Stuff You Should Know - Ed Gein: The Serial Killer's Serial Killer

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Any movie featuring a deranged killer who’s perversely devoted to his mother and makes things out of human skin has a real-life person named Ed Gein to thank for inspiration. He was Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, and Leatherface all rolled into one. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention Orlando and New Orleans. Stuff you should know is coming to your town, October 9th and 10th, which is soon, which means the time to buy tickets is running out. And FYI, our shows tend to sell out.

So go to sysklive.com and you'll find links to tickets and info, and you should probably go now. We'll see you in October. And, if you wanna come see me, do my End of the World Live show. I'll be in Chicago on September 12th and in Austin, Texas on October 2nd. Ticket links are weirdly hard to find,

so just search End of the World, Josh Clark, Austin, or Chicago, and your friendly search engine will help you out. See you in Orlando, New Orleans, Chicago and Austin. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the horror show.

I'm Josh, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and we are about to pass out from nausea. Yeah, I think we need to issue a strong COA. Oh yeah. I don't know, maybe some parents might, it depends on what you title this thing. They might think Ed Gein was like a children's show host

or something. Yeah, I guess that's possible. So yeah, it's a good idea. We prefaced this with, this one is really just not for kids. No. I don't even know what age it would really start, maybe 14, 15?

I don't know, it's really grisly and gross. Yeah, maybe no one should listen to this. How about that? Before we even further started, just let me throw one more thing in, okay? Okay. I am doing an End of the World Live show in Chicago on September 12th, just saying.

So if anybody wants to go see, you can get tickets to come see me do my End of the World Live show in Chicago on September 12th at LH-ST.com. Nuff said. That's great. Thanks Chuck. So we're talking about Ed Gein,

who is most decidedly not a children's show host, although ironically he was a babysitter from time to time. Yeah. That was maybe the most shocking thing I've ever read in my life. Yeah, although, I mean, it doesn't seem like he posed much. I mean, obviously he was a threat to anything, but that was not his MO.

No, kids weren't, which we'll see later. Some people are like, it doesn't matter, he's probably still a child killer. It just doesn't fit. He had a very specific MO for sure, as far as killers go. And he doesn't qualify as far as I know as a serial killer, although I think that's just silly.

But he failed to hit the big three mark, I guess, is what it takes to be a serial killer. Well, proven at least. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So he's possibly a serial killer, I guess. And if you have never heard of Ed Gein, fret not, we're gonna tell you all about him.

But I would wager that you have at least encountered some character based on him, because there's probably no real-life killer or criminal, that will just stick with killer, who's inspired more utterly deranged characters than Ed Gein has. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we know the big three, or of course, Psycho,

with Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Leatherface. Sure. And of course, Silence of the Lambs with Hannibal Lecter. No, it was Jayne Gumm, who was based on- Oh, well, that's true. Jayne Gumm was the Buffalo Bill character. Right, exactly. Who wanted to be-

His family names. None of which are Hannibal Lecter. No, no, Hannibal Lecter was even like, man, that guy's off his rocker. You think? Yeah, I think a little bit. I think he was kind of like this, maybe at least he felt he was sloppy or something.

He definitely knew he was smarter than that guy. So I think he looked down on him in one way or another. Okay. So Ed Gein's story starts as so many of our stories start at birth back in 1906 in Wisconsin. He was born little Edward Theodore Gein. And I'd like to say like things started out normally, but I don't get the impression

that there was a single normal day in Ed Gein's entire life. He just really pulled up the short straw, as it were, as far as the birth lottery goes. Yeah, his father was a abuse of alcoholic. His mother, she owned a grocery store for a little while in La Crosse, Wisconsin, but she was, Augusta was by all accounts,

a mentally ill religious zealot overbearing. Overbearing, there needs to be a stronger word in this case. Super overbearing? Super overbearing mother. Yeah, times infinity. Yeah, and the religious stuff is just off the charts as far as anything to do with sex in intercourse was the worst dirty possible thing imaginable

and that she hammered this into her two boys. She really didn't hammer by, I guess grabbing their genitalia sometimes and railing at them about how this is the devil's unit or whatever she'd call it, I don't know. She probably could have called it the devil's unit. I don't think it's entirely impossible, but she realized she looked around their town

of La Crosse, Wisconsin and said, this place is a sinkhole of filth. There's a quote from her. I guess it's Ed Gein doing an impression of his mom, which we'll find out later. He really liked to do a lot. And she moved her whole family, sold the family grocery store and moved from La Crosse,

Wisconsin to a little town called Plainfield, which had a population of about 500 and Plainfield had been established decades before, but it was still so small that they'd only built the fire station and the local school within the last seven, eight years. It was a very tiny little town. And so you'd think like, okay,

maybe Augusta Gein could relax a little bit here, not so. Yeah, did you look up a picture of her? I didn't actually. I don't think I have ever seen her. Yeah, she looks like you would think. Yeah, I think I just had such a mental image of her. I assumed I knew what she looked like. And she does not look friendly.

Let's put it that way. I could see that hair in kind of a tight bun maybe, and then with the calico lace neck dresses. Yeah, I mean, no one smiled on pictures back then, but she, and the only photo that I found was especially good at the photo scowl. Right, yeah. So, you know, they moved to Plainfield

where she thought things would be better, I guess, and not a sinkhole of filth. And it was not any better. There was no place that Augusta Gein could have gone that would have been suitable for her. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah, because there were other human beings there. And I think she considered just about everyone filth

unless they were, you know, maybe the preacher. And who knows, she may have considered her preacher filth. I could see that. And she definitely considered her husband filth. Consider her husband filth. And women, you know, any woman that had been on a date with another man, she had bad things to say about, it seems like.

Yeah, so that was actually not a good move for the family. You know, they'd been doing okay from what I could tell as far as they could do okay with an abusive alcoholic, shiftless father, and an angry mom. And LaCrosse, I think they'd been doing better financially. They moved to Plainfield and they started farming. And their dad was fairly useless to begin with.

But secondly, the soil, the land, they were not used to farming this kind of sandy soil where they didn't have any idea what they were doing with farming anyway. So they had a really hard time growing crops. And then apparently the neighbors weren't the friendliest neighbors around. So nobody stepped in to help them and show them what to do.

So they endured some real hardship on the farm. That was problem one. Problem two was Ed Gein was not one to leave the house very much and when he did, he went to school. And it's not like school was a respite for him or a place to escape from. It was just as hellish as it was at home basically. Yeah, it was pretty bad for Ed.

He had a weak eye on one side. He had a growth on his tongue that made him talk different than the rest of the kids. He had sort of a feminine appearance. And all of this, and this is bad at any time in history probably when you're a little kid in school. But back then it was really bad. And of course he was bullied and teased

and he would come home crying and his father would beat him for crying and call him a sissy. And things are really getting out of hand. Like his mom won't let he or Henry really leave much at all. So they're just stuck in isolation where his psychosis and later found out to be seriously mentally ill obviously. But it certainly didn't help to be

in this kind of environment. Not at all, but I mean, this was life for him. This is how he lived. He and his older brother, Henry, who had him by I think four years or something like that. This was their life. And Henry had like this, he was not as wrapped up in their mother as Ed was.

Not by a long shot. And Henry felt totally comfortable criticizing his mother. He saw her as mentally imbalanced. He was just not under her spell like Ed was. But that's how they grew up, that's how they lived. And she made them both promise that they would die virgins because sex was just so awful and dirty. And then in 1940, the family took a turn

for the different when George, their dad died of a heart attack. And that actually kind of opened up Ed's life a little bit more. Number one, he had his mom all to himself, right? But number two, just by virtue of having to go out and make more money, he had to go out of the house and do things like odd jobs and babysit

and that kind of stuff. So it changed his life a little bit, but it's not like it had any big lasting effects for the better. Yeah, for sure. He didn't quite have her to himself yet because Henry was still around. That's true.

But Eddie, like you said, he didn't travel much. I think the furthest he ever traveled away from his house was one time when he was 36, he went to Milwaukee 150 miles away for military inspection where he did not get in to the military because of his lazy eye, which could have changed the course of his history, you know? For sure.

Had he gotten accepted into military service and gotten out from under the thumb of his mother. Could it change the course of a lot of people's history? You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. So four years later after dad dies, he and his brother, they're working at the house, they're burning some brush, the fire gets out of control

and then Henry is found dead and everyone's like, you know, he died in this fire, he died in this fire. Upon a little bit of investigation and it seems like that's about all they did that was bruising on Henry's head and neck and they listed his cause of death as being asphyxiation anyway. And like we said earlier, it was never proven

but it seems like since Ed led them to the body even though he said he couldn't find Henry during the fire, yet here's where he is. It's a little fishy. It was all fishy. So, you know, to this day people say that Ed killed his brother and that was probably his first murder.

Yeah, which is a, that's a pretty significant first murder, murdering your own brother, you know? So now Ed really does have his mom to himself but apparently from what I read, she really, her health took a really bad turn for the worse after Henry died. She really took it hard. And so in less than a year, she suffered a stroke

and was basically a housebound, if not bedbound and Ed took care of her, which I get the impression that Ed was more than happy to take care of his mom day and night. Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, it was just such a twisted manipulation that was going on because on one hand, she's just screaming at him and calling, putting him down, calling him a failure and a weakling.

And then other times she would call him into bed to like sleep with her and hold her and she would whisper to him and say that he could spend the night in her bed and stuff. So like he didn't know which way it was up. It was just standard elderly mom and middle-aged son stuff, but we all go through it, it's true. We've all crawled into our mom's bed

and slept the night at age 45, but this didn't go very well for Ed. He still was lapping it up though. Here's the thing, he was so devoted to his mom that any attention from her, negative, positive, whatever would have been, like he needed that. That was normal to him, however he got it. So he took care of her, he cared for her one way or another

and she died in 1945, which is what? Was that a year after his brother died? Yeah. Yeah, so she didn't even last a year after Henry died. She dies from what I saw was pneumonia and probably another stroke. And now here's the thing. Ed Gein, who was almost never allowed to leave the farm

and when he did, he encountered people who were extraordinarily unfriendly to him. He had turned into a bit of a weirdo, you could say, even just from the outside, just from, you know, what normal people knew about him in town. He was considered an oddball and a weirdo, but generally harmless. But now he was totally and utterly alone on this family farm.

And the first thing he did was board up his mom's rooms so that he could establish a shrine tour. The rest of the house though, kind of fell into what you would call disrepair. Yeah, I mean, there was serious neglect at that point. He didn't seem to care about keeping the house up except for that pristine room where mommy lived. He started getting into some unusual things

like anatomy books and pornography and horror novels, pulp horror, Nazi books about Nazi atrocities. And he would start to go out a little bit. He generally still stayed around the farm. And like we said earlier, unbelievably worked as a babysitter and as a handyman around town.

So he started to kind of appear a little bit in town and no one thought a lot about the guy, except like the occasional time when he would stop in at this pub, Mary Hogan's in Pine Grove, and he would say weird things about some horror novel or some Nazi book that he was reading to the point where people were like, hmm, that's a very,

to talk about head hunting and sex change operations. This is what they called it back then. Right. It's an odd thing to talk about in 1945 at a bar. In rural Wisconsin especially. For sure. And he would also, he had a weird habit of like laughing suddenly

apropos of nothing that anyone else could put their finger on. So it seemed a lot like he was laughing at his own jokes, that kind of stuff. He was an odd dude. But again, the town was, they considered him so harmless and so trustworthy that they would let him babysit their children. He wouldn't hurt a fly.

He had a reputation from the way that people put it of not going deer hunting with the rest of the guys, which I mean like, if you don't go deer hunting in Wisconsin in the 40s and 50s, what is wrong with you? You know what I mean? But he was known to be too squeamish to do something like deer hunting.

So he didn't deer hunt. That's how the town viewed him. And if you look back though, there were a lot of red flags that he was putting up that in retrospect with all of the information that the town's folk later had, really seemed very fishy that they were just kind of waving off a lot of stuff.

Like for example, that bar owner, the bar he went to, Mary Hogan's Tavern, she disappeared. And Noah knew where she went for three years. She just vanished. There was a little bit of blood left behind at the bar, but one night as she was closing the bar down, she just vanished.

And Ed used to joke about how Mary was staying at his house for the night. And the town's people thought that was weird, but not necessarily remarkable, maybe a little tasteless. But in reality, he had murdered Mary Hogan back in 1954. Should we take a break right there? Oh yeah, that was an abrupt cliffhanger. We're on the wrong side of the cliff.

Yeah, we are. We'll come back right after this. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stop, you, you, you know. Stop, stop, stop, stop, you shouldn't know. All right, so we're back on the wrong side of a cliffhanger. Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. So Mary Hogan disappeared. What happened, Chuck? What possibly happened to Mary Hogan?

She was murdered. By who? By Ed Gein on December 8th, 1954. I didn't see that coming. He shot her. He shot her with a.32 caliber pistol, put him into his pickup truck and took her back to the farm. And this is not something that was known until 1957

when everything really unraveled. It was a full three years though that he was still in town. And I guess occasionally making a joke about what happened to Mary. Right. So when you say things unraveled for him one night, like they found out everything.

They went from thinking he was just an odd little dude who wouldn't even kill a deer to coming across the most depraved, deranged human being in the history of American crime up to that point. There may have been people that come later on, but Ed Gein was the first truly depraved killer in America that America had ever known.

Prove me wrong, somebody who loves true crime. Prove me wrong. Yeah, and here's the thing. He was, he had survived things like the local kids coming by, peeking in his house and saying they saw human, shrunken human heads hanging in the living room. Yeah.

And he survived all that and laughed it off and said that, oh, you know, my cousin's served in the South Seas in World War II and sitting these little heads back as souvenirs. Where is it? Not that the kids are like wrong or mistaken. It's no, I've got shrunken heads, they're just souvenirs. Yeah, but as it turns out, they were real human heads.

Right, so they were real human heads. They weren't from the South Seas and Ed had shrunk them himself actually. He had read some books on that kind of thing and probably talked about it at the bar, which he probably regretted when those teenagers started running their mouths around town. But he didn't have to worry about that for very long

because in 1957, in November of 1957, he went to the local hardware store, Warden's hardware store. And Warden's hardware store was owned and operated by a woman named Bernice Warden. And she was working that day. It was toward the end of the day. And Ed Gein came in, he needed a jar of Annie freeze

and she sold it to him, filled out a receipt, gave him the receipt. And I guess it was presumed that that was done, their business was done. But Ed walked over to the wall and got down a 22 caliber rifle and pulled a 22 caliber shell out of his pocket, put it in the rifle and then shot Bernice Warden in her head.

And he apparently then, and this is where the podcast really starts to get grisly everybody. So just buckle in or maybe press stop here. But the amount of blood that they would later find in this hardware store was so much that they presumed that Ed cut Bernice Warden's throat after he shot her in the head

and then dragged her to the loading dock where he took her body away. That's right. So he put the rifle back on the rack, didn't even bother to take out the shell that he had brought, took the cash register. And I don't get the idea that that was to make it appear as if it were a robbery even.

I think he just needed the money probably. That's possible. Although who knows. But Bernice Warden had a son named Frank and he was a deputy. And he came back into town after deer hunting like everyone did in Wisconsin in the 1940s. Except Ed.

Except Ed. He stopped by the old hardware store and it was very odd to him because she was not there. The door was unlocked. The back door was open. And then he notices a little trail of blood from the front to the back door.

And very quickly and easily just looked at the little receipt pad. Saw that half gallon of antifreeze was the last receipt made out to Ed Gein called the sheriff and they went to Gein's farmhouse to question him. And very quickly found Bernice Warden behind the house hanging in what's called the summer kitchen.

I guess this is where you go when it's really hot to cook that's not inside the house. Yeah. And again, this is where it gets super grizzly. You've got one more chance to stop. Turn back now. But he basically treated her as if he had been deer hunting.

She was disemboweled and dressed like a deer, hanging naked upside down from a pulley beheaded and fully dressed and butchered like a deer would be. So I want to just restate something. One of the two people who found her was her son. Like he walked into the summer kitchen and there is his beheaded disemboweled mother hanging by her ankles in Ed Gein's summer kitchen.

Just like imagine that. Like if you read all of the accounts of this stuff, no one ever stops and points out that like poor Frank Warden found his mother like this. But he did and the sheriff was there too. And very quickly they called for backup. And back in the day in rural Wisconsin backup meant like all the neighbor folk,

all the men in the surrounding county were deputies basically. So they all showed up. And pretty soon they launched this investigation of Ed Gein's house. And in very short order, Ed Gein's house would be known as the House of Horrors. And that's a pretty good name for it actually

considering what they found there because they caught Ed Gein basically in the act of field dressing Bernice Warden. But this is definitely not his first rodeo as far as that was concerned. No, but it appears as if it was only the second time that he had ever actually killed someone. You're right.

And what they found was really disturbing. And human body parts used in exactly the ways that they were in silence of the lambs as far as like using human skin and human bones and skulls to make into other things. Candy crafts. Yeah, I mean the most horrifying stuff that you could imagine.

And they realized it was probably about 15 women in total from all the various parts that they were able to get together. And he had only killed two of them. So that presented a bit of a conundrum until Ed Gein said basically, you know what I do? I'm digging up people from their graves.

Yeah, he said that later on, he was caught just so utterly red handed. It was ridiculous, but they spent hours and hours, like maybe 10, 12 hours during that first, that first investigation. And it wasn't a big house, but they were just turning up so much horrible, twisted, bizarre stuff made out of body parts

that it just took that long to catalog and comb through everything. But he said, no, I've been robbing graves because I am capable of raising the dead. So I go and rob graves. And the first grave I ever robbed was my mother's grave about a year and a half after she died back in 1945. I went to the grave site, dug her up,

I opened her casket, and I pulled her head, clean off of her body with my bare hands, which is the grizzliest thing any human being has ever done in their entire life in the history of the world. Yeah, but it's interesting in that they never went and exhumed the grave site as part of the investigation, which is really strange.

So they're taking Ed Gein's word for it, I guess. Well, they had dug up other ones' chucks, so I don't know if maybe they were just satisfied that once they found one or two, they're like, fine, we'll believe you on the rest of them. And I guess maybe in the 1940s, that was like they got their man. You know, I don't know.

Yeah. I'm not sure what that would have done in the case of his mother's grave, you know? Sure. It's like, hey, whatever you do to your mother's 18 month old corpse is your business, I guess. I don't think that was the case. Yeah, okay.

But this is where Errol Morris weirdly comes into the story, and I feel like we talked about this on another episode at some point. Oh, really? This was news to me. But Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, he was gonna do a story about Ed Gein, spent about a year in Plainfield in the 70s

doing his research that he never made the film, but his pal, Werner Herzog, they had sort of an interesting relationship over the years, but Werner Herzog said, you know what, we are going to go back and dig up the grave in the dead of night. Nice. Errol, and Errol did not show up.

No, but- Apparently Herzog did though. They had, yeah, they had like an appointed night and day and time and everything, and Herzog was there, right? Probably with the shovel or two, and maybe some coffee and donuts. I would imagine snacks were not in order,

but you never know. I think Errol Morris made the right decision in that case, because, you know, grave robbing, even for verification for a research project or research for a project, you don't wanna do that kind of thing. So as far as we know then, no one has ever verified Ed's story

about him taking his mother's head, but there's a lot of other good evidence that was the case that he did do that, because one of the things they found in his house were faces, human faces of women, and this is a really important point here. Women all roughly of the same age build look kind of, and all of those women happen to look kind of like his mother.

And so over the years, a lot of people have said like, why did he do this? What was the problem? But one of the first psychiatrists after he was caught, and we'll talk a little more about him being caught, but one of the first psychiatrists who examined him said, I'm pretty sure I have figured out why this guy did this. He was robbing graves and trying to resurrect the dead.

When really he was trying to resurrect his mother, and he was robbing the graves of women who looked like her, both of the women, Mary Hogan and Bernice Warden, who he murdered, they bore a rough resemblance to his mom. And so what he was ultimately doing in his head was creating a substitute mother or recreating his mom, reanimating his mom, so that she could never leave him again

because he brought her back from death. In reality, if you were a teenager looking through Ed Gein's window at night, he was dressing up in a suit of skin made from women who he'd murdered or whose graves he'd dug up so that he could pretend more accurately to be his mother. That's right.

He admits, like you said, he was called super red-handed, so he admitted fully to those murders, although Hogan's, the confession about Hogan was ruled inadmissible because they basically, you know, beat him to a pulp while he was in the waiting room. Well, plus also with Bernice Warden, he always said that it was an accident, which is BS, but that he never confessed to purposefully murdering her.

That's right. It was, you know, inappropriately, or I guess inaccurately relayed that there was a human heart and a frying pan on the stove. It turns out that was not true, but that was enough to get rumors started that he was a necrophile, that he was a cannibal, and was eating human organs

because human organs were found all over the place. It seems like that's probably not true, but maybe we should take a break and talk a little bit about the trial of Ed Gein and what happened right after this. Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Before we take a break, Chuck, let's just say he was convicted. We'll be right back right after this.

We'll be right back. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're on the other side of a cliffhanger again. That's right.

Ed Gein has a lawyer named William Belter, who throws in Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity plea. And at the time, he was found unfit to stand trial in 1958 because they diagnosed him as having schizophrenia. And he went to Central State Hospital, where he stayed for 10 years until they finally did say, you are fit to stand trial 10 years later. And then sort of anticlimactically,

he was found guilty of the murder of Bernice Warden, but found insane at the time. So basically, just go back to Central State Hospital. Right. And he petitioned years after that in 1974 to be released. He was like, OK, maybe I was crazy at the time. I'm not anymore. Let me out.

And they said, no. He said, OK. And he never tried again. Yeah, I don't think he would have had much of a shot. No. Apparently, the doctor, the director of the hospital, the Central State Hospital, used to receive pretty frequently death threats if he ever let Ed Gein out.

Yeah, I'm sure that he didn't even need those. No. So a lot of people, including the judge who presided over Ed Gein's case in 1968, who went on to write a book, strongly suspect Ed Gein was responsible for other disappearances and murders, not just his brother, Henry's, but also some local ones. There were two hunters who went missing in 1951.

The only thing that was ever found of them was one of their jackets and one of their dogs. They and their car just vanished mysteriously. And Ed Gein was later questioned about it. He said, I didn't kill him, but my neighbor did. And I can show you where the bodies are. And I guess the authorities went, no, that's OK. There was an 8-year-old girl who went missing, a 15-year-old

girl who went missing. And so some people think that Ed Gein really did kill multiple people. And it's possible because he still never admitted to murdering Bernice Warden, right? So maybe he did, and he just would have never fasted up. I don't know. But it does, like you were saying way earlier,

it goes against his MO, murdering kids and then murdering men. What he was after were women that looked like his mother. That was my impression. Yeah, and as you would expect, a house like this after something like this goes on becomes, it was already sort of the stuff of legends because of kids poking their face in and seeing heads hanging on the wall.

But after this happened, you can imagine exactly what happens. People are coming by to see the house, driving by the house of horrors, vandalizing the house of horrors. They posted notice eventually that the contents of the house and the farm were going to be auctioned. And understandably, the townspeople went nuts. They were like, you can't auction this stuff out. We've already got enough problems with the notoriety

in our little quiet small town that we all love. Population 500. And in March 20th, they took matter into their own hands seemingly, allegedly, because the house burned to the ground one night, and they never caught who did it. But it's pretty clear that it was an entire town of people with pitchforks and torches. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're handing out

like Kool-Aid and Saltines at that thing as refreshments. I think the whole town did it, you know? Yeah, but it did not stop the curiosity of this house, of course. It didn't. I mean, like people still came and still do go to see the lot where this was. But it was probably pretty effective to cut down

on a lot of looky-loose. There was no real pilgrimage or shrine for people to go to with just an empty field. I think maybe like the driveway's still there. I don't know. It's not much to look at. So yeah, there's going to be a lot less people that come to Plainfield.

But a couple of things were auctioned off, one of which was supposedly his cauldron, where he kept disemboweled embowels, I guess. That has not necessarily ever been proven as correct. It actually is his cauldron. It's just allegedly his cauldron. But his car was definitely auctioned off. And there was a bidding war that started between like 14

bidders. And the winning bid was from Bunny Gibbon, who is a carnival sideshow operator, who bought the car to promote at sideshows. And Bunny Gibbon started promoting it as Ed Gein's ghoul car, which he used to transport bodies to and from the grave and transported Bernice Warden back to his house. And Bunny Gibbons put a mannequin in the car as

Ed Gein as the driver and a mannequin as Bernice Warden's body and charged $0.25 to come take a peek at it. Yeah, and he sold a lot of those admission tickets. Sold like 2,000 of them over a two day period. That's a lot for a carnival. It is. And people are attracted to the macabre and kind of always have been.

So he made a little money, although it was very controversial, and he got some good bad publicity because of it, which was fine with him. But at some point, some of these fairs started to say, no, we're not going to let you come in here and bring this car in here. We're basically going to shut you down. The sheriff arrived at one and shut him down.

And then he basically said, you know what? I'm taking my car onto Greener Pastures in Illinois, where hopefully I'll be able to show my car there. Yeah, I guess Illinois was fine with it or just petered out or something because after that, the trail kind of goes cold. And no one has any idea what became of Ed Gein's car. So it may be out there somewhere. It may be in parts and different cars.

It may just be a cube. Who knows? It may be part of your refrigerator, could be. But no one knows what happened to Ed Gein's car. Yeah, we do know what happened to Ed Gein's cauldron, if that was in fact his cauldron. A woman named Evelyn Mayer bought it in 1958 and planted flowers in it, representing the victims.

50 years later, her grandson, Dan McIntyre, found it in his parents' garage, had it verified by people from the auction that they at least say that was the one. And then four years ago, it was auctioned off and now is on display at Basin's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. Wow. I would go see that, wouldn't you? I don't know.

I don't know if I would fly out to Vegas to see it or anything like that, but if I were walking on the street and they're like, come on in, I'd probably go in. I don't think I'm not interested in that stuff. I want to also, let me give a shout out, because I hadn't heard anything about the cauldron before, but I found out about that from the site Cult of Weird. Oh yeah.

Cult of Weird? I'm not sure. It's a good little site, and I think they might actually be Basin, Wisconsin. So I just want to tip my hat to them for teaching me about Ed Gein's cauldron. Interesting. So Chuck, when Ed Gein was still alive,

he was very much a legend. He didn't die until 1984, and long before that, he was basically made into this legendary boogeyman when the first character that was based on him hit the big screen. It was Norman Bates and Hitchcock Psycho. And Hitchcock had made this movie based on a book that had come out, I think, the year before by an author

named Robert Block, also called Psycho. And Block was from Wisconsin. So he kind of fashioned the meat of the story or the bones of the story around the Ed Gein crimes. Was that intentional? The bones or the meat? Yeah. You know what's really sad is it absolutely wasn't.

Oh, interesting. I was like, why are you making that face? I don't understand. The next movie was a little more on the nose. In 1974, there was a low-budget movie called Deranged. And it was about a killer named Ezra Cobb, but it was very clearly modeled on Ed Gein. And when you look at even the production

stills of this thing, he's like eating brains out of a skull and making suits of skin. It looks really pretty horrific. It was a Canadian movie. Oh, man. It starred as Ezra Cobb, aka Ed Gein, won Robert's Blossom, one of my favorite character actors who was no longer with us.

What else was Ian? He played old man Marley in Home Alone. Oh, OK. Wow. That guy. Wow. I'll bet he did a good Ed Gein. He did.

And when he was younger, he looked, I mean, if you think he was scary in Home Alone, you should have seen him when he was in his 20s. I can imagine. Those Canadians, man, they'll make a ghastly film. Have you ever seen Strange Brew? I actually love that movie. Yeah, I bet you I'm not sure if that one ages.

I'll be curious. I was like, come on, what's a movie associated with Canada? Come on, Josh, come on. So the next step was actually the same year. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out the same year that Derange did. And Toby Hooper knew about the Ed Gein story because he had relatives in Wisconsin who

were like, listen to this. And they told him. He said, I'm going to grow up to make a crazy movie about this based on this someday. And he did. He made the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was one of the all-time great, not just horror movies, but indie movies of all time.

For sure. Have you ever read? There's a Texas Monthly, like, long-form article about the making of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Have you ever read it? No, but Texas Monthly is a pretty good rag. It is a good rag. I think maybe Skip Pollinsworth wrote it.

They've got a few really great writers there. But they used to, there was another much, much bigger studio film shooting in the area at the same time. And the crew from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would go to that set and act like they worked there for catering during lunch and stuff like that. They would go steal catering food and just pose like they were supposed to be there.

And then they'd go back and film some more. Although they'd also frequently get kicked off a set and get caught. I went to a catering truck or two in my neighborhood in LA when I wasn't working on them. Well, you're letting them, you're not ruining their shots. So they owe you, you know? Yeah, I was just getting a breakfast burrito occasionally.

So as far as Gein, well, of course, we mentioned Silence of the Lambs in 1991. But as far as Gein goes, he was a model prisoner or, well, I guess, in the home where he was. It wasn't a prison. Well, he was in Carson. He wasn't allowed to leave. Do you call him a prisoner, though, I guess, or a patient?

Patient, inmate. Maybe how about inmate? He was a model inmate. There was one quote from a cook that said Eddie was normally a very unassuming, quiet, helpful kind of guy. You didn't know what he had done. You would think nothing of him.

And like you said, he died there in 1984 of cancer and respiratory illness on July 26 and was buried in Plainfield with his family at 3 AM, obviously, in the dead of night. Ironically, across from a grave that he had robbed. But they smartly eventually removed his headstone and put it in storage because it was stolen in 2000. Then they found it in Seattle a few months later.

They were like, let's just leave this unmarked between Henry and Augustus Graves. Really, what good is it doing? What are they saving it for, you know? Oh, I mean, there may be laws against destroying a headstone. Oh, I'll bet you're right. I'll bet you're right. So yeah, you can go visit their graves now

and the gap in between their headstones, that's where Aguina is buried. And there's one more thing. A lot of people talk about cannibalism. A lot of people talk about necrophilia. But it's not at all clear that he ever ate any person and that he ever engaged in any actual sex with anybody that he murdered or dug up.

And in fact, remember he promised his mother that he would remain a virgin his whole life. He said that he had never had a sexual encounter with anybody else living or dead, just himself. You know what I mean? Yeah. That was it. So he's probably not a necrophile either.

Well, that's it for Ed Gein. Wow, this was a ghastly episode, wasn't it, Chuck? Yeah. If you want to know more about Ed Gein, well, there's a lot that you could go read. Like, we didn't even, we purposefully didn't really go into the stuff that they found at his house.

It was really bad. So if this floated your boat and you want to get all sicko, go check it out. In the meantime, it's time for Listener Mail. This is called eyewitness identification. Real life story here. Hey guys, a few years ago I saw a man crouching by my neighbor's bike.

She kept locked to a chain fence between our properties. Watched for a few moments to confirm he was working towards stealing the bike. When I asked him what he was doing, he muttered nothing. And I said, well, it kind of looks like you're trying to steal my neighbor's bike.

So I'm going to call the cops now. First of all, Karen, I don't know if that was, you shouldn't probably engage that man. That's true, but it was a pretty hilarious line. Yes. He ignored me and continued. So I stood there about five feet away, separated by that chain link fence.

He continued? And describing his clothing and features to the police over the phone. When the dispatcher asked how old he looked, it took everything in me not to pause and ask him his age. So unfortunately, the man got away with a bike before the cops arrived.

So they drove around looking for him. Came back a while later with a man on a bike who did bear a very close resemblance to the thief. Even the clothes were super similar. The guy matched the description. I had given so closely, the cops could not believe it when I repeated, no, he's not the guy. The only reason I was so certain

is because I really took the time to look at him for a moment. I'm a terribly unobservant person and it really made me realize what a poor witness I would make after the fact. Now hard it can be to note those necessary details when your brain is on autopilot. They were never able to catch the petty bike thief,

but very glad they didn't arrest the innocent man. And how dumb am I for standing next to a criminal while I call the cops on him? Well, at least she knows now. She's got some perspective now. Yeah, she says this before our camera phones and such. So next time I'll just snap a picture. Yeah, sir, can you look at me?

Great, thank you. And that is from Karen in Memphis. And Karen said, come do a show in Memphis. She said, you guys could sell out the Orpheum, no problem. Oh yeah? Oh, looked it up. The Orpheum seats 2,500, so. Oh, I don't know.

Karen, we could not sell out the Orpheum, no problem. No, I don't think so. If you have something about half that size. Yeah, we could try that. We might be in business. Maybe we could do it in Memphis. Or a special show at Graceland, that'd be pretty cool. Oh, geez, that'd be wonderful.

We could do it in the television room. Yeah, or in Sun Records, or on the Lisa Marie. Oh yeah, was that the plane? Uh-huh, it's still there. I've been on there, it's great. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us like Karen did, Karen, be a little safer next time. It's a bike, okay?

You can go on to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com, check out our social links there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye.

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