by Patrick H. Moore
In the annals of serial killers, there is probably no one creepier than Eddie Gein, the Plainfield, Wisconsin, mama’s boy par excellence. Largely forgotten due to the obscurity of his rural existence and the fact that many more urbane serial killers have followed in his footsteps, Eddie was the real life inspiration for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, for Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs”, and for the original film version of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” I was seven years old when Eddie’s crimes were discovered and was living in rural Wisconsin, yet I have no memory of these events. No doubt the good country folk tried hard to keep it on the down-low. It was fully 30 years later when I first read about Eddie’s grisly machinations. His is a fascinating and strangely sad tale which, not unlike in “Psycho”, illuminates the price a boy/man and his victims sometimes pay due to being saddled with an overly domineering mother.
Eddie Gein
On November 17, 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin arrived at the dilapidated farmhouse of Eddie Gein, who was a suspect in the robbery of a local hardware store and disappearance of the owner, Bernice Worden. Gein had been the last customer at the hardware store and had been seen loitering around the premises.
Gein’s desolate farmhouse was a study in chaos. Inside, junk and rotting garbage covered the floor and counters. It was almost impossible to walk through the rooms. The smell of filth and decomposition was overwhelming. While the local sheriff, Arthur Schley, inspected the shed with his flashlight, he felt something brush against his jacket. When he looked up to see what it was he ran into, he faced a large, dangling carcass hanging upside down from the beams. The carcass had been decapitated, slit open and gutted. An ugly sight to be sure, but a familiar one in that deer-hunting part of the country, especially during deer season. It took a few moments to sink in, but soon Schley realized that it wasn’t a deer at all, it was the headless butchered body of a woman. Bernice Worden, the 50-year-old mother of his deputy Frank Worden, had been found.
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