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ED GEIN

Edward Gein was born in 1906 and was raised on the family's farm near Plainfield, Wisconsin. A shy, lonely boy, Gein grew to be a reclusive man. His alcoholic father died in 1940 and his domineering, religious mother, Augusta, sternly warned Gein and his brother Henry against premarital sex. When Gein was 38, Henry was found dead on a brush pile. The next year his mother died, and he tried to raise her from the dead by " will power". Failing this, he became depressed. He claimed to have heard her voice talking to him for about a year after she died, and felt that "she was good in every way". In reality she had been a fearsome bible-quoting tyrant who dominated his every waking hour, and warned him to stay away from the women of the town, who were harlots and sinners.

Townspeople knew him as shy Eddie Gein, the local handyman, who was always willing to help out fixing a fence or doing a spot of babysitting. Older children would sit enthralled as he told them morbid ghost stories and said his house was haunted. Most of their parents just thought he was a little crazy, but about as harmless as they come. Eventually, in the face of overwhelming evidence, they began to view him as a cunning and devious killer. The police and psychiatrists questioning him, on the other hand, felt that he hadn't really got the slightest idea what all the fuss was about.

worden's hardware store

Gein took to reading texts on female anatomy and in 1947 he began opening he graves of local women and taking portions of the corpses home, where he preserved them. This activity went undetected for years. In 1954, a local woman vanished, but though he was a suspect, Gein was not arrested. In 1957, the murder of a second middle-aged woman, Bernice Worden, who ran the local hardware store in Plainfield, led to his capture. Her son Frank had returned from a deer-hunting expedition to find evidence of a violent break-in. It being the opening day of the hunting season, most people were out shooting in the woods, but Frank specifically recalled that Ed Gein had specifically asked Bernice if she would be open that day since he'd be calling in to buy some anti-freeze.

Ed's kitchen where Bernice Worden's body was found

Gein, then aged 51, lacked the necessary intellect and fear of pursuit to cover his tracks, so police soon followed the trail to his secluded farmhouse, where, amidst incredible filth and clutter, they found the remains of many women, all put to various utilitarian or decorative uses. The body of Bernice Worden hung in Ed's summer kitchen at the rear of the farmhouse, hung up by the heels, dressed out as a deer would have been. Her head was later found in a sack in the corner, her heart in a bag in front of the stove, and a pile of entrails wrapped up in an old suit on the floor.

bernice worden's corpse

Inside the main house, amid an incredible litter of decaying food, trashy magazines, collections of used chewing gum, and a sink filled with sand were soup bowls made from the sawn-off tops of skulls, a belt of nipples, a shoebox containing noses and another of genitalia - indeed, so many body parts that it was impossible to tell how many people's remains were there. Lampshades, a tom-tom, bracelets, and a wastebasket were all covered in human skin, as were the seats of four straight-backed chairs. By contrast, the rooms that had belonged to Ed's mother, who had been dead for twelve years by then, were just as she'd left them since Gein had long since boarded them shut.

inside ed gein's house

In fact, Gein had quite a fondness for corpses. So much so that he dug them up late at night from local graveyards and took them home to play. Inspired by pulp magazines such as Startling Detective and tales of cannibalism in the south seas, he would strip the face and scalp from each skull, taking care to preserve the skin with oils. Padding out the features with rolled up newspaper, he would hang the faces up on the walls of his home, to be worn later as masks. He made distinctive leggings from pieces of flayed legs,and wore the entire upper torso of a woman as a kind of apron. Sometimes at night, he would venture outside the door of his remote farmhouse dressed in the whole ensemble and dance in the moonlight.

a policeman outside gein's farmhouse

Several graves were opened and found to be empty, and a 40f trench was discovered on Gein's property filled with human remains, together with an ash heap where other body parts had been cremated. The true extent of his activities will never be known.

Though he told psychiatrists that could not remember any details of the murder that he was arrested for, Gein confessed to killing the two women, who, it is rumored, had been selected because they resembled his mother. He noted that, being unmarried, he had never had sexual relations and that as a youth he had contemplated castrating himself. Despite the evidence, he insisted he had not committed necrophilia or cannibalism (due to the smell being "offensive"), but merely decorated himself and his house with female body parts. Found clinically insane and unfit to stand trial for murder, of which he was suspected on another five counts, Gein was locked up for life in a secure institution until his death in 1984, at the age of 78.

A clean shaven Eddie at court

Measured against the popular view of America in the '50s, in which grinning two-car families enjoyed all the pleasures life had to offer and never ran out of petrol, these events seem barely credible. How could a middle-aged bachelor live for years in the middle of a tiny community in a house piled high with corpses, making odd jokes about embalming to his fellow workers, without anyone noticing.

That was the scariest thing about Ed Gein: His apparent ordinariness...