This man was one of the inspirations for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the movie Psycho. He was also the inspiration for the character Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Born at the turn of the century into the small farming community of Plainfeild Wisconsin, Ed Gein lived a repressive and solitary life on his family homestead with a weak, ineffectual brother and domineering mother who taught him from an early age that sex was a sinful thing. When she died her son was a thirty-nine-year old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman's shambles. Thanks to federal subsidies Gein no longer need to farm his land and he abandoned it to do odd jobs here and there, to earn him a little extra cash. But he remained alone in the enormous farmhouse, haunted by the ghost of his overbearing mother, whose bedroom he kept locked and undisturbed, exactly as it had been when she was alive. He also sealed off the drawing room and five more upstairs rooms, living only in one downstairs room and the kitchen.

"Weird old Eddie", as the local community called him, had begun to develop a deeply unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body, an interest that was fed by medical encyclopedias, books on anatomy, pulp horror novels and pornographic magazines. He became particularly interested in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the second world war and the medical experiments performed on Jews in the concentration camps. Soon he graduated on to the real thing by digging up decaying female corpses by night in far-flung Wisconsin cemeteries. These he would dissect and keep some parts; heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines. Then he would flay the skin from the body, draping it over a tailor's dummy or even wearing it himself to dance and cavort around the homestead- a practice that apparently gave him intense gratification. On other occasions, Gein took only the body parts that particularly interested him. He was especially fascinated by the excised female genitalia, which he would fondle and play with, sometimes stuffing them into a pair of women's panties, which he would then wear around the house. not surprisingly, he quickly became recluse in the community, discouraged any visitors from coming near his by now neglected and decaying farm.

Gein's fascination with the female body eventually led him to seek out fresher samples. His victims, usually women of his mothers age, included 54-year old Mary Hogan, who disappeared from the tavern she ran in December 1954, and Bernice Worden, a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store, who disappeared on November 16th, 1957. Mrs. Worden's son Frank was also sheriff's deputy, and upon learning that weird old Eddie Gein had been spotted in town on the day of his mother's disappearance, Frank Worden and the sheriff went to check out the old Gein place.

There, the gruesome evidence proved that Gein's bizarre obsessions had finally exploded into murder, and much, much worst. In the woodshed of the farm was the naked, headless body of Bernice Worden, hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit open down the front. Her heard and intestines were discovered in a box, and her heart on a plate in the dining room. The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, the crown of a skull used as a soup bowl, lampshades covered in flesh pilled taut, a table propped up by a human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs. The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skills and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death masks, the skinned faces of women, and decorative bracelets made out of human skin. The stunned searchers also uncovered soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoe-box full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a "mammary vest" flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother.

The scattered remains of and estimated fifteen bodies were found at the farmhouse when Gein was eventually arrested, but he could not remember how many murders he has actually committed. After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. Although considered fit to stand trial, Eddie was found guilt, but criminally insane. He was first committed to Central State Hospital at Waupon, and then in 1978 he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute where he died in the geriatric ward in 1984, at age seventy-seven. It is said he was always a model prisoner, gentle, polite and discreet. He died of respiratory and heart failure.

By then, however, Gein had already achieved pop immortality, thanks to horror writer Robert Bloch, who had the inspired idea of creating a fictional character based on Gein, a deranged mama's boy named Norman Bates. Plus, as mentioned above, Gein will live on as a part of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.