Killer Gein's gravestone stolen

Sheriff thinks stone may appeal to followers on Internet auction site

Last Updated: June 20, 2000

Plainfield - The grave marker for the man whose crimes inspired the Alfred Hitchcock film "Psycho" has been stolen - possibly by someone hoping to market it via the Internet.

Waushara County Sheriff Patrick Fox said he wouldn't be surprised to see Ed Gein's grave marker turn up for sale on an Internet auction site.

Fox also suggested someone with an interest in the occult or satanism could be involved.

"There are people who would pay big bucks for that," the sheriff said.

Gein, described often as a mild-mannered, soft-spoken farmhand, murdered at least one woman and likely more, and he also robbed graves in the Plainfield area in the late 1940s and 1950s.

He was arrested for murder in 1957 when investigators looking into the disappearance of 58-year-old hardware store owner Bernice Worden went to Gein's farmhouse. They found the victim's headless body gutted like a deer and hanging in the home's old summer kitchen.

They also found other ghoulish souvenirs, such as lamp shades and other items sewn from human skin. The story of the reclusive Gein, who kept the room of his late mother just as it was when she died a decade earlier, soon was making international headlines.

Horror writer Robert Bloch's fictionalized character based on Gein later became Norman Bates of Hitchcock's 1960 film classic "Psycho."

After Gein died from cancer in a mental institution nearly 16 years ago, he was buried in one of the cemeteries he once had plundered, not far from Worden's final resting place.

A small stone marker, 15 inches high, 12 inches deep, and 24 inches wide, bearing Gein's name, was placed at his grave some months later.

Betty Petrusky, caretaker of the Plainfield Cemetery from 1969-'96, noticed Gein's stone missing Saturday when she visited her husband's grave.

Petrusky was one of a handful of people who attended Gein's burial. In fact, she and her late husband dug the grave.