Even after police arrested 51-year-old Ed Gein on November 17, 1957, his Plainfield, Wisconsin neighbours likely failed to realize that their lives would never be the same again.
While Gein had a reputation for being anweird loner, he was still regarded as generally harmless. In fact, he often served as an occasional babysitter for many of the families living near the 160-acre farm where Gein had been living alone since the death of his mother, Augusta, in 1945. While one local boy tried to tell his family about he collection of "shrunken heads" that he had once seen in Gein's farmhouse, people generally dismissed what he saw as yet another of Ed's crazy pranks. If neighbours were put off by his fascination with taxidermy, they largely kept it to themselves.
But, after police discovered the body of local hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, in a shack connected to Gein's farmhouse, they soon discovered more about their quiet neighbour. Much more.
Though the Gein farmhouse was largely dilapidated (Ed only lived in two small rooms and rest of the house was sealed off), police kept making bizarre discovery after bizarre discovery as the searched the farmhouse and surrounding grounds. Not only had the headless body of Bernice Worden been strung up by her heels, they also found cereal in a bowl made from a human skull, lampshades and wastebaskets formed from human skin, a shoe box filled with vaginas, a belt with human nipples attached, a loose collection of noses, and a human heart. But their most grotesque discovery was of a "woman suit" made from the sewn-together skins of Gein's various victims which he would later admit to wearing to make himself feel as if he had breasts and female genitalia.
All told, police found the remains of eleven women though Gein would only confess to murdering two of them, Bernice Worden and a second woman, Mary Hogan, who had gone missing some time earlier. The other bodies had been taken from the local cemetery, something that came as an unpleasant revelation this fellow townspeople who had no idea that the graves of their loved ones had been desecrated. Police had trouble believing that Gein could have stolen the bodies undetected. To bolster their case, they took him to the Plainfield cemetery to show them which graves had been opened (this would be a controversial move when it came out).
Prosecutors quickly charged Ed Gein with first-degree murder for the deaths of Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan but any hope the locals had of avoiding publicity ended when news of what police found at the Gein farm hit the newspapers. NEd Gein and Plainfield, Wisconsin become household names with curiosity-seekers descending on Plainfield from across the country. Many of the locals grudgingly gave media interviews but most of them hoped that things would blow over in time. As for Ed Gein, he was assessed by doctors at the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconin (now the Dodge Correctional Institution). and soon diagnosed him as a "sexual psychopath". They also recommended that Gein be kept in hospital for the rest of his life.
Even as prosecutors and defense attorneys wrestled over the question of Gein's sanity, a battle of another kind was already taking place elsewhere. When an auction house offered up the contents of Ed Gein's house at a public sale, thousands of people from all over the country came to Plainfield to acquire souvenirs. Even before the auction began, the auction house offered tours of Gein's house and farm for fifty cents apiece, Though the outraged families of Gein's victims tried to stop the sale, it still went ahead as scheduled. The farm itself was sold to a local real estate dealer who announced plans to turn the property into a tree farm. As for the 1949 truck that Gein used to cart bodies to his farm, it was sold to junk dealer Chet Sales for $215. While Sales told reporters that he would keep the truck as a souvenir, he later sent the truck on tour with the carnival circuit where it was billed as "Gein's Ghoul Car"/ It would be a familiar sight at carnivals for years afterward.
Considering the simmering anger that the people of Plainfield had over the industry that had sprung up around Gein and his crimes, nobody was really surprised when the local Volunteer Fire Department was called to a fire at the Gein farm on March 20, 1958. While no one took credit for setting the fire, just about everyone in town, including the firefighters, simply stood and watched as the sinister house burned to the ground. And so, with Ed Gein in the hospital where he would remain for the rest of his life and the last physical trace of his life in Plainfield gone up in flames, his former neighbours must have felt some hope that the "Butcher of Plainfield" would be slowly forgotten.
And that might have actually happened had it not been for Robert Albert Bloch...
Already well-known for his work in crime, horror, and fantasy, the Wisconsin-born Bloch had been living in nearby Weyauwega when Ed Gein's crimes were revealed and he followed the case with more than professional interest. Bloch had long been fascinated by abnormal psychology and he had already written several stories about killers with dissociative identity disorder (known as multiple personality disorder in those days). Drawing on his research into Ed Gein's life as well as some related cases, Bloch wrote the book that would be forever associated with his name: Psycho. Published in 1958, Psycho told the story of Norman Bates, a motel owner-operator who was also an amateur taxidermist with an abnormal fascination with his mother, Still, while Bloch had no hesitation about depicting Norman as a murderer, it likely says a lot that the bizarre psychosexual urges that inspired Ed Gein were carefully omitted (Bloch knew his audience). To be fair, Bloch never claimed that his book was based exclusively on Gein but rather on the idea that he represented: a mass murderer living undetected and unsuspected in a typical American town. Since its publication, Psycho has since been
recognized as one of the great horror classics of the 20th century and, not surprisingly, generated renewed interest in Gein and his crimes.
But the book gained even greater fame when director Alfred Hitchcock managed to secure the film rights for a modest sum (largely by using a fake name, something which Bloch would complain about for the rest of his life). While the eminent director faced major opposition in getting funding for a full Hollywood production over such a controversial project, he managed to produce the film for a modest $800,000 by using the production crew from his then-television show. The screenplay, which was faithful to the book, carefully downplayed any suggestion that Norman Bates was a "sexual psychopath" like Gein despite its b Filmed in black-and-white due to limited funding, Psycho, released in 1960, was a hit from the very beginning and made a star of Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates. Even with lukewarm reviews by critics (some of whom condemned it as a "gimmick film"), Psycho proved to be Hitchcock's most profitable productions and has since been recognized as a movie classic and one of Hitchcock's most memorable films.
The film appeal came from its shock value, largely because Hitchcock managed to defy censors trying to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code that had been in force in Hollywood for decades. While the Code was already fraying badly by 1960, the film's bold portrayals of sexuality and violence (including the controversial shower scene) helped open the floodgates to a host of copycat films that attempted to trade on Psycho's success. This meant the introduction of "splatter films" which largely focused on violence and gore rather than the bizarre sexual aspects of Ed Gein's crimes. It would still take decades for Hollywood to "catch up" with Ed Gein with films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
As for Ed Gein himself, he seemed quietly unaware of how his crimes had influenced American culture. By all accounts, he was thoroughly content with his new life at the Central State Hospital. A model inmate, he never required sedation or restraints, and he spent his time reading books, chatting with staff and other patients, and carrying out his chores without complaint. Aside from his disturbing habit of staring at female staff and avoiding them wherever possible, Gein's life seemed idyllic until his death from cancer on July 26, 1984. He was buried between his mother and brother in Plainfield Cemetery, not far from the graves he had desecrated decades earlier (which must have horrified the families involved).
Along with the films he helped inspire, Ed Gein continues to fascinate true crime buffs, many of whom still descend on Plainfield seeking out physical traces of his crimes. While the remains of his abandoned farmhouse and the hardware store where Bernice Worden was murdered are still accessible, visitors to Plainfield seeking out Gein's grave might be surprised to find that it is unmarked. The 150-pound tombstone that used to mark the site was stolen in 2000 and, despite being later recovered by police, was never returned to the cemetery and has been kept in the basement of the Plainfield police department ever since. There is a noticeable hole on Gein's gravesite (visitors often steal dirt as a souvenir) but little else to mark his existence of Plainfield's most notorious resident and the man whose crimes inspired some of Hollywood's most memorable movie monsters.