Infamous America - TEXAS CHAINSAW Ep. 3 | “The Ghoul of Plainfield”

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

After another woman goes missing in Plainfield, Wisconsin, the police make horrifying discoveries at the farm of Ed Gein. The scene is beyond their worst nightmares, and Ed’s crimes become national news. In Texas, Tobe Hooper films his movie during a brutally hot summer. It’s a trial by fire for the young, inexperienced cast and crew that sticks with them for the rest of their lives. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN, so you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress,

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for mature audiences only. Listener discretion is advised. The police officer ran to his squad car to make an urgent call. He had big news over at Ed Gein's farm. When the other officers arrived, they went inside the farmhouse and waved their flashlights around the structure. The sheer number of things to look at would have been overwhelming in the first few seconds. The enormity and severity of the scene would have been impossible to gauge. But all that would have to wait. The first officer wanted his partners to see something at the back of the house. Ed Gein's farmhouse had an old-fashioned addition on the back of the structure called a summer kitchen.

When the officers entered the crude rectangular room with the high ceiling, they found something they'd never seen before, and had probably never imagined even in their worst nightmares. A wooden crossbar was suspended from the rafters using a pulley system. The bar was three feet long, sharpened at both ends, and covered in bark, and it had been shoved through the ankle tendons of an animal that was hanging upside down. As the beams of the flashlights cut through the darkness of the rock, room and searched the body that hung from the crossbar. The officers had to come to terms with

the idea that the body was not the carcass of a deer or a hog. It had been strung up and dressed out like an animal that had been killed for meat, but it wasn't. It was the body of a 58-year-old woman. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is a four-part series on one of the strangest killers in American history, Ed Gein, and how he inspired one of the iconic cult films in American cinema, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is Chapter 3, The Gould of Plainfield. Plainfield, Wisconsin, August, 1957. Eleanor Adams was 51 years old and the mother of two.

On that balmy August night, she was on a date with Ed Gein, except she didn't know it. They were at Ed's house, in his bedroom. She lay on his mattress lit by the dim glow of an oil lamp. When Ed began to remove her clothes, she offered no resistance. Later, no one was able to tell for sure how long Eleanor Adams had been dead before she made the pilgrimage to Ed Gein's house. As the summer of 1957 moved into the fall, the three-year anniversary of the disappearance of Mary Hogan was approaching. She had vanished from the tavern she owned an office. and the case was still a complete mystery.

There were just three clues at the scene of the crime, a 32 caliber shell, a pool of blood, and drag marks through the blood that led out to the parking lot. It seemed clear that someone had shot her while she worked behind the bar, then dragged her body out to a car and driven away. There were no suspects or real motives. But shortly after Mary Hogan disappeared, Ed Gein started saying some strange things.

That was not unusual in and of itself. Ed was a strange guy. It was only in hindsight that his words took on new meaning. A man named Elmo, who occasionally employed Ed as a handyman, teased Ed about being a bachelor. Elmo told Ed that if he'd spent more time courting Mary Hogan, she'd be cooking for him right now instead of being missing. Ed responded by saying,

she's not missing. She's down at the house now. That became Ed's go-to material whenever anyone asked about Mary's whereabouts. He'd say, she's at the farm right now. And he would often add, I went and got her in my pickup truck and took her home. Everyone thought it was a joke. It had to be a joke, right? Of course it was a joke. But then Bob Hill saw some creepy things in Ed's house, and the rumors started. Plainfield, Wisconsin, November, 1957. Bob Hill was the son of some local shopkeepers. Bob may have been Ed's only friend,

despite the huge age difference. Ed Gein was in his early 50s. Bob was in his teens. But they hunted rabbits and saw movies and went to an occasional high school baseball game together. And allegedly, Bob Hill was one of the few people who ever set foot in Ed Gein's house. On one trip, Bob said Ed showed him some human heads with leathery skin, long matted hair,

and hollow eye sockets. When Bob asked Ed where he got them, Ed answered they were genuine South Sea's shrunken heads sent by a cousin who fought in the Philippines during World War II. That excuse seemed plausible. Everyone knew Ed was strange, so they weren't surprised that he had some strange things. And then came deer season. Deer hunting season in Wisconsin was like Marty Grau, the Super Bowl, and Octoberfest rolled into one. The opening of the 1957 season was Saturday, November 16th, under an icy drizzle.

Stores and streets were deserted because nearly every male was out hunting. By the end of the week, there would be over 40,000 dead deer and 13 dead hunters. Ed was one of the few. adult males not setting off for the woods. Instead, he headed over to Bernice Warden's hardware store. Bernice Warden was a 58-year-old widow. She loved fishing and was a devout Methodist and a sharp businesswoman. Her son, Frank, usually helped run the store, but he was out hunting with most of the male population of Plainfield. So when Ed Gein walked into the hardware store, it was just he and Bernice. He said he was there to buy some antifreeze.

He'd been there the previous night, right before she closed, to talk about the price of antifreeze. Truth be told, he'd been hanging around the store a lot lately. Although Bernice regarded Ed as the village idiot, she was always nice and polite to her customers. She filled up his barrel with antifreeze, wrote a receipt, and Ed left the store. A minute later, he came back. Ed said he was thinking of trading in his Marlin rifle, which only fired one of the three types of 22-caliber ammunition. He now wanted a Marlin that can shoot all three. She handed Ed the rifle he was curious about, and then she turned her back and looked across the street.

Bernice Warden didn't see Ed reach into his overall pocket and take out a 22-caliber shell. She had no idea that Ed thought she was a wicked creature who deserved divine punishment. just like Mary Hogan, because neither was as pure as his dearly departed mother. A few hours later, Bob Hill and his sister Darlene appeared in Ed's yard. Their car wouldn't start, so they asked Ed to give them a lift to town so they could buy a new battery. Ed was happy to help. He said he just needed to wash up because his hands were bloody from dressing out a deer. Round Rock, Texas, July 1973. Round Rock is only about 20 minutes north of Austin, but in the 1970s, part of it felt genuinely rural.

The filmmakers found an old Victorian house on an isolated dirt road to be their primary location. It became a house of horrors in more than one way. For decades afterward, people around the world asked Gunnar Hansen if Texas Chainsaw Massacre was fun to film. By that time, the movie and its production process had reached mythical status, and people probably assumed that it felt mythical in the making. Gunner Hansen, who played Leatherface, always gave the same terse response when asked if it was fun to film. Not a bit of it, he said. The heat was intense. It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly every day. The humidity was so thick it felt like you were wading through it.

Anyone who's been through a Texas summer knows the feeling. It's a disgusting combination. There was just one bathroom for a casting crew of 40 people. And that was perfectly emblematic of a low-budget movie shoot, especially in the early 1970s. A big-budget Hollywood movie has redundancies and duplicates for everything. Everything has a backup, or multiple backups. If a prop gets broken or a costume gets ruined,

you just grab one of the backup. There were no backups on Texas chainsaw massacre, including bathrooms. Gunner Hansen, who was 6'4 and weighed nearly 300 pounds, had just one leather face costume. The filmmakers were scared to send it to a cleaner for fear that the look wouldn't match from scene to scene. So Hansen wore the same wool suit and wool pants all day, every day, for five weeks straight in the sweltering Texas heat humidity. And he had to wear a latex mask every day. By the end of the shoot, no one wanted to go near any. And since this was an ultra low budget film, and there were no duplicates of anything, that included the most important item of the shoot, the chainsaw. On most movies, there's a property department.

When an actor uses an object in a scene, whether it's a piece of paper or a mop or a chunk of firewood. Those objects are organized by the property master and the property assistance. There was no prop master on chainsaw. The director of photography, who's in charge of lighting and camera placement, had to rush out and find a chainsaw. He came back with one from a company called McCullough. At some point, the filmmakers approached McCullough about investing in the movie, since its item was now a centerpiece. They received no response. So the movie had one chainsaw. Most of the time they took the teeth off so that it wouldn't hurt anyone. They primed it full of gas so that when Gunner Hansen fired it up,

it would billow smoke and look more deadly than it really was. But that didn't mean there weren't terrifying moments. Hansen's leather face masks severely restricted his vision. During one sequence, he was running with the chainsaw and he slipped. The saw, which had the teeth in, flew up in the air and crashed in. in the air and crashed to the ground just inches from his body. He narrowly avoided disaster. But in filming one of the final scenes of the movie, he thought disaster struck for real.

One of the fascinating things about the film is that there's very little blood shown on screen. The whole movie is a giant mind trick. Your brain thinks it's more gory than it really is. Toby Hooper edited the film in such a way that there's only one scene where you see the chainsaw actually come in physical contact with a character. And ironically, that character is Leatherface himself. Leatherface accidentally cuts his own leg with the chainsaw. For that scene, the crew put a piece of metal under Hansen's pants that would protect his leg. Then they put a stake under his pants and on top of the metal. So when the chainsaw falls on Leatherface's leg, it cuts through

the steak, and it looks like Leatherface has just sliced through his own tissue. For that shot, the chainsaw had to be fully operational. It had to have the teeth in. Hansen wielded the saw himself. He wouldn't let another crew member try to do it. When he brought the roaring chainsaw down on his own leg, it cut through the stake and hit the metal, just as planned. But the blade was so hot that the metal burned his skin.

For a brief second, Hansen thought he had just shredded his own leg. He yanked the saw away. and then discovered the pain he felt came from a burn, not a cut. He was obviously relieved. And he certainly wasn't the only one who experienced close calls or real problems. Nearly every actor walked away with cuts or bruises or scratches or burns. And as the production progressed, it got worse. The first half of the film takes place mostly outside during the day.

Filming those scenes in the Texas heat was bad enough. But the final third of the movie takes place at night inside the house of the cannibals. Filming those sequences was far, far worse, especially for the film's star, Marilyn Burns. Plainfield, Wisconsin, November 1957. The people who drove past Bernice Warden's hardware store could see through the window that it was empty. That made sense. Deer hunting season had just started. Most business owners simply closed their shops on opening day.

And that was what was strange about the hardware store. It appeared to be closed, but the lights were on and there was no one inside. When someone asked Bernice's son Frank, why his mother had locked the store but left the lights on, Frank went to investigate. As soon as he stepped inside, he knew something was wrong. The cash register was missing. The floor was splattered with blood. and there was a blood trail that led out the back door to the parking lot. It looked eerily familiar to the scene of Mary Hogan's disappearance.

When police officers arrived, Frank blurted out just two words. Eddie Gein. Frank Warden said he suspected Gein for a variety of reasons. Ed had been hanging around the store a lot and bothering his mother to go roller skating or dancing or to the movies. Frank then showed the officers of slip of paper he'd just found. It was a sales receipt for Antifreeze to Gien, and it was in his mother's handwriting. Ed was at the home of his teenage friend, Bob Hill. When Word reached a house that Bernice Warden had disappeared, Bob's mother looked at Ed.

He'd been having dinner at their house three years ago when the news of Mary Hogan's disappearance reached them. Irene Hill asked a blunt question, How come every time somebody gets banged on the head and hauled away, you're always around? Ed Gein just shrugged. Not long afterward, the police arrived. Ed wasn't hard to find. If he wasn't at his own home, there was probably only one place he'd be. When the police pulled into the driveway, they found Ed and Bob sitting in Ed's car.

The police tapped on Ed's window and said they'd like to talk to him. Officer Dan Chase asked Gein how he'd spent his day from the moment he woke up until now. Ed told them. Then the officer asked him to repeat his account. Ed's story was different this time. Either the first one was a lie or this one was. It didn't really matter which. They told Ed they needed to search his farm,

but they'd soon be sorry they did. A pair of officers entered the summer kitchen on the back of Ed's house. The room was dark. There was no electricity. They scanned the floor with their flashlights and traversed a maze of rusted farm tools in rotting junk. Then one of the men felt something brush against his shoulder. He shifted the flashlight.

The beam rested on a carcass that dangled from the beams above him. The dead thing hung by its ankles. Its head had been cut off and it had been gutted. But it was clear immediately that it wasn't a deer. It was a woman who was later identified as Bernice Warden. After that grisly discovery, the officers continued into the farmhouse proper. They found piles of weird but harmless items,

like the coffee can filled with used gum, some scraps of food, and plenty of empty cartons. The whole place was filthy, but that wasn't a crime. Then one of the officers picked up something he assumed was a soup bowl. Technically, it was a soup bowl, but not like any he'd ever seen. It was the sawed off top of a human skull. and that skull was just one of many. Some were sawed off, others were complete,

like a pair that was attached to Ed's bedposts. In the kitchen, a chair had a strange appearance. It was one of a set of four. The other three matched, but this one had its original material replaced with strips of human skin. When the officers realized what they were looking at, they examined other pieces of furniture with growing alarm. They found lampshades, bracelets, a wastebasket, and the sheath of a hunting knife made from human skin.

And the search kept getting worse. Officers found accessories made out of female body parts. They found a shoebox full of female parts, one of which was painted silver and trimmed with a red ribbon. Another box contained four human noses. Then they found an item that inspired the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs. Ed Gein had carefully skinned the top half of a woman's body, and then tanned the skin and attached a cord so it could be worn as a vest. A sheriff who was involved in the search was nearly at a loss for words.

He said only that it was too horrible, horrible beyond belief. And then they found the masks. There were nine in all. Each had been peeled from a woman's skull with the hair still attached. Some still had lipstick on their lips and looked almost lifelike. But nothing was as lifelike as what Deputy Arnie Fritz discovered. After he found a brown paper bag, he reached in, pulled out an object that was shaped like a bowling ball,

and held it up to the light. And then he screamed. It was the head of Mary Hogan. Round Rock, Texas, August, 1973. Art director Robert Burns turned himself into a bone collection, for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His job was to decorate the sets. For the house where the three crazy villains lived, whom most people called the cannibal family, he outdid himself. He collected legions of real bones from dead animals and scattered them throughout the house. He had two

full human skeletons, one real and one plastic. He spent hours constructing wicked-looking sculptures. The house looked great. But when he was a little, but when he was a little bit of the When it came time to film the final interior sequence of the movie, the cast and crew started to hate it. It wasn't Bob Burns' fault. The most infamous sequence of the film is usually referred to as the dinner scene. It's only about five minutes long in the finished movie, but the cast and crew filmed for 26 hours straight to get it. The sequence takes place at night, but the crew started filming it during the day. So they covered the windows of the house with thick black, black,

black drapes to block out the sunlight. Then they fired up big movie lights that pumped thousands of watts of light into the dining room. Then they set real food on the dining room table. It was over 100 degrees outside. Inside, the house turned into a literal oven. Most people estimate the temperature soared to over 115 degrees. Cast and crew were packed into the confined space with no fans and no air conditioning. costumes hadn't been washed in weeks. People were sweating profusely. And as hour after hour

ticked by, the food on the table began to cook under the hot lights, and it began to turn rancid. The smell was beyond nauseating. After nearly every take, someone had to run outside to throw up. But they were down to the end of the shooting schedule. They had to get the sequence finished. Nerves became frayed. Patients were. was exhausted. Director Toby Hooper pushed people to their limits and then beyond. And no one was affected more than lead actress Marilyn Burns. By that point in the story, she was the only one of the five friends alive. She was strapped to a chair and held hostage by the family. At one point, Leatherface was required to cut her finger and allow the character of the grandfather

to drink her blood. The grandfather looked ancient and maybe even dead, but in her In reality, he was played by an 18-year-old kid. As the hours wore on, and people became more frustrated, the scenes turned more crazy than expected. They did take after take of Leatherface trying to cut Marilyn's finger, but the fake knife wouldn't work. It was supposed to squirt fake blood onto her finger and make it look like the blade had cut her skin.

Eventually, Gunner Hansen, playing Leatherface, pressed too hard with a fake knife and cut Marilyn's finger for real. She'd been screaming virtually non-stop throughout the sequence, so no one recognized the real screams from the fake screams. Hansen put Marilyn's finger in the mouth of the 18-year-old kid playing grandpa, and the kid sucked her blood. At the time, neither Hansen nor the kid knew it was real. They didn't find out until years later during a series of retrospective interviews. But Marilyn's sequence wasn't done. While she was tied to a chair, the cook, played by Jim Seedow, had to repeatedly hit her with a large hammer. The hammer was made of rubber so that it couldn't do any real damage.

But Seado still held back. He didn't want to do the scene. In every take, it looked fake. Director Toby Hooper yelled at him to really hit her, make it look real. After 24 hours of continuous filming in a rancid sweat box, Jim Seidau was. broke. He started really hitting Maryland with a fake hammer. Toby Hooper finally approved of a take. They'd made it look real because it was. Jim Seedow felt terrible afterward. Marilyn had been bruised, but not seriously injured. And the bruises were added to her laundry

list of pains. For five weeks, she'd been poked, prodded, dragged, chased, scratched, thrown, and cut. But now filming was finally done, until she received some bad news. They had to reshoot some scenes. So when you watch the movie and you see the final shot of a crazed and bloody Marilyn Burns screaming and laughing hysterically at the same time, it's mostly real. By that time, there was almost no difference between her and her character. But at least it was over. Everyone who stayed with the production survived. They didn't know at the time that it would be the stuff of legend, but they'd find out soon enough. And the final shocking conclusion in the saga of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was still to come. There were Hollywood battles,

legal battles, financial battles, and for the cherry on top, the mafia. All that was yet to come. Next time on infamous America, authorities try to understand the full scope of Ed Gein's crimes, and Ed becomes a nationwide sensation as one of the most notorious figures in American history. In Texas, Toby Hooper's low-budget horror movie becomes a shocking box office success, but the success doesn't trickle down to the cast, the crew, or the investors. They discover layers of secrets that all add to the legacy of a movie that turns into a cult classic. That's next week on Infamous America. And if you're a member of our Black Barrel Plus program, you already have access to the full season. If you're not a member, you can sign up

now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Members receive access to each new season in its entirety one week before the season begins for the general public. And members receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up today for just five. per month. Special thanks to Dan Madigan for his insight into the life of his friend, Toby Hooper. This season was researched and written by Brian Frazier and myself. Original music by Rob Valier. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Blackbarrel media on Facebook and Instagram

and B-Beryl Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast.