The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't a true story - Serial Killer Ed Gein -The Plainfield Ghoul

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• published: 04 Mar 2016
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Ed Gein was a notorious killer and grave robber. He inspired the creation of several film characters, including Norman Bates (Psycho), Jame Gumb (The Silence of the Lambs) and Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Ed Gein was obsessively devoted to his mother, a religious fanatic. After her death, Gein began robbing graves—keeping body parts as trophies, practicing necrophilia, and experimenting with human taxidermy. He then turned to murder, killing at least two women in 1957. Gein inspired film characters Norman Bates (Psycho), Jame Gumb (The Silence of the Lambs) and Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Classification: Homicide Characteristics: Necrophilia Number of victims: 2 + Date of murders: December 8, 1954 / November 16, 1957 Date of arrest: November 17, 1957 Date of birth: August 27, 1906 Victims profile: Mary Hogan, 54 (tavern owner) / Bernice C. Worden, 58 (hardware store owner) Method of murder: Shooting (.22-caliber rifle) Location: Plainfield, Wisconsin, USA Status: Sentenced to life imprisonment, 1968. Found not guilty by reason of insanity and acquitted. Transferred to mental hospital. Died on July 26, 1984 Edward Theodore "Ed" Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984) was an American murderer and body snatcher. 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. After police found body parts in his house in 1957, Gein confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, in 1957. Initially found unfit to stand trial, following confinement in a mental health facility, he was tried in 1968 for the murder of Worden and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he spent in a mental hospital. The body of Bernice Worden was found in Gein's shed; her head and the head of Mary Hogan were found inside his house. Robert H. Gollmar, the judge in the Gein case, wrote: "Due to prohibitive costs, Gein was tried for only one murder—that of Mrs. Worden." With fewer than three murders attributed, Gein does not meet the traditional definition of a serial killer. Regardless, his real-life case influenced the creation of several fictional serial killers, including Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates from Psycho and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre... What happened is true! Now the movie that's just as real!", screamed the posters for Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic of independent cinema. Whilst not a literal rendition of the Gein case, the terrible house in Chain Saw, with its bizarre artifacts made out of human detritus - armchairs that bear human arms, lamps made out of human hands - resembles the Gein homestead in many of its particulars, and the crazy Leatherface, who hangs up his victims alive on meat hooks, also sports a grotesque mask fashioned from stitched together pieces of human skin. In Joseph Ellison's 1980 study of psychopathic child-abuse "Don't Go In The House", Donny (Dan Grimaldi) keeps the corpse of his religious fanatic mother in his apartment, and, as a consequence of her nasty habit of burning his arms when he misbehaved as a child, enjoys nothing better than bringing a young woman home and frying her up alive. In William Lustig's "Maniac" (1980), the eponymous Oedipal killer indulges in garroting, deception, shooting and scalping, with the murderer's scalp collection adorning a row of tailor's mannequins. Gein's fondness for wearing human flesh resurfaced again in 1991 as one inspirations for the character Buffalo Bill in Jonathan Demme's "Silence of the Lambs", the homosexual psycho killer so named because he liked to "skin his humps". Gein was also the inspiration for the psycho-biopic "Deranged", a 1974 offering from American-International Pictures, co-written and co-directed by Alan Ormsby, and the lesser known but equally reverential "Three On A Meathook" (1973), directed by small-time auteur William Girdler and filmed in Louisville, Kentucky. It also seems likely that Jorg Buttgereit, a self-confessed "Geinophile", was influenced by Eddie's predilections whilst making his paeans to necrophilia, "Nekromantik" (1988) and "Nekromantik 2" (1991).