| THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF ED GEIN Ed Gein and his brother Henry were brought up on a farm seven miles outside of Plainfield Wisconsin by a domineering mother who was very religious and protective of her two sons. She kept them busy with farm work throughout the 160-acre plot in order to distract them from the sins of the flesh and girls. In 1940, the first of his family died, his father, who was also an alcoholic, died a few years before Ed�s brother Henry who died in 1944, who was thought to have died fighting a forest fire by the local people of Plainfield. It was later speculated that Ed himself might have been the reason for his brother�s death, but this is unfounded. Shortly after this time, Ed�s mother suffered her first stroke, only to suffer a further stroke in 1945 from which she suffered the effects fully and died. In the space of less than 5 years, Ed�s entire family had died in tragic circumstances; he was now left alone in his 160-acres of farmland. It was after this tragedy that he had suffered that he took it upon himself to seal off the upstairs, parlour and his mother�s bedroom of the house. After boarding off these areas, he created his own quarters in the remaining bedroom of his and the kitchen, which would soon, like the rest of the house, become swamped in rubbish and hideous artefacts. Ed also used the shed, but this was all of the house that he used for himself. He soon stopped working the farm as a government subsidy for soil-conservation allowed him to become a handyman instead in the local area as well as doing a spot of babysitting for the local parents of Plainfield. In between hunting and working for the local townsfolk, Ed had found an interest in reading Nazi-concentration books and books on the human anatomy. The sudden influx of descriptions of visciously horrid Nazi experiments and the new-found understanding of the human anatomy, particularly that of women, Ed was led to think on and on about sex, constantly warping his mind�s train of thought until one day he read about the recent burial of a woman�s body at the local cemetery. Ed was a loner, and as a result of much of his time being spent alone warping his mind with endless thoughts of sex and the study of human anatomy, Ed soon had turned himself into something completely different. He soon received the help of a friend called Gus who was also a loner in the town. Like Ed, he was odd, but also like Ed, the townsfolk thought nothing of it except to view him as eccentric. Ed had secured Gus� help assuring him the body was for �medical experiments� only. The first grave to be robbed was only about 10ft away from his mother�s. Over the following 10 years, Ed checked the paper for fresh graves and bodies, visiting the grave only by the light of a full moon. Ed only dug up the parts he wanted, but sometimes took the whole corpse from which he would experiment. After taking the body, he filled in the grave and as it was fresh, nobody was any the wiser. The so-called experiments that Ed conducted on the corpses that he dug up were to say the least, very strange. Ed would meticulously construct objects from the skin and bones of the bodies while storing the organs in his refrigerator to possibly eat at a later date. Beyond this, Ed even tried necrophilia, although he only admitted at a later date to have done it once. At this stage, it wasn�t long before he dug up his mother�s corpse, which helped advance his wanting to become a woman. This was the reason that he had studied the female anatomy in detail so, as there would be a possibility to perform an operation of sorts on himself. Ed never actually did attempt to do this, but he did construct a full-blown female body suit complete with breasts and a mask. This body suit was of course, constructed entirely out of human skin for the greatest realism. As time went on, his collection of grotesque objects grew and his obsession increased his taste for experimentation. |