Ed Gein
(Killings between 1947 and 1957)
Known as history's most inspirational killer with his character
becoming the central theme for many films, including Alfred Hitchcock's
thriller "Psycho", "
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and the character of Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence
of the Lambs" among others. He was a serial killer who would skin his victims, exhume corpses and
decorate his home with parts of his victims' bodies. Human skin was
used to make dustbins, furniture and clothes.
Ed Gein was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on August 27, 1906. He had a weak alcoholic father and a domineering mother who was deeply
religious. He was said to be very attached to her. She taught them
about immorality and the evils of women and sex and discouraged their
sexual desires. In
Plainfield, Ed never left the family farm and lived with his brother
and mother until they had both died by 1945. The day his mother died, Ed was thirty-nine years old and still a
bachelor. Alone in the large house, he kept
his mother's room untouched and locked, just as it had been before she
died. He also sealed off most of the other house, choosing to live only
in a bedroom and the kitchen. Free of his mother's prying eye, he soon began to take an interest
in the female anatomy. Ed found medical books, horror novels,
pornographic magazines, and books on the Nazi medical experiments.
Through this media he was able to thoroughly study that which his
mother had hidden from him for so long. He fantasized about having his
own woman to study, but his social inhibitions disallowed him from
meeting women. A desperate Ed took things a little too far. Ed went to local cemeteries and began digging up female corpses to take
home. He would spend hours studying the corpses and removing parts via
dissection. Sometimes, after removing internal organs and the head, he
would remove the skin and wear it around the house. He also enjoyed
fondling the removed female genitals, sometimes putting them into a
pair of women's underwear, which he wore around the house.
He decided to hunt for another woman in her fifties (about the same age
as his mother when she died) and perform the same practice. His only
known victim was Bernice Worden, who happened to be the mother of the
sheriff's deputy. The deputy heard about Ed being in town (a rare
event) on the same day his mother disappeared and went out to the Gein
house.
When police finally caught up with him, they found - hanging corpse's
with throat and heads missing, bowls made of skull, various pieces of
jewelry made of human skin, hanging lips, skin upholstery for chairs,
masks made of facial skin and vulva, including his mother's, that were
painted silver. The most shocking was his mother's heart that was found
in a pan on the stove. Police counted them as 15 women. Gein told the police that he never had
sex with any of the dead women as "they smelled too bad." His
fascination with women was because of the power they held over men.
Gein was admitted to Waupan State Hospital and died of cancer at the
age of 78.
"She isn't missing. She's at the farm right now." ~Ed Gein