Ed Gein's Childhood: 'The Butcher of Plainfield' Fixated on His Domineering Mother

On November 16, 1957, investigators in Plainfield, Wisconsin, discovered a gruesome scene at the family farm where Ed Gein had spent his entire life. Inside a shed, detectives found the headless and disemboweled body of Bernice Worden, a local hardware store owner Gein had murdered earlier that day. When they entered the main house, they tracked down Worden's head and heart, along with dozens of female body parts from corpses Gein had dug up in a five-year span. His grave digging started two years after his mother, Augusta, died in 1945.

Gein, a notorious killer who inspired the Norman Bates character in the novel "Psycho"—and who was later referred to as "the Butcher of Plainfield" in the media—confessed to killing Worden and another woman, Mary Hogan, as well as stealing nine female corpses.

Shortly after his arrest, psychiatrists diagnosed him Gein schizophrenia and had him committed to a mental hospital for the next decade, after which he was found fit to stand trial. A jury ruled him not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was sent back to a mental institution until his death in 1984.

Gein claimed his two victims and the dead women he dug up resembled Augusta.

Gruesome evidence of Gein's horrific acts—skins from human heads, stuffed faces on the walls, boxes of nipples and noses— were strewn throughout his home, except for one bedroom.

"When you look at the crime scene photos, his house was an absolute disaster," Louis Schlesinger, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. "But his mother's room was immaculate, just as it was when she died."

The pristine state of Augusta's bedroom was a signpost pointing to how Gein's obsessive relationship with his mother partly shaped his criminal behavior, Schlesinger says: "Did he have a very abnormal relationship with his mother? It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to conclude that the answer is obviously 'yes.'"

Augusta kept a tight rein on Ed and his older brother, Henry, during their childhood and adolescent years. Their father, George, was an alcoholic who pawned off parenting duties to Augusta, a devout Christian, causing constant friction in the marriage, Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Preaching from a bible, their mother taught Ed and Henry that booze and dating women would lead them down a path of immorality. She also prevented her boys from having any social interactions with other children outside of school and kept them busy with chores around the farm, Lieberman says.

According to Lieberman, the isolation likely caused Gein to develop an Oedipus complex, a diagnosis of a strong emotional attachment to the parent of the opposite sex, that would play a role in his decisions as an adult to rob graves and murder two women.

"[Gein had] a sexual, romantic attraction to his mother," Lieberman says. And the family’s isolation on the farm only grew his dependence on her—and his attraction to her. “The fact that she hated her husband made her more reliant on her sons for companionship,” she adds. “So, there was a part of her that was nurturing this dependency on her sons."

When they reached adulthood, Henry became more independent from Augusta, while Ed's fixation with their mother continued.

In 1944, four years after George's death, Henry died while he and his brother were putting out a fire near the farm. Coroners ruled Henry asphyxiated from smoke inhalation, but his head had bruises consistent with being struck. Gein told police he had become separated from his brother while battling the blaze.

"After the brother died, the mother had two paralyzing strokes, so she couldn't go anywhere," Lieberman says. "He would have had her all to himself."

In his confession to investigators, Gein claimed that a "force built up in me" in the years following his mother's passing in 1945. He said he visited local cemeteries to dig up fresh graves with recently deceased women so he could sew a "woman suit" in order to physically recreate his mother and become her.

"He wanted to crawl into her skin," Lieberman says. "The body parts he had collected weren't sufficient, so he had to kill these [two] women, according to his confession."

Gein's oedipal relationship with his mother influenced his decisions to steal corpses and kill Hogan and Worden. But his mental illnesses are the likely root causes for his behavior, both Lieberman and Schlesinger say.

"His schizophrenia made him feel very lonely and abandoned by his mother and perhaps is why he heard voices telling him to get another mother," Lieberman says. "After he was caught, some former classmates described his strange mannerisms, including seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal jokes. That would have been auditory hallucinations, and he was probably having a little conversation in his head with these voices."

Schlesinger notes that psychiatrists who diagnosed Gein in the time period between his arrest and his trial didn't have the experience and tools to deal with a deranged killer that mental health experts have today.

"In the 1950s, these were very extraordinary crimes and were not on anybody's radar when they happened," Schlesinger says. "In Gein's case, he was probably dealing with several very disturbed psychopathologies."

While his only meaningful relationship with a domineering, religiously devout mother influenced his decisions in the type of corpses and women he targeted, it's not the sole reason that caused his necrophilia and murderous impulses, Schlesinger says. "But he was psychotic and out of touch with reality."