The Psycho of Plainfield

The Real Story of Ed Gein Separating Fact from Fiction

THE TRUE STORY BEHIND AMERICA’S MOST INFAMOUS KILLER — AND THE LIES WE TELL TO LIVE WITH HIM.

The Psycho of Plainfield: The Real Story of Ed Gein – Separating Fact from Fiction

By Miles Donovan

Before Hollywood turned him into a monster… he was a quiet man in a small town. On a bleak Wisconsin farm, surrounded by frozen earth and religious fear, a son lived under the shadow of a mother who ruled him with sin, shame, and silence. Decades later, when the world discovered what he’d done, it wasn’t just the horror that shocked America — it was the ordinariness. This is not the story you think you know.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTH

Everyone has heard of Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill — but the truth behind Ed Gein is stranger, sadder, and infinitely darker than fiction ever dared to tell. In this groundbreaking investigation, true crime author Miles Donovan strips away the myths, the headlines, and the Hollywood distortion to reveal the real human being behind the American nightmare. Using court records, psychiatric transcripts, and firsthand witness accounts, Donovan reconstructs the full, chilling timeline from Gein’s birth in 1906 to his death in 1984 — not as tabloid fodder, but as forensic history.

INSIDE THE MIND OF AMERICA’S FIRST MODERN MONSTER

The Psycho of Plainfield takes readers deep into the psychology of isolation, repression, and delusion. It explores how Augusta Gein’s fire-and-brimstone sermons built the emotional cage that trapped her son for life. It documents the lonely years after her death, when the farmhouse rotted into a shrine of grief and compulsion. And it reveals how Plainfield, a town desperate to protect its own innocence, allowed evil to grow right under its nose.

THE FIRE THAT WOULDN’T DIE

After Gein’s arrest, the world turned his crimes into legend. The farmhouse burned, but the fascination never did. For generations, Plainfield tried to forget. Yet from the ashes came an entire genre — books, films, and media that transformed one man’s madness into a cultural obsession. This book confronts that obsession head-on, asking the question we’ve avoided for seventy years: Why do we keep resurrecting him?

A MASTERPIECE OF TRUE CRIME INVESTIGATION

Miles Donovan, author of Slashed: The Untold Shocking True Story of Richard Speck and the Night Chicago Screamed and Highway of Horrors: The Truck Stop Killer, brings his signature cinematic style and historical precision to the case that defined the modern American monster. With measured empathy and unflinching realism, he explores the moral collapse of a community, the ethical limits of storytelling, and the haunting aftermath that still lingers in the American psyche.

WHAT THIS BOOK REVEALS:

• The true timeline of Ed Gein’s life — from birth to death, reconstructed entirely from verified sources.
• The truth about Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden — the only confirmed victims whose names deserve to be remembered.
• The forensic psychology behind Gein’s delusions and the psychiatric breakthroughs his case inspired.
• The evolution of the myth — how media, movies, and public fear transformed a man into a monster.

THE LEGEND ENDS WHERE THE TRUTH BEGINS

This isn’t another retelling of a gruesome crime. It’s a reckoning — a journey back to the moment when horror was born in the heart of rural America, and when the line between fact and fiction began to blur forever. Chilling, compassionate, and exhaustively researched, The Psycho of Plainfield is not a story about death. It’s a story about what we choose to remember.

Because every legend begins with a lie… and every truth waits to be found.

Redundant

It was very redundant. Information was repeated numerous times. What was said in 12 hours really could have been said in 5.

Can't put the book down...

It's all here, his life, poetically told. I can't get enough, will listen to it again and again. If you are into serial killers and understanding the mind of the mentally individual, look no further. The story is emotionally and sympathetically thought out going deep into the trauma of his life and how his experience affected him to become what he did. Feel so sorry for him.

Repetitious to a fault

Borrowed this to hear an overview of the Ed Gein story, what I got 3 hours in was repeating the same general points over and over again, merely changing a few words in the phrase. The last 40mins its mention Ed and how he worshipped his mother in at least 20 different ways. And how the town was small and pious by ed was quiet and respectful another 30times

Repeats the same things

This book is a hot mess, it claims to be 100% truthful and separate fact and fiction but the author uses a lot of imagination writing this book. Lines are often repeated several times in a single chapter.

I didn't like it

Waste of time. Ridiculously repetitive. Writer seems to be trying to use every adjective and metaphor he knows