Ed Gein was caught on November 16, 1957, after police linked him to the disappearance of hardware store owner Bernice Worden in Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Quick Scoop

  • Ed Gein became a suspect when Bernice Worden vanished from her hardware store on the morning of November 16, 1957. A sales slip showed Gein had been in the store that morning, which drew immediate attention to him.
  • Police later located and arrested him that same evening, effectively marking the day he was caught.
  • A search of his farmhouse that night revealed Worden’s body and numerous human remains, turning a missing-person investigation into one of the most infamous murder and grave-robbing cases in U.S. history.

A Bit More Context

  • Gein ultimately admitted to killing two women: Mary Hogan (1954) and Bernice Worden (1957), and to exhuming corpses from local graveyards.
  • After his arrest, he was found mentally unfit for trial and committed to a psychiatric hospital, later being judged guilty of murder but not guilty by reason of insanity and remaining institutionalized until his death in 1984.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.

TL;DR: Ed Gein got caught on November 16, 1957, the day Bernice Worden disappeared and police arrested him and uncovered his farmhouse “house of horrors.”