Ed Gein, born in 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, was not just the boy next door. He was a vicious predator considered to be America’s first and best-known serial killer, and the prototype for criminals who would follow in his blood-soaked footsteps. Deeply disturbed, Gein was a murderer, necrophiliac, grave robber and cannibal with an Oedipus complex, whose dark, grisly deeds shocked and repulsed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, and fueled the horror movie industry, as well.

Gein’s turbulent early years foreshadowed his future perverse deeds. They were tainted by mental instability, taunting by school bullies, a lonely existence, a violent and often absent alcoholic father who died from a heart attack, and a strict, domineering mother to whom he became strangely emotionally enslaved.

His mother, Augusta, religious to the point of fanaticism, moved the family to a 160-acre farm in the desolate town of Plainfield, Wisconsin to keep any outsiders from influencing Gein or his older brother, Henry. She intercepted any efforts Gein attempted to make friends or go on dates, so he solely spent time either at school or working on the farm, with his brother as his only companion. Augusta fervently and relentlessly preached to the boys about the evils of drinking, lust, sex and, particularly, of women other than herself, whom she adamantly believed were instruments of Satan.

In addition to rigorously drilling Gein and his brother every afternoon with Bible passages, Augusta incessantly insisted that she was the only woman who would ever genuinely love them. She flooded them with dire warnings about sex and eternal damnation that clashed with Gein’s desires for female companionship. Confused and unable to fulfill his natural attraction to girls, Gein developed a peculiar attachment to his mother.

Henry, on the other hand, began rebelling against their tyrannical mother, while Gein became even more bizarrely devoted to her. His brother allegedly died from a heart attack while attempting to extinguish a brush fire near the farm, but bruises on the back of his head suggest that Gein killed Henry so he could have his mother all to himself. However, Gein’s mother died the same year Henry did. Gein was now 39 and completely alone. He sank even more deeply into the dark depths of withdrawal from people and reality.

He boarded up all the rooms his mother had used – the entire upstairs, the parlor and the living room – confining himself to a small room next to the kitchen. Gein now began digging up corpses, with the aid of an accomplice named Gus, and tanning the skin, preferring to collect the bodies of middle-aged women who were close to his mother’s age and who resembled her. He would often dress in a full-body, human suit of skin and pretend that he was his mother. He also possessed a shirt made entirely of human skin – that additionally included a pair of dried breasts.

At one point, he even dug up his own mother’s grave. It’s rumored that he attempted to raise her from the dead. When this tactic failed, he skinned and tanned her flesh, preserving her form, and sometimes wearing her clothing. From 1947 to 1952 he visited grave sites as often as 40 nights for his macabre purposes. Gein located his victims mere hours after their funerals by reading the local newspaper’s obituaries, which guaranteed fresh bodies.

Author Robert Bloch, who lived only 35 miles away from the Gein farm at the time, drew inspiration from Gein’s grisly hobby to write the novel, “Psycho.” Later, Alfred Hitchcock created a film with the same title, heavily basing the Norman Bates psychotic mama’s boy character upon Ed Gein. Hitchcock was quoted as saying, “The scariest aspects of the movie come from the fact that people can relate it to a case that scared them to the bone.”

After his mother’s death, Gein, who had been sexually ambiguous, developed a fascination with becoming a woman, but, unable to afford the surgery, wore the body parts of deceased women, including breasts, genitals, and even a belt studded with nipples. He kept collecting corpses to continue fashioning them into gruesome articles of clothing.

Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, a deranged transvestite serial killer from the book, “The Silence of the Lambs” – and its movie adaptation in which he dismembers his victims, skins them, and fashions clothing made of women’s flesh – was strongly influenced by Gein and his misdeeds. Author Judith Halberstam writes that Buffalo Bill – and Gein – literally symbolize a lack of ease with their own skin.

Horrifically, Gein also used cadavers for purposes other than clothing himself. He mounted skulls on his bedposts, utilized skin to create lampshades and chair upholstery, turned skulls into soup bowls, designed a ceiling light pull from human lips, made socks and jewelry from flesh and bones, constructed a table using shinbones for legs, collected vulva – including his own mother’s – that he painted silver or wore over his own genitalia, and fashioned a collection of shrunken heads that he’d produced from decapitated bodies. And, just as chillingly, he stored organs in his refrigerator, to be eaten later.

Gein’s taste for human flesh powerfully influenced the development of another “Silence of the Lambs” character, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Diabolically psychotic, Lecter remorselessly described one of his numerous cannibalistic crimes:  “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Gein, dubbed the Butcher of Plainfield, had a ghastly collection of nine faces and several scalps that had been carefully peeled from his victims’ corpses and turned into masks. When wearing these masks, Gein was able to quell his longing for the femininity that he craved, and also pretended to be his mother. His fetish for wearing masks fashioned from human skin profoundly influenced the creation of the cannibalistic character, Leatherface, in the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Leatherface had several different flesh masks – the “Old Lady Mask,” the “Pretty Woman Mask,” and the “Killing Mask,” which he wore during the movie’s brutal slaughters.

Gunnar Hansen, the actor portraying Leatherface in the 1974 film said, “The idea of the mask is that there is no personality under the mask…he has to wear masks to express himself because he can’t do it himself. There is nothing under the mask, which is what makes him so frightening.” Gein, likewise, felt as though his personality was expressed only when he was wearing his female masks or skins.

Gein’s notoriety also influenced Rob Zombie’s movies, “House of 1,000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects.” Decorations made from human body parts and masks of human flesh are prevalent in both movies.

Gein’s madness, however, was no act, as he spiraled down toward the depths of insanity. For years, his grave-robbing sprees and bizarre behavior eluded detection. But in 1954, Gus, his partner in crime, was institutionalized. Without assistance, Gein couldn’t single-handedly exhume bodies. Still desperately needing corpses, he turned to murder.

A primary suspect of several crimes that frustrated police officials because they couldn’t completely link them to Gein were 8 year-old Georgia Weckler’s disappearance while returning home from school, as well as the kidnapping of 15 year-old Evelyn Hartley while she was babysitting. Also inexplicably vanished were two deer hunters, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess.

Still preying upon women who were close to his mother’s age, he attacked 54 year-old Mary Hogan and 58 year-old Bernice Worden. In the winter of 1954, Mary Hogan, a Plainfield tavern owner, inexplicably vanished from the bar. Police found a trail of blood that led from the tavern floor to the parking lot. They also located an empty bullet cartridge. Hogan’s severed head was later found in a paper bag at Gein’s house.

Possibly one of his most grisly crimes was the shooting death and mutilation of hardware store owner, Bernice Worden. A long-time customer of the store, Gein elicited no fear from Worden until he grabbed a .22 rifle from a gun rack and popped in one of his own bullets. Killing her, Gein dragged her body out of the hardware store, into the store’s truck, and brought her corpse to his house.

Ironically, Worden’s son, Frank, was a deputy sheriff. Through a series of clues, he suspected that Gein was responsible for Worden’s disappearance. Entering a shed on Gein’s property, the police discovered possibly one of the deranged killer’s most horrendous crimes – it was so ghastly that it nearly caused a veteran sheriff, Arthur Schley, to vomit. Hanging upside down from the ceiling by ropes around her wrists and a crossbar separating her ankles, was the naked, disemboweled, and beheaded body of Worden. Her head was found in a burlap sack with nails pounded through each ear and connected by twine, as if it was being prepared to be hung as a trophy, and her genitals had been sliced out.

After entering Gein’s house and seeing the horrors it contained, Gein was arrested. He was declared a schizophrenic and a sexual psychopath who was mentally incompetent for a trial, and was sent to Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital for the criminally insane in 1954. In 1984, Gein died of cancer and, ironically, was buried right next to his mother, as well as in close proximity to many of the graves he’d robbed. His house, which harbored so many atrocious memories in Plainfield, was burned to the ground by its citizens. Finally, there was no pain, and no Gein.