Birth Name: Ed Gein

Date of Birth: August 27, 1906

Date of Death: July 26, 1985 (age 77)

Cause of Death: Cardiovascular disease

Nickname: "The Mad Butcher"

Ed Gein, also known as “The Mad Butcher,” is one of the most well-known serial killers in the world. Gein never had a normal life or a normal childhood. His mother would constantly preach about how sex before marriage was a sin, and she would frequently abuse Gein and his older brother, Henry. Gein was always bullied and never had any friends, and if Gein or his brother ever tried making friends, their mother would scold them and be disappointed. Gein’s father wasn’t in his life too much, and he never really provided for the family. Gein’s mother was always busy working at a small grocery store she created, and when she wasn’t working there, she was at home working on the farm. Ed Gein’s mother always feared that Gein and his brother would be losers like their father, and that was one of her excuses for beating the two boys that she was never proud of. Gein’s mother took time out of every day to read to Gein and Henry from The Bible, and she would always read the awful parts that included death, murder, and divine retribution.

Gein’s father, George Philip, died at the age of 40, and then Gein’s brother, Henry, was lost just four years later, while fighting in a marsh fire. In that same year, 1945, Gein’s mother, Augusta Wilhelmine Gein, passed away after having her second stroke. That is when Gein went frantic and absolutely mad. He had a hobby he loved, robbing graves. He would dig up female corpses and cut off their body parts, use them as trophies, and put them all over his house. Sometimes he would even wear their body parts, and then he would put them back in their graves like nothing ever happened. In 1954, Gein turned from grave robbing to murder, and he was less meticulous about that. He would slaughter the bodies, but only women. He never killed men.  He had a weird obsession with women due to the fact that he was oddly obsessed and devoted to his mother until her death in 1945. He even once said, “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part wants to be real nice and sweet, and the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick.”

No one can really say for sure how many women Ed Gein killed, but police implicated him in the murders of two woman, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. During the investigation of the two murders, police learned that Gein practiced necrophilia and experimented with human taxidermy. In that same year Gein pleaded not guilty due to insanity. He was found unfit to stand trial and was admitted to a mental hospital for criminals. Approximately ten years later he was found fit to stand trial and was found guilty of the two murders. He was in many different mental health hospitals and wound up dying in Mendota Mental Health Institute from respiratory and heart failure due to cancer on July 26, 1984, at age 77. He changed many people’s lives in a negative way, especially the victims and their families. He also was the inspiration of many characters in movies such as Norman Bates (Psycho), Jame Gumb (The Silence of the Lambs), and Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). His killings still to this day live on, and if not forever, they’ll live on for many more years to come.