The Horrifying True Story Of Ed Gein

After police discovered what was really inside Ed Gein's home, he was, of course, arrested. According to the Hanneman Archive, Gein quickly confessed to killing Bernice Worden at her hardware store and to another murder three years prior. He had shot and killed Mary Hogan on Dec. 8, 1954, but that, he said, was all the killing he'd done. So, where did all his grisly artifacts come from?

Gein told law enforcement that between 1947 and 1952, he had made regular visits to three local cemeteries — Plainfield, Hancock, and Spiritland. He claimed to have done it while hardly remembering what he was doing, and said (via Crime + Investigation) that he had fallen into a pattern of scanning newspaper obituaries for his "type" — middle-aged to older women, preferably ones he'd known in life.

Then, with the help of a gravedigger only known as "Gus," he'd head out to the cemeteries, exhume the bodies, and collect whatever struck his fancy. Sometimes he reburied the body untouched, sometimes he took the entire thing, and sometimes, he took pieces. He only killed, he claimed, when Gus was committed to a home.

Law enforcement was skeptical but began exhuming some of the graves he claimed to have visited. When they found several empty graves and others with artifacts — like jewelry and dentures — outside of the caskets, they confirmed the source of his body parts.

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