Hear ‘Mad Butcher’ Ed Gein’s voice for first time in new docuseries

A new docuseries about OG serial killer Ed Gein offers fresh insight into the mind of “The Mad Butcher” — told, in parts, by Gein himself in never-before-heard audiotapes.

“Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein,” premiering Sept. 17 on MGM+, uses the tapes, unearthed in 2019, to delve into the mind of Gein, who was arrested in November 1957 in desolate Plainfield, WI. Authorities entering his woodshed and adjoining house discovered a horrific scene: human heads; furniture, lamps and mugs fashioned out of human skin and skulls; human face masks; a heart in a frying pan; a belt made of nipples; and the body of a local woman, Bernice Worden, hanging in Gein’s woodshed — gutted and dismembered like a dead deer.

“Put yourself back in 1957,” said “Lost Tapes” director/executive producer James Buddy Day (“Fall River”). “Ed Gein is arrested and the sheriff and deputies go into his house and never comprehended anything like what they were seeing … so they take him back to the jail and don’t know what to do so they call a local judge who lives down the road and he walks over with a recorder.”

“They start recording Ed as all this was happening and, when they were done, the judge didn’t know what to do with the tapes so he left them in his office in his safe and they made their way into a safety deposit box,” Day said. “Years after he died, his family felt they should do something with them because they’re history. That’s how they came to light in 2019.”

The docuseries includes interviews with experts in necrophilia, psycho-criminal behavior, two authors who’ve written books about Gein and others: they all say that hearing the killer’s voice is a major breakthrough in the much-documented case.

“It’s a game-changer for me,” Day said. “Any time you’re able to discover a piece of evidence or a recording that personifies [a serial killer] on a level like that is remarkable. And what’s so interesting about these tapes are that they’re a window into the Gein case — they’re being recorded right as he’s being arrested and [Gein and the authorities] are reacting to what they found in his house in real time.”

Gein, around 51 at the time, was considered a local oddball raised by an overbearing, puritanical mother, Augusta — who died about a decade before — and alcoholic, abusive father (also dead). He had been robbing local graves for years and was suspected of (but never charged with) killing his older brother, Henry, so he could have Augusta all to himself.

The Gein case inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie “Psycho” — with mother-obsessed motel owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) — Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and brilliant killer cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).

“It’s really the first time in American history where a serial killer is caught … and becomes part of the culture,” Day said. “There were other American serial killers before — Albert Fish and HH Holmes — but that was before movies, TV, before mass media. Even the first true-crime book, Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ [about the Clutter murders in Kansas] comes out in 1959 right after Gein is caught and right before ‘Psycho’ comes out.

“It’s a true inflection point, for sure.”

Day said the “Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein,” also tackles the question of whether serial killers are born or made.

“There’s definitely good science that shows that psychopaths have genetic components, and a lot of science that shows they are made in a much as they are born,” he said.

“I think with Ed Gein he was … born in a very isolated part of the country, his life was isolated, he was raised by a fanatical mother; I can’t imagine anyone else going through what he went through and coming out differently.

“It was like the perfect storm.”

Gein, who pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent to a Wisconsin hospital for the criminally insane and stood trial (sans jury) in 1968. He was sent to Central State Hospital for the criminally insane where he remained until his death in 1984 at the age of 77.

But, in all that time, the public never heard his voice — and now he’s speaking for the first time from beyond the grave.

“[Documentary filmmaker] Errol Morris was planning to make a documentary about Wisconsin serial killers but the project never came to fruition,” Day said. “It was reported that he interviewed Ed in prison but it never saw the light of day.”

“I think the reason no one recorded [Gein] was that true crime was just not a thing then, except for [Charles] Manson,” he said. “We now have a better scope of serial killers and psychopathology.”