Saturday, November 16, 1957, was the opening day of deer season in Waushara County, Wisconsin, and most of the men in Plainfield were in the woods. Bernice Worden, 58, a widow who had run the family hardware store since 1931, opened as usual. Sometime that morning she wrote out a receipt for antifreeze. It was the last sale she ever recorded. When her son Frank, a deputy sheriff, came back from hunting late in the afternoon, he found the store empty, the cash register open, and blood on the floor. The receipt was still on the counter. Frank knew the customer. Everyone in town did. He was a quiet odd-jobs man named Eddie Gein who lived alone on a farm a few miles out of town.

A Farm, a Mother, and a House Full of Rules

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, the younger son of George and Augusta Gein. In 1914 the family bought a farm outside Plainfield, a village of a few hundred people in the center of the state. Augusta ran the household, the farm, and her boys’ minds, reading Scripture to them daily and warning that women outside the home were instruments of sin. George died of heart failure on April 1, 1940. Henry, the older brother, died on May 16, 1944, while the two were fighting a brush fire on the property. Augusta had a stroke and died on December 29, 1945, at 67. Ed, then 39, sealed off her rooms and hired out as a handyman and, for a time, a babysitter.

The Tavern Keeper Who Vanished

On December 8, 1954, Mary Hogan, 54, disappeared from the tavern she ran in Pine Grove, a crossroads in neighboring Portage County. Deputies found blood on the floor and a spent cartridge, but no body and no witnesses, and the investigation stalled within weeks. Around Plainfield, Gein became a running joke. Asked once where he thought Hogan had gone, he reportedly answered that she was at his farm. People laughed. He was Eddie, the harmless fellow who did chores for neighbors and sat in the corner at the tavern. Three years would pass before anyone had reason to remember that remark.

The Last Receipt

Frank Worden remembered Gein asking his mother, the day before, whether she would be open Saturday. The antifreeze slip tied it together. That evening Sheriff Arthur Schley picked Gein up at a neighbor’s house, where he was eating supper, then drove out to the farm. The place had no electricity; the officers used flashlights. In a shed attached to the house, Schley found Bernice Worden’s body. She had been shot with a .22 rifle. Over the following days, searchers found that Gein had taken remains from at least nine graves in three local cemeteries, mostly of middle-aged women buried between 1947 and 1952, and fashioned some of them into masks, bowls, and clothing. Mary Hogan’s face was among the remains identified. Gein admitted killing her and Worden, and denied every other killing put to him.

Waupun, Fire, and the Sale of a Car

Gein was arraigned on November 21, 1957, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Judged unfit for trial, he was committed to Central State Hospital at Waupun. During the first night of questioning, Sheriff Schley had slammed Gein’s head against a wall, and that confession was ruled inadmissible. The farm was scheduled for auction on March 30, 1958, amid talk that a buyer might turn the house into a museum. At about 2:30 a.m. on March 20, a patrolman spotted flames; by morning the house was gone. Officials suspected arson but never proved it. Told of the fire, Gein is said to have replied, “Just as well.” His Ford sedan sold for $760 to carnival operator Bunny Gibbons, who showed it at fairs for 25 cents a look, showmanship of the kind that followed the H.H. Holmes case in Chicago sixty years earlier.

A Trial Eleven Years Late

Schley died of heart failure in May 1968, at 43; relatives blamed the strain of the case. That year doctors declared Gein competent, and the trial for Bernice Worden’s murder opened on November 7 before Judge Robert H. Gollmar, sitting without a jury. On November 14, Gollmar found Gein guilty of first-degree murder, then, in a second phase, found he had been legally insane at the time. Gein went back to the hospital, not to prison, and was never tried for Mary Hogan. A 1974 petition for release was denied. He died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute near Madison on July 26, 1984, of respiratory failure from lung cancer, at 77. He was buried in Plainfield Cemetery beside his mother. His gravestone was stolen in 2000, recovered near Seattle in June 2001, and is now kept out of public view.

Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill

Robert Bloch was living in Wisconsin in 1957, and the idea that a mild bachelor could hide such a life in a small town became the seed of his 1959 novel “Psycho.” Alfred Hitchcock’s film followed a year later; Norman Bates, with his preserved mother, is the first of Gein’s screen descendants. Tobe Hooper borrowed the farmhouse and the masks for “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” in 1974. Thomas Harris drew on Gein for Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs,” the 1991 film that won five Oscars. Gein confessed to two murders, far fewer than Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee or John Wayne Gacy in Chicago, yet his name sits alongside theirs because of those movies.

Netflix, the Emmys, and a Village That Wants to Move On

On October 3, 2025, Netflix released the eight-episode “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” created by Ian Brennan, with Charlie Hunnam as Gein and Laurie Metcalf as Augusta. Critics faulted a fictional romance with Bernice Worden and an invented ending in which Gein helps catch Ted Bundy. Viewers watched anyway: 20.7 million views in its second week. On July 8, 2026, the series received seven Emmy nominations, including lead actor for Hunnam and supporting actress for Metcalf; the ceremony is September 14. Plainfield was less enthusiastic. Clerk-treasurer Emily Schaut said in October 2025 that the community “has worked diligently to become more than a single story,” and warned that trespassing on the farmland where the house once stood would be enforced. Visitors keep coming.

Why This Case Still Matters

Ed Gein confessed to two murders, and the label “serial killer” fits him awkwardly. What he did mattered because of where it happened and who he was: the quiet helper down the road, the man who watched the children. The 1957 discovery changed how Americans imagined danger: not a stranger from the city, but a neighbor with a tidy yard. His trial remains a textbook example of the insanity defense, a guilty verdict followed by a finding of insanity. And the argument over the Netflix series, entertainment against accuracy against a town’s right to move on, is the one Plainfield has been having since 1958.

Authorities opened two of the graves Gein named at Plainfield Cemetery and found both caskets empty. They chose not to dig up the rest.

Related Cases

• H.H. Holmes — the Chicago hotel keeper whose house of traps also burned
• Jeffrey Dahmer — Wisconsin’s other name, thirty-four years later in Milwaukee
• John Wayne Gacy — the contractor and clown with a crawl space under his house

Sources

• Wikipedia — Ed Gein
• Wisconsin Historical Society — Gein, Edward 1906–1984
• History.com — Body of Ed Gein’s final victim, Bernice Worden, is found
• Biography.com — Ed Gein’s farmhouse was set to be a tourist attraction, then burned
• TMZ — Ed Gein’s hometown doesn’t want to be known for his murders
• Television Academy — Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Emmy nominations

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