american psycho

Ed Gein

childhood+

+Has a weak, ineffectual brother and domineering mother who taught him from an early age that sex was a sinful thing.

+Upon accidentally seeing his parents slaughtering a pig, Edward became sexually aroused and had his first orgasm.

perversions+

+"Weird old Eddie", as the local community know him, had begun to develop a deeply unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body.

+In an interview whilst under investigation in 1957, Gein stated that after his mother died he began to have strange visions. He confessed to wanting to see a woman's body. So he went to the cemetery to talk to his mother.

+He dug up the body of a woman who had just been buried, and took it home. He then would watch the newspapers for obituaries of woman and go and open their graves. He did this for around 10 ten years, and raided many many graves.

+He dug 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.

discovery+

+ The things reported to have been found at his house included the genitalia of many women (which he kept in salt); a can of Doctor Pepper containing congealed liquid believed to be blood; a belt made of nipples; a skull made into a soup bowl (Gein claimed to have got the idea from a Norwegian custom); and a mobile made of noses. There were also lampshades and chair seats made from human skin.

downfall+

+After ten years in a mental hospital,Eddie was found guilty, but criminally insane. He was first committed to the 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, aged seventy-seven. It is said he was always a model prisoner - gentle, polite and discreet. He died of respiratory and heart failure in 1984.