For example, Henry was lying on a piece of earth that was untouched by fire and he had bruises on his head. Although Henry was found under strange circumstances, police were quick to dismiss foul play.
No one could believe shy Eddie was capable of killing anyone, especially his brother. Later the county coroner would list asphyxiation as the cause of death.
The only living person Eddie had left was his mother and that was the only person he needed. However, he would have his mother all to himself for a very brief period. On December 29th, , Augusta died after a series of strokes. Eddie's foundations were shaken upon her death.
Harold Schechter in his book Deviant, explained that Eddie had "lost his only friend and one true love. Eddie boarded off the rooms his mother used the most, mainly the upstairs floor, the downstairs parlor and living room. He preserved them as a shrine to her and left them untouched for the years to follow.
He resided in the lower level of the house making use of the kitchen area and a small room located just off of the kitchen, which he used as a bedroom.
It was in these areas that Eddie would spend his spare time reading death-cult magazines and adventure stories. At other times, Eddie would immerse himself in his bizarre hobbies that included nightly visits to the graveyard. After the death of his mother, Eddie became increasingly lonely. He spent much of his spare time reading pulp magazines and anatomy books. The rooms he inhabited were full of periodicals about Nazis, South Sea headhunters and shipwrecks.
From his readings Eddie learned about the process of shrinking heads, exhuming corpses from graves and the anatomy of the human body. He became obsessed with these weird stories and he would often recount some of them to the children he babysat.
Eddie also enjoyed reading the local newspapers. His favorite section was the obituaries. It was from the obituaries that Eddie would learn of the recent deaths of local women. Having never enjoyed the company of the opposite sex, he would quench his lust by visiting graves at night. Although he later swore to police that he never had sexual intercourse with any of the dead women he had exhumed "they smelled too bad" , he did take a particular pleasure in peeling their skin from their bodies and wearing it.
He was curious to know what it was like to have breasts and a vagina and he often dreamed of being a woman. He was fascinated with women because of the power and hold they had over men. He acquired quite a collection of body parts, some of which included preserved heads. On one occasion a young boy that he sometimes looked after visited Eddie's farm. He later said that Eddie had showed him human heads that he kept in his bedroom.
Eddie claimed the shriveled heads were from the South Seas, relics from headhunters. When the young boy told people of his experience, his story was quickly dismissed as a figment of the young boy's imagination. Then somewhat later, the boy was vindicated when two other young men paid a visit to Eddie Gein's farm. They too had seen the preserved heads of women but thought them to be just strange Halloween costumes. Rumors began to circulate and soon most of the townspeople were gossiping about the strange objects Eddie supposedly possessed.
However, no one took the stories seriously until Bernice Worden disappeared years later. In fact, people would often joke with Eddie about having shrunken heads and Eddie would just smile or make reference to having them in his room. No one thought he was telling the truth or maybe they just didn't want to believe it was true. During the late 's and 's, Wisconsin police began to notice an increase in missing persons cases. There were four cases that particularly baffled police.
The first was that of an eight-year-old girl named Georgia Weckler, who had disappeared coming home from school on May 1, Hundreds of residents and police searched an area of ten square miles of Jefferson, Wisconsin, hoping to find the young girl.
Unfortunately, Georgia would never be seen or heard of again. There were no good suspects and the only evidence police had to go on were tire marks found near the place where Georgia was last seen. The tire marks were that of a Ford. The case remained unsolved and wouldn't be opened again until years later when Eddie Gein was convicted of murder.
Another girl disappeared six years later in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley had been babysitting at the time she had vanished. Evelyn's father repeatedly tried to phone the girl at the house where she was babysitting and there was no answer.
Worried, the girl's father immediately drove to where she was babysitting. Nobody answered the door. When he peered through a window, he could see one of his daughter's shoes and a pair of her eyeglasses on the floor. He tried to enter the house, but all the doors and windows were locked. Except for one -- the back basement window. It was at that window where he discovered bloodstains. Petrified, he entered the house and discovered signs of a struggle. Immediately he contacted police. When police arrived at the house they found more evidence of a struggle including blood stains on the grass leading away from the house, a bloody hand print on a neighboring house, footprints and the girl's other shoe on the basement floor.
A regional search was conducted but Evelyn was nowhere to be found. A few days later police discovered some bloodied articles of clothing that belonged to Evelyn, near a highway outside of La Crosse. The worst was suspected. In November of , two men stopped for a drink at a bar in Plainfield, Wisconsin before heading out to hunt deer.
Victor Travis and Ray Burgess spent several hours at the bar before leaving. The two men and their car were never to be seen again. A massive search was conducted but there was no trace of them. They had simply vanished. In the winter of , a Plainfield tavern keeper by the name of Mary Hogan mysteriously disappeared from her place of business. Police suspected foul play when they discovered blood on the tavern floor that trailed into the parking lot. Police also discovered an empty bullet cartridge on the floor.
Police could only speculate about what might have happened to Mary because like the other four missing people, they had no bodies and little useful evidence.
The only other common tie among these cases was that all of the disappearances happened around or in Plainfield, Wisconsin. On November 17, , after the discovery of Bernice Worden's headless corpse and other gruesome artifacts in Eddie's house, police began an exhaustive search of the remaining parts of the farm and surrounding land. They believed Eddie may have been involved in more murders and that the bodies might be buried on his land, possibly those of Georgia Weckler, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, Evelyn Hartley and Mary Hogan.
While excavations began at the farmstead, Eddie was being interviewed at Wautoma County Jailhouse by investigators. Gein at first did not admit to any of the killings. However, after more then a day of silence he began to tell the horrible story of how he killed Mrs. Worden and where he acquired the body parts that were found in his house. Gein had difficulty remembering every detail, because he claimed he had been in a dazed state at the time leading up to and during the murder.
Yet, he recalled dragging Worden's body to his Ford truck, taking the cash register from the store and taking them back to his house. He did not remember shooting her in the head with a. When asked where the other body parts came from that were discovered in his house, he said that he had stolen them from local graves. Eddie insisted that he had not killed any of the people whose remains were found in his house, with the exception of Mrs. However, after days of intense interrogation he finally admitted to the killing of Mary Hogan.
Again, he claimed he was in a dazed state at the time of the murder and he could not remember exact details of what actually happened. The only memory he had was that he had accidentally shot her.
Eddie showed no signs of remorse or emotion during the many hours of interrogation. When he talked about the murders and of his grave robbing escapades he spoke very matter-of-factly, even cheerfully at times. He had no concept of the enormity of his crimes. Gein's sanity was in question and it was suggested that during trial he plead not guilty, by reason of insanity.
Gein underwent a battery of psychological tests, which later concluded that he was indeed emotionally impaired. Psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed him asserted that he was schizophrenic and a "sexual psychopath. Gein apparently suffered from conflicting feelings about women, his natural sexual attraction to them and the unnatural attitudes that his mother had instilled in him.
This love-hate feeling towards women became exaggerated and eventually developed in to a full-blown psychosis. While Eddie was undergoing further interrogation and psychological tests, investigators continued to search the land around his farm.
Police discovered within Eddie's farmhouse the remains of ten women. Although Eddie swore that the remaining body parts of eight women were those taken from local graveyards, police were skeptical. They believed that it was highly possible for the remains to have come from women Eddie may have murdered. The only way police could ascertain whether the remains came from women's corpses was to examine the graves that Eddie claimed he had robbed.
After much controversy about the morality of exhuming the bodies, police were finally permitted to dig up the graves of the women Eddie claimed to have desecrated. All of the coffins showed clear signs of tampering. In most cases, the bodies or parts of the bodies were missing.
There would be another discovery on Eddie's land that would again raise the issue of whether Eddie did in fact murder a third person. On November 29th, police unearthed human skeletal remains on the Gein farm. It was suspected that the body was that of Victor Travis, who had disappeared years earlier. The remains were immediately taken to a crime lab and examined. Tests showed that the body was not that of a male but of a large, middle-aged woman, another graveyard souvenir.
Try as the police did, they could not implicate Eddie in the disappearance of Victor Travis or the three other people who had vanished years earlier in the Plainfield area. When investigators revealed the facts about what was found on Eddie Gein's farm, the news quickly spread. Reporters from all over the world flocked to the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The town became known worldwide and Eddy Gein reached celebrity-like status. People were repulsed, yet at the same time drawn to the atrocities that took place on Eddie Gein's farm.
Psychologists from all over the world attempted to find out what made Eddie tick. During the 's, he gained notoriety as being one of the most famous of documented cases involving a combination of necrophilia, transvestism and fetishism. Even children who knew of the exploits of Eddie began to sing songs about him and make jokes in an effort to, as Harold Schechter suggests in his book Deviant, "exorcise the nightmare with laughter.
Back in Plainfield, residents endured the onslaught of reporters who disrupted their daily life by bombarding them with questions about Eddie. However, many of them eventually became involved in the mania surrounding Eddie and contributed what information they had.
Plainfield was now known to the world as the home of infamous Eddie Gein. Most residents who knew Eddie had only good things to say about him, other than that he was a little peculiar, had a quirky grin and a strange sense of humor. They never suspected him of being capable of committing such ghastly crimes. But the truth was hard to escape. The little shy, quiet man the town thought they knew, was in fact, a murderer who also violated the graves of friends and relatives.
After Gein spent a period of thirty days in a mental institution and was evaluated as mentally incompetent, he could no longer be tried for first degree murder. But if your definition of victims includes the dead and buried, loosely one could say that Gein's depravities victimized an estimated 10 more people and their families who had to live with the knowledge that Gein used their bodies to make clothing and housewares , per the Sheboygan Press.
Crime and Investigation reported that Gein told police he would watch the obituaries and dig up women who reminded him of his domineering and deeply religious mother , who died in He would take the parts he wanted home and get crafty. Other times he would wear their skin around and pretend he was a woman.
Eventually, though, Gein needed more. On July On July 26, , the U. During early colonial times in the s, On July 24, Tokyo decided to strengthen its position in terms of its invasion of China by moving through Southeast Asia. Raised in a middle-class English family, Michael Philip Jagger attended the London School of Economics but left without graduating in order to pursue On July 26, , a swarm of grasshoppers descends on crops throughout the American heartland, devastating millions of acres.
Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, already in the midst of a bad drought, suffered tremendously from this disaster. Since the very beginning of Truman signs the National Security Act, which becomes one of the most important pieces of Cold War legislation. The act established much of the bureaucratic framework for foreign policymaking for the next plus years of the Cold War.
By July , the Cold On July 26, , Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan and of his men are captured at Salineville, Ohio, during a spectacular raid on the North. Around , Augusta moved the family to a farm outside Plainfield, Wisconsin.
Gein rarely left the farm, except for attending school. After George died in , Gein and Henry began working more odd jobs to support the family. In , the brothers were burning brush on the property, when the fire raged out of control. Henry was found dead, and although it was initially believed to be the result of the fire, the circumstances surrounding his death, as well as Gein's later activities, led to conjecture that the younger brother was responsible.
Obsessively devoted to his mother, Gein never left home or dated women. However, after she died in late , he became increasingly deranged. Now living alone, he left her room neat and untouched, while the rest of the home fell into squalor, and he developed an interest in anatomy books. Gein managed to support himself as a handyman and — despite his odd behavior — as a babysitter. Meanwhile, a few residents from the general area had mysteriously disappeared over the years. On November 16, , Bernice Worden was reported missing from her hardware store in Plainfield, with the cash register also gone and a trail of blood leading out the back.
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