Augusta Gein, the woman who drove a man Psycho

A movie had just been released that is billed as “the beginning” of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This cult classic, along with Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho and other films, was inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein.

This seems like a appropriate time to review the life of Ed Gein or perhaps more pertinently, “the beginning” of his ghastly life. Ed Gein is the classic case of a man driven “psycho” by a woman — his mother, Augusta Gein.

Gein’s crimes came to light in 1957.

Bernice Worden was a stocky, bespectacled middle-aged woman who ran a store in the hamlet of Plainfield, Wisconsin, a town that had only several hundred residents. Her adult son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, discovered her missing from the store. He looked for her and found the cash register missing. Then he saw that the area around the counter was ominously spattered with blood.

Mr. Worden phoned other officers and said, “He’s done something to her.” They asked who and he replied, “Eddie Gein.”

Gein seemed an odd person to finger as a potential abductor. He was a pleasant, shy, well-mannered bachelor. He only drank an occasional beer. He never swore.

However, Frank Worden suspected him because Bernice had complained about his pestering to get her to go out with him.

Of course it was Gein as a horrified world would soon learn. Gein had shot and killed Bernice Worden, decapitated her, and hung the headless body upside down from the rafters of his kitchen. It soon emerged that Gein was also the killer of Mary Hogan, a middle-aged tavern owner, who had disappeared from a nearby town a few years earlier.

Other murders would be attributed to him but these are the only he is known with certainty to have committed.

Perhaps even more shocking than the two killings was the state of Ed Gein’s home. Most of the abode was filthy and cluttered but what it was cluttered with made the normal mind reel as Gein had filled his house with body parts taken from grave robberies. The body parts had been taken from the graves of middle-aged and older women.

This extraordinarily sensational case would be even more sensationalized with wide reports of cannibalism. However, Harold Schechter, who wrote Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho, has stated that there is no evidence that Gein ever ate human flesh. Perhaps the perception of Gein-the-cannibal is a result of seeing him as such a monster that every possible monstrosity was attributed to him.

One part of the house Gein’s house not cluttered. The bedroom and parlor of Augusta Gein, Ed Gein’s deceased mother, the area had been sealed off from the rest of the dwelling. When it was exposed to view, was found to be perfectly tidy. As Schecter astutely wrote, “After the unholy squalor of the rest of the house, the very neatness of these rooms was intensely unsettling.” Alfred Hitchcock captured that sense of eeriness in Psycho when Lila Crane (Vera Miles) ventures into the room of Norman Bates’ “Mother.”

The origin of Ed Gein’s madness turned out to lie in the overly close relationship of Ed to his beloved mother, Augusta.

Edward Theodore Gein was born in Le Crosse, Wisconsin August 27, 1906, the second child of George and Augusta Gein.

George Gein was a hard drinking man who drifted from job to job, selling insurance, doing carpentry and working as a tanner, in a power plant, and at a railway. Despite his boozing, George had a ramrod straight posture and dignified manner that could make a positive impression.

At 24, George met a 19-year-old named Augusta upon whom he evidently made such an impression.

Augusta was a large-breasted, heavyset young woman with a broad face. She had been brought up in a deeply religious Lutheran household. Augusta had been especially close to her strict father who took seriously the Biblical injunction that to “spare the rod” is to “spoil the child.”

George and Augusta Gein married December 4, 1899. The marriage was troubled from the start. George’s drinking meant he had trouble keeping a job. He drank the couple’s money away and Augusta furiously derided him. Not a verbal person, George responded to her tirades by alternating giving her the silent treatment or hitting her.

Their sex life was never good, in part because of Augusta’s extreme beliefs on the subject. She believed fornication and adultery were the worst of sins. She saw sex even within marriage as a distasteful, an expression of a husband’s vile lust and a duty a wife performed for the sake of procreation. For all her Bible reading, Augusta appeared to have overlooked or disregarded the Song of Solomon with is richly sensuous and frankly erotic paean to sexual desire and enjoyment between husband and wife. Nor does she appear to have realized the full implications of the phrase in Genesis describing married people as “one flesh.”

However, Augusta yearned for a baby so she did her sexual duty, distasteful as it was.

George and Augusta’s first son, Henry, was born January 17, 1902.

His birth gave Augusta someone upon whom to lavish affection but it did not improve the Gein marriage. George Gein continued to bounce from job to job and Augusta continued to harangue him.

Augusta decided that the solution to George’s employmnet difficulties was for him to go into business for himself. In 1909, George became the owner of a small grocery store. A classic “mom and pop” operation, Augusta did much of the work as George would not give up liquor and apply himself to the business.

The birth of Henry had not assuaged Augusta’s longings. She believed it might be because he was a boy. Augusta was a man-hater but her misandry does not appear to have been “feminist.” Rather, her severe anti-sexual feelings led her to hate men because they caroused around, committing fornication and adultery. Her stern religiosity led her to despise the sex that so frequently took the Lord’s name in vain.

Augusta believed a little girl would be much easier to bring up in what she considered traditionally proper ways. A female would be far more likely to be chaste and pious, sober and obedient.

She again allowed George to have sex and again got pregnant. She prayed for a girl.

But she gave birth to Edward Theodore Gein.

She was bitterly disappointed when she learned her child was a boy. However, as Schechter writes, “Augusta was not the kind to give in to despair. She was made of stronger stuff. And so she took the swaddled newborn in her arms and made a sacred vow. This one would not grow up to be like all the rest of them. Men. Those lustful, swearing, foul-mouthed creatures who made use of women’s bodies in such filthy ways, This one, she promised, would be different. Augusta would see to that.”

When the adult Ed Gein was asked about his mother, tears would inevitably fill his eyes. She was so good, he would say, so pure and pious. She was exactly what a woman should be.

When Eddie was seven, Augusta decided that the family must leave La Crosse. She believed the city was a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, full of fornication and adultery. Her sons must not be exposed to such degradation as she was determined to bring them up to be free of sexual sin.

The Geins had accumulated enough money to purchase a small farm. Late in 1913, the family bought a small dairy farm about forty miles east of La Crosse.

For reasons that are not known, the family moved again in 1914 to a farm in Plainfield.

Augusta was pleased with the most recent acquisition. The farm was 195 acres and boasted a fairly nice two-story house along with a barn, a chicken coop, and an equipment shack.

Its isolation was a big plus because here Augusta could keep her precious sons safe from the temptations of Plainfield itself. She believed sinful, ungodly activities, particularly sexual activities, were rampant in the town.

A fastidious housekeeper, Augusta kept the home squeaky clean and neat as a pin. She believed in the maxim that “cleanliness is next to godliness” and no one was more determined to be godly than Augusta Gein.

Although Augusta wanted to keep her boys as far away from earthly temptations as she could, there was no way to avoid sending them to school since it was compulsory.

Little Eddie was an average student. He soon acquired a special fondness for reading that he would maintain throughout his life.

However, he did not enjoy school. As Schecter writes, Eddie “had a fat, fleshy growth on the corner of his left eyelid. It wasn’t really disfiguring, but it made his eyelid droop.” Some children teased Eddie about the eyelid. He was shy and hung back from groups. He could not make friends.

Occasionally, he would find a child that he hoped to befriend. When he got home, he would tell Mom about the kid. She would inevitably raise objections, saying the proposed pal was from a family with a bad reputation.

The marriage between George and Augusta, never warm, was getting increasingly fractious. He retreated into drink and she into an ever more fervent and narrow religiousness. Fights were frequent and bitter but divorce was out of the question. As Schecter notes, “Divorce was unthinkable, a fundamental violation of her religious beliefs.” To Augusta Gein, life was not something to be enjoyed but a series of burdens to be borne. She did her duty no matter what.

As Henry and Ed grew into adolescence, Augusta made an extra effort to ensure these boys did not fall into the ways of sin like other young men. Modern women were a bunch of brazen hussies, she would tell the boys, and these evil creatures must be righteously shunned.

Often Augusta read out loud to Henry and Ed directly from the Bible. Almost always, she read warnings against lustful iniquity.

A favorite passage was Revelation 17: 3-5. It stated, “So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, ‘MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

Augusta also liked to recite Proverbs 5:3-4 to her sons:
“The lips of a strange woman drop honey,
And her mouth is smoother than oil;
But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword.”

Augusta frequently asked her sons to swear that they would remain sexually pure. The dutiful boys affirmed that they would.

In 1940, George Gein passed away at the age of 66. It is unlikely he was deeply mourned by his widow or sons. In 1942, 36-year-old Ed Gein got a draft notice. He went to Milwaukee for the physical exam and the military rejected him due to the growth on his eyelid because it caused slight problems with his vision.

Back to home, Henry, and Mom. In 1944, Henry was killed in a brush fire near the Gein farmhouse. Although later many suspected Ed, it was never proven that he caused his brother’s death.

So then it was just Ed and Mom. As Tony Perkins playing Gein-inspired Norman Bates in “Psycho” would say, “A boy’s best friend is his mother” and they were each other’s primary company.

However, Augusta suffered a stroke soon after her elder’s son unexpected death. She was able to come home from the hospital but was disabled. Ed tended to her every need. As she had so often read the Bible to her sons, she now requested that Ed read it to her as he sat by her bedside.

Under Eddie’s dedicated ministrations, Augusta began to recover. She was back to walking and even doing some household and farm chores. It was 1945 and Augusta noted that they needed straw.

Eddie and Augusta went to a neighbor named Smith to buy it. When their vehicle pulled into Smith’s yard, they saw him violently beating a dog with a stick. A woman came out of the house and screamed at Smith to leave the poor pooch alone. Smith beat the dog to death.

Augusta was extremely upset by this scene. What bothered her did not appear to be the brutality toward the dog but the presence of the woman. Augusta told Ed that the woman was not married to Smith and so had no business being there. “Smith’s harlot,” Augusta angrily called her.

It always seemed to Ed that Augusta’s emotional upheaval over this apparently unmarried relationship is what contributed to the second, and fatal, stroke she suffered later that week.

Augusta had sown the seeds of Ed’s madness. But she had also been his one human connection. Without her, the lonely and isolated man descended into true insanity. However, that craziness would be of a special sort not evident to his neighbors who continued to see him as shy, quiet, pleasant Eddie Gein.

Until Frank Worden found that his own mother was missing.

Although Ed Gein is often called a serial murderer, Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan are his only known victims. Both were stout, older women – like his mother. However, in some ways they seemed most unlike his mother to Ed.

In the aftermath of Augusta Gein’s death, Ed pondered long and hard at this cruel injustice. In a world filled with harlots, how could God have allowed his mother, a woman so good and pure, to die?

Mary Hogan bore a physical resemblance to Augusta but Ed thought of the tavern keeper as opposite in personality. She used swear words. He had heard rumors of her immorality, how she had been twice divorced and may even have once been the madam of a brothel! Her very life seemed an affront to the memory of his mother.

Similarly, although Bernice Worden was popular in Plainfield, Ed saw the hearty business owner as a Scarlet Woman. He had heard rumors that, prior to her marriage, Bernice had wooed the man who would become her husband away from another woman and that the disappointed woman had committed suicide as a result. He also believed Bernice Worden had been responsible for the break-up of a marriage.

Ultimately, what is to be learned from the life of Augusta Gein? It may be seen as a confirmation of the old saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It is also a warning on many levels: against “smother-mothering,” against sexual repression, against religious fanaticism, and against a life lived in a “bite-the-bullet, all-work-and-no-play” manner.

It is also a reminder that misandry and misogyny are not necessarily polar opposites but can go hand-in-hand. Like Augusta, the same person who views men as crude and lustful beasts can often view women as temptresses and harlots.

In today’s culture, the pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction from Augusta Gein’s dogmas. Many people, including myself, would like to see less sexual activity. However, looking at Augusta tells us we must exercise great care as to HOW we encourage abstinence. It is easy, yet destructive, to encourage abstinence by inculcating suspicion and hostility of the other gender or of human beings in general. Both young men and young women must be taught how to keep friendships on a “just-friends” basis and how to keep romantic relationships from necessarily becoming physical too quickly. But they must not be abstinent out of a hysterical fear of the flesh or a destructive hostility.

“Just Say No” can turn into its own dangerous form of obsession as shown by the peculiarly one-track mind of Augusta Gein.

Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Augusta Gein, Ed Gein, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.