A house decorated with the body parts of women?

On November 16th, 1957 officers in Plainfield Wisconsin walked into one of the most gruesome crime scenes in history. On a remote farm they found a house decorated with the body parts of women. There were waste paper baskets made from heads. Chairs upholstered with human skin. Masks made from tripled faces. It was a house of horrors unlike anything the state had seen before and it was all the work of one man - Ed Gein.

A local part-time handyman and full-time weirdo loner, Ed Gein was also a cannibal serial killer who'd go down in history as the butcher of Plainfield. The inspiration for Norman Bates in psycho, Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill Silence of the Lambs, Gein's crimes were so horrific that his specter still haunts the nightmares, but who really was this monster and how did he become quite so disturbed? Well, let me take you on a journey into the mind of the original psycho.

From the moment Edward Theodore Gein came into the world on August 27th, 1906 he was destined for an awful life. The second son of George Philip Gein and Augusta Gein, young Edwards childhood home was haunted by the twin demons of alcohol and religious fanaticism. Father George Philip was a crippling alcoholic whose tiny self-worth couldn't even be detected by the most powerful electron microscope. Mother Augusta was a hardcore religious woman, who saw sin and filth everywhere. Alongside his older brother Henry, young Edward was thought that they were completely worthless. When Augusta wasn't verbally abusing the boys, she was bullying her drunken husband.

In 1915 Augusta moved the family from La Crosse to Plainfield, Wisconsin. Plainfield can be summed up by three adjectives - flat, empty and anonymous. Augusta preached the boys about evil. She taught them that women were creatures who corrupted men and defiled Christ. The only time Ed and Henry were let out of her sight was to go to school, although they were forbidden from making any friends. Ed was intelligent and a feminist. On April 1st, 1950 God played his cruelest April Fool's joke on all of the family. George Philip was carried off by a heart attack leaving his sons with their dominant mother.

In winter 1944 a fire broke out on the furthest reaches of the Gein farm. The fire brigade went screaming over in their tracks to find Ed in a state of agitation claiming his old brother had vanished in the blaze. After a long search through the smoke police found Henry lying face down. The news of Henry's death reached Augusta and she suffered a massive stroke that left her badly disabled. On December 29th, 1945 a second stroke carried Augusta off to her eternal reward.

As 1946 rumbled by Ed became hooked on horror novels and pornography. He ordered books on Nazi medical experiments and female anatomy and he began teaching himself taxidermy. Finally in 1947 something in Ed Gein snapped. He began robbing the graves of woman who were buried in the Plainfield cemetery digging up the bodies removing their hearts, heads, genitals and intestines before returning them to their crypts. Much later after his arrest Ed Gein would say that he went to the cemetery in a daze that he had visions of grave robbing but he never thought he actually went through with it. The record though it says otherwise today it's estimated that Gein robbed the graves of over 40 women from cemeteries all across the state. By the 1950s he was no longer even returning the bodies to their tombs, instead he drags the bodies of these unknown sisters, mothers, daughters and wives back to his remote farmhouse and practice taxidermy on them patiently learning his craft.

No one knows for sure how many people Ed killed. He never confessed and the state was unwilling to spend much money on covering his gruesome crimes as such there are some who think Ed may have begun his murder spree prior to 1954.

There is no ambiguity about what happens on December 8th, 1954. That cold winter's night Gein travelled to Pine Grove. He walked into the local tavern where Mary Hogan worked, a middle-aged woman. Ed shot and killed Hogan and dragged her corpse out into the snow. He loaded her onto a sledge and took her back to his farmhouse. There he shot her off with an axe and turned her body parts into furniture.

Ed sawed off the tops of woman's severed heads to turn their skulls into soup bowls, stuffed their faces and hung them on walls like hunting trophies. Beneath his beds the butcher of Plainfield kept a box of human noses alongside a box of female genitals. Gein used people's bodies to tailor his own clothes. There are stories of police finding a belt made of human flesh with nipples. There are legs turned into tights and corsets that are fashioned from skin. Freakiest of all Ed took the torso of one woman and turned it into a jacket complete with a heavy pair of breasts. After he was caught Gein would tell investigators that he always secretly wanted to be a woman...

PART TWO COMING OUT SOON