An influence for several fictional serial killers, Edward Theodore Gein was a grave robber and a serial killer. Despite only having two victims. Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin.
When a hardware store owner came up missing, Bernice Worden, police suspected Gein. When police entered Gein’s shed they found Worden’s corpse. She had been decapitated, her headless body hung upside down by means of ropes at her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. The torso was empty, the ribcage split and the body “dressed out” like that of a deer.
When they searched the house they found, Human skulls mounted upon the corner posts of his bed,Human skullcaps used as soup bowls,several shriveled heads,Skin that was made into a lampshade and used to upholster chair seats,Skin from the face of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, found in a paper bag,Socks made from human flesh,A sheath made from human skin,A human heart (it is disputed where the heart was found; deputy reports all claimed that the heart was in a saucepan on the stove, while some crime scene photographers claimed it was in a paper bag), A window shade pull that was made of human lips, Four noses, Organs in the refrigerator, and Pieces of salted genitalia in a box.
Gein would later say that he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother.
Gain spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital.
In 1958, Gein’s car, which he’d used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at a public auction for the then-considerable sum of $760 to carnival sideshow operator Bunny Gibbons. Gibbons later charged carnival-goers 25¢ admission to see it.
Gein died of respiratory and heart failure On July 26, 1984. His grave site was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers chipped off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is displayed at present in a museum in Waushara County, Wisconsin.