Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Ed Gein

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Ed Gein became the real-life blueprint for Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill. But before any of that, he was a boy on an isolated Wisconsin farm, raised by a mother who taught him the entire world was sin. In the first part of our 3-part series, Katie Ring goes back to the beginning, to the family that made Ed Gein, the brother he may have killed, and the night he started slipping out to dig up graves.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House.

Plainfield, Wisconsin is the kind of place you could drive through without noticing. A small farm town in the center of the state, a few hundred people, a quiet main street, fields running out to the horizon in every direction. And on a cold morning in November of 1957, Plainfield was about to become the center

of one of the most shocking crime stories in American history. The man at the heart of it wasn't a stranger who'd drift into town. He was a neighbor everyone thought they knew, a shy, polite, forgettable handyman named Ed Gein, and the crimes he committed would lay the foundation for some of the world's most notorious horror villains. Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill, Ed Gein became the blueprint for nearly every monster next door in American horror. And it's a story that starts a long time

before 1957, on an isolated farm with the woman who ruled it. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's most infamous crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today. This is the first of our three-episode series on Ed Gein,

a quiet Wisconsin handyman who became one of the most infamous figures in American crime. But before any of that, he was a boy on a lonely farm, raised by a mother who taught him the whole world outside their door was a sin. And today, we're going all the way back to the beginning, to the family that made him. To understand Ed Gein, you really have to start with his mother. Her name was Augusta, and she is the single most important person in this story. But before we get into all of the details,

I want to give you a disclaimer that this story contains a lot of descriptions of abuse, so please proceed with care. Augusta married George Gein in 1900. By most accounts, she regretted it almost immediately. George struggled with alcohol abuse, and he couldn't seem to hold anything together. Over the years, he worked as a carpenter, a tanner, even a firefighter, whatever he could find, but nothing ever quite stuck. And he inevitably turned to drinking.

When George drank, he could turn cruel. was known to beat both of his sons. But that didn't mean he ran things in their family. In the Gein House, George was a shadow. A man his own wife regarded as weak, a failure, a disappointment she'd been stuck with, and she made sure her voice saw him that way too. The reason she stayed is its own window into who Augusta was. She despised her husband, but the Geines were Lutheran of German descent

and in Augusta's rigid understanding of her faith, divorce was unthinkable. so she didn't leave. Instead, she stayed in a marriage she couldn't stand and poured all of that frustration into one thing she could control, her household and her sons. For a little while, the family lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where they ran a small grocery store, and it was Augusta, not George, who was in charge of things. She was hardworking, shrewd, and above all, relentlessly devout. She was the one holding the family together, and she never let anyone forget it. She and George had two sons. The first Henry was born in 1901. The second came on August 27, 1906, and they named him Edward Theodore Gein. According to biographer Harold Schechter, Augusta had badly wanted a daughter,

and she took the arrival of a second boy hard. It's a small thing, but it tells you so much about the way she treated Ed. From the very beginning, Augusta had a fixed idea of how the world should be, and the people closest to her were always falling short of it. What she wanted most was to get her boys away from what she saw as the filth of the world. To her, the city was a den of temptation and sin, and she became convinced it would corrupt her sons if she didn't act. So in 1913, she bought a small dairy farm, and the following year, she bought a larger farm on the far outskirts of a little town called Plainfield. In 1914, a woman buying farmland and her own name was extremely unusual,

but Augusta was nobody's idea of a typical wife. The farm she chose sat about five miles from the nearest village, down a dirt road by open fields and woods. It was isolated, and that was the entire point. Out there, Augusta could control exactly who and what reached her sons, and the answer mostly was no one and nothing. And I want you to picture the kind of place she was hiding from. Plainfield was a tight-knit farming community.

the kind of small town where everyone knew everyone, where neighbors noticed when your lights were on and your truck was gone. And somehow, in a place like that, Augusta managed to wall her family off almost completely. The boys worked the land and performed endless chores on the Wisconsin farm, from early morning to dark. The house itself was modest and it would only become more run down as the years and the money got tighter. And Ed would later say he stepped foot off the property for one reason and one reason only to go to school.

Because life out there revolved around Augusta and her faith, although it was a very particular version of faith. Every single afternoon she gathered the boys and read to them from the Bible, but she didn't reach for the comforting passages, the ones about mercy and grace. She favored the Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, the verses about death, murder, divine punishment, and the cost of sin, and she returned again and again to a handful of core lessons.

that the world outside was wicked and out to corrupt them. That drinking was the road to ruin and that they only had to look to their father to see where it led. And above all, that women, all women, every last one except herself, were promiscuous by nature, instruments of the devil sent to drag men down into sin. That was the worldview Ed Gein absorbed before he was old enough to know there was any other way to see the world.

And here's the part that makes it so much sadder. Ed adored his mother, more than anything he wanted to make her happy. A state report would later describe him as inordinately emotionally attached to her. And honestly, that may be putting it gently. But Agusta was almost never happy. She was convinced her boys were destined to turn out just like their father, weak, drunken failures. And she told them so again and again.

By multiple accounts, she could be harsh, cold, even abusive. and Ed just kept trying to win her approval anyway. It was the central project of his entire childhood, but it never really worked. School was the one place Ed was allowed to go, and it was its own kind of misery. His classmates and teachers remembered a shy, soft-spoken boy, an easy target for bullies. He had a lazy eye and a slight speech impediment, which only gave the other kids more to fixate on, and he had a habit nobody ever forgot. Out of nowhere, he would burst into laughter, as if he were responding to some private joke

only he could hear. Years later, after everything came out, people would look back on that strange laughter and wonder what was already happening inside his head. He wasn't a bad student, though. He actually did pretty well, especially in reading, and more and more he retreated into his books, because whenever Ed tried to do the most ordinary thing a child does, make a friend, Augusta shut it down. She'd badmouth the other family, tell him those people were sinners, and punish him for reaching out at all. So eventually he stopped. And that left him with exactly one companion in the entire world, his older brother Henry. Into their teens and even into adulthood, the two of them stayed

detached from just about everyone outside that farm. They really only had each other. This wasn't a boy who had friends over but wasn't allowed to stay out past dark. There were no friends period. No birthday parties with other kids, no sleepovers, no neighbors running in and out of the house. Ed's entire world was that farm, the chores that filled every day from sunrise to dark, the animals, the fields, and inside the house, his mother, her rules, and her scripture. Day after day, year after year. The only window into anything else was the few hours he spent in a schoolhouse where he was mocked and where he never once belonged. Childhood is usually where a person learns how to simply be around other people, how to make a friend, read a room,

recover from a falling out. Ed Gein never really had to do that. He grew up fluent in exactly one relationship, the one with Augusta. Now, it's easy to draw a straight line from a miserable childhood to the horrors we'll get to, but that line doesn't actually exist. Plenty of children grow up isolated, controlled, even abused, and never harm a single soul. Cruel parents don't manufacture a killer, so I'm not telling you any of this to explain away the things Ed Gein did. I'm telling you because it's what the rest of the story grew out of. A boy with no friends, no outside world, and one all-consuming relationship that shaped how he saw absolutely everything.

For the first few decades of Ed Gein's life, the cast of characters on the farm stayed exactly the same, Augusta, her two sons, and her husband. Then, one by one, the men in Augusta's life began to disappear. The first to go was George on April 1, 1940, when Ed was 33, his father died of heart failure. And by every account, George's death didn't leave much of a hole. Augusta had spent four decades treating him as dead weight, and now he was simply gone. If anything, his absence tightened her grip on what was left of her family. Now it was just Augusta and her boys, exactly the way she'd probably always always

wanted it. With their father gone, Ed and Henry needed to bring in money, so the two brothers started taking odd jobs around Plainfield. And here's something that surprises a lot of people. The Gein brothers were actually well-liked. Their neighbors found them dependable and honest, the kind of guys you could call when you needed help. They both worked as handymen, doing repairs and odd jobs, whatever needed doing. And Ed, in particular, became a familiar, trusted figure around town. He had one role especially that people remembered. Ed loved children, and he was good with them. So the families around Plainfield trusted him to babysit. To some of those kids, he was simply Uncle Eddie, the gentle, slightly odd bachelor who'd come watch them and tell

them stories about far away places and strange adventures. People noticed that he seemed far more comfortable around kids than he ever was around adults. More at ease, less guarded, almost like one of them. In hindsight, knowing everything we know now, that's a deeply uncomfortable observation. But at the time, to the people of Plainfield, Ed Gein was nothing more than a harmless, helpful neighbor you were glad to have around. For a while, life settled into a quiet routine, two grown bachelor's sons, their aging mother, and the farm. But Henry was changing, and that change turns out to be one of the most important turning points in this whole story. As Henry got older, he started to see his mother very differently than Ed did.

Where Ed still worshipped Augusta and accepted her version of the world without question, Henry started to push against it. He questioned her grim worldview. He resented her iron grip on their family, the way she'd kept them both walled off from any kind of normal life. And unlike Ed, Henry would sometimes actually stand up to her, something his younger brother never once dared to do. More than that, Henry was quietly building a life of his own.

He'd started seeing someone and he was making real plans to move in with her and finally leave the farm behind, along with his brother. But Henry wasn't just Ed's brother. He was Ed's only friend, his only ally, the one other person on earth who lived inside that house and understood exactly what it was like. If Henry moved in with his girlfriend and started a family of his own, Ed would be losing his last normal connection in the world. That's not what really drove a wedge between the two brothers. though. It was what Henry said about their mother. He started criticizing Augusta right in front of Ed, pointing out how unhealthy it all was, how Ed had completely organized his whole life around her. To Henry, he was just saying the obvious out loud, but to Ed it was almost blasphemy.

Augusta was sacred to him, the center of his entire universe, and hearing his own brother talk about her like that left him shocked, hurt, and torn. For the first time, there was real tension between the two men. And then on May 16th, 1944, Henry Gein died. Here's what we know. That day, Henry decided to set a controlled fire on the farm to clear out some brush. The problem is, this one didn't stay controlled. The fire spread and the local volunteer fire department had to be called out to keep the flames from reaching the farm. They worked all day to contain it. Finally, as the sun started to set, they got it under control. And that's when they realized Henry was with him. Ed told them that he'd lost track of his brother somewhere in the smoke and the chaos,

so a search party set out to find him. And this is the detail that has fueled a lot of questions and speculation, because Ed was able to lead the search team straight to Henry, who was lying face down dead. Officially, it was a tragic accident. The cause of death was ruled to be smoke inhalation, and there was no autopsy or real investigation. But there were things about it that didn't sit right, then or later. According to Harold Schechter's account, Henry's body was covered in soot, although it wasn't actually burned, and he had bruising on his head, which didn't really make sense for a guy who collapsed from inhaling too much smoke. Years later, when the full extent of Ed's crimes had been revealed, a state investigator would circle back and start asking

about Henry's death all over again, and a researcher would describe it as the possible Kane and Abel chapter of the Gein story, brother against brother. So did Ed kill Henry? Honestly, we don't know, and we probably never will. It's entirely possible that Henry died exactly the way the coroner said,

that an out-of-control fire took a man's life and his grieving younger brother led the search team to him because he had a decent idea of where he'd last seen him. Whatever the circumstances were with Henry gone, Ed Gein had lost the only friend he had ever had. In the span of just four years, both his father and his brother were dead, and the one relationship left in his life was by far the most powerful one of all.

Now, there was only Ed and his mother, and his mother was about to need him like never before. Shortly after Henry's death, Augusta had a stroke. It was a serious one that left her partially paralyzed, and for the first time in Ed Gein's life, the dynamic between them flipped completely. the woman who'd controlled his every move was suddenly helpless, and she needed him. Ed threw himself into caring for his mother, feeding her, bathing her, reading to her

from the same Bible she'd once read to him every afternoon. For about a year and a half, he had one job, keeping Augusta comfortable. And here's the part that was so sad and so revealing. In a strange way, this may have been the most fulfilling stretch of Ed's whole life. After decades of trying and failing to ever be enough for his mother, he was finally indispensable to her. For a man who'd spent his entire existence desperate for Augusta's approval, that total dependence was probably the closest thing to love he'd ever known.

There's one episode from this period that people keep coming back to because of what it seems to reveal, both about Augusta and about the world she built inside that house. Sometime in 1945, Ed drove his mom to a neighboring farm to buy some straw. While they were there, Augusta saw their neighbor beating his dog. A woman inside the house ran out, screaming at him to stop, but the neighbor beat the animal to death anyway. Augusta was deeply shaken by it, but here's the chilling part. According to Harold Schechter's account, what disturbed Augusta most wasn't the violence. It was the woman. Augusta

decided that this woman wasn't married to their neighbor, so she had no business being there at all. the woman was the sinner here. That was the lens she saw her entire world through, and it was the exact same lens she'd spent a lifetime forcing onto her son. Augusta seemed to rally for a while. She even started walking again, but it didn't last. She had a second stroke, and this time it was too much to overcome. On December 29, 1945, Augusta Gein died at 67 years old, and Ed's world collapsed. He was 39 years old, and now he was completely by himself in a decaying farmhouse at the end of a dirt road. And the one voice that had guided every single day of his life was gone for good. He would later tell people that he'd lost his best friend and his one true love,

which tells you everything you need to know about their relationship. For most people, even in the depths of grief, life eventually goes back to some semblance of normal. There are other relationships, other obligations, a whole world that slowly pulls you back. Ed had none of that. He buried Augusta in the Plainfield Cemetery and then he went back to the farmhouse alone. There was no wife waiting at home, no children who needed him, no friends stopping by to check on him. There was just Ed, that decaying house, and a vast silence where his mother's voice used to be. And by every account, he just couldn't accept that she was truly gone. This was a man whose entire sense of self had been built around one person

and who'd spent 39 years organizing his whole life around her approval and her rules. Now she'd vanished forever, and he had no idea how to exist without her. Ed didn't try to move on from that house and build a new life. Instead, he sealed himself and his mother inside it. He took the rooms Augusta had used, her bedroom, the downstairs parlor, the living room, the entire upstairs, and he boarded them up. He left them exactly as Augusta had kept them, frozen in time like a shrine to her, and then he shut himself away into a single small room off the kitchen, and that's where he lived. So while Augusta's room stayed perfectly preserved,

the rest of the house slid into disarray. Dishes were left to rot. Trash, junk, and old newspapers piled up across every surface. There was filth in every corner. corner. Ed Gein was living in the rotting ruins of a home built around one perfectly preserved tomb. The farm fell apart too. Ed mostly stopped working the land and in 1951 he started taking a federal farm subsidy, basically the government paying him not to farm certain acres. Instead, he picked up some work with the local road crew and with the crop threshing crews when harvest came around. Somewhere in those years, he also sold off an 80 acre parcel that had belonged to Henry, and the rest he made from those same handyman jobs and babysitting gigs around town.

To the people of Plainfield, none of it looked alarming. He was still just Eddie, the odd, harmless bachelor who would watch your kids, patch your roof, and stop in for a cup of coffee. If you'd asked anyone in town, they would have told you without hesitation that Eddie Gein wouldn't hurt a fly. But behind the boarded-up windows of that farmhouse, Ed Gein's mind was going somewhere dark. He spent a ton of his time reading and the subject matter was extremely questionable. Accounts of cannibals and headhunters,

detailed descriptions of how certain cultures shrink human heads, and the atrocities of the Second World War. He was especially fixated on the figure named Ilsa Koch, a Nazi concentration camp overseer who'd been accused of having objects made from the skin of murdered prisoners, including lampshades. Ed was interested in human beings. anatomy too, the structure of the body and what was underneath the skin. With only himself for company, the grief over losing his mom never faded. Instead, it turned into something worse,

an obsession with death and the human body, and with the female body most of all. Psychiatrists, who examined him years later, would point to the stretch of total isolation as the beginning of his unraveling. Because somewhere around 1947, about two years after Augusta died, Ed started slipping out of the farmhouse late at night. He'd get into his car and drive to the small country cemetery scattered around Plainfield, but he wasn't going there to mourn or visit a loved one. He was going there to dig. It's time to ring the alarm where I will be answering all your questions and giving my

thoughts on the case, so make sure to comment below. This is always the big question with a case like this. Was Ed Gein born this way or made this way? Something that I found interesting in this case is that Ed was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and there are aspects of schizophrenia that are very similar when it comes to the nature versus nurture dynamics for serial killers. When it comes to schizophrenia, biology plays a major role. Genetics strongly increased risk and differences involving brain chemistry, brain development, and how the brain processes dopamine and stress are all associated with schizophrenia.

But genetics alone do not determine whether someone will develop it. many people with a genetic risk never developed the disorder at all. At the same time, environment and life experiences can influence both the risk and the severity of symptoms. Childhood abuse, neglect, chronic fear, emotional instability in the home, bullying, severe stress, social isolation, and traumatic experiences have all been linked to a higher risk of psychotic symptoms in some people. So trauma does not create schizophrenia by itself, in most cases, but it can interact with underlying vulnerability and sometimes contribute to earlier onset

or more severe symptoms or worsening episodes. Researchers sometimes describe this as a stress vulnerability model. Someone may have a biological predisposition and intense or prolonged stress helps trigger the condition. In the same way, many serial killers do have biological factors that make them predisposed to violence and psychopathic traits, but the presence of trauma can determine

whether those are expressed or acted upon. I do want you to remember, though, that there are a lot of people with schizophrenia and people who grew up in abusive households who have not harmed or killed anyone. So how much of this do you actually put on Augusta? When it comes to discussions of serial killers, I feel like it's always solely the evil abusive mother trope.

There's obviously a valid basis to this, but I think it leaves out a lot of nuance and responsibility for fathers. Augusta Gein absolutely deserves the criticism. She was controlling, religiously extreme, and emotionally manipulative. But his father, George Gain, likely played an important psychological role, too. Reports describe George as an alcoholic, unstable, and physically abusive, which could have added another layer of fear, insecurity, and emotional chaos to Ed's development.

Psychologically, growing up with both an abusive father and domineering an abusive mother can create a confusing attachment dynamic. George may have represented unpredictability, humiliation, and physical threat, while Augusta represented emotional control and guilt. Children raised in that kind of environment often struggle to develop a stable sense of identity, healthy emotional regulation, or normal social attachment. In Ed's case, it may have intensified his isolation and dependence on his mother because she became both the source of emotional pain and the only source of approval available to him.

That kind of trauma bonding can create deeply distorted views of love, women, morality, and intimacy. His father's abuse also may have reinforced feelings of weakness and helplessness. Some forensic psychologists have suggested that chronic exposure to violence, reticule, or fear during childhood can contribute to emotional detachment, dissociation, fantasy dependence, and difficulty distinguishing healthy relationships from control or possession. As I mentioned earlier, that does not mean abuse, create serial killers. Most abused children never become violent criminals.

But in Gein's case, the combination of social isolation, probable mental illness, family dysfunction, loss, and obsessional thinking appears to have interacted in a particularly destructive way. Henry's death is the part that stuck with me. What did you make of it? I feel the same. I think it's incredibly suspicious. The fire gets out of control.

Henry vanishes in the smoke. And then Ed walks the search party straight to the body. and the body's covered in soot, but not burned, with bruises on his head. If you're a true crime person, every alarm bell you have is probably going off right now. But here's where I have to check myself. It was never investigated, never proven, and Ed was never charged. And it's genuinely possible it happened exactly the way they said. A man died and a marshfire, and his brother knew roughly where he'd been.

I lean towards thinking there's more to it, but leaning towards something and knowing it are two very different things. and I'm not willing to pretend otherwise. Before we wrap, why do you think this particular case became the one that inspired so much of modern horror? I think one of the biggest things is just how gruesome it is, using people's skin to create belts and other objects and just having it all laying around is one of the sickest things I can think of.

Actually, most of us probably would have never thought about doing it until someone like Ed or Elsa Coke. The way your stomach churns at the facts alone makes for a great horror story. I think another part is the contrast. Ed Gein wasn't some criminal mastermind in a big city. He was a polite little handyman in a town of a few hundred people. This was a guy that people had babysit their kids, and the horror was unfolding behind the windows of an ordinary farmhouse that nobody looked at twice. That idea that the most disturbing thing imaginable could be hiding in the

quietest, most familiar place is genuinely terrifying. And it's the engine behind Norman Bates and a dozen characters who came after him. We'll get into that in part three. For now, just hold on to that image and the harmless neighbor at the end of the dirt road. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and at free. You also get the rest of the Crimehouse lineup at free and early and exclusive bonus episodes. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the the top of the America's most infamous crime show page.

Come back tomorrow for our next episode on Ed Dean. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. On a special four-episode conspiracy theories, cults and crime series, I'm taking you to four kinds of getaways where paradise turned deadly. Listen to our special deadly destination series every Sunday on conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, or join Crimehouse Plus to listen to all four episodes now. free. To join Crimehouse Plus, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at Primehouseplus.com. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think

you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical First Forty-Forty-Eight. hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.