Edward Theodore Geinnote (August 27, 1906 — July 26, 1984) was one of the most notorious American murderers of the 20th century.
Born in Wisconsin in 1906, he was the second of two sons to devout Lutheran parents, George and Augusta Gein. Gein's mother was a dour religious fanatic and Female Misogynist who dominated her husband and two sons, frequently preaching that all sex was sinful and that other women were unrepentant whores. Eventually the family moved to a remote farm on the outskirts of Plainfield, Wisconsin, which would eventually become one of the most infamous addresses in America.
Gein continued to live on the farm into adulthood. When his father died of heart failure, Gein and his brother Henry began taking odd jobs around Plainfield to supplement the family's income; Gein—a shy, awkward man initially considered a harmless eccentric by the locals—got along with children and was often hired to babysit. However, the brothers' newfound exposure to the outside world led to Henry questioning their mother's teachings, and tensions rose within the family when he began seeing a divorced single mother. In May 1944, Henry died while the brothers were burning away brush on the farm. While authorities at the time officially determined that his death was caused by asphyxiation from the fire, no autopsy was conducted and bruises were reportedly seen on Henry's head, raising the possibility that he was Ed's first victim.
Gein's mother suffered a stroke shortly after Henry's death, leading to Gein, ever the dutiful son, devoting his time to her care. She eventually suffered a second, more debilitating stroke (caused by seeing a neighbor in the company of a woman who was not his wife) and passed away in December 1945. Her death devastated Gein as, despite being an abusive tyrant all his life, he genuinely considered her to be the only person he cared about. Driven by grief, he boarded up all of the rooms she had used in their house — the second floor, the living room, the downstairs parlor — and lived an increasingly squalid existence in a small room next to the kitchen. With his mother no longer around to discourage him, he began reading gruesome pulp magazines.
Between 1947 and 1952, Gein broke into local cemeteries and disturbed a total of nine graves belonging to local women who he thought resembled his mother, either removing body parts or the entire corpse. He did this with the aim of constructing a "woman suit" that would enable him to become his mother by symbolically crawling into her skin. After dark he would don the suit and dance in the dooryard of his farm, watching his shadow in the moonlight. From the disinterred corpses he fashioned body parts and pieces of flesh into macabre clothing and furnishings, including but not limited to: a belt made from nipples; lampshades, wastebaskets and upholstery made of skin; a window drawstring pulled by a severed pair of lips; a collection of flayed female faces; a "mammary vest"; and we are surprised you are still reading this.
Gein was arrested in November 1957 following the disappearance of Bernice Worden, the owner of a Plainfield hardware store. Sheriff's deputies ventured onto the Gein farm and discovered Worden's decapitated body, "dressed out like a deer", hung upside down in a shed. A search of the house quickly uncovered Gein's ghastly interior decorating as well as the partial remains of missing tavern owner Mary Hogan, which included a mask made from Hogan's face.
Gein's initial confession was ruled inadmissible because the sheriff, traumatized by what was discovered inside the house, slammed his head and face into a brick wall. Gein claimed no memory of killing Hogan and didn't know whether the murder of Worden had been intentional or accidental, but readily admitted to his serial bodysnatching and activities related to. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and declared unfit to stand trial, resulting in him being detained at state hospitals for eleven years. A trial in 1968 formally determined that Gein was not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was remanded to Wisconsin's Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for the remainder of his life. He died on July 26, 1984, from lung cancer.
Not (officially) a Serial Killer, as he is only confirmed to have killed two people, notwithstanding the suspicious death of his brother, though suspected of up to nine killings which would indeed mean he was a serial killer if true. Also not a necrophile, because, in his words, "They smelled too bad."
Fictional works portraying Ed Gein:
- Gein is perhaps best known for being the basis of several fictional serial killers in horror media: Norman Bates in Psycho (1959), the Narrator in Ratman's Notebooks (adapted in 1971 and 2004 under the title Willard), Ezra Cobb in Deranged (1974), Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
- Features in Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman's short story "Citizen Ed," part of Back in the USSA. An alternate history in which the US becomes a Communist country and the history of the Soviet Union plays out with Americans replacing Russians, Gein becomes a No Historical Figures Were Harmed version of Andrei Chikatilo
; in a Metafictional twist, he also becomes an Expy of Leatherface, in addition to undergoing a Historical Villain Upgrade as never being stopped means he racks up a much higher body count, with one of his vicitms being Harry S. Truman!
- Hitchcock (2012), which follows the titular Alfred Hitchcock's development of his 1960 adaptation of Psycho, shows occasional flashbacks to Gein (Michael Wincott). He also appears in several hallucinations had by Hitchcock.
- The Lordi song ''Deadache" is loosely based on the Ed Gein investigation. Even the dark joke about how his first confirmed kill (a teenager he was minding) was still at his house gets a mention.
- Ed Gein has two films all of his own: a horror movie titled Ed Gein: the Butcher of Plainfeild, and a Dark Comedy titled Ed Gein, the Musical. Both focus on the discovery of Gein's crimes. tBoP is focused on the stretch of time between the murder and mutilation of Mrs. Worden to when he got caught, with his gruesome collection being treated as The Reveal and Gein being discovered by the police in his woman costume. The Musical, meanwhile, is focused on the entire investigation, up to his being locked up in a Bedlam House, with the collection and famous suit never being shown; only the police's reaction to it. It also plays fast-and-loose with his childhood, with Ed being an only child, his mother being depicted as a doting mommy (if a little too interested in her son's sexual development), and his father as an abusive fundamentalist who regularly berated and struck Ed 100 times at little provocation. In truth, George was too drunk to care about much of anything except his next drink, and Agnes was a staunchly Lutheran, sex-adverse harridain (which was why George drank).
- In The Butchers, Ed Gein is one of the serial killers resurrected by the black magic ritual.
- Monster: The Ed Gein Story is the third installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's Anthology Series, Monster (2022), which stars Charlie Hunnam as Gein.
Tropes commonly associated with Ed Gein in fiction:
- Freudian Excuse: The amount of blame that different examinations put on Gein's abusive, domineering mother as the instigator of his crimes (considering that Gein demonstrated an unhealthy attachment to her that supposedly led to his grave robbing and his testimony led law enforcement to the conclusion that he had been trying to literally "become" her by fashioning a skin suit in her likeness) varies, sometimes making him out to be an outright Tragic Monster who could have been a very different person were it not for her influence. Of course, since this is steeped in the outdated psychology of the time he was arrested, plenty of other works make the case that Gein was merely deeply, deeply insane and his actions can't be explained so straightforwardly.
- Gossip Evolution: Given the sordid nature of Gein's crimes, sensationalistic rumors about them quickly began to spread after he was arrested, meaning like many other notorious criminals, the mythos surrounding Gein is filled with unsubstantiated claims and wild exaggerations (not helped by how Gein's own accounts of the events have him repeatedly giving very vague answers or claiming he had no memory of what happened). For a long time, the peculiar nature of Gein's strange fixation with becoming a woman was a particular codifier for tropes like Creepy Crossdresser, even though Gein himself never crossdressed.
- They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: What made Gein's sudden reveal as a murderer and grave robber so striking to the residents of Plainfield was because those who had known him regarded him as a meek and reclusive but otherwise polite and hardworking man who did the odd favor around town, and that he had seemed utterly harmless because of it. Gein's influence on Psycho's Norman Bates contributed heavily to the pop culture idea of murderers and serial killers being unassuming everyday folk that could be people you talk to on the regular, and the innate horror of that idea.