Ed Gein always seemed like the least offensive “serial killer” to me. He only killed 2 people for sure, and while these murders were horrible, what old Eddie did to the corpses was so absolutely repulsive that it makes me feel quite sorry for him. I know that’s a weird way to look at things, but the man dug up women’s graves and took the rotting corpses home. Then he cut off their skin and used it to patch together a lady suit that he would wear around his house. These weren’t spur of the moment, impulsive acts. This dude spent a huge amount of time playing with festering corpses and amputated body parts. This was his hobby. What was going through this man’s head as he greased his collection of amputated vaginas to keep them supple? He claimed that he never had sex with the corpses; he just liked chopping them into little bits and pretending they were part of his own body. I find it hard not to feel sorry for a man as completely unhinged as Eddie Gein.
I guess Eddie just seems more fucked up than evil. The stuff he did was so disgusting that I find it really hard to imagine him taking pleasure in it. There was something very wrong going on in his brain.
I’ve known about Ed Gein for as long as I can remember. I grew up listening to Slayer and Blind Melon songs about him, and I watched a movie about him when I was a teenager that featured a dance scene that stuck in my head. When I was 21, my girlfriend dumped me, and to make myself feel better, I spent an inordinate amount of money on an Ed Gein style hunting cap. I used to wear it when I went camping. I suppose my familiarity with him also relates to the impact that his story had on modern horror. Norman Bates from Psycho, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs are all based partly on Gein.
Harold Schecter’s book on Gein was decent. It felt a bit sensational at times, but the events it’s describing are so fucking gross that it was probably hard to avoid that. A lot of the stuff about Gein’s family life seemed hard to swallow, but I’m sure that has something to do with how it was so similar to Psycho. It is actually hard to believe in somebody being this messed up. There’s a lot of detail included here, and parts felt repetitive and boring, but it’s also nice to read an exhaustive account that covers every imaginable aspect of the case.
There was one part of the book that made me laugh heartily. It’s a passage explaining how psychologists asked Ed to explain the meanings behind common idioms, kind of like a linguistic Rorschach test. His responses to most of the phrases are the kind of interpretations that you’d expect from a stupid person, but one was absolutely incredible. When asked to explain his understanding of the phrase, “a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush”, Ed’s response was, “If you have a bird in your hand, you might squeeze him too much and kill him.” This reminded me of the scene in Of Mice and Men when Lenny crushes the mouse in his pocket.
Deviant seems to be considered the definitive book on Ed Gein. It’s not particularly eloquent, but it did the job for me. Give it a read if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
