Ed Gein - "American Psycho" --- <br />Uploader: forthedishwasher --- <br />Mr Schley, a sheriff from the nearby town of Plainfield, was investigating the disappearance of 58-year-old shopkeeper Bernice Worden. Evidence from her store, a receipt found on the floor near a trail of blood and a missing cash till, had led him to the farmhouse. <br />The owner, 51-year-old Ed Gein, was not in but Sheriff Schley had a warrant to search the premises. As he walked through the trash in the darkened kitchen he brushed into something hanging from the ceiling. <br /> <br />He turned and shone his torch on the object. <br /> <br />It was a human carcass, beheaded, disemboweled and hung upside down from a ceiling beam. Mr Schley gagged at the sight of it but managed to avoid throwing up. The carcass turned out to be the freshly gutted remains of Mrs Worden and police found her head in a burlap sack in another part of the house. <br /> <br />Nails had been hammered through each ear and tied together with twine, as if in readiness for the head to be hung up as a trophy. Detectives spent the entire night, and the next day, trawling through the house. What they found marked a horrific new low in the annals of American crime. <br /> <br />Somebody had been using female body parts to fashion a series of ghoulish artifacts. A soup bowl had been created out of the top of a skull and lampshades and chairs had been fashioned out of human skin. Police found a box full of noses, a curtain pull with a pair of women's lips sewed into it. <br /> <br />A shoebox under the bed contained dried female genitalia and hanging up in the closet was a "shirt" made of human skin, complete with a pair of breasts. On the wall were the faces of nine women, carefully preserved and mounted like the bizarre collection of a human hunter. <br /> <br />Ed Gein had some serious explaining to do. <br /> <br />He was arrested and taken to Wautoma County jailhouse, where police interrogated him. Gein initially denied everything. But gradually he cracked. <br /> <br />Confessions <br /> <br />He admitted killing Mrs Worden, who was shot in the head with a .22 calibre rifle and then dragged outside to his car and transported back to the farmhouse. Later he confessed to the murder, three years earlier, of Plainfield innkeeper Mary Hogan, who had vanished in mysterious circumstances. <br /> <br />But he said most of the body parts had actually been taken from the corpses of women he had dug up in the local cemetery. Detectives were unsure if Gein was telling the truth on this and thought he may be responsible for four other murders in central Wisconsin dating back to 1947. <br /> <br />Eight-year-old Georgia Weckler had gone missing on her way home school and Evelyn Hartley, 15, had been abducted while babysitting. Also listed as missing were two deer hunters, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, who vanished in December 1952. But all the body parts in the house came from female adults, including Mrs Hogan, and no trace was ever found of the four missing people. Police exhumed the bodies of eight women at Plainfield cemetery and discovered they had all been mutilated. Body parts, including faces and strips of skin, had been removed by someone who had carefully placed the bodies back in their coffins and replaced the earth to avoid suspicion. <br /> <br />It transpired that Gein and a trusted friend identified only as Gus, had made these nocturnal raids only hours after these women's funerals after reading their obituaries in the local newspaper. It appears he only began killing when Gus was moved to an old people's home and Gein was unable to carry out his nocturnal exertions alone. <br /> <br />Gein told detectives, in a conversational almost chatty way, how he would wear the human skin shirt around the house at night and often placed the female genitalia over his naked groin as if he were a woman. <br /> <br />Although he was almost certainly a virgin, Gein was obsessed by women and the sexual power they had over men. Psychiatrists later concluded he was clinically insane. But what had driven him mad? The answer, as is often the case, lay in his childhood. <br /> <br />Edward Theodore Gein was born on 27 August 1906 in the town of La Crosse, Wisconsin to George and Augusta Gein. He had an elder brother, Henry, who was seven years older. George Gein was a timid, weak character. He was a farmer and a feckless waster with a serious drink problem. But the more dominant influence in Ed's upbringing was his mother. <br /> <br />A powerful character with a puritanical view of life based on her fanatical Christianity, Augusta dominated the family and drummed into her sons the innate immorality of the world and the twin dangers of alcohol and loose women. She preached endlessly to her boys about the sins of lust and carnal desire and depicted all women, apart from herself, as women of the night.
