…and I’m not talking about cheese, or the Green Bay Packers. No, I’m talking about Ed Gein of Plainfield, who lived a life which fed horror-film screenwriters for decades. I knew his story, of course, but I was reminded of it by a newspaper article about him:
As well as the body of Bernice Worden – decapitated, strung up and gutted “like a deer” – they discovered a hoard of macabre keepsakes, from bowls made from human skulls to a belt made from female nipples and a lampshade covered with a face.
A nipple belt? Even among the buxom, corn-fed Wisconsin women of the area, that’s a lotta women you have to kill to get that amount of material.
After Gein, all other mass murderers and nutcases look like amateurs, and the movie types (like Psycho‘s Norman Bates and the guy in Silence of the Lambs ) are pale imitators.
Brrrr.
Naah – Gein was a world-class nutcase, and killed two women (maybe more), but mostly he was a ghoul – robbing graves for his own demented reasons. On a modern serial killer scale, he hardly registers.
Dahmer was much, much worse, and he was also a Wisconsin resident.
Both Gein and Dahmer did in their victims without an assault rifle. I didn’t think that was possible.
In Gein’s case I’ve often wondered why people didn’t notice that graves were being disturbed. Maybe it was possible to do so in little country cemeteries, but you’d think that after a while somebody would catch on to the idea that the sod over Aunt Martha had been removed and replaced.
My guess is that if he robbed the graves in the late fall, the snow would soon have covered any trace of his doings.
A friend with a sick sense of humor and interest in the macabre named his parakeet Edbirb Gein.
No shit.