DESCRIPTION:
Ed Gein, an American murderer and grave robber. His crimes, which he committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, garnered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin.

His real-life case influenced the creation of several fictional serial killers, including Norman Bates from Psycho, Jame Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs, and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Gein tried to make his mother happy, but she was rarely pleased with her boys. She often abused them, believing that they were destined to become failures like their father. During their teens and throughout their early adulthood, the boys remained detached from people outside of their farmstead, and so had only each other for company.

After his brother's death, Gein lived alone with his mother, who died on December 29, 1945, following a series of strokes, at which time Gein "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world."

Shortly after his mother's death, Gein had decided he wanted a sex change and began to create a "woman suit" so he could pretend to be a female. Gein's practice of donning the tanned skins of women was described as an "insane transvestite ritual".

On November 16, 1957, Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared, and police had reason to suspect Gein. Worden's son had told investigators that Gein had been in the store the evening before the disappearance.

Upon searching Gein's property, investigators discovered Worden's decapitated body in a shed, hung upside down by ropes at her wrists, with a crossbar at her ankles. The torso was "dressed out" like that of a deer. She had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations performed after death.

Searching the house, authorities found a number of items:
- Four noses
- Whole human bones and fragments
- Nine masks of human skin
- Bowls made from human skulls
- Ten female heads with the tops sawed off
- Human skin covering several chair seats
- Mary Hogan's head in a paper bag
- Bernice Worden's head in a burlap sack
- Nine vulvas in a shoe box
- Skulls on his bedposts
- Organs in the refrigerator
- A pair of lips on a draw string for a windowshade

On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home, where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia. Gein admitted robbing nine graves.

He was found to be legally insane, he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital.
On July 26, 1984, Gein died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer.