[reel clicking]
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] The end of the 1950s,
that's a time that we generally associate
with this kind of perfect ideal of the American suburb.
2.5 children, the picket fence, the husband going off to work,
the woman staying at home and tending the family.
What's new, Hasbro?
Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head,
with their own cars and trailers.
That's what's new.
Was that in reality, what was actually happening
the entire time?
Of course not. Of course not.
[man] In 1957, this small-town Wisconsin horror story
was being exposed to the world.
The shock and the fear that suddenly gripped them
when the grisly tale of Ed Gein became public.
[Lee] When you listen to the tape of Ed Gein,
you almost anticipate hearing somebody act like a monster.
There seems to be a real disconnect
between this meek, quiet, solitary person
and the gruesome things that they've discovered at his house.
There's a number of questions when you analyze the Gein case.
Did he have sexual relations with the bodies?
Could he have eaten some of the victims?
There's very little that Gein is not capable of.
[reel clicking]
[Lee] Ed Gein's story is just so gruesome.
Most people can't imagine what it would be like
to excavate a corpse from the ground
and then take the head and the skull
and then create objects out of the parts
that you take from a rotten corpse.
[man speaking indistinctly on tape]
[Berrill] I'm looking at additional records,
maybe a little deeper into the records
based on his initial examination and evaluation
at Central State Hospital.
Edward Gein talks about constructing masks
out of the skin from the skulls of some of the people he dug up.
And then putting these masks on his own face.
One could conjecture that in doing so,
that is to say, putting these masks on,
is this a way of transforming himself
or being a different person for a moment?
Is this a way of relating to the corpses
and becoming intimate with them?
He doesn't really talk about being sickened by the behavior.
So clearly this had meaning for him
and this was important to him.
[Schechter] We know that he had these face masks.
Some of which he hung on his wall as trophies.
You know, this is where Tobe Hooper
got the whole Leatherface idea from.
[camera whirring]
[Lee] I remember watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre
for the first time when I was in high school.
The thing that always stood out to me
was the grittiness of how it was shot.
[camera whirring]
And the fact that it seemed almost in parts
like a snuff video.
The fact that Leatherface, the character was loosely
based on Ed Gein and because of the kind of things that he was
doing with people's skin.
The house that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is modeled upon...
[camera whirring]
...was the home of Ed Gein.
The word that people used over and over again
after they discovered the house was "revolting."
[Henry] There's something about his home to me
is very indicative of who he was, too.
There's just something about serial killers
and kind of like what their homes come to represent to them.
Like there's a house out there where there shouldn't be.
And there's also a bunch of fucked up stuff
happening inside of that house where it shouldn't be.
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] I love this shot where Pamela
is walking up to the house for the first time.
It's shot almost at ground level.
We have lots of camera movement as she's walking in,
and now she's about to enter this really, really awful room,
the room that is, of course, drawing in large part
on what Ed Gein's house would have looked like.
[clattering]
[chicken clucking]
There is so much about Texas Chainsaw Massacre
that just feels so gritty, so grimy,
and like you are stuck in this house
with this entire horrifying family and you can't get out.
That to me was so much of what made it so scary.
It felt completely immersive because it felt so urgent,
so real.
[camera whirring]
The other reason that it's so urgent,
it's so visceral, it's so upsetting
is because not only is it based on a real moment,
but the house that Tobe Hooper and the crew
used to shoot Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
well, they had filled it with all of these animal parts,
and these animal parts were sitting there for days.
[coughing]
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] She's really experiencing
what it's like to be in a room with all of those dead animals,
all of those bits of rotting animals.
[gasping]
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] And of course, she's trying to get away
from all of these horrors, this is, of course, the moment
when Leatherface comes out.
[screaming]
He's called Leatherface because he has a collection of masks
that he has made out of human skin.
[woman screams]
That's the thing that really sticks out to me
in terms of Ed Gein.
It's the fact that he repurposed people's bodies.
And that's what's so upsetting about him.
[chuckles]
[indistinct talking on tape]
[Schlesinger] What makes Gein stand out is what he did
with the bodies.
If you look at a group of sexual murderers,
only about 6% have engaged in necrophilia.
[reporter] Police say these two young men have committed an act
that is so unthinkable there isn't even a law against it.
The men allegedly sexually assaulted two female corpses.
Webster's Dictionary describes necrophilia
as "an erotic attraction to corpses."
[Schlesinger] Necrophilia is a paraphilia.
It's an abnormal sexual arousal pattern.
There's many different types of paraphilias.
Pedophilia is a paraphilia.
Fetishism, sexual arousal to non-living objects
is a paraphilia.
Voyeurism.
Necrophilia is another paraphilia.
Historically, law enforcers here in Florida charged
necrophiliacs with sexual battery.
That is until a few years ago when a circuit court
in South Florida ruled that consent is no longer
an issue if a person is dead.
[Schlesinger] We understand the psychopathology of sexual murder
and all these other sorts of bizarre paraphilias
much better today than they did in the 1950s.
[narrator] Every mental illness has its causes associated
with a patient's character, his upbringing,
and the joys and sorrows he has gone through.
[Schlesinger] The motivation for the vast majority of
necrophiliacs is that a dead body is not threatening.
Because these are people internally that feel weak
and inadequate.
The vast majority of offenders kill the person,
then for some reason, they're stimulated by the dead body
and penetrate the body.
In that case, the body is basically still warm.
Not every case involving necrophilia
involves sexual murder.
I had a case of a guy
who was a histology technician in a hospital,
went to the morgue where they kept the slides
because it was cool.
When security left, he took out the corpse,
the refrigerated corpse of a 91-year-old woman,
penetrated her sexually using a latex glove as a condom.
He didn't kill anybody.
But you go where your psychology leads you.
[camera shutter clicks]
With respect to Ed Gein,
this was not a spontaneous act where he killed somebody
and then he penetrated the person.
No, he was highly motivated to get corpses.
Gein, he's creating items from, most of its genitals
and vaginas and nipples
and these sorts of things, in addition to skin.
In Gein's case, he was wearing human skin,
getting into human skin, this type of thing.
[Berrill] You have to remember that this this guy, Ed,
grew up with more rage probably than anyone could ever imagine.
And even though he couldn't readily
express it, when you're that angry,
you either directed outward or you direct it inward.
You become a murderer, or you become sadistic,
or you become perversely involved
in the kinds of activities
that he found himself involved in.
It's is perverse and bizarre as it can possibly be.
No.
No. Well, as I said, there is a very rare delusion
involving skin.
I did have a case where a person thought
that his brother was wearing a skin suit
and he was an imposter and wound up killing him.
But I've never had a case where a person wanted to wear
somebody else's skin.
I don't think I ever heard of a case
like that in the annals of crime.
Shortly after Augusta died, Ed Gein closed off her room.
And, you know, it was the only room
in the house that he never entered.
He made it into a kind of little shrine.
You don't have to go much further than look at his home.
The place was total disarray, cluttered, dirt,
garbage, smelled of rotting flesh and all the rest.
And then look at his mother's room.
It was completely preserved, neat, the way she left it.
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] That's what's so, so unsettling about
watching Psycho.
Here in Psycho, we have it linked up with the possibility
of it actually being a real story.
And that makes it really, really scary.
Mrs. Bates?
Norman Bates' motivation to kill is that he has this
long-term obsession with his mother
that's so much in keeping with Hitchcock's more raw approach.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Berrill] You can love your parents.
But still, a healthy person strives,
in a sense to be able to formulate
some kind of critique of what, you know, you like
or didn't like about the way they raised you.
I don't think he was able to do that in any conscious way.
So there's a kind of closeness that's pathologic.
Could not separate himself emotionally,
psychologically from his mother.
This is all in his mind.
[Schechter] One of the most infamous aspects of
the Gein case, it's the one that Thomas Harris employed in
Silence of the Lambs, was Gein making a skin suit.
He flayed the legs from a corpse.
He flayed the upper torso,
including the breasts from a corpse.
He dried them.
He apparently attached some kind of strings,
and he would put on this skin suit.
The skin suit, I think, has an entirely different
meaning for him than anything else that he did
with these bodies.
I think the skin suit was the real project.
It raises a couple of possibilities.
Is this his way of becoming more intimate with Mother?
If not literally his mother.
[Lee] I think that with what we know about his attachment
to his mother, that that is a much more
kind of compelling example of him role playing
and desperately just trying to feel her presence again,
even if it means just stepping into this suit that he's made.
My understanding of the case is the reason he couldn't
disinter his mother is I think there was cement
around the coffin itself, which often happens
in some cemeteries for erosion reasons and so on.
I think that was his problem.
[Marcus] I think Ed was far too scared of his mother
to ever even attempt to to dig her up,
because I think it had to be her choice.
It had to be something that she wanted.
He was never going to make her do anything
that she didn't want to do, and she was only going to
come out of that grave if she wanted to come out.
All men should respect women so much.
-Sure. -Yeah.
-[laughter] -That's great.
Because he can't bring his mother's corpse back
to the home where he wants to have his mother,
the skin suit becomes a type of role play
where he can step into the skin of his mother,
even though it's not the skin of his mother.
You can step into some object that represents his mother,
and for whatever period of time, he can kind of resuscitate her
and play as if he is her.
My hobby is stuffing things, you know, taxidermy.
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] So clearly,
both Norman Bates and Ed Gein
are a little bit obsessed with their mothers.
A man should have a hobby.
Well, it's...
It's more than a hobby.
[Szchepaniak-Gillece] In the scene, we start
to learn a little bit more about Norman Bates' mother.
We're also learning that he's very into taxidermy.
We'll learn later, at the end of the film, that Norman Bates
has been keeping his mother taxidermied in his house.
It speaks to this idea of the 1950s American family ideal,
where you should respect your mother,
you should adore your mother,
and then how easily that gets kind of twisted
into absolute obsession and absolute darkness.
I think this is a real moment
where we see horror as a genre developing this notion.
Look, Mama.
I brought you a visitor.
[man] That's what bothers me,
because you're not very big, are you?
[Schechter] In terms of the skin suit he made,
a lot of what Gein did had to do with resurrecting his mother.
But the other part of it is, you know,
Gein's fantasy about becoming a woman.
We know that he avidly read stories about this ex G.I.
who went to Sweden
and had a sex-change operation.
And came back as Christine Jorgensen.
[man] Christine Jorgensen, who made world headlines
when she was transformed from a former G.I. into a woman,
is now a Woman of the Year, a title bestowed upon her
by the Scandinavian Societies of Greater New York.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Schechter] There was a lot of publicity about
Christine Jorgensen, and Ed followed that case very closely.
I am deeply honored and most sincerely touched.
[Marcus] Ed Gein was also obsessed with
the Christine Jorgensen case.
When he was interviewed by psychiatrist later on,
he did say that when he was a little boy,
he did often wonder what it would be like
to be a little girl.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's weird because the entire thing
is filtered through the lens of Ed Gein.
You know, it's still filtered through this like,
demented lens.
[Ben] But he definitely was looking
for a sense of self, though, right?
He's trying to figure out who he is.
-Surely. -And what is he doing
in Plainfield, Wisconsin?
What's the point of life?
And I guess it just led to him making a skin suit.
[Berrill] If you're inclined or sensitive to or vulnerable
to input from magazines or movies you see
or stuff you read,
you know, it may find its way into your imagination
and then start to incorporate that into your own fantasy life.
You know, I think about things like sexual identity
and sort of, who was this guy sexually?
And I don't know if he knew,
but it would seem as though he never had sex.
Seem as though his mother cautioned him
that you shouldn't have sex unless you marry a woman.
So, was there something sexually gratifying about this?
[Schlesinger] Necrophiliacs disinter bodies for the purpose
of having sex with the corpse.
That's why they're doing it.
In Gein's case, it could have been
that he wanted to have sex with his mother.
There's certainly a lot of Oedipal dynamics
that psychologists and psychiatrists
talk about all the time.
He may have been to the point
where his years of wallowing in this very bizarre lifestyle
just wasn't doing the trick for him anymore.
It might be satisfying on some level for him
for many years to defile dead bodies.
But there's nothing more powerful than killing someone.
[reel clicking]
[winding, clicking]
[camera whirring]
Mary Hogan, there are all kinds of rumors about her background.
She was a plain-spoken woman,
apparently with somewhat of a profane tongue,
who ran this little roadhouse tavern that Eddie
sometimes patronized.
Mrs. Hogan, that was the little tavern up there
north of where our farm was.
It was probably four miles up there.
[Schechter] Mary Hogan, Ed Gein sort of saw her
as this dark shadow side of his mother.
You know, where his mother was a saintly figure,
Mary Hogan was the embodiment of all that was most corrupt.
Some customer came in, saw evidence that there had been
some kind of commotion in the tavern.
Mary Hogan was gone.
There were some overturned chairs.
There were bullet casings and some bloodstains.
It was clear that something dire had happened.
[Reid] I would have been, what, 13, 14 years old?
Mary Hogan was missing,
and I suppose they had found some blood.
Nobody knew who did it.
Ed Gein is confronted with the gravity of what he's done
and is unable to own up to it and accept responsibility.
The funny thing was that after that it happened,
the threshing crew, they were talking about it
with Eddie, and Eddie says, "Oh, I got her down to my place."
And they said, "Eddie, you fool,
you haven't got her down to your place."
And he said, "Yes, I do."
And everybody laughed and joked about it,
and that was the extent of it.
He was telling the truth.
He did have her down to his place.
Wisconsin people have a great sense of humor.
-They really do. -And it is kind of funny.
That one is strange to me.
What's interesting about the Mary Hogan accusation
is that it he denied killing Mary Hogan for so long.
It wasn't until they had to tell him,
like, "We found her head inside your house."
[Berrill] Once investigators
were going through Gein's farmhouse,
one of them found a paper bag and just reached inside it
and pulled out this head
that he immediately recognized as Mary Hogan.
[Batterman] I went with
Arnie Fritz and the sheriff
out to Ed Gein's house.
I searched the kitchen
and found in the stove
where there had been some human bones burnt.
Shoebox had the face mask of a woman.
And by that time, the sheriff from
Portage County was there.
And when they lifted up that face mask,
he immediately recognized it as Mary Hogan's.
[man] When you say face mask, what are you talking about?
Well, he took the skin, cut it up in the back and there
and just peeled it off the face, the skin.
The hair and everything was on the masks.
Basically the head, it was rigged up so it could be worn.
In terms of his necrophiliac urges,
you know, it's like he ran out of bodies.
You know, there wasn't any suitable body
in the graveyard at that point, so he decided to create his own.
Ed Gein was devastatingly curious about the female form.
-Yes. -The only female form
that he knew was his mother's.
And he actually developed a form of sexual attraction
to his mother.
No one knows what's going on in his interior life.
He has not said a single one of these thoughts
to another human being.
And there's a curiosity that's been building inside of you.
So it's like it's a further of like just like weirdly
just being obsessed with the female form
and just wanting to see it.
It's such an intimate act, murder,
especially when it's close.
He wasn't getting enough out of the dead bodies emotionally.
The next place to go would be,
well, let me take someone's life.
[reel clicking]
[Lee] Ed Gein says in the tapes several times
that he can't remember.
This is an individual who does not have
the emotional social development of an adult being confronted
with the gruesome crimes that he's committed
and trying to find a way to soften his responsibility.
This is a way to kind of distance himself
from the heinous crimes that he's committed
by feigning that he has amnesia,
that he can't remember, that he goes into a haze,
that he becomes this other person.
At one point, after multiple rounds of this,
where he says that he can't remember,
he says that if they can show that it was my gun
that went off, then I guess it was me.
He's describing an object
that is of his possession,
committing the crime as if it has agency
or autonomy in the world,
when in fact, he is the one committing this violence.
[man speaking indistinctly on tape]
[Schlesinger] When you look carefully at everything
that they asked Gein about what he did,
he just said, "I don't remember.
If the police said I did it, I must have done it.
But I don't remember this, I don't remember that."
He doesn't implicate himself in the more bizarre things.
I thought that was important.
That's called malingered amnesia.
That's very, very typical in criminal defendants in general.
I want you to understand what happened.
It was like coming out of some kind of
horrible trance or dream,
to wake up in the morning and realize what I had done
and with a clear mind.
[Schlesinger] It occurs mainly for two reasons.
One, the criminal defendant believes
it's to his legal advantage to say that they don't remember.
And two, they don't want
to remember and discuss what they had done.
Apparently, I had beaten him to death with my fists.
-And you have no memory? -I have no memory of it.
So I just -- I can't explain it.
I think I have a good memory,
and it's almost like I blacked out.
Keep in mind, also, there is no memory disorder
or neurocognitive disorder
that is selective for criminal behavior.
So Gein doesn't have a memory problem.
The only thing he can't remember are the perverse acts
and the illegal acts and the extraordinary acts
that he's being accused of.
There's a part of him that is seeking to erase his past.
He's grown up in this isolated existence,
cut off from basically everyone except for his mother, right?
And so there's this immense amount of attachment
to this one person who is also responsible
for a lot of your misery.
Part of him is exorcizing these demons from his life
that his mother has created, and he's seeking out victims
who at least ostensibly remind him of his mother.
It seems so unimaginable that one would murder a woman
that you'd known for years and years,
liked enough, you know, to ask out on a date.
We know that he had brought some .22 caliber shells with him.
Worden's Hardware stocked a lot of the supplies
for people who were doing farming and so on.
It also stocked rifles.
Ed Gein took one of the rifles.
When her back was turned, he loaded the rifle.
[gunshot]
[Bowser] We're on Main Street, Plainfield, Wisconsin.
This is the main drag.
This would have been all dirt roads back in the day.
Okay, this is the hardware store.
It's a little different than it was back in 1957.
Actually, the spot where they kept the guns
was in the back of the store.
Bernice Worden was actually looking out the window
across the street where the gas station was
when she got shot in the back of the head.
Ed Gein walked back in a store and wanted to see a .22 rifle
that was in the back of the store.
So Bernice got that for him.
Then she went up front by the counter
to look out the window, out at the gas station.
Ed Gein pulled a bullet out of his front pocket,
loaded it inside the gun,
and shot her in the back of the head.
[gunshot]
Now, the back of the store has changed a little bit.
This part sticking out was not there.
It's totally flush.
Now, right about where these glass doors was,
is actually an overhead garage.
And inside that was where
the Worden's hardware truck was parked.
It was a pickup truck.
Ed put Bernice in the back of that pickup truck.
When you go inside, you kind of feel a heaviness on you.
Like this is an historical spot to me.
[chuckles]
Welcome to Plainfield.
After executing Bernice Worden,
Gein dragged her body out the back of the store,
loaded it into her truck.
Ed Gein drove to his farmhouse,
dragged her corpse into his woodshed,
and then walked back into town, a distance of about six miles,
I think, and got in his own car.
[Bowser] We're currently at Ed Gein's land,
on the corner of 2nd and Archer.
And this is where Ed would have drove his car in
when he had Bernice Worden in the back.
Exciting standing here.
This is the freaking property, man.
This is where it all happened.
[laughs] I love it.
The floor was dirt, and basically she was hanging
from the rafters on a hoist,
and she was basically totally gutted
by like a deer, and no head.
On the tapes, you hear the judge say multiple times,
"You gutted her like a deer."
It's a community where people are used to hunting.
[gunshot]
Used to working with their hands.
They're familiar with knives.
And the practices that you would use to skin and kill animals
is something that could be transferable to humans.
He had no empathy or no ability to connect
emotionally or psychologically to her.
I guess he wanted to clean her up,
get her as clean as possible by bleeding her.
You know, like a deer or like an animal,
so that he could get on with the business
of what he wanted to do, which is probably to skin her.
It is just not even possible for any "normal person"
to, you know, imagine that kind of mentality.
Committing these atrocities on female bodies,
you know, was just -- was just part of his life.
[indistinct chatter]
After Ed was caught,
townspeople started telling stories about
Ed having come to their house
and offered them venison from the deer he had killed.
By his own admission, Ed had never hunted deer.
So the point of those stories was that...
...they now realized...
...that the meat that Gein was offering them...
...was actually human flesh.