Life And Psychological Portrait Of Ed Gein, “the Butcher Of Plainfield” (2/2)
Read part 1 of the Ed Gein 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 It made a huge impact in the small town of Plainfield and spread to surrounding towns. All the inhabitants of the town speculated about what could have happened to him. The owner of the sawmill recalled seeing Ed Gein sitting at the back of the bar in Hogan’s tavern, alone and absorbed in his thoughts, looking at the owner with cold, expressionless eyes. He and many other neighbors who had talked with Ed recalled how he frequently joked about Mary Hogan’s whereabouts with phrases like “she’s not missing… In fact she’s on my farm right now.”
But none of these comments ever alarmed anyone, since they attributed it to yet another example of the farmer’s eccentric behavior.
On November 16, 1957, when the case was already beginning to be forgotten, Ed Gein murdered the owner of a hardware store, Bernice Worden, shooting her in the head with a hunting rifle. In the same way as three years before, He dragged the body to the back of the store, loading it into his van and taking it from there 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 accounting book 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: The corpse of a woman was hanging 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 intestines were stuffed inside a bag of esparto grass and Bernice Worden’s head appeared in another bag. She had hooks through her ears, ready to hang from the ceiling as decoration.
As they continued to inspect the farm, in addition to a large accumulation of garbage and waste, they found a macabre sight: a collection of human skulls, some whole and others 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 inside, 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 her mother’s, which had been sealed with wooden boards since she died.
Once 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. He sometimes took the entire bodies, while other times simply those parts that interested him the most. According to him, he had never had sex with the bodies, because he said they “smelled bad.”
Likewise, Ed Gein He admitted that many nights he heard his mother’s voice before falling asleep and that, in some way, 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 murderer, which is one who kills motivated by an obvious mental disorder. This disorder causes the sufferer to break with reality and, due to delusions and hallucinations (most of the time auditory), they carry out orders to kill a type of person, who usually have common characteristics among them. These commands 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.
In this case, the feelings of love and hate that Ed had towards his mother led him to see her as someone who continued to have an enormous influence despite being dead for years. According to what he told the sheriff, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were the type of women who embodied everything his mother detested, so following the strict moral code that she imposed on him, he murdered them to try to prevent them from continuing with their (as he believed) ) indecent sinful life. The accumulation of forensic evidence at the crime scene (the shotgun shell, traces of blood or the marks in the snow from the van, not to mention everything found on his farm) would be another factor when considering Ed Gein within this typology.
However, it seems that there are elements that do not fit, since visionary murderers usually abandon the weapon and the body at the same crime scene. Likewise, his victims are chosen at random and, from what witnesses and Ed Gein himself alleged, he had been stalking them for some time.
There is an added element of great relevance in this story, and that is that Ed Gein’s purpose in killing those women and unearthing the bodies from the cemetery was not only to revive his mother, but he wanted to become her: the confrontation of the love that he felt, with the feelings of anger and frustration at being denied contact with women, mixed with a late and abnormal sexual development, caused that, when Augusta died, Ed Gein gave free rein to fantasize about transsexuality These ideas of sex change and his admiration for death and dismemberment were what led Ed Gein to make all those articles of clothing with the skin of his victims. Many nights he would put on her suits and walk around her house imitating Augusta’s gestures and voice, behaving as if she were still alive, sitting in her armchair, etc.
During the police interrogation, the Weschler intelligence test was administered, the results of which reflected an intelligence within the average, even exceeding it. But great difficulties were also detected in expressing and communicating. Complementary to these conclusions, the psychologists at the hospital where he was admitted 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 that accumulated in his history. .
Internment and death
Ed Gein was admitted to the Mendota asylum in 1958 for an indefinite period, a decision that did not please the relatives of the victims, who asked for a trial that was never held. After becoming a model inmate, standing out for his good behavior both with guards and with the rest of the inmates, as well as performing tasks and various jobs that earned him a good reputation, in 1974 he asked for freedom. The judge handling the case requested that a second report be 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:
