The 20th century saw some of the most prolific serial killers in history. While not all of them had sky-high body counts, the details of their atrocities substantiate this claim. The first serial killer that we’re going to cover in this series is a sick, sadistic man by the name of Ed Gein.
Gein exhibited signs of psychological impairment from a young age, but he snapped when his mother died in 1945.
When he was arrested, Gein admitted to making 40 trips to local graveyards in the years after his mother died. Gein said that during his trips he was often in a “daze” of sorts. During about 30 of those trips he snapped out of it en route to the cemetery and went home. The other times he dug up the bodies of recently buried middle aged women that he thought resembled his mother.
For Gein, the closest thing he could come to a sex change was creating “women suits” from the skin of the bodies he dug up. Gein would bring the bodies to his home, skin them, and then tan the skin so it could be molded into suits, which he wore regularly. It’s unclear exactly how many suits were found in Gein’s home. He admitted to robbing nine grave in total. But skin suits weren’t the only thing police found when they arrested him…
The killer took up the art of upholstery so that he could cover the furniture he already had with flesh. Police even found a lampshade made out of skin.
He spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric facility until he died from heart failure in 1984.
With killers like Ed Gein, I always wonder if they would have turned out to be murderers if their circumstances had been different. Is this kind of sickness the product of nature, or is this psychopathy nurtured by one’s surroundings? We’ll probably never know.