Ed Gein

The dead of night as people sleep. That's when the spirits creep. As the bell tolls three, dark things take power. We like to call it the supernatural hour.

Speaking of Santa season, we have discussed it. This is going to be our last show of this year. We're going to take a break for the holidays. One of the reasons is because Mike is time for him to put on his Santa suit and go be sent across.

Real quick, just a quick plug for Mike. If you want Mike to come be Santa, I promise you won't bring me a board. How can they get a hold of you to come be Santa? Let's see what is the best way to email that.

I guess the best way it would be to contact me. You can find me on Finlay on Yahoo. You're going to edit this part out here. The best way you can email me directly at mikefindlay.com.

That's probably the easiest way. And how do you spell Finlay for those who have F as in Frank? I-N-D-L-A-Y. Since I don't have one of those cool mike.wist.org emails that you can call in or email and complain to.

No one has one of those. We've actually had to shut those down. Yeah, with our provider they went to a different email service. Now it costs an exorbitant money for each email address.

There's only a couple of those anymore. The wist.org email addresses. This will be our last episode of the season. We'll be coming back after the new year.

And we're actually going to be doing some retooling on the show. We're actually going to turn the show over to Mike and Tim. I'm actually going to be leaving the show after this episode. I just want to tell everybody I appreciate everybody's support.

I'm just entering a new chapter of my life. I've got some different things I'd like to do. And I think it'd be great to get some fresh voices and fresh personalities. And kind of bid everyone a farewell and say thank you if you guys see me.

I'd be out and about staying high. Still working with the radio runner network. But again, just taking a step back off the show. And I just I appreciate everybody.

I'll miss everybody. I'll miss the fun times. And hopefully there's some events. I will catch you those events.

So what are we talking about tonight? So I'm ever talking about Siri Keller. One of the first ones in America that people are aware of. He's actually spawned the inspiration for characters in three different movies including Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And that would be Ed Geem. This guy's so creepy. By the way, if you guys don't know anything about it, I didn't know much about Ed Geem until we started doing the show. And as Tim has talked about several times, this guy, this is the first time when doing research, you know, watching documentaries and reading that I've gotten like the full body shivers and just been creeped out where I had to step away from my laptop.

So the thing is, there's a lot of serial killers out there. And I've heard, you know, a lot of names. I mean, you've got John Wayne Gacy, you've got Ted Bundy. There's a bunch of them.

And you hear Ed Geem's name. And you know, in my mind, when we kind of pick this topic, I was just, you know, another serial killer, you know, another 10 dead prostitutes. But as I started the research, yeah, this guy's off the charts. This guy's legitimately nuts.

In fact, he's one of the few serial killers that did not go to prison. He actually spent the rest of his existence in a criminal asane asylum, basically a state criminal hospital for the criminally mentally ill. This guy is nuts. So let's start a little bit about his past.

Mike, do you want to know that? Sure. Slidbaa's background, his dad was George, again, George was orphaned at the age of three after his father and his mother and his older sister were swept to their deaths in a flash flood. And he was brought up by his maternal grandparents, always had low self esteem as in his teenage years, he turned into alcohol and drank throughout his life.

Things changed for him a bit when he met as mother Augusta. She was described as a fierce stocky woman who was fanatically religious and obsessively outraged by the loose morality of the world that they lived in. She got married on December 4 in 1899 and lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Their marriage was far from perfect though.

You know, it's not quite the white picket fence marriage that everybody hopes for. He drank a lot and with her being so strong, well, she actually dominated him. He was weak and unreliable and it wasn't long before his life was just misery. This led more and more to his reliance on alcohol and it offered an evident and violent disputes between the two of them.

But despite that, on January 17, 1902, they had a baby named Henry and Augusta always had a really hard time bonding with Henry. She wanted a girl and just didn't like men, didn't like boys. So she never really bonded with him. She wanted a girl so bad that when she finally got pregnant with her second pregnancy, she spent every night praying that God would give her a girl.

And on August 27, 1906, she gave birth to a healthy little boy named Edward and she was pissed. She felt betrayed by the Lord. She was just upset. But she did decide to find the embrace of the child.

But she, in her words, she had decided that she will not grow up like the usual lustful foul mouth males who used a woman for their own perverted pleasure. And she was confident that Ed would come out different. And he was. Oh, he definitely came out different.

And he was not a lustful foul mouth person. I mean, he was an upright person. Speaking of foul mouth, I was going to jump in here and say that his mom was nutty or squirrel shit. So she was kind of a religious zealot.

She actually even talked about these lustful foul mouth men. She went off and on about how women in the world were horrors and harlots. And she basically hated everybody. Nobody was as right to some pious as she was.

And she was bound to make sure that little Eddy knew that women were horrid, sinful, vile beings, along with the fact that men were lustful, horrible human beings. And she basically emasculated him as a child. I mean, just on every level, just kind of dominated emasculated. That played in his social life as well.

They had a grocery store for a while. They sold a grocery store and moved to a small dairy farm near Camp Douglas, Wisconsin before making the permanent move to a farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin or just outside of Plainfield. And she had their household pristine and the extreme remoteness of the farm men that she could keep herself and her sons away from what she described as the scandalous low moral standards of the people of Plainfield. She hated the people there.

She took care of her sons, strict religious training so they didn't go to church. They learned everything they knew about God from her. And they never left the farm only except only to go to school. But they go to school and because they were kept so isolated from their children, they had a hard time making friends.

Any time they did make friends, she quickly put it into it and actually had a really miserable time at school. He was often made fun of. He had a droopy eye and kind of a lopsided grin and due to his mother's influence and desires for him, he actually developed a pretty effeminate manner. He was very femmy and quickly became an easy target for bullies.

Well, he's also an indifferent student at the time. I mean, he wasn't spectacular. It wasn't terrible. And just kind of give you an idea of what a guy was like, his later in his life, actually, given a Q test.

And he actually scored as incredibly average. I mean, he wasn't like a brilliant mastermind. He was like me. He was like, no, probably better than me.

He was actually just like you. No, but I mean, he wasn't dumb by any means, but he certainly was no super genius. He was just an incredibly average effeminate kid with him. Not like me, never mind.

He went into scrubbing Mike. I wear a skirt, but I'm not. But yeah, just a kid with a mom who was a nutty or school ship. Yeah.

So, Mr. Ball at school, because he had all the bullying, a home life as miserable as well, his father regularly beat him because of what these drunken rages his dad would get into. His mother's always ranting about morality and religion and add all this to the farms failing and every treated more and more into his own little world. As they got into adulthood, the two brothers took on odd jobs around the town.

I will also work to the farm. They were known as hardworking, reliable, and trustworthy individuals. They were generally liked. By this point, their dad's alcoholism took its toll and in 1937, his health failed and he had to be taken care of by his wife and boys.

And they detested him. They hated him. It would be three more years before George was finally released from his misery and he died on April 1st in 1940 due to heart failure. His wife and sons never mourned for his loss.

In fact, they were relieved that they didn't have to take care of me more. Neither of the brothers were involved in the war. This was their own World War II. It was raging at the time.

Henry was too old to be drafted. And due to Ed's droopy eye, he couldn't pass the physical exam due to slightly impaired vision. And so because of this, there were a lot more men going off to war. This meant that there was a lot more work to be done.

And the brothers started to get more work outside of the farm, helping out on other farms and whatnot. It's kind of interesting because they were, I was watching some documentaries on Ed Guy and as part of my research and actually interviewed some people who worked with Ed back in the day. And I said that he was, for the most part, he's a likable guy. They said that people in town would be like, hey, Ed, my door has a busted hand.

Can you come working on it? And that'd be like, oh, yeah, I'll come work on the hinge on your door. He come over and work on widows houses. He was generally considered in the town to be kind of a little bit of an outsider but very helpful and hard worker.

I guess they had farms where they did chir and a bunch of farm hands to come in and do the harvesting and whatnot. And he was there and everybody said, he's likable enough. He's a little different. He's a little bit of a loner.

But he was likable and he worked hard. Now, one of the documentaries I saw is that Henry had a good reputation for being a grafter, which is where you're grafting different trees together. But Ed had a knack for kids and he actually babysapped for a lot of local families and the kids loved him. So who do you want for your babysitter?

Ed Geiner, John Lynne Geisie. Yeah, well, well, he was better. So if you, as we'll get into it, I think your kids were probably okay with Ed. He's probably more of that corny weirdo that will entertain him.

Yeah, the bad thing about a podcast, I wish we could kind of show a picture of what this guy looks like. Because he's just, he's very skinny, kind of lumpy looking. Kind of has like, he said the weird kind of lazy, I think going on and just generally kind of a creepy looking dude. Yeah, when they made a movie about him, one of the movies that I've seen, they had Kane Hodder play him.

And I don't know if you know Kane Hodder is, but he played Jason Voorhees and the majority of the, uh, Friday the 13th movies. Kane Hodder is basically, he's a buff, like, like he's kind of a short stocky guy, but he's extremely like, like built. Like he's a weight lifter and he looks absolutely nothing like Ed Geiner. That's who they had playing one of them.

It was just like, Casamor is like a steepish, any type of a guy. Yeah, Steve was showing a much better, uh, better choice than, oh yeah, this came harder. That's nothing like it. Yeah, that's just one of the movies.

There was like two movies and the other guy looked a lot closer. Yeah, Kane's a little too muscly and a little too fleshed out. Yeah, uh, I mean, I guess that wasn't really like wind piece, you know, spiny, but he just was not, it was smaller and just right then and just, I mean, the space is very bony because of how thin he was. So I mean, his cheeks were kind of prominent.

But yeah, just kind of, but you look at him, he kind of has an un-a serial killer look to him. Right. So before I became serial killer though, so Ed, you know, like I said, babysitting kids, they're helping on the forums, had a great reputation. The two brothers had a, generally had a good relationship, but there was some animosity between them because of the closeness of the relationship they had with mom.

Henry was concerned that they were just too close and he would often pick on Ed about that and make comments. And that criticism really, really affected the way Ed viewed his opinion of his brother. Ed thought that his mother was a perfect human being and he regarded her as a saint on earth. But, you know, it later came to a head on May 16th, 1944, Henry died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 43.

The story goes that Henry and Ed had been fighting a blaze near a marshland on their farm. And there's a lot of energy dispute about how the blaze started. Some say that it was an accident. Others claim that Ed started it to burn off some dry grass.

Ed claimed that Henry had started it to do some stuff and that the augustive wind came and it blew the fire out of control and became kind of a big wildfire there in the area. The two fought to extinguish it. And as they blazed, they fought the blaze. Henry ended up going missing.

So after the fire is out, Ed goes for help and a search party is sent out to go help find Henry. When the crews arrive at the farm there at the side of the fire, it inexplicably leads the searchers right to where Henry's body is. As if he knew exactly where it was. Yes, supposedly, according to Dean's story, they were fighting this fire and he lost track of his brother that Henry was awesome and they got separated and he didn't know where he was at.

And like you said, he went into town, you know, brought back the police and the searchers was like, I don't know where he's at, except for right over here. You know, basically take some bright. Follow me. Yeah.

Follow me. There is. Follow me. I don't know.

Right. Where is that? You know, and there's some controversy to about the body because they never really definitively determined cause of death, but kind of rumor has it. And I guess you can really take his rumor that he had some strange bruising about his head that was unexplained.

And so there's been some speculation that there may have been some foul play involved there. I saw that the official cause of death was listed as aphyxiation due to being overcome by smoke. And then he fell and hit his head is what they're saying happened a couple years later. They was I mean, what's obvious to us now to them?

They're like, there's no signs of foul play here. Let's it's he just fell and hit his head because he inhaled the smoke. Case closed. Let's go.

Kind of small town Andy Griffith. It seems like an Andy Griffith type channel. You know, maybe very very much so just a very rural farming community. You know, they're going to go for what the easiest explanation is.

And in a time like that, these explanation is it was an accident, not that we have a serial killer in our mess. And it's happened on farms plus everybody likes Henry and George, you know, every Henry and Ed. So I mean, why would you suspect? Yeah, they're just kind of slightly off.

Maybe something like that. The girl last week. Exactly. Good kid.

So anyway, just a little bit about that. So just like his father, George, there was really no outpouring of grief from Ed or Augusta. Ed was happy. He could finally have his beloved mother to himself.

He had daughter. She was the backbone of his life. And he saw her as invincible. So it's a huge shock to him when she becomes ill.

And he rushes her to the hospital in his truck. And it's confirmed that she had suffered a massive stroke. Ed stayed by her bedside in the hospital for hours on end and eventually she was discharged. But she wasn't the same strong and formidable person that she used to be.

And Ed had to give her around the clock care. And it's thought that seeing his mother in this convalescent state was an exhilaration to him because he had a chance to prove to her that he was a dutiful son and that he would somehow gain more and more of her affection. But it didn't quite happen that way. She did recover somewhat and was almost back to her full self.

But she never showed him any gratitude for it. But the care that he gave her and that really, really hurt him. You know, I got to say his mom seems like a really sweet lady. I can just visualize that she's the type of woman that no matter what he did, it was not good enough.

Everything he does a simple way. And obviously he probably grew up wanting, like any kid does, love and affection and approval from his parents. His dad's an alcoholic ass who beats him on a regular basis. Mom's kind of a zealot.

And again, every single thing he does is a failure. Every single thing he does is not good enough. Meanwhile, being drilled into him that the ways of the world are wicked. And so he's got to be in a spot where he's trying to do anything he can to win the love and approval that anybody wants.

You know, I mean, you hear kind of the adageo, you know, not getting the hugs as a kid. In this case, it might actually be a true statement because every kid wants approval from their adult. Well, he was already your favorite, though. I mean, like Henry got shafted when it came to the love, you know, and she decided that she was going to focus her attention on it and everything.

Yeah, I still can't imagine that she's not. She strikes me as a kind of woman who's probably never satisfied. You know, even though Ed was probably, like you said, her favorite, I still suspect that she constantly belittled him and badgered him and pointed out his shortcomings, regardless. And as well as cases were being the favorite might not necessarily be the best thing because you're also the target.

He was the most expectations on him. Right. But I think of her, I keep thinking of the movie, Mommy Dearest. I've heard of the movie.

She's like freaks out like, no, why are hangers? My wife will love that reference. She makes that comment sometimes. Anyway, or in Carrie, her mom was was that way.

That's a perfect example from Carrie. She was everybody's just out to defile you and and Carrie's kind of the scapegoat for moms, anger and you know, and not to get off on a side track, but it kind of makes those people tick. But as you can see with a game, basically, you can seriously damage a child. Yeah, you can.

So, so, moms love your kids. Just love them. Lots of hugs. Lots of hugs.

Anyway, so thanks to Ed's care. She recovered was mostly back to her old angry self in 1945. She accompanied Ed to a nearby farm to pick up some straw and as they drove into the yard, the farmer and his wife were out in the front yard having a heated argument as the man had beaten a puppy to death. And the side of the farmer's wife in the yard, she didn't care that they were having a fight.

The fact that his wife was out in the yard just outraged Augusta. She viewed her as a harlot, ended up set her so much and she just couldn't let it go that a week later, she suffered another stroke and she'd actually died on December 29, 1945. Actually, it wasn't his wife. She was mad because she wasn't his wife and she had no business being there.

It was even better. That's right. The plot thickens. It's funny that she was worried about how men treated women and viewed women and how her sons would be women, but yet at the same time, the way she viewed other women was probably just as bad, if not worse.

I get the impression of her though that nobody is good enough for her standards. Like she's the only one who's good enough for her standards and everybody except for her fall short. Right. So that's a little backstory to add up to where he started a little alone.

Now it was said that when his mom died, that's kind of where it's believed that Ed snapped. If he reported that at her funeral, he actually cried like, he was describing his crying like a little boy whose mommy had just died. I mean just kind of over the top freaked out that mommy was gone because mom was his whole world. In fact, I'm going to jump just ahead a little bit, but later when they searched at home, they found that mom's room was kept in pristine condition.

It was well maintained. All her stuff was there. It was kind of almost a shrine, a memorial to the crazy mom, to the crazy majan. Well, it wasn't just her room.

It was anywhere that she frequented like any space that was hers was kept in pristine condition. Where's the rest of the house? Was it a different story? But we'll get into that in a minute.

He pretty much just lived in the kitchen, in his bedroom, in the hallway there and everything else was boarded up and kept as pristine as she would have had it when she was alive. Nobody messes with mom's stuff. The morning of, so Edler's alone, and he keeps to himself a bit more. He does go into town every once in a while.

In the morning of November 16th, 1957, the playing field hardware store owner Bernice Warden disappeared. A playing field resident reported that the hardware store's truck had been driven out from the rear of the building around 9.30 a.m. The hardware store was closed the entire day. Some of the residents believe that this was because of the deer hunting season.

So what happens in playing field, I guess it's like really good deer territory. Some of the pictures I saw were of like all these men out there. They had like 20 deer all when one giant rod all hanging. It's like a deer festival and all the men go out and go out and go out and know deer hunting.

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in the thriving metropolis of Pais and Utah. And in the late 70s, early 80s, the deer hunt was a huge deal. Everybody went deer hunting. Do they have any stoplights when you were a kid?

How many what? Any stoplights in Pais and when you were a kid? Not when I was first a kid. They weren't invented yet.

Yeah, as a dude out there at the torch. They had to stop sign of that that that that that T right? No, they actually they did put one stoplight in when I was a kid. But kind of what I'm going with this is when I was a kid in the late 70s, early 80s.

Right. The deer hunt was a huge deal and everybody, I mean you just basically went down to the local hardware store. You bought your deer tag and you went deer hunting. That's just what you did.

If you didn't deer hunt, you're kind of an outsider in a weirdo. And I imagine a playing field is very similar in that it's a rural farming community. So when the deer hunt comes along, I imagine everybody gets in their pick them up truck with their 30 out 6 to shoot them in a white tail. So like you said, everybody in town for the most part hit the road to go deer hunting.

I mean, it was a big deal. Right. So her son comes home. Bernice's son comes home.

He's actually the deputy sheriff. His name is Frank Gordon. He comes to the store around 5 p.m. to find the store's catch right just open and blood stains on the floor.

And Frank discovers Ed Gain had been in the store the night before his mother's disappearance. And he was supposed to come back the next morning for a gallon of anaphrase. Yeah, I think he's looking for some anaphrase when he went in the day before. And the sales for a gallon of anaphrase was the last receipt written in the little receipt book by Bernice on the morning that she had disappeared.

On the evening, the same day Gene was arrested yet in a grocery store there in the west end of playing field. Now what's kind of interesting with that if I go into that just a little bit. And by today's legal standards, I think they would have had a hard time getting any kind of conviction on Ed Gain. So the sheriff and the deputies went to a Gain's farm to kind of figure out what was what was up.

And they got out there and the house has no plumbing has no electricity. But it didn't appear that anybody was home. So modern police work you would probably sit on the house or you would get a warrant for the house or do something along those lines. But since Ed wasn't home and they thought he might be susceptible what you do, you start poking around.

So they end up going into the shed that's on the property. And they walk in and it's dark. And as they walk in, they're kind of using their flashlights around the ground and something bumped into one of the deputies. And as he got his flashlight and swung it up, they actually found the body of the word.

Yeah, they found her hung up like a deer. Basically, feed up kind of spread apart on like meat hooks. She was gutted like a deer. Her head was missing.

It was like he was dressing her out like you would if you shot a deer, which I'm sure freaked out the sheriff and deputies. And so because of this, they proceeded to go and actually search the farmhouse. Yeah, so she was shot with a 22-caliber rifle and then just the body was just mutilated. Did I say where she was shot at?

It doesn't say. But yeah, so her head was off and she's dressed out. So then they went to the home and this is where things get really creepy. It's really gross.

I mean, just run through the list of what they found. Yeah, listen, if you want to see pictures, so here's another thing that was really, I thought it was these pictures here, sick bass. That had an interesting. At the time, the rules for the media wasn't quite what they are today.

And so there's actually quite a few photos that were taken in the house of all of the different things that they found due to reporters and whatnot. Say if I remember right, and I didn't run across this in my research, but if I remember, I'd actually have to press to the house to write photos during the actual investigation. Right. That's all.

Hey newspaper guys, get over here, get a little of this. Don't take a picture of this, so we can't use it in court because it's... Again, I think they're ruled a little bit looser in those days because the whole discovery of the body in and of itself would be tossed out by these little standards. But anyway, so just a small list of some of the things that they found.

They found whole human bones and fragments of bones. There was a waste basket made of human skin. There was human skin covering several chair seats. And like I said, you can find pictures of these things if you're more of enough you want to see them.

They're not pretty. He had skulls on bed posts, female skulls, some of them with the top sawed off. He had bowls that he'd made from human skulls, they're like using the suit bowls. He had a corset made from a female torso skin from the shoulders to the way so I had the breast and everything on it.

They actually referred to it as the mammary vest. It was a vest that he would put on that basically had boobs on it that he could wear around the house where he was a woman with boobs because he had this vest he made out of woman skin. Yeah, leggings made from human skin from women's legs. He made masks from the skin of female heads.

Mary Ho, so there was another woman who had been a bar owner that had gone missing a couple of years before. Nobody ever figured out what had happened to her. Now this was an interesting story. Do you mind if I tell it?

Yeah, tell it. So as the deputy said, these are going through the house. You know, they're seeing all this furniture made out of bones. They're seeing a pulse rate done with human skin, human skin lampshades, these fun camels, soup bowls made out of human skulls, the mammary vest, the leggings.

One of the deputies comes across the paper sack inside and sees a clump of hair. And so he kind of, the deputy later says he doesn't know kind of what possessions to do it, but he reaches into the sack, grabs his hair, pulls it out. And they recognized it as a sparktender who disappeared two years prior. Guy Nade had actually taken her, again, had taken her face and basically skinned her face off with the hair.

And so he basically created a human mask using this woman's face and was keeping it in this paper sack. Had hooks in it and string a twine that went around the back so that it would be like a strap to hold the back of the to hold it around the back of his head. And not to get gruesome, but it was said that he took like women's genitals that he removed. Get into those.

Let me stop you. Yeah. So they found her face in a paper bag. They found Mary Hogan's skull in a box.

They found Bernice Wardin's entire head in a burlap sack. And you know, I mean, she only been dead. What a day. Yeah, they're Bernice Wardin's heart was in a plastic bag in front of his pop-belief stove.

They found nine vulvas in a shoe box. They found a young girl's dress and the vulvas of two females judged him about 15 years old. They found a belt made from female human nipples. They found four noses, a pair of lips on a window shade, draw a stream.

So like the drawing that you string pulled open your curtains, how the pair of women's lips hanging on the edge of that. You know, nice little pull tab there. They found a lampshade made of skin from a human face and fingernails and female fingers in a box. That's a fun teaching visit.

Right? For those who are not in Utah, that's when a church members come visit your house and teach you. So where it gets interesting is, so you're looking at it, there's all these different victims here, right? Well, most of them, he, when he was questioned, he told investigators that between 1947 and 1952, I mean granted, like I said, this is in 1957 that they went to his house.

So from 47 to 52, he made as many as 40 nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhumed recently buried bodies. And he said that when he would go, he'd be like in a days like state. And on about 30 of those visits, he claimed that he came out of the days, swelt the cemetery and left the grave in the good order and returned to home empty-handed. On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of the recently buried middle-aged women that he thought resembled his mother and he took the bodies home where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.

Sometimes a lot of times he would just watch the obituaries and so he would know who died and if they looked right and things looked right, then he would go and he would, yeah, soon as he got dark, he was in the old station wagon with a shovel to go. Probably snatching. We did a little episode on that. Right.

And so it's believed he only actually killed two people that we know of. And what was interesting is they... Three-handed count Henry. Yeah, it's true.

But they arrested him, took him to jail and initially he didn't really say anything. He just kind of sat in jail, totally confronted him with the evidence of a wounds body. And at that point he basically confessed to her and the bartender, Gail, I can't remember her name. I don't know what's in front of me.

Her name was Mary Hogan. Mary Hogan. And he admitted to those and he was like, yep, well, whatever. I did it.

And so he basically confessed to both of those with like immediately essentially once he was like, hey, we found this in your house. Oh, yep, I did that. Like you said, he was like a firm watcher though obituaries and he would just, as soon as somebody died, he was interested in, you know, get the shovel, go dig him up and that was his next toy. And it was easy for him to pull him off too because he was, you know, the greatest freshly dug.

You know, and this is before they used cement bolts and all the things that they do now. These are just wooden caskets that are placed in and covered with dirt. So you have a fresh mound of dirt, middle of the night he goes and digs up the body, you know, dig opens up the casket. Sometimes he wouldn't take the whole body, he would just take the parts he wanted and then leave the rest of the body, but then he would bury it back up.

And so nobody was any of the wiser. And so people had a hard time believing this when they were hearing about it. And he would, I believe that he actually identified some of the ones that he had gone to and the family's like, no. And so they actually had to go and exhum the bodies to verify that he actually did do this because they just had a hard time believing that he would go dig up their mom and and now they were never able to confirm whether or not there's any cannibalism involved in this.

I mean the fact that a heart was found in a plastic bag in front of the stove is, I call that a clue. But they were never able to actually confirm whether or not he consumed any of the body parts. But there were, do you remember how many parts they found or how many bodies they think were involved? Um, let me check on that.

I don't have that actually. But basically he said, they went and they did assume some of the graves on one of them. They found a, there's one that he failed to open when he lost his pry bar. There was another one where he found just a pry bar in the casket.

He did return rings in some body parts and that also kind of helped corroborate his confessions. Soon after his mother's death, he began to create a women's suit and that's where that vest comes in with the leggings. And it was so that he could become his mother. He would literally crawl into the, not necessarily her skin, but the skin that would kind of identify his mom.

He did deny having sex with any of the bodies exhumed, explaining that they smelled too bad. So at least he had some sort of sense, right? But, um, you know, during this, during the state crime of interrogation, he also admitted to the shooting death of Mary Hogan, who was the tavern owner. And she disappeared in 1954.

Her head was found in the house, as we said, but he later denied any memory of the details around her death. There was a 16 year old girl whose parents were friends of teens, and they'd attended ball games and movies with him. They reported that he had, the kids have reported that he had shrunken heads in his house, and he'd describe them as relics from the Philippines that were sent by a cousin who served in the islands during World War II, and that he'd set him like his souvenir shrunken head things. But upon investigation by the police, these were determined to be human facial skins that were carefully peeled from corpses and that he had used his masks and just kind of sewed them together to make like a shrunken head.

He was also considered a suspect in several unsolved cases in Wisconsin, including the 1953 disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, who was a lacrosse babysitter across the town there in Wisconsin. During questioning by the sheriff, Art Schle, he actually reportedly assaulted gain, banging his head and his face into a brick wall, just trying to get that confession out of him. So, in confession, his initial confession is actually now ruled inadmissible in court because he was basically beat out of him. Schle actually died of heart failure at age 43 in 1968 before Gaines' trial ever actually came to fruition.

Many who knew Schle said that he was traumatized by the horror of Gaines' crimes and through the whole process, and in this, along with the fear of having to testify, especially about assaulting Gaines, he had just the stress that caused his death. And one of his friends actually said that he's actually the victim of another, the last victim of Ed Gaines, just as shortly as he had put it in. That sounds more like the victim of too many cheeseburgers, but... And stress.

Did you have something you wanted out on that, Tim? You just kept bouncing back and forth calling him Gain and Gain. Gain, Gain, Tomato, Tomato. So, what was interesting is when Gain went to trial, they actually fundamentally incompetent to stand trial.

Basically, they did a lot of psychological examinations and found out they had like a weird mother fixation, which obviously we know now after learning all about him. And they basically said, hey, you know, this guy is not culpable to stand a criminal trial. So they essentially sentenced him to stay in a criminal mental hospital until he could be fit to stand trial. So, kind of a modernist saying asylum, if you will, or a hospital for the criminal insane, which we still do today.

We still send people who are nuts to a state hospital until they're mentally capable of standing trial for their crimes. It's said that when he was in the hospital, he was actually fairly normal, would play games, was kind of quiet, wouldn't really talk to other residents in the hospital, he'd just go sit in the corner and do his thing. He liked it there. Yeah, I say one of the actual supervisors there at the hospital, we have conversations with him, said he's a pretty normal guy for the most part, just how he behaved at the hospital.

But he said when there's a full moon, he would get really kind of goofy and start talking about women and what he'd like to do to women and just get really kind of over the top. I believe the term is a lot extra until the full moon went down, which point he would kind of return to being a normal, and I'm using my air quotations, a normal human being, if you will, in this mental hospital. Did you have anything you want to add on with that mic? Not really.

They did end up selling his house and all the things, his car was bought by a woman, I forget her last night with her lefurs, it was Bonnie, but she did side shows and she charged 25 cents per view to go look at this car at the various state fairs that she'd go around to. The house was sold but was immediately burned down. Well, interestingly, if it wasn't quite sold, so what happened with that is that they were going to do an auction, a property auction at the the game farm. And so the head of auction scheduled to sell off his property.

I wonder what a human face lamp goes for. But they had an auction to sell the property scheduled for, I believe it was a Saturday. I set the question mark because I'm not sure. But the next morning, the town kind of woke to an orange glow in the sky, went out there and found that the home had been completely burned to the ground, the home and all his possessions.

They actually didn't investigation to try and find out what had caused the fire, but they came back inconclusive. They couldn't find any reason for the blaze. So it's still unknown whether somebody in town said it on fire, whether it was actually, actually I'm breathing notes here. So it says a deputy marshal reported that a rubbish fire had been set 75 feet away from the house by a cleaning crew tasked with disposing of trash.

And the hot coals were recovered from the spot where the bonfire was ever they burning trash. My notes didn't have that. However, there was no like fire traveling across the grass or anything towards the house. There was no evidence that the fire had actually spread to the house.

It was one of those convenient things. Just kind of like that fire where they were burning with Henry and Ed and conveniently ends up being a murder site. I honestly can't help but think that somebody in town had to help that fire start. You know, the notoriety of Ed Gein and I mean it was all over the news.

I mean he was infamous and you know the media was all over his story. I can't imagine that there wasn't somebody, some good boy in town who said you know what we don't need this attention. We don't want this attention. I'm just gonna go over there tonight before this auction happens and just burn this on the bitch to the ground.

That makes more sense to me than anything. And the rubbish fire would certainly be a very good easy cover to just take a pile of hot coals from the rubbish fire with a shovel toss him into the house and lock away and let nature take its course. Yeah, they suspected that there was ours involved but they really could ever officially determine it so they and they just kind of let it go. And when they actually told Ed about it he shrugged and said just as well.

Yeah, just didn't really care. Is 1949 Ford's stand so that he did find that he used to haul the bodies of his victims and that's why it's so weird because he used to stick bodies in the trunk. Was sold at a public auction for $760 which is about the equivalent of $6,000 in 2018 so last year. He sold it to a carnival side shop where your bunny gibbons and she charged a $0.25 per mission to see it.

To actually put like a tent around it so I mean you had to actually pay money and go in and to see it. So it wasn't just easily visible to the public yet to actually physically pay and go into to get an Eiffel of his car. Geen, I'm interested right? Geen was only tried for one murder and that was of Bernie Swarden although he did admit to killing Mary Hogan.

A psychologist, a psychiatrist that he'd been working with did testify that Geena told him that he didn't know whether the killing of Denise was intentional or accidental but the Geena told him that while he had examined a gun at Warden's store apparently he was going to sell a gun that he'd had. The gun went off and it actually killed Bernie's. Geen testified later after trying to load a bullet into the rifle it just discharged. He hadn't really aimed at a rifle at rifle at her but he didn't remember anything that happened that morning but he then he remembers that but he doesn't remember anything else.

Oops! So it's like yeah I just killed somebody let's go make it. Oh a fresh one. Yes!

So he died in July 26th 1984 at the Mendona Middle Hospital Respiratory Failure for a member of the Respiratory Failure to lung cancer. Oh okay. He was 77 years old. Over the years he's actually buried next to his parents and over the years souvenir secret ship pieces off of his gravestone that they're at the Plainfield Cemetery until the stone itself was stolen in 2000 and it was recovered in 2001 near C.L.

and was placed in storage at the Washura County Sheriff's Department. It's now marked it's not the grav site is now unmarked but it's not a note everybody knows where it is he's right between his parents. Well they said they said that a lot of times flowers and notes and stuff show up all the time at his grave site because some of you people out there are just sick yeah as I said I have a big here to know what people are leaving him flowers and to me it's just that's almost as creepy as the same people the same letter love letters to Ted Bunney you don't want to get married to him while he's in prison and the same one that idolized Charles Manson and wanted Mary Charles Manson while he's in prison with a swastika on his forehead and yeah I don't even know man. Yeah I don't even know man.

It's a sick world. You know what's interesting though that house as paranormal investigators could you guys imagine investigating that home or could you even imagine the no because it burned down but if it hadn't had or could you imagine living in that home or just the issues that would be tied to that home I mean I wouldn't be surprised if there's even issues just tied to the land itself after that kind of stuff you can't tell me that desecrating multiple human bodies wouldn't draw in like a type three spirit in an awful hurry or just and part of me wondered you know if he and I wonder this I wonder this back when we were talking about Avenueville you know about whether there was any kind of demonic influence or possession involved and if that might have played into some of Ed's kind of insanity if there could have been anything I mean obviously he's fits the profile of somebody who becomes susceptible he's bullied he's got some weird crazy stuff going on and nobody in their right mind I mean nobody just decides to start making lamps out of people. Right there's a whole level of crazy involved in this one that you don't really see with other show tours I mean you have Ted Bundy who you know killed lots of women you know you're different armor who killed and like cannibalized dudes. Or in Gacy you know just you know home different uh and with those it's like I can't relate to them because I don't relate but I can see what they were I can relate to them I can see their motives though right so it's like a rapist to Sony oh he's attracted to women he gets off on the power and committing that that naughty taboo stuff I don't I just can't fathom I'm kind of lost a word it's like this just goes way beyond yeah arts and craft time with that body yeah you know who wants new crafts now what's interesting though about uh gien is I'm not sympathizing by by doing but anyway with any of those by the way I just want to put it out there I just I was trying to understand where people go nuts gien's act or so kind of horrifically over the top that actually inspired a whole bunch of pop culture spin-offs based on his acts some very closely related on his acts and some just loosely based on his acts for instance leatherface famous or seeing the movie leatherface that was based very roughly on Texas Chainsaw massacre based on uh ed gien um silence of the lambs uh was well on Texas Chainsaw Massacre I mean there's the leatherface obviously wearing the face of a human person but there was also uh cannibalism that the family did which and like I said they never actually proved that he was accountable but I I'm pretty sure he was um but there's also several rooms in the house where they've decorated and made lamps and other stuff out of human bones and sandalers and whatnot so that's really uh got some of the inspiration for Texas Chainsaw Massacre now you get into like his Silence of the Lambs and he got the character of Buffalo Bill was also based on ed gien uh because of the you know Buffalo Bill in the movie he would kidnap larger women uh put him in the well star of him and it's not his skin where else it gets the hose again yeah um but yeah he would he would basically uh star of them so their skin would get loose and then he would skin them and where their their skin uh he'd turn them into dresses and whatnot and that's stuff something ed gien that actually did like I said would you know he had the the mammary vest and other leggings and whatnot um another movie that was also uh one of the characters he was an inspiration for was Norman Bates and Psycho um no it said that ed gien heard the the voice of his mother even if she had passed away and they would drive him crazy because she was just still even though she was dead she was still haunting him and if you haven't seen psycho that's pretty much the reason why Norman Bates was the way he was I mean just like how skittish he was and you know he was you know he had his you know spoiler alert from him in the 60s our 70s or whatever it was um you know he had his dead mother still in address with a wig on in the window upstairs in the house and you know he still heard her voice and she told him you know basically how he was a terrible person and that's kind of where they got the inspiration for that character from was also from i mean so those were the three major pictures that that this man was responsible for some of the characters of there was another one too it wasn't there was just a three oh there's like the house of a thousand corpses from Rob Zombie and it's sequel that doubles rejects um where's he was an inspiration for that there's one called the light of the moon um ed gien the butcher of playing field in 2007 there's a pretty big list of various different ones but uh i bet there was actually one that there was an american filmmaker named aril morris and a German filmmaker Werner Herzog that attempted to unsuccessfully collaborate on a film project about ed from 75 to 76 um aril morris actually interviewed gien gien sorry at 10 several times and ended up spending almost a year in playing field interviewing dozens of locals on these two had planned to secretly exhumed gien's mother from her grave just to test a theory but never followed through on it and eventually their collaboration ended they aborted the project and uh never made the the movie that they were going to so yeah so ed gien's got my uh well for creepy a serial killer all time yeah there's a lot of other creepy ones out there but i think he's by far the worst and i guess really best technically classified as a serial killer if he's only been committed of tumors i was about to give him three more to be a serial killer i was like well if we count Henry well that would actually prove him Henry would make Henry would make three but what is the role to be a serial killer yeah and ultimately that's kind of the i guess you know as Tim brings up and i was actually about to say that is i don't know that uh whether or not he's a serial killer he's kind of considered a serial killer but uh who knows definitely a serial grave robber either way he's and beyond he's a creepy son of a bitch see at least the other the the grave robbers were making money they were selling the bodies to a medical school back when we were talking about the the grave robbers in London or you know against an arts and craft time it's art it's yeah who's got some numbers blue um we need some numbers glues and popsicle sticks some cotton balls and three corpses um yeah so he's got my creepiest one so um anything else you guys want to talk about with him before we move on uh i'm all gien'd out Tim you guys don't leak for us negative all right well i've got a creepy no stones no stones this this week all right 60 hour work weeks makes a little time for study 60 hour quick makes Tim no fun all right so a lost hacker claims that goes saved him a hacker who's found after being lost in the mountains of Taiwan for 10 days told the rest of yours he managed to survive thanks to the help from a ghost couple he got into safety the strange case we poorly began back in November 10th when song wryziong and i probably put her that name uh venture into the wilderness of a region of the country known as pintong at some point in the hike he lost his way in his cell phone dive leaving him in a particularly precarious position when wryziong did not return home that evening his family contacted authorities with their concerns a massive search party consisting of 284 people as well as 111 police and fire officials at the very specific number um and scoured the mountains where the mountain hiking in hopes of locating him despite their best efforts roosing was nowhere to be found after worrisome 10 days until he emerged from the wilderness on Wednesday morning with a rather amazing story to share according to her reasoning he had attempted to climb a rock while early on during his disappearance and in the process fell must his glasses the lost hacker then hid in the cave for a few days until he came to the conclusion of the only way out of the predicament was to try and find his way down the mountain when he emerged in the cavern ruegying that misteries couple who walked with him through the forest for two hours suddenly he claims they disappeared and he looked for them he spotted a trundled back to civilization looking back on the experience roozing was certain that the guidance of the spirit was Taiwanese people who once adapted the region so he was saved by the ghost well happens a lot i mean uh oh who is it that has the song camouflage about the soldier that died saving on a firefight oh that's a very good song um i'm blank and i know it i can see it in my mind i'm trying to think who i don't see that my head too damn it's large um yeah so that's it for uh for this episode you guys have anything you want to add not really all right well like i said this will be our last episode for this season uh we'll be back after the first the year what's that standard way standard way check it out we'll be back uh well you guys will be back uh 2020 with new episodes some new personalities um maybe a little bit of a new direction on the show uh like i said i'm headed out i've got some different directions in life that i'm gonna go i appreciate everybody's support uh with this it's been really fun uh my content we're gonna continue soldering on and so they're gonna do an amazing job i have no doubts so i just want to say thank you everybody who's listened to this point uh if you guys see me out about give me a shout uh i will be not here but i'll be around so thanks everybody uh we came we saw apparently it kicked one of our asses that might be mine have a good night everybody you've been listening to the super natural hour at advancedmarinormal.com the super natural hour is part of the radio run and network found at radironin.com