Ed Gein and the Farm of Horrors: A True Crime Case That Redefined Horror

0:00 (upbeat music) If you ever thought your mom was a little too controlling, let me introduce you to Augusta Gien, Bible Thumper, Moral Enforcer, and all around Terror in a Housecoat. Her son Ed didn't just grow up sheltered, he grew up suffocated, with Augusta ruling his every thought and move like some kind of old testament dictator. And when she finally left this world, she didn't just leave a void, she left behind a man who didn't know how to function without her.

0:42 So he got creative. Today we're diving into the twisted world of Ed Gien, a quiet little man from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who turned his farm into a grotesque monument to his mother's legacy. This story has obsession, isolation, and some very questionable DIY projects you definitely don't want to Google. But before we get into that story, if you like your true crime, brief and bingeable, you have found the right podcast. Tap the follow button now for access to at least two episodes per week. Welcome to 10 Minute Murder. (upbeat music) (soft music) Augusta Willamine Gien ruled her household like a fire and brimstone despot.

1:32 Her reign extending over a remote plainfield Wisconsin farm where she kept a firm grip on her two sons, Henry and Edward, and her husband, George Philip Gien. Think family values meets totalitarian state. For Henry and Ed, growing up under Augusta's iron fist, meant that one thing was clear. Dad was the ultimate cautionary tale. George, a perpetually inebriated washout, shuffled through life with the ambition of a damprack. He'd recently sold his grocery store in La Crosse and dragged the family to a desolate farm, a move Augusta regarded with predictable disdain. To her, it simply cemented two facts.

2:15 George was a waste of oxygen and her sons wouldn't dare follow his example. To prevent any generational backsliding into sin, Augusta became a one woman morality boot camp. Daily Bible lessons served as her weapon of choice. Often spotlighting verses about immorality, divine retribution, and everything that made eternal damnation sound like a guaranteed summer vacation. And if Augusta had a personal arch-nemesis, it wasn't alcohol. Though that earned a dishonorable mention, it was lust. Lust, she proclaimed, was the mother of all evils, and women, aside from herself, of course, were its unwitting agents of chaos.

2:59 In the Geen household, morality wasn't just preached. It was policed. While Henry and Ed occasionally ventured into the outside world through school, Augusta's leash remained tight, making friends. That was just fraternizing with sin. The punishment for stepping out of line was swift and brutal. One particularly traumatic example occurred during Ed's teenage years. Augusta caught him in the bathtub in "Join some alone time," we'll say. Her reaction, she stormed in, grabbed him by the genitals and delivered a sermon about the curse of man. The scar at left on Ed wasn't just psychological.

3:41 It was foundational. From that moment, Ed's path was forever marked by his mother's warped morality. Ed didn't just grow up sheltered. He grew up as if the outside world was a raging inferno. And Augusta was the only bucket of holy water that could save him. Every movie made was under her unyielding gaze, and she made it clear. His moral compass pointed to good only because she was holding the map. But even Augusta's iron grip couldn't stop the march of time or morality. When George Gein, her perpetually disappointing husband, finally succumbed to heart failure at 66, Augusta faced a harsh reality.

4:21 Sure, he'd been as reliable as a three-legged chair, but now he was gone, and with him went their main source of income. By then, Henry and Ed were grown men chronologically, anyway, both in their 30s, but still tethered to the farm. Augusta reluctantly loosened her grip, allowed her sons to find odd jobs in the community. To her dismay, both men became likeable fixtures around town. But cracks in the family dynamic began the show. Henry, the older brother, started noticing that the Gein family wasn't exactly normal. By his late 30s, he realized that Augusta wasn't a savior protecting her boys from sin.

5:02 She was a puppet master controlling every aspect of their lives. He even began quietly rebelling by striking up a relationship with a local divorced mother of two, a move that surely had Augusta clutching her pearls. Worse still, Henry started nudging Ed to rethink his blind devotion to their mother. Ed, however, was having none of it. Criticized Augusta blasphemy. For Ed, Augusta was the North Star, guiding his every move, and Henry's attempts at reasoning only drove Ed further into his mother's shadow. Then came the spring of 1944, a fire broke out on the Gein farm, and both brothers rushed to battle the flames.

5:45 With the farm being miles from town, the fire brigade arrived late to the scene. By the time they got there, it wasn't the flames that shocked them. It was what Ed led them to in the field. Henry was dead. His body bore no burns, no signs of being caught in the fire. The corner ruled it as a heart failure, combined with his fixation. But the circumstances surrounding his death left a lingering unease. Whether anyone else felt this unease, Ed clearly didn't. With Henry gone, it was just him and Augusta trapped in their toxic cocoon. With no one else surround to temper her influence, Augusta's control over Ed became absolute.

6:27 By day, she sent him out to earn money, for raiding him if he came back empty handed, or dared to veer off her prescribed path. By night, she softened, just enough to let him share her bed. A strange, codependent ritual that further cemented Ed's inability to see life without her. Together, they spiraled deeper into isolation. Their remote farm becoming a fortress of dysfunction. It was only a matter of time before they're already precarious existence tipped into chaos. For a time, life on the Geen farm limped along in its usual dysfunctional rhythm, until Augusta suffered a debilitating stroke, paralyzed, but still very much in control.

7:10 In spirit, at least, she now depended on Ed as her full-time caretaker. And Ed, ever the devoted son, was glued to her side when an incident in 1945 tipped their lives into chaos. While buying straw at a neighboring farm, Augusta witnessed something that sent her into a fury. The farmer emerged with another woman. A woman he wasn't married to. For Augusta, this was the ultimate moral failing. A front row seat to the very sin she loathed the most. The stress triggered another stroke. This one, fatal. Augusta, the immovable force in Ed's life, was gone.

7:52 With his moral compass shattered, Ed was set adrift, unanchored. His first move preserved Augusta's memory in the most literal way possible. He boarded up the room she used, the entire upper floor and the sitting room, leaving them frozen in time, like a shrine to her oppressive legacy. Meanwhile, the rest of the house descended into squalor, reflecting the unraveling of Ed's mind. Ed didn't need to work anymore, thanks to a farm subsidy from the government, so he cut himself off completely. He filled his days with Nazi-themed articles and stories about Ilsy Koch, the witch of Butchenwald, whose gruesome hobby of crafting household items from human skin struck a disturbing cord with him.

8:37 For nearly a decade, Ed's world shrank to the size of his derelict farm. But then, in the winter of 1957, his hermetic life came crashing down. When 58-year-old hardware store owner, Bernice Warden, vanished from her shop. Her son, the local deputy sheriff, noticed something was off. The cash register was open, blood stained the floor, and the last receipt was for a gallon of antifreeze she sold to none other than Ed Geen. Ed was promptly arrested, and what authorities found that his farm was beyond anything they could have prepared for. Bernice's body had been shot and then hung in a shed, processed like a deer.

9:21 But this was only the beginning. The house was a grotesque treasure trove of human remains, meticulously repurposed into furniture, utensils, and even clothing. Among them, Cobb discoveries were human bones scattered throughout the property, chairs pulsed with human skin, skull bowls, literal skulls turned into bowls, a bin crafted entirely of skin. And Ed's prized piece, a suit made from women's skin, complete with leggings, a torso, and mask. Investigators determined that Ed wasn't just a killer. He was also a grave robber.

10:03 Over the years, he had made more than 40 trips to cemeteries, digging up freshly buried women to harvest body parts for his grotesque projects. Ed confessed to two murders, Bernice Warden and Mary Hogan, a 51-year-old tavern owner who had gone missing the year before. While he was suspected in other disappearances, no concrete evidence tied him to additional murders. And courts, Ed pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, citing schizophrenia as the root of his behavior. The courts agreed, and he was sent to a hospital for the criminally insane. After nearly a decade of treatment, Ed was declared fit to stand trial for Bernice Warden's murder.

10:47 The trial lasted a week, and while he was found guilty, the judge ultimately ruled that Ed was still insane. This technicality spared him from a prison sentence, sending him back to the institution where he would spend the rest of his life. Ed died in 1984 at the age of 77, leaving behind a legacy of horror that continues to haunt true crime lore. His twisted devotion to Augusta and the unimaginable crimes that spawned cemented his place as one of the most infamous figures in American history. [MUSIC PLAYING] That's 10-minute murder for today.

11:28 Brief and bingeable true crime. I'm Joe, the host. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. If you're a new subscriber, welcome. Make sure you are subscribed on all the platforms that you'd like to listen to podcasts and connected with the show on social media. Links are at 10-minutemurder.com. And if this story today about Edgene, if you've never heard the name Edgene, first of all, I find that a little bit hard to believe. I think that you have. You just don't realize that you have. Chances are that you do know the name, and you know that Edgene inspired numerous countless horror movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates and Psycho, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lamps. I could go on and on.

12:09 And now, monster, the Netflix series, season three, is going to be coming out. At the time of this recording, it's not out. But it's going to be coming out. Season one was focused on Jeffrey Dahmer. Season two, the focus was the Menendez brothers. So season three is going to be Edgene. And the person playing Edgene, kind of surprising to me. Jack's Teller from Sons of Anarchy. I can never remember that guy's name, Charlie, something. And you're probably shouting right now, trying to tell me. But I can't hear you. Shout louder. No, I starting to get it. But he's going to be playing Edgene, which is weird to me because Charlie's a handsome guy. And it reminds me of when, also named monster, the movie monster with Charlie's Theron, where she played Eileen Mournos, the serial killer.

12:55 They ugly to hurt up real good to play in that movie. So I'm looking forward to that coming out. And I hope it's good. The first two seasons were pretty good. So I think that this one should be good as well. That's going to do it. That is your episode for today and a little reminder. If you're into the brief, bingeable concepts, but not necessarily murders all the time, like you get with 10-minute murder, we're still going to be here. And by we, I mean me, because it's just me. I do another podcast as well. It's called 10-Minute Mystery. Same kind of vibe as this one, but it's about mysteries. So if you enjoy that kind of thing, check it out, 10-Minute Mystery. And if not, that's cool too. Thank you so much for listening to "10 Minute Murder."

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