So far the research I have done has taken me on a journey through Ed Gein’s childhood, adulthood, crimes, arrest, and death. Currently I have determined that the further in depth I go into my research the more questions I seem to run into. It seems that my primary focus of “why did Gein keep specific artifacts from his grave robbing quests and murder” has evolved into what motivated and inspired him to become a necrophilia and sexual psychopath? In my research a majority of Gein’s decisions he made in his adulthood stemmed from the emotional and verbal abuse he received in his childhood from his mother, the physical abuse he received from his alcoholic father, and the verbal abuse from children he went to school with due to his abnormalities. Gein had an abnormally magnified attachment to his mother where he idolized everything she did. She was his entire world. Augusta Gein was a strong Christian and preached to both Ed and his brother Henry every day about all women (except for herself) being prostitutes and about the evils that filled the world. She tactfully controlled every aspect of the families life and in doing so moved them to a secluded farm house in the small town of Plainfield where she discouraged any sort of friendship among her boys and the outside world. This action taken by Augusta turned the boys, especially Ed, into silent, introverted and mentally unbalanced. Ed wanted nothing more then to please his mother who so dearly wanted a girl that she could relate to and connect with because she was unsatisfied with her marriage. This unhealthy bond with his mother contributed to Ed’s unstable mental stage which dominated his life after his mother passed away. Ed was in love with his mother so when she died it tore him apart and he desperately tried to find ways to keep her alive with him. This involved visiting the cemetery she was buried in. As time passed his visits turned into excavations of elderly women’s graves that resembled his deceased mother. During his grave robbing days he would take flesh and organs that he would use to make furniture as well as a full body suit. These actions allowed him to become like his mother and to still connect with her.

The third source I am blogging about is a secondary source from an education forum sight that discusses the psychological aspect of Gein’s childhood. I chose this source because it talked about influential moments in Gein’s childhood that ended up shaping the choices and decisions he made later in life. This appeared import because I had not read anywhere else about two distinct memories Gein remembers that correlate and begin to explain the love-hate relationship between him and his mother.

This source demonstrated rhetorical distance because it talked in a third person voice and was presented in a way that emphasizes knowledge and information instead of persuading the audience on whether Gein was  guilty or innocent and/or sane/insane.

In this article by Adam Wilkonsin he argues that like most psychologically damaged people his problems were rooted in his childhood. Wilkonsin further goes on to explain that Gein’s mother had desperately wanted a daughter but instead was given another boy. Gein’s mother, Augusta, was disappointed because she hated and mistrusted men but vowed that Ed wouldn’t turn out like the rest of the male population. She was determined to protect him from not only the godless men she saw around her but also from women that she viewed as prostitutes and whores.  For 39 years Augusta controlled and dominated Gein, causing Gein to develop an intense love-hate relationship for his mother. Gein idolized his mother but never received any affection from her. With him being so young and closed off from the outside world he soaked up her religious views without a shadow of a doubt that it was wrong or skewed. Wilkonsin further goes on to explain that one of Gein’s earliest childhood memories is when he “peered through the open door of the slaughter house behind his parents grocery store and watched, mesmerized as his father held up a trussed pig. Then, he remembered in vivid detail, how his mother skillfully slit its belly and drew out the entrails with a long knife.” (1) People that remember Gein as a young boy remember him being shy and not being able to bear the sight of blood while privately he had an unnatural interest in gory horror. After his father died due to the decades of incessive drinking, his brother dieing  from a fire, and his mother dying from a stroke Gein was all alone. He was now left alone in a world he didn’t understand. One that he had been told was evil. As twisted as his mother’s demonstration of affections were she was the only one that showed him anything so after she passed away it only made sense for the targets of his future affection were women that resembled her. Gein became obsessed with medical experiments carried out by the Nazis on the Jewish and the autonomy of the female body that his mother had excluded from him. He filled his days with reading books like medical encyclopaedias and pornographic magazines. The further and further he dove into his readings the more and more corrupt his thinking became from the violence and repression of his childhood until it became a twisted compulsion of hating his mother and wanted to become like her. Gein targeted all ready dead bodies from the graveyard until 1954 when he began much more dangerous. Because Gein wanted to be just like his mother it made sense for him to target women that resembled her such as Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden.

I think that this is a very credible and useful source because it gives examples from Gein’s psychological meetings and dives into his childhood where his problems truly originated. It’s interesting to see how much his mother influenced and controlled Gein. With this source it is definatley a strength to have it focus more on his childhood then the conviction and trial.

From this source I learned a lot about the emotional hold Augusta had on Gein. It was very valuable to read examples about the relationship between the two of them since many critics blame Gein’s mother for his grave robbing’s and killings.  I found it really interesting that one of Gein’s earliest memories was of his mother slicing a pig open because it is exactly what he did to all of his victims as well as to the bodies he stole from the cemetery. I think that this was another way he could relate and connect to his mother after she had died. It was an attempt to “become like her” even though she was gone. This source had great value because it also focused on his childhood where the stem of Gein’s psychological damage originated so it was interesting to obtain more information about that. From here I would like to find out why Augusta was so critical of her boys as well as explore why she was so distasteful to men and viewed women as prostitutes.

I believe that this source helped fill in the cracks of my other sources because they explained the big picture but never really explained why he had such attachment to his mother. I would still like to do more research on Gein’s childhood and possibly explore Augusta’s childhood too. After the research I’ve done so far it seems that although I’m answering my initial question I’m gaining more and more questions the further I dive into my sources.

Work Cited:

Wilkonsin, Adam. Crime Case Study: Ed Gein, Making A Killer. 12 January 2006. Web. 5 November 2013.

I chose two more newspaper clippings as the source of my third blog post. However, this time the newspaper was the Oshkosh Daily Northern and was dated ten years after Gein’s final victim and arrest. I selected this source because the information I read was very different then anything I had read prior. In this article it showed the behind the scene aspect of things while interrogating and persecuting Gein. This article was also very interesting because it was written a decade after Gein’s apprehension.  After Gein’s arrest he plead insanity. Due to this the hospital staff was willing to certify that  there was no danger and was fit to participate in a trial. I chose to incorporate this source because I had not found other sources that took you through the trial or the hassle of inadmissible evidence.

The articles from Oshkosh Daily Northwestern show kairos because they were published while the judge was tentatively scheduling preliminary motions and discussing dates of the trial. It was during this time that County Judge Andrew Cotter decided that the evidence against Gein was sufficient for a trial to be held. These articles also show rhetorical distance because the purpose is to inform  the citizens in Oshkosh of the progress and decisions being made in the Gein case. The writing style is very formal and uses third person tone. The author does a good job of not  voicing there opinion or stance on the Gein topic.. This is valuable because the topic of Gein being sane and guilty or insane and guilty was a very controversial topic.

The two articles I read were not argumentative but rather informational. County Judge Andrew Cotter ruled that the state had shown that Gein had probably murdered Bernice Worden. He also decided that the evidence against Gein was enough for a trial to be held. Cotter called Arthur Schley, sheriff at the time Gein’s case broke, as the only witness.  Schley repeatedly said that he didn’t remember the details of the case that occurred ten years ago.  Cotter discovered that “Gein’s right to remain silent and to have an attorney were violated after he was arrested” this made the confession by Gein unusable and something that should be excluded as evidence.  After talking to Schley’s interogating partner, Wilimovsky, he revealed that Gein’s “confession” was made while the two of them were alone in a room with Gein and that no written records were made of this conversation. After further questioning it was discovered that Schley didn’t remember whether he got a search warrant or received permission from Gein to enter his house after the murder was committed (__). They also revealed that there was no record that a search warrant was ever given. Schley argued that witnessing Bernice Worden’s body hanging from the ceiling was enough evidence to demonstrate that a crime had been committed. It was during this time that Ed Gein’s attorney, William Belter, argued that Gein could be set free even though he is found to be guilty of killing Worden.  This would be possible if Gein was found guilty of killing but innocent of the crime of murder by reason of insanity where he would be sent back to the state hospital for further tests. It would be possible for Gein to be set free if the hospital staff was willing to certify that there was no danger Gein would commit murder again.

I think that this source was very helpful in answering questions I had about what happened to him after he was arrested. This was important because it was only after his arrest that it was discovered that he was schizophrenic and needed to be housed in a mental hospital. It was also interesting to read about all of the police rules and regulations that were broken in Gein’s case. I had not read this information anywhere else so it was fascinating to read about.  In some ways though it’s hard for me to believe that so many rules could be broken during Gein’s interrogation because he was such a huge deal in the small town of Plainfield.

These newspaper articles do not exactly correlate with my research question but they do shed light on what happened to him after his arrest and what his life was like after being apprehended. This source had value in the sense that it talked about the aftermath of Gein’s robbing and murdering phase as well as the consequences of not only his actions but also of the sheriff that didn’t follow protocol. I wish that they would have talked a bit more about the points that directed them towards Gein being mentally unstable and why if the hospital staff thought he was a model patient didn’t they allow him to be free. From here I want to explore more of why Gein was never released back into the public.

My research has cumulated to me being more and more curious about what motivated Gein to rob graves and what led to the rest of his life being in a mental institution versus freedom. The more I research the more I think that the town folk were aware of what was going on in Gein’s house but they were so full of denial that they refused to believe that anyone could possibly do such things. I have found that the more I research the more intrigued I become and the more questions I obtain.

Work Cited:

“Order Ed Gein Tried on Murder, Robbery” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern 22 Feb. 1968. Access Newspaperarchive.com. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.

“Trial May Be Without Jury” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern 22 Feb. 1968. Access Newspaperarchive.com. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.

For my primary source I am using newspaper articles from the Special Collections section of the Library.  These newspaper articles are authentic because they are from Plainfield, Wisconsin’s newspaper provider (The Sun) at the time of Ed Gein’s horrendous crimes. I chose to start with a primary source because primary sources enable researchers to get as close as possible to what actually happened during a historical event. These newspaper clippings provide a first hand account of what was going on in the town of Plainfield during the grave robing’s, murders, and cannibalism actions of Ed Gein.

This source shows rhetorical distance because this source is a newspaper article. Newspaper articles are informational and are used to educate not voice opinions, therefore this source is stating facts. Newspapers are used to report news so they inform it’s audiences through third person and formal word choice versus first person. The newspapers found in the archieves is kairotic because they were printed right after Ed Gein was caught for murdering Bernice.

The articles I found are from a few short days after the slaying of Bernice Worden. Bernice was Gein’s final victim. Bernice’s death was the key to Gein’s capture because Bernice’s son was a deputy that became suspicious of Gein and authorized a search of his house where they found skulls being used as bowls, organs in the refrigerator, and human skin used as upholstery for the furniture. The article took you through the sequence of events that led up to Bernice’s death and well through the order of Gein capture. On the day of Bernice’s murder she was operating the Worden Hardware and Implement Co. that her husband had left to her after he had died. On November 16, 1957 the store was unusually closed.  The community members knew that if she ever left the store it was locked so they initially didn’t think much about it. Bernice’s son Frank was hunting so he wasn’t around to look after the store either, therefore there was no need for alarm. But by late afternoon when the store was still closed people began to wonder. When Frank returned he grabbed the extra set of keys from his house, unlocked the store doors, and entered finding a pool of blood on the floor, and the cash register and truck missing. Frank turned his suspicions to Ed Gein who had visited the store the day prior around closing time and questions Frank about if he was going hunting the next day. Gein had concluded the conversation by telling Frank he would be back in the morning for anti-freeze. The store records showed that anti-freeze had been sold the day of Bernice’s death. Police officers eventually found Gein in a car, near a store he visited frequently, and taken into custody. After being taken into custody Gein insists the skulls are from when he dug up and robbed the graves. Gein acknowledges coming to the store and buying anti-freeze and dragging the Worden’s body to the truck but has no recollection of hitting or striking her.

I believe that all of the information provided in this source is accurate and credible. I am confident in this because this newspaper article was printed the day after Bernice Worden’s murder and Ed Gein’s arrest. I am also confident that this information is accurate because the newspaper is from Plainfield, Waushara County, Wisconsin where Gein committed his horrendous crimes. I found that the journalist that published this piece added interesting questions and fears that the county had. A majority of these questions based off of whether or not Gein had been the one responsible for the unsolved Mary Hogan murder in addition to whether or not he was going to be pleading insanity or not.

I feel as though I learned a lot of valuable information about the process of how Gein executed his final murder. It was very beneficial to learn how his last murder went because it was because of Bernice Worden that he got caught. I also learned through the article that Gein didn’t remember hurting her he only remembers dragging her body to the truck and then later switching trucks. I think that this is a very interesting point because it hints at very deep psychological issue with Gein. This source has value because it’s a primary source and because it has authenticity from not only the correct time frame but also from the actual location. The article I found is missing information about the actual proof and evidence of why they believe Ed Gein was responsible for Mary Hogan’s murder because originally they hadn’t been able to solve her case. The only evidence they include is that Worden’s murder looked a lot like Hogan’s murder. With this in mind they began to try to explore the possibility of Gein being the common denominator. From this point I would like to move towards a documentary source that will go more into depth about his thoughts prior to his murders. I would also like to explore his mental health and the psychological side of Gein. I think it would be beneficial to learn information about the type of killer he is and compare those traits with others like him.

My research topic is Ed Gein, a serial killer in Plainfield, Wisconsin. I chose him for my research topic because I find the crimes he committed worth exploring and understanding. Gein only killed two women during his time but used to dig up and rob the graves of buried women. With this knowledge it shows that Gein didn’t just kill to kill, instead he would keep women parts as souvenirs and covered the furniture of his home with the skin of his victims. Not only was the skin used to cover furniture but he also used it to create a life like human suit for himself to wear. It would be interesting to find out the meaning behind the madness as to why he chose to keep these souvenirs versus others since these souvenirs were a huge part of what made him such a unique serial killer. I think that this question could be answered by looking at the psychological aspect of Gein’s life as well as the emotional attachment he had to his mother who instilled in him that women were “evil.”