True Crime With Caledonian Kitty

(The Gein Farmhouse: Picture credit: allthatsinteresting.com) 

Continued from part one...

As I mentioned in part one, please be aware that I will be sharing some disturbing details. 

With no sign of Henry as the night wore on, Augusta sought the police and a search around the local area took place. In a strange twist of events, Ed told some of the police officers to follow him and he led the police to his brother's body. Henry was lying on the ground untouched by the fire but with brusing to his forehead. It was obvious some kind of struggle had taken place and Henry had suffered injuries to his head but the police decided not to pursue Ed on the matter and declared that Henry had died due to smoke inhalation.

It's a mystery why the police didn't press on with this further but it was reported by other people who lived in the town at that time, that everyone thought that it was just another tragedy that happened and that the Gein family had already been through enough having lost George just a few years before.

Henry was buried in Plainfield Cemetery a couple of plots away from George and no more was mentioned of his death. 

Ed and Augusta continued to live in the farmhouse and their strange, unhealthy bond seemed to be stronger than ever although it was a very distructive relationship. Augusta constantly belittled Ed and he had a love/hate relationship with her. No matter what she said or did he worshipped her and only wanted to please her.

Some time later, Augusta's health began to fail and she suffered a series of strokes. Ed was worried sick, he could not live without his mother, she was all he knew. He did everything he could for her but she passed away on the 29th of December 1945. Ed was beside himself and cried like a baby at her funeral. Despite the way she treated him and the lack of love towards him, all he wanted to do was make her happy and make her love him. 

Suddenly, here he was alone in this big old farmhouse not knowing what to do or how to look after himself. Some of the locals felt sorry for him and continued to give him odd jobs to do as well as having him over for dinner and sometimes he would babysit their children. He never let anyone come inside of his house. That's one of the things that some people don't know about Ed Gein, people actually liked him, they thought he was eccentric and had a strange way about him but they thought he was gentle and they trusted him.

As time went on, Ed became more and more isolated and being in the farmhouse alone haunted him, everything reminded him of his mother and he could still hear her voice in his mind. He boarded up her bedroom which was left tidy and untouched. He also boarded up the downstairs parlor and livingroom as these were areas that his mother used a lot. He lived on tins of pork and beans and slept in a small room next to the kitchen. The kitchen and room soon became cluttered and filthy.

It wasn't long before there was no electricity and there was a problem with the plumbing at the house, it's a wonder how Ed managed to get through the winter weather in these conditions. He lost himself in books and enjoyed reading about death cults, adventures and human anatomy. 

He became obsessed with dead bodies and believed that he had the power to bring people back from the dead, he fantasized about exhuming a body and also about becoming a woman. 

Ed told investigators later on that he started visiting local cemeteries late at night in 1947. He would read the obituaries in the local newspaper and find out who was having a funeral on a certain day and if they were female and around his mother's age. He would sneak in to the graveyard late at night with a shovel and dig for hours until he retrieved the body from the coffin where he would put it in the back of his Ford Sedan and go back to his farmhouse. 

There, the body would be laid on a table and Ed would try and perform some sort of ritual to bring them back from the dead. He would then dismember the body and preserve the parts. There's still speculation to this day if he did or did not eat human flesh but he did say that he didn't have sexual intercourse with the bodies as ''they smelled really bad''. 

It makes you wonder, the horrible thought that if the bodies didn't give off an odour, would he have done that? it's something that one does not dare to think about. 

If you thought the story of Ed Gein was disturbing enough so far, it's about to get even worse. He continued his routine of searching the obituaries and digging up corpses which was sickening enough but the way he treated the bodies afterwards was a horror in itself beyond anyone's nightmares. Ed liked to make furniture out of people's remains. I will include the list of gruesome finds that the police documented in a moment but first I want to move onto the horrific murder of Bernice Worden which took place in 1957. Bernice owned a hardware store in Plainfield and always got on so well with Ed. She was well known and liked in the town and when her shop was closed on the 16th of November, everyone was wondering what was going on. 

Bernice's son went to the shop to find the cash register opened and some blood. When the police arrived he told them that Ed Gein had been in the shop the night before asking about anti-freeze. Ed said he would be back in the morning and there was a receipt with his details next to the cash register. Bernice's son had always felt uncomfortable around Ed Gein, especially the way he looked at his mother, there was something not quite right about him. The police were in two minds at first, thinking how could this possibly be connected to harmless Ed Gein but when they saw the receipt they thought that they'd better check it out. 

When the police arrived at Ed's farmhouse it was pitch black because of the lack of electricity so they had to rely on flashlights. They went to the wood shed behind the house and whilst they were trying to concentrate on where they were walking, one of the officers felt something against his shoulder, he moved the flashlight towards the object and to his absolute horror, there was Bernice Worden's body hanging upside down, gutted and her head had been decapitated. One can not imagine how those officers must have felt that night, stood there on that isolated farm, in the darkness with just the flashlights and this horrific sight of this poor woman's remains before them. 

It was time to find Ed Gein as soon as possible and get inside that house, what was this monster hiding in there?

Continued in part three...