In November 1957, the disappearance of 58-year-old hardware store owner Bernice Worden led police to a secluded farmhouse outside Plainfield, Wisconsin.
What investigators found inside would become one of the most disturbing crime scenes in American history.
The farmhouse belonged to Edward Theodore “Ed” Gein, a quiet handyman and farmer whom neighbors generally considered odd but harmless. Inside his home, authorities discovered Bernice’s mutilated body along with human remains that Gein had transformed into masks, bowls, furniture coverings, and other objects.
And most of those remains had not come from murder victims.
Gein admitted that for years he had been secretly visiting local cemeteries, exhuming recently buried women, and taking portions of their bodies back to his farmhouse. He also admitted killing Bernice Worden and tavern owner Mary Hogan, who had disappeared in 1954. Although Gein has often been called a serial killer, only those two murders were ever established, and he was ultimately convicted only in Worden’s death.
In 1968, Gein was found guilty of murdering Bernice Worden but was determined to have been legally insane at the time of the crime. He spent the remainder of his life in psychiatric institutions and died in 1984 at age 77.
Yet Ed Gein’s influence stretched far beyond Plainfield.
Elements of his crimes helped inspire some of horror’s most infamous fictional characters, including Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. His story returned to popular culture again with Netflix’s 2025 series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, although the dramatization included several events and murders that are not supported by the historical record.
This is the historical true crime story of Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield—two murdered women, stolen bodies, a farmhouse filled with horrors, and the real-life crimes that helped create some of Hollywood’s most terrifying monsters.
He was the real Norman Bates. The real Leatherface. The real Buffalo Bill. This is the true and gruesome story of Ed Gein.
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