TWISTED KILLER TURNED HOLLYWOOD HORROR
EDWARD GEIN’S HORRIFIC CRIMES HAVE INSPIRED A GENERATION OF FILMS
The quiet township of Plainfield, Wisconsin, was put on the map for a very chilling reason. One of its residents, a shy and unassuming man named Edward Gein, would go on to become one of America’s most notorious killers and body-snatchers.
Gein was born in 1906 to abusive and severely religious parents George and Augusta.
Despite their fractured family life, Gein was strangely obsessed with his mother Augusta. When his father died in 1940, followed by his brother Henry’s suspicious death in 1944, Gein had his mother all to himself.
The pair lived in a run-down farm in sleepy Plainfield until Augusta died the following year after a stroke. Her passing left Gein desolate.
In the words of his biographer, Harold Schechter,
Gein had “lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world”.
Turning his home into a shrine for his late mother, Gein boarded up rooms she had used and left the rest of his living quarters squalid.
Aside from sporadic work as a handyman around town, Gein kept to himself. It wasn’t until November 1957 that he came to the attention of police.
A shopkeeper named Bernice Worden went missing – and it was discovered Gein was her last-known customer at the hardware store.
Police arrived at the dilapidated farmhouse to question Gein, unaware of the atrocities they were about to uncover. Inside his shed, they found a decapitated Bernice hanging upside down by her ankles, with her internal organs clumsily removed.
But Bernice’s dismembered corpse was just the opening act of Gein’s sick and twisted theatre of cruelty. While searching the house, authorities found human bones and organs in the refrigerator, a heart on the stove, bowls made from human skulls, chairs sewed together with human skin and a lampshade made from a face.
After Augusta’s 1945 death, Gein had become fixated on recreating her out of corpses. He admitted to police that he’d dug up graves of recently deceased women who reminded him of his mother to make a gruesome skin suit.
Investigators found the remains of 10 women inside his home, however he was only linked to the murders of Bernice and missing tavern owner Mary Hogan. Gein confessed to both murders, admitting to killing Bernice after robbing her store and to shooting Mary at her bar.
He was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and was sent to a hospital for the criminally insane. In 1968, Gein was deemed fit to stand trial but was ultimately found guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in a facility before his death in 1984, aged 77.
The infamous killer inspired a generation of cult Hollywood horror films and TV shows. Gein’s crimes were the muse behind Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel.
He was also the basis of fictional serial killers Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, and Dr Oliver Thredson in American Horror Story: Asylum.
Norman Bates’ unnatural relationship with his mother in Psycho was inspired by Gein, while Leatherface used human skin masks in the 1974 film.
“I definitely studied Gein,” said The Texas Chainsaw Massacre screenwriter Kim Henkel.
Ed Gein’s crimes have been immortalised in a way he could never achieve with his mother.