Murder of Bernice Worden by Ed Gein

On November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden, a 58-year-old hardware store owner in Plainfield, Wisconsin, disappeared from her shop. Her son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, discovered the store's cash register open and blood on the floor that evening. He told investigators that Ed Gein, a local farmer, had been in the store the previous evening and was expected to return for a gallon of antifreeze; a sales slip for that purchase was the last receipt Worden had written. Gein was arrested that night at a nearby grocery store, and the Waushara County Sheriff's Department searched his farm.

Deputies found Worden's decapitated body hung upside down in a shed on Gein's property, with mutilations made after her death. A search of Gein's house recovered numerous items fashioned from human remains, including furniture upholstered in human skin, bowls and masks made from skulls and facial skin, and other remains later identified as belonging to Worden and to Mary Hogan, a 51-year-old tavern owner who had disappeared in December 1954. During interrogation, Gein admitted to shooting Hogan, though he said he had no memory of the details of her death. He also admitted to exhuming bodies from local cemeteries between 1947 and 1952, targeting graves of recently buried middle-aged women he believed resembled his mother, and using their skin and bones to create keepsakes, including a "woman suit." He stated he had visited graveyards as many as forty times and admitted to robbing nine graves; investigators exhumed three test graves and found Gein's account largely corroborated.

Gein was questioned about several other unsolved disappearances in Wisconsin, including those of Georgia Jean Weckler, Evelyn Grace Hartley, Victor Harold Travis, and James Walsh, but lie detector tests did not implicate him in these cases, and no charges related to them were brought.

Gein was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder on November 21, 1957, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was initially found incompetent to stand trial due to schizophrenia and was committed to a psychiatric facility. In 1968, doctors determined he was competent, and his trial began on November 7 of that year before Judge Robert H. Gollmar, sitting without a jury at the defense's request. On November 14, 1968, Gollmar found Gein guilty of murdering Bernice Worden. In a subsequent phase addressing his sanity, Gollmar ruled Gein not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered him committed to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Gein was never tried for the killing of Mary Hogan, to which he had confessed, reportedly due to the cost of a second trial.

Gein remained institutionalized for the rest of his life and died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute on July 26, 1984, of respiratory failure secondary to lung cancer. He is buried in Plainfield Cemetery.