Serial Killer Sunday (#2)

#"I'll make a shoehorn outta your skin
I'll make a lampshade of durable skin
And oh, don't you know that I'm always feelin' able
When I'm sittin' home and I'm carving out your navel#
Skinned by Blind Melon

Born Edward Theodore on 27 August 1906 to George and Augusta Gein. The younger brother of Henry Gein, Ed Gein has been the inspiration behind many memorable movie serial killers -- including Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. The latter is one of the more accurate portrayals of the mass murderer who made 'suits' from the skin of his victims, and made ornaments out of their skulls.

Gein's childhood is almost undoubtedly where it all began -- although as ever with this type of depravity, one can't help but wonder if someone could just be born bad. Gein's father, George Gein, was a hopeless and timid alcoholic while his mother, Augusta, was feverishly puritanic and endlessly warned her sons against the sins of the flesh, and the inherent evil of women. Although she had their best interests at heart with her dire warnings of the pits of hell, and preached of the evils of alcohol and lust, one can't help but feel it may have been taken a little too far.

Gein's brother Henry died four years after their father died of a heart attack. By all accounts, Henry grew up fine and wanted a normal life of his own -- perhaps a wife and family, and to move away. He apparently also made the mistake of bad-mouthing their mother to his younger brother. In 1944 the fire service were called to a bursh fire at the Gein farm. On their arrival, Gein claimed his brother was missing, although he lead them to where his body lay. The cause of death was put down as asphxiation from the smoke.

Gein spent the next year living alone with his mother in their farmhouse, and the inspiration for the movie Psycho apparently comes from their relationship, where Augusta would tell her son what a waste he was and compare him to his father, in between praising him and letting him share her bed. Her death from cancer a year later, following a series of strokes, probably didn't do Gein's mental stability a lot of good.

With the assistance of an accomplice, known only as Gus, who worked at a local cemetary, Gein mutilated the bodies of a number of women. He apparently favoured the older, plump women who reminded him of his own mother -- and it was from these that he began making his gruesome trophies. The details of these I won't go into here, there are some things I just won't talk about in public, after all.

In a move that may have been inevitable, when 'Gus' was moved to an old people's home and could no longer help Gein with his nocturnal activities -- which, incidentally, went unnoticed, Gein moved from grave robbing to murder.

A number of missing persons in the area were left unsolved after bodies were never found, and although after his arrest Gein was later a suspect, he denied killing more than two people.

Gein spent 10 years in a mental institution, before being declared mentally competent to stand trial for his crimes. Despite being found guilty, it was ruled that he had been insane at the time of the murders and he was sent back to hospital where he was apparently a model patient. He died of cancer in 1984, and was buried alongside his mother in the same cemetary he had desecrated during his lifetime.