Arguably, no other serial killer has held the cinematic imagination captive more than the notoriously deranged Ed Gein, who was finally captured in the 1950s.
The Wisconsin-born criminal helped inspire some of the films’ most demonic creations.
One is Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous Norman Bates character featured in Psycho.
Other notable horror films include Silence of the Lambs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which also drew inspiration from Gein’s life.
Born to a fervently Lutheran mother, and raised on an isolated farm, both Gein and his brother were subjected to hours-long lectures on the evil of drinking, the innate immorality of women whom she believed were prostitutes by nature and instruments of the devil.
The boys read aloud with their mother awfully graphic passages from the New Testament daily, and were not allowed to make friends.
In school, Gein was shy, and his colleagues remember him as being a bit of an odd duck, prone to random spasms of laughter, talking to himself, and so on.
While the exact timeline of Gein’s crimes as a serial killer is a bit muddled, it seems that his most insane episodes began when his mother died, and he began creating what was called a “woman suit” so that he could become his mother by literally crawling into her skin.
So, in addition to being a serial killer, Ed Gein’s most notable crimes involved exhuming corpses from the nearby cemetery, to play with the skin and bones he found.
Upon Gein’s capture, local law enforcement found a ghastly accouterment of body parts in his home, all given various uses; bowls made from human skulls, a corset made from a female torso’s skin, leggings cut from human skin, masks made from the skin of female heads, and a lampshade made from a human face, amongst other horrifying creations.
Shortly before Ed Gein would take the stand in the criminal case against him, the local sheriff in charge of his case died of a heart attack; his family blamed the scarring images he saw as the prime reason behind his untimely death.
