Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, and The Silence of the Lambs were all famous movies about serial killers. However, the mass-murdering psychopaths portrayed in these movies were all dreamed up because their creators were inspired by one man. Ed Gein was the man that inspired the birth of these murderers, and he is all too real. Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in Plainfield, Wisconsin. His mother, Augusta Grafter, and his father, George P. Gein, were not exactly very good parents. George was an alcoholic, and even his wife hated him. Ed’s mother, Augusta, was constantly verbally abusive towards her sons (they had another son named Henry). However, the two boys took very different approaches in their views of her. While Henry …show more content…
His brother, Henry, died of a mysterious forest fire in 1944. Edward eventually reported that Henry went missing, but many think that Ed murdered Henry himself. When the police arrive at the farm, Edward could lead the officers directly to the burnt corpse. Also, when the body was found, it was found with bruises all over its head. The case, despite the suspicious findings, was legally ruled as an accident. Gein eventually got the police’s attention in 1957, when a local hardware store owner, 58-year-old Bernice Worden, disappeared while working at her store. The police eventually tracked him down later that evening, and another officer entered his house and found a gruesome scene. When the officer arrived, he found Bernice’s decapitated, eviscerated, and mutilated body strung up by its heels. When searching the gory house of horrors, the police found these articles: human skulls mounted on his bed human skin fashioned into a lampshade human skin used to upholster chair seats a human heart the head of Mary Hogan (a local tavern owner that went missing in 1954) a ceiling light pull made of human lips a vest crafted from the skin of a woman’s torso (which he wore and pretended to be his …show more content…
The “Triad of Symptoms” includes three possible warning signs of a serial killer. These signs are: being cruel to animals, fire-setting, and enuresis (bed-wetting). It is possible that Edward has at least one of these symptoms; many people think that he murdered his brother in the forest fire incident in 1944, but it is not confirmed. The death of Edward’s mother in 1945 can be used to mark his quick descent into madness. Ed idolized Augusta, and losing her could possibly have led him to depression. It’s possible that he wanted her back in any way possible, and he eventually became desperate. This may explain the female skin torso that he wore, which he did so in order to pretend to be his deceased mother. This can possibly be a sign of Dissociative Identity Disorder, considering he was not acting like himself during these