If a serial killer is defined as someone who murders at least three victims over an extended period of time, then - strictly speaking - Edward Gein was not a serial killer, since he appears to have murdered no more than two women. And yet his crimes were so grotesque and appalling that they have haunted America for almost forty years. Gein was raised by a fanatical, domineering mother who ranted incessantly about the sinful nature of her own sex. When she died in 1945, her son was a 39-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. Boarding up her room, he preserved it as though it were a shrine. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman's shambles. When Gein wasn't earning his meager living doing odd jobs for neighbors, he passed his lonely hours poring over lurid magazine pieces about sex-change operations, South Sea headhunters, and Nazi atrocities. Driven by his desperate loneliness - and burgeoning psychosis - he started making nocturnal raids on local graveyards, digging up the bodies of middle-aged women and bringing them back to his remote farmhouse. In 1954, he augmented his necrophiliac activities with murder, shooting a local tavernkeeper named Mary Hogan and absconding with her two-hundred pound corpse. Three years later - on the first day of hunting season in 1957 - he killed another local woman, a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother who owned the village hardware store. Suspicion immediately lighted on Gein, who had been hanging around the store in recent days. Breaking into his summer kitchen, police discovered the victim's headless and gutted corpse suspended upside-down from a rafter like a dressed-out game animal. Inside the house itself, the stunned searchers uncovered a large assortment of unspeakable artifacts - chairs upholstered with human skin, soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox 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 discovery of these Gothic horrors sent shock waves throughout Eisenhower-era America. In Wisconsin itself, Gein quickly entered local folklore. Within weeks of his arrest, macabre jokes called "Geiners" became a statewide craze. After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty but insane and institutionalized for the rest of his life, dying of cancer in 1984. (The A to Z Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers)
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