Life and psychological portrait of Ed Gein, "the Butcher of Plainfield" (2Life and psychological portrait of Ed Gein, "The Butcher of Plainfield" (2/2)

Second part of the biography and psychological portrait of Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield. Read the 1st part of Ed Gein's story: Life and psychological portrait of Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield (1/2)

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The news about the disappearance of Mary Hogan caused a great shock in the small town of Plainfield and spread to the surrounding villages. Everyone in town speculated about what might have happened to her. The sawmill owner recalled seeing Ed Gein sitting at the back of the bar in Hogan's tavern, alone and deep in thought, gazing at the proprietress with cold, expressionless eyes. He and many other neighbors who had conversed with Ed recalled how Ed frequently joked about Mary Hogan's whereabouts with phrases such as "She's not missing... In fact she's on my farm right now."

But none of these comments ever alarmed anyone, as they chalked it up to yet another display of the farmer's eccentric behavior.

More cold-blooded murders

On November 16, 1957, just as the case was beginning to be forgotten, Ed Gein murdered hardware store owner Bernice Worden, shooting her in the head with a hunting rifle. In the same manner as three years earlier, he dragged the body to the back of the store, loaded it into his van and drove it away. But this time he made a mistake: Ed had come in with the excuse of buying antifreeze fluid for his van, and his name was listed in the store's ledger as the last customer.

While two police officers arrested Ed, two others went to search his farm and what they saw when they entered the tool shed made their Blood run cold: a woman's corpse hung upside down from pulleys, decapitated and naked.. It had been cut open from the chest to the base of the abdomen and emptied from the inside. The guts were stuffed into a esparto grass bag, and in another bag was Bernice Worden's head. She had hooks through her ears, ready to hang from the ceiling for decoration.

Police notice Ed Gein's macabre acts.

Upon further inspection of the farmhouse, in addition to a large accumulation of garbage and garbage, they found a macabre spectacle: a collection of human skulls, some whole and some cut crosswise to be used as bowls, masks made from human skin that decorated Ed Gein's room, as well as chairs and various items of clothing made in the same way. There were boxes with human bones in them, and in the kitchen they found a boiling pot with Bernice Worden's heart in it. They also found Mary Hogan's head in one of the bags. The only room in the entire house that was intact was his mother's room, which had been sealed off with wooden planks since she passed away.

Back at the police station, Ed admitted that he often felt the need to go to the cemetery and exhume the bodies of dead women who reminded him of his mother, many of whom he had known in life. Sometimes he would take the whole bodies, while other times he would simply take the parts that interested him most. He said he had never had sex with the bodies, because he said they "smelled bad".

Likewise, Ed Gein acknowledged that many nights he heard his mother's voice before he fell asleep and that somehow, she urged him to kill. Accordingly, according to Holmes and DeBurger's (1988) classification of serial killers, he would be part of the "visionary" type of killer, which is one who kills driven by an obvious mental disorder. This disorder provokes in the sufferer a break with reality and, due to delusions and hallucinations (mostly auditory), he carries out orders to kill a certain type of people, who usually share common characteristics. These orders usually come from beings from another world or from the devil himself, but also from beings who, for one reason or another, have exercised great dominion over the murderers, who come to perceive them as deities of undeniable authority.

The traumas of the butcher of Plainfeld

In this case, Ed's feelings of love and hatred for his mother led him to see her as someone who continued to have enormous influence even though she had been dead for years. As he testified to the sheriff, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were the kind of women who embodied everything his mother detested, so following the strict moral code she imposed on him, he murdered them in an attempt to prevent them from continuing their (he believed) indecent sinful lives. The accumulation of forensic evidence at the crime scene (the shotgun shell, traces of blood or the marks in the snow of the van, not to mention everything found on his farm) would be another factor in considering Ed Gein within this typology.

However, there seem to be elements that do not fit, as visionary killers often leave the weapon and the corpse at the same crime scene. Also, their victims are chosen at random and, from what witnesses and Ed Gein himself alleged, Ed Gein had been haunting them for some time.

There is an added element of great relevance in this story, and it is that Ed Gein's purpose in killing those women and digging up the bodies in the cemetery was not only to revive his mother, but he wanted to become her: the confrontation of the love he felt, with the feelings of anger and frustration for denying him contact with women, mixed with a late and anomalous sexual development, caused Ed Gein, upon Augusta's death, to gave free rein to fantasizing about transsexuality.. These ideations of sex change and his admiration for death and dismemberment was what led Ed Gein to make all those clothes with the skin of his victims. Many nights she would put on her costumes and walk around her house imitating Augusta's gestures and voice, behaving as if she were still alive, sitting in her armchair, etc.

In the police interrogation she was administered the Weschler intelligence test, the results of which reflected an intelligence within the average, even exceeding it. However, great difficulties in expressing himself and communicating were also detected. In addition to these conclusions, the psychologists at the hospital where he was hospitalized ruled that he suffered from an emotional disorder that led him to behave irrationally, combined with periods of lucidity during which he felt remorse for the crimes he had accumulated in his record.

Internment and death

Ed Gein was admitted to the Mendota Asylum in 1958 for an indefinite period of time, a decision that did not please the victims' families, who demanded a trial that was never held. After becoming a model inmate, standing out for his good behavior both with the guards and with the rest of the inmates, as well as performing labor and various jobs that earned him a good reputation, in 1974 he asked for his release. The judge in charge of the case requested a second report carried out by four psychologists, who unanimously determined that Gein should continue to be confined.

Ed Gein died of respiratory failure on July 26, 1984 at the Mendota Geriatric Hospital for the Mentally Ill. From Ed Gein's life we can draw certain conclusions about the risk factors that led his criminal life to the point of being classified as a serial killer:

• His coming from a dysfunctional home, with a family history of parental neglect, alcohol abuse and mistreatment, among others, was the first component that made possible the development of his psychopathic and violent personality.

• Secondly, the social isolation suffered during adolescence made him unable to establish the necessary social relationships during this period and thus be able to connect emotionally with people.

• And finally, the withdrawal and loneliness that led to the generation of fantasies and the development of antisocial behavior, based on the belief that the world is a hostile place. The more lonely Ed Gein became, the more his dependence on his fantasies increased. Over time, these fantasies became more violent and twisted.