In 1945 Augusta Gein died, to the world anyway, but not to Ed. Ed undertook a horribly disordered psyche he would substitute his handyman jobs for reading about details of the nazi holocaust, the headhunting practices of the South Seas tribesmen and gained a fascination in the new advances being made in sex change surgery. Ed's muddle of psychotic vulgarities emerged at night, robbing graves and doing numerous things to the corpses such as shrinking the skulls, using human skin for lamp shades, tops of skulls became soup bowls, engaging in necrophelia, and cannibalism. Then where Thomas Harris would get part of his influence for silence of the lambs Ed would wear the dried out women's skin instead of undergoing any kind of surgery and dance around in the moonlight. In 1954 Ed began killing, his first victim being Mary Hogan, a crude woman from the local tavern. For three years Ed would endulge in his deluded ways as the rest of the town saw him as a little odd. In 1957 while most of the men in the town were out hunting, Ed took a short visit to the local hardware store and shot the proprietor, Bernice Warden and drove her body back to the farm.
When the police found a receipt made out last to Ed Gein in the store upon finding the crime scene, they trailed Gein back to his farm. What they thought at the time or what they were ready for was nothing compared to the horror they were about to unveil. In the shed they found the body of Denise Worden swinging by the ankles, decapitated and disemboweled. Then when the police stepped into the farm house they would see the mass decorations of human anatomy spread everywhere as well as boxes filled with noses and vaginas, and Bernice Worden's head under a mattress nails driven into her ears were connected by twine more than likely to be hung as a trophy. Judged insane Gein spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital, he died in 1984. Inspired by the case Robert Bloch wrote a novel which would be the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho (1960).
