The SERIAL KILLER Serial

ED GEIN: IN THE FLESH            article by Jessie Horsting

     Ed Gein was the second son of Augusta and George Gein (pronounced Geen) on August 27, 1906 near La Crosse Wisconsin. The family owned and ran a grocery store in the small town while Eddie and brother Henry attended school. During interviews conducted at the Central State Hospital after his arrest and commitment, Eddie stated he remembered very little of his childhood at La Crosse, but did share two incidents that he recalled very strongly. He told the psychologist that one afternoon while standing at the head of the basement stairs in his home, something that felt "almost like a push" nearly caused him to tumble down the steps. He recalled that his mother was in the kitchen as the time, and it was she who prevented him from falling. He was horrified at the obvious suggestion that his mother may actually have tried to push him down the stairs. He would insist, in testimony and interviews that, "My mother was a saint" though every psychologist who interviewed Ed over the years of his confinement would later assert August was a dominating rigid, and very likely, abusive head of the household.

      Eddie's second recollection is certainly the more chilling. The family lived behind their grocery store and often prepared their own meat for resale, which was common at the time. The slaughter shed stood some distance behind the main house but both Eddie and Henry were forbidden to enter. Naturally, Eddie was filled with an intense curiosity about the shed and one afternoon, his parents nowhere to be seen, he recalled sneaking back to the building and peeking through the unlocked door. There stood his mother and father, wearing ankle-length leather aprons splattered with blood. A pig carcass hung upside down from a chainfall bolted to the ceiling, blood and offal spilling into a pan on the floor of the shed. He watched while his mother pulled the viscera from the slit belly, and vividly remembers her head turning toward the door, her arms still elbow deep in the belly of the pig, to meet his gaze of stunned surprise.

      The rest of Eddie's childhood was fairly uneventful When he was right years old, the family moved to a 195-acre farm just outside the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Eddie attended school and was recalled by those who knew him as a very small and quiet child, unusual only for his drooping left eyelid and his habit of laughing at inappropriate times. Eddie quit school after eighth grade and stayed in Plainfield to help his family run the farm. He often did odd jobs for other farmers and townspeople, and was thought by the people of Plainfield to be a likable, thought quirky, member of the community.

      From 1914 to 1940, the Geins lived anonymously in Plainfield, surviving the Depression, being untouched by World War II because both sons were too old for military duty by the time the U.S. entered the war. On April Fool's Day of 1940, Ed's father George died, the first death in the tight-knit family that seemed to prompt a series of tragedies in Ed's life. At the time of his father's death, Ed was an adult, still a virgin and still strangely attached to his mother. That attachment only grew firmer after George's death and caused a rift between the brothers. Henry thought the relationship was "unwholesome." Eddie retaliated by insinuated Henry was responsible for the death of their father. Three years later, Henry's mysterious death marked the first time Eddie came under suspicion of murder. [NEXT PAGE]