290. Ed Gein's House of Horrors

You're listening to an ONO Media Podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband. Well, it's spooky season and we have a special guest on the show. Everyone watching say hi to Mr. Skelly. And if you're not watching, Mr. Skelly is with us on set today. It is a, it's not a real person. Don't worry everybody. No, cover your ears. It's a skeleton that we got. The whole bottom of him is currently duct tape because he was leaking his insights. Sand everywhere. So we duct taped him. He's good to go. Muck in life. I came down stairs at night time. That would be a little freaky. Yeah, Loki is really big. Daisy is really pissed off. She does not like this skeleton. She's very jealous. But she needs to get over it. Hope everyone is having a great Monday spooky season. Then we have November, then we have December, then we have 2020 six. And then at one point, at some point, we all get old and we die. You know, life just kind of flashes before your eyes. We love you guys. We hope you're doing great. For my 10 seconds, something I've always wanted to do. And I say I'm going to do it every year than it never happens is I've always wanted to be that house that gives out, you know, like big candy bars. But then every year, it comes. And then Peyton, I realized we haven't bought candy yet. And then we go to the store day before when we buy some candy. And I don't know, it would be cool to do like huge candy bars or something crazy. What do you think, babe? Yeah. You don't really care about that? I mean, Did you not trick or treat when you were younger? No, I did. It was just always snowing. Oh, I guess that's oh, in Idaho. Yeah. It's that's true. I never really experienced that growing up. I was in my snow. I had my snow suit over my costume. Yeah, I never really thought about that. That sucks. If you live somewhere where it snows, I am sorry. How does that work actually? If you live somewhere where it's dumping snow on a holiday, you just don't trick or treat it. I assume. I mean, I never just hangs out inside. Right? We would go like even in her snow. But I guess if it's a full blown storm, no, you wouldn't go. If there was snow on the ground, we would still go. Oh, okay. Anyways, I don't know. I've always wanted to get big candy bars. So maybe I'll end up doing that. I'll keep you guys posted on Instagram or something. Other than that, it sounds like we have a pretty wild case today. You guys should all know this. I only know what it is. What it's going to be about because Payton mentioned it to me yesterday. And apparently there's a new Netflix documentary that came out about it as well. Documentary. It was very. Oh, was it like a. It's like a. Renactment? Okay. Got it. Oh, you can take it away from here, baby. All right, you guys. If you don't know what we're covering, Netflix just dropped its third monster series on Edgine. Edgine is a prolific killer. I don't know if he can be qualified as a serial killer, but he definitely. His name is brought up often when people talk about serial killers. Because they believe he's one of the very first most disturbing killers that we have documented, and he influenced a lot of American culture once people learned about his life. Again, Netflix just dropped the new monster series based on Edgine. And I'm just going to give my quick thoughts on it before we start. So that way, I don't have to do it throughout. It is definitely not a documentary. And it is definitely not an accurate depiction of the Edgine case. So we will be covering Edgine and I, if you're watching this series, we'll go through and kind of tell you what's different from this series. I do still think it's a good series. It's just not Edgine case. I do love that they tie in the influence that he had on American culture. And one of the things I think they went for the most was how monsters influence monsters all the way to the point where there's even a scene where Ed actually looks right at the camera, kind of breaks a third wall and says, am I the monster or are you the monster? Because you can't stop watching. So basically like what's Ricky? So basically he's saying like people who are fast because he was influenced by World War II and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. That's kind of what pushed him in. So they're saying like that influenced him, which then influenced directors to make movies based on Edgine that we then watched and became obsessed with. And now we're all obsessed with chocolate. So but I still think they could have done that theme while sticking more to the facts of the case because it just like I said is really messy in terms of the actual story when you're using actual names, but I digress it's a disturbing watch. But yeah, definitely not an accurate representation. That being said, Gary, do you know anything about Edgine? The only thing I know is that he would wear. Okay, yep. Cannot say it. No, you can. That he'd wear people's faces. Yeah. How do you know that because I said it? Yes. Because you said it when you were talking to somebody the other day. That's about the only thing I know. Let's get into today's episode. Our sources for this episode are deviant by Harold Schechter, biography.com, Britannica.com, markah.com, medium.com, and call it her.com. All right, let's face it. Every day doing this show feels kind of like spooky season to us. When you're constantly talking about the worst products of mankind, it is easy to feel like the world is just one big horror film. But the man we are talking about today might be in a league of his own. He's a son so twisted. He gives new meaning to the term Mama's boy. He's a man so deranged that his biography feels more like a legend meant to scare children to sleep. He's a monster so disturbed that he inspired not one but several well-known horror films. But today's subject was no storybook myth. He was a human just like the rest of us who somewhere along the journey lost his way. Ed was a handyman. He was a farmer even dabbled in babysitting. He was a seemingly average though odd man blending in with the rest of society. And honestly that might be the most horrifying part of it all. So let me set the scene. It is 1954 in central Wisconsin in the area of Plainfield to be exact. And I just need to say Plainfield is a quiet desolate area even for the 50s. So it is definitely like out in the middle of nowhere in the 50s. The roads are lined with picturesque farmland, silos sprouting from the rolling hills, cattle grazing in the pastures, outside of the one main street in Plainfield. There is really not a lot to do. There is a hardware store, a gas station, a bank. They do have a couple churches scattered around the area. One weekly newspaper delivering the mundane updates of Plainfield and a tavern or two, where people go to spread news and gossip, especially after a long day on the farm, which is what most people there do. Now, one of the popular locations is called Mary Hogan's tavern. It is located in a little stretch, seven miles or so outside of Plainfield village, called Pine Grove. And Mary's tavern is often bustling with people just looking to blow off steam. It honestly doesn't look like much from the outside. It looks more like a roadside warehouse than like an inviting tavern that a bunch of people go to hang out, but it's what's inside the counts. And Mary Hogan was actually the face of that bar, so it was named after her. She was a portly woman with a thick German accent, a foul mouth, and a pretty shady past. The facts about Mary's past, honestly, may have been rumors since not too much is really known about her. Some said she was divorced twice, which in the 50s is a big no-no. Some said she had connections to the mob. Some said that she had worked in the big city as a madam before moving out to the middle of nowhere to tend a bar. But on a cold December afternoon in 1954, the rumors whispered about Mary Hogan would take on an entire new meaning. So it's a few weeks before Christmas, Wednesday, December 8th. A farmer named Seymour Lester strolls into Mary's bar in the middle of the day, just like he usually does. He slaps his hat down on the counter and sighs as he waits for Mary to pour him a beer. He's used to being the only one alone here this early in the day, but today does seem unusually quiet, and Mary isn't even there. to say hello. So he's looking around, looking for someone and employee. And that's when he piers over the bar and he sees a pool of blood on the floor. So he's not going to waste another second in that place. It's a pretty large pool of blood. He decides to get out of there. He races to the nearest farmhouse up the road and calls not the police, he calls the town chairman of Pine Grove first, which just screams small town. Yeah, that's funny. And then after that, he calls the sheriff's office. Now before long, Mary's tavern is swarming with deputies, taking a closer look at this pool of blood. And that's when they find their first real piece of evidence. There is a 32 caliber cartridge on the ground next to that patch of blood. What C more didn't stick around to notice was that there was also a trail of blood leading out the back door of the tavern and into the parking lot. So over the next several days, the tavern goes from a local hangout to a full blown crime scene. The state crime lab comes into search for fingerprints and other clues. Please go door to door, farm to farm, questioning people in the area. Now on December 8, 1955, so this is a whole year later. Mary Hogan's case is no closer to closure than it was a year ago. And then another year goes by and nearly another and still no one knows where Mary went. There's no clues, no substantial leads until November of 1957. When another crime leads police down a path that will forever change plainfield and it's legacy. So now I'm going to introduce you to another woman named Bernice Warden. Now unlike a lot of the locals, Bernice wasn't born in plainfield. She was actually originally from Illinois. She moved to plainfield when she was a young girl though. So this was the place that she always thought as home. And when she was in her 20s, Bernice married another local named Leon Warden. They bought and ran a little hardware store in town. And over the years, they had two children, a boy and a girl named Frank and Miriam. By 1957 though, things had really changed for their family. The kids were now adults. Frank was a police officer in plainfield and Miriam was a mother of her own kids and their father Leon had passed away over two decades prior. So now Bernice ran the hardware store in town, mostly on her own sometimes with the help of her son. And because of the way she handled herself, everyone in town had a lot of respect and admiration for Bernice. They knew she was a family woman with good Methodist values. Again, religion was very important in this small town in the 50s. Bernice loved the simple pleasures in life, like spending time with her grandkids going fishing out on the lake. In fact, people in plainfield seemed to like Bernice so much that they actually gave her the citizen of the week award in the summer of 1956, and I do want to point out that she was the first woman to ever get it. But on the morning of November 16th, 1957, again, this is years after that first murder, Bernice's story would meet a tragic end. That day was a special one for the people of plainfield because it was the start of hunting season. I want to note that almost every one of the men in plainfield was in the woods on the opening day of hunting season this day. So many of the shops in town were actually closed because of this, but 58 year old Bernice knew the men might need supplies from her hardware store. So she did open her doors like usual that morning. But later in the day, the man working across the street at the local gas station noticed something strange. Bernice's shops seemed quieter than usual. So he walked over and checked the front door. It was locked. Maybe Bernice had decided to close up for the day since all the men were hunting. But there was also one thing that seemed unusual. Bernice had left the lights on inside the hardware store. Now word of this gets back to Bernice's son, Frank, the adult son later that day. And around 5 p.m. he stops by the store to check on his mom. Now remember, he is a deputy sheriff. So he knows pretty immediately that something is off here. Not only is his mother not at the store like she should be. The cash register inside is wide open. Though it doesn't seem like anything is stolen. And he notices blood stains on the floor. So by 7 p.m. the main streets flooded once again with cop cars all invested in now Bernice Wardens disappearance. Was this the same person who had killed Mary Hogan? That's all they can think. But there's one thing different between Bernice's case and Mary's case. And that is inside the shop. There was actually a sale receipt for antifreeze. It was made out earlier that day to another local man in town. A well-known kind of weird oddball named Ed Gein. So this is how police go was this the last person to visit. And now Bernice is missing. This is how they initially and he is from yes this small town. He was mostly raised there. Yes. Okay. He wasn't born there, but he was mostly raised there. Got it. So before I get into what police do once they, you know, catch this lead of Ed, they're not necessarily thinking he's the murderer, but he's the last one. There's a receipt there. So they're going to look into it. But before I go there, we need to understand the man inside the monster. We need to know who Ed Gein himself is before I tell you the details of the story because his history and past actually influences his crimes pretty heavily. So Ed was born on August 27th 1906 in lacrosse Wisconsin. This is about 90 miles away from Plainfield. Okay. And his childhood was pretty rough from the start. His mother Augusta and his paternal grandparents were all German immigrants who would come to America to start a new life. Now Augusta found her way through religion in America while Ed's father George found his way through the bottle. Alcahaw. Augusta was incredibly devout. Okay. I'm I'm saying strictest of the strict. She read the Bible to Ed and his older brother Henry who was six years older than him, basically daily. And at a very early age, Augusta instilled in her two boys, the idea that all women were corrupt, that they were horrors, that they were sent to earth with no goals other than to tempt man with sin. Sounds like an amazing person. So she basically is sex is horrible. You will never ever ever be intimate with a woman because they are evil. They are of the devil. And even saying like the only time I ever slept with your father was when I was trying to make you guys other than that sex is evil. Like she was just very this is not religious. This is mental. Yeah. I was going to say why like what? Well, she's using the excuse as a Christianity, but it's obviously not Christianity. So this doesn't change when the family finally moves to Plainfield in 1914. Now I do want to know that the reason they move is because she starts to tell George, Ed and his brother Henry that this also small town in Wisconsin that's 90 miles away from Plainfield where they're going to move is starting to turn into Sodom and Gomorrah. And it's she's talking like oh, it's a huge like it's this big city. And everyone's sinning and we can't raise our kids and there's like 50 people. Yeah, it's still a small town. It's just not as small as Plainfield. So they end up moving to Plainfield in 1914. And they settled on a 159 acre plot of farmland that's on the rim of town. Now they lived in a two story L shaped white frame farmhouse. Okay. Just think of like a creepy haunted farmhouse in any scary movie. It's equipped with a barn, a chicken coop and an equipment shed. It was quiet. It was very remote. Their nearest neighbors were about a quarter mile down the road and Plainfield village, which is where Bernice Warden would one day open that hardware store was about six miles away. So they're about six miles out of town, if you will. But Augusta liked keeping the family away from the rest of Plainfield and the sinners in it. She did not trust anyone with her boys. It was Augusta gain against the world. Okay. Even her husband George had a hard time finding his place in the family. Augusta judged her husband very harshly. She berated him. She destroyed his confidence as a man. She was the disciplinarian in this home. And as a result, he spent his evenings after working as a carpenter and a Tanner over at the pub. He would go there. He would forget about his life. He would procrastinate returning home, which meant that Edgene and his brother Henry really didn't see their father much. And when they did, he was kind of a shell of a man. Although that was better than him coming home drunk because that allegedly meant Ed Henry and Augusta were going to catch a beating from their drunk husband slash father, which is also maybe why Augusta kept her son so close to the point where Ed didn't even go to school until he was eight years old. And as you can imagine, Ed had a really hard time fitting in with other kids who had by now kind of hung out with other kids and honed their social skills. So while Ed was smart and his grades were good, making friends was not his strong suit. But I'm not saying he was mean. He was just odd. And if Ed did ever make a friend Augusta shut it down really fast. When he would run home to tell his mother about some boy that offered his ball on the playground, Augusta would make up lies about the little boy being like, I know his parents, they are sinful, they are not people of God, and then wouldn't let Ed play. She like possessed like why there's zero rhyme or reason to be doing this. And mentally, I would, I mean, I think she just is so far gone in this. And this continued in pretty intense ways. All because Augusta had a really intense connection with Ed gain from the time he was little. And Ed didn't really know any better in his mind. His mother was nearly equivalent to God. Like he held her on this pedestal. He thought she was the the perfect woman, this perfect Christian woman. Was it was the neither sexual allegedly. Okay. So I'm going to I'm going to say probably most people do believe so. The show does somewhat insinuate it. But there's never been confirmation. That's also hard. It's so far back then that like we'll probably never have confirmation. No. But I would, I would say probably. Okay. So because of this intense mama's boy connection, like he thought his mom was God. He thought that she was something to be feared and loved simultaneously. But even if Ed wanted to make friends, it wouldn't have been easy for him because of how socially behind he was, his classmates did see him as odd. He would sometimes laugh at inappropriate times. Like he didn't always catch on. He had a lazy eye. He had a speech impediment not to mention an interesting lopsided grin that he would kind of wear. But the more he was picked on, the more he realized that his mother was right about these other kids. And maybe about the world as a whole. Like the more he was shut out from the society, the more he believed his mom and turned into her. So Ed dropped out of school just a few years after he began. At 14 years old, he finished the eighth grade and then just went to work on his parents farm while also picking up other small jobs around town, like a handyman, a babysitter. But even once he and Henry reached adulthood, neither of them were converted to society enough to be able to move out of their parents farmhouse. So despite the emotional and physical torment at home, they stuck around through their 20s and then into their 30s. But a lot changed for the gain family in 1940 when Ed was around 34 years old. So by that point, years of drinking had taken a toll on 66 year old George, and after years of wasting away, he died on April 4, 1940. Now his death seemed to bring a sense of relief for the family more than anything else. It was no secret that George had been treated as a burden on the family for years. He wasn't working. He was wasting the family's money away on booze between that and the abuse he would inflict when he was drunk. Ed claims he was happy to step into the role of man of the house after his father's passing. This was a role that Augusta actually pushed on him more than his older brother, Henry, because her and Henry's relationship wasn't like her in Ed's. So that means he needs to step it up financially. So for the first time in 1942, the 36 year old Ed traveled away from home to see if he could join the army. Only they again, this is 42 World War two. They rejected him because of a growth on his left eyelid, which made his vision kind of bad. So he was sent back to Plainfield with his tell between his legs ready to continue the variety of jobs he'd been doing at home his whole life. So babysitting did seem to be one of Ed's favorites. Again, if you watch the show, this is an entirely different babysitting story than what they show now that he was an adult and no longer appear. Ed actually loved kids because he was very childish in his own ways. They seem to accept him a lot more than the rest of the community. But there was something about Ed's immaturity and just like stunted growth that really bugged his older brother, Henry. Ed was an unhealthy mama's boy. But since the passing of their father, it appeared much worse. Ed was seeing Augusta as more faultless than ever, constantly defending standing up for her. Maybe because she was the only parent left, Ed did everything for her to a fault. And Ed had always looked up to Henry, but when Henry brought this issue up with Ed, like, hey, your relationship with mom is unhealthy, we got to get out of here. This isn't normal. Ed took it as full blown criticism on like his existence, like this is his security and safety, and it seemed to fester from there. And then in 1944, something happens that made people for the first time ever look at Ed Gain a little bit differently in town. So that may a fire breaks out on the Gain's property. And again, the way this is shown on the show, there's no evidence of that just suspicion, but they make it seem factual on the show. So at first, this fire was controlled. It was Ed's way of burning the marsh to get rid of dead brush, but before long, according to him, the fire gets out of hand. Henry, who is still living at the farm and helping his little brother, him and Ed gets separated, according to Ed in the smoke inflames, Ed said it wasn't until he put out the fire that even realized Henry was missing. He goes into town and asks for help from a few locals, including a deputy sheriff. They all return to the family's farm that night and help Ed look for his missing brother, but something happened during that search. So he goes and gets all these people and then they get back to the farm and Ed literally leads this group of people to exactly where his brother is lying on the ground. Okay. And so he leads the search party straight to the brother. And when they find Henry, his clothes are covered in dirt and sit, but his body doesn't look burned at all. He does have a few bruises on his head. At this point, he's definitely dead. So when they confront Ed, he's not burned. No. So they confront Ed. They're like, well, okay. And I want to mention Henry is 43 years old at this point, still living at home under his mom's rule. And they're like, how did you like you walk to straight to him? He looks at them and says, quote, funny how that works. Again, he's odd. Everyone just kind of has a little bit of sympathy for him because he's so odd and because of his home life, but the, like the response just like weird, like people were like, what? So the autopsy reported that Henry likely died of his fixation from the smoke and maybe hit his head when he passed out on the ground. Some said that wasn't surprising. Henry was said to have a bad heart. There were a few who felt like based on Ed's response in just their home situation that maybe this wasn't an accident. The Ed might have been responsible for his brother's death. Maybe because he was critical of his relationship with Augusta or was threatening to leave. Unfortunately, that relationship between Ed and his mother wasn't long for this world either because despite the cold-hearted woman, many believed Augusta to be, she supposedly had a really hard time coping after Henry's death. And in 1945, less than a year later, she began suffering from a series of strokes during which Ed becomes her full-time caregiver. So this mother that he loves, this relationship is very unhealthy. He begins doting on her. No matter how much he did for her though, he couldn't restore her health. And in December of 1945, she dies after a second stroke at the age of 67. So now Edgene, who has never lived on his own, we're not even sure he can be a functioning adult, is all alone. All his family is dead. He has no friends and he's living alone at this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere with time on his hands. So he kind of begins 40 years old now. He's kind of going into town. He's a little odd and he ends up spending a lot of time at Mary Hogan's tavern. This is the first victim that we covered. So he spent countless nights there sitting in the corner watching the rest of Plainfield's community laugh and hang out. It probably brought Ed back to his school days, only this time he couldn't run home and cry to his mother and say, hey, these people aren't including me and just heard me like, well, the rest of the world is sinners. So I mean, Ed did play nice, though. Many people said he was a good neighbor. Like despite the fact that he had lost his entire family, he would help out if someone needed a hand hauling grain or repairing a fence, but there were some signs that Ed had been deteriorating since his mother's passing, both he and his family's farmhouse looked quite run down from the outside. It was pretty obvious that Ed was not showering or bathing. He wasn't shaving the home from the outside looks like it's falling into despair. And Ed's lurking around town had become more noticeable by people. They were like, what is he always doing here? Around 1957, when he seemed to develop an obsession with a local businesswoman, a 58-year-old grandmother that actually bore a bit of resemblance to Augusta, his now dead mother, this woman, 58-year-old Bernice Warden, the second victim. Okay. Here we go. So that year, 50-year-old Ed had been making an unusual amount of trips to the -- Wait, question, real quick, were they, was the town not completely freaked out that someone just got killed in a small town and nobody knows who it is? Yes, they were, but they didn't have any clues because the first murder had absolutely no clues. They didn't know where to start. That's just freaky. Like you're in a town that's extremely small. Someone gets murdered and you're just supposed to, all right, let's just go on with. Yeah. Yeah. It's extremely scary. Yeah. But keep in mind, they hadn't found her body. It was just the pool of blood. Yeah. So that's even harder. That's even bigger. Yeah. So anyways, 50-year-old Ed, 50 years old, has been making an unusual amount of trips to the Warden's hardware store and not always to buy something. Instead, it was almost like he would go in and start, like, annoying Bernice? I don't know if, like, just kind of like making conversation with her, but maybe flirting, but you know how when little kids like have a crush, they're kind of mean. It was almost like that. He would go in and ask this older woman who bore resemblance to his dead mother, ask her to go out to the movies with him, ask him where to go ice skating. Bernice was polite, but pretty stern with Ed, typically turning him down with excuses, which again, is vastly different than what they show on the show. Now it wasn't clear if Ed was asking her because he was romantically interested or if it was because she was one of the few people in town who kind of gave him the time of day, even when she didn't need something from him. I feel like a lot of these shows that do, like, fictional reenactments. Yeah, so do reenactments of serial killers. They always make the killer, I think they do it on purpose, but they always try to make the killer a little likeable or they try to make you feel bad for the killer. And I find that really interesting because they've killed people and I just don't know the cause behind trying to make us feel like we should like them. So I was actually having this discourse on my Twitch stream the other day because I was saying this monsters series that has done very infamous coverings of killers. It's on Netflix that is very popular has gotten into some heat for doing this for like number one, not just dramatizing a story, but like literally changing a story and changing facts that sometimes make you feel bad for the killer or like, it's not like it's a Harry Potter book and they're changing the movie, like, this is a real life event that happened that was tragic. I'm not sure why we're right. And then doing that a lot of the time, it's not even about like the story I'm telling you has given you more background on these victims than the show even did. Yeah. And not only that, they changed the victims characters to be people they weren't even. Yeah. So disrespectful to like portray a victim as someone they weren't in a show where you're people, not everyone is a true crime fan. And I would say it's the minority who even know the facts of Ed Geens case. And so this is the only only exposure they're going to get to bed. And that's what I mean by people will and they do go, oh, I mean like, this is what happened. Well, people start to, what's the word? Yeah, empathize, but they start to reason with, well, maybe this makes sense. Maybe it made sense why they killed them. I kind of get, you know, so, and I also said this. Mental illness or a study of someone's psyche might be an explanation for the bad things they did, but it is definitely not an excuse or reason reason. And we need to like, walk that line a little more safely because when you start, when you learn about someone's history and it does, it is sucky, you can't, like you can't make it an excuse for their behavior because there are lots of people when we start justifying things. That's where we get the trouble. Yes. So it might be an explanation, which there's an explanation for everything, but that doesn't make everything excusable. Yeah. Just find that interesting. You know, you can keep going. I was just the most distraught about the fact that like, for instance, I'm telling you about Ed's relationship with Bernie's right now and that he had this fascination with her. In the show, they have a full blown sexual relationship and they show her as this older woman who was kind of the town lady who becomes obsessed with Ed. And then his dead mom tells him that she has STDs and so he kills her. And like Bernie's didn't have, you know what I mean? So it's just like the portrayal of the victim. Uh, anyways. So Bernie's kids, they find it creepy. The Ed had taken such an interest in their older mother. So you can imagine what was going through Frank Warden's mind when his mother's missing and Ed Geeng's name is on the receipt the day his mother disappeared. So it was alarming to say the least that in the fact that just the day before he had spoken to Ed who asked him point blank if he was planning to go hunting with the other men in town on opening day tomorrow. Now Frank was thinking maybe Ed had been planning some attack against his mother for a while and that's why he wanted to know if Frank would be gone and he knew the first day of hunting season. Maybe off in the woods, I mean, this is what's running through Frank's mind when his mother's missing and he sees the receipt. Now upon hearing his name, a few detectives begin looking around town for Ed. They want to talk to him. Some of them had gotten wind that Ed might be at a neighbor's home. The hills having dinner with them and their kids. So when police arrived, they find Ed sitting in the driveway with the hill's son and he was actually about to give him a ride into town. So they knock on the window, Ed rolls it down and seemed rather confused as to why officers were even there. They ask him if you would come down to the station and answer a few questions and without any fight at all, Ed gets out of the vehicle and walks into the back of the squat car. As the officers asked Ed to run through his day, he says something pretty strange. He immediately goes, I'm being framed. And when the officers are like, what for? He says for Bernice Warden, followed by she's dead, isn't she? Now at this point, no one knew for sure whether Bernice was alive or missing or had been murdered. Obviously, Edgene just cleared this right up for police. So later that evening, and this is probably the most infamous part of this case later that evening at around 8pm, two officers just to go over to Edgene's property while he's obviously not there to see if there's any sign of Bernice. This is the rundown farm that people had been kind of noticing from the outside. So they go through and the second the door opens, they are hit in the face with this horrific smell. Now it is completely dark inside, so they use their flashlights to peek around. And this is when they notice there is trash and junk everywhere inside this house. And you just have to look at the pictures. I can't even put into words the state of this home. It is horrific. Like absolutely horrific. There is rotting food. There is newspapers all over the place. There's tools. There's garbage all over the place. That is not all. Police are walking through. It smells horrific. It is. There are flies. There's everything. They are going through and they're just seeing odd things in the home. They see this chair. And they realize that the center of the chair has been cut out and replaced with like what looks like leather. Oh no. But they start to realize like, I think that skin like is that a pig skin? Oh my god. What is this? And they're like, okay, this is very weird. Then they notice that the, the dross. strings to the blinds in the house like the the cord. Yeah, he's made of human lips. Holy shit. Like tons of lips. No way to yes. That's when they find a lamp. Oh my gosh. They find a lampshade. So like the cover of a lamp that is like stitched together. And they figure out that that is also human body that has been turned into a lampshade. They go into where he sleeps. And on the bed posts, like think of an old bed of his bed, there are actual human skulls like sitting on top of the bed post. First of all, how is he getting this many like what's hello? I will get there. This is insane. Only two women missing. We'll get there. Okay. Oh, what was he going to graves? Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. He can keep going. So it wasn't even really about the murder. It was about his fascination with dead bodies. Okay. Which he didn't even really murder that many people. He just I will say is absolutely horrible. But I will if I were to make a scale, I would say killing somebody is probably worse 100%. I mean, he obviously killed two people. So he's a I mean, he's still complete. I mean, mentally ill, that's what I say, like, no, get out of here. But okay. Yes. He obviously does. I just was I was just curious if it was more killings or if it was I can't believe you caught on to that. I mean, it's illegal. There's a reason that you can't defy about that's discussed. Yeah. There's a reason it's illegal. It's absolutely disgusting. It's horrible. I can't believe people would ever do that. Okay. So they see these skulls. Okay. You just have to imagine the cops in this tiny town this long ago. What the what is going on? Okay. I just I'm going to go into. There's shoe boxes sitting in the house. And when they open the shoe boxes, it is full of women's noses. Like he cut off the noses and kept them. It gets worse. There's also a shoe box full of vaginas. Like collected vaginas that have been cut off. There are pants like pants that he could put on made from the skin of human legs. So he like cut off the skin and then sewed it together so he could wear pants of of legs. There is a belt that's just completely made of nipples, like a full belt that he could wear that's just cut off nipples. Holy it doesn't even like there's this is uncomprehendable and he's living alone babies in his 50s. He's alone in this. He's odd. Like it's just so disturbing. You can't even. It is disturbing. No, like he's he's from hell. So the list goes on and on. Okay. I haven't even told you everything. But everyone knew Edgene was different. But this is a nightmare beyond what any of them could have imagined. This is a house of whores. And just when they thought it couldn't get worse, one of the detectives felt something graces back. So he turns around a look and this is in like the shed. There is a body hanging upside down from the ceiling from its heels. So think like a bar each foot is attached and it's upside down hanging from the ceiling. There's no head on the body. So it's missing a head. And then also this body has been eviscerated. It has been cut from its chest all the way down to in between its legs. He was skinning him basically. Yeah, it's cut. Oh, but think of like a pig hanging in a meat. How sad is what a human body is doing? It doesn't take them long. It probably smells. I cannot even imagine the smell. Well, police are absolute, like, I mean, if you saw an image of this, like it is absolutely scary, probably needed to go to therapy for 50 years. And when they like, notice the body, it's actually, it's missing a head, but it's actually fresh enough that they realize this is most likely any sward that he had cut her head off, cut her all the way open and then hung her upside down, like in a meat factory. So police officers are going outside to vomit. Others are just trying to take in what they're seeing. There's a bag behind one of the doors in the kitchen. He reaches down, picks it up. There's a clump of human hair inside. He pulls it out and it's a woman's head hanging from a bag inside the kitchen. But it's not Bernie's warden's head. It is Mary Hogan's, the woman who had gone missing from her tavern years before the head is just sitting here. Now I do want to note that there is a human heart sitting in a frying pan on the stove and he was no. You cannot tell me he wasn't eating these. Yes. So it's alleged. He's never said he was. There's never any factual evidence. He a hundred percent, but why else is there a human heart in a frying pan? Yeah. Why else are we collecting a bonosis in human body parts? He was a hundred percent. I mean, it's just safe to say that like his house is essentially a human body just like strewn about, cut up everywhere. Like it just doesn't even make sense. I'm a big, I very much understand how being raised can affect who you are, what happens, different drugs, different, the huge, huge believer comprehend all of it, understand it, therapy, so on and so forth. This is next level. Yeah. So like this is leap some bounds beyond what I thought was possible. Yes. So like I said, he was raised in a horrific setting. No one should ever be put through isolation. I mean, what he was put through. We take an example of like the Mendes brothers or something, right? And there's the anyways. So there might be an explanation for why Edgene was odd, why he might be unhealthy, why he might struggle with mental illness. This is beyond that. No, there's no explanation for this. This is beyond that. This is sick. This is not, you can't even attribute it. Like you might be able to find some explanation. There's also like no internet. It's like, how do you like? Oh, we'll get there. Okay. So this news quickly makes its way back to the station where Edgene is currently being questioned. And to say these officers are shocked, they probably didn't even believe it. Like when they get the news that this is what they're discovering at his house, they're probably like, what? So from what I can tell, Edgene was never suspected of having anything to do with Mary Hogan's disappearance. So to find both her and Bernie's wardens, insides, pieces of them inside Edgene's house is mind boggling. All of these officers knew Ed. Okay, it's not like this was a stranger. This is a small town. He was the quirky oddball neighbor. Never in a million years did they expect his house to be an example of mutilation and murder. But looking back now, there might have been signs. Some people around town who'd hired Ed for a job remembered him making an odd statement after Mary disappeared. One of them had made a comment to Ed, something like, if you had spent more time courting Mary, she'd be cooking for you right now instead of missing to which Ed replied, she's not missing. She's down at the house right now. So he's still mentally ill that he's like kind of not even keeping like he's not even catching on to what people are saying. Apparently you would reuse this statement on other people. Now, of course, everyone just thought Ed was making some weird joke. Now it's clear he wasn't kidding. And he was willing to say even more when police pressed him down at the station. So now we're going to have straight out of Ed's mouth. He had just one request before he started talking to them about his house. He wanted some apple pie with a slice of cheese. Now when Ed was asked how the murder of Bernice Warden went down, he said this, he walked into Bernice's store that day and had her refill a jug of antifreeze. He left, but then immediately went back because he forgot something he wanted to see one of the guns she had on display. He was thinking of buying a new model while Bernice had her back to Ed. He took a bullet out of his overalls loaded the gun that she had just taken off the wall to show him and pulled the trigger. He also claimed, I don't know though my memory is a bit foggy. He said he recalled vaguely then dragging her body across the floor to the back of his truck. He also remembered taking her back to his house stringing her up her body up like that. But then he's like, I don't know details are a little foggy. I don't even know if he actually feels bad, like I think not the logic. The side of him that grew up and people saying, hey, don't kill people. Hey, don't this, which is what he kind of comprehend. But I don't think he actually thinks he did anything wrong. No, I don't think he's even really capable of understanding. Like, yeah, I don't think he knows. I truly don't think he knows. I think when we're talking about the insanity defense, this is the perfect case for the insanity defense. You're still responsible for what you did, but it looks different. During the confession, he also committed to killing Mary Hogan. He said the events were really similarly, literally, he just went in. She was alone and he killed her. But clearly, there was a lot more to the story because police had found over 40 different body parts inside of Ed's home. And so they're like, Ed, there's not just two women inside your home. We found a lot of things. So can you tell us about the schools? Can you tell us about the nipple belt? He tells them something none of them anticipated and gear it guest. Oh, I didn't murder those people. I just took them out of the the cemetery. He's like, I didn't do that. I just I just dug them up out of the cemetery. cemetery. He said he had been reading obituaries, looking for women who kind of matched his mother. Like that's who he was burglarizing. You would watch to see women around his mother's age who died and then he would go that night and dig their freshly buried bodies up and then take the body home. And sometimes he wouldn't even take it home. Sometimes he would mutilate it right there in the grave and then bury it back and leave. Now unfortunately, which is so weird that almost like half respectful to confirm Ed's stories. Please obviously would later go dig these graves up. It's the truth. So after spending nine hours, nine hours, getting the full confession from Ed, because that's like you have to have an explanation for everything they found and it took nine hours. He was taken to the county gel house where he would await next steps. Ed was formally charged with first degree murder for Bernice Warden, but interestingly, not for Mary Hogan because of cost and resources and a bunch of, I mean, he was going to be in jail for life. So probably didn't matter at that. But they don't charge him with that. It obviously doesn't take long for Ed to lawyer up and enter a plea, not guilty by reason of insanity. The next step was to see if Ed was fit to stand trial. The judge ordered a 30 day observation period at the central state hospital for the criminally insane. It was there. The doctors and officials would try to get answers to an even bigger question. They're watching to see if he's sane enough to stand trial, but also why kill like why did he do this? Because this is obviously there's no motive. So what is the motive? It didn't take long for police to realize both Mary Hogan and Bernice Warden were of similar stature and somewhat close in age. And they both bore an eerie resemblance to Ed's mother Augusta through his time in the state hospital. Doctors dug into an even deeper issue. The fact that Ed gain seemed to have an edipus complex which meant feelings of attraction for his mother and feelings of hatred for his father. Yeah. And you know, we kind of talked about it. Or I mentioned at the beginning. Yeah, it cannot happen without them being sexually active. But considering everything that I've heard in this case, there's no doubt in my mind that the mom wasn't grooming, abusing, so on and so forth. Allegedly. Allegedly. I mean, it's 2025. This was in the 50s. Who's suing us? Yeah, who's suing us. His doctors there also determine he was quote a very suggestible person who appeared emotionally dull has rather rigid moral concepts, which he expects others to follow and tends to project blame for his own inadequacies on others. But if Ed loved his mother so much, why would he target women like her? Now, this is where like behavioral psychology really starts to take a turn. Ed gain was huge for the BAU. Okay. Because the idea was that they come up with was that Ed developed obsessive or even conflicting attachments towards his mother that ran deeper than just love. It became mental illness. Remember, Augusta had a strict hold over Ed controlled all of his life. She also at least emotionally abused him in many ways. And since that's the case, Ed may have experienced both unconscious desire and frustration towards Augusta that led to some very dark and destructive behavior, which he took out on women that resembled her, but also why he wanted to wear them. Because he loved them, but hated them. So after that 30 day assessment, doctors gave him an official diagnosis back then, schizophrenia, they deemed him unfit to stand trial. It was a huge blow to the victim's families who would not get to see Ed gain have his day in court. Instead, he was admitted to central state hospital indefinitely. I 100% understand, but I honestly think it's the first case that I've heard in a long time on this podcast where I'm like, they are actually insane. Like they're insane. Like he wasn't in the same world. He doesn't. He's in reality. Yes. Yes. So a lot of people in the plainfold area were actually outraged with this decision. I mean, this is huge for a town. It was huge for the nation. I mean, Ed gain is a known name. And some of them decided to take revenge on what little was left of the gain estate in March 1958, five months after Ed was committed his home, the farm home was supposed to be put up for auction. How anyone, no, burn that, burn it down. Instead, it mysteriously caught fire in the middle of the night. Honestly, that's the better decision there. By the time the fire department arrived, the place was not worth saving the only, which actually there is a lot of Ed gain memorabilia out there that like the police collected and stuff. But most of the house was burned down. So all we have is pictures. When Ed heard about the news in the hospital, his response was, quote, just as well, like he had this place was his. If you could see the inside of his brain, it was out in this home. And he could have cared less that it burned down. I don't think he has this any comprehension about anything. A decade later in January of 1968, circumstances changed for Ed. His doctor decided that he was now a little bit better after spending 10 years in the hospital and no longer unfit to stand trial. So on November 7th of that year, Ed's trial for the murder of Bernice Warden began. His defense attorney argued that the trial be conducted with just a judge, no jury. The whole thing lasted about a week. The results were rather disappointing. The judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity still. Yeah, I mean, he's not just going to get better. This guy is insane. So he wasn't going to go to prison. He was going to go back to the central state hospital. And that's where Ed lived out the rest of his days. In 1984, at the age of 77, he died at the institution from cancer and respiratory problems. He was buried next to his mother. Now, all the families buried together. So many people went on to an interest thing hurt his grave that he no longer has a tombstone. Oh, it's just an empty plot because obviously, and while again, might have been dead, his horrific story lives on. And this is where the show, like I said, I found it fascinating that they kind of tied these two things together. But again, this horrific story goes on to be immortalized in the horror film genre. He became the inspiration behind one of the most iconic villains to date, which I don't think Garrett knows this Norman Bates in the movie Psycho is based on Edgene. Norman Bates has this obsession with his mother. He's a mama's boy, very unhealthy. He's based off him. It's based off Edgene. And he influenced other legendary monsters like leather face in the Texas chainsaw massacre. No, I don't think so at all. I was going to say, um, silence of the lambs. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Buffalo Bill in silence of the lambs. And maybe because of that, Edgene's story feels more like a fever dream because it's been like portrayed in three really big horror movies. And he changed, this changed the horror genre before Edgene, the horror genre was vampires Frankenstein monsters. Edgene turned the horror genre into human monsters. That's when the humans began to be the monsters. That's covered in the show. He was a nightmare so dark that it seems hard to imagine this actually happened in real life. So I want you to take this time to let it sink in. Remember there are real monsters out there lurking in the real world. Monsters so evil that they inspire fiction. And the scariest ones can blend in seamlessly with the rest of society. They babysit your kids, they fix your roof, they offer you a ride into town. So be careful because if there is one thing we can take away from Edgene's case, it is that the most terrifying monsters are the ones that look and act just like us. And so Edgene is lumped in with all of these serial killers. He killed two people though. So the infamous name of Edgene is actually just alarming. And that is the case of Edgene. Insane. I didn't, I mean, until we started getting into it and then I realized that it was graves. I was like, wait, he didn't kill. I mean killing two people is crazy, but you think of him as this infamous serial killer. I guess I thought he was going to be like, he killed 60 people and he skinned every single day. I had no idea. His name is looped in with Ted Bundy. Yes. Who killed a lot of people. I think it's just the horror of the reality of him and his inner mind and his world and his backstory and his bringing up that let kind of lumps him in with these people. Yeah, disgusting. Crazy. Honestly, crazy. So again, good job. Thank you. I wanted to stick to the facts. Again, I do think as a fictionalized work of art, the show is good, but I just want everyone to remember that this show is fiction. It really doesn't fall. I mean, yes, the obsession with World War II and Nazis was real. He did have these magazines that would show the experiments Nazis did. And that's kind of like, What inspired his work in his home? But just take everything with a grain of salt. This is the factual story. There are real victims who are not portrayed correctly on that show. And that is my only hang-up with it. But yeah, that was the covering of Edgine. If you want to go watch the show now, like I said, it is like I do think the production's good. I think the music is good. I think the set is good. But yeah, now Garrett knows the monster Edgine. And that is it for today's episode. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye.