Ed Gein (August 27, 1906 - July 26, 1984) was one of the most notorious serial killers of the United States. Although he may have committed only three murders, what he did to his victims shocked the world.
Police investigating the disappearance of a store clerk named Bernice Worden in Plainfield, Wisconsin on November 16, 1957 suspected Gein to be involved. When they entered his house, they found the body of the store clerk butchered in the summer kitchen like a recently killed deer. Searching the house, they found severed heads in the bedroom, skin used to make lampshades and chair seats, skulls made into soup bowls, a human heart in the frying pan, a necklace of human lips, a waistcoat made up of a vagina and breasts which he used in rituals, and many more items fashioned from the parts of human bodies including a belt fashioned from nipples.
Under questioning, Gein freely admitted that he would dig up the graves of recently buried young women and take the bodies home where he tanned their skin to make his macabre possessions. He was pronounced insane and spent the rest of his days in a mental institution where he died of natural causes. He was buried in the graveyard he had spent much of his life desecrating.
It is believed that his domineering mother may be part of the reason Gein turned out the way he did.
The crimes of Ed Gein became widely known because they inspired the novel Psycho by Robert Bloch, which became an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
The crimes also inspired the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as parts of The Silence of the Lambs (in the form of character Buffalo Bill).
A non-fiction account of the story of Ed Gein is Harold Schechter's Deviant.
