of the shocked Ed. Tears filled his eyes, and his mother looked awfully upset, too. But get this, she wasn’t upset about the dog. She didn’t care at all about the dog. She then told Ed that the woman who’d appeared in the doorway of Smith’s house was not his wife. What a terrible sin it was! With a bloodied dog in front of him, Ed’s mother said two words, “Smith’s harlot!” And then his mother died. Ed’s thoughts turned to how cruel the world was. He was absolutely lost without her. Who would guide him and keep him on the path of righteousness? He very quickly descended into insanity, although this wasn’t apparent to the local people.

They even sent their kids to the farm so he could babysit them. Later, some would return home saying Ed liked to tell them about the pulp books he had that featured stories about cannibals and Nazi atrocities. One time a 16-year-old returned home and told his parents he’d seen shrunken heads at the house, which Ed later said he’d been sent by a cousin of his who’d served in WWII. What the kid had actually seen were some of Ed’s face masks. The parents paid no mind. It was just weird Ed being weird again. To everyone, he was just a harmless, lonely man. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

His first victim was the local tavern owner named Mary Hogan. She looked a bit like his mother, although in personality she was very different. She cursed, she’d been divorced twice, she’d even been a madam in a brothel, but dead, she could certainly become part of a bodysuit. Police found her head at his house upon his arrest. He admitted that he had no scruples about taking her life because he believed her to be an immoral person. It seemed with the puritanical influence of his mother gone, he didn’t have the ability to create an identity for himself. This is one of the reasons he killed Mary Hogan and the woman the cops found strung up in his barn, Bernice Worden. He later said he’d planned her murder for about a week. Hogan was killed with a .32 Mauser pistol when they were both alone in the tavern. He killed Worden in her store with a Marlin .22 rifle. Both times he somehow managed to get the bodies home without anyone seeing. Did he kill more people?

It’s very possible that he may have murdered a 15-year-old named Evelyn Hartley. The Plainfield resident had gone missing after babysitting. There were signs of a struggle in the house where she’d been, with her broken eyeglasses found and bloodstains on the floor. Her underwear was found nearby and some bloodied man’s pants found a little farther away. He may also have killed 8-year-old Georgia Weckler, who went to school one day and never came back. Her body was never found and the only clue was a tire track from a Ford vehicle.

Then there were the two deer hunters, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, who also went missing in Plainfield during the time Ed was living on that farm. One thing you don’t always hear about the Ed Gein interrogations is the fact he took a lie detector test regarding the murders we have just talked about. Such tests are not conclusive, but this is what Charles M. Wilson from the State Crime Laboratory concluded when he gave him the test: “The lie detector tests of Edward Gein have now been completed, and after consultation with the several interested district attorneys, we are able at this time to state that the results of the tests referred to eliminate the subject, Edward Gein, 51 years of age, as the person responsible for and/or involved in the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley in La Crosse County on Oct. 24, 1953; the disappearance of Georgia Jean Weckler in Jefferson County May 1, 1947, and Victor Tavis in Adams County Nov. 1, 1952.” Reading psychologists’ take on Ed, they all seem to believe the genesis of his madness was his unusual relationship with his mother and the neglect shown by his father. Once they were all gone, he was alone with all his frustrations, and he had no outlet in which to talk about them.

There’s also something called the “routine activities theory”. In short, this means Ed was able to kill easily and able to rob bodies easily since he lived in such a quiet town. Because he was isolated on the farm, he could get away with it, and because he was mild-mannered, people didn’t suspect him of any wrongdoing. So many serial killers in this world have been the type of person who people say, “He kept to himself.” On top of that, some experts have talked about “arousal theory.” Growing up, Ed didn’t get much stimulation at all. After his mother died, he was free to seek out stimulation. He did once say that he had problems communicating with women. Being around the dead wasn’t a problem at all for him, although he said he never did anything sexual with them because they “smelled too bad.”

Ed said at one point that he wanted to join the army, and if that had happened, no one would have been killed. He actually traveled once to Milwaukee for an army physical, but he was turned down because of a growth over his eye that affected his vision. He was also getting on in years. Another time, Ed admitted that if his neighbor had swung by to visit him just once, he’d very likely have been found out early on. He admitted that he’d visited graveyards to steal corpses on over 40 occasions, but often he’d come out of his daze and just return home empty-handed. It’s thought that 15 women’s bodies were used to make all his trophies and clothes, although once he’d got the parts he wanted, he’d often return the rest of the body to the grave.

It’s alleged he dug up his dead mother first and would sleep next to the corpse, although this has never been substantiated. Ed did admit this, though. He said at the beginning of his grave-robbing days he was helped by a man named Gus. He told Gus he was fascinated with human experiments in Nazi prisoner camps and he wanted to perform some experiments himself. Gus was institutionalized before any murders happened and likely died before Ed was arrested. He also said in lengthy interviews that his father sometimes hit him so hard his ears rang, so people have wondered if some kind of head injury helped set him off on his bad path. Then there was the slaughtered pig event, which was life-changing for Ed. He was ten years old and was watching his mother slice open and pull the guts out of a pig. This was the first time he had an orgasm. Two years later, his mother caught him playing with himself in the bathtub. For that, she threw hot water over him and told him his genitals were a curse. Not surprisingly, he remained a virgin his entire life.

Ed had been accused of cannibalizing the bodies, but he always strenuously denied this. He told the authorities that eating humans “could make you sick.” Psychologists of course were interested in talking to Ed, but he often seemed to ramble and sometimes sounded quite childish. He did seem to have a dark way of seeing things, though. One day a psychologist asked what the phrase, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” meant to him. He replied, “If you have a bird in your hand, you might squeeze it too hard, and kill it.” Another thing he once said on record was that he “never killed a deer.” He said such a thing made him feel squeamish. Hmm, could that be true?

This became big news because at times Ed had been known to give packages of venison to locals. After hearing about his possible cannibalism and the possibility that he’d never killed a deer, they came to the conclusion that they might have eaten people. When his community found out it’s alleged that many of them rushed to their doctors complaining of stomach problems. He certainly was a hunter and he definitely had guns, and at times, he’d even offered to be a deer-hunting guide for people. Some people now think he lied about not killing any deer and had in fact been playing mind games, as one person put it, playing a “sick joke on the townspeople who he hated.”

We may never know what he meant by saying that to the cops. Mr. Gein certainly was a strange one, possibly the strangest man to leave his footprints on American history. In 1968, Ed began his lengthy stay in psychiatric institutions. He was said to be a model patient by those that knew him. He took his last breaths at Mendota Mental Health Institute on July 26, 1984, aged 77.