Murder, Mystery & Makeup - Edward Gein - REAL LIFE Silence Of The Lambs?! Body Snatcher

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Hi Friends! Today I wanted to talk about Edward Gein, a man who inspired many movies, documentaries, and books. His story is a strange one, hard to believe and honestly, what was the switch that went off in his brain to take him crimes to the next level? Hope you guys have a wonderful day today, I love and appreciate you all so much!! I will be seeing you guys very soon xo Bailey Sarian If you haven't already, check me out on YouTube! @BaileySarian

Hi, how are you today? My name is Bailey Sarian and today is Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery and Makeup Monday. If you are new here, every Monday I sit down, I get ready and I talk about a true crime story that's on my brain. If you like true crime and you like makeup, well guess what? Welcome, you made it.

So I just have to start this off with a disclaimer. I do, I should be doing this in every video but today's kind of gruesome. I won't lie. Warning the following presentation is intended for mature audiences. Viewer discretion is advised. So maybe you've seen Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs. These are the types of films that you see and you're like oh my gosh thank god it's just a movie. These are the types of films that you see and you're like, oh my gosh, thank God it's just a movie. But what if I told you that characters in those movies

were based off a real guy? His name was Edward Gein. Are you familiar? Okay, well, that's who we're talking about today. Let's talk about Edward's family first. I think we should start there. I think that's a good place to start. Ed's mother and father were Augusta and George.

And Augusta would be described as a thick set buxom woman. She was very intimidating. Like she had a very stern face. Augusta had been brought up to obey strict code of conduct, which her father had not hesitated to reinforce with regular beatings and was raised in an extremely strict household with very hardcore religious beliefs.

George, Ed's soon to be father, he was described as a strong straight man with a reserved, even dignified manner. He was an orphan at a young age, sadly. His family had died in, I think I read, sorry, the Mississippi River. Like I guess there was a flooding and they drowned. Didn't have a stable home. George worked many jobs.

He worked on a railroad, carpenter, insurance salesman. It was rumored that he couldn't keep a job because he loved to drink. He liked alcohol and he was always getting drunk. He would spend all of his money on alcohol. So how Augusta, Ed's mom and George got together is, I don't think anybody really knows, but they somehow got together. Said to be that Augusta liked George

because he was a pushover. And George liked Augusta because, I don't know. People would say that Augusta was verbally abusive to him, calling him worthless, good for nothing, lazy dog. And she would do it in public too. George would go to a local tavern after work and he would get pretty drunk. And when he would go back home, he would beat Augusta

because that was like the only way he would get any type of courage to stand up to her. When he would beat Augusta, it would lead to Augusta on her hands and knees praying to God to please kill her husband. It wasn't a good situation, but Augusta did crave the need for children and for family as well.

So in January of 1902, the first born came. His name was Henry. 1906, Edward was born, and they lived in lacrosse wisconsin so then in 1915 augusta uh she forced her husband to leave the sinkhole of filth which was lacrosse and moved to what she believed to be a more righteous location, which was on 155 acre farm in the town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. She kept her two sons on the farm and away from anything considered dangerous or sinful.

She kept her boys away from those sinful whorish women. That's what she said. She was afraid of whores or she, no, no, no, no. She highly dislik of whores or she, no, no, no, no. She highly disliked whores. She just thought every woman besides her, I guess, was a whore. And she took full advantage of this farm that they lived on because they were in complete isolation. So she just like really locked up the kids. She just would make them do chores around the farm and then they could go to school. That was it. And then they had to come straight home, do their chores.

Augusta was extremely religious, if you haven't caught on. She preached to her boys about the immorality of the world and her belief that all women except herself were naturally prostitutes and instruments of the devil. So Edward, Edward, Edward, Edward. Edward was described as being shy. His classmates teachers would say that he had very strange mannerisms. When I first read these mannerisms, I was like, is that strange though? You see, I guess Edward would just like bust out laughing

randomly. And Edward would say that he was laughing at his own inside jokes that he was saying in his head. And that was odd. Is that weird? I thought that was normal. Anyways, I just have to say that I'm hilarious and I make myself laugh all the time, but I'm not a killer.

So I guess that's good. Oh, oh. Edward did not have many friends. Actually, he really didn't have any friends at all, poor kid. And when he did make friends, his mom, Augusta, was heavily against that because they were gonna allow sin into his life.

She did not want him to have friends. So she completely went off on him if he even mentioned to talking to anybody else. Now, because Edward, Henry, Augusta, and George, well, I don't know where George was at. He apparently was always working or drunk. That's really all you hear about. Augusta and Ed, they were very, very close.

They were like inseparable. Edward would say that his mom was like his first love, his best friend. He was obsessed with his mom. Then comes April 1st, 1940. Ed's father, George, dies. He dies of heart failure. They think it had to do with him drinking.

So Henry and Ed, they both had to pick up some odd jobs around the town to help cover living expenses. And then Henry, the brother, he began dating a divorced single mother of two and they were planning on moving in together. Henry was concerned for Edward. He seemed very attached to his mom and like Henry was moving on with his life. He was getting out. He was going to get married to this new girl. Edward was just kind of stuck at home, obsessed with his mom. He needed to get out there, meet some ladies, start his own life. So Henry kind of expressed this to Edward and then he also spoke pretty poorly about Augusta to Edward and this upset Edward. So then May 16th, 1944, Henry and Ed, they were out working on the farm and they were burning away marsh vegetation on the property. Reportedly, the fire got out of control. Fire department came out, put the fire out, but then

Edward said that his brother was missing. Like, where's henry i don't know where he's at a search party was put together looking for henry and then eventually they found his body lying face down apparently he had been dead for some time henry it appeared that the cause of death was heart failure since he had not been burned it was later reported that henry had bruises on his head which which was weird, but okay. Police dismissed the possibility of foul play. Coroner later officially listed asphyxiation as the cause of death.

Some would suspect that Ed killed his brother, but this would just be all speculation. No one really has proof of that. But knowing what we're gonna know, he probably killed his brother, yeah. Edward seemed to be happy. He finally had his mother all to himself. Although a year later, Augusta had a stroke

and was confined to her bed. Ed would tend to her day and night and she would still like verbally abuse him. She was very mean to him. She would call him a weakling and a failure and that he would never be able to survive without her. Anyway, so it turns out Augusta died. Sorry.

She died December, 1945. She had a stroke. So this poor family is just not doing too well, right? So Edward was 39 when this happened, right? And he was devastated by the loss of his mother. He was left alone to really fend for himself. He's been given no life skills. Well, besides like working small odd jobs,

but like no social skills. Yeah, so doesn't seem like it's gonna be good, but this is when things just went downhill. Now the home that they lived in was huge. It was a pretty good size home. So Edward had it all to himself. So he ended up like boarding up all the rooms to the house and he kept his mom's room in perfect condition,

like she never left. I mean, that was probably because it was an effort to repress the fact that she had died. The rest of the house was completely neglected. I mean, there was trash piled everywhere inside this home. He had piles of household items, furniture, mounds of dust collecting on all of the items inside of the home.

He mainly hung out in the kitchen area and it was just trash and garbage everywhere. It looked like what we know now as someone who is a hoarder. For some time, no one seemed to really even notice Ed. Poor guy. He was a loner. He rarely ventured off the farm. You would only see him in town when he was running errands

or stopped for an occasional beer at Mary Hogan's Tavern. And then of course, once everything went down, that's when people started to like second guess on maybe some conversations they had with Ed. Like maybe they should have paid more attention to the signs, of course. It's hard because sometimes people are just odd and like that's who they are and that's okay.

And they're not doing anything shady. But then there are people who are odd like Edward and they're up to no good. How do you tell the difference? I don't know. After everything comes out about Edward, which we'll get into, that's when people are starting to realize,

you know what? He made some weird comments a lot of the time. Ed's jokes, they were always weird. Mary Hogan, she's the tavern owner that they would, everyone would go have a beer at or whatever. She went missing one day. And like the only thing that was left behind of Mary

was like a pool of blood, but no one ever saw Mary again. But Ed would joke saying that she was staying overnight at his house. He would say it in a joking manner, but in their mind, they would think that was a tasteless joke. People in the town would think, oh, old Ed wouldn't hurt anybody.

So here's what happened. Bernice Worden disappeared bernice warden she disappeared november 16 1957 late that afternoon frank warden returned to town from a day of deer hunting and stopped by the hardware store where bernice worked um bernice was his mom and he was just stopping by to check on her she's's 58 years old. She was a widow. He noticed that Bernice wasn't there and it was weird because she had left the door unlocked and she left the back door open. So then Frank kind of looks around the hardware store and then he sees by the register there's a trail of blood. Like I guess it's just blood is on the floor and it's kind of like leading outwards

or like smudged towards the exit. And this worries Frank. Frank looks at like the register area and he finds a receipt. And it was a receipt for a half gallon of antifreeze. And it had been made out to Ed. Ed, Ed, Ed. So Frank is thinking, suspish. Not even suspish, that's like a full red

flag. Ed knows something. He notifies police and lets them know like, hey, my mom's missing. Ed, I think he was the last customer because there's no receipts after that. The police come out and they look at the hardware store and then they decide to all pretty much go to Ed's farm because they need to question him, what he was doing at the hardware store does he know where Miss Warden's whereabouts are so the police officers when they arrive they they search his home and then they find the body of Bernice in the back like they call it a summer kitchen and it's behind the house. I don't know what a summer kitchen is. It sounds fancy, but Bernice was in there.

Again, I added a disclaimer and I apologize, but like, this is weird. Bernice, they find Bernice. She was hanging by her feet from an overhead pulley and she was naked. There was a cut in Bernice from her pelvic bone all the way to like her chest area. Edward was taking out her insides

and like letting it drain. Also, she was decapitated. For obvious reasons, this stunned and sickened officers and they immediately called for backup. And a short time later, about a dozen other law enforcement officers showed up to the house. They go in and they see poor Bernice.

So that warrants them to then search the rest of the farm area and make sure, well, first of all, they need to find Bernice's head, but they also want to make sure that like, what else is on this property? So they all started like combing the farm and exploring the contents of what would become known as Ed Gein's House of Horrors.

Oh, horrors, not whores. So when the police officers searched the home, they found lots of other things. Now the things that are gonna come out of my mouth right now, the things that were found in this house are so hard to believe. You're like, yeah, right. There's no way. And then you Google the images,

you realize that it's very much real, okay? They searched the home. What do they find? Where do we begin? A lot of skulls, human skulls, and these skulls have been sawed off and turned into soup bowls. They also found a chair that had been upholstered in human skin. It's just the seat of the chair, like he used human skin and sewed it onto this chair. I thought Armin was crafty. Nay, nay.

Ed was a different level. Yep, he did that. So then he made lampshades out of flesh. I'm not kidding you. He made lampshades out of flesh. There was a box that was discovered and it contained nothing but human noses. Like he sawed off the nose

and he put it in a box for a rainy day. But I remember back in high school reading about this and it was just like, what? Edward made a belt, you know, a belt that you wear on your jeans. He made a belt and it had the whole buckle and everything on it, but he made it out of women's nipples.

I wish I could show you a picture, I really do because it's like, huh? First of all, how did he even think of this thing? Nipples, belt, Edward. He made a shade pole and it had been decorated with a pair of women's lips. There was a shoe box under a bed and it contained a collection of dried women's genitalia. Guess what? There's more. Then, okay, on one wall of this house there was the

faces of nine women. So Edward cut, I don't even know how to describe this, he cut the face, peeled the skin off, made sure to keep like the face intact so you could see tell it's a face and then he used it as wall decoration. Edward had seemed to be making or like sewing, hand sewing a shirt out of human skin and there was breasts that he peeled off of somebody and sewed it onto this shirt and he sewed together this this this shirt this long sleeve shirt of different types of skin that he collected from different bodies and it's all sewn together wow now edward would later explain what exactly he was doing because he made leggings out of skin as well.

He was making a whole body suit. He made leggings. He made a corset from a female torso. Edward would later on say that he would put on this long sleeve shirt and leggings. He wanted to essentially dress up and be a woman and that he wanted to be his mother. So he would dress up like a lady in his skin outfit and walk around in it for the night. He said he would just kind of sit around or even go outside in his new skin. He was pretending to be his mother. They just kept finding more and more stuff. They found skulls on his bedpost.

Do you remember Mary, the tavern owner? Well, they ended up finding her face in a plastic bag. He like skinned it already. And then they found like tons of fingernails, tongues. They found it all. And then just to make it all worse, because you know, we're already here. So let's just keep it going.

They opened up the refrigerator and then they see that there is, it's just stocked with human organs. There was a human heart that was found on the stove. No word on what he was gonna do. Was he gonna eat it? They don't know. They think roughly there was about 15 different bodies

that was found in edward's home the police had been at the house like all day pretty much searching and grabbing all these items for evidence discovering more and more stuff and then at about 4 30 in the morning that's when they discovered a bloody burlap burlap sack and then inside of it was a freshly severed head. Inserted into the ears were large nails connected with twine. It was indeed Bernice. They asked Edward, you know, what were you doing? Why are there nails in her head?

And Edward said that he was gonna hang Bernice's head on the wall as decoration. So. said that he was gonna hang Bernice's head on the wall as decoration. So, again, for a minute, it's super easy to be like, this can't be real, but it's real. Ed had some problems. Don't know if he caught on to that yet. Now, I just have to say, just really quick, side note, I won't insert any of the images

because they could ruin your day. But if you're curious, you can Google these images and see like the lampshades and stuff and this bodysuit. He made gloves, he made gloves. The flipping nipple belt. How did he think of these things? How did he learn how to sew? The lampshade, you have to see the lampshade.

It's like, what the, how did, eh How did? Look, I just gotta keep it real. He was really like, what's the word? Crafty? DIY king. And yes, it's absolutely disgusting what he did. Obviously, Edward was taken in. Eventually, they got Edward to admit the murders of Bernice and the tavern owner, Mary. He confessed to killing Mary later on down the road,

I think like a couple of years later, but they eventually got him to confess about it. Now you're probably wondering like, okay, well if you only killed those two people, where did he get all those bodies? He lived not far from a cemetery for about 12 years after his mom died. He would visit the local cemetery at night he met a

friend there his name was gus and gus would help him dig up grave sites or graves and open up the caskets and get the bodies out gus didn't help participate in the crafting that edward had going on edward would say that the skin of the bodies that were already dead for a while, the skin was really dry and hard to work with. It wasn't easy to sew the skin and make his little outfits. So he needed new and fresh skin. And that's why he decided to kill.

He liked fresh skin because it was plump and moisturized. I'm not making this up. Edward was charged with one count of first degree murder. He pled not guilty for reasons of insanity. A lot of people claim that they're insane just so they could get like an easier sentence, but I will have to 100% agree that Edward would fall into that category for sure, yeah. He was unfit to stand trial and was sent to the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane. And then 10 years later, he was sane enough for trial.

Within a week, he was found guilty of first degree murder. As far as Edward's house goes, so people in the community hated this house. Not only did they think it was just representing evil and absolute disgust, but it was also bringing a lot of tourists. But they decided to put the house up for auction. And then mysteriously, Edward's home caught on fire and burned down to the ground. Arson was suspected and people were actually kind of happy that the house was gone.

Honestly, I think it's probably better that the house was gone. Yeah, yeah. Ed stayed locked up in an institution for the rest of his life. He ended up passing away July 26th, 1984 is when he passed away. And then when he died, they took his body and buried it in Plainfields

and they gave him a headstone, set his name on it. Of course, people went crazy. I guess people would go and visit his grave and then they would take piece, like they would break off a piece of his headstone, said his name on it. Of course people went crazy. I guess people would go and visit his grave and then they would take piece like they would break off a piece of his headstone to take home as like a souvenir, which come on you guys get better idols. Eventually in 2000 somebody stole the whole headstone and it was found later in like Seattle okay. It was decided that Ed was not gonna get a headstone because it was just bringing too many people. Ed is still buried in Plainfield, but he has no headstone.

So then of course, his story did not end there. So in 1960, the movie Psycho came out and it was based off the character in a book by Robert Blotch, who was based off of Ed. And then in 1974, there was a movie called Deranged and in that movie there is a killer named Ezra and who is also based off of Edward. 1974 we have the Texas Chainsaw Massacre based off Ed and then in 1990 not no and then in 1991 we have Academy Award winning movie Silence of the Lambs.

The character Buffalo Bill was based off of Edward. I guess Edward brought good movies. I don't know how to turn this into a positive. Edward's story inspired many documentaries, many books. Some people would call Edward a serial killer, but I feel like that's debatable. I don't think Edward Edward a serial killer, but I feel like that's debatable. I don't think Edward was a serial killer. I think he was more of a, just a straight body snatcher

would be the best way to describe him. I think we can all agree he was very sick. I don't know what little switch went off in his head to actually take it to the level that it was taken. With that being said, what can we take away and learn from this story? I have no idea. Yeah, and that's the story about Edward Gein.

So sorry to ruin your day like this, but we needed to learn about Ed. Anyways, I hope you have a really good day today. Sorry. But other than that, I hope you have a really good day today. You make good choices and I'll be seeing you guys later. Bye.