Ed Gein lived alone on a farm outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, until police searching his property in November 1957 found human body parts, furniture upholstered in skin, and bowls made from skulls. This film reconstructs how a quiet, socially withdrawn handyman became the source of some of the era's worst rumors, tracing his habit of digging up recently buried women from local cemeteries to take skin and bones for what he called trophies. It follows the two killings authorities could actually prove: tavern owner Mary Hogan, who vanished in 1954, and Bernice Worden, the Plainfield hardware store owner Gein shot in 1957, whose disappearance led investigators to his farmhouse. The film lays out the discovery scene, the exhumation records, and Gein's own confession, and treats the case as the direct source material behind decades of horror-film killers modeled on him. Gein was committed rather than executed, and died in a state hospital in 1984.