| Ed Gein spent most of his life locked in the Mendota Asylum. Mendota Asylum was it's title when it opened in 1860. According to the administrative staff of this historic asylum situated in Wisconsin where Ed Gein lived the facility went through name changes to accomodate the norms accorded to mental disabilities and madness. With the new standards for mental illness and the drug therapies available to patients such as Ed Gein would be in later years the Mendota Asylum became the Mendota Mental Health Institute. Yet in later years the Ed Gein Asylum in Mendota was renamed to Mendota State Hospital. The Plainfield Butcher was transferred here after the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane was converted to a prison starting in 1975 and renamed Dodge Correctional Institute[1].
Side note - Mendota State Hospital is situated on the shores of Mendota Lake and on a sacred ground of sorts. On this land there exists to this day the remains an ancient bird effigy mound. These mounds are remnants of camps built by travellers of the past. They are food storehouses and are numerous throughout the states. These are spiritual places for many Native Americans. Thunderbirds are especially sacred to the Natives and stories abound of the power of this heavenly flying creature[2].
But that is all mythological stuff and certainly it had no incline on the mental disposition of Mr Ed Gein or on the staff who treated the famed ghoulish serial killer of Wisconsin.
  Five foot five Edward Theodore Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield was born on August 27, 1906 and lived on a farm with his mother Augusta Gein (Lehrke), his father George, and his brother Henry Gein. Plainfield is some 75 miles from Mendota. The Gein family lost their father in 1940. Henry Gein died in 1944 and some stories have it that Ed might have started his life of serial crime by killing his own brother. Brother Gein died in a bush fire and other stories have it that Ed was the last to see Henry alive!!! County coroners listed the death of Henry Gein as asphyxiation.
Mother Gein was a religious women of Lutheran influence. Her message to the boys was that women and alcohol were the work of the devil and that they should be stayed away from. Henry tended to disagree and the story goes that Ed sided with mother Gein on the women prostitute issue. Mother Gein died in 1945 and Ed Gein inherited the farm. But Ed had no social skills and he had spent most of his life attaching himself deeply to his mother. Ed had however learnt to read which was likely a skill that added to his being picked on as a stereotypical geek in an age where reading was sissy.
Ed Gein was alone in a big farmhouse. Weird Eddie neglected the farmhouse and the yard, all except that portion dedicated to his dead mother. He began doing more handyman work in the Plainfield area. In 1945 Ed was 39 years of age.
House of Horror Stuns
 By 1957 the truth of the plainfield butcher came to light. Life Magazine of December 2, 1957 carried an article story where it describes Plainfield, Wisconsin as a small quiet town that had never attracted much attention until 1954 when Mary Hogan, a local girl who ran a tavern had disappeared. Even the excitement of the Hogan event had nearly vanished until the story of a 51 year old bachelor and sometimes babysitter turned monstrous killer re-established the interest of America.
A sheriff (Arch Sly - A&E) was investigating the disappearance of a local citizen, Bernice Worden, who was owner of the town's hardware store. The Sheriff interrogation started with the son of Mrs. Worden who quickly pieced together the name Ed Gein as suspect. A sales receipt for anti-freeze with the Butcher's name on it was enough to lead the sheriff to the Gein farm where the rest of this story becomes callously sickening.
The graphic forensic evidence found on the farmland included the dismembered bodies of both Worden and Hogan. But further crime scene investigation soon revealed the remains of 10 other human heads. Recall that this Life Magazine article is being written while forensic detectives, media people, medical field experts, and Americans in general are being exposed to the gruesome revelations coming out of Wisconsin.[3]
From the same article we are told that Gein revealed to his Lawyers that he'd often wished he'd been a women and that the skulls were taken from the local cemetary. Gein's grave robbing confession would later prove to be true.
The response of psychiatrists to the serial killing acts of the Plainfield Butcher was that he seemed to present the tendencies and mental incapacitation of the schizophrenic or split personality. In his case, a man tortured by the confusion between his male obsession to be a female and his love and hate for the opposite sex. Psychiatrists were also mentioning necrophilia or the love of the dead as a Gein case for madness or insanity.
These psychiatric evaluations would be brought before a judge in time and would determine the future fate of Ed Gein.
"Eddie was always talking crazy like that".
Journalists who interviewed townspeople who'd dealt with Ed Gein found that "Eddie" as some called him had a tendency to be overly focused on topics of death and of the methods police or law enforcement detectives always seemed to "butcher up" (pun) such cases. Ed had taken to reading anything he could find on the anatomy of the human body, embalming, and on crime. His madness had pushed him to making art from the remains of corpses. His cup was a skull. His idea of an afghan type seat cover was one made from the skin of the dead victim.
District Attorney Earl Kileen
While Ed Gein was undergoing mental psychiatric assessments at the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane in Dodge County, Lawyer and District Attorney Earl Kileen was getting him to disclose evidence. Meanwhile Crime Lab Chief Charles Madison is busy checking the Gein farm and Deputy Sheriff Hank Sherman is using X rays to identify the skulls.
Earl Kileen gets his confessions and looks to close the case by declaring the Plainfield Butcher insane and incompetent for trial but others won't hear of it.
Gein in court
The judge ruled with Lawyer Earl Kileen plea of insanity on June 16, 1958. The Plainfield Butcher's asylum days began in Waupun, Wisconsin, at the Central State Hospital. By 1968 he'd been officially diagnosed as schizophrenic and a new trial again found him mentally incompetent and insane. By 1978 he would be transferred to the Mendota State Hospital when the Dodge County Prison took over the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane. Ed Gein was supposedly a quiet and model patient and he remained incarcerated until his death on July 26, 1984.
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Other notes on Ed Gein
- aka - The Plainfield Butcher - Grandfather of Gore - The Plainfield Ghoul - The Ghoul of Plainfield
- might have been 5 foot seven
- might have killed a few hunters who went missing
- the band Slayer wrote a song called "Dead Skin Mask" which may have been inspired by the Gein serial killings
- might have been cannabalistic
- rock group Macabre wrote a song "Ed Gein"
- Ed Gein of Grindcore is supposedly named after the Butcher
- "Nothing to Gein" is Mudvayne's legacy to the serial killer
- "Ed Gein's Car" was the name of a punk rock group
- Bunny Gibbons got thrills working sideshows with the insane's beat up Ford pickup. "the car that hauled the dead from their graves".
- Several movie makers were inspired by the serial killers sickness
- Psycho
- Ed and His dead mother
- Silence of the Lambs
- Motor Hell
- Deranged
- Maniac
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre
- Three on a Meathook
- House of 1000 corpses
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