Who was Ed Gein, the "Boucher de Plainfield" who inspired Alfred Hitchcock – 29/03/2019

Childhood and adolescence are the two key stages in the life of each serial killer. In the majority of serial killers, years of not only cultivating education, but also norms, ethics and personality, the family in which they grow up has a great influence on their criminal behavior. In the case of Edward Theodore Gein, better known as Ed Gein, would not be inferior. His childhood clearly marked him, and many.

Of Abusive father and strict mother and religious fanatic, the young man engendered a tortuous and incestuous relationship with the matriarch. The Oedipus complex he suffered has resulted in an obsession with blood and torture. The story of the so-called "Boucher de Plainfield" inspired television series and movies such as "Psycho" by Alfred Hitchbad.

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Edward was born on August 27, 1906 in La Crosse County, in the state of Wisconsin (USA). After seven years, they settled in the town of Plainfield, on a small isolated ranch on the outskirts of the city, where they practice farming. One of the first and most troubling memories of Gein's childhood: when, at the door of the slaughterhouse of his parents' shop, he watched the pigs open into a cbad with a long, sharp knife.

At first, Ed said that murder it made him nauseous and seeing the blood made him faint. Although this dislike is in contradiction with some of his pbadions: horror cartoons and books devoted to the torture perpetrated in the Nazi concentration camps.

During the first sixteen years of his life, the only contact of the child with reality was the school. But Augusta has ambaded so much that he has forbidden her to have friends to prevent his moral purity from being defiled. In fact, by quoting the Bible, he reminded her that all men were sinners. Little by little, a strange relationship was forged, "a love-hate relationship," says psychiatrist George Amdt. Because the boy "listened to him, loved him and listened to him everywhere",

However, over time, this situation has become the "An ideal breeding ground for a psychiatric pathology", Says Harold Schechter, author of Deviant." There were four people under the control of this woman. It was the ideal environment for madness. "

As for the mistreatment suffered by the father, they ended when he died in 1940. It would not be the only death of the Gein family. It seems that the death of his brother Henry, it was actually the first crime what this psychopath did And although it was never possible to prove it, everything indicated that after the death of the patriarch, the disputes between brothers were in crescendo. Henry saw that Ed's addiction to his mother had hurt him, which he categorically denied.

Shortly after, Henry died in strange circumstances: a fire on the family farm put an end to his life. As Ed explained to the police, both tried to extinguish the fire, but his brother could not escape the flames. After asking for help, not only indicated the location of his brother's body, but also his appearance with a blow to the head. Finally, the investigation certified death by asphyxiation. It was in 1944.

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Father first, then brother and a year after the tragedy of the fire, Augusta also died. I have suffered from heart problems. Unlike the first two, the death of his mother affected Gein a lot. I did not have anyone to communicate with. "He realized that he could not do anything without his mother," says Amdt. Because his mother was "his only connection to mental health".

Thereafter, Ed gave free rein to the criminal instinct that tormented him. He no longer had the fake curious of his mother disapproving of his immoral behavior. But his voice, continuous and permanent, speaks in his head.

The way Gein found to reconstruct Augusta's figure was to profane graves. He stole the corpses of middle-aged women who could imitate the image of his mother. For this, he reviewed the funeral announcements of the local newspaper and selected the victims. Later, he went to the cemetery in the heat of the night, unearthed the corpses, loaded them into his van and transported them to the basement of his house. This place hid the most horrible crimes we could remember.

And although during those years his hobby was devoted to the theft of people who died in 1947, unexplained disappearances were attributed to him in Plainfield and the surrounding area.

An 8 year old girl at the door of her house; a 15 year old teenager who takes care of the children of a neighbor; a farmer and his friend who were going to hunt … But no one knew who the architect was for those absences. Two women, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, had to die for the authorities to appoint Ed Gein as the murderer.

According to the psychological tests done on him once arrested, they confirmed that Edward was a smart man, even above average. This has brought respect and trust to some of her neighbors, but with emotional and sometimes irrational upheaval. Others, on the other hand, experienced more lucid and calm periods during which I felt remorse.

All this with a delay of badual and emotional development produced by the repression exerted by his mother, made Gein create a world of strange fantasies. In him, his feelings for women were confused with the pain he felt for his mother's death and the fear of transgressing his own moral code.

This conflict was reflected in his eyes. Neighbors like Lena Trickey say that she felt very uncomfortable in her presence. "There was something in his eyes that bothered me," he says. "He was not the kind of person I would trust," he says. Curiously, this feeling only had the women of the city.

So with this pathology, coupled with his compelling need to kill, the murderer seriously chose his first victim. Mary Hogan, owner of the village bar, suffered all kinds of harbadment and dissections. It was a full moon night, his favorite, because he wore his special costume of woman made with the human skin of its victims.

While the murderer perpetrated this macabre ritual in the basement of his farm, a local farmer, Seymour Lester, entered the woman's tavern. It was the afternoon of December 8, 1954. Seymour entered the room open and bright, but completely empty. Everything was very strange. He started calling Mary and no one answered.

It was then that he saw a big blood stain on the door that led to the back shop. He called the sheriff for help and, when he arrived with his badistants, they followed the bloody trail leading to the parking lot.

Mary's car was still parked and the blood stain had ended next to the tracks of a truck. Beside them, they struck a 32-caliber pistol cartridge. According to the evidence, Mary was reportedly killed and her body dragged in a car waiting for her on the outside. . There was no sign of struggle, no money had been stolen from the fund and there seemed to be no reason for such a crime.

The news of this mystery spread quickly and over the weeks, without the authorities discovering anything new, a question arose in all the conversations: "What happened to Mary Hogan?". A month after the events, Ed Gein himself participated in one of the researches. His former neighbor, Fred Rein, remembers saying, "He's at home, on the farm." But no one paid attention to him. Everyone thought I was joking. Unfortunately, he was telling the truth. He had killed her.

Mary Hogan was not the only victim to have crossed the operating room in her basement. Ironmonger Bernice Worden was his next "guest" in the so-called "Farm of Horrors". Bernice and Mary had something in common for Gein: "They were not good women." Or so he said.

It was the morning of Saturday, November 16, 1957, when the criminal arrived at the hardware store in the city of Bernice to buy antifreeze. The woman, of middle and recently separated age, was surprised when Ed asked her to go out. I did not take it very seriously. So, after entering his name in the register, he did it with each buyer for accounting reasons, Gein took out his shotgun and fired it. He carried his body to the basement and performed the same ritual as with Mary.

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Nobody noticed the lack of hardware before the end of the afternoon, when the person in charge of the service station saw the door close with the lights on. When the authorities arrived, they found a great trail of blood that was found behind and that was lost behind traces of vans. Once the premises registered, they noticed the last note of Bernice. The name of Ed Gein appeared as his last client.

Meanwhile, the murderer was visited by childhood friends. Bob and Darlene Hill knocked on his door and Ed came out with his hands stained with blood. His excuse: he was tearing a deer. He invited them to wash, to change clothes and to dine at the mother of the hill. It was there when another neighbor appeared to inform him of Bernice's disappearance. At this moment, Gein reacts with one: "It must be somebody with a lot of composure."

His friend urged them to go to the city to get information and help the police, but at that time, several sheriff units broke into the property. They were going to stop him. When Gein saw them, the first thing he let go was: "Someone incriminated me."

As soon as one of the agents confirmed the murderer's arrest on the radio, the sheriff and county captain began inspecting Gein's home. During the raid, they ran into hanging corpses, human body remains, waste mountains, excrement, medicine and anatomy books, and all kinds of elements in human skin. Not to mention heads reduced to Jibaro style. An important note: the body of his mother, Augusta, was still lying on the bed in his room. She has never been buried.

While they were investigating his farm, Ed was waiting in Wautoma State Prison, guarded by two police officers. On Saturday, November 17 at 2:30 am, the sheriff returned from the crime scene and interrogated him for twelve hours. He did not open his mouth. He remained silent.

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It was the next morning when the suspect He confessed to killing Bernice and Mary Hogan. However, he has always denied practicing cannibalism with corpses, as investigators pointed out after noting the multiple mutilations that these bodies had possessed.

On the other hand, when detectives asked him about the other corpses found in the basement, Ed Gein claimed that he had taken them out of the graveyard after desecrating their graves. Of course, he denied having bad with them. There, when the press baptized him with the nickname "The Butcher of Plainfield". They had just discovered a monster that was hidden.

After several psychological examinations, December 18 the doctors concluded that Gein was suffering from schizophrenia and that as a result, he was not able to attend a trial. But that did not comfort the citizens of Plainfield.

After spending Christmas in a psychiatric hospital on January 6, 1958, the accused listened impbadively to the testimony of three psychologists while eating chewing gum. Finally, the judge accepted the recommendations of the experts and Ed Gein was interned in the state asylum for an indefinite period. But this judicial decision raised such a wave of protests among the inhabitants of the city that one day before Palm Sunday in March 1958, the famous "Farm of Horrors" has ended in flames.

The crimes of Ed Gein and especially the strange and unhealthy relationship he had with his mother directly inspired the novel "Psychosis" Robert Bloch, who will later be adapted to the cinema thanks to Alfred Hitchbad. In fact, the filmmaker has rediscovered the truculent personality of this serial killer to create the character of Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, and whose precedent, the series Bates Motel, is played by the very young Freddie Highmore.

The other cbadettes based on the butcher are: "The slaughter of texas"; the 1974 film Deranged, starring Roberts Blossom; or the character of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.

On July 26, 1984, Ed Gein died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute, a victim of cancer and respiratory failure. His body was buried in Plainfield Cemetery, in an unidentified grave, to avoid new tensions among the local population.

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One can never really know what turned Ed Gein into what he was, a true psychopath. But after the homicides perpetrated by the "Boucher de Plainfield", this little American city is never the same again. Nothing was like before. These crimes have changed them forever.

Report: Mónica G. Álvarez